Blue_Opossum

Morning of December 24, 2014. Wednesday.



My family and I are living in an unknown location which at one point is similar to the house on Stadcor Street but mirror-imaged, yet later seems to be more like the Loomis Street house in the next segment. There is a part where we had apparently been growing beans near the back porch. There is a concern that not all of them had been used in meals. There are seemingly only a few big pods left, but they seem a bit damaged and “too old” and weathered for usage in a proper meal. However, there is also a clearer thought of soon having a lot more bean plants (of different types) growing in the yard (as they are easy to grow).



At one point, my brother Jim appears. I am aware that he had died (in real life, though I am not fully lucid) yet I still approach him cheerfully. At first though, there is an idea that it may be someone else walking away from our house (though I do not recall any prior scene involving him). He appears to be only in his thirties and seems happy when he turns around to see me. He has several old books on computers as well as at least one book about postage stamps (which is mostly about identifying old and rare stamps, it seems). I talk to him about how much computer technology has changed. However, I say a couple things that are not actually true. I say how hard drives are no longer formatted by the end user, but of course in reality they sometimes still are. I also say how directories (folders) are no longer used, which is also not really true. Intending to look through one of the computer books, I instead find myself looking through the book about stamps and mostly notice images of very old stamps (about three or four larger images per page) that each are of mostly one color and are Iranian in appearance - seemingly from the late 1880s and such, but there are a lot of fictional horizontally rectangular ones, including many with mostly just calligraphy art in simple patterns. The overall detail in this part of my dream is very well-rendered. I still find it interesting how the mind can create such precise imagery without distortion.



At one point near the last section of my dream, it seems there is a medical problem present within my family. I also eventually have similar symptoms of speckles of blood in a few locations on my arms and stomach. It turns out to have been caused by a larger swarm of drain flies (a bit bigger than in reality, but not by much), which come in through an open window through the back of the house (the laundry window, in fact). One gets me on the left arm near my elbow. I am annoyed at this point, but actually feel better about the “explanation” of the earlier in-dream symptoms - which are not really related to an internal problem (or the body’s organs or systems) as was originally worriedly thought. In reality, I have rarely seen this type of fly, and they do not actually bite as far as I know (thus apparently do not cause illness at least according to some sources). Also in reality my in-dream concern likely only relates to heat rash, as this is the hottest part of the year in Australia, though it could also be a typical play on “time flies” and time “down the drain” (relative to how quickly the holidays come and go - though I do not really have present negative associations with holidays).

Night of March 2, 2014. Sunday.

I am younger and in a stage of collecting stamps. My sister Marilyn (half-sister on my mother’s side) is alive again in the opening of my dream, but her face is changing back and forth from various unusual colors, somewhat reminiscent of how a series of usually smaller and older foreign stamps has the same face on different postal values but with different colors for each; red, yellow, purple, green, and so on, in various shades. She is at a table in her living room and appears to be having a small meal.

Later, during the more vivid and longer part of my dream, I am not certain of where I am, but I own at least one very large cardboard box full of materials mostly relating to a stamp collection. As I dig deeper down into the box, more and more complete letters and catalog-sized envelopes, most from primarily Eastern Europe, China, and India, are visible (with the stamps still on the original mailings - most of them unopened or resealed perhaps). There is also a smaller stamp album where the stamps (Poland, Hungary, and Romania, I believe - those countries often had the most attractive postage stamps during one time period) are displayed in rows held by thin sheets of transparent plastic in no particular order.

The beauty of the stamps and other variously-colored and textured paper materials is impressive to me. As I go deeper (placing some of the materials on an adjacent table), there are several old but unopened A4 manilla envelopes from India near the bottom with at least seven or eight older India stamps (1940s-1950s) in each upper right corner, some with various types of “scribbling” as cancellation/postal marks and other features. Eventually, I also notice black and white graphic novels, similar to the type of the older Warren publications. I do not understand the plot, though, as the writing is mostly all in Sanskrit, although some like a mix of Hindi and Chinese, with only a few English translations written by hand here and there. I feel very peaceful and happy about the box for some reason. There are a few other unknown characters around. I am proud of my collection and enjoying the multicolored pleasures of what almost seems to hold endless potential.

There are a few other pages of comic-book-like papers, seemingly in English, but the individual letters are spread out somewhat web-like and too “blurry” to read (much like ghost frequencies on a spectrograph in appearance). (This part was precognitive. I just recently found a link on the “Wayback Machine” that had a lot of older comic books in PDF format. Most of them are readable, it seems. Some of them, though, were identical in appearance to the effect in this dream, probably from being saved in too low a resolution and unreadable. Also, many turned out to be older Warren publications as my dream implied - I had not used the site in that particular manner or purpose at any earlier time.)

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Part of this is also based on real life. Years ago, as a young teen, I sometimes bought a larger bulk pack of discarded postal materials, usually envelopes and such with the stamps still on them in various conditions - of which I actually preferred to isolating and collecting the individual stamps themselves regardless of the fair amount of space they took up (I even had chests-of-drawers sitting atop other chests-of-drawers for extra storage space). The envelopes were of various colors and intriguing textures and all the various addresses in different languages still on the envelopes and used postcards and such. During this time, I decided to give one of my favorites, an unusual envelope (with several stamps, a few still in blocks) from India with a sort of almost corrugated-like texture and writing all over it, to my sister Marilyn by mailing it to her (Florida to Wisconsin). She liked getting it and asked me where I got it. Apparently they did not have these bulk collections available where she lived at the time. Eventually, I sold a part of my collection for only a hundred dollars when I needed more money (by which in afterthought I should have sold to a collector instead of a company).

Finishing this entry for the online version, I noted this from a website (linns.com, under “Soaker’s remorse”.) “How many interesting, valuable or historically significant old folded letters or envelopes with stamps and postmarks (known as "covers” to stamp collectors) do you suppose have been destroyed by people who did not know what they were doing?“

Interesting. Another play on "everyman” (or “normal” society) I think.

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Night of November 25, 1978. Saturday.



I am back in the living room in Cubitis, seemingly very late at night, at a table near the northeast corner near where the chimney my father had built was in real life. There is an older cigar box with about twenty or more stamps at the bottom, near one corner. The cover of the cigar box actually looks more like the back of an American one dollar bill, with the eye above the pyramid part, except that it has a sort of sepia and orange tint instead of being greenish.

Marilyn and Carol (two of my half-sisters on my mother’s side) are in the room. There seems to be an unusual energy, almost like a “dark force” or suggested evil presence. The stamps rise in the air and hover above the bottom of the cigar box and there is a slightly uncomfortable sense of our home now being haunted (although I was no longer living there in real life).

Looking at this dream record now on Monday, 18 January 2016, it seems very straightforward and easy to interpret. A box or container in a dream symbolically represents the non-lucid dream self’s attempt to quantize the dream (or dream state) - in other words, to “contain” and define the level of awareness or “world” the dream self finds itself in. In this case the box contains haunted stamps as stamps represent communications “between two selves” (yet within the same container). Each stamp is a (incomplete) two-dimensional form of conscious thought potential (or the essence of the waking self as different from both the fully conscious self and the dream self incarnation). This - the flat stamps and static imagery of each stamp - is with regard to the “other-dimensional” nature of dreams. Many of the stamps feature human head profiles, giving more evidence to this concept. The eye above the pyramid symbol represents the full conscious self (or perhaps even the Source). In fact, most “haunting” dreams seem to be subtle links between the conscious self and the dream self while in the dream state. This is a little similar to my lifelong recurring dream scenario (since around age twelve) of being worried about someone finding a human skull hidden in a box of books under my bed or buried.