Blue_Opossum

Morning of June 1, 1988. Friday.



This dream has very strange imagery and seems of the type where I am both disembodied as well as somehow “outside” my dream. I am apparently looking at a magazine (though it seems like a “real” scene as well, eventually), and focusing more and more on it. I see the “Dennis the Menace” character and he appears to be in a store, perhaps in preparation to look at or buy comic books, though his dog Ruff is also in the store and standing to his left (my right in perspective but a bit more in the foreground). I seem to be looking at a large colorful drawing or perhaps a sketchy oil painting by Hank Ketcham. (It somehow does not seem at all like part of a comic strip or comic book.)

The more closely I look over the scene, the more things seem “off” even though it seems “real”. Dennis the Menace has only one large eye on his forehead, which is somewhat dome-like and a sort of “sickly” brownish green. It may also be implied to be somewhat reflective (or mirror-like, though also “dirty” or murky). There are no other eye-like details, just the oval green “blob” on his forehead. This causes me to feel somewhat strange and out-of-place as if I am almost looking at something “wrongfully” otherworldly. I do not become lucid but begin to “understand” that everything is otherwise “normal” about this character’s drawing at this point in time. Prior to waking, it almost seems like the “real” Dennis may have been “taken over” by an alien threat (or at least as such relevant to semiconscious waking thoughts).

---

Explanations for this dream are not all that diffciult to determine. Firstly, dreams typically have surreal and bizarre imagery, often incidental, so this could just be a “glitch” as such. However, it could also be a play on the “third eye”. Dennis is not a real character, which could reflect the “unreal” dream state. The “eye” could also represent a “portal” (that is, the return to waking reality as my dream “melts” into one color and with less detail). Because of the color it may relate to looking down into the ground.

---

The “Dennis the Menace” comic panel prior to this date was a gag where he said “Guess what, mom! All the mirrors in the house look like ME!” - which may have vaguely influenced my dream on one level (and the one on this date - not yet seen at the time - having him ask Mr. Wilson, who is digging, “Who buries the worms here in the first place?” - nothing I know of relating to any “explanation” for this imagery other than the eye being partly mirror-like relating to a meditation I had been doing). I also had read many of the “Dennis the Menace” digests when younger but this is the only significant dream of this nature ever documented.

---

Update: On this date in 2001 (exactly 13 years after this dream), Hank Ketcham passed away. This makes both my dream and his own comic panel published on this date in 1988 seem a bit eerie (no disrespect intended).

Morning of October 1, 1980. Wednesday.



My main dream sequence was somewhat abstract and mostly involved looking around in an unusual store that was a distorted composite, with what was being sold together in the same store as such not making much sense. There are craft items, fishing tackle, and possibly school textbooks on certain shelves, and possibly food. However, the waking transition was very clear as it usually is and can easily be decoded.

I am later fishing while standing on a roofed sidewalk. I am at the front of the store (facing east) but which also mainly looks like the entrance to my middle school in Florida. The parking lot has been replaced by a large body of water which comes up to the level of where the parking lot’s surface would otherwise be. This is where I am fishing.

After a short time, I hook onto something that feels very heavy and large but does not fight that much. Soon however, a huge catfish slowly emerges from the surface of the water, slides on its stomach up onto the sidewalk and swallows an unknown chubby male (of perhaps forty) who had been standing about eight feet to my right. There is a sense of awe but I am also somewhat amused.

---

I would rather experience coalescence autosymbolism by watching another (typically unknown and presumed fictional) dream character being swallowed than experience it as my dream self. This is otherwise autosymbolism for the illusory dream state being swallowed up by the conscious self identity and the distorted dream self coalescing back into consciousness. The parking lot is liminal space (autosymbolism for being in a specific level of unconsciousness between dreaming and waking), and water lowering waking symbolism eventually commences here as in many other dreams. An area of land being replaced by becoming the surface of a body of water has happened in a number of my dreams, and other people have reported this as well.

---