The Fourth Factor

I seem to be visiting my parents, who live on an island. I’m busy for most of the day cleaning out a cabinet or wardrobe. In only another hour or so, there are going to be guests over for dinner.

We’re out of the house now for some reason. Mother is concerned that I’ve been exerting myself so much, and I should drink some water. I’m not particularly thirsty but say I will. My father and I go off to a sort of convenience store-like shop nearby to buy a bottle, but the water is very expensive – almost 10 dollars for a water bottle (though I can’t swear it wasn't some other currency). That’s right, I remember – there isn’t any fresh water on the island, so it all has to be shipped here, and that makes it so expensive. My father asks if it’s OK if I don’t get the water, and I say I’m fine with it. Again, I don’t particularly care either way – I just want to keep them happy.

Not long after that, I step onto what unexpectedly turns out to be an elevator – a floating glass elevator, à la Willy Wonka. It rises up and flies partway across the island to a large building, then down several stories into its basement. I briefly see the various underground floors on the way down. I consider getting off and heading back – I don’t want to be late for dinner – but rumor has it that the headquarters of the secret police is on one of those floors, and I have a history with them. Just walking through their headquarters would be asking for trouble.

So I wait as some other people get on the elevator and it continues to the third major hub on the island – it isn’t very large, and so there are only the three. This one is on the other end, farther away – a place I’ve never been before. The elevator flies over lawns dotted with groves of trees. It’s dusk now, and we approach and pass a blue light – some sort of decorative sculpture marking the approach. This whole area is like an estate, or a place that was one at some previous time.

Once we’re there, I get off. There’s a tower there – perhaps I have to climb down the side to get to the ground, but one way or another, I wind up climbing on it. It’s a fairly small building, though tall, made of square, grey stones, each of which has a shape cut through it large enough to make a foothold or handhold – circles, squares, stars, etc. Each stone is also marked with two sets of letters, one a capital letter, the others one or more lowercase ones. As I grab hold of one hollow stone, I feel a switch flip on the inside edge, causing the opening to light up. The whole thing is a giant cipher key, I realize. I don’t have any messages in need of decoding – but if I happen to find any, I now know exactly where to bring them.

I climb around for a bit, playing around with it to make sure I know how it works. But once I’m back on the ground, a woman starts yelling at me for climbing on the tower. Guess I wasn’t supposed to be doing that. I stay calm. What she’s saying doesn’t make much sense – really not a coherent accusation against me at all, just anger. I ask a couple reasonable questions. She answers, still in an angry tone. But then, having lost her momentum, the absurdity of it seems to dawn on her, and she starts laughing. I laugh, too. It seems like everything is OK now.

12.2.20

I’m on a trip with my parents and an unfamiliar young man. We were all supposed to go to a casino—and they did actually go. But I didn’t care much for that plan, and so I’ve been off doing something else and only arrived back at the hotel room in time for their last trip there, late on the final evening.

I have the impression that this is a place they’re familiar with, but this will be my first time there. I’ve been told not to bring my purse with me for whatever reason, but I don’t like going around without writing materials on hand, and so I say that I’ll just take my wallet out before I go. But it seems my parents are so eager to get back that, rather than waiting the couple of minutes this will take, they go on without me, leaving the young man to drive us there.

Outside, it’s raining hard, and has been for a while, judging by all the standing water in the streets. As we go on, it only gets deeper, until the car, which is a fairly low one, starts having trouble moving forward. Some light on the dashboard has come on. He curses at the car—and quite probably my parents, who would have had no trouble handling this in theirs. I suggest that we just pull off the road onto higher ground, as some other cars seem to be doing, and walk the rest of the way there. It isn’t very far. He agrees to it.

The next part I remember clearly is being inside the casino, in a large room with a grand staircase, crowded with fancily dressed people. On the upper floor, near a restaurant area, I meet up with my parents again. It’s sort of like a buffet, with tables in a horseshoe shape, each one with an attendant behind them, offering samples of various kinds of foods to the guests. Mother is going to get a chocolate milkshake—apparently, a favorite of hers there—but my father isn’t interested. The idea doesn’t appeal much to me either, and anyways, this is all new to me: I want to try things out before I order anything.

He heads off somewhere else. I get some kind of a soup, and then head over to where they’re serving white wine. I try the sample they have there, which is pretty good—but they have all kinds of interesting drinks here, and this would be a good chance to try things I wouldn’t necessarily want a full glass of. And my mother is trying to get my attention from across the room, so I leave the table without ordering anything and head over in her direction.

Then, suddenly, I feel a spray of cold water—and the people around me do as well, judging by how they’re crying out. It seems someone is spraying people with a hose. I move out of the way, wondering what that was about. Maybe the casino staff themselves are responsible. The whole reason this place exists is to take money from people, after all—I think it’s best not to lose sight of that—and it wouldn’t surprise me at all for one to start charging people to keep things going nicely, once they’ve got them used to it.

Once out of range, I pause and kneel down to make sure the cat is still with me. He is indeed still there and comes to get pet. He’s an orange cat, an adult, though on the small side, and has been here with me this whole time. So far, nobody has noticed him—or else they just don’t care. But it’s still a little dangerous for him to be here with me, and so I’ve been making sure he stays close, waiting until I feel him against the back of my ankles before moving on.

11.5.19

I’m in a study, sitting at a desk facing a wall. A man is sitting to my left. This seems to be some kind of music lesson: we have sheets of manuscript paper in front of us, and I’m doing some sort of exercise where I fill in bits of the melodies that aren’t written. I’m having trouble figuring out how to notate the rhythm I have in mind, but after moving to something else for a little while, I come back and manage it easily. I write the notes in with a red pen, very neatly.

The lesson’s almost over when a young girl, 7 or 8, runs into the room and lies down on the desk in front of us—the man’s daughter. She seems to be in a silly mood. She speaks to him in German - we've been speaking English until now - and he answers. She moves across the room, and they have an exchange in which he asks her questions, but she just gives nonsense answers and giggles (and totally ignores me). I just watch and pet the cat, a gray tabby that’s also entered the room, not at all put out by the interruption. Before long, a woman who seems to be a nanny comes in, presumably for the girl.

I wake up.

In the next dream, I’m staying in a large hotel with my parents. As I walk through the lobby, towards the staircase, I see a number of men dressed in suits of armor decorated with intricate patterns and women in white ballerina’s outfits with similar patterns in silver. Some sort of wedding party, I figure.

After a quick trip to the room, which is at the end of a hallway, my mother and I seem to be walking out, away from the city center and towards the outskirts. This is Wilhelmshöhe, apparently—although it would be hard to find a place that looks less like the actual place of that name. There’s less and less to see as we walk along. Less traffic, too. A man drives a horse-drawn carriage past and gives us a peculiar look. Somehow, I have the feeling that we’re expected here, and he’s a part of it.

And, an unknown period of time after that, I’ve been transported to a different place, a large building full of people getting ready to something to begin. I’m a part of it, too, now. A man is explaining to me what’s going on in a mixture of French and German. That seems to be the norm here, and I slip into it too as I speak with him.

I comment at one point that something he just said sounded more like how people talk in movies than in real life—or dreams, I add. Because I do know it’s a dream by now, although I’m not sure just when the realization hit me. But I’m going along with it because it looks like some interesting and possibly important things are going on here.

Unusually for a lucid dream, it was difficult to remember much of what happened—some details stood out, but a lot of it just blurred together. The man I’ve been talking to seems to be in charge and has us carry out different tasks, and give answers to questions. I seem to be apart from the others somehow, involved, but playing a different role.

(17.6.18)

I’m in the house where my friend Saimi and her family live, near the kitchen, where Saimi and a couple others are. It’s an old-fashioned sort of kitchen with a fireplace and a pipe through which water is supposed to come—but right now, water isn’t coming in, even though it’s raining right now. It seems that something has clogged it. Nearby, in a living room area, my uncle is lying on a couch.

As I stand there watching, a small bird is fluttering around my face, very close. It’s annoying, and I want to wave it away, but that doesn’t seem right somehow. There must be a reason for this. I stand still and let my mind go blank. I can feel vague memories begin to stir—very old memories, stories concerning this kind of bird. And suddenly, it occurs to me that this is how birds behave when there’s a predator nearby. Am I being warned? And where could the danger be?

My attention is drawn to the clogged pipe. Slowly, two green heads are emerging from it—snakes. I tell the others what’s going on and run to the foyer, where I see what I’m looking for—an umbrella rack.

It is a sort of rectangular cage made of a brassy metal, very much like the one my family used to have. If it had been my family’s umbrella rack, it would have contained an assortment of swords, bamboo rods and a pair of snake sticks, the best possible tool for the task at hand. Disappointingly, this one is mostly full of umbrellas. But my sword cane is here, at least, and I can work with that. I grab it by the cobra head-shaped knob, which seems oddly apropos. I grab another long rod which seems like it could be useful and hurry back to the kitchen. Once there, I hand the sword cane to my uncle and we wait for the snakes to emerge.

Two of them do at once, and we go for them—the goal being to transport them outside again. My uncle doesn’t seem to have much trouble with his, but the one I’m wrangling—it’s green with white bands—is proving more difficult because it’s so small and fast. Before I can do anything, it’s crawled up the rod and onto my arm. I tell my uncle, and he pulls it off with the cane—but not before it bites me. It just feels like little pinpricks. Nothing serious—it probably didn’t even inject any venom. I say as much to the others as we wait for the next one.

This one is all green, and much larger than the others. I try to pick it up with the rod, but the thing seems much flimsier than before, and is constantly telescoping into itself. My uncle and the sword cane, which I could really use right now, seem to have disappeared. Under the circumstances, my chances of getting the snake safely outside aren’t good. I’ll have to kill it. Through a combination of the rod and my feet, I manage without getting hurt myself—and then wake up.

26.1.18

In the dream, I seem to have traveled to some sort of large family gathering at an unfamiliar location. It is the last day before we go our separate ways, and so I speak with my aunt and uncle, arranging a time to meet up tomorrow morning, since we’ll be returning together. It’s better to get the planning out of the way now rather than try to do it at the party tonight, I explain.

Later on, I’ve gone somewhere nearby but higher up, by a park on a hill. In the middle of a well-kept green area is a large statue of the Brothers Grimm. There is another green hill off to one side with a row of tiny houses around the base, and stuck into the hillside is a large stone plaque, round with a wavy outline. Across the top, a few names are engraved, and below, a body of text in a smaller size.

There’s a police officer nearby, and I get into a conversation with him. The part of it I can still recall went like this:

“You could live in that house.”

It is the house nearest to us that he’s talking about, a sort of cabin-like structure. The door is wide open, so I can see that it is vacant. I can also see that it is ridiculously tiny, which would probably explain why. I tell him I can’t live possibly there: there isn’t even enough room to lie down inside.

“You could sleep in the park,” he says, undeterred. “And keep food in the house.”

This is a bit odd coming from someone whose job, as I understand it, involves keeping people from sleeping in parks. I must have said something expressing my doubt as to whether that was allowed because he then—in the manner of someone who’s lived in a town all his life and apparently knows everything significant that’s happened there since the dawn of civilization—asks me if I’ve heard of a certain person—a Greek name, but I can’t recall it any longer. I thought I did—a young man, a Greek general from the early 20th century—but he replied that it was actually someone else who was associated with him somehow.

This man, explained the officer, had spent a night sleeping on the statue itself. I look over and see that Wilhelm, on the right, is holding a scroll that looks like it would make a natural perch for the venturesome and bored. And not only did this man not get in trouble for it—the policeman is very emphatic about this—they put his name on the plaque along with the other famous people who had been there to visit the site. The point being, I guess, that nobody would hold it against me, either.

And after that, I was down in the area with my family again until I woke up around four in the morning.

(13.1.18)