Blue_Opossum

Morning of October 1, 2017. Sunday.

Dream #: 18,549-02. Reading time: 40 sec.



Post-induction: I am with my wife Zsuzsanna and our children as we appear now. We are seemingly at the local showgrounds at nighttime. (This scene stems from residual memory of the enjoyable time we had there in real life.)

Vestibular stage: Zsuzsanna takes our youngest daughter up a ladder to a minimal structure where a person is to jump off an I-beam from at least thirty feet up. I soon see the view from overhead even though I had not yet climbed the ladder, yet I do not seem incorporeal.

The drop: I am wary as I do not want Zsuzsanna or our daughter injured. However, after they jump, a safety net appears, and they cheerfully land on it.

Sustaining vestibular modulation: I decide to try it, but I start to realize as I am climbing the metal ladder that I am liminally trying to enhance my imaginary physicality. Before I get to the I-beam (though I was already on it in the first scene), I wake, feeling amused.

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Morning of October 1, 1982. Friday.



While in the northeast bedroom of the Loomis Street house, I am vaguely aware of the presence of duck hunters. Through the window, I see that the front yard is marshy. The streets are lightly flooded, which seems normal to my dream self, and related to the seasons.

Although there had been no perceived presence of the duck hunters being in the house at any point, there are a number of duck decoys sitting about in the house which they had still somehow apparently set up. I find this annoying and intrusive. I gather a few and place them outside, though remain wary of being shot at if I move a certain way. Curiously though, I soon do not feel that much in danger. I notice there is now less water on the streets (very common waking symbolism). The duck hunters actually seem to be gone. (The hunters in this case are this dream’s preconscious element. There is no “threat” as the waking transition has already activated via RAS.)

While trying to go back to sleep, I falsely recall that one of the wooden duck decoys was mine, having had it since very young, and being fond of it and frustrated about now possibly losing it. I am puzzled by the situation until I wake. (This is likely based on my feelings of nostalgia for the 1960s plastic model kit “The Visible Pigeon”, although I also had a duck decoy catalog as a teenager as I enjoyed collecting mail-order catalogs at that time.)

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This is typified as “failed flight waking symbolism”, a very common waking transition dream component (a perfectly natural unconscious transmutation of the biological falling start, which has nothing to do with waking life or the conscious self as some extremely unintelligent people pretend), not meant to be in a negative context but as a result of a natural transition from sleeping to waking and the temporary puzzlement of being in liminal space and not being fully aware of one’s physical body while semi-conscious. My hypnopompic waking “jolt” is subdued here, which is directly related to the fake ducks, which are neither real nor can fly away (similar to any dream where a person otherwise falls, or an airplane crashes, a meteor is seen, or many other generic analogies to returning to wakeful consciousness, including climbing or using a staircase or a “flight” of stairs). Flight symbols in dreams are typically linked to real-time inner ear dynamics (loosely related to dizziness or falling sensations when awake) and RAS (reticular activating system) in subliminal anticipation of leaving the dream state. Flight symbols as such have occurred in at least one dream per sleeping period for over fifty years, which automatically renders “interpretation” (in the common superstitious usage of the term) as an invalid concept, not however, discounting literal prescience, literal practice events, or literal willful scripting of a dream (including viable healing affirmations).

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Night of September 30, 2017. Saturday.



I am sitting on our couch in the darkness in our lounge room in our present home. I am on the right side of our couch facing the north end of our lounge room.

I feel very peaceful and in a state of well-being and bliss. I soon become aware that our oldest son has come out of his room (from our lounge room’s access door on the west of his room). He has a pale yellow cell phone with a flashlight beam coming out of the top edge of it (not an item he has in real life). He moves it around, mainly in a horizontal semicircle from his right to his left, as if searching for something or someone, apparently me. He seems very cheerful though about five years younger than he presently is (though my dream self does not consider this distortion as such). I quickly wake as a result of RAS (reticular activating system, which is what biologically controls the dream state dynamics and inherent waking symbolism), still feeling very peaceful, calm, and happy.

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I had this longer microdream while actually sitting on our couch (same position and orientation as my dream) after the power had been out this evening for over an hour (the result of a regional blackout). I was so relaxed sitting in the darkness that I slipped into a microdream within a few minutes upon sitting down on our couch (which usually only happens as I am watching television). Our son carrying the flashlight “looking for me” was simply the biological RAS activation (otherwise typified as “searchlight waking symbolism” of the passive and positive kind). The emergent consciousness factor was quite brief and the preconscious dynamic was non-aggressive as this was not a dream of a longer sleeping period. (In actuality, our youngest son had used a flashlight but not on me during the period of my dream.) The cell phone feature is present due to RAS mediating consciousness (as a type of communication with the transient fictional dream self).

The strictly biological RAS “searchlight effect” has occurred in hundreds of dreams since early childhood, including in documented dreams online such as “Steering Clear of a Laser Tracking Weapon” from 2013, “Spacecraft in the Alley” from 1997, “Not Exactly the Three Musketeers” from 1988, “Laser-Eyed Alligator” from 1979, “The Beam” from 1977, and a number of other dreams.

For the majority of people who have no understanding of dreams, it may be important to address why this biological RAS activation is different in this case from other dreams that utilize the same basic waking symbolism (the dawning consciousness metaphor), for example, how does this dream differ from “Laser-Eyed Alligator” or other dreams of the same type?

The most obvious difference here is, I expected and wanted the power to come back on. In “Laser-Eyed Alligator” and “Steering Clear of a Laser Tracking Weapon”, my dream self, at a subliminal level, did not want to wake yet. This is what RAS and the transpersonal preconscious are for. It is not rocket science unless one is superstitious and clueless.

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On a side note, I talked with my lovely wife Zsuzsanna tonight about a possibility of perhaps editing and resupplementing all 4,000 or so of my dream journal entries presently on the Internet to make them more “idiot-proof”. Alas, this seems next to impossible. No matter how much clarity and accuracy I include in some of my entries, based on over fifty years of experience, there are people who do not get dreams at all (or of whom are of the unfortunate mentality to believe in “dream interpretation” in the various superstitious or pseudo-psychological ways the term is misused). There always seems to be one person (usually a male with obvious personal issues) who somehow feels the need to contradict the obvious or add to my post in various ways. I am stating that here just in case such a comment appears on an entry.

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