Blue_Opossum

Night of December 21, 1970. Monday.



My older brother Dennis, half-brother on my mother’s side, is visiting my parents and me at our home in Cubitis during his leave during the Vietnam war, in my dream as well as in reality. Also in reality as is recognized in my dream, he had given me a small silver flashlight with a corrugated surface, that was identical to the one he had. My birthday was the day before; December 20th. [Dennis plays the role of “interested witness” in my dream and is the only other human character in this segment.]

He and I are in my father’s original room at the southwest corner of my Cubitis home. It seems to be very late at night, perhaps around midnight or after. There is a light mist in the room, rising up to just below knee-level. [The appearance of a mist at or near ground-level, especially inside a familiar house, is a very good dream sign, though I do not become lucid.] We are standing close to the large bed (and which has mostly light gray and light blue bedding), almost touching the sides. My brother Dennis is standing on the left of my informal disembodied viewpoint, closer to both the door and the head of the bed as I am looking south towards the jalousie windows which the head of the bed is adjacent to and from my incorporeal perspective of watching myself (which I do not find unusual at all), the other “real” (physical) me being closer to the foot of the bed on my right, the bed perpendicular to the south wall of the room, out from about the middle of the wall. [A bed is another very good and more obvious dream sign, especially when a mist appears around it.]

A ghostly tadpole, floating in the air, partially transparent and with a hint of blue, about the length of my hand, is hovering and wavering horizontally above the center of the empty bed, and it is looking north towards the foot of the bed as well as alternating glances at us, remaining in position at about two and a half feet from the bed’s surface, reminding me a little of a fluttering pennant. [“See, I am like a ship’s pennant, fluttering above a bed in a room of mist, marking the platform of your induction, so take notice of me, do you not see you are in a dream?”]

This ghostly tadpole is my secondary conscious self presence within my dream, projected here as the flying symbol of dream state immersion and waking transition, downsized and rendered as not yet an adult frog to remind me I am still a boy. It speaks to me of coalescence, impossibly “swimming” fairly high above the implied surface of a pond or other body of water; as such, rising above the awareness of a typical dream, and as a result, my dream almost reaches apex lucidity and becomes nearly as vivid as real life.

Both Dennis and I are shining flashlights at it and around it and watching its big eyes dart from side to side, as I remain with a feeling of awe and wonder, watching how the light reacts to various aspects of its partly reflective wavering body. Its mouth also makes fish-like movements the whole time. My brother is talking about it in detail and making other comments. I catch the word “weird” a few times but not much else. [The flashlight is the power of the whole conscious self, shining light and awareness into the dream state, and in addition to this being my primary conscious self essence, it also signifies the inevitability of sunrise and daylight - that which dissolves the most vivid of dreams.]

Time passes and the hovering ghostly tadpole eventually quickly turns (after seemingly deciding if he wanted to go into Dennis’s flashlight or mine) and suddenly “swims” into my flashlight, following the ray of light that my flashlight emits, yet my flashlight goes out as my dream eventually “darkens” and I wake with somewhat of a curious awareness and puzzlement. I get an impression that Dennis will be puzzled by my flashlight no longer working as I come out of an odd half-awake state.

…and thus my dream ends, the small “undeveloped” (not yet a frog) ghost of my dream self projection, incomplete threads of conscious puzzlement and limited identity, the “haunted” nature of “unraveled” conscious attentions, deciding to coalesce back into the light of day, the tool and form of whole consciousness, the flashlight, the ray of rationality, the flight of the waking, half-aware self back to the source and out of the dream state. There is only one additional detail. My flashlight really did stop working that morning, which puzzled my brother greatly. The batteries were new. Perhaps the bulb burnt out. I did not drop it, but it never worked again.