Blue_Opossum

Morning of September 11, 1969. Thursday.



My dream starts with an atypical unseen narrator who says, without emotion: “New York Harbor 1969. The city is a mess”.

I am flying over Manhattan in the first scene. I am semi-lucid and vividly aware of curious saxophone and xylophone music (never heard in real life); a series of repeated staccato notes. My sheet music image (only available on some websites with this entry) is close to what I heard in my dream. There is a later version where the third set of eighth notes in each motif is removed, giving a sense of anticipation.



On websites where the image is not available, the eighth notes (except for the last C, a quarter note) are: C C C C, C D C D, C D C D, E E E E, E F E F, E F E F, G G G G, G A G A, G A G A, A G G F, F E E D, C. The tempo is about 84 at first, though is accelerando. The music becomes a bit more intense yet with a less audible orchestral sound in the background, as if the volume is turned down though later up again. (This effect has happened in other dreams, usually when the level of dream state awareness changes, as sometimes the closer I am to waking, the less number of instruments are heard.)

Looking directly down as I fly, I watch a giant snake swim through the water, moving along on the water’s surface. (As such, my dream’s foundation is the most common form; water induction, as water symbolizes sleep dynamics in real time.) The snake is so large that it knocks aside boats (mostly tugboats) as it moves. However, there is also a brief awareness that the snake is of normal size and the debris is more like small pieces of bark, leaves, and twigs as I seemingly watch the “same” scene much closer to the water’s surface (as if of a small lake) before the implication changes again. At this point I also get the distinct impression that I am standing or hovering in my orb form (while incorporeal) to the left of the doorway in the southwest bedroom (not where I slept) at the same time I am dreaming this (with a vague association with having looked into our full bathtub and toilet while somehow sleepwalking, though I had not been). This bilocated impression (typical of a lot of my childhood dreams) does not continue. Helicopters fly over the Statue of Liberty and there is more news about the attack on Manhattan as apparently giant snakes came from a crashed flying saucer (as if perhaps manlike aliens, though unseen, and possibly from two different planets, lost control of their spacecraft for an unknown reason). There are two kinds of giant snakes that fight each other. One kind seems friendlier to humans. I watch a lot of the monster-movie-like battles though my dream eventually shifts to my home in Cubitis, and my previous lucid threads fade.

I am chasing a baby giant snake (which is my height in its upright “S” form) in a southerly direction, from the end of our driveway, near Highway Seventeen, and moving past the west side of our large culvert. The snake is the recurring Pepto Bismol pink that was fairly common in my dreams around this time period (after my mother had me drink it in real life). It is somehow quickly slithering upright like a standing (vertical) letter S and moving much like a swan. I am fearlessly chasing it, to make it leave the area so that bigger snakes do not eventually come by to investigate. Suddenly, when I get past the neighbor’s house a short distance, the snake looks “confused” (and I get the impression of an actual question mark floating in the air over its head very briefly, a curious feature of other childhood dreams, likely influenced by comic strips) and it turns around to start chasing me. I raise my arms up and out as I am now running away, but as if the scene is meant to be comedic or playful.

This continues for a short time when suddenly, the snake and I are very good friends. We are now at the end of the driveway, where I first found myself chasing it. I am holding the large snake in my arms like a baby, which is eventually even wearing an old-fashioned pale blue baby bonnet and held within a white baby blanket and is now going to sleep.

I am aware that the War of the Serpents will continue, possibly to the point where a lot more regions will be damaged. My parents do not appear at any point, and in fact, I do not interact with anyone I know in real life. Later, I am calm in the presence of a few giant black snakes (though my dream fades when I start flying again). This likely relates to the fact that black snakes were considered good due to a reputation where I lived of them supposedly chasing off rattlesnakes, which seems the main origin of my dream’s otherwise science-fiction theme.

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This dream has two discernible attempts at subliminal reinduction (a non-lucid attempt to vivify or extend the dream state, though I am semi-lucid when my dream begins). Firstly, my dream begins with typical water induction (my most common form of dream state initiation). A snake is the primary (biological) reticular activating system symbol (RAS mechanism), due to having evolved out of the natural fear that primates have of snakes, and thus RAS renders it as the potential waking trigger (in generating enough emotion as an “alert” for the purpose of waking the dreamer to attend to real physical needs), though a snake will sometimes relate to different factors (sometimes literal) and symbolism depending on the dream type, which only the dreamer could understand the origin and validation of in any case.

My first attempt at reinduction (even though I am still in the water as sleep initiation stage, though already with the snake as a potential RAS factor) is evidenced by the music having a similar essence as snake-charming music, to delay RAS waking dynamics. The second attempt is far more obvious and easier to validate. I succeed in harmoniously putting the snake to sleep (which represents willfully though subliminally decreasing RAS dynamics that might otherwise wake me up) at the end of the driveway, which symbolizes the subliminal awareness of eventually needing to wake up and stand at the end of my driveway to wait for the school bus. Dreams are very easy to understand once ignorant superstition and “interpretation” is cast aside in the acknowledgement of what dreams actually are. It should be emphasized that this dream began with conscious choice of first deliberately “stepping into” (and then flying within) my dream’s water-based environment (as I have done thousands of times since childhood and for over fifty years), which is also why the bilocated essence regarding another bedroom (obvious dream state indicator) in our house came into focus. (It should also be obvious that the baby snake additionally symbolizes a mild stomach ache, and the RAS “taming” of it for a few reasons; one, actually being the color of stomach ache medicine, two, being shaped like a human intestine, and three, stomach pain associated with a snake that squeezes its prey.)

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Edited for clarity and resupplemented on Sunday, 29 October 2017.

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