The Fourth Factor

I am traveling in a foreign country, driving a car down a dirt road—although there’s a bit of a traffic jam at the moment, and nobody is actually moving except the pedestrians, who walk between the cars and on the side of the road. Two women wearing some kind of sari-like traditional dress walk past. I think about giving them a lift—something I wouldn’t ordinarily consider doing, but they seem particularly trustworthy somehow.

At some point, I suddenly find that the car is full of people, and I’m in the backseat. The two people in the front seats are wearing police uniforms, and two or three other people are standing between the rows of seats. I ask a man in a white business-type shirt standing to my left if this is a police chase, and he confirms that it is. I have heard about this—of officers requisitioning vehicles so they can go after somebody who would otherwise escape them. I suppose that’s OK—not that I get any choice in the matter.

The next thing I remember is walking through a public building, talking with the same man. He’s asking me questions. One is, essentially, whether I can take any time off work. I reply that I can’t. I’m working remotely even now, on this trip. He is concerned that I’m not recovering from something, which he seems to feel is my fault, and wants me to undergo a scan of some kind—he’s holding the equipment now, beside a machine there. This is a little exasperating, as I’m already pretty sure this has to do with some kind of control issue, which isn't exactly news. But what’s more troubling is the fact that he’s mentioning things that happened since the car chase, and I don’t remember anything between now and then. I try to determine how big of a memory gap I’m dealing with. Very shortly afterwards, I conclude that this is not something it’s possible to do without knowing what happened during that time. And at that point, I wake up.

It’s an hour or so after that—after recording the dream and after listening to people being typically noisy atypically early downstairs—that my cell phone rings. Or vibrates, rather, since that’s the setting I keep it on. I’m annoyed since I was almost asleep, and this is such a good opportunity for having a lucid dream. If I ignore it and don’t move, it’ll stop soon enough. But it doesn’t stop after the normal number of rings, and so I finally give up on the dream and get up to shut it off. And that’s when I realize—this is a dream.

This is the part where I figure out what to do, now that I have this opportunity. And right now, what I want to do is go back to the setting of the last dream and figure out what was going on there. I head over to the window and step onto the windowsill, disregarding the glass pane, which obligingly acts as though it didn’t exist.

It is dark out, but the setting I see before me has nothing else in common with what I’d ordinarily see out my window. For one thing, it’s a long way down—the ledge where I’m perched isn’t as high as an airplane would fly, perhaps, but it can’t be that much closer to the earth. The landscape spread out before me is also unfamiliar, and remarkably strange. The ground is uniformly flat, with nothing but houses and trees as far as the eye can see. But every so often, there are tall, thin spires, each set of them closely grouped, apparently made of rock— like giant needles stuck into the earth. Their tips are about level with where I am—in other words, incredibly high—and they’re so disproportionate to the rest of the landscape that they look unnatural.

Looks like I’ll be flying, then. But first—I will it to become daytime and wait for a little while. Nothing happens. Well, that was probably a little unrealistic, but it was worth a try. Anyway, I can see just fine, even with no discernible source of light: everything below me and in the distance is clear and crisply outlined. But seen with night-vision, it’s all dark blue, which will make it less interesting to fly over. (Later on, after waking up, I’ll recall that I intentionally enabled myself to see in the dark in a lucid dream a couple months ago—could it be that it was a lasting modification? That would be interesting.)

I ready myself and launch outwards, extending a set of muscles I only have in dreams, when I choose to: wings. It’s a smooth glide for the most part. There isn’t much in the way of wind up here—as empty and still and silent as it is on the ground far below. Trees, houses, more trees, more houses, and the nearest set of spires, coming ever closer. It’s an odd feeling, being up here in this lonely place, poised and sharply aware and secure somehow.

The next part is difficult to remember—I’m not exactly sure how I managed to find my way back to the building from the first dream, but it seemed to involve flying in a pattern around the spires—a little like dialing the combination of a lock, a little like grabbing the fabric of dream-space and twisting it in exactly the right way. But one way or another, I'm there. The building was full of people before, but now it is dark and empty. And a woman with brown skin and dark hair is standing beside me there—she will take me to the man I want to speak to.

And that’s the point where it would be best to end this account, I think….

(29.1.18)

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

I find myself in a room that’s like my bedroom in my old house in K---, more or less. I notice a stranger is there—a dark-haired boy, maybe between eight and 10. I immediately go over and interrogate him—who is he, and what is he doing here in my house? But then I ‘remember’—he’s the neighbor’s kid, and we’ve arranged it so that he comes over here when he arrives home before his parents do so he doesn’t have to be in the house alone. Oops.

After that, I want to make sure he feels welcome here, so I invite him over to my desk to see what I’m working on. I’m reverse engineering a notebook, I explain. I have it there: the powder blue leather-covered notebook I bought yesterday. I’m going to take it apart, and then I’m going to use what I learned to make a notebook of my own that’s similar in design. As I speak, I’m actually disassembling it. He doesn’t say anything—not once in the entire dream, I think—but he seems to be listening.

And when I’m all done, I tell him, I’m going to put the original one back together. It won’t be exactly as it was before, since part of it was damaged in the process—something I easily could have avoided, but it doesn’t actually matter that much. I’m going to sew together some colorful scraps of leather to replace that part, and it’ll end up looking nicer that way anyway.

At one point, he takes an envelope that’s stuffed into my desk organizer—it’s made from a greyish recycled paper, like the kind used for official correspondence in Germany—and sets it on top of a pile of unopened envelopes. Probably trying to help, I figure. I take the envelope and put it back where it was. The pile is unopened mail, I explain. In between finals, visiting family, everyone getting the flu and all the work being done on the house, there’s a lot I haven’t had the chance to look at yet.

My old friend Saimi and I are sitting at a table by the city’s inner wall, having coffee. They are thick walls, built with greyish stone, and through a window in the wall—a rough hole with a metal grid across it—we can see something a little troubling taking place: a small group of oni is building a campfire there, in the courtyard area between this wall and the outer one. They’re larger than humans, with colorful skin and wearing rough clothing, some of it made from animal skins. It’s odd, I think to myself. It’s been ages since I’ve read, watched or played anything with oni in it. The ones I can recall looked different. And yet, these guys strike me as familiar—familiar as individuals, even. I can’t account for it.

Anyway, Saimi and I have business to take care of. I have been investigating a series of mysterious events that Saimi has been involved with in some way—something from a dream from earlier in the night that I can no longer remember— and since our last meeting, my research has turned up something quite interesting. We have two small pages of text with us that appeared when the events took place and that we suspect may be connected to them somehow—both the same text, but one copy in English and one in Korean. They seem to concern some kind of game.

The oni—whom we’ve been keeping a watchful eye on this whole time—are now entering through the gate, which isn't far from where we're sitting, and roaming the city square. Presumably, they're looking for someone to eat. Should we move? We decide not to. They'll probably be satisfied with only one person, and there’s only a small chance it’ll be one of us. We continue talking. But suddenly, I feel myself grabbed from behind and carried backwards. My espresso cup falls to the ground and rolls away. I call out something to Saimi as I struggle to get free—but then the dream shifts around us. I’m not sure now whether it was something I did intentionally or something that just happened, but at any rate, I seem to be better prepared for it than the oni are. While they’re trying to figure out what just happened, I break loose and run for it.

Or rather, my character on the screen does, since I’m now experiencing this as a video game. I get a few screens away, at which point I know I’m safe. From there, I explore the town where I now am for a little while, going into houses and talking to the people there—and then I seem to be on my computer, checking my email. As I watch, new emails are arriving in my inbox every few seconds, which is unusual. Something big must be happening.

And then I wake up.

(22.1.17)

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)