Blue_Opossum

Morning of May 4, 2018. Friday.



My dream starts with the very common liminal awareness of my physical body being in bed as I sleep, but I do not attain viable lucidity.

My dream still renders a bed as my dream’s setting, though the location is unknown and undefined and I absentmindedly perceive it more as serving as a table upon which to play the card game. In fact, even though I am aware of playing Gin Rummy with several other people, I do not ever actually see them. I am on my left side (as I am in reality as I sleep) looking at the several piles of playing cards, some face up, each pile with a few cards, some spread out more. I am trying to remember what I need to do next.

However, as my dream self in non-lucidity has neither viable access to the unconscious nor the conscious self identity, I remain uncertain of the rules (even though I have played Gin Rummy in real life numerous times). I gather up all the cards to shuffle them and start to deal them out, but then I consider that this is probably wrong. My dream becomes more abstract and I soon wake.

---

This dream was a result of watching “Think Tank” (a television game show) with Zsuzsanna, when a question about Gin Rummy was asked of one contestant and he got it wrong. It is interesting how the simplest random event can integrate into the dreaming and waking processes, but is there a real reason in this case? The question was about the highest-ranking card in Gin Rummy, of which the answer is “King”. I suspect that this correlates with potential liminal dream control in the dream state for a few reasons. One, the presence of the dream state indicator (me being on the bed). Two, my passive dream self allowing the preconscious to modulate rather than a thread of my conscious self identity taking control of my dream. Three, this dream is of the type based on thinking skills correlation, to induce synaptic gating for triggering consciousness.

---

Morning of May 15, 2015. Friday.



In the first part of my dream, I am with my wife and children in what seems to be our previous home on Barolin Street. I mostly remain around the area near the doorway into the kitchen, though staying mostly in the living room. I have some sort of card, about the size of a standard playing card or trading card, that is transparent in some areas and may be three-layered (with the transparent part being sandwiched between two thin cardboard layers that may have a couple abstract patterns). When I hold it up over my left eye, it creates realistic holograms in the room of various (unfamiliar) people walking around, sitting down (on our actual furniture), and interacting with each other. It is almost like watching characters in a movie. It is very realistic and three-dimensional and I mention this to my wife who is standing near the doorway at one point. This dream scene is almost like the opposite in mood to my dream from yesterday (“Several Intruders” from May 14th) in that there is a cheerful and interesting atmosphere (though of course, in this case, I decide whether or not to see them via usage of the card). I remain intrigued by how “realistic” the holographic people are though they are completely intangible and lack the potential to interact with, apparently, and I do not clearly recall experiencing them audibly speaking or at least what was said. There are mostly a few older females in long old-fashioned dresses as well as children (both male and female) of various ages.

Later, the living room of the Barolin Street house seems to slightly infuse into a composite that includes my old King Street apartment (the northeast corner room with the cupola area), though it “feels” more like the Barolin Street house. Still, the pinhead Leonard S shows up (mostly standing) and there is also an unknown younger male in the room (sitting on the floor) and he seems annoyed. He is possibly a college student and is probably loosely modeled after friend Rick S though he does not resemble him that much. He becomes angry after I inform him not to go through my belongings and he eventually starts yelling about not having eaten for several days, which is supposedly why his mood is atypically as it presently is. I go to check the status of my (fictional) collection of trading cards. (In fact, he may have been going through my room to find food, though this is not certain.)

My “collection”, or at least about half of it, seems to include duplicates of the same musician-themed card (and which are more like typical plain trading cards; not like the hologram-making card in the first part of my dream). Two of the slightly sketchy card designs are Rick Springfield (thus the possible association with friend Rick S) and David Essex - though the cards seem to have been made in the early 1960s or the late 1950s, which makes the scenario impossible (which is typical of dreams for some reason). Inside a large white wooden cabinet on the bottom spacious shelf is a sequence of four metal (silver) rotating trading card racks that make me think of rotating comic book racks (also called “revolving comic book racks”) except about one-fourth the size and with four tiers each. I am annoyed by the different tiers coming apart and some of the cards falling out onto the shelf and floor (though I do not question why I would have so many copies of the same card). I keep trying to fix everything up as the unknown male complains about his status in the background. I seem to have a slight empathy for him regarding his plight.

Morning of May 5, 2015. Tuesday.



There is some sort of small rectangular container (not that deep and perhaps large enough to store four to six stacks of playing cards) on a desk in our (last) house on Barolin Street which seems to be for commercial endeavors yet not directly connected with us in any way - which of course seems a bit odd in afterthought - as if a part of our house just incidentally happens to be open to the general public for no particular reason (sparsely recurring concept but more common over ten years ago). Supposedly, it is some sort of lottery where a person buys a card - which I think could cost as much as twenty dollars (or perhaps less) and apparently circles one word in each of three columns, such as “bill” or “beak” in one column, which I see fairly clearly - though it also seemingly has features like a scratch-off ticket. It seems the words you circle have something to do with exponentially increasing your winnings if only the right one is circled in each column. We do not make any kind of a profit for hosting this lottery as far as I know (and I am not sure who the setup actually belongs to), and no other person comes into our house to buy one of the cards at any point, so all in all, the scenario makes little sense. We actually “buy” a couple cards (I am not sure how the money transfers) and I look at them more closely but we do not win anything (yet) as far as I know. The front of the cards have different closeup bird scenes and the back has the scratch-off and circling area. The upper half of the back is yellow. The word-circling area is near the middle.

Later on, I start to think that we could just take some of the cards and see if they are winners (as there is no one else around to see what we are doing in our own home). At one point, I find a smaller series of cards under one stack that is slightly different and I start to think about why that is. These other cards are mostly the same in design but are a little thicker, have a glossier surface, and are orange on the upper half of the back instead of yellow. For a short time, I wonder if they are counterfeits (possibly made in China). However, it may also be that they are just a different run or later printing. Still, I only keep several of the other type to check for winning ones. (Here, I will mention that there is no in-dream back story or memory of how the lottery came to be set up in our home in this way, and the puzzle about the other type and where they came from is not solved.)

It eventually seems that about five or six of the cards we take (out of about a dozen or more) are winners, though a few are of only a smaller value. However, I then start to worry that they will know whether or not a person actually bought them by way of an automatic checking of some sort of identification code that is only recorded and stored when a card is legitimately purchased from the right source. I am not certain of this, but I start to think that I may not do this, thinking of putting them back. (This idea of just taking something that is already in our house though linked to a commercial business that is not related to us is something I vaguely recall dreaming of in the past, but not with the specifics at this time.)