Blue_Opossum

Morning of February 9, 2015. Monday.



This was a shorter dream without much plot or even a back story. It mostly involved (at first) only foreground-renderings in terms of perspective although I am in a park at one point and I am eventually aware of more around me for a time. However, much time is spent looking at things only a few feet away.

I am listening to various old cassette tapes I supposedly recorded music on including some of my own where I sing Bob Marley songs. Over time, one cassette gets chewed up from the capstan jamming. I watch the tape go inside the deck but pull most of it out afterwards. There is also a point where several other cassettes have lengths that had somehow been neatly sliced into rather short curled pieces, somewhat like flat macaroni. I contemplate putting them all back together, which of course would be impossible in reality. There would be no way to know which pieces went where when reconnecting - but it still seems I might be able to do this in-dream.

When I am eventually in a large park with a rural feel, it seems as that is where I had been since the dream started even though I was fairly certain I was in a room somewhere a short time earlier (otherwise my cassettes had been spread out over the ground outside which does not seem right - and the deck would likely have been plugged in somewhere). My brother Dennis comes from due south, I think, and starts talking to everyone (oddly, except to me) about police coming into the park soon to check everybody for some reason. This does not make much sense to me and I am not that concerned about it. My dream eventually fades with no ensuing drama.

Although it is not that uncommon for cassette tapes to go out of alignment or the capstan to get stuck, resulting in the tape being chewed, it is possible that this happens in a dream for the reason of a real-life noise intruding into the dream, or the dream losing cohesion as a result of something else (an incidental shift in consciousness perhaps).

Morning of January 20, 2015. Tuesday.



As my dream begins, I seem to be sitting on a bed (aligned along the west wall) in my father’s music room in Cubitis as it was around 1975. I have four cassette tapes. Two of them are in cases with seemingly commercial labeling and two seem created by an amateur outfit with store-bought blanks. Apparently, I am involved in my own dub recordings using these four cassette tapes as some sort of background audio.

Two of the cassette tapes have something to do with Captain Kirk (of “Star Trek”) though I am not certain if it is music, talking (such as interviews with the cast), the reading of a “Star Trek” novel, or sound effects from the show, or perhaps a random bit of everything. These two tapes have a cover with the same picture of a very young William Shatner as Kirk (sitting at a table with his hands clasped), with different label coloring on each as if part of a set or series. The other two tapes, or at least one of them, is an amateur fan fiction tape which also contains other things such as unusual sections of music and possibly a couple interviews or even unrelated random talking from a radio (or even just the static at times). I am not sure if the tapes are ninety minutes or an hour each, or perhaps much shorter, though I do eventually maintain the overall impression that they each are at least an hour long or half-hour per side.

Unlike many dreams of this nature, the tapes are not eaten by the cassette player and no other mechanical problems ensue. What I hear is actually not very unusual. It seems I do listen to the entire side of one cassette, at least, by which the last section is a shorter pad-like sound with dull and lower frequency dynamics. I hear it very clearly in-dream. Prior to this was two males talking in some sort of (possibly political) interview and there was also a speech by a male “Star Trek” fan and his work in an amateur “Star Trek” movie where he plays Captain Kirk. However, much of it seems like non-rhythmic electronic music and other sounds, including sound effects from the original “Star Trek” series. I am thinking on how I have yet to “filter” and compress the entire length of audio of that side of the tape and then add my own music over the top of it - by which it will then all sound completely different. I get the impression the first step will give the tapes a much better “silky” dynamic (with no tape noise or hiss whatsoever), but I am not thinking about low quality MP3s - which often have an overly silky sound as well as an irritating chorus-like funnel effect on high-hats and higher frequencies in general. It seems my “album” will only be on cassette tapes and oddly, I have no clearer memory of my work in digital audio at all.

Part of this is likely based on real-life memories of my father having bought “blank” cassette tapes at flea markets which had a variety of people already having recorded various random things on them, including cussing soliloquies and various incomplete radio “experiments”, with someone continuously changing the stations as they were recording.