Night Vision

I am on an unspecified Greek island with people I know to be my classmates. We are outside, in a rocky area - the context is rather vague. We talk. There are also some third-person views of the landscape at some point, which prominently features a volcano.

My father has just invited me to go visit him on Corfu for the week, which is something out of the ordinary. My mother is apparently on a different island. It occurs to me that there’s something symbolic to this - to all of us being so far apart, on separate islands….

At some point, the volcano starts to show some alarming signs of activity. People close to it are running. I’m afraid for them, and hope they make it far away in time - they need to make it past the water separating them from the rest of the island before it gets too hot to pass. But I should be getting as far away as I can too, just in case.

The landscape has a number of small canyons threading through it - the only real paths we can take, which is definitely kind of unfortunate since that’s where the lava is bound to be channeled as well. I can already see it, not far behind a group of people running past where their path intersects with mine. For some reason, I’m sure it’ll only follow one path, so I wait at an intersection, ready to go down the path it doesn’t take.

The group approaches, now followed by a big wheel of flame - just a large circle made of fire, rolling along on its rim after them. But it doesn’t follow the group, doesn’t go down either one of the paths: it stays at the intersection where I am. Not only that: it actually seems to be shadowing my movements. Something clicks. This clearly isn’t the situation I had first thought it was. What now?

I do what feels right: I hook the wheel around my right leg and spin it around. It turns blue when I make contact with it, and as it spins faster, it contracts from being a bit larger than a hula hoop to being around the size of a tire. After some time, I switch it to my left leg and spin it the other direction, and finally, I set it back down. It stays blue and small, and sits there looking slightly wobbly and indistinct for a few seconds before dissipating.

My father has picked this moment to arrive. I start to tell him about what just happened, but he interrupts and doesn’t really give me a chance to talk. It occurs to me - maybe it would be better just not to mention the whole fire wheel thing. He probably wouldn’t get it anyway. I wonder what my classmates must be thinking now - there’s a whole group of them nearby, their attention still focused on me.

I kind of wish he’d just stop talking and at least let me take care of the burns, though. I was doing that with bare legs, and yeah, I can see marks there, even though the burns don’t look too serious, and I’m not feeling any pain from them.

A false awakening after that, in which I make notes about the dream and then various other things happen.

There were so many dreams after that, many of them full of conversations, and without awakenings in between - at least that I can remember - I just didn’t have time to write them down after having already woken up around 5 to record that one. But the last dream of the night involved being in (probably) a gym, where I was doing an exercise that involved jumping over a yoga mat and then jumping backwards to the starting position in a certain posture. NR came over and set a timer down on the floor set for half an hour - an analog device, kind of like a big egg timer. The implication is clear. I don’t think I’ll have trouble keeping this up or half an hour, but there is another problem: I seriously doubt that I’m going to be asleep for another half hour to keep doing it.

Actually, I only stayed asleep for another minute or so. You have no idea how much I’m looking forward to a time when I can devote more attention to dreaming and get back to moments like that actually resulting in full lucidity.

(Additional note: this was not my first volcano dream, but this one was almost certainly triggered by having seen video on the news of the port explosion in Iran the previous day, since that’s what my aunt had going on the TV in her hospital room when I went to visit.)

28.4.25

A canyon-like setting, rocky with little vegetation. I’m seeing events play out in third person. A man called Xeno lives in a house there with his wife, and others live there as well. It seems as if they’re his students or something of the sort. He knows that the area is about to flood and that there aren’t enough people there to do the necessary work to keep the house safe, and so he raises a man from the dead to make a zombie to help. He talks with the man, who doesn’t look visibly dead and seems rather like a sleepwalker. At one point, the man says, “I like unimaginative nightmares.” I’m not sure if there was a context for this or not….

—

I’m standing in a long line outside of a restaurant, waiting to get in. For a long time, the line doesn’t move, and I’m just about ready to leave and go somewhere else, but then it does start moving - and pretty fast at that - and doesn’t stop, so that I’m inside just about as fast as I can walk.

Once inside, somebody I know calls me over to her table, and I sit down across from her. She indicates the table next to us, on the left - nobody is there now, but there are a couple shopping bags on the booth seating. She says that my Aunt O is sitting at that table, and they were talking earlier. She obviously has no idea that this is not something I’d be all that happy about. I wonder - should I warn her about some of the things she’s done to me and said about me to others? That doesn’t seem right, though - like I wouldn’t be giving my friend the chance to make her own first impression.

The dream changes to a view of a line drawing, kind of like a manga page but not really in the right kind of art style, showing a full-body picture of smiling woman. The title of the book was: Love Brings Us Home.


22.1.25

I’m in a school, waiting for a colleague to arrive. He’s supposed to be here subbing for the person I’d usually be working with. I’ve never met him before, and all I know about him is that his name is Rishab.

Through the end-of-school-day crowds, I see a dark-skinned young man wearing what I can tell even from a distance is one of the bright green company t-shirts. I wave at him, trying to get his attention. He sees and comes over to me, and I tell him to follow me to the room where we need to set up.

I realize that we’re going to go right past where my Aunt B is, so I stop to check on her. She’s been here for a while - I couldn’t get her to go lie down. I say something to her, but she just sits there staring and doesn’t answer. I am concerned - so is Rishab, and a couple others who are in the room.

1.2.25


Part of a longer dream. I’m in a school, walking students to the door to meet their parents alongside someone else. Mostly notable in that, at one point, the perspective switches to that other person, so I can briefly see myself from behind. I’m wearing black cotton trousers, a pink tank top, and a black cap - all modeled off of clothing I actually have, although I wouldn’t ordinarily be wearing it to work - and my hair is in a braid down my back. It switches back and stays that way for the rest of the dream, as far as I remember. A student’s mother is already there at the door waiting for her. One of them is called Britney, although I can’t remember now whether it was the mother or the student….

—

I’m in a grocery store, or something that’s supposed to be one. It really seems more like an outdoor market that just happens to be inside, if that makes sense. Various things happen which may or may not have been interesting, but at some point I become aware that I’m dreaming. Possibly before I get into a conversation with a man there, although I think this is one of those cases where the realization didn’t happen all at once.

He was the one who started the conversation with me, I’m pretty sure. A heavyset man, maybe in his 40s or 50s, with dark skin - so black it’s almost bluish. I don’t remember exactly what he was wearing - just an impression of bright colors and complexity.

He expresses concern about me. (This may have had some connection to the dream, but definitely had a foundation in waking life, as I’d probably spent most of the night trying to find a sleeping position that didn’t hurt to lie in. Kind of a long story, but it boils down to a bad reaction to a food additive combining with chronic back issues and developing into neck and shoulder pain. So no, it hasn’t been a good week.) I tell him it’s no big deal. I’m not going to let it get to me, and I know I’ll be feeling a lot better if I can just get out to dance this weekend. He seems skeptical that it could really be that significant, saying something about people just going out now and then for a night dancing to top-40 stuff. I reply that maybe that’s how it is some places, for some people - maybe even the way it is for most people, for all I know - but that’s a totally different world from the one I’m familiar with. And I have no idea what’s even in the top 40 now, and I bet that’s probably true for most people over 30. He laughs, as if to say that, yeah, I’ve got him there.

From there, the conversation turns to the Grammys, and in an oblique dream logic move to award shows in general, which I profess to be meaningless. He agrees overall, but adds that there are exceptions - he mentions actors who fit their roles so well that from that point on, people don’t think about them apart from the role. This strikes the by now definitely lucid me as having some special significance that I ought to make a point of remembering.

At some point we get up from where we’re sitting and part ways. I walk around, just looking at my surroundings, and I soon find myself in a relatively open area, where I spend a couple minutes just messing around, running and jumping higher and longer than a person could do outside of a dream. But then I decide I’d really rather go somewhere else and walk through a wall. Usually I just go straight through them, but this one turns out to have kind of a gooey texture, a little like raw bread dough, and so I have to push my way through.

I find myself in utter darkness on the other side. But I know what to do in a situation like this: just keep on going, and keep my other senses as engaged as possible. I walk. The air is a little cold here, and I feel cold water around my feet, which becomes deeper as I go. I sing the first thing that comes to mind, which happens to be:


Hello darkness, my old friend,
I’ve come to talk with you again.


Lyrics appear out of the darkness - not in space, but in my mind’s eye, which just happens to be indistinguishable from it right now. They appear one line at a time, spelled out in large letters in a vivid orange, and I treat them kind of as a karaoke prompt - although I only realized after waking up that what appeared weren’t the actual lyrics, and by then I could no longer remember anything specific about them. Waking up to a body in pain definitely does not help with dream recall.

Eventually, I can see my surroundings again. I’m now in a corridor with an industrial back area feel to it. No windows - only metal doors in metal walls. I walk along and push open a door that’s already ajar. The room inside has tables set up in a horseshoe shape like an office boardroom, although it looks like some kind of storage room otherwise, and isn’t quite big enough to fit the tables comfortably. A couple people are sitting there. One of them tells me that I’m not allowed in there. Fair enough - I continue down the hallway and try another door.

This one appears to be a classroom - there’s a long whiteboard along one wall with writing and drawings in black marker all over it, although, similar to the other room, it looks more like some kind of storage space that just happens to be set up as a classroom. Students are seated on the floor facing the board, and there are a number of free-standing shelves on the other side of the room, which is much larger than the first one. I notice a drawing on the board showing an octave’s worth of piano keys. Maybe this is some kind of music class - this could be interesting. I ask one of the men who seem to be teachers there if I can sit in on it, and he says yes, so I go in.

I take a closer look at the shelves, as it looks like they’re not quite ready to start the lesson just yet. It occurs to me that it could be a good idea to have something to make notes with, so I make a pencil materialize, but before I can do a notebook as well, the lecture begins, so I go over to where the students are to sit down. I wake up soon after that, though.

6.2.24

I’m driving to a grocery store with my mother. Not clear what the context is, as the environment seems entirely unfamiliar. I park the car, and in response to something my mother said, I get her a black cardigan (maybe the wrong name for it - I never know what to call articles of clothing….) that just seems to be kicking around somewhere in the backseat so that she won’t be cold inside. We go in.

We are immediately confronted by almost bare shelves. Uh-oh. Maybe this wasn’t the best day to come here. We might have trouble finding what we’re looking for today. But most of the store isn’t quite that bad.

At some point, we split up. The store seems to be divided into distinct sections, with different kinds of food in each, and I walk through a couple of them before I hear something strange. There’s music playing, but the melody is just one note, played in a rhythm over the changing chords. I see where it’s coming from: it’s something like an arcade game, although it seems to be specifically set up for music creation. Beside it are two women. One is a frail-looking older woman, who I think was in a wheelchair, and the other looks like she may be some kind of medical attendant. She’s the one who’s tapping out the single note over what I gather the older woman has made on the machine, apparently to help out in some way.

How I can tactfully step in and take over, since the attendant obviously has no idea what she’s doing? I can already imagine the melody I’d improvise - a simple one that keeps the rhythm she’s tapping out, but with a better fitting, musical shape. I wake up and immediately record what I remember:



(I put chord indications in, but I’m actually not 100% sure of anything except the cadence. For the rest, I just picked out the simplest chords that would match what I remember of where the repeated note was clashing and what I intended to do to fix it. It’s not all that interesting of a musical fragment, but the simplicity did make it relatively easy to transcribe after awakening.)

16.12.24

I seem to be visiting my parents - maybe over the holidays or something like that. The dream is set late at night, in what is maybe supposed to be their house. It’s a condo that seems very beige and nondescript to the point of not really looking like a place where people live. More like a hotel room or something.

On this day every year, on which everything always happens exactly the same, I can see into the future. It’s all just there for me - the memories of how things will go. I try talking to them about it, my mother in particular, but although it doesn’t seem as if she actively disbelieves what I’m saying, it’s clear that she hasn’t really absorbed it, or considered the implications in any depth. I was talking to my father at some point, too - about being able to see the bad things that will happen to him, and to me as well, but already knowing saying it isn’t actually going to lead to anything. This apparently relates to dreams in a way that’s no longer clear - I actually use the phrase, “this dream I’m having right now” - although, somehow, I manage to do so without it triggering lucidity.

Later in the night, in another dream, I’m in what’s supposed to be my room. I’m digitizing a record - “Tomorrow Never Knows,” by the Beatles. The screen is on some kind of high shelf - too high up for me to be able to read it easily, which I find kind of annoying.

Partway through, my uncle comes in - maybe my uncle. It kind of seems like he’s my father in the dream, or some kind of half-invented composite figure. A number of people follow him in - seven or eight of them. They are apparently family, but also people I haven’t known for long, as if they’re in-laws or something of the sort. They are mostly male, and younger - the exception being the eldest of them, a teenage girl who comes in holding a small child.

My uncle apparently had something to tell me, and leaves after saying it. I’m surprised he didn’t take any notice of the device I have set up. It was his, after all - he just gave it to me because he wasn’t doing anything with it. The others all stick around, though, as if they’re curious and just don’t have anything better to do than watch what I’m doing.

9.12.24

I seem to be visiting my parents, who live on an island. I’m busy for most of the day cleaning out a cabinet or wardrobe. In only another hour or so, there are going to be guests over for dinner.

We’re out of the house now for some reason. Mother is concerned that I’ve been exerting myself so much, and I should drink some water. I’m not particularly thirsty but say I will. My father and I go off to a sort of convenience store-like shop nearby to buy a bottle, but the water is very expensive – almost 10 dollars for a water bottle (though I can’t swear it wasn't some other currency). That’s right, I remember – there isn’t any fresh water on the island, so it all has to be shipped here, and that makes it so expensive. My father asks if it’s OK if I don’t get the water, and I say I’m fine with it. Again, I don’t particularly care either way – I just want to keep them happy.

Not long after that, I step onto what unexpectedly turns out to be an elevator – a floating glass elevator, à la Willy Wonka. It rises up and flies partway across the island to a large building, then down several stories into its basement. I briefly see the various underground floors on the way down. I consider getting off and heading back – I don’t want to be late for dinner – but rumor has it that the headquarters of the secret police is on one of those floors, and I have a history with them. Just walking through their headquarters would be asking for trouble.

So I wait as some other people get on the elevator and it continues to the third major hub on the island – it isn’t very large, and so there are only the three. This one is on the other end, farther away – a place I’ve never been before. The elevator flies over lawns dotted with groves of trees. It’s dusk now, and we approach and pass a blue light – some sort of decorative sculpture marking the approach. This whole area is like an estate, or a place that was one at some previous time.

Once we’re there, I get off. There’s a tower there – perhaps I have to climb down the side to get to the ground, but one way or another, I wind up climbing on it. It’s a fairly small building, though tall, made of square, grey stones, each of which has a shape cut through it large enough to make a foothold or handhold – circles, squares, stars, etc. Each stone is also marked with two sets of letters, one a capital letter, the others one or more lowercase ones. As I grab hold of one hollow stone, I feel a switch flip on the inside edge, causing the opening to light up. The whole thing is a giant cipher key, I realize. I don’t have any messages in need of decoding – but if I happen to find any, I now know exactly where to bring them.

I climb around for a bit, playing around with it to make sure I know how it works. But once I’m back on the ground, a woman starts yelling at me for climbing on the tower. Guess I wasn’t supposed to be doing that. I stay calm. What she’s saying doesn’t make much sense – really not a coherent accusation against me at all, just anger. I ask a couple reasonable questions. She answers, still in an angry tone. But then, having lost her momentum, the absurdity of it seems to dawn on her, and she starts laughing. I laugh, too. It seems like everything is OK now.

12.2.20

I’m on a trip with my parents and an unfamiliar young man. We were all supposed to go to a casino—and they did actually go. But I didn’t care much for that plan, and so I’ve been off doing something else and only arrived back at the hotel room in time for their last trip there, late on the final evening.

I have the impression that this is a place they’re familiar with, but this will be my first time there. I’ve been told not to bring my purse with me for whatever reason, but I don’t like going around without writing materials on hand, and so I say that I’ll just take my wallet out before I go. But it seems my parents are so eager to get back that, rather than waiting the couple of minutes this will take, they go on without me, leaving the young man to drive us there.

Outside, it’s raining hard, and has been for a while, judging by all the standing water in the streets. As we go on, it only gets deeper, until the car, which is a fairly low one, starts having trouble moving forward. Some light on the dashboard has come on. He curses at the car—and quite probably my parents, who would have had no trouble handling this in theirs. I suggest that we just pull off the road onto higher ground, as some other cars seem to be doing, and walk the rest of the way there. It isn’t very far. He agrees to it.

The next part I remember clearly is being inside the casino, in a large room with a grand staircase, crowded with fancily dressed people. On the upper floor, near a restaurant area, I meet up with my parents again. It’s sort of like a buffet, with tables in a horseshoe shape, each one with an attendant behind them, offering samples of various kinds of foods to the guests. Mother is going to get a chocolate milkshake—apparently, a favorite of hers there—but my father isn’t interested. The idea doesn’t appeal much to me either, and anyways, this is all new to me: I want to try things out before I order anything.

He heads off somewhere else. I get some kind of a soup, and then head over to where they’re serving white wine. I try the sample they have there, which is pretty good—but they have all kinds of interesting drinks here, and this would be a good chance to try things I wouldn’t necessarily want a full glass of. And my mother is trying to get my attention from across the room, so I leave the table without ordering anything and head over in her direction.

Then, suddenly, I feel a spray of cold water—and the people around me do as well, judging by how they’re crying out. It seems someone is spraying people with a hose. I move out of the way, wondering what that was about. Maybe the casino staff themselves are responsible. The whole reason this place exists is to take money from people, after all—I think it’s best not to lose sight of that—and it wouldn’t surprise me at all for one to start charging people to keep things going nicely, once they’ve got them used to it.

Once out of range, I pause and kneel down to make sure the cat is still with me. He is indeed still there and comes to get pet. He’s an orange cat, an adult, though on the small side, and has been here with me this whole time. So far, nobody has noticed him—or else they just don’t care. But it’s still a little dangerous for him to be here with me, and so I’ve been making sure he stays close, waiting until I feel him against the back of my ankles before moving on.

11.5.19

I’m in a study, sitting at a desk facing a wall. A man is sitting to my left. This seems to be some kind of music lesson: we have sheets of manuscript paper in front of us, and I’m doing some sort of exercise where I fill in bits of the melodies that aren’t written. I’m having trouble figuring out how to notate the rhythm I have in mind, but after moving to something else for a little while, I come back and manage it easily. I write the notes in with a red pen, very neatly.

The lesson’s almost over when a young girl, 7 or 8, runs into the room and lies down on the desk in front of us—the man’s daughter. She seems to be in a silly mood. She speaks to him in German - we've been speaking English until now - and he answers. She moves across the room, and they have an exchange in which he asks her questions, but she just gives nonsense answers and giggles (and totally ignores me). I just watch and pet the cat, a gray tabby that’s also entered the room, not at all put out by the interruption. Before long, a woman who seems to be a nanny comes in, presumably for the girl.

I wake up.

In the next dream, I’m staying in a large hotel with my parents. As I walk through the lobby, towards the staircase, I see a number of men dressed in suits of armor decorated with intricate patterns and women in white ballerina’s outfits with similar patterns in silver. Some sort of wedding party, I figure.

After a quick trip to the room, which is at the end of a hallway, my mother and I seem to be walking out, away from the city center and towards the outskirts. This is Wilhelmshöhe, apparently—although it would be hard to find a place that looks less like the actual place of that name. There’s less and less to see as we walk along. Less traffic, too. A man drives a horse-drawn carriage past and gives us a peculiar look. Somehow, I have the feeling that we’re expected here, and he’s a part of it.

And, an unknown period of time after that, I’ve been transported to a different place, a large building full of people getting ready to something to begin. I’m a part of it, too, now. A man is explaining to me what’s going on in a mixture of French and German. That seems to be the norm here, and I slip into it too as I speak with him.

I comment at one point that something he just said sounded more like how people talk in movies than in real life—or dreams, I add. Because I do know it’s a dream by now, although I’m not sure just when the realization hit me. But I’m going along with it because it looks like some interesting and possibly important things are going on here.

Unusually for a lucid dream, it was difficult to remember much of what happened—some details stood out, but a lot of it just blurred together. The man I’ve been talking to seems to be in charge and has us carry out different tasks, and give answers to questions. I seem to be apart from the others somehow, involved, but playing a different role.

(17.6.18)

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

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)