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

In a forested area by a wide, shallow river with a large group of people. I’m not sure exactly what’s supposed to be going on, but at some point, it looks as if there’s some kind of attack on us. People are gathering at a couple of large pavilions nearby, so I go there as well. It’s now dark out, lit only by a couple of large bonfires.

Someone is heading towards me. They lunge, and I see that they have a knife. Reflexes take over, and after a brief struggle I’m standing behind her, pinning her to the ground with the knife at her throat. I can see it’s a woman now - physically larger than I am, but younger, maybe early 20s, with sandy blonde wavy hair down to her shoulders. I really don’t want to do this. But if I let her go, will she just go and attack someone else? No. I don’t think she will. She looks terrified.

“Are you scared?” I ask her. She says yes. I let her go, and she runs off, past the groups of indeterminate fire-lit people. I continue towards the pavilions.

—

I’m moving into a new flat - possibly at the beginning of a new university semester. I look around at everything: there seems to be a main area, with kitchen, dining room, and a living room area in an open-floor arrangement, then a bedroom/office separate from that. Someone else, a woman, seems to be there with me. I’m thinking about how I want to arrange the furniture here - everything seems to have come with the space.

At some point, it looks like a new room has appeared, so we go in to check it out. This appears to be a dedicated bedroom, meaning I can make the other one into just a study space. Apparently, we can’t leave again until I’ve checked out this new space and made sure that everything is in order here. But even though I can’t find anything that looks off about it, I seem to have gotten hold of the wrong end of the lucidity stick or something because I can’t shake the feeling that new rooms aren’t supposed to appear out of nowhere, and I should not be taking this in stride. Possibly I’m also still a little on edge from the whole someone trying to kill me thing from earlier in the night. No matter how many times I check the room and find nothing wrong, I just can’t convince myself that everything is OK, and so the whole thing just keeps dragging on.

At some point, though, I wake up in the bed there from what feels like a long and deep sleep. No one else seems to be around. What ended up happening? I try to remember, but the impressions are too confused. Some other people were here at one point, I guess? And I feel as if I should at least remember falling asleep here if that was what happened, which I don’t.

I get up and go into the main area. Maybe now I can move that table somewhere else. I’m sure I’ll never use it for anything there if I have an actual study. But it’s such a weird shape - where else would I even put it?

I wake up.

8.9.24