Morning of October 31, 2018. Wednesday. Dream #: 18,944-03. Reading time: 1 min 48 sec. Readability score: 72. I lose my conscious self identity in a later water reinduction stage. I am still in a canoe that is floating through a marsh, probably Mink Slough. Two unfamiliar children are with me, a boy and a girl. I am young as well, though possibly about eighteen. The water seems shallower at one point. There is much vegetation protruding from the water’s surface. The plants are multicolored, that is, different colors in different sections. Someone had coated all the dried-up leaves with a few different colors of spray paint, including blue, red, and yellow. I consider that it was a thoughtless act, as it will likely cause environmental problems. Eventually, we reach the bank and leave the canoe. The King Street landlady has given the children a task to build what I first think is a rabbit cage. (This is an association with early childhood, as my father had a rabbit farm.) There are pieces of wood, screen, and wire to use to build the cage. They are in a pile near the south end of the King Street house. I decide that I will help, but the boy had already built a cage when I pick up a few random boards. In the last scene, I am in the King Street mansion’s kitchen. There is a birdcage where the sink was in real life. The boy may have been cleaning the cage already, as when he leaves the room, there is birdseed stuck all over his face. He does not seem to care. Curiously, the last scene was from a minimal thought while watching “Cargo” (2017) last night, when the girl Thoomi was eating something and got seeds or crumbs stuck on her lips and face. I have always found it astounding how the non-lucid dream self can take one fleeting impersonal trivial thought and make it part of a dream scenario. The movie was about zombies, and yet I have never dreamt of zombies in the apocalyptic sense. (In a dream from 1981, they were based on the original usage of the term as slow-moving sleepwalking slaves, but were revealed to be actors.) I think it is because of how they move so unnaturally in such movies when my reticular formation and vestibular system mostly only create fluid movements in dreams. That, and it is difficult to imagine very sick people as being stronger or faster than healthy people. The common melatonin mediation factor appears here (as occurs one or more times each sleep cycle). It starts with water induction and ends with vestibular system correlation (the boy in the kitchen as the vestibular simulacrum leaving the birdcage - and note how the birdcage was where the sink was in reality).
Morning of August 9, 2017. Wednesday. I become aware that I am babysitting an unfamiliar boy of about four years of age in the northeast area of the Cubitis living room. I perceive myself as being about twenty-five years old. It feels like it might be late morning. I have no associations with whomever the boy’s parents might be. The dreamer does not realize that he has not lived in Cubitis since 1978, leaving when he was seventeen. He also does not recall that he lived in Wisconsin when he was twenty-five, not Florida. The memory of his three sons (and two daughters) does not seem extant, though the presence of the unfamiliar boy, who does not resemble any of his sons, may be a subliminal clue, though he otherwise has no memory of who he presently really is. There is a huge Raggedy Ann doll sitting against the north wall near the northeast corner of the living room. I have a notion that the giant stuffed doll is somehow a mother figure for the boy. It almost reaches the ceiling. The head is unrealistically large in proportion to the rest of the doll. Time passes, and the head seems flatter (front to back) than it should be. The doll begins to sag and lean forward and the boy and I are annoyed that this oversized pie-like head may cover us. I have to push it back a few times, but when I do, the whole doll, especially the head, seems slightly thinner. The dreamer still does not have viable memory. He does not question why a giant doll would be perceived as a “real” mother by the boy or comfort him as such. He does not even consider simply moving out of the way of the doll when it leans forward at times. He does not consider why the doll’s head gets vertically flatter when there is no discernible reason for the change. Perhaps he is subliminally aware of the weight of the blanket on his real physical body as he sleeps, and perhaps through the veil of sleep, he indirectly recalls that his youngest daughter has stuffed toys near her as she sleeps. Could this hodgepodge of current neural energy while sleeping be why such a scene is rendered? He also did have concern that his youngest son had enough blankets prior to sleeping. As a doll symbolizes the physical inactivity of someone while in the dream state, it likely is a very distorted thread of memory of his beautiful wife Zsuzsanna, combined with thoughts of his pillow that sometimes seems too flat. Eventually, I notice that much of the oversized ragdoll is now more like a collection of blankets that fall forward at times, a couple that cover me, though I think the doll is still sitting there. It seems ambiguous, and the round face itself seems more and more like a large flat pillow I push back several times. It does not seem cold. I do not think that the boy will be harmed, only perhaps annoyed by being covered like this. After a few minutes, I am aware that Dennis (half-brother on my mother’s side) is coming into the house. He seems about thirty years old and is dressed like a biker. He wants to show me something. It seems the boy will be okay on his own, though I somehow perceive that Dennis has no interest in the boy’s well-being. I go with him for a short distance after leaving the house. I then decide to fly. Coming out from the house, it is now the King Street boarding house. I effortlessness fly north over Tenth Street South, leaving Dennis behind for now. The dreamer’s brother had not been to Florida since 1970. Like every other dream feature, it is erroneous, completely removed from any correct timeline. Even more curiously, he walked out from the north end of the open carport in Florida yet simultaneously from the closed porch of the King Street boarding house, not regarded in real life much since 1990 and over 1,500 miles away from the original setting. There is no measure of distance in thought, but that is moot, as the two buildings were somehow perceived as being the same. The dreamer often flies in his dreams as if it was a perfectly natural thing to do. To take to the air to get somewhere else is what he has done often for many years in both lucid and non-lucid dreams, without considering physics or gravity. There is no doubt, but the dream self is not the conscious self, and the rules that dictate that flying cannot be as such do not apply, even if there was some subliminal memory that it was not possible. I end up in some sort of forest on the other side of La Crosse, which I perceive may be several blocks west of Loomis Street. After walking around and entering a denser area of forest by way of a footpath, I notice that Dennis is already here. He talks to a seemingly homeless person in dark apparel. The unfamiliar scruffy male is sitting at the side of the path, facing outwards from the dense trees. Dennis seems annoyed and may be impatient about something. It has something to do with the other male not owning a motorcycle as he is expected to. There is no fighting, just a conversation. It seems the other male may have sold or lost his motorcycle and is now living in the woods. I walk around and see another clear footpath that leads straight through the densest part of the forest. It seems to be afternoon and the imagery is very clear and beautiful. The path leads east and seems to continue for quite a distance. I can see an open area at the very end that indicates an urban area. Still, after walking around, I decide to fly again. The dreamer does not question this fictional area of land. The area in real life would be within the same area as the Northside Elementary School (though the area looks much different now than when he last lived there in February 1994). He does not ask himself how Dennis apparently walked there and got there before him. As I am flying, my focus changes somewhat. I see below me, something that is almost like a life-sized map, showing how the area originally appeared. It was mostly a marshy expanse with no trees for a long time. This changes, as Dennis had planted a number of saplings over time, until it was a dense forest. Curiously, I am aware that no one else, including members of the city council, ever noticed this change other than Dennis and a few biker friends of his. I watch the changes in the map as I turn and fly south. Looking down on a slowly animated life-sized map superimposed over the bird’s-eye view of the land below does not seem unusual to the dreamer. It is like a visual historical view displaying the changes over time, not following the rules of real-life perception. He does not fly back down to investigate or consider that if he did, he might be in the original treeless marsh as it supposedly was years previously. I am now aware that it is nighttime even though it had been afternoon moments before. I do not find the change unusual. I am aware of a missile lighting up a small area of the sky to the north, over what I perceive may be a small island, but I still consider it as a threat even though it seems far away. My wife Zsuzsanna now joins me as we run southward. The buildings around us start to shake. They seem to wobble and waver unrealistically, somewhat like exaggerated jelly motions. I think we can escape. We run over the tops of buildings, over the roofs of commercial buildings of various heights, no attention to how tall they are. It seems effortless but annoying. I get the idea to take cover in a boiler room of a commercial building. I sense the ceiling may collapse, but it does not, though there is still shaking. We end up near a breaker panel. I have a fading idea about possibly resetting the main breaker, as if that might somehow make the building more suitable to hide in. The dreamer’s memory seems more viable now as he recalls Zsuzsanna. There is even a thread of recent memory about North Korea’s missile launches, but little else. His focus on the breaker panel reveals a subliminal awareness of the neural energy within his mind, yet not fully realizing why this thought emerges in the last seconds of his dream or whether it symbolizes “deactivating” his dream, increasing his neural energy and expansion into whole consciousness, or both.
Morning of December 30, 2012. Sunday. Reading time: 1 min 50 sec. Readability score: 63. In my dream, I am in an open field in an undetermined location. It seems to be late morning. At least two soldiers are present, one possibly a lieutenant. One is using binoculars at times. (I am unaware of directional orientation as is sometimes the case even with unfamiliar settings or distorted composites sometimes including it.) A flock of birds, possibly ducks, flies overhead. There is something about “retaliation.” I am unsure if the soldiers are referring to the birds or an unseen human enemy beyond. They have a model white plane without any detail on its surface. They send it into the flock of birds by remote control. I anticipate something dramatic will happen. One of the soldiers looks at me curiously for a short time. The airplane seems to have gone out of sight and crash-landed in a marsh. It seems to be my task to get it. I wade through soft wet ground near a river. I grab what I think is the model aircraft. Upon my return, the soldiers are now duck hunters. The airplane I am holding is now a duck decoy. They seem to be annoyed that I have “retrieved” it as they are still using it. I give it to them, and we do not exchange words, angry or otherwise. Vestibular system correlation, which has occurred in at least one dream per sleep cycle for over fifty years (typically more, especially in the first stages of sleep), has infinite dynamics. Certain incidental elements are part of it, but outcome stems from levels of non-lucid or lucid control of anticipation of the waking process. I have documented and decoded thousands of such dreams, and the nuances are always unique (just as I have never dreamt of the same place, in the same way, more than once). In this dream, the simulacrum of emerging consciousness is a projection as the model airplane. The remote control aspect is the reactive representation of RAS mediation, the preconscious avatar as the soldier with the binoculars. The transition stems from the fact that this was not my last dream of the sleep cycle. In those, RAS personification is more dominant when present. The change comes by way of reinduction (water as sleep). There is the transition of “toy” airplane to “toy” duck. The duck is not alive, which means less chance of a hypnopompic trigger under these circumstances. (This is also true when I see a picture of such as a helicopter rather than a present or moving one.) Reactive representation (autosymbolism, though not restricted to Herbert Silberer’s usage of the term as all dreams are a result of it, not only hypnagogia), has many different possibilities. Although there are not that many variations of the waking process, the nuances are seemingly infinitely unique.
Morning of July 1, 1973. Sunday. I find myself peacefully moving through a beautiful marshy area (which I think I chose to “step into” during the slowdown of the hypnagogic state). (Water induction.) Over time, my dream’s original setting is slowly integrated with the West Elementary School’s school grounds (where there were no marshy features and where I am no longer a student in reality). (Critical thinking skills cessation). My dream self is presumed corporeal at times and incorporeal or intangible at other times. A giant American bittern (composite of premonitory back spasm symbol and anticipatory consciousness shift symbol) is eventually known of (with no discernible backstory) and seen to be present. The bird is about as big as a horse. Mostly while incorporeal, I watch this giant bird stalk a few schoolmates (individually) but there is no attack. Curiously, my schoolmates are seemingly not aware of it even when it is in full view just outside the perimeter of the giant reeds. I do not communicate with my schoolmates at any point. I notice that the marsh features, such as the tall grass, are to the scale of the giant bittern rather than in correct proportion to the school building, school grounds, and banyan tree in the playground. The giant bittern does not stalk or even focus on me at any time prior to my waking, and in fact becomes more distant in the final moments. The school grounds become less marshy throughout. (Water lowering as dream cessation metaphor.) The lower back spasm waking event was hardly noticeable. It appears that I had a certain level of subliminal control over the metaphorical waking transition and my lower back muscles, as I was not directly jabbed by the bird’s beak (as the waking prompt) as I had vaguely anticipated. There was no point where I was actively lucid. The bittern association came from a pocket book field guide to North American birds, which I had since I was very young.