Blue_Opossum

Morning of June 13, 2020. Saturday.

Dream #: 19,535-07. Reading time (optimized): 2 min.



My dream self maintains the instinctual awareness I am dreaming (after dropping back from post-liminal mode to pre-liminal) by becoming more aware while sitting in a bed near the ocean (potential reinduction). There is the typical indoor-outdoor ambiguity, with my bed in this instance being near a harbor in Antissa, Lesbos, though the setting does not have a more discernible definition.

My waking-life identity is absent. I am listening to an operatic aria (fictitious, I assume) sung by Luciano Pavarotti about Antissa. (I do not listen to opera in waking life.) I am unsure of the source of the music, but it is probably from a cassette (as my dream self has no recall of what a CD is).

The sleep-wake manager eventually appears as an unknown male, but he is in passive mode (non-RAS; non-cerebral.) I sit down and watch him create a painting. It features a black oval as a scene of outer space. (This feature represents a higher level of sleep atonia, which may be why somatosensory kicks in as the trigger in the last scene rather than a vestibular event.) There are sparse red and blue ovular arcs around the “egg.” I absentmindedly add a blue ovular arc to the image’s right side with a felt-tip pen. Almost immediately, I feel as if I may have been intrusive in doing this. I start praising his art, focusing the most on the outer space rendering within the oval. He does not seem angry or annoyed.

A reporter approaches and wants to interview the unknown artist. There is still indoor-outdoor ambiguity, though the setting has more outside dynamics at this point. The two men stand and face each other, about ten feet away from me. The reporter says he is interviewing “the aggressor.” I am puzzled by this and state that he is not an “aggressor,” though I do not know his history. I hope I did not embarrass him by saying this.

Soon, a sun spider (camel spider), as long as the reporter’s head, crawls around from behind his head and covers his right ear. I am amused, as neither man seems to know it is there. Another sun spider of about the same size as the first crawls from behind the reporter’s head but goes around to the other man’s right ear. The man ignores it despite being aware of it. There is no sense of a threat, as my dream self considers them harmless. I wake at this point with a sense of great amusement.

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A vestibular-cerebral handshake did not occur as the waking process in this instance (as the result of greater sleep atonia but with a directive toward hand myoclonus), so it was somatosensory in this case. In other words, I sleep on my left side, with my right ear more exposed to my waking-life environment. The somatosensory focus was liminally drawn to that factor, especially as a spider often represents the human hand and its somatosensory arousal (though a sun spider is not a true spider).

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Morning of August 17, 1980. Sunday. (Last clarified and resupplemented on Friday, 1 September 2017.)



The myth: “You cannot snore and dream at the same time.” This is one of those virtually endless bits of disinformation that one sees in various lists about dreams (and in most cases the entire list is untrue, including those related to “interpretation” by “experts”, as well as the superstitious “black cats crossing a person’s path“ mentality). I do not know who came up with this mindless concept or how it spread, but there have been many times in my life when I was snoring and dreaming at the same time, which includes the following entry.

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I am doing a news report that includes a celebrity interview (apparently with Rod Stewart, though he never makes an appearance), using a black generic microphone with a long cord (the cord going into the back of a white van), similar to the one I use in real life to record affirmations (though I am not using a cassette tape for any type of scripted dreaming in this case). At times, my microphone is making a sort of buzzing “snoring” sound. A few times, I move and swing the cord around to see if a short is causing the sound.

I walk around in the parking lot and it seems to be late morning. I am to ask the singer about the different classic cars he owned. The parking lot is full of his cars, mainly from the 1940s to the present. As I walk near one of the cars, I hear that it had been left running and the engine also makes a sort of unusual snoring sound. I consider asking him when I see him if he is aware that the car had been running. There are several others around at first, all unfamiliar males, but a few are from the radio station I am supposedly working for.

Eventually, a black bear comes onto the scene and my team and I need to escape. It also seems to be making a snoring sound, though it is implied to be growling as such.

I decide to quickly climb down over a cliff at the edge of the parking lot (to hide from the bear), and, although there is a narrow ledge, I end up hanging on the microphone cord. Someone, I do not know who, is soon pulling me up, though I sense it may be the bear doing this (though I am not sure), but as I begin to climb up, the bear leaps over the cliff with his front paws spread out but misses me and presumably falls to his death. I wake up in the middle of a snore.

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The parking lot setting, as well as the cliff, is completely unrelated to waking life. Both are specific liminal space indicators of the dream state, the parking lot because it represents a halfway point (between dreaming and waking) as analogous to leaving an area (the dream state) and the potential of returning home (waking life), and the cliff being related to the biologically premonitory nature of waking from sleep (which often produces a natural falling sensation based on inner ear dynamics and coming out of being unconscious and otherwise has no meaning).

The bear in this case may also have no meaning other than the preconscious factor (which is sometimes aggressive, depending on incidental dream dynamics, for the sole purpose of waking the dreamer) as it was primarily rendered by way of the sound of my own snoring. Note the progression; microphone buzzing, car engine running, bear growling. This is all sound-based, where my unconscious was simply trying to compensate for the sound of my own snoring yet also slowly alerting me to the waking transition. To validate this, a microphone would not normally get my attention (especially as I am already holding it despite its presumed technical difficulty), a car engine running would not necessarily get my attention either, but a bear certainly would. See how this works? (It should be obvious to a person of reasonable intelligence.) The usual hypnopompic falling dynamic was transferred to the bear so that my waking was softer than it would have been otherwise.

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