Night Vision

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

I have arrived in a green area shaded by trees. It seems that I’m traveling somewhere, and this is a stop along the way. The dream doesn’t make it explicit, but this seems to be the Czech countryside in the early 20th century – more or less.

Gradually, other people arrive. I converse with a woman there as we wait. A couple large dogs arrive as well and are running around getting in people’s way. I order them to sit, figuring that they’ve just run here ahead of their masters, who won’t be far behind. They obey. One of them lies down, then rolls over on its back, obviously looking to get pet.

The car arrives – a distinctly old-fashioned one. (Although there is some uncertainty there, as if the dream can’t quite decide on what sort of vehicle it should be. They all tend to be more or less interchangeable in my dreams.) There isn’t enough room in the car for everybody, but since I was there first, I get to be on its first trip. The woman I was talking to has to wait for its next one.

I look around as we ride. The man next to me in the backseat is choosing the music that plays in the car via something rather like a touch-screen tablet framed in brown leather – much more aesthetic than the modern ones, I think to myself. Out the window, I see a turquoise river pouring over an oddly shaped stone formation into a lake – a place I’ve seen pictures of before but never visited. I turn around to continue to look through the back window as we drive by.

I’m aware, as I look around, that in the not-so-distant future this area will be devastated by war. It adds a poignancy to being here in this beautiful place.

The train – sure enough, it’s decided it would rather be a train now – approaches a platform, stopping under a curved wooden roof from which flowering vines hang down. An invasive species, I note. Parasitic to boot. But quite pretty, and so you can understand why people let it grow like this. In the future, there will be more of a push against it – but not so much here as in other places. A brief image comes to me of the future, of its yellow flowers filled with ash.

It now seems as if the woman from before is on the train too, and along with another passenger, we continue our conversation.

When I woke up, I remembered the following melody:




I don’t think it was actually playing during any part of the dream – my impression is that it was connected to it somehow but happening on a different level of awareness. I find it rather odd that it’s in C# major since that’s not a key I ordinarily have much to do with. Maybe I waited too long before transcribing it and my pitch memory was off? Or maybe it was just in C# major.

-31/1/20

A meeting is taking place beside a river between a knight and a woman. His name is Gawain. Her name is Lotus. It seems like the beginning of a relationship between them. But she can see into the future, and she knows that one day, he will kill her. And yet, she doesn't attempt to break things off.

I am seeing things from his perspective and from hers, and also from somewhere outside of it, where I don’t like the way things are going. And so I pull the scene apart, untangling all the little mental streams that are contributing to it and recombining them into three separate bundles. It will be easier to work with this way, I figure. Now I am in the kitchen of my old house in M--- with my mother, preparing a meal. I’m making the salads. But as I tear the lettuce into smaller pieces, I can still see the river there, and a little point of red light shining in the grass beside it. It’s easy to see and easy to avoid, but it still makes me uneasy.

In a different dream, I’m in a grocery store, although the building seems to be serving multiple functions. I’m there shopping with Saimi’s little sister, who seems to be around seven years old. After a while, I figure I’ll let her take care of a few things. She gets to do something all on her own, I get to read for a little bit—it seems like a pretty good arrangement. I tell her to pick out some plums—maybe three, whatever kind looks nice—and I sit down at a table there with my book of Rilke’s poetry, which I apparently have with me. She goes off and comes back a few minutes later with a single plum in a plastic bag. She places it on the table and then leaves again. A few minutes later, she’s back with another plum in a bag. Kids. You know there’s got to be some sort of weird logic behind this.

But now something else seems to be happening: there’s going to be a horse race here, inside the building, and Saimi’s little sister is participating, along with three other people. But the horse she’s on is a rather strange one: it seems to be made of some embroidered red material with yellow patterns in it, while still behaving like a living horse. But the race doesn’t begin immediately, and I awaken before it actually takes place.