Night Vision

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

Part of a longer dream - I can only remember fragments of the earlier parts. It seems to be some kind of a school setting where I’m a student, and everybody is going to watch a play in the auditorium. I head there, with some people from the earlier part of the dream not far behind me. Not many others have arrived yet, so there are plenty of places where we can find seats together.

I find an empty row and sit down. On the stage below, I can see that there are a couple large wooden shelves set up on the right (relative to my position) and a larger set piece on the left with a very large fan in front, blowing onto it. But the fan is clearly causing some problems. The shelves don’t seem to be secured very well, and they start rocking back and forth. As I watch, they both fall over forward. Since everything on them is just fastened-down props, it doesn’t look like any real damage has been done. However, they seem to have been attached to the structure on the left, and having broken loose from it, it now looks to be in immanent danger of being blown backstage by the high-powered air, where it could cause some serious damage.

A friend of mine is in the play - his first time doing this - and I’m concerned for him, and for the situation in general, so I hurry down to the stage. The structure is being braced in front by a long, flat metal strip attached to it by metal pieces on either side, so I stand on that. It’s holding steady so far, but I was kind of hoping other people would also come down to help once I made the initiative, and while a few have made it as far as the stage, they don’t seem inclined to get any closer. More people weighing it down would be better - but if I pressure them to help and things end up going badly anyway, that would just make for a complicated situation. I’d rather not do that. It’s better that they freely decide to take on the risk themselves.

That’s where the situation stands when the dream shifts into some video game-like situation where some others and I are tasked with going around a massive backstage area and solving puzzles to collect everything that was blown back there so that the play can begin.

25.12.24

I’ve gone to a school building to hold a chess club meeting there. It’s dark, like an early winter morning before school hours, and it’s drizzling out. The layout of the building is reminiscent of the second high school I attended. I realize I’ve left my equipment in the car, but I still have plenty of time to get it and set up before students start arriving.

I’m still setting up when Coach A arrives. (He taught math there, as well as coaching track and cross country.) He’s apparently going to be here for the lesson today. The students start arriving as well, but I still haven’t got my board up. Looking around the room, I notice that I also seem to have brought my bouzouki along, in its hard case, as well as a Jolly Roger on a short staff (which, in retrospect, was maybe the first sign that things were about to get a little weird).

I hang my board in the front of the room, but some students say they could see it better in the back, so I move it there instead and begin the lesson. I start with ladder checkmates, asking whether anyone is already familiar with them. Some are. I continue, but Coach A comes in with an explanation of his own which seems to be a bit of a digression. I’m not really happy about his presence, but he does work here, so I just have to work with the situation.

In what follows, I give a version of the lesson which is recognizable, though a bit twisted in places, explaining how the rooks work together to trap the opponent’s king on one side of the board – I recall comparing the rooks to clumps of dough around the king when the checkmate has been accomplished. I’m aware that this seems to be taking an unusually long time, and most of the students who would really benefit from it aren’t here today, and at this rate I don’t know if I’ll have time for the rook and king checkmate, too.

I then proceed to explain the checkmate again, in a different way, by launching into a long, elaborate story about a man who is walking along the street one day, minding his own business, when he finds himself closed in by an impassable wall. He tries to escape, but he is already trapped, and the walls keep getting closer and closer without there being anything he can do about it. The visual aspect of the dream is now the story’s events rather than the classroom. I can’t remember many of the details now but you can probably get a good idea of what it was like by watching a video on ladder checkmates and then reading Kafka’s The Trial.

-24.5.22

(Note: The longer my dreams are, the harder it is for me to remember details, particularly conversations, and this was a long one. There’s several hours’ worth of material here that I can only remember happened at all because I can remember remembering it in a later part of the dream, and this does raise questions of whether they ever actually played out. But, for what it’s worth, it doesn’t feel to me as if that’s what happened, and I do have many cases of knowing dream memory is working in that way to compare it to.)

The earliest part I can remember is of a disaster taking place, a flood sweeping through a public building of some kind. Everybody is trying to get out. I’m one of the last out, but I wait, holding the door open so that the waters don’t forcibly close it and trap the one person who’s still there. It took him a while to believe this was actually happening (understandable, considering how weird it is), so he didn’t get out as quickly as everyone else.

After this series of events is the biggest memory gap, which seems to mainly consist of meeting up with a large group of people and preparing for some kind of expedition together. I become lucid not long before we’re going to set off, although it’s not so much me realizing that it’s a dream as it is the unconscious knowledge that it’s a dream, which I’ve been acting on this whole time, becoming conscious. And this sort of makes it feel as if I’ve been lucid the whole time, if that makes sense.

I’m looking out the window of a house onto the rolling fields beyond as it happens. I still have some preparation to do here, though, so I’m still here packing as everybody else is leaving. I’m taking my hiking backpack, the black one with yellow trim. It occurs to me to wonder whether I need to do this in a dream, since I can just make things appear if I need them. But I have the impression, based on earlier conversations, that I might not be able to do that in some of the places we’re going, and so I’ll want to make sure I have essentials with me, at least. The last thing I grab is my brown aviator-style jacket, which I fold and pack into the backpack before buckling it and heading downstairs and outside.

I can just see somebody disappearing past the other side of the house, down a broad stone staircase. That’s where everybody’s gone. I try flying part of the way, but perhaps because of the hiking backpack—even though it doesn’t feel heavy—it’s hard to get more than a couple feet off the ground. But flying seems to be slower than running anyway, so I just run around the side and down the stairs.

I’m now in an area with several platforms rising a distance above the ground. Next to one on the far side is a cliff wall with a small tunnel partway up, a little above head height. A young women is nearby – it seems she had to stop to do something before going onward. I jump onto one of the platforms, where I see some piled-up clothing. I recognize it as a kind of uniform for us to wear. It looks a bit like a karate gi: loose pants and a shirt that ties around the front, white, though a little discolored with age and threadbare in places. On some of the edges, flowers are embroidered in pale colors. I put it on over my clothing.

Jumping onto the last platform and up to the tunnel—taking off the backpack and pushing it in first—is practically effortless, much easier than it would be in waking life, which makes it kind of fun. The tunnel is not tall enough to walk in, and it narrows considerably not far ahead, so I push the backpack in ahead of me. It barely fits, and I can see it slide down once it gets past the narrow point, where the tunnel slopes downward. I barely fit, too – I actually have to turn my head to the side to squeeze through. But soon, it’s large enough to where I can crawl again, and then walk upright.

The tunnel is made of squares of some smooth material, solid black in the center but with a stripe of red-orange around the edges that glows, lighting the way. As I walk, it slopes further downward and eventually drops me into a corridor with a grimy, institutional feel to it. All dimly and artificially lit, as if I’m somewhere underground.

It has a distinctly unpleasant vibe – although part of the reason may be because of what I know about this place. It is actually a sentient environment, and not a very nice one, and now that I’m inside of it, it’s going to be tracking my every move and shaping itself according to my actions and reactions. It’s not the destination – just somewhere we have to pass through on the way. There’ll be a test at the end that has to be passed before we can get out – but this place doesn’t like people leaving it and will be actively throwing obstacles in our way.

My backpack isn’t here – the place probably hid it somewhere, and so I’ll have to be on the lookout for it. I turn towards the right, reading the plates on the doors as I go by, deciding which room to enter first. The place looks to be some sort of school judging by what they say.

As I walk, faint, unpleasant feeling-tones arise, like the ghosts of memories with an archaic, dark quality to them, although they definitely don't involve my personal past – not in this lifetime, anyway. Or maybe they’re anticipations of what I’ll find here, behind the doors. Or maybe both. I also see a set of stairs leading downwards, but I don’t want to leave this floor just yet.

After reaching the end of the corridor, I head back, still making up my mind. It’s not terribly important where I go first, but I am aware that, as the first deliberate choice I make here, it will give the place some insight into me, will establish the course of how things will go. I decide on a room about midway between the end of the corridor and where I started from labelled “Faculty Lounge.”

As I open the door, I’m surprised by what I see. It’s a little room, somewhat like the bedroom of a hostel, with two bunk beds, a table off to one side and some assorted furniture – overall, quite nice apart from the lack of windows. But the really surprising thing is that it’s already occupied by two people from the group I started with.

Sam is there—Sam, maker of ukuleles, fixer of anything with strings and frets, host of concerts and an accomplished musician in his own right. His dog is there with him. The other person isn’t waking-life familiar, although he does somewhat resemble one of my coworkers, with dark hair, pale skin and some kind of facial hair, I think. A dog has come in with me as well, a large, black one. I don’t pay much attention to it besides noting that it’s mine and hoping that the room isn’t going to be too crowded now.

Sam greets me – but he uses a different name, a man’s name. They must be seeing this place and this situation differently than I do, I realize. It had been mentioned at the earlier gatherings that it would appear differently to everybody – but I had assumed that we would also be going through it alone, individually, and so it hadn’t occurred to me that I’d find myself in this kind of situation. But I can roll with it.

We talk for a little while. At one point, one of them advises me to be careful not to give this place “the impression that I’m somebody it can f*** with.” Sam mentions that he’s working on a puzzle—it seems to be set up on the table there—and I say I’ll leave him to it. I mention, though, that I’m good with puzzles, and he invites me to come help put it together. This must be part of their test, I realize – and it strikes me that maybe it isn’t a coincidence I ended up here to help them with it, although from everything I’ve heard, it would be uncharacteristically benevolent for the place to intentionally direct me to them.

The puzzle seems to mainly feature cute baby animals, and it is close to being finished. I help assemble the remaining pieces as Sam tells me some anecdotes he’s heard about a 20th century Viennese composer. He can’t remember which one they’re about. I notice, though, that the bottom edge of the puzzle isn’t complete. Sam is stirring some sort of gooey blue liquid, and I realize that that will also be part of it: the tests, though different, all have one thing in common: incorporating two bowls of these brightly colored mixtures into them somehow.

14.7.20

I am on a computer, looking through files. I’m trying to find papers from an earlier part of the dream where I’d stayed after a math class drawing, and the teacher had brought over a stack of graded assignments he’d apparently been working on while I sat there. I’d just glanced at them and seen that’d I’d done really well on them before taking off, but now I want a closer look, and this was apparently where they were.

I scroll through small pictures, some of which began to move. One has expanded to fill the whole screen. It shows a house on fire, people running out. It scrolls past a small stage on which two double basses stand, one the traditional sort, another more metallic – electric by the look of it, but still a roughly double bass size and shape. It sits in a sort of flower-shaped metal pad. It catches my attention, and I’m struck by the level of detail.

I am now – not sure in what order – both present in the dream and lucid. I’m in a park-like area, a clearing with groves of trees and some woods not far off. Another stage is nearby, this one a roofed circular platform on which sits another of those big electric basses. I consider giving it a try – that could be fun. But it occurs to me that I’ve never produced frightening scenarios in lucid dreams before, and I should try it at least once.

Surrounded by demons is the first thing that occurs to me for some reason. That’ll do. I will them into being. As I focus on the intention, everything around me grows dark, swirling and immaterial. I’m floating, moving vaguely backwards. But nothing else seems to be happening. Oh, well. Maybe I’ll give that bass a try after all.

I let go of the intention. The original scene immediately returns, and I walk back towards the area I started out in. But not far from it, by a ridge in front of a forested area, I spot a strange figure. Its head looks like a skull, bovine in shape, with horns that curl around to the front and knot around each other, and it’s wearing a black and white herringbone tweed blazer with a thin purple scarf and a long grey-black skirt. It looks like I managed something, at least, although I can’t say it’s especially scary.

As I approach, it waves its hand, causing a small sphere of darkness to shoot towards me. This startles me a bit, but it doesn’t seem to have any effect. I keep walking towards it, ignoring its attacks. As I pass the pavilion, I notice the instrument sitting there looks different now. There are also now a number of cats up under the roof, lying in big cat piles that seem to extend upward into tunnels. They seem to just be waking up. The grey and orange tabbies stay where they are, but a few black cats stretch and jump down onto the stage.

As I turn back towards the figure, I see that it is now a cat as well – a small black one. I pick it up. It doesn’t look happy with being held, but it makes no attempt to escape.

At that point, I wake up.

9.1.20

I'm lying in the middle of a dark room, trying to sleep. But it’s not very comfortable there since I don’t have a pillow or blankets or anything else except the (possibly carpeted) floor. As I lie there, a piece of music comes into my mind—“Night on Bald Mountain.” It’s not as if I’m thinking of it: rather it’s as if it’s pushing all the other thoughts out of my head until it’s the only thing there, even though it's clearly in my head and not actually playing.

It plays for a few bars, and then, just as the horn blasts the first note of the melody, I hear a loud crash from outside. A jolt of alarm—but it lasts only for a moment. The noise I heard sounds just like the falling branch did a couple weeks ago, when the winds came through, and it seems likely to me that that’s what happened now. But I reflect that that was odd, about it matching the melody—almost as if, on some level, I knew the crash was going to happen in advance.

I’m not sure what series of events came in between this and the next dream I can remember clearly, but my memory picks up shortly after attaining lucidity somehow. I step through a door out into a hallway—tile floors, completely bare, and several wooden doors, including one with a window in it at the end of the hall. Through the window, I can see some sort of colorful projection on the wall, like a screen. I head towards it and open the door.

The room turns out to be a mid-sized lecture hall, with the seats and desks in a semicircular amphitheater arrangement. A few students are scattered throughout, and although there doesn’t seem to be a teacher here, a PowerPoint presentation is going. It seems to be a presentation on poetry.

An idea occurs to me: I’ll write down what I see and then try to record as much of it as I can in my dream journal once I’m awake. Granted, most of it looks like the sort of word salad you might except the subconscious mind on autopilot to kick out, but it could still be interesting. I forage around for something to write on but turn up with nothing but a pencil and some kind of treated animal skin, which is pretty far from ideal, but I figure I can try writing on the leathery side. I slip into a seat in the back row and start taking notes.

I have a good half “page” or so written by the time I wake up—with no warning, as usual. But I find I can’t remember any of it—not even the one line that actually seemed striking to me as I was recording it. The only thing I can remember from the whole presentation was the centipug (to give an appropriate name to it)—the clipart-ish picture of a pug with many sets of legs that was at the bottom of one of the slides. Funny how that works.

13.3.18