Blue_Opossum

Morning of February 17, 2015. Tuesday.



This is a rare dream type where a nearly overwhelming odor dominates my dream’s environment (with more potency than real life just as the sense of touch is often augmented in dreams). I have documented only a few of these in my lifetime, the first one featuring the very unpleasant odor of asphalt. In this case, it also has another fairly rare environmental feature where much of the action takes place near and in a corner of a large room, where most of the only objects, characters, or other features are.

I am at a clothing sale in what was once a large store full of items at a large shopping mall apparently in this area or possibly in Brisbane. The room is very large and at what would be on the right side from the main entrance of the mall, though all that remains of the ongoing sale is in one area near a corner. Several unknown saleswomen and cashiers are working, which seems a bit unusual as there are only a few racks of clothing left and hardly any costumers.

I notice a stench coming from somewhere when I go in to look around, though there are not many mens’ clothes left. At first the source of the odor is completely unknown. It has both a chemical and metallic smell. The workers are annoyed and it is possibly keeping any more costumers from maintaining much interest in shopping. I buy a couple pairs of pants and soon find myself in the kitchen at my present home, though its layout is perpendicular (rotated ninety degrees east) to how it is in reality. For some reason I am sitting under the table in the center of the room where there are more clothes piled.

I somehow end up back at the store and approach the large hot water heater that is an odd feature of the store, the only noticeable feature other than the clothing sale area. The tank is near the middle of the wall opposite the entrance. I am clearly aware that the stench is much more potent here. An older male notices me and approaches as I tell him that the stench is coming from just above the hot water tank, which also appears to be leaking somewhat. At first he does not believe me, but when he goes to put his face closer to the top pipe he backs away immediately and nods in confirmation.

Two of the sales ladies come over and frustratingly ask if it has to be replaced and the older male nods. They seem very annoyed at having to replace the device (which I think also doubles as an in-store furnace) when they only have a small amount of inventory left to sell.

Even though the smell became much clearer and more powerful when I was near the hot water heater, there was no smell of any kind in reality after waking (though sometimes “phantom smells” and “phantom tastes” do carry over from dream states).

Morning of September 15, 1969. Monday.



As I ride my crowded southbound school bus on Highway Seventeen in early morning, there is a vague recall (without lucidity) of how I sometimes daydream (in real life) that my school bus is a rocket going to the moon. This becomes the case in my dream, though my school bus remains of the same appearance. I feel the sensation of my school bus moving through the sky.

My classroom is in the same building, yet rendered as being on the moon. I sit in my classroom in the left-most row of desks in about the middle of the row, facing south. Farther to my left is a large singular window (not a real-life feature).

Instead of an outside view, it seems to be a chemistry laboratory (even though I had been vaguely aware of the moon’s surface viewed from this window, the ambiguous change probably a result of a dream reset). The Disney cartoon character Emil Eagle is there, picking up and pouring from test tubes, seemingly planning something questionable, likely with bad intent, perhaps even an intent to poison all the students and my teacher (an unfamiliar female). (However, he may be trying to create a “hair-growing formula”, based on a comic book story I had read a few times. Emil Eagle first appeared in “The Evil Inventor” in May of 1966 as a balding industrial spy that sought to steal Gyro’s hair growth formula.)

My teacher and classmates do not seem to be aware of what he is doing or even that he is present. I eventually discern an unpleasant odor, which is much like asphalt. I consider that the teacher and students might think I had passed wind, with a vague contemplation of the word “asphalt” as “ass fault”. However, I also consider that the odor is real asphalt from outside, unrelated to Emil’s experiment. I worry about the odor and hold onto a concern about possibly being poisoned by noxious gas, yet I do not leave the classroom or express my concern to my teacher, as I might be blamed for disrupting the class.

I still contemplate passively pointing out that Emil Eagle is responsible for the odor (in case someone else says something first). I consider that they might think the odor is caused by smoke from a nearby fire or (as in real life) the supposed factory fumes from Nocatee (which was sarcastically referred to by schoolmates as “Skunkatee”). I neither make the connection that Emil Eagle is only a villainous Disney comic book character, not an entity I would ever see in real life, nor do I consider that being on the moon is unusual.

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Non-lucid dream control is evidenced by the association with daydreaming and my dream self not being surprised by my dream’s otherwise impossible events. Additionally, the main factor of this dream reveals non-lucid dream control in my partial modulation of the liminal space divider’s (the window’s) autosymbolism that is otherwise a result of vestibular system correlation (and liminally anticipating it as a negative consequence as evidenced by an ambiguous sketchy flight symbol rendered as Emil Eagle, as it has always been very common for me to have liminal anticipation of the waking process, typically experienced biologically as a falling sensation, as renderings of birds, airplanes, or related factors). All of the other dynamics, including the odor itself, have literal associations.

Emil Eagle is this dream’s preconscious factor (which is often personified), always uniquely rendered. Non-lucid manipulation of liminal space barriers (or dream state “bulwarks”), the division between dream self and waking self identity, has been a very common factor in my dreams since early childhood, probably the most common form of non-lucid dream control other than generic summoning.

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Years after this dream, in ninth grade in high school, I found myself in a very similar classroom, sitting in the same orientation as I was in this dream (of which at the time did not correlate with real-life orientation of any classroom I had been in). My new homeroom teacher for this term reminded me of the otherwise fictitious teacher of this dream. In real life, this teacher had spent time one morning dramatically complaining before class started, about a bad odor. Considering the hundreds of times when Zsuzsanna and I inexplicably communicated in dreams before we made contact in real life, attributing a factor of this dream to a possibly prescient thread is certainly not unreasonable.

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