Verre

I just woke from a night that was thick, rich, dense with dreaming, but the recall was scattered and sparse, which makes me ponder the nature of dream memory. After this last waking, I lay there for some minutes without being able to remember a single thing, not one detail, yet I knew for certain that I had been dreaming. This is a peculiar state of mind, the ultimate experience of ambiguity. I lay back down on the bed sideways across the covers so that I would not accidentally fall asleep again, and then let my mind drift, looking for the particulars. At first it seemed hopeless, like groping through mud, until through some mysterious process a tiny detail took shape...

...near my new house, a stream full of fish, all sizes and varieties...

That detail links to more images and events, and then there all are, as vivid as life, all those memories that had seemed to be lost, and might have never been recovered had I not taken the time to seek them...

...I look forward to fishing, catching my own dinner... is the water clean enough? I need a fishing pole, I can buy one right now on Amazon, I'm sure they sell them, it will be here in two days... or is this the sort of thing I should buy in person? find a sporting goods store, feel the weight and balance in my hands first, try out the cast...

...and finally I'll have somewhere to shoot my bow! so nice to have space again.... but my bow and target are still in my old house, I won't have them until we complete the move... guess I'll have to be patient...

...a bit concerned about the neighbors, though, that father yelling at his children, hitting them with tires, and so openly, right in the yard! should I call and report? but surely someone has tried before, and nothing has changed. I walk back that way and he's still at it, now they're all carrying tires, all four or five children, and he's still hitting them, yelling "we don't put wood in the house!" what does that mean? all houses have wood in them, it's a basic building material... I should inquire with the other neighbors, something has to be done... at least my house is across the stream, away from here, secluded in the woods...

And this reminds me of yet another dream...

...the two boys were living in such a house, alone in an open field, only woods on all sides. the old man must have been living off the grid, so no one knew when he died, and they quietly took over the house... his guests become his heirs... what did they do with the body, bury it in the yard? and then the seclusion let them build their operations, what was it, computers? what were they trying to accomplish... still can't remember...

And another...

...but before that we were looking for someone, an uncle?...can't just "lose" someone these days, not unless they don't want to be found... it takes a lot of care not to show up on the internet, to avoid social media entirely. the only clue we had was a partial bag of english muffins, not sure what that can prove, but then I wonder if the city where it was purchased is printed on the bottom... sure enough it is... but it is the name of my own city! is he here, or is this not even the right bag?

And so on... from no memories at all, to more than are worth writing down.

What would have happened to those memories if I hadn't taken the trouble to consciously retrieve them? What happens to all the memories of the dreams we don't remember, or have forgotten? Is there a kind of deep storage? I think there must be, because from time to time they come swimming up in flashes, like fish catching the light near the surface...

....a gleam of light against the wall of the building across from us, like a tile of glass catching the sun... Arya isn't paying attention, I catch her eye and direct her toward it with my own... she looks the wrong way and I have to pantomime the gaze even more cartoonishly before she sees it... we are under observation and can't speak aloud... but at last she sees the gleam and we go over to find out what it is... I think it is magic itself, these signals... this isn't the first... but is it directed by a person or inherent in the world, plot, fate? we climb the stairs inside the building and open the door at the very top... with satisfaction I perceive it is a magical goods store, and actually tell the lady proprietor what brought us there... perhaps she or something she sells here can assist us in our predicament...

That was yet another from last night, where my own turn of phrase, "catching the light," caught the memory. But often I'll be sitting around doing things in waking life and apparently random glimpses will surface of dreams I know I had years ago, probably ones I never even wrote down, yet in some obscure way they still shadow me. Where and what are memories when we're not remembering them? Dream memory feels like it is stored separately from waking life memory, which would make sense if we need to distinguish the two to maintain sanity. But maybe that sense of separateness only comes because dream memories do not fit into the established contexts of ordinary life... at least for me, where dreams and waking life have so few qualities in common.

There are people who hardly remember their dreams at all... are those dream memories buried inside them as if in some secret vault? Could some odd balance of brain chemicals unlock it, bring them all flooding back, the dreams of a lifetime?

I was stressed about work. How am I going to complete all the obligations piling up this month, which is already getting shorter? I figured it would be best to prioritize. I should be able to finish the map in an afternoon if I get the right materials together. I thought about what I would need to finish it, and came up with vellum and archival paper. Fortunately I knew I already had these somewhere and was pretty sure where I had last put them, in a box in the storage area. I could see it in my mind's eye. I had woken up early and wanted to go retrieve them, but the rest of my family was still asleep.

My mother, brother, and father were all staying with me in the house and I didn't want to disturb them by walking through the building and rummaging around in boxes. I decided to go outside for a walk instead. I walked down the stairs, which were littered with all the discarded santa masks. This struck me as odd at first, but I reasoned we must have had a holiday party yesterday.

Outside it felt like early morning, and there was a narrow stream of clear water nearby. Next to the stream was a small building of naturally weathered wood, a sort of shed. Just after I entered it, it occurred to me that even though I know I'm awake, I should practice some RCs to instill good habits. No one else was around and there was no reason not to do a blatant one, so I jumped. Yes, just as I thought, it's obvious I'm awake, because that felt perfectly normal. But just for good measure I should do it a few more times in order to internalize the feeling of what a proper jump feels like in waking life.

So I jumped in the air several times in succession, concentrating on that critical moment at the apex, when the upward motion reverses and gravity takes over. I knew that I would be able to tell if I were dreaming because the timing would be off, that moment would feel drawn out slightly, extended. Hmmm.... it isn't, is it? Was that a touch of hesitation at the top? No, I'm pretty sure this is natural. I've just never concentrated on it sufficiently before, my attention is making it seem more pronounced.

And yet... it does seem a trifle too long. Could it be...? What if...? I had just begun to seriously consider the possibility that I might be dreaming after all, when I woke up in bed. Only very slowly did I come back to myself and realize that all the things I had taken as evidence that I was awake were wrong or askew, signs of false memory. The building and surroundings that seemed so familiar at the time were pure dream space, unlike any place I know in waking life. It made sense at the time that my whole family was there, but the only accurate part is that I'm currently sharing a hotel room with my mother. The anxiety about work is real enough, but it was only well after I had written down my initial notes that I realized that in the dream I had felt responsible for an additional project that didn't exist in WL, in addition to the real ones. Finally, as I initially lay in bed reviewing the dream, I didn't even notice how I slipped back briefly from genuine waking into an FA, and briefly found myself another place entirely, which only transitioned again to lying back in bed once I reached the point where I felt I had enough grasp of the memory to get up and write.