Night Vision

A classroom - another person and I are teachers there, but I’m aware the situation isn’t real without having identified it as a dream. Rather, I think of it as a story we’re making together. After some time eliciting answers from students on a certain topic, I think that we’ll need to pause and discuss making notes for each of them and their backstories as they become established.

There are some third-person scenes featuring the main character of possibly the same story. It’s like the beginning of a new plot arc. The dream shows an older mentor character with the two protagonists on a hill, a place they often go. Some kind of shadowy, inky blackness comes out of him and into them, and it’s shown heading from them onto a world map on a bulletin board. The blackness covers the entire map before gathering in a single spot that seems to be located approximately in the center of Texas. A pin moves to mark it, going all the way through the board. The protagonist girls are puzzled when they return and see it there. The board seems to be in one of their rooms.

1.3.25


I am in a large building with an industrial vibe, alone. I’m exploring this place in a deliberate way, almost as if it were a video game. There’s no sense of any immediate threat, or anybody or anything else around, but I’m still keeping a close eye on my surroundings.

At the end of a hallway, I find a sort of utility room behind a door, and a staircase to the right takes me upstairs, where there’s an electrical panel in a location directly above it. I examine the panel. I know I have to disarm the security system to get any further in, but it’s going to be tricky. Once I get started, I’ll only have a limited time to finish, and I’ll have to be going back and forth between here and the room downstairs. It’s already getting late, so I figure it'll be better to come back here tomorrow instead of trying to do it now.

5.3.25


A place similar to the one in yesterday’s dream - speaking with a man, something about him going to retrieve my body if I die there.

6.3.25


It is a foggy day, and I’m going to use it as an opportunity to sneak into the yard of the neighbor across the street and see what’s there. I’ve heard all kinds of weird rumors about it, and the area back there looks very interesting on my maps. (Why do I have maps, you might ask? That’s a very good question….)

It is a unique-to-dream setting, and I start by flying to the top of an extremely tall tree in the front yard. The branches are bare, as if it’s still early spring. I figure they’re less likely to see me if I enter like this, from above. I fly across and land in back of the house. From there, things get a little unclear - lots of conversations with strange beings that are back there. But there’s definitely something off about the whole place.

—

I’m on board a ship. I start out on the deck - I think there may also have been some parts before this - and go inside, where I almost immediately find the person I’m looking for, who seems to be loosely based on a musician I know but haven’t seen for more than a year now, J. We go back out, and I ask him about routes that we can take to our destination. We actually seem to be in a city waterway, so there are buildings and other ships visible around us.

J tells me about the first route, which seems to be through some kind of a narrow pass. He indicates the direction it’s in. Even before he starts describing the other, I know that’s the one we’ll be taking, even if it is almost certainly the more dangerous of the two. We’d have a tailwind all the way there - it’s too good to pass up.

14.3.25


I am in a grocery store - yet another one, with another unfamiliar layout. It isn’t all that familiar to me in the dream, either. I’m looking for some crumbled pecans for a recipe but am having trouble finding any. I check back again in the aisle that the entrance of the store led directly into, since that seems like the most likely place, but still no luck.

While this is going on, some employees of the store are trying to get everyone there to join them in singing sea shanties, apparently as some kind of obligatory fun somebody somewhere thought up. And they really seem to be enforcing participation, so I join in, but it’s distracting me from the pecan search, so I stop again to focus on that.

Eventually, I figure that they must just not have any pecans, so I get a bag of almonds instead, figuring those will also work.

21.3.25

I am in what seems to be a dorm room set up for three people, although there are only two of us living there. Above the doorways, I can see red text continually scrolling by, which is then replaced by new text—records of conversations, it seems. On the walls, there are a few posters, different pictures, but all with the words “conserve merriment” at the bottom. This is a reference to something familiar to the person I am in the dream. I walk from the room where I am to the one where my flatmate is sitting.

He/she—this person seems rather androgynous, and the dream itself offers no clues—wants to know if I’m interested in going to do something with him/her. I reflect that I do seem to have been learning more from the things I spend my free time doing than from my actual classes. But I still feel reluctant. It has to do with things I experienced before getting here, I tell my flatmate. In a way, it’s like I’m telling about everything that’s happened to me up until now, but all compressed into a sentence or two—a lifetime spent as a fugitive, never being able to stay in any one place for long, just one bad thing after another.

And then he/she replies: “Is that all?” And actually, when you put like that, it really doesn’t seem so bad. Sure, I guess I’ll go to your thing.

We then talk for a bit about the place we’re at, which is called Campa Piri, and another place I can’t remember the name of now. Then I find myself reading a transcript of the conversation rather than experiencing it. I glance a bit further on, where we’re talking about yet another nearby place called Stone Sway and joking about how it totally sounds like a double entendre. And at that point, I wake up.

In the next dream of the night, I also seem to be a different person—a young boy staying at a large house with a group of other people, all adults, apparently. There was a lot that happened in the early parts of this dream that I can no longer remember, but it seemed to involve finding some kind of special thing in this house—I want to say it was a book, but I’m not entirely sure, and so from here on out it will be known as the MacGuffin.

We are all preparing to leave, and it seems that my uncle—my actual uncle, the only familiar person in this dream—is going to be taking the MacGuffin back with him. I don’t like this: I think that it would be better off in the hands of literally anyone else in the world, and it really ought to stay in the house here. But he’s intent on it and, as usual, impervious to arguments.

He’ll also be taking all the paintings that were in the dining room. It’s a wood-paneled room with a long, wooden table in the middle of it, and pretty much all the space on the walls was taken up with paintings, which illustrated various stories. But now he has them stacked in a closet there, ready to be taken out to the car. I’m not happy about this either. I tell him that he wouldn’t have the space to hang them up, and they’d probably just sit in his house, not even properly stored. He claims he’ll hang them up, but I don’t believe him. What strikes me as particularly unfair about this is that it was only by means of the paintings that we had managed to understand the MacGuffin’s true nature and gain possession of it—possibly from some dark sorcerer type, but that’s also escaped my memory. If the paintings aren’t available, the MacGuffin may never be able to make its way into the hands of someone more suitable in the future.

But then it occurs to me—I can make sure the paintings never make it to his house. There are many people here who also feel this isn’t right, and with their cooperation, we can have the paintings mysteriously back on their walls. Maybe we can spook him into returning the MacGuffin. I pull someone aside to tell them my idea, and pretty soon, the plan is ready to be put into action. But we need a diversion so we can get our hands on the paintings.

It’s announced that I’m going to be talking about a painting in a nearby room, and so everybody—minus a few co-conspirators—files in and sits down in rows of chairs. I have the painting there at the front of the room: a fairly small one of a winter scene with trees. I begin talking. I am a kid and don’t know a thing about painting, but I confidently B.S. my way through it.

Just as I’m explaining how the branches of the trees in the painting are reminiscent of the branches of knowledge, continually reaching out and producing new shoots, an older man with short, white hair stands up and approaches me. He is a professor of art history, and he thinks that the branches are nothing of the sort. I tell him that that’s what one of my philosophy professors had said about them. I definitely have the impression that he, too, is in on it, and that this, too, is part of the diversion.

Once I’m done, we head out towards the door. This requires us to pass through the dining room, which I had forgotten about, but I see that the walls there are still bare. That’s good—right now, it’s still too early. But I’m sure the paintings will be back up once everyone’s gone through.

16.2.18