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    1. Bear and Missile Escapades

      by , 12-09-2019 at 10:41 AM
      Morning of December 9, 2019. Monday.

      Dream #: 19,348-02. Reading time: 3 min 20 sec.



      Sleep-wake mediation begins with the typical activation of the preconscious simulacrum (reticular activating system personification) as intrusive to make my dream state less inviting and sustainable. My identity is extant to a partial degree, as I recall Zsuzsanna and our family, but our home is fictitious. The preconscious simulacrum is an unfamiliar woman who is staying with us and is supposedly Zsuzsanna’s friend. She has a young daughter and son. At one point, it is late at night, and I cannot rest or focus because she and her children are making noise (with the attempt to pull me out of the dream state), so I tell them to get out. There is increased neuron energy in my annoyance, which vivifies my dream, but this does not wake me. Even so, a wall opens up, though it leads more inward into the dream state by my intent, and I see everyone else walking out into a forest. It is still night.

      I walk into the forest, finding it a pleasurable setting. The woman and her two children have gone behind some dense shrubbery. The vague awareness my dream is becoming a bathroom wake-up call remains in the background. The preconscious becomes an animal semblance. A bear is in the woods, so I decide to turn around and find shelter. Ambiguity becomes a factor, and the house no longer exists, but there is still a bathroom left. I go in. The bear follows me, but I close the door. At times, I can see its claws slide in and out under the door. I hold the door closed, my strength keeping the bear from coming in. Wall mediation vivifies my dream and increases awareness of my identity. Imaginary physicality and momentum become more realistic.

      I try to sustain my dream despite my need to wake. I fill my hands with water from the running faucet of the bathtub on my right. The tangibility of the water is amazingly realistic, and I can feel its heat (cortical arousal overriding virtual melatonin mediation). I think the bear might be annoyed by the hot water, so I continue to fling it under the door. The bear seems annoyed but does not leave. The dynamics of cortical arousal integrate more with the situation, and guns appear. I suddenly have a Beretta in my right hand, and there are now weapons and several rounds of ammunition on the other side of the door. I shoot the pistol under the door at a rocket launcher. My act implies ambiguous intent as I typically use fire to wake myself. The house exists again. The missile curves, but its trajectory remains adjacent to the outer walls of the house. With x-ray vision, I see its flames. I also hear a loud sizzling. I am amused. I anticipate it will explode near the front of the house. I sense my thoughts creating the dream content, but release the dynamics of cortical arousal so that I remain in the dream state. As a result, the rocket does not explode.

      I make one more attempt to reset my dream. I open the door, and the bear becomes smaller, backs away, and falls into a pothole filled with water. Only its head is visible. The house is gone again, and it is if I am looking at a street. Even so, I turn to go into the forest, and the house appears again.

      Sleep-wake mediation continues, and my dream’s potential exit point renders as a store’s checkout (which is common). Zsuzsanna is here. The preconscious personification is here with her two children, except they are now both boys. I make one more attempt to remain in the dream state. I walk back to the beginning of the checkout and pick up a magazine (cognitive arousal). Liminal awareness that reading is often not viable in the dream state causes the magazine to fly out of my hands and slap against the ceiling, briefly sticking to it (vestibular cortex liminality). Two can play at this game, so I use telekinesis to cause the magazine to fly rapidly all around the checkout area and slap into my hands three times. The preconscious, now a man, looks on with puzzlement, and I finally wake myself by going to the end up the checkout (exit point).



      Compare this with another recent bathroom wake-up call dream where I was in an underwater bathroom and holding the door against a giant catfish. Another dreaming experience rendered the RAS semblance as a vulture, blocking me from the bathroom in that instance because of vestibular system correlation and drop anticipation (with its association with flying or falling). There was one with the same dynamics with a snake, and one with a lioness as the RAS semblance. Some people might wonder why a different RAS semblance occurs with what is otherwise the same simple process each time. The reason is to prevent a pattern from emerging, which would confuse the dream self into thinking there is wakefulness consistency present.


      Categories
      non-lucid
    2. Bear Escapades

      by , 04-22-2018 at 10:22 AM
      Morning of April 22, 2018. Sunday.



      I am on the porch of the Loomis Street house in late morning. There is conversation relating to my oldest son. Zsuzsanna is present. I find a narrow cardboard box that is just large enough to hold a human forearm. Inside are two bones, both from human arms, but also deformed, with at least one or two miniature arm bones growing out of the first. This puzzles me, but I realize it is from when our son was being given human remains, as he is a doctor (not in real life) and this relates to his medical training and writing of essays. Apparently, a slow-witted woman had donated her son’s body to medical science after he died.

      I go into the house (still the Loomis Street house). Looking out beyond the doorway of what should be the north bedroom is an outdoor setting instead. Our son is sitting near a corner of the house. Two unfamliar young people, male and female, walk about near one other unfamiliar person. Loud heavy metal music is playing. Our son begins to talk to me, but it is not him (though my dream self does not consider this). It is actually Johnny, a close friend from school days, who had said he wanted to be a doctor when he left school.

      Eventually, my dream self becomes distracted and RAS mediation more fully kicks in. RAS is rendered as a brown bear that tries to come in from the front door to the porch (thus implying the typical doorway waking symbolism established when I was a toddler over fifty years ago). I am not scared (as I am likely subliminally aware of being asleep as with the majority of my dreams that are not viably lucid). Still, I do not want the brown bear getting into the house. I manage to close the door and keep it closed. (I have no focus on the doorway erroneously open to the outside from the north wall of the dining room.)

      From here, I go to the back of the house, where another large brown bear sees me and runs away, just managing to squeeze through the back door, to close it behind him.



      Faux lucidity is implied due to the odd RAS mediation dynamics, though it is usually not related to liminal dream control as it seems to be here. The part with the arm bones was from lying on my arm to where it had become numb.


      Tags: bear
      Categories
      non-lucid
    3. Snow Bear

      by , 11-17-1982 at 05:17 PM
      Morning of November 17, 1982. Wednesday. (Extensively clarified for inexperienced dream journalists on Sunday, 17 September 2017.)



      It seems to be early afternoon throughout most of this dream. My dream starts out in the apartment above my sister Marilyn’s house on Loomis Street, which seems vacant at the time, though there are a few items around including minimal furniture. The steps are unusual, but are similar to other dreams with this distortion. They go around the sides of the living room to no particular location and have no railing.

      Eventually, a large and seemingly menacing polar bear makes an appearance but does not chase me at any point. I realize that the polar bear may have eaten the previous occupant of the apartment, but later, I am also thinking that this tenant (Colleen) may have gotten away but left some of her things behind (due to the presence of the bear). There is a distortion when her apartment seems to be upside-down, yet without furniture and other items falling from the implied ceiling. There is a scene where I am on the unlikely stairs and looking down at the creature though I seem incorporeal at one point.

      Later, in the last part of my dream, I am downstairs in my sister’s living room and there is a knock on the door which is presumed to be the mailman with a package. Instead, it turns out to be the polar bear. It is standing upright on two legs (and at least a foot taller than me). It does not attempt to attack me, though I wake almost immediately. There is a sense of surprise and awe, but it is not nightmarish.



      This dreams ends with non-lucid doorway waking symbolism. This type of dream outcome is sometimes triggered by the reticular activating system when environmental noise is present and based on the implied need to wake up and answer the door (which does not mean that the environmental noise is an actual door knock as the mind is unconscious and does not correctly perceive the real environment).

      Dreams are experienced in real time and mainly symbolize mental processes and changes in REM semi-consciousness or neural patterns. Therefore, a staircase usually metaphorically signifies changes in levels of awareness while sleeping (just as it is deliberately used as such in some forms of meditation and hypnosis). In this case, using a staircase put me into a more vivid offset dream, which is typical. (I use a staircase in some dreams to augment lucidity.)

      The polar bear becoming the preconscious to emergent consciousness factor in this case may be coincidentally based on the possible shift to doorway waking symbolism as a result of environmental noise, only if not assuming the earlier segment to be a precursor to it. The assumption that the door knock was possibly a mailman validates the reticular activating system prompt, as a mailman otherwise often relates to incrementing communication between dream self and conscious self (that is, the true conscious self identity trying to reach the otherwise muddled personified subconscious aka dream self).

      If there is any waking life relevance here, it may relate to a wish to see myself as stronger or more adaptable to the cold weather (as I had moved from Florida to Wisconsin during the summer of 1978). However, there also seems to be a less-detailed thread of prescience. I told my sister about this dream. Later this day, she said “There’s your snow bear”. It was a television commercial we had never seen previously with the scene of a polar bear running across a featureless ice floe. (However, during one time period, I also regularly saw a real stuffed polar bear in a commercial window display while walking through an area in La Crosse.)


      Updated 08-02-2022 at 04:25 PM by 1390

      Categories
      Uncategorized
    4. The Bear in the Parking Lot

      by , 08-17-1980 at 02:17 PM
      Morning of August 17, 1980. Sunday. (Last clarified and resupplemented on Friday, 1 September 2017.)



      The myth: “You cannot snore and dream at the same time.” This is one of those virtually endless bits of disinformation that one sees in various lists about dreams (and in most cases the entire list is untrue, including those related to “interpretation” by “experts”, as well as the superstitious “black cats crossing a person’s path“ mentality). I do not know who came up with this mindless concept or how it spread, but there have been many times in my life when I was snoring and dreaming at the same time, which includes the following entry.



      I am doing a news report that includes a celebrity interview (apparently with Rod Stewart, though he never makes an appearance), using a black generic microphone with a long cord (the cord going into the back of a white van), similar to the one I use in real life to record affirmations (though I am not using a cassette tape for any type of scripted dreaming in this case). At times, my microphone is making a sort of buzzing “snoring” sound. A few times, I move and swing the cord around to see if a short is causing the sound.

      I walk around in the parking lot and it seems to be late morning. I am to ask the singer about the different classic cars he owned. The parking lot is full of his cars, mainly from the 1940s to the present. As I walk near one of the cars, I hear that it had been left running and the engine also makes a sort of unusual snoring sound. I consider asking him when I see him if he is aware that the car had been running. There are several others around at first, all unfamiliar males, but a few are from the radio station I am supposedly working for.

      Eventually, a black bear comes onto the scene and my team and I need to escape. It also seems to be making a snoring sound, though it is implied to be growling as such.

      I decide to quickly climb down over a cliff at the edge of the parking lot (to hide from the bear), and, although there is a narrow ledge, I end up hanging on the microphone cord. Someone, I do not know who, is soon pulling me up, though I sense it may be the bear doing this (though I am not sure), but as I begin to climb up, the bear leaps over the cliff with his front paws spread out but misses me and presumably falls to his death. I wake up in the middle of a snore.



      The parking lot setting, as well as the cliff, is completely unrelated to waking life. Both are specific liminal space indicators of the dream state, the parking lot because it represents a halfway point (between dreaming and waking) as analogous to leaving an area (the dream state) and the potential of returning home (waking life), and the cliff being related to the biologically premonitory nature of waking from sleep (which often produces a natural falling sensation based on inner ear dynamics and coming out of being unconscious and otherwise has no meaning).

      The bear in this case may also have no meaning other than the preconscious factor (which is sometimes aggressive, depending on incidental dream dynamics, for the sole purpose of waking the dreamer) as it was primarily rendered by way of the sound of my own snoring. Note the progression; microphone buzzing, car engine running, bear growling. This is all sound-based, where my unconscious was simply trying to compensate for the sound of my own snoring yet also slowly alerting me to the waking transition. To validate this, a microphone would not normally get my attention (especially as I am already holding it despite its presumed technical difficulty), a car engine running would not necessarily get my attention either, but a bear certainly would. See how this works? (It should be obvious to a person of reasonable intelligence.) The usual hypnopompic falling dynamic was transferred to the bear so that my waking was softer than it would have been otherwise.


      Updated 09-10-2017 at 05:37 AM by 1390

      Categories
      non-lucid
    5. "In a Nutshell" Revisited, with Causality Explained

      by , 10-06-1979 at 01:01 PM
      Morning of October 6, 1979. Saturday.

      Dream #: 4,674-04. Optimized 1 minute 30 second read.





      My dream implies I am in an ongoing monster movie called “In a Nutshell” in Cubitis. Although it is vivid, my emotions are not intense enough to initiate wakefulness as I summon the essence of horror to serve my dream’s imaginary narrative. (I often do this by habit to manifest ASMR, the “spine tingling” that brings about bliss, but which is rarely complete in this mode of dreaming.)

      My father is near at one point, sitting on the bed, but only as a backstory commentator.

      Most scenes occur in semi-darkness in the southwest bedroom of the Cubitis house (not where I am sleeping in reality but still the result of background awareness I am in bed).

      The featured monster begins its life by growing inside an egg that mimics a walnut. I see one of them prematurely hatch as a tiny black horse that jerks about on its side on the floor - reminiscent of a mosquito larva (“wriggler”). This one may be dying because of hatching too quickly (though I hit the “walnut” with a hammer as a requirement of the “movie’s script”). (There is no outcome here, only a transition to another scene.)

      The adult form of the monster is a mutant bear that has poisonous porcupine quills. It hunts people for food. There is a nighttime scene when I am “surprised” by the creature (though it is metacognitive summoning and pretending). It occurs as I walk around a corner of the Cubitis house (at its south end). The monster lifts its arms, but it does not attack me.



      Metacognitive Dreaming Responses:

      Predominant bedroom setting.

      REM atonia (something enclosed or its movement restricted; the tiny “horse” inside the “walnut”).

      Sleep myoclonus (the wriggling “horse” on its side, modeling my sleeping position, as a horse typically appears when anticipating my physical mobility after waking).

      Association with “hibernation” or sleeping (the mutant bear).

      “Around the corner” metacognitive summoning (a deliberate dreaming element since early childhood). In a childhood dream, the result was a dog coming from around the same corner. It jumped up to press against my chest, resulting in a myoclonic awakening.



      Influences:

      The movie “Prophecy” (1979).

      The movie “The Valley of Gwangi” (1969).

      The Crazy Magazine parody of “The Waltons” titled “The Walnuts” (1974).



      Updated 01-05-2022 at 09:04 AM by 1390

      Categories
      lucid
    6. Bear Beer

      by , 12-10-1977 at 06:00 AM
      Night of December 10, 1967. Sunday.



      This is another early childhood dream that I had recorded years ago that came again to me around the same time last night as the Christmas-themed “Cold Hands, Warm Heart”. Again, I am not sure why, perhaps because of my desire to work with any and all previously documented dreams and resolve any mysteries.

      In this fairly vivid dream (not lucid), even though I am a child, I seem to have some sort of adult role with regard to being a manager or making decisions relative to a brewery I inherited. Neither of my parents drank beer but we did live near G. Heileman Brewing Company at one point (which apparently stopped operating in 1996, about two years after I moved to Australia). The location, though, seems to be near the Chipmunk Coulee region and near a mostly wooded, elevated area. It is a fictional, or at least unfamiliar, area. Added note: I consider this dream long-term precognitive at a subtle layer, as I did work there in real life years later, though only as a cleaner.

      For the most part, I remain outside across a bridge (made of logs laid horizontally) from the actual brewery. There is a moat-like area around the building, but not filled with water; just mostly ice and snow and parts of bushes, sticks, and logs. There are not many people around outside - I guess they are mostly working.

      In the last part of my dream, there is supposedly a bear running around inside the brewery and causing problems, perhaps even eating people. I am not sure how to deal with that - though I guess it is my job to get rid of the bear somehow. I go closer near the beginning of the bridge that leads across the moat-like area but never cross the bridge or go inside the building to see what is going on. It is not really a nightmare, though, as I never see the bear. There are vague “The Prisoner” references (which I must have seen just prior to this dream, as there are also hammer and anvil references regarding how the beer is supposedly made, but not realistically feasible - according to IMDb, it was broadcast on December 10th, 1967).

      There is a vague idea that the bear may be a pet that escaped from its owner, but that is not all that clear an idea. Not much drama ensues. I mostly just want to leave the region and find myself wandering around in the woods hoping the bear does not leave the building. There is a bit of relief in the thought that it would have to know how to open doors - but even so - how had it gotten in in the first place? Thus, I actually feel safer outside in the wild, as the bear is in the building (the opposite of other dreams with similar themes, especially with cougars and bulls).

      Updated 07-12-2015 at 08:57 PM by 1390

      Tags: bear, beer
      Categories
      Uncategorized
    7. There’s a Bear Outside

      by , 12-17-1972 at 06:17 PM
      Morning of December 17, 1972. Sunday.



      A bear is wandering around in the area near our home in Cubitis. There are no clearer thoughts of my parents or addressing my concerns to them about the bear, as if I do not perceive them as being present (though this is not logical - though many of my childhood dreams were erroneously rendered as such, which may be a natural but vestigial dreaming element, as my parents never left me home alone in reality). I worry about it getting into our house (though this dream has no nightmarish element, only lesser trepidation). At times, it seems of a duller orange coloration, though I think it is a lighter brown (or meant to be) in most scenes. There is a concern which seems to last about a full day and night and there is what seems like at least one “reset”. Throughout this seeming passage of time, I am not aware of any other activities or events.

      Finally, the bear finds her three cubs in our backyard (an event which seems to be taking place early in the morning) and the mood of my dream changes completely into a beautiful sense of peace and love as the bear then seems to radiate a sort of light or light rays like the sun (even though it logically seems as if she would have found them before unless they had recently just strayed into that area coming into the backyard from elsewhere). Two of the bear cubs are in the area between our house and our neighbors’ to the south. The third is closer to his mother on her right side.



      This dream combines two forms of waking symbolism, sunrise waking symbolism and coalescence waking symbolism.



      This dream is a wonderful example of rendering two contrasting ideas in the same scene. The mother bear of course represents my mother (especially as it is this dream’s preconscious factor). The cub directly to her right (in the foreground in my viewpoint of the scene) represents me. Farther to the right in this scene, another cub (in the pair of cubs closer to the neighbors’ yard) is also me, but with the third cub representing Lisa. The two of “us” in this pair farther from the mother bear relates to a real day-to-day activity, though the mother bear is still watching them. (This is really not that different from seeing two versions of someone in a dream, or in fact, seeing oneself in a dream as if invisible or incorporeal or seeing two or more versions of the same pet at the same time.) The bear also remains, in the final scene, in the area where my mother hung clothes in real life.



      “Seeing” my mother as a threatening figure from the viewpoint of my dream self (prior to resolving the association in the last act) is really not that unusual. However, there were a number of dreams where the animal symbolism was not resolved as such and seemed limited to biological factors, that is, being “warned” about a potential animal-related event as a biological safety mechanism rather than having an “interpretation”. (I am fairly certain that if a dog dreams about being pursued or attacked by a large animal that the meaning is literal and preparatory, not symbolic.)



      There was a precognitive thread in this dream as well. About a day after this dream, I had gotten, from my older sister Carol, a package containing a number of plastic model kits. One of them was “Black Bear and Cubs”. There were two cubs in the kit, and the bear was not golden, but the associations where very similar.



      Updated 01-27-2018 at 05:08 AM by 1390

      Tags: bear, bear cubs
      Categories
      non-lucid , memorable