Blue_Opossum

Morning of February 16, 2018. Friday.



In my dream, the most vivid scenario of the waking transition involves my dream self (personified subconscious) being on a bus with my wife Zsuzsanna and our youngest children. I remain in a passive and thankful mood. The location is unknown. It does not seem familiar, though the bus driver is on the left side, so it seems to be implied to be in America (though I have not lived there since 1994 and Zsuzsanna has never been there).

The bus driver is an unknown chubby female of whom reminds me of my crossing guard from when I lived at 901 Rose Street (near the intersection in a second floor apartment of a building which is no longer there).

It seems to be late morning, though the perceived time seems to change a few times (of which is very common in my dreams, as my subconscious self has no viable sense of time or continuity). There is an intersection up ahead. I am aware that it had been raining. An interesting mood develops. I realize that rain makes human life possible and that without it, the world would have no life. I have a vague awareness that the bus driver had telepathically caused me to realize this.

There had been a flood in one part of the street (from the rain), but the water has lowered. As we near the intersection, I have the typical focus on whether or not the bus driver is competent (this being a long-term carryover from waking life thought since childhood, though this thought does not dominate or seem problematic and I ultimately trust the driver to get us home safely).

The bus stops, but we are apparently not at our destination yet (though my dream self has no focus on where I presently live as is often the case). The bus is on the right side of the street, its back close to the perpendicular street it just turned from. The bus driver says, “I have to find something”. I am standing in the front stairwell of the bus watching her. She puts her hands down into the murky water near the curb. Soon, she pulls out a small tennis racket that is slightly muddy (though with very light-colored tan sand). I am uncertain if this is what she had been looking for, but she gives it to my youngest son. My dream fades from here.

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Zsuzsanna, in real life, had been looking at, and thinking about, small tennis rackets made for dolls while at a Kmart store on the previous day (Our Generation dolls and accessories). There is no explicable way I could have known this or for it to influence the main event in my final dream of the sleeping period. Not only this, she said her thought processes were “stronger” than usual during this event. Additionally, after my dream, she told me of how she had won a tennis racket at age twelve by reaching into water and pulling out a toy duck (relating to a matching number for the prize at a Brisbane show). This is not unusual in my experience, as at least one dream per sleeping period is based on something Zsuzsanna had thought about (or said to someone else) of which I could not have possibly known about. This was validated to have been going on, continuously, long before we met, and additionally, Zsuzsanna is the “mystery girl” who had been in my dreams since childhood (and of whom I even saw in my dreams as an adult while she was still very young).

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The scenario of this dream, a bus approaching an intersection and stopping or bumping into a curb before turning right (sometimes in the event of water lowering waking symbolism as here), has recurred since early childhood, though always with different dynamics. This is based on neural gating. It signifies whether or not the dream state will terminate or continue. (However, there are also inexplicable dynamics of which I will describe below.) As here, the bus turns right and my dream soon ends after the RAS to emergent consciousness factor, additionally validated by the water lowering waking symbolism, which occurs in at least one dream during every sleeping period (water symbolizing sleep in autosymbolism, its dynamics relevant to the specific aspect of REM).

RAS as the personified preconscious is a bus driver here. The biological function of RAS (Reticular Activating System) is for sleep-wake transitions (though again, there are inexplicable dynamics). This is why a dream is primarily autosymbolic of the dream state and waking transition itself, which is why “interpretation” as most commonly propagated is not a real concept despite the Barnum effect.

There is evidence that the side the bus driver is on in a dream correlates with what side I am sleeping on, especially as buses and cars often symbolize (or are an autosymbolic extension of) the human body. (This is also true for boats, airplanes, and trains when vestibular system ambiguity is more extant in REM. In fact, there has even been a dream where a bus I was on rolled over after I rolled over to sleep on my opposite side. However, the content of a dream must be looked at closely, as autosymbolism is based on the specific level of unconsciousness and varies from state to state through the waking transition.)

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I know that RAS mediation and modulation as a dream’s final event, when it utilizes personification as the preconscious as here, is often transpersonal (inherently unrelated to both the dream self and the conscious self by its very nature and purpose, as its purpose is to ignite enough emotion to trigger waking, including by way of dominance or perceived conflict, real or not, though some of this “conflict” is caused by muscle tension in unconsciousness as well as vestibular system ambiguity or subliminal concern over unknown environmental noise). This tells me that RAS is not simply the biological factor of the neural gating of the dream state in REM, but transpersonal neural gating that also occurs when I am conscious. However, the dynamics are puzzling. Sometimes these events have happened in real time (during my nap while Zsuzsanna was elsewhere and “sending” in real time) and sometimes based on recent thoughts that Zsuzsanna had held in her mind but which later integrates into my dream.

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