Blue_Opossum

Morning of December 14, 1979. Friday.



I perceive myself as being someone else; an unknown male of about forty. I seem to be planning where soldiers will go by using a large map that covers a table, and I point out locations as other males stand around watching. The country that the war is against is unknown, but is possibly China (though it may also be somewhere in Africa, though that seems illogical in conscious afterthought).

Over time, it becomes obvious that I have made a mistake, in that a large yellow butterfly has landed on the map, by which I am then incorrectly designating features of the butterfly’s wings as being rivers, rivulets, and locations of possible villages. The people observing and listening to my instructions do not seem that concerned or amused, but I notice a few walking away.

The butterfly has landed so that its head is over a delta and its superimposition also creates the illusion that its bottom half is over the ocean or other body of water. At one point, I am trying to work out where the perimeter of the butterfly ends and the map details begin.

When I look up, many people have gone to a different table, where at least three unfamiliar males, possibly astronauts in blue coveralls, are looking at a larger map on a table, one male pointing at it with a pointing stick. (This scene was directly influenced by a View-Master “Project Apollo” frame, which I gazed at many times as a boy.)

I am somewhat puzzled. The butterfly has made my presentation problematic but now I am vaguely unsure if the meeting was about going to war, or returning to Earth. Somehow, “returning to Earth” does not seem quite right as it would entail that we are not on Earth presently (though this is not certain either).

Explanation:

Over twenty percent of my dreams since early childhood have rendered return-to-consciousness symbolism as related to flight, though always unique, with positive, negative, or neutral imagery which often seems unrelated to waking life (though is sometimes validated as prescience). This is obviously based on subliminally anticipated hypnopompic effects, mainly including the feeling of falling (which is spontaneous and biological, without the pretense of “interpretation”).

The concept of war in this case is related to the “struggle” of the fictional dream self, the transient identity and neural patterns changing via the dynamics of emergent consciousness and beginning wakefulness, which is sometimes represented by the color yellow (though red when I have been sleeping too long). It is also seen as a “journey”. In this case, it is even more obvious by the questioning of whether we are on Earth. Technically, we are not, as it is the dream state and I am not walking around on the real Earth.

There are some curious layers here including “delta” as an association with sleep as well as ocean waves, a play on “delta waves” (relating to deeper sleep rather than REM). It is also associated with the song “Delta Dawn” (sunrise). Water is my most common association with being in the dream state (and its sound has been used in virtually endless commercial relaxation recordings to bring about sleep). The butterfly creates an illusion of “returning to land”, which is akin to returning to the real world from the dream state (as thousands of my dreams have been proven to contain this same type of waking symbolism, though always unique).

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