Blue_Opossum

Morning of April 27, 2019. Saturday.

Dream #: 19,122-02. Reading time (optimized): 3 min.



Water induction and the Naiad/Oceanid factor changes into a fishing scenario. Despite the former process beginning at least one dream each sleep cycle for over 50 years, the continuity and outcome are always unique.

Zsuzsanna and I are sitting on the shore of a lake, though it seems to stem from associations with El Jobean, which is near the ocean and the area where I fished as a boy, close to the bridge. It seems to be afternoon.

Two unknown men are present. One of them is cheerfully fishing. The other, the preconscious simulacrum of this dream, is sitting on our right. There is a brief, vague concern that someone might throw something from the bridge high above us, but no one does. (It is subliminal anticipation of vestibular cortex activity, which is a common dream perception.) I soon attach the hook to the end of my line, and I also put the reel on the rod. At first, I snag a sunfish carcass (on its dorsal fin) floating on its left side (as analogous to my sleeping orientation) on the lake’s surface. The preconscious is holding a pair of scissors. I am wary, as I think he intends to take them while claiming someone lost them. Looking down, I see another pair of scissors that is nearly the same and belongs with the other. There are small rust marks on the handles of each. I comment on how similar they are and pick up the pair on the ground. I take the other scissors from the simulacrum (with no protest on his part, which is atypical in RAS mediation, especially as the scissors indicate potential separation from the dream state) and put both pair in the tackle box.

I verbalize loud, sarcastic remarks about people sitting near people who are fishing. He soon leaves (thus allowing me to sustain my dream). So does the other male, though it is getting later and is almost too dark to see. I ask Zsuzsanna if fishing at night is allowed and it seems that it is. (This process, regarding nightfall with enhanced awareness, is sometimes indicative of the return to slow-wave sleep, but I maintain my dream state awareness without direct lucidity.)

I do not have live bait and consider digging in the ground with my hands, but I find a live worm with at least two hooks through it in a small paper bag that someone left behind. I think it is artificial before it starts moving. I attach the rig to my line.

When I cast, I accidentally snag a cluster of plants halfway across the lake’s distance from our side. I see an unknown woman off to the left near her car on our side. She had also cast. I find the situation somewhat amusing but not that frustrating, especially when it seems I had also hooked a big fish. However, it turns out that she is reeling the line from her end, causing the little island to move toward her.

I hook onto something big. Upon reeling it in, I see that I have snagged a seal, with the hook in its bottom lip. “It’s a seal,” I loudly say. The woman and I agree that I should take the hook out and release it, which I do.

When I cast again, the hook ends up near the woman’s car. She decides to leave but ends up falling in the lake almost up to her neck. She swims out, gets into her car, and it accidentally backs up into the lake, sinking completely.

I dive into the lake. I swim to the end of the lake to the right of my original location, underwater (being able to breathe underwater as in all my dreams since early childhood). The woman is sleeping in a small dry cave underwater, as the water remains as an impossible “wall” at its entrance. I maneuver into the cave through the “wall,” without disrupting the impossible vertical water barrier. I ask the woman if she needs me to rescue her. She shakes her head and shivers slightly, with her eyes moving as if in REM sleep. I ask her again, and she nods.

My feet push against the water “wall,” and water starts to flood the cave, but I wake around this time. I see that Zsuzsanna is sleeping in the same position as the woman had been.

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This dream renders the same processes as usual, but also unique as always and very vivid and enjoyable.

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Morning of January 10, 2017. Tuesday.



After exploring an unknown but interesting region in an unfamiliar rural area, I eventually start thinking about fishing. It seems to be late afternoon. I find an area where several others are fishing, mostly males in their thirties. There is a building on one longer side of a pond with a pathway just wide enough to walk on. The rectangular pond is about three-fourths a city block in length though only about half that length at the ends.

When I decide to fish, I see that there are too many bobbers on the water’s surface near the side I first go to. As I walk along the pond’s length near the building, I see bobber after bobber on the surface (as well as the trailing fishing line) and a number of fishing poles along the bank that extend over the entire length of the pond on that side, the setups of which apparently belong to the group of three men who are sitting at the end of the pond. This annoys me but I do not become very angry.

I walk back to where the other three males are (even though it would have made more sense to keep going around the corner to the other longer side of the pond to search for a space to fish). After a short time, that longer side of the pond I had just walked back along seems clear (though there is neither a memory nor enough time implied to have passed for the men to have actually reeled it all in or to have gathered up their equipment). There are only a couple areas where bobbers and line are still visible on that side. For a short time, I walk in midair above the water (not on the water as in certain past dreams) to get past a corner. I do this without thinking it to be unusual.

I sit down to fish. I have a soft plastic jig body (shad-style soft plastic lure) and slide it onto a hook. An unknown male to my right tells me that I am not doing it by the proper standards. I take it off and slowly put it back onto the hook and he seems satisfied. “You know the fish in here aren’t that big?” he asks me. I nod, regardless of not knowing anything about the area. Still, when I look into the water, I can clearly see under the surface. There are several very large walleye and carp. I intend on catching a walleye.

After I cast my line, I see that I am almost immediately snagged on something. It looks like a large Ragdoll cat swimming under the water. I try to get the hook disentangled from its fur, which is along the side of its body near the middle. An unfamiliar boy of about ten wades out and is eventually able to take the hook out. I am not sure if the cat belongs to him or if he is there to perform a service (as an actual parks and recreation employee). The cat remains swimming in the water. I notice the boy seems to be dressed as a boy scout or parks employee, so may actually work here.

I ask the male who is still to my right about the “other area to fish” with the pretense of me being familiar with the area. I hint at it being a place beginning with “m” and pretending not to remember the full name. He asks me if I mean K-Mart, and I tentatively nod. I then ask him if it is legal to fish there presently. It seems it is.

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• Fishing, a common dream event for me since early childhood, represents the subliminal desire of the limited dream self to bring the emergent consciousness to the surface in order to wake or at least increase awareness. Water symbolizes sleep and a fish on the line is the downgraded conscious self identity developing coherence (often increasing in size and strength) when being caught.
• This is more specifically confirmed as a self-initiated waking precursor due to the behavior of the personified preconscious. Typically, the preconscious is only hostile when the personified subconscious (dream self) does not want to wake or (metaphorically) initiate waking. As fishing is an act of deliberately seeking the emergent consciousness, the preconscious is passive here. He even helps me continue my task without aggressiveness or treating me strangely.
• This is more specifically confirmed as a self-initiated waking precursor due to the behavior of the personified preconscious. Typically, the preconscious is only hostile when the personified subconscious (dream self) does not want to wake or (metaphorically) initiate waking. As fishing is an act of deliberately seeking the emergent consciousness, the preconscious is passive here. He even helps me continue my task without aggressiveness or treating me strangely.
• The personified preconscious rarely appears in fishing dreams (again, due to what fishing metaphorically represents in real time). He only appears here due to the delay in the waking transition, which was caused by my own hesitancy and non-lucid dream control in creating the additional bobbers and too many random additional "lines of communication".
• The cat in the water is a factor of the circadian rhythms of nighttime (and the dream state during a particular sleep cycle) and has also appeared as the final waking prompt in past dreams though is underwater here based on the time of my dream (after sunrise). Catching the cat would be akin to enhancing the essence of night (or night-based thoughts), in contrast to the “correct” waking goal.
• The reference to K-Mart is a mixed waking prompt and dream sign, since I associate K-Mart with clothes and getting up and getting dressed.

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Morning of August 24, 2016. Wednesday.

Dream #: 18,146-05. Reading time (optimized): 3 min.



I am with my family in an unknown location near a small oval pond of an area of about ten feet by six feet, seemingly late at night. There are no other discernible environmental features. Zsuzsanna is off to my left, our two youngest sons closer to me on my left, our youngest the closest.

Our youngest son is fishing, but I eventually help him reel in a fish. It turns out to be a small pale bluegill (even though I had considered that there were no fish in the pond) with the hook stuck on the outside of his mouth on its right side, which is difficult to pull out. The tangibility and sense of movement and weight of catching a fish are amazingly realistic. When I throw it to my right instead of putting it on a stringer, I see a second pond, about the same size as the first, perpendicular to it and about two feet away from it. The water is only inches deep. There is a pile of bluegill about three or four high, almost covering the far half of the side of the pond, most caught within the last day or two. About a third are alive. I wonder which fish came from which body of water, but the second one is not deep enough to fish in now.

Later, we walk near a ravine in an unknown location (where there is only part of a guardrail) near an urban area. It seems to be late afternoon. The scene is clear and detailed, with plenty of light to see at a distance. I see puddles far below and three big parallel fish on their stomachs about five feet apart, facing away from us. They are about four feet long and still alive. I tell Zsuzsanna two are sturgeons, but one is an alligator gar, but the imagery changes to feature the opposite. The scene is ambiguous, as they are similar in appearance. We teleport to the area near the fish far below. I warn our youngest son not to put his hand near the mouth of a gar, but he does after patting its back, seemingly preparing to take it home with us to eat. He appears to have cut his fingers. However, this is not the case, and he seems cheerful.

We walk through a long but narrow park, adjacent to the road. It is late at night again. There are about five other people around (of questionable repute), and they are setting up an overnight camp in the closed park. They gather under a park shelter nearby. An unknown male in his forties, who may be lighting a cigarette, throws a lit match into the river close to where he is. As a result (and as I vaguely anticipate), the river’s surface somehow catches fire with a bright flash and tall flames, and they are startled but unharmed.

Not wanting trouble from the park rangers, Zsuzsanna and our children, under my lead, turn to go back in the opposite direction with a steady gait, though not as if fleeing, but assertively. I am aware that there may be a game warden or two near the boat ramp directly opposite the entrance (where we first came in), but this is uncertain.

Now we are going home. It seems to be around the same time as the previous scene. We reach the perimeter of a parking lot, about one-fifth the size of a city block, adjacent to the sidewalk. We may walk through it diagonally from here (off to its right) rather than go around at the intersection. However, the declivity might be too challenging for us to traverse, especially for Zsuzsanna to manage the pram.

We walk through a high school instead. Even though it is late at night, students are walking on the grounds. (At least one is wearing an American football uniform.) We use the entrance and the exit but go back around and up to a fence that blocks our way. We walk around it and continue from here as I wake.

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Dream signature: Water induction, seeking correlation of dream state awareness (fishing), water lowering (melatonin mediation), vestibular system adaptation (walking near ravine), water reinduction (river), lit match and river on fire (precursory consciousness initiation; choice to “go home”; wake), liminal space entry (parking lot), vestibular system correlation (anticipation of walking through declivity; wariness of waking process as potential falling sensation), emerging thinking skills (going through high school), wall mediation (fence).

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Morning of March 18, 2016. Friday.



This is a typical and easily decoded fishing dream (though my views on this common dream situation have changed somewhat over the years with new realizations and additional evidence) where I “expect” to catch a very large fish and do hook one but wake before fully reeling it in. I am near a bridge in an unknown region. The bridge is fairly high from the area near the shore where I go to fish. (A bridge typically represents either deeper dream entry or waking, but I do not utilize it here in any way.)

I soon hook into a giant walleye, which is between twenty and thirty feet long (which is of course, ridiculous, especially as it stays on my line the whole time). I slowly reel it in and it splashes near the surface, filling spectators with awe. Its tail sweeps up from the surface, whale-like.

An unknown man and his annoying large dog appear on the scene. I am not sure of what breed of dog it is, but it is possibly a Doberman. The man seems oblivious to the large fish I am reeling in.

Soon, feeling amused, I deliberately reel the fish towards the dog, which is splashing in the water a few feet from shore. The big fish rises up from the water and swallows the dog in one gulp (the fish directly facing me as he does so). The man looks bewildered. I feel no regret and actually have to hold back laughter. In a short time, the water starts to lower somewhat, which represents the instigation of the waking process (and has as such since very early childhood, the first documented instance being in 1965).

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As I have found even more evidence that well serves the meaning, I will still note that fish have different meanings depending on the situation, as does a whale, even transitory meanings - for example, a large fish is the essence (and projection) of the dream self until caught by the dream self where it then becomes the emergent consciousness in being pulled from the dream state. This dream uses the “swallowing the dream remnants” transition and is analogous to the “Pinocchio” story on one level. Carefully considering the elements, I typically see a large fish or a whale as a dream self projection while it is in water (especially going deeper into a body of water). However, the giant fish in this dream is actually my emergent consciousness rising from the dream state (body of water) to swallow the dog (dream remnants and dream self projection, which are rendered as annoying and “intrusive” concerning my dawning awareness in getting closer to waking). This relates directly to the “Pinocchio” story, confirmed by the fact that Pinocchio is “not a real boy” (until the end of the story) and is thus solely the dream self rather than a thread or projection of the conscious self (the latter as with apex lucidity where the conscious self is almost completely aware, fully in the dream body, and fully in control). The whale or emergent consciousness swallows the dream self, instigating the waking transition. Swallowing is a form of coalescence of dream self and waking self and if you believe the theory of how complex cells came to evolve (through engulfed bacterium) then it makes even more sense.

This pattern of dream meaning can be seen in a few dreams; the boa swallowing Danny (as he was on a scaffold which also represents getting closer to waking), the miniature lion swallowing our daughter, a very large catfish swallowing an unknown male, and so on, all during the waking transition, including even the one where each larger box “swallows” each smaller box in a series.

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Morning of November 17, 2015. Tuesday.



My wife Zsuzsanna and our children and I appear to be living back on Barolin Street but it has more of a rural feel. At one point, I go outside and it seems to be early evening, during sunset. Some sort of unexpected large movement takes place to my right (though in the distance) and there is mild anticipation over something unusual about to be seen. Something soon comes into view from between a couple houses on our side of the street. It looks like a detached Ferris wheel rolling slowly across the street and away from our neighborhood. I can make out its silhouette against the dark blue sky as it rolls towards the horizon.

Later, my wife and children are outside. Curiously, there is a couch on the front lawn facing the street but at an angle towards where the rolling Ferris wheel was last seen. Zsuzsanna and our two youngest sons seem curious about what I saw and are seated there in expectation. Perhaps it will happen again.

Meanwhile, I am looking through a magazine which has various articles about guitar music and rock musicians as well as at least one article about fishing (kind of a strange mix). We will be eating fish (either lutefisk or sushi, neither of which I have ever eaten in real life), which is in a cheap plastic salad container of the overpriced kind sold in grocery stores. However, I have an additional set of at least three smaller plastic salad containers, also containing some type of fish salad, that somehow came out of the magazine. I am not sure if they are fresh, as the magazine’s date is unknown, and I remain uncertain about eating anything.

There are a few photographs related to fishing. One photograph shows a man fishing from a small boat. Somehow, the fishing line from the photograph is eventually hanging out of the magazine and gets caught up in features of other photographs and even the guitar strings in a photograph of a male rock musician performing (playing electric guitar) on stage. I pull on it a bit and try to work out what other pages or photographs it is connected to. It is in somewhat of a tangle across a few pages.

Eventually, the Ferris wheel (or a different one, as it comes from the same area and I do not recall the original event showing it rolling back to where it was), comes out in the same way as before. This time though, it stops and leans in our direction - though it is about a block away and not really threatening should it fall. It somehow transforms into a giant robot and picks up a white truck, crushing it and dropping it to the ground. I am worried about flying debris (even though it is not that close to us), so I get my family to go inside the house. Otherwise, the giant robot does not leave that area. It appears to simply be junkyard activity at this point, though the walking anthropomorphic car compactor is a rather fancy feature.

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There is another dream event, somewhat distorted and viewed from space, where an asteroid comes down into the ocean, causing a huge tidal wave that goes around the planet and covers most of the land on every continent. There is seemingly at least one “reset” where I “make sure” it goes all the way around to cover the United States evenly (though I am aware I had been living in Australia, which is the first to be covered). There is no fear or even much concern, just an odd emotion I cannot quite describe, with a slight giddiness, though not unpleasant. This is probably some sort of waking metaphor event; for example, destroying or “covering up” the dream state.

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Morning of October 18, 2014. Saturday.



These were typical “filler” dreams, I suppose; the type of dream that comes between more significant dreams.

It was also the typical fishing theme of a dream type that usually has the same overall aspects since early childhood (the “prototype” first occurring at age four; October 2, 1965 in La Crosse). This includes the facets of fishing with my brother-in-law Bob, the water getting lower over time until mostly all gone (with the water often being shallow as it is), about four adjoining fishing spots (at least one spot often being clearly with no fish), and sometimes the scene mysteriously changing from outside to inside.

In this one, I am fishing in an unknown location with my brother-in-law Bob and one other male I am not sure of the identity of at this time. I firstly catch a large northern pike with a treble hook. The two others do not catch anything. It is too difficult to get the hook out of the fish’s tough mouth but I somehow mentally will it out and then will it onto the stringer. The water is cold and will keep the fish fresh.

At one point, I find myself about ten feet above the ground and standing on a narrow ledge against some sort of edifice or possibly part of a commercial dam. It somehow seems that the ledge seemed wider at first. This seems problematic (and one could easily fall off simply by casting with too much forward momentum or enthusiasm), so I go back down to the ground. I go to a different area and notice that one location has no fish (which I conclude due to the clarity of the water down to the small lake bottom). After casting too far and getting a few snags in both rocks and plants on the other side of the small lake (both above and below the water’s surface), I manage to catch two more fish; two bluegills. The others have still not caught anything, but we have enough to eat for one smaller meal, it seems.

After time passes, it seems like the location is now somehow indoors. Most of the water has lowered to where it would be pointless to try to fish anymore. This common in-dream scenario likely simply relates to becoming more conscious (slowly waking) and little else (whereas more water relates to going “deeper” into the dream for me, often triggering lucidity where I then sometimes control the motions of the water), in addition to the logical slowly waking perspective of then being indoors where one actually is at the time. I think that a lot of in-dream transitions have nothing to do with supposed symbolism as much as they represent simply going from the dream into waking life and I have documented such obvious waking transitions thousands of times with hundreds of different representations of transition types - from larger boxes closing over smaller boxes (“closing up a subconscious facet” with more clarity and growing consciousness) to fruit growing rapidly (or “becoming more conscious and aware”) and stopping at the point of waking. In fact, even falling asleep in the past, I often started to hear the pleasant sound of water (as if from a small brook) in beginning hypnagogic audio.

In the next dream, which is fairly short, I am playing darts where Josh Holloway is present. (Josh Holloway, for some reason, is the only recent celebrity that appears with any regularity but he always has a different name though in this dream a name is not noticed.) One player puts his face near the board as a sort of challenge but I meet the challenge by not throwing a dart into his face and hitting the areas mostly near the center. The same person does not trust one of the other players as he had trusted me and moves away when the other person is up.

Looking back, the fishing dream was preceded by another dream related to fishing but involving my old classmates including David S (also a friend) and Wayne H and Bobby S. This one is rather odd in that we mostly only talk about going fishing on a particular day with mention of the weather being too problematic to do much. The dream focuses on a larger room full of beds, some in line with each other, some perpendicular to others. I spend most of the time washing blankets and sheets and being annoyed by how little a washing machine holds. I can only fit about two sheets in at a time when I have at least ten or more to wash for the next visit by the group.

The ledge scene in the first dream above is a vague in-dream replay of a scenario from “Cat’s Eye” (from 1985).

Morning of September 12, 1997. Friday.



I am fishing amidst much man-made debris in the shallow water (not sure of location), although I do catch a rather large fish. Whenever the fish jumps, there is a larger splash that reaches me and a couple other males (one unknown who may be with the military, the other possibly from my maintenance job at a college). (Much of my wife’s dream of this date had the same aspects as my dream for no discernible reason.)

There is a giant black derby “cloud” that “rains” over parts of the ocean and eventually goes more inland, continuing over rivers and smaller streams, mostly. Very briefly, it seems like a UFO, yet continues to function as a raincloud. It seems familiar as if I may have seen it in an illustrated book of dreams in real life sometime in the past (though I am not certain).

I take a large jar of olives to an Italian wedding reception. I carry it in my left hand. I have something else that is smaller and in thin plastic wrap - sort of near my right hand (something sweet I think; I get the vague impression of a small amount of caramel popcorn), but floating it along near the jar with telekinesis, I think. An older male (who gives the impression of being at least part Transylvanian) comes to the door. I do not go in to the actual party.

Morning of January 21, 1997. Tuesday.



My dream’s setting is a new and unique composite of La Crosse and Cubitis (which are over 1,500 miles apart in reality).

My dream’s induction is the typical nonthreatening flood, a dream feature that has occurred in at least one dream virtually every night since earliest memory, so it is obviously an autosymbolic induction factor that is usually unrelated to waking life, especially as water autosymbolism correlates with the dynamics of sleep and the sleep cycle.

Curiously, our front yard does not seem flooded at one point but our carport does (as a distortion of a Cubitis feature). I am fishing in it (which of course is a ridiculous concept, as the front yard and carport would otherwise be at the same level in real life, but water replacing ground or floor at the same level, yet implying depth, is a common dream distortion, another factor of water as autosymbolism for the sleeping and dreaming process by the transformation of ground into the essence of fluid).

At one point, it seems I have caught a large striped bass, which is a kind of silver fish I used to catch in America (often using orange florescent fishing spoons as a lure).

The “fish” gets heavier over time (as is often the case in my fishing dreams when I hook something). However, it eventually turns out to be a large white cat, though of which does not appear to be injured from my “catching” it with my fishing equipment. It comes near me and purrs and my focus shifts as I move more toward waking.

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Fishing is a type of autosymbolic preconscious mediation when my dream self seeks to find the conscious self identity to initiate the waking process. In this case, it is paired with another form of preconscious mediation, which is the carport - in representing the liminal space buffer as a factor of the waking process. A cat has often served as a preconscious avatar (and “witness” to the dream state), though in this case becomes the emergent consciousness factor.

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Morning of August 23, 1987. Sunday.



I am with Leonard S on a fishing trip at Pettibone Park, across the bridge from where we live on the south-side of La Crosse and where we often fish in real life. I believe it is late morning. There is an idea that the authorities might soon be here to “investigate” our fishing methods even though we are not doing anything wrong. After a short time, a helicopter appears in the sky overhead. Soon, it seems to have some difficulty staying up. It ends up moving down onto the ground at an angle, close to the riverbank, so that the rotor blades hit the ground and then seem to become like some sort of digging machine as dirt flies up - and the helicopter goes farther into the ground almost like it was designed to (and the rotor blades do not break, they just keep turning and digging, pulling the helicopter deeper into the ground).

From here, for some reason, my dream then only focuses on Leonard’s profile which takes on a rather odd insect-like appearance and his eyes seem to project visible dashes (a series of short “lines”) in the air, moving out horizontally from them in an old-fashioned-comic-strip-like indication of where he is looking (as if he is extremely puzzled by the helicopter’s “slow-motion” accident unfolding before him). He is still supposedly completely human. My dream becomes vague and partly abstract at this point.

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Leonard in this case stands for my dream self and temporary waking self hybrid (present in many dream types but not all). He is very puzzled over why the waking mechanism failed as a result of the association with sleeping longer (including anticipation of the return to slow-wave sleep), the short lines that project from his eyes create a virtual highway (or an implied linear pathway), a highway (or in fact any implied pathway) being a conduit for either deeper induction or the waking transition.

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Morning of October 1, 1980. Wednesday.



My main dream sequence was somewhat abstract and mostly involved looking around in an unusual store that was a distorted composite, with what was being sold together in the same store as such not making much sense. There are craft items, fishing tackle, and possibly school textbooks on certain shelves, and possibly food. However, the waking transition was very clear as it usually is and can easily be decoded.

I am later fishing while standing on a roofed sidewalk. I am at the front of the store (facing east) but which also mainly looks like the entrance to my middle school in Florida. The parking lot has been replaced by a large body of water which comes up to the level of where the parking lot’s surface would otherwise be. This is where I am fishing.

After a short time, I hook onto something that feels very heavy and large but does not fight that much. Soon however, a huge catfish slowly emerges from the surface of the water, slides on its stomach up onto the sidewalk and swallows an unknown chubby male (of perhaps forty) who had been standing about eight feet to my right. There is a sense of awe but I am also somewhat amused.

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I would rather experience coalescence autosymbolism by watching another (typically unknown and presumed fictional) dream character being swallowed than experience it as my dream self. This is otherwise autosymbolism for the illusory dream state being swallowed up by the conscious self identity and the distorted dream self coalescing back into consciousness. The parking lot is liminal space (autosymbolism for being in a specific level of unconsciousness between dreaming and waking), and water lowering waking symbolism eventually commences here as in many other dreams. An area of land being replaced by becoming the surface of a body of water has happened in a number of my dreams, and other people have reported this as well.

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Night of September 29, 1976. Wednesday.



In my dream, I am fishing at El Jobean in the afternoon. The weather is very nice at first. There are a lot of other people of various ages, some fishing, but not that close to where I am.

Over time, I notice that I get a bite now and then, but every time I reel in, it looks like a tiny piece of tin foil moving just under the water and is not there later on when all the line and hook comes fully out of the water, as if something is following my bait, which may be a minnow or tiny shiny fish. This annoys me somewhat. It seems to be a strange and growing mystery. Other people are not noticing what is happening and a few people are leaving now and then, as it is getting later in the afternoon. The scene is very vivid, yet I cannot work out the reason for the small tinfoil-like “creature” under the water or what sometimes seems like an actual gum wrapper section somehow moving in consistent patterns (or maybe someone is playing a practical joke).

Oddly, there is a utility pole to my left, with a three-digit number painted at an odd diagonal angle about chest-high and an additional mark of some kind. It seems sort of out-of-place near the beach.

It is getting darker and darker and time seems to be compressed a bit. Everyone has left the beach but me and it has grown slightly cooler.

Once again, the silvery, reflective form is under the water, but as the sun has just gone down, things change a bit. A very large and strange silvery manta ray, which is somehow walking like a person, “slimmer” than a real manta ray, and about as tall as a person (or a bit taller) is coming up from the shoreline with its “wings” out. I see it as potentially dangerous. It is very vivid (not quite lucid - but almost). I manage to back up and grab some sort of gig or harpoon with my left hand and am able to send it into the creature and kill it. I feel “heroic” somehow, as if I am part of a legend of some sort. There is a subtle sense of rain and motion of waves as if the scene is being “painted” by those aspects. It is an eerie scene, yet somehow not nightmarish to me.

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There is mostly only moon symbolism here. This includes the silver manta ray, the fact it came from deep levels of the ocean (unconscious mind), the fact that silvery “moonlight” was glimmering from under the water’s surface prior to its emergence, the fact that I was fishing (seeking connection with my unconscious state to resolve my eventual waking transition), and the fact that a telephone pole appeared in an unlikely place near the beach - as a telephone pole represents communication between different levels of consciousness while in the dream state. The nature of this dream firstly going from afternoon to nighttime is also obvious in this meaning as it is analogous to “the moon coming out”. This is validated by the fact that the manta ray is an intriguing flight symbol which represents a very specific level of consciousness. The rain adds to this effect as rain also represents communication from deeper levels of consciousness and flow of thought while in the dream state. To conclude, this is a circadian rhythms dream with adolescent factors.

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What was interesting about this is that the next afternoon, the utility pole near the highway (but still a part of our front yard area) had the exact same white paint markings as from my dream and at the same height. Unfortunately, I do not have a photo on hand and did not sketch out the somewhat oddly painted number (could not fully tell what it was - only that it looked the same as my dream image and had at least one six - or what looked like one). It had definitely not been there earlier (even my father mentioned it and confirmed it was brand new). This is one of those times where I just reflected on how curious that was (especially since there was no seeming connection with any “silver manta” in any way - and that part of my dream was quite “mundane” compared to the “epic battle”). It mostly seemed to me as if they had worked at “marking” the poles for when they were to put in the small green utility boxes relating to underground cables (which I did not hear about until later). It did look a little like a graffiti tag, but we were “in the middle of nowhere” and it had never happened before.