Blue_Opossum

Morning of October 4, 2017. Wednesday.



A task is given to me but the backstory is unclear. I find myself with two cans of paint and I believe I am supposed to paint two chests of drawers, one bigger than the other. I am painting (or apparently had been painting) in a sloppy way. There is a large uneven horizontal streak of orange paint at the bottom of the front with the drawers apparently being a bluish color. I notice that I had accidentally combined the two colors (dark orange and a darker yellow) into the container and I try to think of a way to separate the colors (which of course is not logical). However, I end up stirring the colors together even more, and as I do this, several other colors are seen in the mix. It then seems to be more of a dark blue and green color (which is illogical, as orange and yellow certainly do not produce any shade of blue or green). I think that maybe I will just use the one color, though the person who owns these apparent antiques might be dissatisfied. At one point, one chest of drawers has an uneven coat of an ugly dull blue color. I am annoyed, as both of my paint brushes are sticky and thick with paint, making them difficult to use competently.

I think about this situation as being of the wrong thing to do, as I consider that the furniture looks much better in its natural wood grain. It turns out I am right. The male who had given me the work to do did not want the chests of drawers painted. I do not talk to him directly, but I see him from a distance. He reminds me somewhat of the teacher I had for wood shop classes at WWTI, but also a little of the owner of the pawnshop in the same city (La Crosse). It is a different (unfamiliar) male of about twenty who tells me the other male did not want them painted, but varnished.

There is an unusual change in the situation without much thought about what had happened. Now it seems that I had not painted the chests of drawers at all, though this is actually a reset of my dream.

An unknown female (of about forty) is showing some people some furniture, mainly chests of drawers (all of them of a natural wood grain) in a sequence of about eight or so in an unknown location. I start to point out how great one of them looks. It is fancy. It has brass handles on all the drawers and narrower scroll work all around. (It does not look like any furniture I had seen in real life, at least not recently.) Two of them, including the fancy one on the right end of the series, are apparently the ones I had originally been painting but I do not consider how I reset my dream due to being annoyed. The other one I had been painting is about the fourth left of the fancy one.

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The tendency to reset or “start my dream over” when I am dissatisfied with how it is going is of a curious type of non-lucid dream control that I have experienced naturally since early childhood.

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Morning of August 21, 1976. Saturday.



This very long dream event came about after falling asleep again before eleven o'clock in the afternoon, with the sun streaming through the windows but not directly near me. My parents were not in the house during this time. My more nightmarish dreams happened mostly in daylight, sometimes with the sun’s rays shining in through the curtains or windows as here and perhaps triggered by the body’s need to get up and do things, thus the dream state seems to become “hostile” to the dream self.

This one started out during the longest sleep paralysis I have ever had, about thirty to forty minutes, and it was during this time that I partly woke several times, going back into a very lucidly aware dream state. My head was “buzzing” at different times, but there was no “out of body” perception at any point. I was asleep on the couch in the middle of the living room, facing east, my head to the north. (Normally, sleep paralysis is enjoyable for me.)

The main events involved two pieces of furniture that the sun’s rays had been shining upon now and then in real life, but somehow also creating a nightmarish shadowy gloomy effect in the room. One was a kitchen chair, looking much the same as in real life and starting to “walk” from the same position from near the partially open curtains in real life at the time. The other was the small green metal typewriter table on wheels, with the built-in bendable lamp, with the conical green metal lampshade. (See photo; it is the same as I had). As the sun went behind the clouds now and then, but still keeping the room light enough to see all the details as I drifted in and out of lucid dreaming and sleep paralysis, either the chair or the small table would “walk” towards me in an ominous, menacing way at a particular time. What came the closest to me was the small green typewriter table, its lamp being the “head” and the bendable part being the “neck” of some sort of miniature surreal “giraffe” as it moved towards me, appearing to “study” me (with the light bulb “face”) and I was hearing its groaning and clacking “legs” and “feet” upon the tiled floor (even though it has wheels). As the last energies of sleep paralysis wore off, I finally caught myself staring at the chair in the room in real life (although when it was walking, it did not have as much a menacing presence as the small table). It did not move of course, yet still looked the same as from my dream, facing directly towards me in perfect perspective and still having a creepy essence before I was fully awake. This was fascinating to me after being fully awake for a time. It was almost like a game, where I would open and close my eyes to check whether or not the furniture was really seemingly alive or potentially menacing.

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This is obvious sunrise symbolism with the related dawning consciousness event. A light bulb (especially if on) is also analogous to getting an idea, used as such in various newspaper cartoons and comic strips. It is also a sunrise metaphor (logic related to daytime wakefulness and being “bright” as in contrast to a “dim” person or akin to the phrase “the lights are on but no one’s home”, indicating the dreams self is aware and active but not fully awake and conscious). It is fairly common to have unusual dreams when sleeping in a different location and here, the bendable lamp stretched towards me to create an aggressive sense of sunrise (the yellowish glow) and the need to fully wake. It was as if my conscious self was annoyed by me still being asleep.

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My lovely wife Zsuzsanna has also had a lucid nightmare with this theme, yet she was watching the upright electric floor fan “walking” towards her on its otherwise flat-to-the-floor four “legs” and moving its “head” (the motor and fan) in a very similar way as the small table with the bendable lamp (in a seemingly menacing “observing” way) as in mine.

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