Blue_Opossum

Morning of January 26, 2019. Saturday.

Dream #: 19,031-02. Reading time: 50 sec.



I find myself in an unfamiliar arcade with minimal lighting, unaware of my conscious self identity. I am at a table and become involved in playing a game, without a backbox, that has the appearance of two side-by-side pinball shooter lanes and little else.

I push buttons and press the palms of my hands against the front edge of the table. My actions result in one to four balls rolling back and forth in the lanes, knocking against each other. Sometimes there is only one ball on one side. Most of them are like a slightly oversized pinball, but there are also white plastic balls with hardly any weight to them.

I remain unsure of what the purpose of this game is, but I seem to be doing well, as I keep balls moving in the lanes. I do not see a score indicator. Other people watch me play at times.

The table has four metal legs. However, there is a short time when the table is on the floor (without legs), and I am playing the game while seated cross-legged on the floor. Curiously, I pay no attention to this error in my dream’s continuity, but it is probably a subliminal dream state indicator that I am not standing in reality.

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Morning of May 4, 2018. Friday.



My dream starts with the very common liminal awareness of my physical body being in bed as I sleep, but I do not attain viable lucidity.

My dream still renders a bed as my dream’s setting, though the location is unknown and undefined and I absentmindedly perceive it more as serving as a table upon which to play the card game. In fact, even though I am aware of playing Gin Rummy with several other people, I do not ever actually see them. I am on my left side (as I am in reality as I sleep) looking at the several piles of playing cards, some face up, each pile with a few cards, some spread out more. I am trying to remember what I need to do next.

However, as my dream self in non-lucidity has neither viable access to the unconscious nor the conscious self identity, I remain uncertain of the rules (even though I have played Gin Rummy in real life numerous times). I gather up all the cards to shuffle them and start to deal them out, but then I consider that this is probably wrong. My dream becomes more abstract and I soon wake.

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This dream was a result of watching “Think Tank” (a television game show) with Zsuzsanna, when a question about Gin Rummy was asked of one contestant and he got it wrong. It is interesting how the simplest random event can integrate into the dreaming and waking processes, but is there a real reason in this case? The question was about the highest-ranking card in Gin Rummy, of which the answer is “King”. I suspect that this correlates with potential liminal dream control in the dream state for a few reasons. One, the presence of the dream state indicator (me being on the bed). Two, my passive dream self allowing the preconscious to modulate rather than a thread of my conscious self identity taking control of my dream. Three, this dream is of the type based on thinking skills correlation, to induce synaptic gating for triggering consciousness.

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Morning of September 4, 2015. Friday.



My senses are not very clear in this sequence. Firstly, I am playing some sort of game with an unseen character (seemingly by proxy via some sort of radio broadcast but he may also be “present” though disembodied) though the plays and outcome are quite abstract and hard to describe and follow. The playing field is illogically on an otherwise featureless area of an electronic keyboard (where the voice settings and other features would otherwise be). There is something to do with placing very short lengths of “hair” (of only about one centimeter) into a pattern that seems to have no particular form. It seems difficult and annoying. We had apparently been playing awhile because the shape that is supposedly mine is like a large circular form, but it seems the other character is winning (though I am not sure why or even what the purpose or rules are). Eventually, as I do not seem to be the winner, I pick up my game result and it is somewhat like a furball though seemingly made of drawn lines that somehow are separated from the surface that they were originally drawn on.

Later, I am on my side in a bed that is outside near an isolated intersection in a wooded area during the afternoon. I get a vague impression that there may be large dinosaurs (such as a tyrannosaurus) in the area. There is no fear or perceived threat of any kind, though. It is almost as if I am aware I can create any creature I want and have it run around by the intersection and along the perimeter of the forest. I absentmindedly choose not to focus more clearly to do this, though. Instead I am playing around with an electronic drum kit that also is like a digital sampler to capture at least an octave range of a particular sample.

I press something (some sort of small rectangular button) and sample the ambiance of the area, which is barely audible. I try to play a melody on the pads, but the sample is not loud enough to hear. I try again and get some ambiance that is slightly louder, but mostly only wind through the trees, my breathing, and a distant (unknown) animal sound. From here, I am able to play a random melody with a rather odd sound (almost like a person saying “huh?”), though which eventually sounds more and more like an electric guitar. I remember that sound can be recorded from anywhere and turned into anything else.

Morning of July 7, 2015. Tuesday.



My dream starts out like a typical imposer dream. The setting is our present house on W Street, though there is a slight change in the layout relative to size. My wife Zsuzsanna is sitting near our front window (sewing, I think, though her sewing machine is in our living room in reality) where there is more of a view of the neighbor’s house. I notice that the fence design is different. The thinner wooden planks had supposedly been horizontal (rather than vertical as in reality) but are now mostly decayed and lying on the ground. However, the first section of fence about three feet into the front yard division is still standing and made of brick - and is at least five feet high. There is a group of at least four young males. One of these males steps over the rotted planks into our front yard and this imposition immediately annoys me. I am thinking of going out and making sure they stay where they belong, but he goes back on his own. I speak about continuing the front part of the fence by putting more bricks in (not thinking about cost or work effort).

From here, I am concerned about the longevity of our wooden house. These thoughts do not result in any threatening event manifesting even though I consider the possibility of parts of the ceiling falling on us. Diverse features of the ceiling and the angles and differences in height in different areas are far more complex than in reality.

I am outside for a short time. I notice that one section of the sky to my right is different than to my left; a very distinct green color, which makes me think a really bad storm is on the way, perhaps a tornado (even though the sky to my left to the west seems normal and calm).

I go into our house, concerned about the possibly approaching bad weather. As I shut our front door, there is resistance and a pulling sensation and I think that it might be an imposing neighbor trying to get in to assault someone or burglarize, though it turns out that the door will not fully shut due to a large circular (slightly wreath-like) clump of grass being blown into the doorway above the doorknob and being stuck between the door and door frame at about shoulder level (mostly due to my closing the door so quickly that the grass did not have time to fall, the additional pull being caused by the wind). However, I do manage to get it closed. From here, I join Zsuzsanna and our youngest son, and the inside of our house then seems longer, though narrower, north to south, almost hall-like. There is soon a very eerie and human-like low-pitched howling of the wind, which we first think may be an old man or creature moaning just outside our front door. We end up still running, but in a sort of playful manner upon realizing the circle of grass stuck in the closed door is making a feature to cause sound to amplify and phase in this way.

The next scene involves other people being in our house, apparently by permission or just random passive characters coming into existence. Regardless of the weather concern, I sit down to consider a very large game board (about three feet by about one and a half feet) that has several different simultaneous game scenarios at once (though seemingly not at all related to each other). I take it apart (the board seems to have small joints whereby smaller sections connect), separating a section that appears to have some sort of Egyptian strategy game in progress (so that the other sections of the board displaying different cultures and battle scenarios do not distract from the seemingly individual game). The two buildings in the opposition look more like ziggurats than pyramids, though. I do not really reflect on why a person or group of people would have so many different things going on at the same time on the same game board. I am not interested in playing it now.

An older male sits on the couch (its position has changed; it is perpendicular to its location in reality; it faces east rather than north), apparently talking to a young Ava Gardner (December 24, 1922-January 25, 1990) - probably related to the fact that my wife had checked out a “Perry Mason” DVD set in real life (thus a distorted Erle Stanley Gardner association). I am not sure what the scenario is; perhaps he is coaching her in her acting, though he is seemingly her agent. I go over and notice that she is dressed in lacy black and is sitting back with her arms back (and knees up) on the floor. I grab her heels and lift them slightly. She then transforms into a Tweety Bird foil balloon (shaped like Tweety Bird in frontal silhouette) of about three feet long. I end up whacking the balloon by her “feet” (the balloon of which is still somehow her) against the floor (though I am not even focused on why) with a slight wariness that I probably should be doing something else.

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Morning of April 8, 1998. Wednesday.



My wife Zsuzsanna and I own some sort of large game, which is as long as one side of the Gellibrand Street kitchen (the side with the internal door, the north wall), where a toy canoe goes across a conveyor-belt-like mechanism that simulates a journey by river where you have to gather a few things worth points as well as go around areas that come up from trapdoors in the “river” (playing field), such as (toy) alligators. I suppose in some ways it is like a real-life mechanical version of a computer game. The game seems mostly made of plastic with metal features. Gears cause different things to come up out of the simulated water imagery.

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Night of October 29, 1966. Saturday.



I am involved in a seeming prototype (first version of a dream theme that appears in more complex forms later on, especially after moving to a new home) of what appears to be a variation of the (originally) Milton Bradley game “Operation” (which is fairly new at the time). It reminds me just a bit of the “nostalgic” noise and lights of a carnival on a much smaller scale (and according to some sources, actually was based on games in funfairs so maybe that is a typical association). The main distortion is that it has a red telephone (receiver only, but probably only about half the size of a real one) in a recess on the left side, nested on its side though does somehow become full-sized at times. (This may be from a distortion of the actual shapes relative to real game sections, which are somewhat reminiscent of a telephone receiver shape.)

I am not quite sure if the telephone allows you to somehow talk to the character in the game and receive information on his present status, but it seems a bit strange at times as if I am “expecting” an eerie “contact” at one point. No conversations ever ensue, however. My dream remains nonthreatening.

Interestingly enough, I did not live in a home with a telephone until 1978 (we never had a telephone all the years I lived in Florida and only my sister had a telephone in the Rose Street building in Wisconsin).

Morning of April 4, 1971. Sunday.



My dream renders what is intended to be an area of the West Elementary school grounds for playing games, though it is in an incorrect (though not regarded as incorrect by my dream self) featureless location that is implied to be northwest of the elementary school building.

It seems to be late morning. My schoolmates are sitting in a circle and a game of “Duck, Duck, Goose” is in progress. In the back of my mind is a vague idea that I am in a movie that is presently being filmed (which was a recurring aspect of my childhood dreams that suggests subliminal conscious self awareness of being in the dream state, yet without viable lucidity).

In this version of “Duck, Duck, Goose” I am aware that the person who is caught is to eventually marry the person who catches them. I find myself walking clockwise in a circle around the seated group of our schoolmates, with Toby a few feet in front of me (even though there is only one “it” in “Duck, Duck, Goose”). Toby intends to tap Brenda on the head, much to my dismay. However, instead of Brenda being tapped and getting up to chase Toby, she dodges Toby’s attempt to tap her and the roles become reversed. Toby ends up chasing Brenda around the circular group of seated schoolmates.

I decide to start running after her as well, to get to her before Toby does, though I remain at a distance. Still, Toby never comes any closer to her than about six feet. We run around and around and it seems to go on for a long time. The three of us never leave the circle to run elsewhere. For a time, I contemplate the adult paperback Western “The War on Charity Ross” (by Jack M. Bickham), which I had recently read. I start to contemplate that this event is “The War on Brenda Wilson”. There is a sense of drama and anticipation, though my dream eventually fades without a victor.

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The failure of my personified subconscious to perceive the setting as wrong yet still possess the memory of a paperback I had recently read is typical of the unusual erroneous neural gating of the dream state.

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My dream designates Brenda as the Vestibular System Personification (a waking alert factor which RAS mediates due to the biological vestibular system ambiguity of being unconscious), though she does not fall or fly but runs in a circle, though there is the implied vestibular-system-based flight symbol of being a “goose”.

Even here at age ten, my dream self was thinking of life partnership. Brenda was validated, in a prescient sense, to symbolize Zsuzsanna long before we met (even though Zsuzsanna often appeared literally as herself, though sometimes as part of a composite which also integrated Brenda, even directly before Zsuzsanna first made contact with me, mainly because I did not learn that Zsuzsanna was a real person until March 1991). Zsuzsanna and I were married on April 9, 1994. (One of the stories she wrote when she was fourteen was called “Wilson’s Dream”, which was about dream state adventures into other worlds. Her first tribal name from the PAIA was “Magic Pen”, which I viewed as a play on female swan, which has a loose association with “Duck, Duck, Goose”.)

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This online dream journal entry was reformatted from the source material, abridged, and clarified on Wednesday, 21 February 2018.

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