Blue_Opossum

Morning of June 1, 1988. Friday.



This dream has very strange imagery and seems of the type where I am both disembodied as well as somehow “outside” my dream. I am apparently looking at a magazine (though it seems like a “real” scene as well, eventually), and focusing more and more on it. I see the “Dennis the Menace” character and he appears to be in a store, perhaps in preparation to look at or buy comic books, though his dog Ruff is also in the store and standing to his left (my right in perspective but a bit more in the foreground). I seem to be looking at a large colorful drawing or perhaps a sketchy oil painting by Hank Ketcham. (It somehow does not seem at all like part of a comic strip or comic book.)

The more closely I look over the scene, the more things seem “off” even though it seems “real”. Dennis the Menace has only one large eye on his forehead, which is somewhat dome-like and a sort of “sickly” brownish green. It may also be implied to be somewhat reflective (or mirror-like, though also “dirty” or murky). There are no other eye-like details, just the oval green “blob” on his forehead. This causes me to feel somewhat strange and out-of-place as if I am almost looking at something “wrongfully” otherworldly. I do not become lucid but begin to “understand” that everything is otherwise “normal” about this character’s drawing at this point in time. Prior to waking, it almost seems like the “real” Dennis may have been “taken over” by an alien threat (or at least as such relevant to semiconscious waking thoughts).

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Explanations for this dream are not all that diffciult to determine. Firstly, dreams typically have surreal and bizarre imagery, often incidental, so this could just be a “glitch” as such. However, it could also be a play on the “third eye”. Dennis is not a real character, which could reflect the “unreal” dream state. The “eye” could also represent a “portal” (that is, the return to waking reality as my dream “melts” into one color and with less detail). Because of the color it may relate to looking down into the ground.

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The “Dennis the Menace” comic panel prior to this date was a gag where he said “Guess what, mom! All the mirrors in the house look like ME!” - which may have vaguely influenced my dream on one level (and the one on this date - not yet seen at the time - having him ask Mr. Wilson, who is digging, “Who buries the worms here in the first place?” - nothing I know of relating to any “explanation” for this imagery other than the eye being partly mirror-like relating to a meditation I had been doing). I also had read many of the “Dennis the Menace” digests when younger but this is the only significant dream of this nature ever documented.

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Update: On this date in 2001 (exactly 13 years after this dream), Hank Ketcham passed away. This makes both my dream and his own comic panel published on this date in 1988 seem a bit eerie (no disrespect intended).

Morning of December 2, 1967. Saturday.



A green cat is seemingly “haunting” an unfamiliar area of an unknown neighborhood in my dream (though possibly implied to be near my sister Carol’s house in Wisconsin). It glows brightly, mostly while walking atop an older brick fence near a residence where there are a lot of shrubs and flowers in the front yard. The green cat does not seem to be a lost pet, but perhaps the ghost of a stray. It does not frighten me in any way. Although I see it walking towards me at times, I also seem mostly incorporeal and perhaps unseen by this “ghost”.

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A cat is linked to the idea of sleep yet being active at night, and therefore is a good representation of the dream state itself. Here, the cat mostly only appears in liminal space - the top of a wall. Although the color blue usually serves as induction, green sometimes does as well (in contrast to red, which mainly seems like a waking priority prompt).

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This was possibly influenced by a very small plastic figure of a green cat (which may have come from some vendor novelties my brother Earl had in his apartment near ours at North Monroe Street) that I had in a large box of various small items, which included a soft orange rubber cockroach, a black brontosaurus with its head turned around over its body, and a plastic flying lizard among many other items.

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