Blue_Opossum

Saturday morning, 18 December 1971. Age 10.

Dream #: 1,825-01.

1 minute and 50 seconds to read.

Requires reading and understanding: MAPPED DREAM “Run from the Brontosaurus” in the first part of this report.

This dream is one of many from childhood that I still cherish, regardless of its usual predictable causality factors. I still view this dream as hilarious on one level.

While hand mobility and somatosensory response (often with summoning and handling coins) have occurred regularly in dreams since childhood, foot mobility with a somatosensory response in the bottoms of my feet is uncommon, though I also use my hands in this case - and it is still predictably tied to leg mobility as most outcomes in this mode.

The curious event here involves falling and breaking a window by landing on it from a reasonable height but remaining in the dream state. Although horizontal, it ties to using a door as a dream’s deliberate exit point. While my intent to exit is ongoing, it triggers an offset somatosensory dream segment instead. I had, however, deliberately jumped from a bridge to leave the dream state, expecting, if remaining in the dream, to land in the water, as with similar instances. That is what I find hilarious.

“Doubling” is a viable term for this dream sequence because I am still in the dream state for an additional vivid segment, and it combines two dream-exiting methods I have often used.

What caused this particular shifting response (rather than waking me up)? My guess is because of the lack of myoclonus in this case. (Even so, there have been more recent dreams where I remained in the dream state after feeling “the drop.”) Myoclonus most often wakes me from the dream’s physical illusions (particularly leg myoclonus at the beginning of every sleep cycle). It shifted into a somatosensory response (glass in the bottoms of my feet) but still did not wake me. A typical hand-based somatosensory response as a catalyst is an animal nibbling my fingers.

Again, the lightning (an increasing synaptic energy analogy) striking the dinosaur and bringing it to life (waking it up) was also a transition representing precursory wakefulness, though, at that point, my dream also shifted into another segment (though with my deliberate intent in the first instance - because in childhood, I learned to hold myself in the dream state even when there is an imaginary threat and now have gotten much better at it - see “Heraldic Dragon Storm” from 2023 for example).

The unrealistic stop-motion effect (movie influence) has occurred in many other dreams. These days, “bad CGI” also occasionally “corrupts” dream narratives. Animated content superimposed over otherwise realistic scenes has also often occurred since childhood.