Blue_Opossum

Morning of July 6, 1975. Sunday.



In my dream, I am with my best friend Toby on some sort of excursion of which I am not sure of the nature of. I believe the word play, “Safari, so good” (so far, so good) is suggested by Toby. We actually seem to be in Africa (or a reconstruction of certain features of one area) at one point, but I do not have a clear memory of how we got there, although the idea of a school bus having taken us there comes into mind very briefly, which suggests that we got left behind on some sort of field trip, perhaps to Busch Gardens at Tampa Bay. Somehow, as we walk around with no particular implied destination, we end up going into another world through an unseen or unrecognized portal.

After a time, we end up being chased by several mythological creatures, including a minotaur and a centaur. We are not caught or directly threatened at any point, but the landscape and the creatures become more unusual over time.

Eventually, without realizing it, after being chased by surreal mythological beasts on several different occasions, we seem to be back in our own world in the same area from where we started, just prior to entering the other world.

Nearby, a lion watches us from tall grasses and soon roars with the idea he may start to chase us. Even though we start running to escape from the potentially threatening situation, Toby starts laughing, saying rather loudly and somewhat happily under the circumstances, “A good ol’ Earth lion!” which means he is glad to be out of the other world, though he lags behind me. There is no fear at this point; but almost a strange sense of relief and appreciated familiarity of the potential to return home.

This is a fairly straightforward dream-as-a-dream event (as many are, even many of which people try to “interpret”, which in the first place, is something only the dreamer can do, as the dreamer is the only one with the relevant memory of the previous experiences and associations that build the dream in the first place). The lion in the last segment is my emergent consciousness rendered as the waking transition’s symbol of coalescence. This is because a lion in the dream state represents the ability to consume the dream self, since that is always the ultimate fate of the dream self (to coalesce into whole consciousness) even after being in the “alternate world of mythology” (the dream state itself). The implied swallowing is not seen in this dream (and in fact, is not even needed to be rendered since the transition has already developed). Waking transitions of this type are often achieved without any need for disturbing imagery (and again, it was even amusing in this case, which happily colored my mood for the day).