Blue_Opossum

Morning of June 12, 1965. Saturday.



I am my present age in my dream (four years old), riding in a familiar car with my mother and father. My father is driving. The car windows are all down and it is seemingly a nice sunny day, around nine o’clock in the morning. There is a very mild breeze. I am sitting in the back seat and looking out the window on the left side (thus I am seated behind my father, though this is not a fixed orientation in dreams where I am riding in a car with my parents). We are going up a winding road of about a ten degree inclination, which curves slightly to the left, which seems to be Mohawk Valley Road in Stoddard, Wisconsin, not that far from where we live. However, there also seems to be the essence of the landfill near Fort Ogden, Florida that I had seen when very young.

As we ride over a small bridge made of logs (seemingly unrealistic for a car to go over) which crosses a very narrow and shallow stream, I notice an old mattress lying mostly flat along the left side of the road. It is close to the bank of the stream. I clearly see a couple large holes with parts of the material missing and part of at least one spring. There are a few other features that indicate that this may be a small landfill.

A rattlesnake sits coiled at the top of the hill to my left, though unrealistically remaining in perspective near the horizon of the slope (even though my dream otherwise seems nearly as vivid as wakeful reality). Its head and upper body move up and down slowly as there is a soft hissing and soft rattle sound which integrates with the sound of the breeze in the trees as well as the nearly inaudible sound of crickets. There is no fear; only a sense of curiosity. The rattlesnake is too large in perspective relative to distance and it is also unrealistic in the sense that it is moving up and down in more of a loose vertical spring-like form, reminding me of a mattress spring.

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Dreaming dynamics and first-level dream meaning:

• Many dreams utilize biological foreshadowing of the hypnopompic jerk. In this case, the rattlesnake is the hypnopompic jerk precursor and a “dream sign” factor (mattress spring symbolism) of my emergent consciousness. This is validated by how it is moving up and down on the close virtual horizon of the hilltop. Note that a rattlesnake moves and strikes while a mattress spring (which it symbolizes) does not. This is because the rattlesnake is alive and directly linked with the organic dynamics of a hypnopompic jerk.
• The close virtual horizon of the hilltop symbolizes the implied waking point in real time, that is, the event horizon of the emergent consciousness, though no confrontation is rendered in this case and no negative energy is perceived at any time.
• Driving or riding in a car in a dream represents the viable threads linking back to conscious self identity (reflecting the goal of the fictional dream self to find its way back to full consciousness). (The road is winding due to both my body sometimes moving randomly in sleep and as being analogous of the rattlesnake’s movements.)
• The landfill setting relates to the extraneous thoughts (“junk”) that occur during the rising of wakeful consciousness, similar to the random and fuzzy nature of various thoughts occurring prior to sleep, when critical thinking skills eventually cease.
• The rattlesnake is also clearly a visual symbol for a mattress spring in this particular case in its unrealistic fully rising and coiling upwards and downwards. Despite my dream having no negative energy, it is still seen as a warning of sleeping on a torn mattress with an exposed mattress spring (which I soon learned to be careful of and which a folded pillowcase was placed over). (This is probably because of my very young age and not fully realizing that both a rattlesnake and an exposed mattress spring could be very dangerous.)
• My dream’s meaning and message is validated by my torn mattress being seen in my dream just prior to seeing the rattlesnake on the hilltop.
• The nature of my dream is additionally validated by the shallow stream, implying a “water getting lower over time” event, which is both biological and symbolic, representing the waking transition. Note that my (presumed to have been discarded) mattress is near the stream, the stream representing continuity of sleep, as water represents my real-time sleep dynamics, while the road represents continuity of potentially wakeful emergent consciousness. This dynamic has occurred in at least one of my dreams every night for over fifty years (and with water often being the induction factor).
• A bridge is a real-time symbol for a shift in consciousness within the dream state. Note that we cross the bridge after seeing my torn mattress and then see the transmuted form of the mattress spring as a rattlesnake up ahead. Despite both being potentially dangerous, this is primarily a visual transmutation rather than implying any sort of connection based on a non-existent “dream language”.
• It might be thought by some people that my father driving the car can be “interpreted” as a focus upon the one who mainly controlled the direction of my life at the time of this dream. Even so, that is completely irrelevant to my dream’s main precognitive message. Also, I have had hundreds of dreams where the driver was either unknown or an imaginary character.
• This dream also has the “contrived convenience” that many dreams have. In this example, I am on the left side of the car looking out the window. My mattress is also on the left side, and the rattlesnake, despite the car implied to be on a winding road, is oversized and remaining on the left in direct view on the hilltop. This viewpoint would not have been possible in reality, where the rattlesnake would otherwise have been impossible to see this clearly and my viewpoint would have kept changing on the winding road.

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