Blue_Opossum

Morning of June 11, 2017. Sunday.



My wife Zsuzsanna and our children as we are now are at a carnival, though curiously, a group of people are in our house at one point (mostly in our lounge room) who are apparently waiting to enter another area. I do not see them as imposers and even consider how there are not that many people around. There is the typical ambiguity of the setting being an unlikely essence of indoors and outdoors at the same time, a common factor of my dreams since early childhood.

A photographer is present in a few different scenes. He reminds me of Al, the Italian manager of a pawn shop in La Crosse, who I have not seen in nearly twenty-five years.

Although some of the photographs he takes seem okay, many are very poorly done, often cutting off the person’s face below the nose. I have the strong impression that the photographs he takes that turn out well are the result of random coincidence.

Zsuzsanna and I sit to the right of an unknown family. I sit to Zsuzsanna’s right. I assume the photographer is going to take a few good photographs of the scene. However, when I look at them later, I see that my face is only visible above the mouth and in one photograph, the one I look at the longest, both my eyes are closed. I show Zsuzsanna and relate my opinion of this photographer as not being very good. I notice in the last photograph, my right eye is closed and my left eye is open.

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The photographer is of course this dream’s personified preconscious. He is not really confrontational here as in many other dreams. The purpose of the personified preconscious is to initiate the waking transition and in some cases, as here, to give evidence that the dreamer is dreaming. The subliminal anticipation of the hypnopompic jerk is only one of several factors in this waking symbolism. The preconscious is more of a biological necessity, though not always personified (for example, is sometimes an animal, sometimes an event or feature of a setting, but always fairly obvious if one understands dreams). The nature of how the preconscious waking factor is rendered, and what character plays the role in a particular dream, sometimes seems completely random. However, looking more deeply, there is usually more than one layer.

In this case, the photographer is played by a man who worked at a checkout. A checkout is a form of liminal space waking symbolism. (The analogy is that a person is done shopping and ready to return home as akin to leaving the dream state, or “checking out of the dream state”.) This type of hybrid characterization, though always unique, has occurred in thousands of my dreams, with the same waking symbolism and implications.

It is not that common for me as my personified subconscious (temporary fictional dream self) to be The Sleeper. This element is typically projected as something else, even faulty technology. In the last photograph, one of my eyes is open, which is an emergent consciousness factor. (My mouth is not visible in the photographs as I cannot speak coherently while sleeping.) Zsuzsanna and I are oriented in my dream as we are in bed in reality (that is, she is to my left). There seem to be a few types of instinctual dreaming (non-lucid dream control). In addition to the state where the dreamer knows he is making the dream (and yet does not even remember or know what a dream is), there is the state as here, where the dreamer is more passive to events, yet where there is the subliminal knowledge of being asleep but not direct or creating viable lucidity. There is also a sort of halfway point when I am next to Zsuzsanna, my dream attaining real environmental orientation while still within the dream state (more common and sustained in my childhood dreams).

Of course, a carnival symbolizes the dream state itself (that is, a place not relevant to the usual day-to-day reality, though my family had been to one recently).

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