Blue_Opossum

Morning of December 19, 2019. Thursday.

Dream #: 19,358-02. Reading time (optimized): 2 min.



My dream results in reticular activating system sleep-wake mediation in a literal sense in this experience. Although I am in a bed, it is in a spacious unfamiliar business office. I am not tired or sleepy and had (in real life) gone to sleep earlier than usual.

The first sleep-wake mediation personification is an unfamiliar woman, about sixty years old, sitting at a desk to my right. (The process typically begins on my right, the side more exposed to environmental sounds as I sleep.) Her desk is a few feet from my bed and facing me. Over time, I become slightly puzzled by the situation, but my dream self does not register it as illogical or intrusive. Still, I instinctually initiate wall mediation by using clothespins to put up curtains between my bed and her desk. At first, one of my curtains falls on her, and she complains. Eventually, she puts up curtains as well, and there is a space of about three feet between my curtains and hers.

My waking-life identity is now more emergent (as it typically is as a result of wall mediation, which brings my dream self closer to liminality) and I realize that Zsuzsanna is sleeping in a canoe on the other side of the room to my left (as she sleeps on my left in reality, and most dreams render this factor correctly). I think I should be with her even though there may not be much space. (Despite the instinctual association with dream state reinduction with the canoe, there is no presence of water or wetness in this experience.)

I go over and get into the canoe. Another canoe is upside-down over the top of the first. I enjoy being with Zsuzsanna, and although there is an increase in my perception of imaginary physicality, there is no discomfort in the restricted space. (We are in the correct orientation, though our heads are in the opposite direction as mine was at the beginning of my dream.)

Later, an unfamiliar teenage boy gets into the canoe. After a short time, the secretary (still on the other side of the room), calls someone to come and get him. He is supposedly a juvenile delinquent, but I had not seen him as threatening.

Zsuzsanna and I are soon standing in the room. There is a sense of peace. I watch her go to the door that opens to outside. An unknown man, only in shadow, remaining in the doorway, calls her by the wrong name (Laura), but she responds with unknown information of some kind. (Wrong names occur in my dreams to signify how the dream self is not a viable model of waking-life; obvious, as my dreams never render valid memories.)

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The use of a virtual door into or out of the dream state in sleep-wake mediation is common, and this is mediated by cortical arousal personification by way of preconscious simulacra and the reticular activating system. However, Zsuzsanna responding to this process rather than my dream self is intriguing.

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