Blue_Opossum

Morning of December 20, 2020. Sunday.

Dream #: 19,725-02. Reading time (optimized): 2 min.



My typical navigation of liminality and phasing sequences during sleep does not include waking-life identity at first or recall of what a dream is. The extraordinarily vivid experience of imaginary kinaesthesia is predominant throughout the first part of my dreaming experience.

Duality with vestibular phasing personification results in an unknown male driving a vehicle I ride in. The “car” is solely two back-to-back couches on wheels. It is similar to the couch I sit on in waking life, though I am on the far left (unlike at any time in waking life). We go through an unknown city. There does not appear to be a steering wheel anywhere. Somehow, as we are traveling, the unfamiliar man leaves. I remain on the front couch while his wife and at least one son stay on the back couch. Additionally, the “vehicle” is now speedily going in reverse over an overpass.

The realism of imaginary kinaesthesia, including the vivid sense of momentum and direction, is astounding. I become slightly wary at times, but I do not have any fear. The others, speeding forward, do not seem afraid. As the front couch speeds in reverse, I see cars on the street of the appearance they should have, yet which does not cause me to question why our “car” is back-to-back couches.

I consider I will try to stop or at least slow down the couch as our speed increases slightly. On the left end, below the arm, is a lever. (In waking life, this is the lever that extends the footrest.) As I pull it, I feel the couch slow down and come to a stop in the parking lot of a shopping mall. We all get out, and our driver is there looking at a storefront. Two people talk to him as they are leaving. They say they cannot give him a tour but invite him to look around inside the empty store. Dagwood Bumstead (from the “Blondie” comic strip) is standing nearby.

I begin to recall my waking-life identity, but I walk to an unknown residence where my family and I supposedly live. I walk through a room with a Christmas tree in the corner. I see the isolated shadow of a tree’s branch on the ceiling (truncated as a circular form), with no source, but I perceive it as random dirt I will remove later.

Somatosensory phasing begins with increasing liminal awareness of being asleep in bed in my dream’s final segment. Gustatory phasing coheres with somatosensory phasing. As a result, in my dream, I am on a bed. I need to clean candy sprinkles from it. I scoop them up to eat, and their taste is sweet. The hundreds of tiny pieces of candy form a pattern similar to a river delta. There seems to be no end to them as I continue to eat as many as possible. The bed extends several feet, even into another room. No matter how many sprinkles I pick up to eat, there are always several remaining.

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Morning of May 27, 1995. Saturday.



I find myself in the backyard of the Cubitis property in late morning. I vaguely recall a childhood dream (same setting and time) where a flying saucer hovered above me, casting a large round shadow over an area of the backyard and upon me. I am not viably lucid (that is, I remain unaware that I am dreaming), but there is faux lucidity where I illogically make the connections as relevant to presumed reality. I find the situation more interesting than threatening.

Zsuzsanna is present in the living room, looking through the east windows. I tell her of how this has happened before, and that the last time, I ran south, somehow vertically running straight down the side of a ravine, then running horizontally on the ground and across the surface of the river, and running vertically straight up the other side to continue running normally.

As I decide to attempt this again (even after over twenty-five years), I look back as I start to cheerfully run and see it is not a flying saucer but a hot air balloon. This puzzles me and instead of running straight down the side of the deep ravine as I near it, I awake with a slight falling sensation and with a mild hypnopompic kick. I am close to laughing aloud shortly after waking.

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Liminal space fallacy: This is a specific type of faux lucidity, where I attempt to duplicate an event from an older dream without realizing I am dreaming, yet I also perceive my situation as only my dream self could in a dream. Even so, this faux reasoning is something that could not occur in consciousness, and additionally, cannot even be logically perceived or resolved as even being possible, yet it is, as I am very familiar with its dynamics. For me, this proves that dreams are of an entirely different nature, purpose, and meaning than what most people claim.

Faux threads: Cubitis has not been my home since June 1978. Zsuzsanna has never been to America. The shadow was cast in the wrong direction (oriented southerly instead of westerly). There were no deeper ravines near where I lived. It is not possible to run vertically down or up the side of a ravine or run over the surface of a river.

Literal threads: Zsuzsanna’s presence, genuine recall of a childhood dream from 1969.

Current thread: Zsuzsanna’s presence only (that is, no viable recall of any other current life status, including our present address).

Vestibular system thread: The hot air balloon, in addition to being associated with breathing while sleeping, was biologically premonitory of the hypnopompic kick. (Falling in a dream is usually the result of natural vestibular system ambiguity by inherently not being able to balance the imaginary dream body in unconsciousness. As such, it is unrelated to the popular myth of “interpretation”.)

Emergent consciousness thread: The hot air balloon’s shadow signifies the looming essence of the conscious self and the inevitability of waking. This implies a different form of RAS mediation than when the preconscious is dominantly personified to rouse the emergent consciousness thread.

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Morning of September 10, 2016. Saturday.



My wife Zsuzsanna and our children and I are living back at Stadcor Street in Brisbane. It seems to be early afternoon and we have to go shopping for groceries. I am going out the back way, through our kitchen, but the layout is a bit different. The small square area that one needs to go through to get to the back porch is much bigger and there are additional doors, one directly into our backyard and another one onto our back porch.

I notice what I first think is our pet black cat in the small room with me but it has no eye, nose, or mouth detail. It is like a three-dimensional shadow and I sense puzzlement radiating from it. I am slightly wary (but not fearful in any way) as the creature jumps up and somehow goes through the area between the central top part of the door and the door frame (and would have to be as thin as a sheet of paper to do this). This would be the door that goes to our back porch (liminal space).

I go to the lounge room to talk to Zsuzsanna about this strange event and she calls the animal something I do not seem to be able to hear properly. After I ask her to repeat it a few times, it still sounds something like “wolf-roosh”. My hearing ability seems to become too distorted each time to hear the final part of the term. What I grasp from the term seems odd to me as it was seemingly a cat shadow, without any wolf associations at all.

After we do our shopping, the unfamiliar balding male cashier (of about forty years of age) cannot seem to get the cash register to work properly. Apparently he has to press his thumb on a pad to acknowledge he has the authority to use the cash register, but it is not recognizing him. I am thinking that maybe his thumb needs to have a small amount of yellow ink on it to get it to work. I am getting annoyed and I am not sure how we will complete the transaction if the cash register will not work.

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The checkout area of a store is a waking transition metaphor symbolizing leaving the dream state. In this case, the lack of “yellow thumb” is associated with not being fully conscious. The cash register symbolizes the potential increments of critical thinking during the waking transition as conscious self identity emerges.

The threshold event (here an atypical precursor rather than my dream’s final scene) concerning the door, featured a cat shadow in liminal space as the emergent consciousness factor. Curiously, this was borrowed from the ending of “The Flintstones” (which I had seen so many times as a child). Even the essence of the movement (comparative to the sabre-toothed tiger jumping up in the cartoon) was the same. I found that fascinating, especially as the ending theme’s line “…cat will stay out for the night” could be interpreted as remaining unconscious (asleep) throughout the sleep cycle.

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Morning of October 17, 2015. Saturday.



I am in an unknown room that does not have many discernible features other than perhaps a table and chair.

An unknown person is present on my left, seemingly male, but I do not look at them directly at any point. I get the impression that they may be in their late twenties.

I notice what I first take to be a couple palm tree silhouettes on the wall near a sash window. I think it may be some sort of wallpaper design or painting. Soon however, it seems to move slightly. I realize that it is the shadow of an oversized thistle or two. I consider what would happen if I blow on it, with the idea of how seeds would appear to float out from the plant.

I blow, and what I first think to be small bird silhouettes are moving to the right from out of the area where the seeds would otherwise be. Looking more closely, I see that it is an army of small black spiders that I must have disturbed. I move back out of slight wariness, but perhaps I was wrong about what I saw.

I blow again farther to the left, and it does appear that thistle seeds, or rather, their silhouettes, are moving along the wall. “Well, how about that?” I say, but some of them somehow crash into the light bulb and make it sizzle and flicker. The light bulb is hanging down from a cord just above head level and has a pull chain.

After a time, I no longer see the floating seed silhouettes or the silhouette of the plant on the wall but I do then see what seems to be an oversized thistle plant outside about ten feet away or more. There is a strange eerie feeling, almost like fear, but not fully. Something seems “off” about the whole adventure.

Of course, the light sizzling and flickering represents real-time neural activity changing slightly in the dream state. This dream was vaguely lucid, but not fully.

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Morning of November 29, 1981. Sunday.



I am back in the living room in Cubitis, more in the southwestern area of the larger room. It seems to be “isolated” somehow and I am perhaps the only one in the entire region. There is a very vivid awareness of the type which I would label as a type of “faux lucidity”, as, even though I am fully, consciously aware and it is so vivid, I am not certain of the nature of the “level” of my dream (regarding the particular “eerie” band of consciousness), and so see it as a potential aspect of really being fully awake at the time - it is an unusual state of knowing you are dreaming, yet still thinking you are somewhat conscious in an actual place with eyes open - a bit hard to explain, I think.

In one area to the south, near the left; the narrower section of wall at the end of the hallway (that was to the right of the kitchenette entrance though the layout is distorted), I see a large shadow slowly and very smoothly sweep across that area on the wall. It is shaped like a bird, seemingly a raven. There is an unusual sense of timelessness. This exact same theme (and very similar imagery) repeated later on (a few months later), but seemed to occur at an open construction site late at night in Wisconsin rather than my old Florida home as here.

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Over time, this seemed to create the phrase within my mind - “time is raven-winged”, (a possible play on “time flies” though also in the context of time being a “scavenger”).

This may sound negative, but we (my wife Zsuzsanna and our two oldest children at the time) had a positive enriching experience with helping an injured raven in real life years later.

The bird shadow symbol (usually rendered as being in flight), sometimes “sweeping” though sometimes falling, which primarily represents the waking point itself, has been common in a number of my waking transitions since early childhood. “Frozen” and motionless bird shadows with no source projected onto a stage used as a living space by a female tulpa was an extremely vivid scene in a dream of recent apex lucidity of the type of augmented awareness that almost surpasses real life perception. When your mind is able to freeze the birds in flight rendering to where only the hovering shadows are projected, that is near-ultimate dream control.

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From the night of December 23, 1966. Friday.

Dream #: 4-01. Reading time (optimized): 1 min 30 sec.



This dream (repeating at different levels of vividness several times on the same night, though chiefly from willing it) occurred three days after my sixth birthday. It started before midnight of December 23 while I slept in the second-floor apartment of 901 Rose Street in La Crosse, Wisconsin.

Its primary causation is simply a different version of the first microdream that I have had virtually every sleep cycle to date (as of October 19, 2020) when I am walking with a vivid awareness of imaginary kinaesthesia and suddenly fall into wakefulness with myoclonus. The main difference, other than its unique content, originates from the predominant degree of sleep atonia resulting in a dream of a longer length than the common microdream I have described here.

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In my dream, it is late at night, and no other person seems to be awake. It is dark. I walk on the back roof of the Rose Street building (accessible from the second floor by way of a door at the end of a hallway), with liminal dream state awareness. I think of using the fire escape at the back of the building to descend to the parking area. When I start to step onto it, it is no longer present. A more realistic version of the Shadow Cat from “Gay Purr-ee” (1962) is suddenly holding onto my hand as I remain in the dream, though in undefined liminal space for a time.

I entered different versions of my dream several times in the same sleep cycle. In one instance, I descended the stairs. In another, I chose not to walk to the edge, though in another, I floated.

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Other than the usual causation, more specific influences in this case mainly come from the musical scenes in the animated movie. It includes the lines “If anyone can save you, the money cat can!” and “In the palm of our paw” from “The Money Cat.” Of lesser influence was “Show me the way to all my dreams” and “and be seen hand-in-hand with Paree” from “Take My Hand, Paree.”

Because of this dreaming experience, I began to develop an advanced understanding of dream control, liminality, and dream content causation in a world where virtually everything I read about dreams is the result of misconception.

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Morning of August 29, 1970. Saturday.



In a number of repeating similar scenes throughout what seems a very long dreaming period, I find myself somehow arriving on an island very early in the morning before sunrise, each time for “the first time”, though the repetitive nature of the “resets” is not monotonous or of any type of negative effect. I seem incorporeal for the most part, though sometimes standing on the beach in my physical body. Regardless of my mainly unresolved redundant arrivals, I do not become impatient. There is mainly a feeling of perfection, happiness, and timelessness. I have a vague sense of my “mystery girl” (who may be living near the central area of the island) but I do not see her at any point.

Always in the distance no closer than thirty feet away, is a shadow in the form of a man but is also implied to be feline, with cat ears, and I sense it may be half panther and half man. There is no threat or negative emotion. The overall feeling the character is mostly projecting is neutral though seems to imply a beneficial future and even nostalgia (which seems unusual from a child’s point of view but has happened often with me as a boy). It seems like the creature is somehow always walking along the beach at this time on this seemingly isolated island. There are times when I more vividly perceive that this entity is my own shadow somehow cast from where I am standing on the beach (sparsely recurring including in much later dreams).

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Entry and additional notes confirmed and updated Wednesday, 26 October 2016.

• Mainly influenced by the movie “Terror Is a Man” (November 1959) though again, completely lacking in anything either frightening or threatening.
• Additionally influenced by the Money Cat scene from the animated movie “Gay-Purr-ee” (October 1962).
• Additionally influenced from a previous dream from the night of Friday, December 23, 1966 (“Money Cat” minion saves me).
• As of this writing, my last dream to feature an association with the Shadow Cat as the preconscious essence was “Catlike Shadow Creature and Shopping” from Saturday, September 10, 2016, though it has appeared in a number of other dreams, typically in a dream’s final minutes.
• A beach in a dream represents liminal space and in fact is the most powerful setting of this nature. (See off-site link: The Beach, part 3 - Liminal Space.)
• A cat (or in this case, a panther) mainly symbolizes the nocturnal form of the preconscious (especially in this shadow form), where its origin seems to be (even though cats are active during the day).
• Shadow forms in my dreams are often friendly, helpful, and even radiate love, the opposite of what the majority of other people claim.
• This form of the preconscious sometimes seems to be my own shadow, but in this case, I do not consider that a shadow could not appear in this way (for example, with no wall behind it for it to be logically cast upon), the same fallacy that has occurred in a number of other dreams since early childhood.