maboroshi

Good morning, everybody.

My nighttime discipline has been terrible lately! Last night, I spent too long watching the Girls' Generation "Visual Dreams" video and some anime stuff on YouTube. It wrecked my dream recall.

One thing before I do the dreams. At the Japan Society in NYC a series is currently running showcasing the work of the director Sabu.

On Wednesday I watched Sabu's film Monday. The plot of the story revolves around a businessman who wakes up after having been drunk for two days. He slowly recalls all the things he did while he was drunk.

The story reminds me of waking up and looking back on a dream. But at a certain moment the main character takes charge over his actions. At this moment, the "dream" stories become more like lucid dreams.

There aren't any extreme special effects. But I think the film, in itself, is very good. And I think it's also good as a metaphor for the dreaming and lucid dreaming processes.

Anyhow, I want to suggest that anybody in or near NYC go to the Japan Society to check out some of Sabu's films. Sabu is there to introduce each film and do a Q&A. So that's also incredible.

Dream #1

I was in my great-grandmother's backyard on a sunny day. My great-grandmother was still alive. My family may have been near me somewhere. My great-grandma was talking to me, possibly standing very close to me, or possibly through some kind of telepathy.

I was now in my "great-grandma's basement." I stood before a bed that was covered in deep blue sheets. My great-grandma told me something about my great-grandfather. I got the feeling that this may have been the bed my great-grandfather had died in.

My great-grandma now told me that I had to lay in the bed. It was as if I was going to be in town for a while, and that I would have to stay at this house while I was here. So I'd be using this bed.

The bed was now different. The previous bed didn't have any headboard. But this bed had a very fancy headboard of nice wood. The bed also had blankets. In fact, the bedding appeared to be a very nice, homemade quilt with mint-green squares alternating with white squares with pink flower (?) designs on them.

I was a little afraid to lay in the bed. I felt like it had been empty for so long that maybe bedbugs had started to live inside of it. I thought I would check the bed for bugs. But I knew my great-grandmother was somewhere around me. I didn't want to check the bed in front of her and offend her by implying that she had neglected the bed.

Dream #2

I was in some museum or art gallery. I was in a room, possibly laying face down on a cushioned bench that was backed up against a wall. My head kind of hung down over one end of the bench. This specific room was spacious but small, kind of dimly lit, with white walls and possibly some thin carpet.

There had been some big art exhibit opening. The opening included some kind of presentation by the artist, a woman who kind of looked like Laurel Nakadate. Now everybody was milling around or leaving. Most of the people looked like somewhat wealthy business people.

The artist woman leaned against the wall near the bench on which I lay. I was playing with some device like an iPhone. All the icons on the phone were squares with a swirly pattern of pinks, browns, and oranges. I was scanning through a number of different icons.

The artist said something to me like, "I could never figure out how those things worked. You seem to know it pretty well. You must be smart."

I figured from this that the artist couldn't afford to own an iPhone. I let her look at mine, so she could figure out how to use it. But as soon as I handed it over, I felt a little bit of anxiety. I knew I had a lot of really wacky porn sites still up on my internet. I hoped that she wouldn't look through my internet history.

The artist, did, however, end up scrolling through my internet history. As the artist continued using the phone, the phone became something like a sit-down driving game like you would see in an arcade. The artist was sitting inside the game, scrolling through my internet history, which was a black screen, with old, pixellated, dim-white lettering. The room also became dim, like an arcade.

The artist, thankfully, kept scrolling down to sections full of internet searches I'd apparently done for really fancy recipes. Also, there seemed to be some sections where I'd taken pictures of these fancy dishes I made.

The artist may have made some comment about how nice it was that a guy actually put effort into making all these delicious meals. That comment made me even more afraid of the artist finding the porn sites.

I thought that maybe I'd get lucky and that the artist might not happen upon any of the porn sites that I'd looked at on my phone. But she eventually did. The porn sites in question were apparently of me, all by myself, on my bed, masturbating or dressed in women's underwear.

At some point the arcade game version of my phone became my phone again, although at certain times the views were coming straight into my head, as if I were just imagining them all. The artist was gone, although I may have heard her talking to me, as if I were hearing the conversation telepathically or through "memory-phone."

I now stood before a bed in an almost completely dark room. I may have thrown the phone on my bed. I still had the weird photos of me running through my head. Eventually I got on the bed, standing on my knees.

(Side notes: Dream #2 implies that I look for porn and fancy recipes on the web. This is wrong. I don't look for fancy recipes. But I probably should, because I think cooking is really cool.)

Good morning, everybody. I'm pretty sure I was only semi-lucid in the first dream, even though I was aware that I was dreaming.

The second dream took place between 5 AM and 5:30 AM, I'm pretty sure.

Dream #1

I was in a house with some female "family members." They appeared to be about my age, white, very pretty. I saw them as if we were all close together. The women were having some kind of serious conversation.

I suddenly floated up and out of the house. I assumed I was in the neighborhood my family had lived in before I went to college. (Though it now seems to me that all the houses were much bigger that in that neighborhood, and that they all had flat roofs.)

At some point during all of this, I told myself I was dreaming. I think that I was thinking this was something more like an out-of-body experience than a dream. I told myself to focus on the rooftops and try to "bring something back" to waking life that would prove I'd had an OBE.

But I was only floating around between a small number of houses. I think I was having some kind of trouble with my vertical control, like I kept on going up way high and having to pull myself back down.

At some point in time I saw a house with its roof caved in. I recognized this house as being a couple houses down from my family's old house. I thought for sure that this would be something I could "bring back."

I thought I'd focus in on this house, land on the roof. But instead of landing on the roof, I ended up going way down to the ground or a much lower roof (as if all these houses were like multi-story buildings -- which is obviously not true in that neighborhood). I flew back up and landed on the top of the roof.

But the roof wasn't collapsed. Instead, I found, the whole thing had been an optical illusion. The object which had given an impression of a depression in the roof was actually the basin of a gigantic hot tub.

Somehow, again without any criticism, I found myself in the empty basin of this gigantic hot tub, indoors. The hot tub was actually on the roof of the back end of a big RV. The room I was in was like a gigantic garage for the RV (even though, again, it was on the top floor of this "house").

I called out to my brother. He'd been friends with the son of this family. I figured he'd know more about this than I did. My brother "appeared," though I don't think I ever saw him directly.

After I'd "asked" (mentally?) my brother about the gigantic RV and hot tub, he responded, "Yeah, I was surprised, too, the first time I came to their house. I thought it was a broken roof, too. Because they always looked and acted so poor.

"But then I realized that they really did have all this rich stuff, too. Then I started getting jealous, because we don't have anything like this! But then they started letting me use it, too."

Dream #2

I was watching some kind of live-action drama that had elements in common with an anime drama.

The view eventually changed to some kind of drama of which I was a part, even though I was still only an observer.

There were a bunch of beautiful, rich, college-aged people walking from the right to the left of my view, before some stone castle which was part of some college campus. The sky overhead was dark and roiling with clouds. The students (mostly or all women?) were wearing colorful, silk dresses and plastic masks to make them look like anime characters.

Eventually I was in a room, at a party. The room felt like a study in a big, nice house. The room was dim, full of people, probably rich adults.

I had been talking at first with a young woman. At some point I was listening to the speech of a man who had a face like Rodin's sculptures of Balzac. The man was speaking with great pride about how he had cheated some business associate, then killed and eaten him.

Now I saw a group of partiers, all turned toward me, motionless, silent. They were mostly women. The women wore masks like female anime characters. The men wore masks like the mustache mask from V for Vendetta (?).

My view now shifted to a number of fragmented scenes showing old, great manga and anime artists at their work. One scene had a man sitting back in his swivel chair before his desk. The man was tallish, wearing a sweater and a beret (but he wasn't Tezuka).

The wall of the man's room was turquoise blue, and was decorated with some of the classic anime and manga he'd created. One drawing was a figure of a plain, young man with black hair wearing a yellow sweater and khaki slacks. Another anime of his had to do with the adventures of some little girl in a forest. I heard the anime theme song.

(As I woke, I could hear the theme song of this anime. I even hummed it to keep it in my mind. But I forgot it now. Ugh.)

(Good morning, everybody. I remember one dream from last night.

The character in my dream definitely looks like a person I know from waking life. I don't know him personally, but he goes to certain art events I also attend, including one last night.

He's not at all like the person in the dream. He's really cool and insightful. So I don't know why I dreamt of him being this way.)

Dream #1

I sat at an anime fest, in a place like a basketball arena. It was like everybody who had come to attend the festival were sitting in bleachers, looking down to a stage-like area that would be where the basketball court was. The seating section, as big as in any pro basketball arena, was completely packed.

I sat near the front row. The row I sat in had a big, wooden bannister before it, which kind of reminds me of the front railing in the public area in a court room, or of the balcony area where the public sits during government sessions in capitols.

The area where the basketball court would be was full, probably with artists' booths. But the festival patrons weren't going down there.

We were all watching some presentation given to us by some white man who was apparently a manga artist. The man may have been tall, a little overweight, balding, with red-brown hair, and red-tan skin. He may have been wearing a kind of old, green sweatshirt and blue jeans.

When the man's presentation was finished, the man announced that we could all come down to his booth. He had a black binder full of his manga art, and he informed us that we could each choose our favorite female manga character out of the binder and take the page for free. He might also have said he would sign the page.

An overweight, black man about my age, with thick glasses and wearing a dark blue sweatshirt, sat to my left. He said, probably to me, in a joking-confiding way, "Well, everybody who's in line behind me better get ready to wait a long time. Cause I'm gonna take my time going through that book until I find my favorite anime girl."

Some announcer called each person down by name. They called the man. Right after that, they called me. I stood behind the man as he slowly flipped through the pages of the binder.

The binder was huge, full of pages. The pages were probably all in individual plastic sleeves. The art looked very pencil-y but very professional. Some of the art was in grey pencil. Some was in blue pencil.

The man pulled something out of his pocket that looked like a cell-phone-sized laptop. He checked the time, put the device back in his pocket, and went back to leafing slowly through the pages.

I was trying really hard to think to myself who my favorite manga character was. All I could come up with was Jasmine from Disney's Aladdin. I thought I should be able to come up with a character better than that. But I figured that maybe Jasmine from Aladdin really was my favorite manga character.

The man had flipped all the way to the end of the binder. Then, saying out loud that he didn't see a manga girl he liked yet, he began flipping backward through the binder.

As I watched the man flip through the pages of the binder, I saw a number of drawings of Jasmine. I figured I'd be happy with just about any of those drawings. Seeing all these Jasmine drawings, I was starting to get impatient with the man. I could have had a perfectly fine picture and been gone by now. But this man wouldn't stop taking his turn!

The man pulled his "phone" back out of his pocket and looked at the time again. The phone indicated that he'd been flipping through the book for 20 or 22 minutes by now. (The phone may not have been showing the time. It may actually been timing the man as he flipped through the pages.)

The man nodded approval at the time, put his phone back in his pocket, and began flipping slowly through the binder again. He may have gone all the way backward through the binder and started flipping forward again.