The Fourth Factor

I’m in what seems to be a bathhouse—a basic, no-frills rectangular room with a concrete floor, on the large side, with a number of small pools and folding screens that can be moved around. Although the setting also seemed shifty and indefinite in a more basic way—a “I had this dream early in the night” kind of way.

Weird things are constantly happening there, strange figures materializing and disappearing again in a sort of timeless convergence - it almost seems like there's nothing outside of this place, even though in one sense I arrived here at a definite point of time - but nobody else seems aware of it. But this is normal: I hadn’t been able to see them once, but I had been through a long process—all of it, every stage. I go over it in memory: some parts of it had been unpleasant or even frightening, but there’s nothing frightening about it now that I can see the whole of it instead of just pieces. It’s familiar—it even feels like home somehow.

I seem to have come here with two young women, and at some point—it’s very difficult to say what order things happened in in this dream—I say to one that this is a special place, that you can feel it in the atmosphere. I’m curious if she can feel it too, on some level. At some other point, perhaps earlier or perhaps later, one asks me if there’s anyone here I’m interested in romantically. I say that there is one person, but I’ve only spoken to him a couple times. And he hasn’t shown up here for a couple hundred years now—but I feel it’s best not to mention that.

Also, at one point, one of them is arranging stuff around a pool we're going to use. There isn't enough space for two people to do it without getting in each other's way, but I don't want to just sit there, so I clean up some of the central area at the same time.

Later on, towards morning, I have another dream. I’m now in a large house with my bouzouki instructor for a lesson. I have the impression that it’s not his house or mine—that he’s an employee here. There are interruptions to our lesson—we have to temporarily leave the house at one point and go somewhere else in a car.

But we do make it back inside eventually, and he tells me to go get something. He gives me directions to the room and tells me to get #5, indicating approximately where in the room I’ll be able to find it.

It’s only a few rooms away, and I make it there without difficulty. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to call this house a mansion, but the room I now find myself in wouldn’t be out of place in a palace. It’s richly decorated, 18th-century style, in blue and silver. There’s another doorway on the other end, and one of the longer walls, to my left, is covered with shelves, all of which are lined with ornate silver music boxes. They’re all individually numbered, and #5 is one of the farthest to the left, about mid-way up.

It occurs to me that people who decorate rooms like this usually don’t like other people coming in and messing with them. But, at the same time, this place has the look of an archive. It will probably be OK, then. I take the music box off the shelf. It has its number and what seems to be some notes about it carved onto the top in a rather messy handwriting.

I open it there—but unfortunately, I can’t really remember what happened then, although the dream kept going. Before carrying it back, I notice what looks like a bone flute lying on the floor, the only thing out of place here. Perhaps a child was playing with it and left it there, I think.

(8.11.18)