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)

There is a woman—some dark entity had reached out for her, badly frightening her. She has shut herself away somewhere to get away from it, but it can still reach her. I can hear her screaming there—but I’m on my way to help her.

The first thing I have to do is get out of a sort of wooden elevator running down the center of the building. I seem to have entered this way, going down, but none of the doors are opening. Somehow, I can see perfectly fine into the space beyond the shaft, but the walls are definitely there, and the doors are not only solid but quite heavy. I’m alone here in the elevator, but in communication with someone else—someone I know to be my mother, although she isn’t my actual, waking life mother. She seems to be playing some kind of guiding or teaching role.

Above my head, everything just fades into darkness, like the heights of a cavern. Apparently, it doesn’t occur to most people who come here to look up for a while, and so this comes as a bit of a shock to them, but I can remember having been through this series of events before, and so this place holds no surprises for me. Besides that, I have access to a deeper understanding of the space I’m in: it’s defined by solfege, as if the intervals and their syllables are acting as some kind of abstract structural parameters, and they are also structuring what I am able to do in it and do to it.

Once I finally manage to get out, I find myself in what seems to be an iteration of my old house in M---. This version looks twisted, hollowed out, dark—actually, there doesn’t seem to be a source of light anywhere, which would explain why, even though I feel vividly present here, it has an odd visual quality to it, and the only non-black color I can see here is blue. I’m using night vision. The blue is brightest in the fog hovering throughout the house, moving as though stirred by currents of air. When this fog is concentrated, it indicates the presence of a ghost—or perhaps it simply is the ghost.

This whole place gives off a decidedly creepy vibe—a palpable sense of decay and malevolence. But the fact that I already know where all the dangers are takes the edge off the creepiness, as does the fact that this seems to be a case where there is no outcome but success. I already know things are going to turn out fine, and so I don’t let the place bother me too much.

Now the person who is my mother is physically here with me, a couple rooms away—although, either because the walls are in ruins or because I can see through these ones too, she’s still visible from where I’m looking around the living room. Nothing much seems to be happening at the moment. I’m just keeping an eye on the blue fog. There are some mirrors there in the room: I use them to check my form as I practice jumping from side to side, moving between stances I might need to use later.

(7.9.18)

In this dream, I ampart of a group, possibly of students, although we seem to be doing whatever it is we’re doing out in the streets of a city rather than in a classroom. At some point, I go into a shop with a few others. It’s selling clothing—skirts mostly, long, summer-y ones that look handmade, in a variety of colors and patterns, but some belts and scarves and things as well.

The things in the shop don’t seem to be in any particular order: in one part of the room is a big pile of loosely-folded skirts. I think one skirt looks interesting and pull it out to get a closer look, but it now seems to be a sheepskin vest with pictures and words on it, not really like anything else in the shop. I put it back.

I then look at a display of jewelry on one wall. It all appears to be carved out of some kind of iridescent mineral of many colors—definitely something natural, judging by the variations. Next to the jewelry are some plectra made from the same material. A young woman from the class tells me that there are more in another part of the room, so I go to look at those as well.

I find one plectrum there that’s blue, in a kind of boomerang shape. It looks interesting, but I’m concerned that it’s too blunt. Another is a brilliant red with little flecks of black and white on the edges and basically triangular, but with slightly concave edges going up to the point. I’ll buy that one, I decide.

12.6.18

Almost all of the details of this dream faded from memory when I woke up. All I can remember of the earlier parts was of a complicated plotline that seemed to involve three main character and ended with everybody getting onto buses.

I was watching everything take place, and I knew that something was going to happen soon—some conflict, I think. I now had a sort of abstract representation in front of me, a rectangular box filled with a blue sand-like substance. It was arranged in little wavy lines, most of them going only a short distance before being interrupted by other little wavy lines going in different directions. I traced a wavy line going all the way from one corner of the rectangle to the opposite one, cutting across the other lines. This would allow the people in the dream to move into action quickly once it became necessary. Their reinforcements would be able to arrive in the same amount of time as it would have taken them to travel along only one of the hundreds of tiny lines.

22.2.18