The Fourth Factor

I am hanging out with co-workers and getting to know somebody who’s apparently just been hired. Her name is Marie, and she’s from Canada. In addition to working here, she’s a grad student working on a music degree, which she's now almost done with. She's currently working on the composition that will be her thesis. She shows it to me – via some sort of electronic device, I think.

The music is notated on manuscript paper, but instead of the usual note shapes, there are little horizontal rectangles that stretch out for as long as the note is held, rather like a midi display. The inside of each rectangle is patterned in ways that indicate something about the music. I hear it in my head as I read, with the patterns calling up images and connotations in relation to it.

The first bar begins with two long Gs an octave apart played by instruments in the violin family – I don’t identify them explicitly in the dream, but given that it’s written in the bass clef, almost certainly cellos. The rectangles contain the patterns signifying darkness and light. The impression this makes is hard to describe. Poignant, maybe – a suggestion of a cavernous space vast enough to hold them both at once. It continues, but I can’t remember the part after that so well.

16.5.20

The dream starts out with a scenario very much like the waking one I must have just left: having trouble getting to sleep. I’m initially on a thin mat on the floor of a room in a house, in a sleeping bag, but I give up and move the sleeping bag to the couch, where I do finally manage to fall asleep.

The dream I subsequently find myself in is a lucid one. It went on for long enough to where entire segments of it have faded from memory, and I’m no longer entirely sure whether I have the order of the things right. But here goes.

The earliest parts, probably, were of flying over a city at night. I’m just looking around, observing my surroundings. I spot a brightly lit area—tennis courts—and fly down. But as I’m getting close, the lights suddenly turn off, leaving me in the dark. I imagine my wings—which I’ve been doing without until now—and use them to propel myself up from just above the ground. But not long after that, I figure that it might be better to walk—there are people I’m looking for here, and it might be easier to find them down there. So I land and continue going that way.

This city seems to be a modern one, and the area I'm in is well lit. To my right, I spot a large building that looks like a hotel, and further on is another one. No people around, though. I pause to examine some graffiti carved into the gray paint of a metal pillar, possibly supporting an overpass. Most of it is illegible scribbles, but I distinctly read the name “Joseph”.

Nobody else seems to be walking around. I do eventually spot some people (specifically, four guys and a ferret) through the glass-walled corner of a building and have a brief conversation with them, but it seems to cut off partway through, and I find myself as a disembodied point of view, looking at a bunch of grapes. They’re hanging on a vine that’s grown around a tree in a forest. I remember reading something on Dreamviews about being able to play with the perspective of visual imagery—and there’s no way in hell I’m going to be able to visualize that well while awake, so I figure I’ll try it now. I find I can change the angle just by intending to, can zoom in and have a closer look. Even close, it looks incredibly realistic.

But before I can get even closer, there’s another transition, and I find myself in a house. I’m near a large window—I can’t see anything outside since it’s light inside and dark outside, and it just looks black, but I figure I’ll jump through it and see what happens.

I jump straight through the glass as if it wasn’t there and find that what I saw before was actually accurate—there really is nothing here but featureless darkness. I don’t even seem to have a body anymore. I consider the situation. I’m not worried about waking up: I recall that I spent quite a while lying awake before this—having correctly remembered my waking life circumstances rather than mistaking the dream I fell asleep in for real, which isn't always what happens in these situations—and so I’ll still be catching up on sleep.

The idea occurs to me to sing a song, one I remember singing in choir when I was a kid. I then think that it’s kind of a silly song—why would I want to do that? But no, it’s better to go with my first thought. It’s probably the right one—it’s better not to second-guess this kind of thing. And so I sing it there.

Long ago, in a far off land,
Lived a child who loved to sing.
She opens up her fragile heart,
And the song, it takes wing…

Although it’s not exactly like I’m singing it, since I still seem to be somewhat disembodied. I’m surprised by how good my voice sounds here, though. It resonates in a way I wasn’t expecting in a space that appears to be a complete void.

At some point after that, after some unknown transition, I seem to be in the same house as before, just looking around. It has multiple floors, and above one staircase, I find what appears to be a clock playing a waltz-like melody. It sounds a bit like a calliope.

As I listen, it occurs to me to try another experiment. I clear my mind, getting everything else out of the way, then wordlessly sing, improvising a melody that might come after what I've already heard. And I find that what I'm singing exactly matches the tune the calliope clock is playing. It's as if, one way or another, we’re drawing from the same source, which is fascinating. So it is just me after all.

There’s quite a bit that happened after that, most of it involving the man who lived in the house—but, unfortunately, I can only remember the very end, as he was walking out. Shortly after that, I wake up.

(3.10.18)