The Fourth Factor

I am somewhere like a dorm room, which I seem to share with around three other people. The beds are really low, maybe just mattresses on the floor, and we’re sitting on them, listening to a woman in some kind of position of authority who’s speaking to us. She takes a feather comforter from somewhere and hands it to me to replace my current one. My bedding is all extremely tangled and twisted - I’ve slept badly. I tell her that it wouldn’t be that difficult to untangle it, but she still wants to give me the new one, so I take it and set the old one at the front of the bed. She then leaves.

My old friend Ona, who seems to be one of my roommates, is trying to tell me something now, but she’s wearing something over her mouth sort of like an underwater breathing apparatus, so I have trouble understanding her at first. Eventually, with the help of one of the others, I understand that she’s saying something about a concert she saw me play in yesterday – also something about how she had previously been familiar with only one of the composers whose pieces were played there.

This next part may or may not be part of the same dream – there were definitely parts after that one that I forgot, anyway. But I’m in a restaurant now. It’s a large, bright space, lit mainly by daylight streaming through full-length glass windows, but a little crowded – all the tables seem to be filled, and there isn’t much space to move between them. Saimi passes by the table where I’m sitting and makes some kind of signal to me with her hand. This somehow clues me into the fact that I’m dreaming.

I get up and follow her out to the balcony to talk. As I pass through the glass window, I can feel some sensations from it, especially the dividing metal bars, which is unusual and a little surprising – possibly it has something to do with the overall level of realism seeming especially high this time. Saimi watches, pauses for a second, and then opens a glass door and walks out. I jokingly say that I haven’t used a door in a dream for years now.

We jump down from the balcony and walk around while we decide what to do. It’s now clear that the restaurant is located on a college campus – one that’s dream-familiar to me from at least one dream I know I’ve recorded. Saimi says that before meeting up with me, she was waiting for my Aunt O so that they could see something together. She seems to want me to guess, so I do. A play? No. A movie? Also no. Apparently, it’s something like episodes from a TV series being screened somewhere on campus. She still wants to do this now, while lucid. I don’t think this sounds like a very good idea – looking at a screen for any considerable length of time seems like a pretty good way of losing lucidity to me. It could be interesting to see if my aunt shows up, though, and to talk with her, so I agree to wait with her. Since they agreed to meet in the restaurant, we head back there, flying back up to the balcony and going back where we started.

I figure I should probably do something to keep engaged with the dream. This doesn’t strike me as a very interesting situation to work with initially. I wonder, though: what if I try to read these people’s minds? I look around the room, getting a read of the atmosphere – just in a way one might in waking life. How should I do this? I focus on one woman sitting at a table near me, trying to access her mindstate. What happens is that the dream imagery itself seems to transform so that now I’m seeing her in something like a large version of a baby’s high chair, chewing a mouthful of food with evident displeasure. So the form of the dream changed to reflect my intention, rather than my experiencing her thoughts as some kind of verbal overlay – fascinating.

I wake up soon after, but quickly fall asleep again and find myself in the same setting, this time with my cat Ronnie. I’m trying to tie something around one of his paws, but soon I remember that I’m dreaming. I wake up again before I can do much of anything.

-16.12.22

I’m on a trip with my parents and an unfamiliar young man. We were all supposed to go to a casino—and they did actually go. But I didn’t care much for that plan, and so I’ve been off doing something else and only arrived back at the hotel room in time for their last trip there, late on the final evening.

I have the impression that this is a place they’re familiar with, but this will be my first time there. I’ve been told not to bring my purse with me for whatever reason, but I don’t like going around without writing materials on hand, and so I say that I’ll just take my wallet out before I go. But it seems my parents are so eager to get back that, rather than waiting the couple of minutes this will take, they go on without me, leaving the young man to drive us there.

Outside, it’s raining hard, and has been for a while, judging by all the standing water in the streets. As we go on, it only gets deeper, until the car, which is a fairly low one, starts having trouble moving forward. Some light on the dashboard has come on. He curses at the car—and quite probably my parents, who would have had no trouble handling this in theirs. I suggest that we just pull off the road onto higher ground, as some other cars seem to be doing, and walk the rest of the way there. It isn’t very far. He agrees to it.

The next part I remember clearly is being inside the casino, in a large room with a grand staircase, crowded with fancily dressed people. On the upper floor, near a restaurant area, I meet up with my parents again. It’s sort of like a buffet, with tables in a horseshoe shape, each one with an attendant behind them, offering samples of various kinds of foods to the guests. Mother is going to get a chocolate milkshake—apparently, a favorite of hers there—but my father isn’t interested. The idea doesn’t appeal much to me either, and anyways, this is all new to me: I want to try things out before I order anything.

He heads off somewhere else. I get some kind of a soup, and then head over to where they’re serving white wine. I try the sample they have there, which is pretty good—but they have all kinds of interesting drinks here, and this would be a good chance to try things I wouldn’t necessarily want a full glass of. And my mother is trying to get my attention from across the room, so I leave the table without ordering anything and head over in her direction.

Then, suddenly, I feel a spray of cold water—and the people around me do as well, judging by how they’re crying out. It seems someone is spraying people with a hose. I move out of the way, wondering what that was about. Maybe the casino staff themselves are responsible. The whole reason this place exists is to take money from people, after all—I think it’s best not to lose sight of that—and it wouldn’t surprise me at all for one to start charging people to keep things going nicely, once they’ve got them used to it.

Once out of range, I pause and kneel down to make sure the cat is still with me. He is indeed still there and comes to get pet. He’s an orange cat, an adult, though on the small side, and has been here with me this whole time. So far, nobody has noticed him—or else they just don’t care. But it’s still a little dangerous for him to be here with me, and so I’ve been making sure he stays close, waiting until I feel him against the back of my ankles before moving on.

11.5.19

A meeting is taking place beside a river between a knight and a woman. His name is Gawain. Her name is Lotus. It seems like the beginning of a relationship between them. But she can see into the future, and she knows that one day, he will kill her. And yet, she doesn't attempt to break things off.

I am seeing things from his perspective and from hers, and also from somewhere outside of it, where I don’t like the way things are going. And so I pull the scene apart, untangling all the little mental streams that are contributing to it and recombining them into three separate bundles. It will be easier to work with this way, I figure. Now I am in the kitchen of my old house in M--- with my mother, preparing a meal. I’m making the salads. But as I tear the lettuce into smaller pieces, I can still see the river there, and a little point of red light shining in the grass beside it. It’s easy to see and easy to avoid, but it still makes me uneasy.

In a different dream, I’m in a grocery store, although the building seems to be serving multiple functions. I’m there shopping with Saimi’s little sister, who seems to be around seven years old. After a while, I figure I’ll let her take care of a few things. She gets to do something all on her own, I get to read for a little bit—it seems like a pretty good arrangement. I tell her to pick out some plums—maybe three, whatever kind looks nice—and I sit down at a table there with my book of Rilke’s poetry, which I apparently have with me. She goes off and comes back a few minutes later with a single plum in a plastic bag. She places it on the table and then leaves again. A few minutes later, she’s back with another plum in a bag. Kids. You know there’s got to be some sort of weird logic behind this.

But now something else seems to be happening: there’s going to be a horse race here, inside the building, and Saimi’s little sister is participating, along with three other people. But the horse she’s on is a rather strange one: it seems to be made of some embroidered red material with yellow patterns in it, while still behaving like a living horse. But the race doesn’t begin immediately, and I awaken before it actually takes place.