Night Vision

It is late at night (or you could also say very early in the morning). I’ve been out dancing somewhere, in an earlier part of the dream I’ve now forgotten, and am now on my way back to my car. Or, at least, it starts off as a car, but then it decides it would rather be a motorbike, and that little segment of the dream replays with the change. It’s in a line of vehicles on one side of a little triangle of parkland where what looks like a wooden caravan is just packing up to go. They seem to have left fliers on the nearby vehicles, so I look at the one on mine - a half-sheet of peachy pink paper that says they’re holding some kind of musical event here tomorrow (as it kind of looks like they’ve done today as well). I stick it in the folder inside my messenger bag and stow it in the motorbike’s compartment, and the people in the caravan give me a friendly wave as they drive past.

Possibly left over from its brief time as a car, the motorbike has a built-in GPS, which I turn on so I can find my way out of the city, which is an unfamiliar one to me. I don’t ride it, though - I plan to walk with it until I’m close to the highway. As it turns out, though, the GPS is thoroughly confused and does not seem to be taking me any closer to where I want to go. The city seems to be a pretty nice place, old-fashioned with a lot of cobblestoned areas not accessible by car (although it does take me along a major road a couple times, and I get another sighting of the caravan). At one point, I pass a lit-up fountain in a tiny, irregularly shaped plaza. It’s about at that point that it becomes clear that the GPS still has no idea where I am and seems to have just been taking me in a big circle.

The city also has what strikes me as an unusually large number of people out and about at such an early hour. I have seen some of them enough times to suspect that they are probably lost too. I ask a nearby woman - she looks to be in her mid-20s, with pale skin and wearing a dull blue hooded jacket - where she is going. She says she is on her way to church. Oh, right - I guess that’s also a thing people sometimes do at ridiculously early hours of the morning. (She has an accent that I can’t place at first, but a little further into the dream, after my brain has had time to make the necessary connections, it occurs to me that it’s probably Finnish.) On further questioning, it turns out she’s got to go in the same direction I'm headed, and so are a couple others people nearby, so we decide to go together. I will use my phone GPS to take use there, as I’m sure it is more reliable than the other one.

It already seems to be going a lot better - the layout on the phone is actually matching up with the streets we’re walking along. At one point, we arrive at a major thoroughfare, and across the street is a large, baroque-looking building. I’m struck by how beautiful it is, the moonlight shining down on it from among the dramatically piled clouds. Do we go left or right from here? I check my phone. Oddly, it seems to be telling us to go straight through the building. But, now that I’m looking for it, I can see that there’s a narrow passageway that we can take. No crosswalk, but there’s barely anything on the road, so we just wait for a truck to pass and then cross.

Somehow, the passageway ends up taking us inside of the building. (The actual transition is rather vague, and so unfortunately I can’t say exactly how it went with taking the motorbike up that staircase….) This area is brightly lit, with white walls and largely white furnishings, and is vaguely familiar to me. People seem to be busy there setting things up in preparation for the next day. We end up stopping to talk to some people near a large table, where several of us sit down, and at some point a man approaches me, asking if I can help get my parents’ cat down from upstairs.

I agree, and he takes me to an adjoining room where there’s a kind of tunnel with a ladder in it leading up into a loft area. That’s where he is. I’m not looking forward to this. I have memories of this place, and that passage is a little narrower than my shoulders, which makes it uncomfortable to go up, but even worse coming down. I can only imagine what it’s like coming down it while trying to restrain a highly strung cat.

I climb the ladder partway, up to where I can see a little ways into the room, and call his name. Immediately, I see his pointy little Siamese face poking over the edge, looking down at me. Straightaway, he jumps down - the tunnel is sloped towards the top - and approaches me. He recognizes me. I was not expecting to get this lucky.

When he’s close enough, I grab him. He squirms, but I hold on tight, knowing it’s probably going to be a lot harder to catch him if he gets free and runs back up there, and bring him down to where the man has a carrier ready for him. I drop him down through the carrier’s open door, which he then closes. It’s done.

(As a note, the cat in this dream died a couple weeks ago - he was an old cat, and his kidneys were starting to fail - which gives an interesting dimension to all of this. You gotta wonder sometimes….)

17.5.25

The basic scenario of the dream seems to be that because one of the classes that JT and I are responsible for is on a trip to a nearby city for a week - one about an hour's drive away - we have to go there as well. There are some scenes of travel, with last part of the journey seemingly being via helicopter. There are some interactions with the guy piloting it that I can no longer recall.

While there, we meet up with a number of other people who belong to our organization - not based on real people, but in the context of the dream, they are supposed to be people I usually only see a couple times a year, for training and such, since they’re based in a different region. One of these is a young man with blond, spiky hair and tattoos all over his arms, including some that depict Baby Mario’s origin story (making this the third inexplicable Mario reference in not very long, especially inexplicable in this case since I don’t actually know the story, and it was probably just something my dreaming mind invented). We've apparently gotten along well on the occasions we’ve met previously, and at some point, he says that if I’d like, I can stay over at his place for evolution sometime.

I am initially confused by this and run through a couple possibilities of what he could mean until I “remember” that Evolution is the name of a party with a somewhat notorious reputation that happens around here. “Let’s talk about it later,” I say. (In the dream, there are clearly no romantic implications to this exchange.)

The classroom where JT’s and my students are is in a large building, on an upper floor. It seems to have been made to be difficult to find, with a number of entrances camouflaged into an ornate wall. Inside, it looks almost like some kind of laboratory. The students are already there - mine, anyway. JT and his are in an adjoining room. There are a number of scenes here where nothing very definite or memorable happens, although at some point, JT comes by in a wheelchair. I’m concerned and ask him what happened, but he seems brusque and doesn’t acknowledge that anything is wrong. OK, so he doesn’t want to talk about it. I won’t push it.

21.12.24

Touched by a Yeti

I have traveled somewhere with a large group of people, possibly by ship. I’m a different person (male, early 20s, with a Spanish-sounding name). We’ve just arrived here. It’s unclear exactly what kind of setting this is, but it’s clearly not contemporary, and maybe entirely fantastical. Everything is currently covered in snow.

I am happy because I have a new sword, and it is awesome. It’s a long, slightly curved blade, and there are etchings of animals on it – wild boars, maybe others. I have it out, showing people, when a strange creature appears – I know it to be a yeti. It’s white and shaggy, but actually a little smaller than an average human – overall, a very vague visual impression. (Although maybe not vaguer than my visual impressions of dream characters in general. Or, really, people in general, as I am pretty much face-blind and have had to work out other ways of recognizing people.)

Anyway. The creature is lightning-fast and moves in unpredictable ways, including short jumps between locations. In the brief time they have to react, people are trying to get away from it, but it just moves straight past them and appears right next to me. It touches my arm, which it does something to me that makes me lose consciousness.

I’m woken up by someone what seems like only a short time later – same setting, only more people are around now, and the yeti is clearly not. I go with some people to have a conversation with someone who can explain what’s going on. The person (who seems a lot like NR) explains that the creature is the guardian of this place, and it didn’t like the sword – or, rather, its symbolic charge, so to speak – what it represented, which was being an outsider here and coming in intending to fix problems as an outsider, without being a part of it, which is arrogance.

This makes sense to me. I now feel as if I understand the creature – not just from the explanation of its behavior but because I can tell that I now have some kind of connection with it. I know that it’s here all the time, even when it’s not manifesting physically. At some point later, as I’m talking with some other people who haven’t yet heard about the incident, I mention the yeti to them, and I turn around, expecting to see it there behind me, and it is – and from their reaction, I can tell that they can see it there too. I also know that eventually, when the time is right, I’ll take the sword out again, and use it this time, but in cooperation with it.

28.5.23

Cycles

I’m in a room in a house at night, sitting at a keyboard. (It does seem to be me this time. Probably.) I’m playing with settings, designing sounds that I’ll be able to use for projects later on. While I’m doing this, I have a strong sense of my aunt’s presence, which seems connected with the keyboard in some way even though she isn’t there in the dream.

Later, I’m somewhere like the dining room table of my current house, also at night. My parents are there, and I’m showing them something on a laptop: a vst instrument that I’m thinking about getting. It is called The Curse. The sound has an evolving quality to it, and it is accompanied by simple images that change alongside it as it cycles through its various stages. It had six different settings, all represented by images of people shown in bright neon outline against a black background going through different transformations. The first was fairy tale-like – that’s all I can remember about it. Another image was of a woman holding a baby: it showed the woman growing old rapidly and then becoming young again as the baby continued to look the same. Some of the images I didn’t see the cycles for were of a young man and woman holding wineglasses in a celebratory pose, and of a woman in a short dress wearing a helmet like the one Athena is portrayed in – one of the only lone figures – and a man and woman I surmised were in some sort of muse/artist relationship, since the woman was holding a quill pen.

1.6.23

Smell Epiphany

I am a different person (female, Asian, maybe around eight years old) living in a house with my family. The house is somewhat similar to childhood home #5, at least in the size/location of the kitchen area. Something is bothering me – I’ve forgotten some of the points related to this – so I go outside to sit by the garden. There’s a steep, rocky slope lined with trees that leads down to a small garden where vegetables are growing. I sit on the slope, shaded by trees, and stay there for a while.

Later, I’m in a building with my father and older brother, walking down a hallway. It’s a busy area, and many of the walls are lined with shelves full of bottles and boxes. He seems to be some kind of medical professional, and he is giving us a lesson, something both my brother and I find boring. He tells us to take a certain amount of a certain kind of powder on a shelf, so we do, putting it containers we have with us. He asks us how we can tell whether it’s good quality or not. I know the right answer, and so I give it: by its smell. He tells us to go back to where we got the powder and smell it. We do. My brother goes first, and when he’s done, I lean down to smell it. The stuff looks, and also kind of smells, like curry powder. As I smell it, I realize for the first time just how many dimensions a smell can have. It’s like a whole world. The idea that people can extract meaningful information doing this was just abstract to me before, but now it’s real.

5.6.23

Also a Couple Lucid Dreams

I won’t describe them in detail, though, since I don’t think walking/flying around and looking at things would make for very interesting reading. The first (10.6.23) had an interesting setting – I get lucid after the dream’s ‘plot’ seems to come to an end, fly through a wall, and start exploring. I gain height and fly around an industrial park at night – brightly lit in different colors, with the reflected light from the overcast sky giving it a vivid atmosphere, while lightning flashes in the distance. I go in and out a number of times and make my wings appear at least twice – notably, just based on my shadow, they seem to be smaller than normal, which maybe makes sense as I can fly perfectly well without them, and so there’s no real need to make them look like they’re actually serving some purpose.

In the second lucid dream (13.6.23), after some dream events I can’t recall very clearly, I’m leaving a school and happen to see by NR looking at children’s artwork hanging in the hallway. He’s wearing a wide-brimmed hat, and so I can’t see his face. I walk past, but then it occurs to me that I should really take the opportunity to talk with him. I turn around and see that he’s begun to vanish, and I realize that I’m dreaming. I decide that I’ll go somewhere else, just leaving the location up to the dream.

I keep walking towards the entrance, close my eyes, and let the dream fade around me. My sense of having a body, and therefore of having my eyes closed, vanishes completely, and once it’s gone, imagery begins to arise again. In a flash, I see bare tree branches in a thick, white mist. Accompanying the visuals is a strong impression of early spring. Then everything comes into full focus again, and I’m standing in a bare garden underneath a bare-branched tree by a pond. I (wrongly) identify this as the backyard of childhood home #5 and am a little disappointed – just think of all the more interesting places I could have ended up. But maybe there will be some value in revisiting the place here in a dream – it’s not exactly one I have good memories of.

And so I walk up to the house, jumping through the garage doors but then opening the one to the inside normally for some reason – maybe I just expected it to be unlocked. The layout of the house does not resemble the one I’ve mistaken it for in any meaningful way other than having hardwood floors. I walk through the various rooms, ground floor first, then upper floor. Nobody is around – I only see a couple cats in one of the rooms. My alarm awakens me before I can explore the whole house.

I seem to be staying with a large group of people in a sort of vacation rental house. It’s late night, early morning, and having woken up, I’ve checked on the cats to make sure they’re still here, where they’re supposed to be. (I notice at some point that I’m not wearing pajamas, but an olive green cargo vest over a multicolor shirt, which strikes me as a little odd.) The cats are fine, but it looks like other people are up and about as well – the other young people there seem to be gathering together in an unused room, and there’s an atmosphere of anticipation, as if some spur-of-the-moment plan is being put together. I don’t really feel like going in to see what’s going on, though – I walk past to the bathroom down the hall.

After that, somebody actually comes along to invite me to join them, and there’s a jump to another location, this one outside, along a street of what seems vaguely like a small city. We’re near an ice cream vendor and his cart, and somebody has apparently managed to get a really good deal on a large quantity of ice cream. The man scoops different kinds out and hands it over to the people who are also out here now. An older man explains to me what’s going on: everybody is planning to travel together to Prague to see the Pablo Neruda museum. (This places the location firmly in Dream-Prague, as no such thing exists there, as far as I know.)

He has a picture of it, like a newspaper clipping in black and white showing the front of the building, which strikes me as familiar. There are four odd statues out front, roughly human-shaped. One seems to have a head the shape of a crescent moon. The man states that the museum is located in the Place of Right. This confuses me for just a second. Then I tell him that the name would probably be something more like “Law Square” or “Legal Plaza” translated into English. My memories of the place suggest that the association with the law comes from a former era and is not representative of the present-day location, that it’s located near the Mala Strana area (possibly by association with Nerudova Street) or a bit south of that, and that there’s a Gothic tower in the square as well as the museum.

All of us are in Croatia, and I’m not sure if I feel like traveling all the way to Prague, especially since I visited the museum relatively recently. But it would be an interesting experience in its own right, traveling there with all these people. And maybe they could use someone who knows their way around there. Somebody brings me a cup of ice cream, white with flecks of chocolate or cookies in it. I take it. I don’t really like ice cream that much, especially not first thing in the morning, but it would probably just sit there and melt if I refused.

-12.5.22

I am in what looks to be some kind of large home improvement store, having travelled here to meet up with some people. It is a very large store: towards the back, the aisles actually turn into streets, which is where I need to go. I’ve been this way enough times to where I’ve got the route memorized, and when I reach the signpost with a number of street signs, I take a left onto Montaigne Street.

Montaigne street has a rather sleazy vibe, with a sort of over-the-top neon-over-historic-district aesthetic. But it seems completely confined to this particular street, and then it’s back into plain downtown area. However, something is strange: the street I’m looking for doesn’t seem to be here. This is an area full of little winding streets, so I look around for a bit to make sure I haven’t missed it, then head back out to where the store begins and go along Montaigne Street all over again. But the street really seems to have gone now.

I go back to the store area and browse the stationary near the front as I consider what to do next. Maybe I forgot to check something, and the meet-ups aren’t happening right now. It’s going to be a few hours before I head back, and I need to figure out what I’m going to do for dinner at some point. I also decide, in a moment of latent lucidity, that I’m going to change the name of Montaigne Street to Montero Street, as that seems to fit it better. In the end, I just decide to look around the store for a while longer.

Towards one corner, I find a series of furnished rooms. They’re a bit like display rooms you might actually find in a home improvement store showing off appliances or furnishings, only these ones seem to be set up as miniature haunted houses. I enter the room on the far end first, one that’s almost completely dark. This one seems to have a “pet ghost” theme. As I explore the various furniture and parts of the room, certain things happen, triggered by my presence, such as noises or motion, and even the visible ghosts of cats. But I don’t find the place scary at all. It’s actually rather relaxing. I lie on the bed in the corner for a while listening to things rustle and thinking about dead pets from times gone by.

After a while, I move on, going into a couple more rooms I can no longer remember before heading into what’s clearly set up as a haunted nursery. This room has a lot more light coming in, so it’s easy to see the furnishings, most prominently, a young child’s bed – not actually a crib, but something that seems made for children about that age, maybe from an earlier era. The bed is dishevelled, and there are several piles of feces either on it or on the floor nearby, hinting towards neglect. It doesn’t really look real and definitely doesn’t smell real.

As I examine a chest on the side of the room facing the store, I suddenly see a large group of ghosts standing together, looking in my direction. One of them, an older gentleman in a suit, gestures that I should come over to them. I do, and they lead me to a long table set up for a meal. It seems that the store has staffed their haunted rooms with real ghosts, and now that they’re off-duty, they’re closing up the rooms and inviting me to eat with them.

It’s only once were seated and the meal begins – tea and pastries – that they begin talking, or possibly that’s just when I become able to understand them. The older gentleman is seated on my left, and we have a conversation in which I distinctly remember telling him about my cat, Thomas, who died 12 years ago.

At some point, the scene changes – the implication seems to be that time has passed, and I’m travelling somewhere with three or four of them. One opens the back door of a black car, and another climbs in. I realize I’m supposed to get in as well. I notice I’m wearing a smooth black coat coming down somewhere between my knees and waist and a pair of black leather gloves.

The scene changes further after that to a completely new setting – and while the store, at least, was almost certainly located in the U.S., this place has more the vibe of a developing country, possibly in the Caribbean. The man showing me around takes me past an area where many small boats are docked. He seems to feel this is a touristy area, not really representative of the place itself.

At a clothing market, somebody comes up to him. It seems he’s needed somewhere immediately, so it looks like I’m going to be on my own for the next couple hours. We agree to meet back up here in that general timeframe – this doesn’t seem to be a place where people make appointments more precise than that.

15.7.21

(Note: The longer my dreams are, the harder it is for me to remember details, particularly conversations, and this was a long one. There’s several hours’ worth of material here that I can only remember happened at all because I can remember remembering it in a later part of the dream, and this does raise questions of whether they ever actually played out. But, for what it’s worth, it doesn’t feel to me as if that’s what happened, and I do have many cases of knowing dream memory is working in that way to compare it to.)

The earliest part I can remember is of a disaster taking place, a flood sweeping through a public building of some kind. Everybody is trying to get out. I’m one of the last out, but I wait, holding the door open so that the waters don’t forcibly close it and trap the one person who’s still there. It took him a while to believe this was actually happening (understandable, considering how weird it is), so he didn’t get out as quickly as everyone else.

After this series of events is the biggest memory gap, which seems to mainly consist of meeting up with a large group of people and preparing for some kind of expedition together. I become lucid not long before we’re going to set off, although it’s not so much me realizing that it’s a dream as it is the unconscious knowledge that it’s a dream, which I’ve been acting on this whole time, becoming conscious. And this sort of makes it feel as if I’ve been lucid the whole time, if that makes sense.

I’m looking out the window of a house onto the rolling fields beyond as it happens. I still have some preparation to do here, though, so I’m still here packing as everybody else is leaving. I’m taking my hiking backpack, the black one with yellow trim. It occurs to me to wonder whether I need to do this in a dream, since I can just make things appear if I need them. But I have the impression, based on earlier conversations, that I might not be able to do that in some of the places we’re going, and so I’ll want to make sure I have essentials with me, at least. The last thing I grab is my brown aviator-style jacket, which I fold and pack into the backpack before buckling it and heading downstairs and outside.

I can just see somebody disappearing past the other side of the house, down a broad stone staircase. That’s where everybody’s gone. I try flying part of the way, but perhaps because of the hiking backpack—even though it doesn’t feel heavy—it’s hard to get more than a couple feet off the ground. But flying seems to be slower than running anyway, so I just run around the side and down the stairs.

I’m now in an area with several platforms rising a distance above the ground. Next to one on the far side is a cliff wall with a small tunnel partway up, a little above head height. A young women is nearby – it seems she had to stop to do something before going onward. I jump onto one of the platforms, where I see some piled-up clothing. I recognize it as a kind of uniform for us to wear. It looks a bit like a karate gi: loose pants and a shirt that ties around the front, white, though a little discolored with age and threadbare in places. On some of the edges, flowers are embroidered in pale colors. I put it on over my clothing.

Jumping onto the last platform and up to the tunnel—taking off the backpack and pushing it in first—is practically effortless, much easier than it would be in waking life, which makes it kind of fun. The tunnel is not tall enough to walk in, and it narrows considerably not far ahead, so I push the backpack in ahead of me. It barely fits, and I can see it slide down once it gets past the narrow point, where the tunnel slopes downward. I barely fit, too – I actually have to turn my head to the side to squeeze through. But soon, it’s large enough to where I can crawl again, and then walk upright.

The tunnel is made of squares of some smooth material, solid black in the center but with a stripe of red-orange around the edges that glows, lighting the way. As I walk, it slopes further downward and eventually drops me into a corridor with a grimy, institutional feel to it. All dimly and artificially lit, as if I’m somewhere underground.

It has a distinctly unpleasant vibe – although part of the reason may be because of what I know about this place. It is actually a sentient environment, and not a very nice one, and now that I’m inside of it, it’s going to be tracking my every move and shaping itself according to my actions and reactions. It’s not the destination – just somewhere we have to pass through on the way. There’ll be a test at the end that has to be passed before we can get out – but this place doesn’t like people leaving it and will be actively throwing obstacles in our way.

My backpack isn’t here – the place probably hid it somewhere, and so I’ll have to be on the lookout for it. I turn towards the right, reading the plates on the doors as I go by, deciding which room to enter first. The place looks to be some sort of school judging by what they say.

As I walk, faint, unpleasant feeling-tones arise, like the ghosts of memories with an archaic, dark quality to them, although they definitely don't involve my personal past – not in this lifetime, anyway. Or maybe they’re anticipations of what I’ll find here, behind the doors. Or maybe both. I also see a set of stairs leading downwards, but I don’t want to leave this floor just yet.

After reaching the end of the corridor, I head back, still making up my mind. It’s not terribly important where I go first, but I am aware that, as the first deliberate choice I make here, it will give the place some insight into me, will establish the course of how things will go. I decide on a room about midway between the end of the corridor and where I started from labelled “Faculty Lounge.”

As I open the door, I’m surprised by what I see. It’s a little room, somewhat like the bedroom of a hostel, with two bunk beds, a table off to one side and some assorted furniture – overall, quite nice apart from the lack of windows. But the really surprising thing is that it’s already occupied by two people from the group I started with.

Sam is there—Sam, maker of ukuleles, fixer of anything with strings and frets, host of concerts and an accomplished musician in his own right. His dog is there with him. The other person isn’t waking-life familiar, although he does somewhat resemble one of my coworkers, with dark hair, pale skin and some kind of facial hair, I think. A dog has come in with me as well, a large, black one. I don’t pay much attention to it besides noting that it’s mine and hoping that the room isn’t going to be too crowded now.

Sam greets me – but he uses a different name, a man’s name. They must be seeing this place and this situation differently than I do, I realize. It had been mentioned at the earlier gatherings that it would appear differently to everybody – but I had assumed that we would also be going through it alone, individually, and so it hadn’t occurred to me that I’d find myself in this kind of situation. But I can roll with it.

We talk for a little while. At one point, one of them advises me to be careful not to give this place “the impression that I’m somebody it can f*** with.” Sam mentions that he’s working on a puzzle—it seems to be set up on the table there—and I say I’ll leave him to it. I mention, though, that I’m good with puzzles, and he invites me to come help put it together. This must be part of their test, I realize – and it strikes me that maybe it isn’t a coincidence I ended up here to help them with it, although from everything I’ve heard, it would be uncharacteristically benevolent for the place to intentionally direct me to them.

The puzzle seems to mainly feature cute baby animals, and it is close to being finished. I help assemble the remaining pieces as Sam tells me some anecdotes he’s heard about a 20th century Viennese composer. He can’t remember which one they’re about. I notice, though, that the bottom edge of the puzzle isn’t complete. Sam is stirring some sort of gooey blue liquid, and I realize that that will also be part of it: the tests, though different, all have one thing in common: incorporating two bowls of these brightly colored mixtures into them somehow.

14.7.20

I have arrived in a green area shaded by trees. It seems that I’m traveling somewhere, and this is a stop along the way. The dream doesn’t make it explicit, but this seems to be the Czech countryside in the early 20th century – more or less.

Gradually, other people arrive. I converse with a woman there as we wait. A couple large dogs arrive as well and are running around getting in people’s way. I order them to sit, figuring that they’ve just run here ahead of their masters, who won’t be far behind. They obey. One of them lies down, then rolls over on its back, obviously looking to get pet.

The car arrives – a distinctly old-fashioned one. (Although there is some uncertainty there, as if the dream can’t quite decide on what sort of vehicle it should be. They all tend to be more or less interchangeable in my dreams.) There isn’t enough room in the car for everybody, but since I was there first, I get to be on its first trip. The woman I was talking to has to wait for its next one.

I look around as we ride. The man next to me in the backseat is choosing the music that plays in the car via something rather like a touch-screen tablet framed in brown leather – much more aesthetic than the modern ones, I think to myself. Out the window, I see a turquoise river pouring over an oddly shaped stone formation into a lake – a place I’ve seen pictures of before but never visited. I turn around to continue to look through the back window as we drive by.

I’m aware, as I look around, that in the not-so-distant future this area will be devastated by war. It adds a poignancy to being here in this beautiful place.

The train – sure enough, it’s decided it would rather be a train now – approaches a platform, stopping under a curved wooden roof from which flowering vines hang down. An invasive species, I note. Parasitic to boot. But quite pretty, and so you can understand why people let it grow like this. In the future, there will be more of a push against it – but not so much here as in other places. A brief image comes to me of the future, of its yellow flowers filled with ash.

It now seems as if the woman from before is on the train too, and along with another passenger, we continue our conversation.

When I woke up, I remembered the following melody:




I don’t think it was actually playing during any part of the dream – my impression is that it was connected to it somehow but happening on a different level of awareness. I find it rather odd that it’s in C# major since that’s not a key I ordinarily have much to do with. Maybe I waited too long before transcribing it and my pitch memory was off? Or maybe it was just in C# major.

-31/1/20

I am going on a trip with some other people—vague impressions of preparation, of using a computer in a lab to take care of some paperwork I need for it—some kind of registration, maybe.

It seems to be a long trip. We are traveling by car, and after a while, we stop at a gas station. I go inside to find something to eat and am pleasantly surprised to discover they have marzipan here. I pick out a couple small bars of it, along with some other food for the road.

A little while later, I’m in a room belonging to my friend Nina—it seems to be in the same building, with the gas station just on the other side of a door. I’m examining some small statues on the shelves. The statues illustrate the “eight ways of dying”—which actually seems to signify ways of living, the idea being that they’re lifestyles that don’t really deserve to be called living.

There are two complete sets of the eight, and they both go about illustrating them in different ways. I looked at all of the statues, but the only one I remember vividly was the eighth one of the second set, which I was looking at as I woke up. The key symbol seems to be a snail, representing an unthinking, animal-like life. But while the sculptor of the first set has just portrayed the snail, the sculptor of the second—who seems to have a more fanciful take on things in general—has portrayed the snail crawling over a human corpse in a colorful stage of decomposition. Where’s Nina so I can ask her about these, I wonder.

I can also vaguely remember a couple other statues, also from the second set. The second statue showed a woman lying on a massage table surrounded by jars and bottles and things, and the fourth didn’t seem to have any living figures at all, but looked like a mineralogist’s work table might—rocks of various kinds scattered over it and a jar of rocks in the center.

15.4.18

(Note: I think the Buddhist ideas here are pretty clear, but it may be less obvious that it’s also drawing pretty heavily from Plato.)

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

I can’t remember how the dream began, which means that I can’t be sure whether I had realized I was dreaming and decided to fly around for a while or whether I had somehow realized that I could fly and stabilize my surroundings but not the full implications of it. But either way, that’s what I ended up doing.

It seems to be early evening, and I’m on a street where all the buildings are lit up with small, multicolored lights. The street is steep and winding—a little reminiscent of Nerudova Street in its topography and architecture—and it has a vibrant and exciting atmosphere, as if it’s a Saturday night and this is the place to go on a Saturday night.


(Click to enlarge (because I can't figure out how to make it bigger here))

I fly all the way up the street and then turn around and fly back down again. But it doesn’t feel quite as real as I know it could be. I focus harder, and I imagine hearing music as I fly along, and that seems to help—this time, it feels as if I’m actually there. I fly back again, and this time I try it while spinning around—something I’ve never done before. It turns out to be a lot of fun, seeing the ground change places with the sky.

Sometime later—in another dream, probably—I'm on a bus on some kind of a trip. I’m with a large group—many young children, some teenagers and a couple adults. There are also some children and teens there who are exchange students from another country. I have the impression this is a trip for the kids, and the teens and I—not sure of my age in the dream—are there to help out with it.

At some point, we make a stop at a large grocery store—the sort that’s often still open in the middle of the night, which it seems to be now. A group of us, including me, goes in. But a woman—maybe the person in charge—asks me if I could take the dog outside for a bit so she can have a chance to burn off some energy before we’re back on the bus. She has the dog there—a big, black dog, female, I think. I agree to it.

Once in front of the store, the dog goes sprinting off in a big loop, eventually coming back around to me. She immediately runs off again, and this time she returns carrying a stick in her mouth. Looks like we’re going to be playing fetch. But just then, I hear barking coming off from to my left. Two smaller dogs are there—neither one on a leash, I note—and the one that looks like a half-size pit bull is barking up a storm. I am instantly on alert: I have seen scenarios like this one end with furniture being toppled. But the black dog is not acting threatened or aggressive, and so it seems unlikely that a fight’s going to break out. I have a vague impression of the dogs’ owner nearby—but just then, my alarm wakes me.

8.2.18

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