The Fourth Factor

The dream seems to be set within some kind of video game world, and as part of the game, I have to go out swimming in the sea and do something with the various fish swimming below the surface (I am no longer sure precisely what the point was supposed to be). One particularly large shape seems a little too interested in me, and it’s only after repeatedly beating it off that it gets the message that I’m not dinner and comes to the surface.

It is a shark, and it proceeds to tell me a story – one that I can already tell is unlikely to have a happy ending from a human point of view, although the shark itself is completely oblivious to these implications. I am annoyed with the game for making me come all the way out here and do this. I do not enjoy punching sharks. I do not especially like being buttonholed by them, either. But, I reflect, that is always the problem with open mics.

-20.3.22

In the earliest parts I can remember, I’m traveling on a ship with a friend when the water underneath starts to swirl. Soon, a whirlpool has formed, and we’re spinning around as the wall of water grows higher around us. It now seems to be just us in the water – the whole dream was a bit iffy on continuity – and I see a smaller spiral under the surface near me. I move away, but it follows. It strikes me that this thing is only after me, not my friend, so I pass them something which is supposed to be a useful tool of some kind and encourage them to leave.

I am alone now. The ship (or something, anyway) seems to be back, and there’s nothing to do but wait, I figure. I pull out a book—The Hobbit—so I can read until it feels like manifesting.

At some point, a dark, oppressive energic atmosphere begins to form—not something visible, but a feeling hanging over everything—and it does show itself – in the form of Bilbo Baggins. Simultaneously with this, I now seem to be Frodo. “Bilbo” starts going on an exaggerated diatribe about what an awful book “The Hobbit” is. This goes on for quite a while, interspersed with my occasional sarcastic responses. The continuity continues to be rather sketchy, with “Bilbo” occasionally disappearing and subsequently reappearing elsewhere, and once, apparently accidentally, walking into view undisguised before the previous one has finished talking, appearing as a figure cloaked in black, face hidden beneath a hood.

But then, a little later, it’s back to “Bilbo” again. He now has his own copy of “The Hobbit,” enclosed in a bubble wrap packing envelope which he’s holding by one corner as if it’s something disgusting. There’s a whole tub filled with bubble wrap beside him. I haven’t been taking anything that’s happened the least bit seriously so far—I’ve been treating it as if it’s some kind of unavoidable everyday nuisance rather than an actual threat—but somehow, in this whole improbable series of events, it is the bubble wrap that gets me thinking critically about what’s going on. “Bubble wrap. Why?” I say aloud. There is no bubble wrap in Middle Earth. I think it over just to be sure. No, it’s quite impossible. Couldn’t happen.

I then proceed to do the only logical thing one can do under the circumstances: transform myself into a cat and leap into the bubble wrap-filled crate. But it’s just then that the dream ends, and I awaken.

4.11.21

(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

In the earliest part of the dream I remember, I'm stepping into an elevator. I seem to be able to see through its walls, into the shaft and the mechanism it runs on, and the rough, dark area around it. I want to go up a floor, but after getting about halfway there, the elevator stops. Then it goes back down, past the floor I got in on – down and at an angle as it follows the track. It seems to be headed down to the basement floors, which annoys me. I hate it when this happens.

I think it must have dawned on me around then that the earlier experience I was thinking of took place in a dream, and that this too was a dream. But it’s hard to remember exactly because once I’m out, the dream turns out to be one of those lucid ones where my senses don’t seem to be working properly. I can’t control the dream; even moving around is laborious. But, knowing that these are problems that often goes away on their own, and that I rarely experience them in outdoor areas, I keep going, trying to make my way up to the surface.

Eventually, I do make it up. I’m in an unfamiliar house with large, light rooms, including a sunporch, visible through a glass window. Since the problems from before don’t seem to be affecting me anymore, I step straight through the glass to the sunporch, then through that glass to the area outside, where there’s a small lake.

There’s ice on the lake, which gives me an idea: I could try ice skating in a dream. But the ice is breaking up and thawing even as I watch, and it doesn’t seem quite right to freeze it again. But this is a dream, after all, so why shouldn’t I be able to skate on liquid water?

I step out onto the lake, surrounding my bare feet with a slippery layer of air, and kick off. It works perfectly, a bit like self-propelled jet-skiing. It’s an exhilarating experience.

The lake is long and irregularly shaped, with small, rocky islands, purple and green with lichens, and beds of rushes and lily pads. It’s bounded by a stone wall too tall for me to be able to see over, not far past the lake’s edge in some places. And there now seem to be a number of cats around, sitting on the rocks – watching me, perhaps. Near one of the wall’s corners, I see one that looks like the feral cat my household took in but who died of cancer the previous week. I reach out and pet him – something he would never allow a human to do – and he responds affectionately.

After making another round of the lake, I’m starting to get curious about that wall. What’s on the other side of it? I circle back, pick up speed, and jump towards it with the intention of going through – and suddenly find myself bodiless in empty space. I guess there was NREM on the other side.

I prepare myself for maintaining awareness in this state – but it only lasts a minute or so before I wake up.

-27.2.20

I seem to be visiting my parents, who live on an island. I’m busy for most of the day cleaning out a cabinet or wardrobe. In only another hour or so, there are going to be guests over for dinner.

We’re out of the house now for some reason. Mother is concerned that I’ve been exerting myself so much, and I should drink some water. I’m not particularly thirsty but say I will. My father and I go off to a sort of convenience store-like shop nearby to buy a bottle, but the water is very expensive – almost 10 dollars for a water bottle (though I can’t swear it wasn't some other currency). That’s right, I remember – there isn’t any fresh water on the island, so it all has to be shipped here, and that makes it so expensive. My father asks if it’s OK if I don’t get the water, and I say I’m fine with it. Again, I don’t particularly care either way – I just want to keep them happy.

Not long after that, I step onto what unexpectedly turns out to be an elevator – a floating glass elevator, à la Willy Wonka. It rises up and flies partway across the island to a large building, then down several stories into its basement. I briefly see the various underground floors on the way down. I consider getting off and heading back – I don’t want to be late for dinner – but rumor has it that the headquarters of the secret police is on one of those floors, and I have a history with them. Just walking through their headquarters would be asking for trouble.

So I wait as some other people get on the elevator and it continues to the third major hub on the island – it isn’t very large, and so there are only the three. This one is on the other end, farther away – a place I’ve never been before. The elevator flies over lawns dotted with groves of trees. It’s dusk now, and we approach and pass a blue light – some sort of decorative sculpture marking the approach. This whole area is like an estate, or a place that was one at some previous time.

Once we’re there, I get off. There’s a tower there – perhaps I have to climb down the side to get to the ground, but one way or another, I wind up climbing on it. It’s a fairly small building, though tall, made of square, grey stones, each of which has a shape cut through it large enough to make a foothold or handhold – circles, squares, stars, etc. Each stone is also marked with two sets of letters, one a capital letter, the others one or more lowercase ones. As I grab hold of one hollow stone, I feel a switch flip on the inside edge, causing the opening to light up. The whole thing is a giant cipher key, I realize. I don’t have any messages in need of decoding – but if I happen to find any, I now know exactly where to bring them.

I climb around for a bit, playing around with it to make sure I know how it works. But once I’m back on the ground, a woman starts yelling at me for climbing on the tower. Guess I wasn’t supposed to be doing that. I stay calm. What she’s saying doesn’t make much sense – really not a coherent accusation against me at all, just anger. I ask a couple reasonable questions. She answers, still in an angry tone. But then, having lost her momentum, the absurdity of it seems to dawn on her, and she starts laughing. I laugh, too. It seems like everything is OK now.

12.2.20

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

As usual, I seem to have become aware that I’m dreaming without being able to remember how it happened. I’m in a house along with two other people. I believe that they’re other dreamers—not sure now on what basis.

In one part early on, I’m looking at a still scene in front of me, like a picture. It takes me a couple minutes to puzzle out what’s happening in it. A young man is shown looking into a body of water like a lake. The sky is colorful and full of varied light, with a couple odd-shaped clouds in the foreground. I figure out that the cloud that looks like a unicorn’s head is going towards the cloud shaped like a dragon’s, which represents an attack on the sun by the moon, and the man is watching it through the reflections in the water.

When I’ve realized this, the scene comes to life in front of me. The clouds converge, and the sky darkens, with the moon appearing. It behaves strangely at first before taking up a normal course in the sky. The man gets up and heads in the direction it has gone. He’s going to try to fix the situation.

A lot of the dream faded from memory when I woke up, but in the subsequent parts, I was with the two dreamers. I only remember one person well, a guy. He is apparently already familiar with this legend—I get the impression he knows a lot of them.

At some point quite a bit later on, the others are somewhere else, fighting a monster of some kind. I guess some people don’t feel like they’ve really accomplished something unless there’s an epic boss battle at the end—but I just don’t find those things very interesting. While that’s going on, I’m standing near a grove of palm trees, above which the moon is floating in the form of a little, glowing crescent shape. Once we get ahold of that, we’ve won. According to the man, however, there’s something odd about the palm leaves, and a person will die if they touch them. But they just look like normal palm leaves to me, and so I figure I’ll take my chances with them. Anyway, I can fly in from above and avoid the leaves that way.

First step: make wings. I’ve been using shortcuts so much lately I figure that this time, I’ll do the full procedure like I used to. I stand facing my shadow on the ground, and will it to grow wings. Immediately, I see them unfolding, and unfolding further, out to their usual considerable span.

But this time—perhaps in response to my wanting to get a better view of what happens when I do this—there are also reflective surfaces nearby, although I can’t say now just what they were. I can see the wings themselves reflected in them—and since I’ve never set an intention for anything beyond generic wings, it’s a bit of a surprise to see how they’re turning out—red-gold in color, and faintly glowing. I climb up onto a nearby object—again, I can’t remember specifically what it was—and from there, hover over to the trees and grab the crescent moon.

In the process, though, I brush the tips of a couple palm leaves. And, perhaps because of that— or perhaps not— I soon find the dream fading around me until I’m in complete darkness. I’m still lucid, though. It feels as if I’m moving forward, but with nothing visible except for occasional faint shapes in the darkness, it’s impossible to tell—or, for that matter, tell how much time is passing. But after a while, I feel like it’s a good time to go back. I open my eyes, intending to be in the previous setting.

And I’m there, as before, and so are the two people. I can remember even less of this later part than I can the previous one—although I can recall the second person definitely being female in this one, whereas I can remember nothing at all about them from the first. There’s a series of events involving a deep pit filled with boiling water that opened up in the house. At some later part, the others seem to have lost lucidity. They're acting somewhat zombie-like, and are unresponsive to my efforts to get their attention. Not long after that, I wake up.

8.12.18

In the dream, I’m watching a film. I think I was watching it on a screen at first, but in the part I can remember well, I’m just standing on scene, watching as events unfold—or, rather, fail to unfold, as this seems to be the kind of film where nothing much happens.

The main (and only present) character, a man, is in a kind of apartment with a desk or a dresser that he’s sitting at. There are no walls: I can see directly into the strange landscape beyond, where the horizon is dominated by mountain peaks, including two volcanoes. The action is divided into distinct segments, with each one ending anticlimactically. In the last one, the man calls his girlfriend on his cellphone, but nobody picks up. This seems to illustrate the unremitting futility of life—or at least you’d think it does, based on the dramatic treatment it gets.

But once that comes to an end, all sorts of odd things start happening: a nearby pool of water starts to bubble, and one of the volcanoes erupts. I’m now in the backseat of a car with several other people, trying to get somewhere safe. But then the other volcano, which is straight ahead of us, also begins to erupt, the bright magma spilling over the rim. The woman who’s driving comments on it. I tell her she’s got the name wrong—she’s thinking of the other volcano. The one ahead of us is Vesuvius. And then I start laughing because of course what matters in this situation is making sure we get the name of the volcano that kills us right.

I’m also laughing because I’m fully aware of how ridiculous this geography is. I know none of this is real, and that makes it hilarious. As if in acknowledgement, all kinds of odd and impossible things are appearing out of nowhere around us, even as I watch. A gigantic man wearing a striped shirt materializes off to our left, over a large body of water. He steps from island to island, striding in the same direction our car is going. I’m still laughing too hard to speak, and so it’s someone else in the car who says it: “I found Waldo.” They also seem to find the whole thing funny.

28.4.18

This dream took place in a city than my brain identified as Dubrovnik. And it wasn’t entirely unlike Dubrovnik—it was by the sea, and in the right sort of general landscape, only hillier, and it did have a similar aesthetic. This wasn’t the first time I had a dream set there, although I don’t think I identified it as anywhere familiar that time.

In this dream, the city seems to be gearing up for a festival, with some tents and stalls already up, some still being set up. The city is full of people, which strikes me as an unusual circumstance, as if I’ve been living here rather than a visitor like them. As I hear people talking among the crowd about the best route to a certain location, I know the answer. But right now, they’re heading in the right direction anyway—at least, if they want to see the preparations along the way, which is what I want to do.

Across a canal or some kind of long, rectangular pond, there are yet more people near a fountain, including someone I know—an old classmate of mine, an Italian exchange student. She and an unfamiliar man are embracing there. In front of me, some other people I recognize as classmates have also noticed, and they don’t like what they see. One young woman in red makes a disparaging comment rather loudly, clearly intending to be heard by them. I don’t know what the story is here, but I find it hard to believe that it could possibly be any of their business.

I run into her again later on, as part of a group of performers, doing some kind of open-air act—oddly, it’s as if they’re all hovering above the water of a canal like the other one, only wider. I wave to them as I pass, and they wave back, but nobody else is even acknowledging them. I have the impression that they’re afraid to for some reason.

At some point, I’m further up, out of the city proper. I pause to look down a broad stone staircase—really, more of a terraced sidewalk—that winds its way down to the sea. The sea is shining and calm, pale blue and pink, as if the sun only rose a short time ago.

And further still, there's some kind of special site. I climb on a big rock to get a better look at it. The whole area is blocked off with a sheet of glass and has a rather stage-y appearance, as if it were intended to be seen from this angle. To the right is the entrance of a cave, where cacti and other scrubby plants are growing. To the left are four reclining chairs in a row—I assume that means this place will be open to the public at some point, since I can’t imagine why they would be there otherwise.

The ground they’re located on breaks off with a sheer cliff face which I’m directly facing, and I can see something interesting there: some kind of symbol carved in the pale stone. It's a small circle with two lines inside it, which are arranged like the hands of a clock when it’s 10 o’clock, and coming off the bottom is a long, wavy line ending with a wedge, like an arrow. It strikes me as vaguely alchemical. I wonder what it signifies—it definitely seems to suggest some kind of downward motion.

Some other people have gathered here while I’ve been looking—I recognize someone else I know. The last time I spoke to him was very awkward, but he doesn’t mention that, which I’m glad of. He’s telling me about the cave. But unfortunately, I can’t remember much of what he says—only that something important took place here a couple millennia ago.

8.4.18

I’m driving in an unfamiliar town, where I’m going to attend an event of some kind. I have the impression it has something to do with Kyabje Düd’jom Rinpoche? At first, I’m trying to find a parking spot near a junction, but all the spots there seem to belong to the nearby buildings, so I turn the car around and head towards the waterfront, closer to where the event will actually be held. It’s a long, straight street with small, gray paving stones and narrow, wooden houses painted light colors on either side. At one end of it, I can see boats, their masts blocking the view further out—to the harbor itself, presumably.

I look around for house no. 11, which is where the event will take place, so I can park nearby. The address plates are large and clearly display the numbers, rather like the Prague address plates do. The plates seem to be in the right general order, and so I don’t have trouble finding it—but there do seem to be both odd and even numbers on a single side. I’m not sure whether it was this that clued me into the fact that I was dreaming, but it definitely happened right around then.

This is a dream: what will I do? Checking out no. 11 still seems like a pretty good idea, but first, I decide to take a look around the area. I walk along the street, towards the harbor—but as I walk, it seems to change from a street to an underground tunnel, and when I reach the end, I’m not by the open sea, but looking into a square room full of water. It seems completely closed off and is made of some yellow-red stone, mossy where it's close to the waterline. The water is packed with boats—not big ones like I saw before, but little ones, more on the order of rowboats.

There’s something a little ominous about this place; it’s impossible to imagine what purpose it could possibly be serving. If this were a Zelda game, I’d fully expect the door to slam behind me and some giant monster to rise up out of the water and attack. I wait. The water seems to be rippling in a rather odd way. After a little while, a couple of larger waves swell up, rolling beneath the layer of boats. But they just die down again, and the water becomes perfectly still. I watch for a little while longer, but it looks as if that’s all that’s going to happen, and so I head back towards the house—now, an entrance partway along the tunnel. I open the door and step in.

An Asian woman greets me: it seems I’ve been expected, although there doesn’t seem to be any kind of a gathering here as I thought. The woman also seems to be expecting me to have a female friend along. I consider telling her that I’m here alone, but actually, there’s no reason I can’t invite someone else. I tell the woman I’ll send them a text message and they should be here shortly.

I pull my iPhone out of my pocket. But somehow, all the people I can think to invite are male. An idea occurs to me: I start spelling out A-N-I-M-A using the numbers which correspond to those letters. The phone is a bit shifty, as such devices often are in dreams, but not enough to impede me. But partway through, I remember that I’m not supposed to have an anima, being female and all. So I make it end U-S instead and send the ‘coded’ message off. Well, I guess I’ll see what happens. I put the phone back in my pocket and we sit down at the table in the next room to eat.

The table is a large one, but there are only three places set—hers, mine and the empty one. We have some kind of fish dish, which tastes good. Not much in the way of conversation is happening, and so I’m mostly focusing on remaining aware, making sure I don’t forget this is a dream. It’s an interesting feeling, being here in this place, which feels so real and yet so unreal. I could get up and do something else, but I want to see where this is going.

But at some point, I wake up—due to some environmental noise, possibly. But it’s only a short time before I fall asleep again, and find myself back in the house, in an upstairs bedroom this time.

Through a window, I see branch falls onto the roof of a neighboring building—a large, blocky structure. The roof looks like it’s in bad shape, with large chunks of tile missing—this place must have got hit by the storm too, I figure.

I’m eating a cup of yogurt there. It’s chalky and bland. Probably low-fat. Why am I eating this awful stuff? This is a dream, I don’t have to eat it. I place the cup on a dresser or some similar piece of furniture. Downstairs, I hear the door of the house opening, voices in conversation—somebody has arrived. Maybe it’s the person I invited in the earlier part of the dream. I’ll go down and check. But right now I’m wearing a nightgown, so I ought to put something else on first.

I step over to the full-length mirror, which is standing near the door, and look at my reflection. I’m wearing a plain nightgown, like a short dress with spaghetti straps. Oddly, I don’t seem to look quite like myself—my face is different, though not completely different, and my eyes seem to be the usual color. I step back. It’s been a while since I’ve done this—and actually, I’ve never done exactly what I’m about to try, but it doesn’t seem like it should be too hard. I’ll create myself something more appropriate to wear. I extend my hands, palms upward, feeling energy gathering.

But it doesn’t feel right—there’s some kind of a resistance there. As I notice that, I also see something standing behind me in the mirror—a furious-looking panda bear approaching me. I turn around, looking into the room—but it's empty. There's nothing there. I look back at the mirror: furious panda. Well, this is a little creepy. But because it’s a panda, being furious just makes it look ridiculous rather than menacing. I step backwards into the room with one hand behind me, feeling for the spot where the panda ought to be based on its reflection—but I wake up before I can get to it.

6.3.18