memorable

I am in a lush forest with two people. I climb a thick tree because I am trying to escape from a girl known simply as "Neuf". Neuf has two people with her and they are hunting me like an animal. The man Neuf is with has a gun and he will shoot me on sight. I decide to climb a tree, moving stealthily from limb to limb as I go higher and higher. This action is extremely vivid. I am given instruction on where to climb from the people I am with. I eventually decide to climb down when I think it is safe. I am alone now. I meet up with "Neuf", who is also alone. She jumps on my shoulders and I carry her around. We become friends and she helps me avoid the man with the gun and the woman who is with him. Both of them are still hunting me. I begin to feel unsafe again and start looking for the tree I climbed down from. I want to get back up to safety, but there are so many trees in this forest, I get lost and can't find my special tree. The man with the gun suddenly emerges from a trail and looks my way. I quickly duck down another path. I suddenly see my "special tree", but with Neuf on my shoulders I can hardly climb it. I instead wait for my two my friends to come down. The man with the gun and the woman go down another trail and we lose them. Dreamt 1/30/2017

Note: I met a girl the next day at my work who perfectly fit the description of "Neuf" in this dream. Her hair color, her body shape -- everything, perfectly. I told her about this dream and she wasn't surprised. She is interested in astral travel and lucid dreaming and believes dreams can be meshed, or shared. As far as 'Neuf", I only know it is the French word for "9" or "new". Her conjecture is that it may have something to do with the lunar cycle.

I am at a dignified office party, a party which takes up two floors of a department store. There are partygoers travelling up and down the escalators like shoppers at Macy's. Nobody's face is distinguishable; everyone is a shadow figure. The building is filled the sounds of conversation, laughter, background piano music, and wine glasses tinkling. The predominant color of the party is brown -- the walls and carpet and light fixtures are all brown, invoking a very seventies feel to the aura of the interior. There is a black Baby Grand piano on the first floor. Groups of people are huddled around it with drinks in their hands as some unseen shadow figure plays smooth jazz.

As I ponder the ambiance of this party, I wander the floors seemingly invisible: nobody tries to talk to me, nobody recognizes me or even alludes to the fact that I'm there. I seem to be a ghost. When I realize this, everyone in the building suddenly freezes. The piano music stops. All the shadow figures freeze in mid-sentence, glasses raised, and the place is enveloped in total silence. I will myself to rise above them like a spirit and float around the department store. I float past them down the escalators, along the corridors, the breezeways, over the indoor balconies. To me it looks like an empty department store filled with dark, faceless mannequins.

I eventually leave the building and float out into the city. I walk amidst the rubble and ruin of where famous skyscrapers once stood. I begin to look for my brother in the rubble, but I cannot find him. I suddenly translocate from the demolition site to a warehouse filled with boxes and pallets and heavy machinery. I am now holding a glass bottle filled with a white, milky substance. I drink from it and it tastes like a vanilla milkshake/energy drink combo. Two warehouse employees join me and together we look for my brother. We make our way all the way to the back, expecting to see him sandbagging and hiding from the boss, but he's not there. I am wearing blue jeans and a blue button-down shirt -- dressed just like the other workers. I then realize that I too am on the clock now, and we shouldn't be back here. I look around cautiously and tell the two guys that as long as we hang here we should be safe from detection. Dreamt 1/20/2017

I am sharing a hotel room with my sister-in-law, Michelle. We have separate beds. We appear to be on some sort of road trip. In the past, Michelle has given me CD's of J.S. Bach's music as gifts. This is because my wife had told her he is my favorite composer. In this dream, I am reclining on my bed and she is asking me questions about him. I try to explain why I love his music so, and describe what I experience when I listen to his art. I also give her some interesting biographical information on him. At some point, I get up to go to the bathroom. There I see an old, 80's-style transistor radio. As I push the chunky "play" button, the radio suddenly shapeshifts into an old library book on Bach. Glorious harpsichord music pours out of its pages when I open it. The music is elegant, exhilarating, exquisite...and wholly original. I marvel at the fact that I've never heard these Bach works before. I sit on the bathroom floor listening to the sounds, utterly stupefied.

The more I listen to the sounds, the more I begin to realize that this music is of pivotal relevance: it appears to be the missing link of transition between the high baroque which Bach epitomized and the lighter, more refined strains of classicism pioneered by Haydn and then perfected by Mozart. I ruminate in the dream that although musicologists conclude Bach is merely the culmination of the baroque, here I am listening to proof that Bach was also responsible for the transition into classicism! Academia will have to rewrite the textbooks!

Dumbfounded, I continue to listen to the music. As it plays on, I find myself more and more enraptured, enthralled and utterly amazed at how beautiful this music is. The synthesis of the two idioms is seamless. A lurking sensation however begins to surface in my mind as the music plays on: being a Bachian scholar, in reality I knew of no such transitional link existing in his music. This thought continues to wrestle in my mind and eventually nudges me toward a waking state. Upon awakening, I can still hear the tinkling and chiming and delicate phrasings of the passages of hypnogogic music, not yet completely faded. Motionless in bed and with my eyes still closed, I cherish the vanishing wisps of melody for as long as I can until at last they submerge back down into fathomless ocean of my subconscious. Dreamt 1/17/2017

I am at a roadside café with a buddy of mine. There's another guy tagging along with us, but we don't know him very well. He may have been a hitchhiker we picked up. He is annoying, and we'd like to get rid of him. The waitress is a petite older woman with shoulder-length dirty blonde hair. She is wearing a traditional diner waitress uniform, with the apron sashes tied in a bow in the back. She is carrying a pot of freshly-brewed coffee and is bustling about the diner like a busy bee, filling coffee mugs and taking orders. I start up a friendly conversation with her when she comes to our booth.

She begins telling us about her hometown -- a place I'd never heard of by the name of Alkie, Texas. I keep asking her how to say the name. To me it sounds like the diminutive of being an alcoholic. Taking advantage of her southern congeniality and realizing there may be a way I could make some money, I ask her whether or not Alkie had big, upper-scale homes. She tells me there are indeed several wealthy neighborhoods, and then gives me directions on how to get to them. As I fish for more information, she proposes I take her car to go check out the neighborhoods for myself. After I reluctantly agree to take her car, she comes back from the kitchen with three keys stuck to a piece of white, laminated cardboard: one key for me, one for my friend, and one for the annoying guy who is tagging along with us and whom we can't seem to get rid of. He gets real excited when he sees "his" key, but I don't give it to him. I separate it from the cardboard and put it in my pocket.

She takes us outside to her car, an old white sedan, and wishes us good luck as she heads back inside the diner. Pulling out of the parking lot, it suddenly dawns on me I have no recollection of the directions she gave us. I just drive around aimlessly, looking for signs that might indicate how to get to Alkie. When it starts getting dark, I pull up to an old abandoned church. I'm not sure why I stop here, but the place seems familiar; it appears to be a place I recently visited in another fragment earlier that night. I have a nagging sensation that I have some unfinished business here. The three of us get out of the car and head toward the rectory. It is now twilight.

As we approach the door, we pass by two suspicious-looking men sitting on a stone bench. They stop talking and watch us. We enter the church and I quickly lock the door behind us. The church is dark, silent, empty. I peek out the little window in the door to see if the men on the bench had followed us, but all is quiet. The inside of the church is a bit unsettling. It appears that we entered through a side door leading into a kitchen. The sanctuary is to the right. The two guys I am with stay in the kitchen while I walk into the sanctuary.

There is a coffin at the altar. An old pewter candelabra sits on it, with extinguished white candles melted halfway down. In an instant, it all comes back to me: there was a funeral taking place in the church during my last dream fragment, and now it was over. But why didn't they bury the body? I suddenly realize I am in a locked, dark church with a dead body. I look around the sanctuary and see several people sleeping in lazy boy recliners. The recliners are where the pews used to be. Someone reclines too far back and falls out their chair. Other people then start waking up because of the noise. I see their faces and start to recognize them as the funeral-goers from the dream I had. It appears they had waited for me to return. They are friendly. In the back of the group, I see an extremely attractive blonde smiling at me. She captivates my full attention, and I forget everything as a powerful jolt of sexual arousal shoots through my body. Fade recall. Dreamt 1/15/2017