Blue_Opossum

Morning of June 11, 2017. Sunday.



My wife Zsuzsanna and our children as we are now are at a carnival, though curiously, a group of people are in our house at one point (mostly in our lounge room) who are apparently waiting to enter another area. I do not see them as imposers and even consider how there are not that many people around. There is the typical ambiguity of the setting being an unlikely essence of indoors and outdoors at the same time, a common factor of my dreams since early childhood.

A photographer is present in a few different scenes. He reminds me of Al, the Italian manager of a pawn shop in La Crosse, who I have not seen in nearly twenty-five years.

Although some of the photographs he takes seem okay, many are very poorly done, often cutting off the person’s face below the nose. I have the strong impression that the photographs he takes that turn out well are the result of random coincidence.

Zsuzsanna and I sit to the right of an unknown family. I sit to Zsuzsanna’s right. I assume the photographer is going to take a few good photographs of the scene. However, when I look at them later, I see that my face is only visible above the mouth and in one photograph, the one I look at the longest, both my eyes are closed. I show Zsuzsanna and relate my opinion of this photographer as not being very good. I notice in the last photograph, my right eye is closed and my left eye is open.

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The photographer is of course this dream’s personified preconscious. He is not really confrontational here as in many other dreams. The purpose of the personified preconscious is to initiate the waking transition and in some cases, as here, to give evidence that the dreamer is dreaming. The subliminal anticipation of the hypnopompic jerk is only one of several factors in this waking symbolism. The preconscious is more of a biological necessity, though not always personified (for example, is sometimes an animal, sometimes an event or feature of a setting, but always fairly obvious if one understands dreams). The nature of how the preconscious waking factor is rendered, and what character plays the role in a particular dream, sometimes seems completely random. However, looking more deeply, there is usually more than one layer.

In this case, the photographer is played by a man who worked at a checkout. A checkout is a form of liminal space waking symbolism. (The analogy is that a person is done shopping and ready to return home as akin to leaving the dream state, or “checking out of the dream state”.) This type of hybrid characterization, though always unique, has occurred in thousands of my dreams, with the same waking symbolism and implications.

It is not that common for me as my personified subconscious (temporary fictional dream self) to be The Sleeper. This element is typically projected as something else, even faulty technology. In the last photograph, one of my eyes is open, which is an emergent consciousness factor. (My mouth is not visible in the photographs as I cannot speak coherently while sleeping.) Zsuzsanna and I are oriented in my dream as we are in bed in reality (that is, she is to my left). There seem to be a few types of instinctual dreaming (non-lucid dream control). In addition to the state where the dreamer knows he is making the dream (and yet does not even remember or know what a dream is), there is the state as here, where the dreamer is more passive to events, yet where there is the subliminal knowledge of being asleep but not direct or creating viable lucidity. There is also a sort of halfway point when I am next to Zsuzsanna, my dream attaining real environmental orientation while still within the dream state (more common and sustained in my childhood dreams).

Of course, a carnival symbolizes the dream state itself (that is, a place not relevant to the usual day-to-day reality, though my family had been to one recently).

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Morning of June 11, 2017. Sunday.



I am riding in the back of a taxi. The driver, a dark-haired male in his thirties, is unfamiliar. Zsuzsanna is with me. There also seems to be at least one unknown female present as a passenger. She makes unusual comments as we ride through a mostly unlit area, as if she is uncertain of the intention of the cab driver or where we are going. We go through an odd area between two exterior (presumably) walls in a more isolated part of the unknown city. The walls are irregular (more like rock faces) and seem to have recesses with unknown features, perhaps living creatures, but this never becomes clear.

Several different times, the taxi goes up a staircase, similar to the one on Rose Street (but somehow never down one). I do not consider this unusual, even though we somehow are eventually outside and at ground level again, to later ride up another high flight of steps. The last staircase is slightly steeper than the previous but there is never any sense of fear or even wariness.

Finally, we get out of the taxi on the second floor of an apartment building, apparently where the driver lives. This does not seem unusual to me. (In fact, my dream self had no backstory memory or any destination in mind at any point.) The driver walks over to an unusual “table” in his kitchen, but which looks more like the walls we saw earlier, and is actually like a large irregular rock (though flat on the top) in the shape of a rectangular prism. The driver exclaims “Oh!” (as if surprised by something unseen) and waves his hand, but there is nothing there. He mentions that a wasp had emerged earlier from the “table” and seems to think that this event is also transpiring presently (though it is not). I do not feel threatened or alarmed in any way and calmly mention to all the others that there is nothing there.

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In this dream, the preconscious shows me, several times, the “staircase as consciousness shift” factor (here, as implied waking symbolism). Still, there is no discernible change in the waking transition as such (though in contrast to going up, going down steps typically either vivifies my dream or triggers full lucidity). Even more oddly, he pretends the flight symbol (hypnopompic start precursor) is present in the last scene when I do not see it or feel the “return flight” mood at all. (Obviously, I still eventually wake.)

It is a general rule that the preconscious becomes more dominant (even aggressive or uncommunicative) over time during a particular sleep cycle. Obviously, this is because waking up is a biological necessity. This did not seem so much like a glitch as a “practice run” inclusive of my usual waking symbolism over the last fifty years.

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