Blue_Opossum

Morning of October 19, 1975. Sunday.



I would not call this a nightmare even though the physical awareness and changes were quite extraordinary and somewhat unnerving. I wanted to wait a bit before posting this, until I was able to locate some of the older photos, but will post it now.

It is based on a cypress knee my father retrieved from a deeper area of the Florida swamps in 1967, I think. The intriguing thing about cypress knees is that they often take on amazingly lifelike but grotesque anthropomorphic forms. My father used to gather very large numbers of these cypress knees from deep swampy areas. He mostly only used either the anthropomorphic ones to make mostly lamps - ones that usually looked like arms with five-fingered hands in various positions, large “hands” on their own, legs with knees or “feet”, and so on, or ones that were really surreal-looking. He said he found one once that looked just like a pregnant woman standing in the reeds but was too big to retrieve. Apparently there are people who carve cypress knees, but many already look weird enough (my father never carved any, he just used them as they were with a bit of sanding and varnish and installed the wiring and sockets).

What annoyed me later on was that he painted the cypress knee he found which was so close to a ghoulish human-like head (not in exact shape, but with all the main features) that it was hard to believe it was a natural formation (unless you had the experiences of learning how fairly common anthropomorphic cypress knees were or how weird they were in general), but it was. He did this to bring out the startling “features” more from a distance. This cypress knee had two “bulging eyes” in the correct location, with even the seeming lid detail and the two irises, even. It also had two nearly perfect “ears” but which were mostly inward implied “ears”. It also had a raised triangular but skeletal-like nose formation, and two human-like “lips” (partly open) - and all of this was in the “correct” location when seen as a “head”. He made a lamp from it like everything else he found, but when it was returned by a person who was supposedly terrified by it (it was a gift I guess), he decided to keep it after taking the wiring out (which was just inserted through a small tunnel made by hand drilling) and jokingly called it a “Martian head” or “ghoul’s head” at times. It was also about the right size for a human head. A lot of people could not believe their eyes when they saw it (mostly unlearned city people, though, who had not been around nature much - and who to this day often think anything they had not seen in the city is unusual or actually “alien” - it boggles my mind, frankly).

My dream related to having fallen asleep on the bed in my father’s music room where he kept the knee on a dresser at the time. He had painted it white with other colors given to the detail of the “eyes”, “nose”, “lips”, and “ears”, mostly. (We never gave it a name, by the way). In my dream I am looking at it “face on”. I eventually feel myself rise up into the air and move towards it, sort of hovering. I then feel myself “splitting apart” into thousands of tiny gnat-sized pieces - an extremely strange awareness. I still would not call it a nightmare, as I did not panic as with actual nightmares. There was a sort of higher-pitched “buzzing”. This was not relative to sleep paralysis and was not as vivid as similar dreams of hovering and physically changing. This was much like an OBE I had heard people talk about but it did not have the “magnetic displacement” sensations that I had in events I considered to be actual out-of-body events (in terms of actual waking nerve energy perception - where I was awake with my eyes open and could see my limbs but only be able to move a “ghost limb” for a time).

I eventually got rid of it, although a relative may now have it (from retrieving it from things I had placed for removal - people did get things from there - but I am not certain of everything that people got). There are hundreds of other cypress lamps my father made out there somewhere. He retrieved and made more than most people in the 60s and 70s. A few of my relatives have older photos of the “head” somewhere (both originally unpainted and painted); I will try to post an image or two one day.