Blue_Opossum

Morning of April 30, 2016. Saturday.



In my dream, my wife Zsuzsanna and our children, mostly as we are now, are living in a distorted version of the Barolin Street house, where we have not lived in years.

I am at the computer on Facebook and apparently writing a response to something my older brother Dennis (half-brother on my mother’s side) had written. I end up writing something about Thor (both flight symbol and lucid dream symbol but which does nothing here) and stating how it is good they are making movies from the Marvel comic books I used to enjoy reading as I was growing up. Oddly, I get the impression that the latest Thor movie is along the lines of an Elvis movie, and there are apparently scenes where a large group of girls is hanging around him, but I do not consider that as unusual.

Looking at the computer screen, I see that there are two responses to what I had written, each about a paragraph long. Oddly, I see that the user name is “But Dennis” and with no avatar. He has written mostly incoherent nonsense claiming that no good movies have been released since the 1960s and it is supposedly my brother’s fault (and I later inform Zsuzsanna of some of what had been written). The first part of each paragraph is a continuation of his user name such as in “But Dennis was responsible for the decline in…” (which is why he uses the troll name “But Dennis”; as he solely trolls Dennis). In real life, this had been utilized as the user name followed by such as “is feeling happy”, but the “But Dennis” as a user name seems a bit clever and I firstly think it might be Linda (a niece) doing this but it is not.

Soon, the very common downgrading shift occurs relative to technology. As I go deeper into my dream, parts of my unconscious that for whatever reason cannot accept computer technology, alter my dream without me even taking notice. Instead of Facebook being on my computer screen, it is now in a softcover notebook where the communication still somehow ensues in the manner of continuous Facebook posts. I consider the possibility of my brother replying to the strange unknown poster, but I do not notice evidence of this. Looking at the next page of the notebook, I see he has written more in fairly neat printing, though what he is saying makes little sense. He writes about how a certain sitcom of years ago was one of the last watchable television shows, but then he starts to write about Thor though none of it is actually correct in reference to either the movie or comic book history.

I notice page after page of his writing and begin to realize that he is insane and his trolling of Dennis may only be a random choice just from seeing his name once. Both his printing and paragraph content change completely from page to page. In the back of my mind, I contemplate how he must write out something then scan it and then upload it so that it appears in the notebook. It does not dawn on me what a ridiculous concept this is or cause me to reflect on the many other dreams where this sort of false technology has appeared. On one page the writing is very large but vertically stretched and slanting backwards which makes it impossible to read. (This is actually based on the trick where you hold a page horizontally up to your eye and then are able to see what is written when it is elongated over the entire page.)

I eventually come across pages that look as if they were written out on an old typewriter. I tell Zsuzsanna how he probably should have done that in the first place, but after that, there are more pages of scribbled handwriting. Finally, I reach a page where it supposedly shows his photograph at the top (somewhat like a Facebook banner). When I look at it, it first seems to be the actor Mitch Pileggi, who played Skinner on “The X-Files”, yet I tell Zsuzsanna that “I know him” and that it is my foreman from one of the factories I had worked at in La Crosse.

As is typical of the continuous inconsistency of dreams, he is now depicted as a blind Albino African who apparently had been homeless for a long time, though another homeless black male is in the foreground on the right (a direct giveaway to who this “dream journal” actually belongs to) and a Norwegian backpacker on the far left. I cannot be sure which one is the writer. I notice that the back of the notebook is torn and the last few pages are solely thick scribbles in felt pen. For some reason the faux logic of my dream changes completely and I come to the conclusion that he must have somehow placed the notebook in our house when we were not aware of it. “He must have done it around twelve o'clock,” says Zsuzsanna. It concerns me that someone had been in our house while we were sleeping and we had somehow not awakened at the time. (This is an obvious dream sign - talking about sleeping while in the dream state, especially in reference to what seems like someone leaving their dream journal in our house - but I do not catch on at all.)

And now the waking transition begins. It seems to be late at night. I go onto the porch and see a strange man on our sidewalk (of about fifty or more) looking cautiously at our porch. Though it still looks like the Barolin Street house in some ways, there is no fence. There are several young girls running around on our front lawn, all wearing pajamas. Off to the left, there is a square shallow foxhole (about six feet by six feet) with pillows along all sides. One girl jumps in and rolls to the center. Other girls stand about gossiping. This does not bother me as I consider that it may be some sort of school-related ceremony. The man comes up to our door. I push my steel barbell through the mail slot in case he tries anything threatening (blatant symbolism here), though he seems somewhat nervous. He speaks a bit incoherently and seems to be warning me of a couple other males in the neighborhood.

Strangely, our porch rotates to where it is now perpendicular in orientation to how it had felt before, seemingly facing north instead of east. Still, I do not pay notice to this change at all in my dream. A different man approaches our door. He is only about half the age of the other man. Again, I hold out the barbell in case he chooses to impose further. He brings attention to the strange insect nests on our porch. I lie and tell him that we are moving anyway so as to cause him to not impose further with his insincere concern. I look up and see a lot of strange features near the porch light including what looks like a sleeping bat, though it is actually some sort of strange black cobweb hanging down. One of the features looks like a large white fuzzy ball hanging from the ceiling, bigger than a baseball. “You have a Kapoosh up there,” he points out, stating that it is a type of very dangerous venomous ant nest (though a Kapoosh is actually for holding knives and is usually a cube, not a sphere). The concept of a singular ant living high up triggers vague but inconsequential doubt.

“Good, I wish there was a lot more, to keep people like you away from our porch,” I say sarcastically. (It actually represents my attempt to keep dreaming even though I am not lucid, as it represents the downsizing of the moon near the ceiling. This is why I am adamant against this “intruder” who is actually my emergent conscious mind sent to the porch-liminal point to wake me.)

Soon, a (fictional; nonexistent in real layout) door opens on the opposite side of the porch which apparently also leads to outside (and it does not occur to me that this is impossible, as it would actually have to lead into our bedroom if there was really a door there). An unknown male comes in and grabs me. The other male also enters the porch from the front. Even though the waking mechanism has already been triggered, I still decide to knock them back with the barbell but the first male grabs it and prevents its movement. Finally, I have had enough of this dream and become lucid in the last second. Even though it is futile and the waking mechanism is already nearing its end, I mentally change my right hand into a gun and shoot both of them and they go flying backwards in opposite directions.

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Many people who have legitimately and honestly worked with real dreams probably know that the porch of a house is a waking transition setting. This of course is because it is directly between one’s living quarters and the outside world in real life, to metaphorically render the state between deeper dreaming and the path to waking. Even more obvious, I should have also realized this from the dream signs (girls in pajamas and the foxhole with pillows around it as a play on “the outside world is also sleeping and dreaming now”) and thus would either let the less aggressive male instigate the waking mechanism or decide to become lucid and perhaps greatly lengthen my dream and awareness level. As it is, violence was needed to wake me (with the old “being killed” metaphor to “destroy” the dream self as it probably had originally been at the beginning of mankind).

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The notebook with all the different writing reminds me a lot of a teacher’s writing rubric standards guide with open response question examples related to a reading assessment, which shows how various students answered a particular query in their own writing, which displays vastly different levels of intelligence even in high school students, almost to a surreal degree.

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