Blue_Opossum

Morning of October 1, 1988. Saturday.

Dream #: 7,957-03. Optimized 2 min read.

My dream concludes briskly. Its foreground is defined by rich imagery and lively movement but without adequate realism. (Its content is unrelated, but the outcome has a similar essence and momentum as a childhood dreaming experience in which Toby and I rescue Brenda from a fire.)

---

It is late morning in La Crosse. Without evidence, I assume an accident has occurred in the factory where my brother-in-law Bob is working. The mentation does not infer any details of the accident. I remain standing near the street, about half a block from the factory (probably Machine Products Co. Inc. - where Bob works in real life, though lacking its correct appearance). The rest of the setting is a featureless lawn. There is a sense of urgency, but I do not interact with my dream’s surreal content. There is awe but no concern regarding Bob’s fate or how he might recover.

An ambulance suddenly arrives off to my left, but I do not focus on it. The ambulance crew rushes into the factory. Immediately (with my dream not including any intermediate details or realistic timing), I see my brother-in-law lying on a stretcher, being quickly carried into the foreground by unfamiliar young men in white. Bob is oriented with his head away from me, though partly at an angle oriented to my right. One man holds the end of the stretcher near Bob’s feet, though grips it from behind him while running forward. The second man is supporting the other end.

Bob is on his back, with only the right side of his body remaining. His left side is missing as if he was vertically cut in half, yet there is no blood or gore. Even so, he seems to be alive but semi-conscious. The exaggerated stride of the two interns is vaguely reminiscent of a Mad Magazine Don Martin panel. The impossibility of the scene does not register with my dream self as such.

---

This dream is merely a waking trope, correlating with the absence of mind-body connectivity resulting from sleep. Its self-evident causation is immediately recognizable.

Half of Bob’s body on the stretcher is an atypical feature caused by anticipating vestibular system correlation, feasible mobility, and viable physicality in emerging from in-dream sleep paralysis (of which I usually am only instinctually aware other than when I navigate the hypnopompic state). Bob is this dream’s sleep simulacrum, a fundamental factor of my dreaming experiences each sleep cycle for over 50 years.

---

A lifetime of experience has taught me that waking tropes usually do not have a real-life meaning or significance. Why would they? They are fundamentally the result of navigating dream space or emerging from sleep. Whether sleep simulacra appear as deceased, sleeping, in suspended animation, or with surreal or impossible injuries as here does not have to correlate with anything other than my depth of sleep and my anticipated transition into mind-body reconnectivity and wakefulness. Even the sense of urgency is often irrelevant, sometimes triggered by an insignificant sound in the environment.

---