Blue_Opossum

Late morning of October 17, 1976. Sunday. (There were other versions which played out more like semi-lucid reconstructions, as this dream was more like a very interesting coherent story than is usually the case.)



There apparently is going to be a movie made of a class play regarding issues on pollution and habitat loss. I am to be the main performer in the opening of the film, which will supposedly be distributed to a larger audience. There is a sketchy mascot, a beaver, related to the line, “You too can be an eager beaver and help stop pollution”. The movie is to be made at a city dump which happens to be near a large otherwise clean lake where logging had been done at one time. The mascot drawing is not very good and reminds me somewhat of “Go Go Gophers” and he appears in a concentric oval frame with lines going outward around between the two ovals, with the school logo above that and with the antipollution line under that.

I arrive at the location too early. The season and feeling seem much as in real life regarding the temperature and such. There is an old and worn dingy sofa on a pile of rubbish at the dumping area where I am to sit and converse with the puppet beaver. I wait for awhile in case the camera had already been set up. After a few minutes, the beaver comes up through a hole in the seat of the upholstery, the arm of the controller likely under the cushion or near the back of the couch. I seem to remember most of my lines, most of which are simple questions of which the beaver is supposed to answer. As time passes, I notice how amazingly “real” the beaver puppet appears to be. Not only that, I am aware that the communication from the beaver seems telepathic in nature. I find this a very strange and intriguing “film trick” and wonder how they are doing it - possibly with speakers on each side of my head, but at a distance and in an unnoticeable area, probably hidden.

I look around but I try not to absentmindedly search for the camera that is filming the interaction. Everything is going well and I feel very assertive in my performance. The beaver says its last line and then is gone.

Soon though, I notice a station wagon coming around the curve of the road. A man gets out and sets up a tripod about ten feet from the bank of the lake. There are also at least three of my classmates in the vehicle but I am unsure who. I am now unsure of what is going on. After a time, I feel movement and look down and a very ugly cartoon-like allover orange beaver puppet, which reminds me of the texture and color of my Nerf ball, has emerged from the hole to my right. This beaver puppet has mismatched googly eyes that roll around a bit as it moves and its voice is very annoying; scratchy, squeaky, and slightly muffled. I am not sure what happened to the realistic puppet of minutes before. After the scene is filmed, the puppet “bites” me on the fingers and hand (and I experience realistic discomfort in my fingers) and the unknown male controller is playing around and really annoying me.

I get up and look at the lake and I realize that the first beaver was “real”; that is, an actual living animal that was supposedly “speaking” telepathically, yet no one else had been around at the time. Its head emerges from the lake at a fair distance and nods and I “hear” the phrase “and now you know”.

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I remained intrigued by this dream. The overall plot was very unique and did not reflect anything I had thought of in waking life. At its core, it is doubly-layered autosymbolism for the nature of lucidity, even though I am not viably lucid in this version. A puppet represents both the fictitious nature of the dream self identity (as manipulated by RAS and the preconscious) but also the potential for controlling the dream state as one would a puppet show.

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On a spiritual level, it might also serve as an analogy for everyman, when the general public allows themselves to be controlled by an invalid belief system even when truth has already clearly revealed itself.

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