Blue_Opossum

Morning of June 13, 2020. Saturday.

Dream #: 19,535-07. Reading time (optimized): 2 min.



My dream self maintains the instinctual awareness I am dreaming (after dropping back from post-liminal mode to pre-liminal) by becoming more aware while sitting in a bed near the ocean (potential reinduction). There is the typical indoor-outdoor ambiguity, with my bed in this instance being near a harbor in Antissa, Lesbos, though the setting does not have a more discernible definition.

My waking-life identity is absent. I am listening to an operatic aria (fictitious, I assume) sung by Luciano Pavarotti about Antissa. (I do not listen to opera in waking life.) I am unsure of the source of the music, but it is probably from a cassette (as my dream self has no recall of what a CD is).

The sleep-wake manager eventually appears as an unknown male, but he is in passive mode (non-RAS; non-cerebral.) I sit down and watch him create a painting. It features a black oval as a scene of outer space. (This feature represents a higher level of sleep atonia, which may be why somatosensory kicks in as the trigger in the last scene rather than a vestibular event.) There are sparse red and blue ovular arcs around the “egg.” I absentmindedly add a blue ovular arc to the image’s right side with a felt-tip pen. Almost immediately, I feel as if I may have been intrusive in doing this. I start praising his art, focusing the most on the outer space rendering within the oval. He does not seem angry or annoyed.

A reporter approaches and wants to interview the unknown artist. There is still indoor-outdoor ambiguity, though the setting has more outside dynamics at this point. The two men stand and face each other, about ten feet away from me. The reporter says he is interviewing “the aggressor.” I am puzzled by this and state that he is not an “aggressor,” though I do not know his history. I hope I did not embarrass him by saying this.

Soon, a sun spider (camel spider), as long as the reporter’s head, crawls around from behind his head and covers his right ear. I am amused, as neither man seems to know it is there. Another sun spider of about the same size as the first crawls from behind the reporter’s head but goes around to the other man’s right ear. The man ignores it despite being aware of it. There is no sense of a threat, as my dream self considers them harmless. I wake at this point with a sense of great amusement.

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A vestibular-cerebral handshake did not occur as the waking process in this instance (as the result of greater sleep atonia but with a directive toward hand myoclonus), so it was somatosensory in this case. In other words, I sleep on my left side, with my right ear more exposed to my waking-life environment. The somatosensory focus was liminally drawn to that factor, especially as a spider often represents the human hand and its somatosensory arousal (though a sun spider is not a true spider).

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