Blue_Opossum

Morning of November 17, 1982. Wednesday. (Extensively clarified for inexperienced dream journalists on Sunday, 17 September 2017.)



It seems to be early afternoon throughout most of this dream. My dream starts out in the apartment above my sister Marilyn’s house on Loomis Street, which seems vacant at the time, though there are a few items around including minimal furniture. The steps are unusual, but are similar to other dreams with this distortion. They go around the sides of the living room to no particular location and have no railing.

Eventually, a large and seemingly menacing polar bear makes an appearance but does not chase me at any point. I realize that the polar bear may have eaten the previous occupant of the apartment, but later, I am also thinking that this tenant (Colleen) may have gotten away but left some of her things behind (due to the presence of the bear). There is a distortion when her apartment seems to be upside-down, yet without furniture and other items falling from the implied ceiling. There is a scene where I am on the unlikely stairs and looking down at the creature though I seem incorporeal at one point.

Later, in the last part of my dream, I am downstairs in my sister’s living room and there is a knock on the door which is presumed to be the mailman with a package. Instead, it turns out to be the polar bear. It is standing upright on two legs (and at least a foot taller than me). It does not attempt to attack me, though I wake almost immediately. There is a sense of surprise and awe, but it is not nightmarish.

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This dreams ends with non-lucid doorway waking symbolism. This type of dream outcome is sometimes triggered by the reticular activating system when environmental noise is present and based on the implied need to wake up and answer the door (which does not mean that the environmental noise is an actual door knock as the mind is unconscious and does not correctly perceive the real environment).

Dreams are experienced in real time and mainly symbolize mental processes and changes in REM semi-consciousness or neural patterns. Therefore, a staircase usually metaphorically signifies changes in levels of awareness while sleeping (just as it is deliberately used as such in some forms of meditation and hypnosis). In this case, using a staircase put me into a more vivid offset dream, which is typical. (I use a staircase in some dreams to augment lucidity.)

The polar bear becoming the preconscious to emergent consciousness factor in this case may be coincidentally based on the possible shift to doorway waking symbolism as a result of environmental noise, only if not assuming the earlier segment to be a precursor to it. The assumption that the door knock was possibly a mailman validates the reticular activating system prompt, as a mailman otherwise often relates to incrementing communication between dream self and conscious self (that is, the true conscious self identity trying to reach the otherwise muddled personified subconscious aka dream self).

If there is any waking life relevance here, it may relate to a wish to see myself as stronger or more adaptable to the cold weather (as I had moved from Florida to Wisconsin during the summer of 1978). However, there also seems to be a less-detailed thread of prescience. I told my sister about this dream. Later this day, she said “There’s your snow bear”. It was a television commercial we had never seen previously with the scene of a polar bear running across a featureless ice floe. (However, during one time period, I also regularly saw a real stuffed polar bear in a commercial window display while walking through an area in La Crosse.)

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