Blue_Opossum

Night of March 2, 2014. Sunday.

I am younger and in a stage of collecting stamps. My sister Marilyn (half-sister on my mother’s side) is alive again in the opening of my dream, but her face is changing back and forth from various unusual colors, somewhat reminiscent of how a series of usually smaller and older foreign stamps has the same face on different postal values but with different colors for each; red, yellow, purple, green, and so on, in various shades. She is at a table in her living room and appears to be having a small meal.

Later, during the more vivid and longer part of my dream, I am not certain of where I am, but I own at least one very large cardboard box full of materials mostly relating to a stamp collection. As I dig deeper down into the box, more and more complete letters and catalog-sized envelopes, most from primarily Eastern Europe, China, and India, are visible (with the stamps still on the original mailings - most of them unopened or resealed perhaps). There is also a smaller stamp album where the stamps (Poland, Hungary, and Romania, I believe - those countries often had the most attractive postage stamps during one time period) are displayed in rows held by thin sheets of transparent plastic in no particular order.

The beauty of the stamps and other variously-colored and textured paper materials is impressive to me. As I go deeper (placing some of the materials on an adjacent table), there are several old but unopened A4 manilla envelopes from India near the bottom with at least seven or eight older India stamps (1940s-1950s) in each upper right corner, some with various types of “scribbling” as cancellation/postal marks and other features. Eventually, I also notice black and white graphic novels, similar to the type of the older Warren publications. I do not understand the plot, though, as the writing is mostly all in Sanskrit, although some like a mix of Hindi and Chinese, with only a few English translations written by hand here and there. I feel very peaceful and happy about the box for some reason. There are a few other unknown characters around. I am proud of my collection and enjoying the multicolored pleasures of what almost seems to hold endless potential.

There are a few other pages of comic-book-like papers, seemingly in English, but the individual letters are spread out somewhat web-like and too “blurry” to read (much like ghost frequencies on a spectrograph in appearance). (This part was precognitive. I just recently found a link on the “Wayback Machine” that had a lot of older comic books in PDF format. Most of them are readable, it seems. Some of them, though, were identical in appearance to the effect in this dream, probably from being saved in too low a resolution and unreadable. Also, many turned out to be older Warren publications as my dream implied - I had not used the site in that particular manner or purpose at any earlier time.)

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Part of this is also based on real life. Years ago, as a young teen, I sometimes bought a larger bulk pack of discarded postal materials, usually envelopes and such with the stamps still on them in various conditions - of which I actually preferred to isolating and collecting the individual stamps themselves regardless of the fair amount of space they took up (I even had chests-of-drawers sitting atop other chests-of-drawers for extra storage space). The envelopes were of various colors and intriguing textures and all the various addresses in different languages still on the envelopes and used postcards and such. During this time, I decided to give one of my favorites, an unusual envelope (with several stamps, a few still in blocks) from India with a sort of almost corrugated-like texture and writing all over it, to my sister Marilyn by mailing it to her (Florida to Wisconsin). She liked getting it and asked me where I got it. Apparently they did not have these bulk collections available where she lived at the time. Eventually, I sold a part of my collection for only a hundred dollars when I needed more money (by which in afterthought I should have sold to a collector instead of a company).

Finishing this entry for the online version, I noted this from a website (linns.com, under “Soaker’s remorse”.) “How many interesting, valuable or historically significant old folded letters or envelopes with stamps and postmarks (known as "covers” to stamp collectors) do you suppose have been destroyed by people who did not know what they were doing?“

Interesting. Another play on "everyman” (or “normal” society) I think.

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