dream fragment

Morning of July 8, 1973. Sunday.



[I willfully enter into what I consider may be my last dream of the morning. I maintain my lucidity, perhaps only losing a thread or two of my conscious self identity. The essence of my neural activity becomes the more tangible form of water, as it most often does, and the water expands to form a lake. I welcome the presence of female genitalia, and it is rendered as a canoe, which floats on the shimmering lake in mid-afternoon].

I look upon Lake Katherine. The area seems more rural than it is in reality. I gaze upon the beauty of the reflected trees, downwardly mirrored in the lake’s surface around its perimeter.

[I desire female company and physical pleasure, so I choose to become fully integrated within my dream self’s imaginary body.]

I am sitting in the canoe facing my dark-haired green-eyed gypsy dream girl. We begin to become intimate. My sense of touch is augmented. We mostly kiss for several minutes.

[I am enjoying my dream very much. My dream girl is passive and welcoming. I begin to become distracted by some sort of ambiance that extends beyond my will. It sounds somewhat like hissing.]

A large green sea serpent rises up out of the water on my left in somewhat of an “S” shape, hissing at us. It is not that close to the canoe but displaying at least ten feet of its body from the lake’s surface to the top of its head.

[The preconscious is warning me that I need to leave my dream even though I do not want to. Still, the preconscious’s lake denizen is rather silly-looking, modeled after the one in the Carl Barks “No Such Varmint” Donald Duck comic book story, though slightly more realistic and menacing, though I do not feel that threatened because I am lucid.]

I want to be more intimate with my dream girl but upon touching her, the tangibility of her forearm seems to dissipate. My dream world starts to dissolve.

[I float horizontally and upwards, my back downwards, in the higher mental realm of dissipating liminal space, annoyed by my dream being over. I can still hear the hissing to my left. The hissing turns out to be the real sound of the garden hose as my mother is watering the front flower box in real life at this time, some of the water spraying onto my closed jalousie windows.]

My spoiled dream is of no consequence. I married my dark-haired green-eyed gypsy dream girl on April 9, 1994.

Morning of April 1, 1973. Sunday.



I am in my backyard in Cubitis and there is what is supposedly “the longest snake in the world” a few feet south of me though I do not really feel in danger at any time. A few other unknown and unfamiliar people are around. It is a long skinny black snake that does not seem very threatening. In fact, I am not even sure if it is that much alive, though it does show some minimal signs of life. Its head is at the southeast corner of the house near the utility room and the rest of it is lined easterly across the yard almost to the weedy area prior to the train track embankment.

There is an unusual but rather vague idea that it will grow longer and longer until it reaches around the world, yet that seems not at all inevitable as it does not seem to be growing or even moving much. Not much happens, and it stays in the same area for the most part.

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It is very clear here that the snake is a “replacement” for a virtual fence between my yard and the girl who lives next door (where no barrier of any kind exists in reality). Even though the idea of a black snake keeping rattlesnakes away (which I heard fairly often during this time period) is probably not true, that does not stop a dream from utilizing such a myth. Therefore, the black snake analogy as fence and as protector is consistent as a fence also protects in a different way. In other words, at the time, I seemed to believe the girl next door needed protection from me even though the relationship we had never developed into harmful long-term repercussions. Is there a “temptation” layer as snakes sometimes represent? Perhaps on one level due to the deplorable Adam and Eve myth but only if one has heard it once too often. I could step over this virtual fence but I do not (though I do not feel threatened by it). Therefore, the snake serves as a fence, a protector, and as a reminder of temptation - all in one concise composite that dreams are so intriguingly known for.

Night of March 1, 1973. Thursday.



In real life on this day, I am twelve years old and living in Cubitis. My mother tells me that the CBS late movie of this night is “The Night of the Iguana” (from 1964), which sounds interesting to me. I surmise that it is possibly some sort of monster movie or perhaps horror and probably takes place on a small island. I want to watch it, though it is on too late for a weeknight (though my mother allowed me to watch television on a school night if I had had a longer nap, though which I did not in this case), though apparently my mother is going to at least watch part of it and perhaps tell me a bit about it in case it is shown again on a night when it is possible for me to watch it. The television sits in the northeast corner of the living room and when I sleep (from about ten-thirty, the movie starting at eleven-thirty), I dream that the movie involves at least one cat-sized iguana that climbs people’s legs, due to supposedly mistaking human beings for trees, as I had read something of this nature somewhere in real life. One boy (about my age), in particular, needs to remain motionless in several scenes (where nothing happens otherwise).

My dream version seems to have no ending and my dream-self is not fully integrated into the setting. The next day in real life, I discovered that the movie (much to my puzzlement) was in fact a Richard Burton movie about a defrocked minister becoming a tour guide in Mexico and thus had nothing to do with people remaining motionless while an iguana roamed around - which of course, would not make for much of a movie anyway, as the in-dream events implied that whenever someone moved, the iguana would run to them and climb their leg, the person staying still until someone else in the outside area moved. (This was my first dream of the night before crossing over into the next day.)

2 minute 20 second read.

Saturday morning, 7 October 1972. (Rewritten for clarifications on 21 June 2022.)

The Sally Struthers Autograph

Dream # 2,119-05.



Some people might incorrectly claim the foundation of this dream is a "false awakening," but it originated from semi-conscious summoning and maintaining it with partial lucidness. However, there were sparsely occurring "false awakenings" (but not in the conventional sense) later in this sleep cycle.

To clarify, I thought I had been awake a few times before morning when I was not (though this was more like false memories of brief dreams that did not occur), mistakenly confirming "Sally Struthers" was written on the page. (There was no resemblance to her real-world autograph). The outcome was that it was not her name but "sepia" written in cursive in real life. (Even if it had been her name, it would have been me who had written it.) The word was on the right-hand page, slightly above the center. As a boy, I had written that it might have been confusion with the word "sleepy." Ultimately, trying to remain alert enough throughout the night to write in my dream journal immediately after a dream was something I felt was problematic. I never had trouble recalling multiple dreams in vivid detail every morning, so it was unnecessary.

In my dream, actress Sally Struthers, dressed informally in blue jeans and an orange sweater, visits me around midnight in the darkness of my Cubitis bedroom. She stands in the southwest quadrant of my room near the head of my bed. She seems younger, probably from my associations with her teenage persona of Pebbles in the cartoon.

As she leans over me (as I do not get out of bed), she tells me about the work she will be doing to help people in poverty and her pending activism (Christian Children's Fund, which became a scandalous organization in 1994, and public service announcements). She wants to sign her name on a page of my dream journal (that, in real life, was open on the desk near the head of my bed) to prove to me that she had been here.

I was familiar with her acting in "All in the Family," the movie "Five Easy Pieces," and (as aforementioned) voicing Pebbles in "The Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm Show."

There is unaccountable content here. Sally's appearance and persona are more like Fran Clinton in "The Getaway," but that movie did not come out until December 1972. Odder is how, according to sources, she only became the Christian Children's Fund spokeswoman in 1976.

Because the movie ("The Getaway") was already in production when I had this dream, it is demonstrably more from a co-occurrent "non-local" perception rather than "seeing the future." (That is certainly true for my continual "communication" with Zsuzsanna before we learned of each other in waking life.)

The content regarding the Christian Children's Fund and the charity work she became known for is likely from a type of perception people do not fully understand yet. I do not think it is "seeing the future." Because they approached her as such, it must have been for a discernible reason, something I impersonally perceived (for no particular reason for me). With Zsuzsanna, it is different and an unknown factor continually linking us together all our lives on many levels.

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Night of November 13, 1971. Saturday.



Yes, I know, stupid title. It was originally “Haunted House 2” and I think the first title (before copied over into another book) was “The House” (wow…such imagination I had…).

The actress Jocelyn Lane appears as a child around my age, but in the first part of the dream there is a newspaper article that she has gone missing, possibly kidnapped. There is not much to this dream other than wandering around in a mostly featureless house, but it had a very vivid atmosphere and sharp awareness. It copies the “Tickle Me” (1965) scene, though it is me singing through the window (not Elvis) and she is not actually annoyed or scared at any point but hopeful of escaping the house since I am there with her. I do not see any supposed kidnappers at any point.

It turns out that she was taken by a giant hairy white monster, the creature from “I Was a Slave of the Living Titan!” from Marvel’s “Monsters on the Prowl” number 11. What is a bit odd, though, is that the orientation does not make much sense when the monster’s face appears in the window. We are supposedly on the first floor of a building, yet the monster’s face appears directly in the window (as big as the area of the larger sash window) as if he is standing in a deep hole just outside (though this is not implied by the location). Eventually, the house is on fire, but we had already escaped by then. When going back to get something the girl said she lost, there is just bare ground.

The large empty house that this dream supposedly took place at had already burned down in real life (I did have a precognitive dream of this). It was north (by about four or five implied lots) of my Cubitis home and on the other side of the two-lane highway. It was a very strange morning when that happened, watching the huge flames go into the sky while waiting for the school bus in the dark. I used to wait for the bus to go to school (usually with the S family - Lisa M went to a private school - SCA) during one period, just prior to dawn, which, now, seems quite intriguing to me, because in the region I live in now, it is already getting light at 4:30 and fairly bright out by 5:00.

Just out of curiosity and marching on with my meticulous notes on the thousands of childhood dreams I had documented several times over (with the older copies on hand for accuracy), additional research revealed something I was not as aware of when younger in how comic books, television shows, and even movies (though I was aware of some “duplicate” movies which were only different in title and a few edited scenes) were released again in a slightly different form - I am somewhat amused by how often they did this. (See image.) It is funny, because dreams have a tendency to do this as well.

Night of September 21, 1970. Monday.



This is a long repetitive dream relating to a search (by unknown people, mostly) for Lucille Ball from the “Here’s Lucy” television show. This is the episode where she is skydiving and there is ambiguity in my dream of whether she is still in the air somewhere somehow (not logical of course) or had crashed through a roof.

Lucy herself does not even appear at any point in my dream. Instead, there are several scenes where I am on the roofs of buildings, somehow floating over roofs, and one scene where I am hanging from the ceiling after apparently crashing through the roof in a parachute, though this also seems like some sort of odd pretense (solely using some sort of mental power instead of by physical effort to suddenly establish the scene and setup and my placement, though without lucidity) in attempting to show others what might have happened to Lucy.

In a few segments of my dream, I am only seeing the eaves of roofs and there is also something about television antennas that do not seem to be working correctly (and a few people are even using their televisions to help to find Lucy as if a television had built-in “radar” or a way of scanning the sky). Most of the imagery of the roofs becomes a bit convoluted (almost like a flight of steps in a couple areas) but there is eventually mist and oversimplified (unrealistic) buildings as the main form of the setting.

Update Saturday, 26 March 2016: I can now look at this dream and decode it fully, as I see that it has the same basic metaphorical meanings of the dream state itself that is found in hundreds if not thousands of other dreams.

Included in this dream are:

The “failed flight” metaphor (or “something coming down from the sky”) that is not a negative implication at all but which simply represents the end of the dream (since flying itself - or in fact, contemplating or being aware of anything that flies or floats or is in the air - represents the dream state).

The mist has been a common feature in my dreams though mostly when I was younger. A mist or fog relates to the dream state itself which seems metaphorical for a dream being “not as clear as reality”.

The roofs that have somewhat of a staircase appearance in silhouette are a double play on “coming down”, as a staircase also relates to waking from a dream and whether or not you are closer to waking by going up or down depends on the dream self placement and perspective.

Breaking through a roof (or even parts of a roof being blown away as in a few other dreams) is also related to the waking stage as is breaking through a wall (more so a window) or even coming through a door (which usually creates a shift in awareness for me, though not always related to waking - but is sometimes a transition within the dream as it continues, making a dream much more vivid in many cases).

Antennas also relate to the dream state and the communication of dream self from threads of the conscious self, almost implying a dream being built in the manner of a television broadcast from the conscious self. A television is also a downsizing of the dream itself to distance the dreamer from direct involvement in a scene for whatever reason (and focus on a television seems to serve as both induction and waking preparation).

Morning of June 1, 1970. Monday.



In my dream, I had been on a mid-morning school field trip with classmates in the southeastern side of the main part of Arcadia (and south of my school) but got separated and did not return to the group when I should have. It is at a very small museum (but which is more like a small empty family-run grocery store or knickknack store) with hardly anything in it, one of the only features being a stuffed fox (in the taxidermy sense). It is on a large shelf (like the kind in a grocery store) that faces west, the fox’s head on the south end. At one point no one else is around, not even the people who supposedly own the “museum”. I am trying to work out if perhaps the fox comes to life and prowls the local area to get food to keep it in a more pristine appearance on the shelf but that does not make much sense. I do not see much else at the supposed museum other than a few empty narrow crystal vases and at least one large urn. I should probably go home but do not know if I should go back to school instead though it seems to be on or near the last day for the semester. Nothing threatening happens at any point. There does seem to be some sort of vague mystery associated with the fox. There is a vague idea that I will visit there again soon but will be somehow invisible.

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Although this dream was precisely precognitive, it may have other layers of meaning. (Remember that only the dreamer can viably “interpret” his or her own dream. Do not let people mislead you.)

On June 5, 1970, the following Friday after this Monday morning dream, it was the last day of school prior to summer vacation. My class went to a park as well as a small unusual museum (that looked as if it might have served as a knickknack store in the past) that I did not know existed (especially as it was in an area my parents never drove to south of the school) and I actually did see a small stuffed (real) fox.

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Of another layer, the fox could also represent the red-haired girl who was my close friend and next-door neighbor (also south of where I lived in the same orientation as the museum from the school). Even more obviously, her name was Lisa which actually means “fox” in Russian. She also had a somewhat sly demeanor. The fox was rendered as stuffed because she was not yet in her transitional stage into the teenage years (thus “inactive” at this point relative to a more mature relationship) and on a particular level on the shelf up from the floor as she was neither “beneath” me or “above” me in that sense. On another note, she was the only other one “with” me (in the museum setting), as she did not go to my school or know my classmates at this time, though was someone I spent the most time with otherwise. She primarily faced away from me, though her head was turned to the right to partly acknowledge me even though we were not always “face to face” or seeing “eye to eye” (though we did share dream work at times). This dream also has additional layers of meaning too personal to get into, relating to self-fulfilling prophecy on one level.

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Morning of April 18, 1970. Saturday.



I am at school (West Elementary in Arcadia) and see my (second-best friend after Toby T at this time) friend Danny H. He is high on a scaffold and trying to be friendly with a giant boa constrictor when everyone else has gone into hiding within the school buildings. The snake’s mouth is ready to engulf him - the top of the mouth over him and the bottom part under the part of the scaffold he is standing on. However, nothing happens after this as if it suddenly becomes a “frozen image” from my perspective (as if time had suddenly stopped somehow). (In real life, some classmates made fun of him for being feminine, such as how he carried his books across his chest or how he spoke.) Note that with the term “boa constrictor” - the idea of constricting stomach pain or intestinal constriction are also possible plays (especially as a snake looks like an intestine). Thus the pain of a stomach illness could be a “boy constrictor”. I did not have this at the time - but Danny did in reality.

This dream seems to have two possible layers of composite cause as the dreaming mind cleverly utilizes over time. Because Danny was believed to be on the path to being “too feminine” (which was really no concern for me at all, but I did not like how he was bullied), the snake, being a boa (a play on “boy” as was often used in real life in my school, especially by David K, whereby if someone called him a “boy”, he would angrily state “I ain’t no boy/boa constrictor”!) seemed to grow to bigger-than-life as a sort of threat to see if this would be enough to increase his male nature.

Also, he had a stomach ache (as in real life) at the time and needed to go to the nurse’s station by way of a (fictional) questionable outside entrance that was clearly unsafe. This links to the snake also being a visual symbol of the intestine and the pain of a stomach problem. I was clearly, in both cases of interpretation, dreaming directly about him and not an aspect of myself (especially as I was not the one with a stomach ache in reality - he was).

Update Tuesday, 8 December 2015. There may be another viable “explanation” here. Snakes may also represent umbilical cords. In this case, I may be projecting Danny as being immature as well as not having as much support from other people (who are in the building while he is outside the building on a precarious structure). The “giant umbilical cord” may relate to being “constricted” as such (perhaps by his mother in comparison to my mother, as I view the scene from a distance).

This dream is type ECA (subtype Cbellsub: emergent consciousness bellicosity sublimated to a secondary character). The giant truculent boa constrictor is my emergent consciousness. Danny is the projection of my dream self, therefore the temporary waking self model, but my true dream self watches safely from a distance. Here my conscious self swallows Danny as representing coalescence.