memorable

Morning of July 15, 1977. Friday.



This dream was on the morning after drinking a small amount of beer from my brother-in-law Mel who was visiting from Wisconsin. It was titled “The Beam” in my original dream journal as well.

I am walking out to the highway (Highway Seventeen - the original route before the name was changed to NE Cubitis Avenue) with my father very late at night (or very early in the morning before dawn). I notice a partly melted bicycle just off the highway (about half on the wayside) that a very thin beam (like a laser beam) was shining onto, going into the handlebars. I also notice that a small part of the highway itself is like liquid as it is beginning to melt, sizzle, and bubble. I am aware that this beam is eventually going to melt everything in its path and is potentially very dangerous for some of the world and will likely continue to be problematic for a long time. There is no real sense of danger regarding my own safety though, or that of our home, at least for the time being. Its path at this point seems to be mostly down the highway to the north. I am not certain of its origin and not exactly sure if the bicycle is implied to be mine or my father’s.

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The meaning of this dream is basically the same as thousands of others I have documented, studied, and decoded and is anticipatory autosymbolism for waking into the light of day, more specifically via the emergent consciousness, seeking out the dream self for coalescence and to “save” the experience and perspective of the dream state. The same template and components, with the same meaning, are easily seen and recognized in dreams like “The Tadpole’s Ghost”, “Laser-Eyed Alligator”, and many others, though are more passive in dreams like “The Day There Was No Sun” where the role and active threads of the dream self and conscious self are slightly different, which probably depends on circadian rhythms and the time (and the date) of the dream.

Curiously, the highway begins to take on properties of another typical dream conduit, the river, though I have no perception of bilocation in this dream. The highway in this case seems to be “melting”. It is almost as if the “light of day” beam of the emergent consciousness is changing the dream setting for a “smoother” flow into the waking state by transforming it into the river conduit but this potential does not complete. The melted bicycle has been validated as a symbol for alcohol intake. As little alcohol as I have had in my life (even at my present age) it always triggered the appearance of a bicycle in a dream, almost always partly melted as here. This can be understood to mean that alcohol alters both balance and direction of thoughts and also alters the linear and more stable nature of decision-making.

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Morning of April 9, 1977. Saturday.



This first part is part of a much longer dream series - the “Zane Master Zeff” cluster, but involves a sort of monster-chase as one of the last parts of the scenes of this particular “set”. I am having a sort of shape-shifting “battle” with another shape-shifter. It starts when I am at the middle school on the southeast area of the grounds (but fairly close to the building) and a tyrannosaurus seems to threaten me (this being a form of the “Zane Master Zeff”). I vividly grow as tall as the tyrannosaurus (recurring) and punch him in the “face” and he falls back but is not defeated. We become different things including giant snakes and back to dinosaurs again - for some reason, he even becomes a brontosaurus in a manner that suggests that he is now the probable “victim” in the battle for a time, but eventually is the tyrannosaurus again for a very short time. (This is partially left over from earlier childhood dreams where I enjoyed being a giant and fighting with another giant, knocking over buildings, etc.)

After a time, the other tyrannosaurus is no longer in view. I look down and see that he is now actually a shorter but human-sized version of the Nebbish from Crazy Magazine and he is waddling off to escape. For a moment I think that I could just step on him, but I let him waddle off, seeing the top view of his unusual hat and apparent nervous shaking. (“The Nebbish” may not be his “true form”, though, even though it seems as such for a time.)

I have decided to include some of the main body (at least in partial summary) of this seeming series here. I had assumed and finally decided (in my twenties) that the “evil” character’s name, Zane Master Zeff, was possibly a distortion of Zen Master Jeff or Zen Master Seth. This character was my nemesis and a shape-shifter as described in my dream above. It may also be a relevant play (or misremembered pattern) on Zane Grey, the writer, though possibly even a play on “zany”.

In my last relative dream, I finally defeat him and in the last part of my dream, I see myself sitting on a throne on a platform above a flight of steps. I hear myself say “I sit on the throne and lo…I am the Zane Master Zeff” which seems to indicate some sort of ironic or odd ending (as if the character had been playing me somehow or possibly a different odd or ambiguous twist).

The main theme seems to be protecting my wife (the “mystery girl”) and fictional family. Even though we had supposedly just been married, time shifts and we have five or six children. However, I seem to move through a time distortion of this supposed destiny (because of the “evil magic” of Zane Master Zeff) and my family transforms into an image of high grasses near the wayside of a dirt road. It is very vivid, and my fictional wife and children seem very vivid. This imagery of a fictional family of a wife and children transforming into tall grasses by a roadside continued on and off for years. Sometimes I even felt quite sad, even “guilty” about it. It is interesting how I actually did come to marry and have several children - something that adds up to far more than self-fulfilling prophecy considering all the other evidence I have lived through by direct experience.

This dream, in some ways, turned out to be date-specific precognitive. I also now have five children (updated in 2015). There really did seem to be a lot of “dark forces” (for lack of a better term) working against my new family at the beginning, mostly caused by my wife’s disturbed mother (many lies and manipulation of government and authority and even fabrication of medical concerns, though she did succeed in taking my wife’s sister’s child without any intervention by authority whatsoever and basically ruined - and still controls - her life). It is also interesting that my wife has an “unlikely” two of the letter “Z” in her first name. There were numerous similar dreams regarding this theme, also precognitive.

Morning of April 8, 1967. Saturday.



I am in a featureless and seemingly barren landscape with the zigzagging path (recurring). In the background, it seems almost as if the horizon is “fake” or part of a theater backdrop.

A pair of boots walks more to the right side of the scene, and forwards toward me. This is not nightmarish, but quite eerie. It may relate to the idea of “filling the shoes of my father”. Because I was only six at the time, I am not sure about any viable associations, though.

Morning of April 2, 1967. Sunday.



When I was much younger in my dream work (around age nine), I had later tried to recall or determine associations with this recurring one as if it might have been based on an obscure real-life memory (even though only a few years had passed at the time since living in Wisconsin), though that does seem somewhat unlikely.

My parents and I visit, a few times, an old married couple on seemingly the west side of the street, possibly Third Street in La Crosse. They live in what seemingly used to be a large clothing store and the one large room is mostly their living area. The storefront door and windows (and now empty window display area) are mostly always blocked from the inside with multicolored velvety curtains. It is still mostly a commercial area of the city, though.

The old couple typically sit at a smaller dining room table, right next to the wall, man facing west and woman facing east, where there is a small bowl in the middle of the table (though sometimes a plant pot) that catches rainwater from a leak (though it does not have to still be raining at the time). The leak is usually only one drop at a time. For some reason, the whole scene and living area does not seem unusual at all. We usually visit them around nine in the morning or earlier.

It seems possible that my dream was built by associations with the “Jack Sprat” poem (possibly the only association I had at the time with an older couple at a table in this manner), the “Don’t Let the Rain Come Down” song (Serendipity Singers 1964 version), and an actual one-time visit to an older couple in the city. Still, this is one of the mysteries from older dream work as it somehow seems more relative to a real memory and place, which for some reason, is more elusive than much clearer memories from this time period. I usually kept my dream work secret (mostly due to believing that published works about dreams were all completely wrong), so did not ask my parents. It could be a composite memory of two places we frequented in reality.

Night of March 4, 1967. Saturday.



After extensive research I discovered that the movie that mainly influenced this recurring eerie dream was “Blood Beast from Outer Space“, also known as “The Night Caller” and “Night Caller from Outer Space“, first seen at age six. I also finally learned that it was a deformed hand, not a lobster claw as in my dream. I find it interesting how the last few minutes of a movie (seen in early childhood) can create such an intriguing recurring dream scenario for several years (though not nightmarish for the most part). I very much enjoy learning more and more about what influenced my dreams throughout my life and pinpointing dreams and trends. (Note that the IMDb date for this release is incorrect, as it was first shown in America prior to the listed November 1966 date.) I had this dream while sleeping in the matte black 1950s camper we had at the time in the space above the cab. Seeing this footage after so many years had a rather odd emotional effect on me.

In the actual movie, the alien was not a giant, but I was easily able to determine where the long-term influences came from, almost like traveling back in time or greatly stimulating old memories with an enhanced clarity. I am not sure why this particular few ending minutes of a movie had such an impact, while many other movies I have seen seem to have had little or no impact at all.

In my dream, I am outside at night with my parents seemingly during a long trip from Wisconsin to Florida (we do not have much with us - just enough to fill the otherwise empty areas of the station wagon - as the camper I am sleeping in in reality is not featured in my dream for some reason). It appears to be near a very long shopfront in a parking lot, including a used car lot on one side. A giant man (about twenty feet tall) with a burned face and with one arm being that of a lobster threatens the whole town. Fire seems to be involved and he seems to glow eerily in a pale green at one point. For some reason, we have to leave everything behind in the car, including my favorite coloring books. My mother assures me that I will have new coloring books at our new home (in Florida) when we get away from this danger. (I am not sure why we have to find a different car to leave in - perhaps there had been fire damage, or the engine stopped working or it was wrecked at that point in some other way.) Whatever state we are in at the time (which is uncertain in-dream) will no longer exist as a state because this giant creature will live here within the fire. (In the last scene of the movie, the alien stands in front of a large fire for a couple minutes.)

There appears to be some sort of odd (nostalgic) connection to the Johnny Cash song “The Story of a Broken Heart” (as if it were part of a monster movie and descriptive of this giant creature - it is possible I heard this song on the radio around this same time period). For some reason, coloring books seem to be my most important possessions in this dream. There was a motel we stopped at, at night, where I really enjoyed looking through an (as yet unused) over-sized (seemingly) dinosaurs coloring book.

Morning of February 9, 1977. Wednesday.



Dream Series: The Experience of Prescience, the Inexplicable Dream State Phenomenon. Part 4

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This dream’s main setting is an unusual variation of my Cubitis home. The shed is not present in the northern part of the backyard and one area near where the front of it would otherwise be is the side of a trailer that is oriented north to south, where two of my older brothers, Dennis and Jim, supposedly live (though they are living in Wisconsin at the time in reality, not Florida). The location of the main focus or dream’s climax is the exact same spot in the north side yard where my “mystery girl” revealed herself for the final time in this particular setting in a later dream (and also above where the body of Christ was literally buried in a childhood dream - eventually indicating I was the “son of the universe” in this cycle of existence), with the exact appearance (and unlikely accent) in every way, as my wife-to-be, Zsuzsanna, before we ever met in reality or even viably knew that we were real to each other.

An unknown beautiful dark-haired green-eyed girl (with the usual mixed Hungarian and Australian accent) features in my dream, thoug again, she has the same appearance as my lifelong “mystery girl” (dream girl of otherworldly beauty). She carries a sword which sometimes has a blue sheen and she wears some sort of unusual bikini-like outfit composed of teal-colored reptilian scales. Where I have a large scar on my left wrist, she has only a small scar on her left wrist. (In reality, Zsuzsanna has a smaller scar like a section of mine on her left wrist in the exact same spot where it matches mine. We got them in the same way; by falling onto a broken glass mug shard.)

At one point, I enter the trailer (its door otherwise in the same area the shed door would have been, though it is elevated). Jim and Dennis are not there, yet I have no doubt about the “reality” of this dream. I become impatient and angry at not finding my “mystery girl” after she is not present for a time, so angry that I tip over the shelves containing my brothers’ cassettes and records and such. I then make all the chairs fly about with telekinesis for a time as well as my literal “turning the tables” act, where I will a table to spin about and change its original orientation.

However, my “mystery girl” appears again in the next-to-last segment of this dream. She tells me that it is not my time to be with her yet and says she must “return to the Source”. I am not sure what it is all about. She is to be my bride, so I become impatient and reach out to her. She tells me that I will meet her in seventeen years in Australia. She seems to shrink, become younger and younger, and over time, becomes a gecko and scurries off southward. (In real life, I met Zsuzsanna in Australia exactly seventeen years after this dream, on February 9, 1994.)

I walk quickly south (covering more ground than would be possible in reality), thinking I might see her again, and, as is often the case, there is shallow water in many areas, but curiously, some swimming pools are mostly somehow empty while parts of the ground are lightly flooded (a variation of the very common water lowering waking symbolism, signifying the cessation of the dream state).

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Night of December 24, 1966. Saturday. (Christmas Eve.) Original date and other data validated and corrected.



A girl older than me (about nine) is dressed in a cat suit (like Catwoman from “Batman”) with the smaller eye mask. I confront her after she seems to not know someone is out on the roof (Rose Street apartments in La Crosse, Wisconsin). I think it is just before midnight and it is cold and very quiet otherwise and there is a bit of snow on the roof (more-so the recessed areas on either side of the walkway). She is surprised by me prior to going through the window into my sister Marilyn’s apartment and claims to be one of Santa’s elves (though it is not Christmas eve and I inform her of this in a somewhat patronizing yet friendly way). I am not sure what to think. She is carrying a green, lumpy bag which seems to contain a fair amount of unknown items (possibly some soda/pop bottles), but is seemingly not that heavy for her. (In the original, I had noted a possible set of holes with a fork partially protruding near the top.)

There was also a scene of a partial hypnopompic unfolding where paw prints are noted on the roof instead of human ones and I am considered to be “telling a story” regarding the incident later on in a false awakening.

This is a recurring theme of catlike people or beings being on the Rose Street roof late at night, often shadowy or mysterious forms; a likely influence - the animated movie “Gay Purr-ee” from 1962 (which I first saw on the 23rd of December, 1966) and the short-lived TV series “T.H.E. Cat”. In fact, an episode of “T.H.E. Cat” played during the next television airing of “Gay Purr-ee” (also written as “Gay Purree”) on a different channel.

This dream did have precognitive nuances as usual, but not that multilayered. A few years later, I saw the girl who seemed like the one in this dream (with the exact same details in the costume and same manner and movement) in real life. She was a classmate who had dressed up as “Catwoman” (not the exact character, but for some other story) for the school Halloween play.

Several years later, in 1971, the song where they sang “the Candy Man can” was sometimes "automatically" mentally “replaced” by “the Money Cat can” - which has a vaguely similar style and the same number of syllables in parts. I thought as a child that they were perhaps influenced by the “Money Cat” song, which would not be the first time one song influenced another commercially. In fact, I made a note of this to a few classmates, but they ignored the idea completely. This was one of the few times during that period I mentioned anything dream-related.

From the night of December 23, 1966. Friday.

Dream #: 4-01. Reading time (optimized): 1 min 30 sec.



This dream (repeating at different levels of vividness several times on the same night, though chiefly from willing it) occurred three days after my sixth birthday. It started before midnight of December 23 while I slept in the second-floor apartment of 901 Rose Street in La Crosse, Wisconsin.

Its primary causation is simply a different version of the first microdream that I have had virtually every sleep cycle to date (as of October 19, 2020) when I am walking with a vivid awareness of imaginary kinaesthesia and suddenly fall into wakefulness with myoclonus. The main difference, other than its unique content, originates from the predominant degree of sleep atonia resulting in a dream of a longer length than the common microdream I have described here.

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In my dream, it is late at night, and no other person seems to be awake. It is dark. I walk on the back roof of the Rose Street building (accessible from the second floor by way of a door at the end of a hallway), with liminal dream state awareness. I think of using the fire escape at the back of the building to descend to the parking area. When I start to step onto it, it is no longer present. A more realistic version of the Shadow Cat from “Gay Purr-ee” (1962) is suddenly holding onto my hand as I remain in the dream, though in undefined liminal space for a time.

I entered different versions of my dream several times in the same sleep cycle. In one instance, I descended the stairs. In another, I chose not to walk to the edge, though in another, I floated.

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Other than the usual causation, more specific influences in this case mainly come from the musical scenes in the animated movie. It includes the lines “If anyone can save you, the money cat can!” and “In the palm of our paw” from “The Money Cat.” Of lesser influence was “Show me the way to all my dreams” and “and be seen hand-in-hand with Paree” from “Take My Hand, Paree.”

Because of this dreaming experience, I began to develop an advanced understanding of dream control, liminality, and dream content causation in a world where virtually everything I read about dreams is the result of misconception.

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Night of December 16, 1966. Friday.



This was recurring from when I was very young. I believe there were a few versions that occurred in the middle of the night. In one version, in one journal, I had decided that the opossums may actually be small foxes (even though that really was not very reasonable), so I wrote a poem called “Foxes in the Trees” in real life, yet later decided that I should not change things, so I came to have an internal self-fulfilling symbolism of the opossums being the “princes of the trees”. Being watched by mysterious animal eyes is probably a universal theme in children’s dreams regardless of race or culture, but I am only guessing that based on my own early experiences in dream work.

It is late at night and I am in the woods, I assume in an area of Chipmunk Coulee farther from where I had actually lived in that region.

I am near a tree in which there are a few opossums on the branches but all I can see are their eerie glowing eyes (and in later versions, the lighter heart-shaped areas of their faces). It seems these opossums are some sort of guardians that are supposed to follow me and protect me in some unknown way. I pretend not to notice them because I do not want to cause trouble or perhaps draw attention to myself in this unfamiliar landscape.

In the distance is a long, winding path of an unusual (almost a sequence of Z-shaped turns) path where some areas seem to be dead forests. The moon (or sun in a rather “bad” dream rendering?) seems to be a black shadow hanging in the sky rather than the “real” moon or sun. This unusual area seems to be very similar to my “Empty Boots” dream found here: http://blue-opossum.tumblr.com/post/...75/empty-boots

Morning of November 29, 1976. Monday.



My older brother Earl (half-brother on my mother’s side whose father died on September 23, 1950, age 39, in a newspaper van accident) is in the process of completing his work in building a spacecraft which looks like the classic 1950s flying saucer, at first (though the appearance changes). He tests it around town and people often stop to see what is going on. I am with a friend and he also seems interested in this endeavor.

In the last part of my dream it seems my brother intends on leaving Earth and not coming back. The flying saucer takes off ominously into the sky in the afternoon and narrowly misses a clock tower, flying very slowly at first, nearly hovering in one spot at times. There is a very vivid awareness at this point. Regardless of a couple near misses with the tops of buildings, it successfully flies away. At this point it looks a lot like the Flying Sub from the television series “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea”. Shortly after this, I do not see any sign of where he has gone.

My (unfamiliar supposed classmate) friend and I are discussing his life as we are walking along through an alley, seemingly south. He asks me, “How old was your brother?” and I say “Thirty-six,” waking up slowly to the unusual sadness in my voice.

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I had to do a lot of research on this to make sure it presently stands as correct as possible (regardless of later versions which have proven to be even more ambiguous). My brother died on November 29, 2007 (age 67, way too young in my opinion), so there is indeed a (long-term precognitive) marker here, one clue (unknown at the time) being the clock tower.

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This dream has the typical waking transition of the flight symbol, but it appears as an extraordinary atypical composite (with layered meaning) here, firstly as a flight symbol that metaphorically shows the essence of the dreamer successfully leaving the dream state (in contrast to the far more common directly perceived “falling” event). However, it is a “flying sub” which means it also comes from deep within the unconscious (or even collective conscious or the Source’s) realm. It is also a spaceship, which relates to tentative associations between waking self and full conscious self memory. I should add an additional note here that my brother also owned a Stingray (car), and of which the marine animal called a stingray resembles the Flying Sub. This dream also seems like a subtle “continuation” of my “Rocket Science?” dream, from earlier this year.

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Just because a dream is influenced by, say, television, does not mean it is dismissible. The foundations of non-lucid dreams will borrow anything and everything to metaphorically display the sleeping, dreaming, and waking process. The day before this dream, I had seen a CBS report on UFOS as well as as Nova’s “The Case of the Bermuda Triangle” (featuring the ocean of course and loosely associated with UFOs, perhaps even “flying subs”).

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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Morning of October 3, 1976. Sunday.



I travel in a car with good friend Johnny C as the driver (same car he had in real life and this scenario being similar to real life to a point), best friend Toby T, and three girls including Tina L (so I guess the car was apparently crowded but did not seem as such). There is a recurring idea that was very common in dreams of this time period. The idea of moving through time or into “alternate worlds” based on a series of directions alone. I am semi-lucid but not “take full control” lucid, as I did not seem to want to be at this stage, just so I could passively enjoy things.

I am in the back seat on the right side. We are going north at one point. There is the idea that we should stop near my Cubitis home to see how it has changed. We decide to make my house the main destination through different “alternate worlds” or “alternate times”.

Upon our first stop, we find the house has changed into a laboratory but it has seemingly been abandoned. I see a beautiful painting on the east wall in my room that shows strange birds. They look like ordinary birds except that they have “sideways beaks” that I realize are exactly like the mandibles of a stag beetle. I feel a very strange awareness upon seeing this, an unusual feeling I cannot quite relate. I also notice a few pinned-up diagrams and scattered papers with various complex equations sitting on a desk. For some reason, I think of them as “byrds” with understanding of the different spelling.

We leave and come back into a different “time”. This time the place does not seem abandoned and one man is there to say that we are allowed to look around but not to touch anything. Going onto the carport, we see cages on the left. There are about three larger cages with strange creatures in them. One is like a peacock with snakelike features and it hisses and “strikes” at us but only succeeds in hitting the bars. I notice that our chicken shed is still there but built up a bit.

Once again, we leave and “come back”. This time, the house is abandoned again. We look around and mostly only find dusty ground and rusty pieces of metal. As there is not much to see, Toby T suggests going “as far as possible”. Johnny C seems hesitant, but we are on our way.

There is a strange sensation of moving very swiftly. We seem to be thousands of years in the future. We look out and see a strange sight. The house is very different (or likely a different building) and there are some strange creatures. It seems a “mother creature” is communicating with her “son”, who is standing near an upper-section-opened Dutch door to what looks somewhat like a barn (upper half open). They are somewhat human in form, but also a bit more like mostly white, living ceramic chickens with a Chinese appearance and with very small but defined simple geometric patterns (in mostly red and black) all over the large heads and smaller thinner bodies. They are making a sort of higher-pitched crunching noise to communicate by moving their “beaks” which is not really a beak but like some sort of small sliding door that varies in sound to how far it is open at any given time. The “mother” is somewhat wary of us, which is why she wants to get her “son” (about half as tall as “her”) and go inside.

We decide to go back. However, we end up taking a wrong turn, it seems (seemingly based on something Toby said), as the car goes flying westerly over an embankment and into Lettuce Lake. We all escape, but Johnny is annoyed at having lost his car. (There is also an idea that the land features may have changed when traveling through different time periods rather than solely misdirection.)

Notes on the bird relevance in this dream: Firstly, the living ceramic chicken (somewhat anthropomorphic) in this dream is perceived as being an incarnation of me (as the dreamer) at the “end of time”. It is curious how it is near the Dutch door. As a door represents the waking point (or shift in awareness), but here has only the top half open, it is a very curious reference to a false awakening (as well as a seeming invitation to be above as opposed to below - possibly suggesting rising from the end of the dream rather than the usual “falling”), which does occur, but still with continuation of seemingly the “same” dream. (Johnny’s car ends up in the water, which, even though water is often induction, is more relative to the “falling” waking transition here.)

Addressing the two other odd bird forms here, the serpentine peacock that hisses from the cage is a form of “captured flight” (restricted emotional, sexual, or spiritual freedom in the dream state). Even though the dream is very vivid, I do not become viably lucid. It may also be an association from when I heard that people thought that a peacock feather was an “evil eye” which may be linked to the fact that the peacock also had snakelike aspects. This of course is an absurd idea that I never considered as having any merit, but dreams utilize anything and everything (including the nonsensical beliefs of humanity) to teach viable focus and discernment. The other odd distortion, a painting of flying birds (which may otherwise be implied to be sparrows) with the sideways “beaks” (mandibles) of stag beetles, is relevant to the greater understanding of dream composites in general. The fact that these flying birds and beetle composites are only in a painting is a giveaway relating to the two other nonflying bird symbols and the failure to become lucid or resolve the concept of freedom. My dream self is not able to resolve why these birds are “wrong” either, only that they are somehow unusual. I even think of them as “byrds” rather than “birds” while in the dream state.

Morning of September 30, 1966. Friday.



In my dream, I somehow find myself back in the forest I used to play in (up in the bluff region) before moving down into town on Rose Street. It seems to be early morning, during sunrise.

In a deeper part of the forest and mainly near a large tree near a cluster of bushes, forming somewhat of an implied semicircular arrangement, I see a pile of life-sized dolls or mannequins which I soon realize are my actual classmates who have been transformed by our teacher Mrs. Yandell. Their arms are freely out and some of them are in pajamas. Somewhat puzzled, I consider whether or not if I am also there somewhere, even though I am fully in-body in my dream self’s perspective. The scene is eerie but no violence is implied. (Our teacher is not present at any point.)

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This dream, like many, is extraordinarily easy to understand. I am seeing my classmates in their static sleeping form, as a doll or mannequin represents being asleep, as well as lesser patterns of active conscious threads within the dream state. This metaphorical meaning also links to dreams representing circadian rhythms in various ways. There are several layers of validation in understanding this but I will keep it simple here. They are in a semicircular pattern deep in the forest. The forest is a deeper level of the dream state or the unconscious realm (as mostly anything away from day to day “civilization” is). I do not recall (or it was not documented) the waking transition of this particular dream. They are “arranged” as such due to (threads of) my conscious self attempting to quantify and “organize” facets of the dream state.

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Night of September 9, 1976. Thursday.



One of the worst nights of pain based on the operation on my right thumb (on the 25th of August) and wrist (and much tissue removed), a cobra strikes me on my thumb in my dream, extraordinarily vivid and bright in the backyard (Cubitis), seemingly in early morning.

Finally, my mother gives me a stronger painkiller again and I slip into an extraordinarily vivid and lucid dream. I am rolling down an embankment head over heals, along a grassy hillside, doing “perfect” somersaults with no physical discomfort whatsoever, and in fact, feeling quite peaceful and blissful. I roll into a river of mist. It looks like a normal river and in an otherwise normal meadow-like area, but instead is made of flowing foggy tendrils instead of running water. I am heading into a “bottomless” domain, much like Alice on morphine, I suppose, and am completely free from all discomfort and concern.

I “land” softly in a hallway after moving downwards through the mist for a seemingly long time, which appears to be the set for some sort of avant-garde movie called “Hello Harry”. It is about a young businessman who dies at an early age on his birthday (late twenties, I think). All of the other workers at the business, both male and female (but mostly male) benefit only from his work (and do little themselves) - yet he is mostly disliked by his business associates. This seems to imply that the business will now fail since he has died (though he is not the manager - there may be some sort of very subtle connection to “Gunga Din” by vague implications), without the other associates knowing or acknowledging his role in keeping the business going, possibly as the best or most dynamic salesman (and may actually come in part from having read “Death of a Salesman” at an earlier date, as I did read the 1949 play sometime during this period). He only has one good friend who mourns him. I “float” into a room with concrete walls and floor and see that the man who had been his friend is drinking too much from a bottle of gin and “celebrating” his friend’s birthday while wearing a multicolored cone-shaped cardboard hat (with red “V” or boomerang shapes) and a red tinsel lei. The remains are in a coffin in an adjoining smaller room. The rooms are mostly featureless and appear to be part of some sort of large basement, but possibly in the commercial building where he died. (It is possible he may be cremated in the business’s furnace, but I am not certain.)

The man (name unknown, I only know the dead man’s name is Harry - the other man could be Willy) goes into the smaller room and places a cocktail glass of gin on the coffin and takes one final drink from his cocktail glass and slowly and mournfully sings (to Harry) “Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you…” (obviously not expecting an “answer” of any kind, as he is the only one there and the other man has died the day or so before).

However, a clear voice comes from the closed coffin and it is supposedly Harry (even though he has actually died) also mournfully singing…“Happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me…”

This is the last scene and it seems to have some sort of science-fiction-like theme as well as the avant-garde movie essence.

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Night of August 18, 1966. Thursday.



This is probably one of my first more precisely documented dreams over time. It was recurring and lucid in some versions. One might think this would be a nightmare, but not even close, just a sense of childlike awe and wonder and likely my first tulpa-creating attempt within a dream state.

My dream usually starts at the Concordia Ballroom (at 1129 La Crosse Street) where my father often performed in real life. It is fairly late at night. I danced there in reality at the time, but in my dream, things are quite different. The Concordia building seems to be oriented perpendicular to actuality. There are also a lot of cars that seem more of a late 1940s style than the 1960s.

Not only that, I end up wandering off into the darkness, yet seeing that a large barn…yes…a barn - exists just down the street a short distance from the Concordia Ballroom.

In the barn it is semi-dark. Cobras are certainly not to be found in Wisconsin (in the wild, anyway), but there is a cobra in the hayloft (and only ever one). It is mostly black with a bit of yellowish orange. In some versions (even later on, as it got colder in real life), I wait expectantly, but wake up before it appears (almost as if it had to appear before I could leave my dream with “better confidence” - hard to explain). Sometimes it seems to be a long time for me to be standing there. No drama happens. No one comes looking for me. I do not think of climbing up to the hayloft at all. The cobra is high above in the hayloft, upright, around the middle area, and is no real threat. There seems to be a mystical atmosphere over the whole time period with similar dreams.