memorable

Night of December 21, 1970. Monday.



My older brother Dennis, half-brother on my mother’s side, is visiting my parents and me at our home in Cubitis during his leave during the Vietnam war, in my dream as well as in reality. Also in reality as is recognized in my dream, he had given me a small silver flashlight with a corrugated surface, that was identical to the one he had. My birthday was the day before; December 20th. [Dennis plays the role of “interested witness” in my dream and is the only other human character in this segment.]

He and I are in my father’s original room at the southwest corner of my Cubitis home. It seems to be very late at night, perhaps around midnight or after. There is a light mist in the room, rising up to just below knee-level. [The appearance of a mist at or near ground-level, especially inside a familiar house, is a very good dream sign, though I do not become lucid.] We are standing close to the large bed (and which has mostly light gray and light blue bedding), almost touching the sides. My brother Dennis is standing on the left of my informal disembodied viewpoint, closer to both the door and the head of the bed as I am looking south towards the jalousie windows which the head of the bed is adjacent to and from my incorporeal perspective of watching myself (which I do not find unusual at all), the other “real” (physical) me being closer to the foot of the bed on my right, the bed perpendicular to the south wall of the room, out from about the middle of the wall. [A bed is another very good and more obvious dream sign, especially when a mist appears around it.]

A ghostly tadpole, floating in the air, partially transparent and with a hint of blue, about the length of my hand, is hovering and wavering horizontally above the center of the empty bed, and it is looking north towards the foot of the bed as well as alternating glances at us, remaining in position at about two and a half feet from the bed’s surface, reminding me a little of a fluttering pennant. [“See, I am like a ship’s pennant, fluttering above a bed in a room of mist, marking the platform of your induction, so take notice of me, do you not see you are in a dream?”]

This ghostly tadpole is my secondary conscious self presence within my dream, projected here as the flying symbol of dream state immersion and waking transition, downsized and rendered as not yet an adult frog to remind me I am still a boy. It speaks to me of coalescence, impossibly “swimming” fairly high above the implied surface of a pond or other body of water; as such, rising above the awareness of a typical dream, and as a result, my dream almost reaches apex lucidity and becomes nearly as vivid as real life.

Both Dennis and I are shining flashlights at it and around it and watching its big eyes dart from side to side, as I remain with a feeling of awe and wonder, watching how the light reacts to various aspects of its partly reflective wavering body. Its mouth also makes fish-like movements the whole time. My brother is talking about it in detail and making other comments. I catch the word “weird” a few times but not much else. [The flashlight is the power of the whole conscious self, shining light and awareness into the dream state, and in addition to this being my primary conscious self essence, it also signifies the inevitability of sunrise and daylight - that which dissolves the most vivid of dreams.]

Time passes and the hovering ghostly tadpole eventually quickly turns (after seemingly deciding if he wanted to go into Dennis’s flashlight or mine) and suddenly “swims” into my flashlight, following the ray of light that my flashlight emits, yet my flashlight goes out as my dream eventually “darkens” and I wake with somewhat of a curious awareness and puzzlement. I get an impression that Dennis will be puzzled by my flashlight no longer working as I come out of an odd half-awake state.

…and thus my dream ends, the small “undeveloped” (not yet a frog) ghost of my dream self projection, incomplete threads of conscious puzzlement and limited identity, the “haunted” nature of “unraveled” conscious attentions, deciding to coalesce back into the light of day, the tool and form of whole consciousness, the flashlight, the ray of rationality, the flight of the waking, half-aware self back to the source and out of the dream state. There is only one additional detail. My flashlight really did stop working that morning, which puzzled my brother greatly. The batteries were new. Perhaps the bulb burnt out. I did not drop it, but it never worked again.

Night of December 19, 1970. Saturday.



On the eve of my tenth birthday (December 19, 1970), a rather oddly titled article by John Dart appeared in the “Crossroads” newspaper supplement, that being “Is God A She?” I wonder if anyone else even noticed. More importantly, was God “the queen of outer space” (that afternoon’s movie)? “Obviously not all goddesses one meets…are of this sort,” said Dr. Dornish at the end of the article.

One of my most vivid memories from age five is being in the “Miracle Space Ship” in Copeland Park in La Crosse, especially on the day I slid down the big wavy slide for the first time while there was a light rain beginning and my mother was waiting near the bottom (on the right) with arms akimbo and my father just pulling up in a car on the edge of the road, being apparently annoyed by my tentativeness in getting out of the rocket according to what my mother was saying rather loudly. However, I never developed the courage to go all the way up to the top and mostly stopped about one section above what was at the time, a massive slide “above the world”. I listened to the giggles and the metallic thumps above me, sensing the movement and vibrations in this “rocket”, and thought perhaps the whole structure precarious, and even perhaps the other children floating off into nowhere when reaching the top. (Years later, when I returned to Wisconsin as an older teenager, it was far less intimidating.)

In an adventurous dream, Talleah and Yllana are present. Random male classmates serve the background roles. There was the typical composite confusion found in dreams, where I absentmindedly replaced the new slide in the West Elementary School playground with the rocket slide from Copeland Park. This was not problematic as dream characters sometimes do not care less if a setting is even there, let alone rendered with proper detail.

Talleah (Zsa Zsa Gabor) tells me “You needn’t worry dahlink.”

Queen Yllana: “I’m going to allow myself the exquisite pleasure of watching you while I obliterate the Earth.” (I did not yet know what “exquisite” meant. I thought it might have something to do with pinching someone as they did on St. Patrick’s Day if you were not wearing green regardless of any cultural background or considerations.) John C (classmate) does not seem too impressed and seems to be talking a bit too much. I wish he would just stop before the women get more annoyed or call “dial-a-verse” to keep himself quiet.

The playground is the playground though an outpost on Venus at the same time, perhaps bilocated through typical in-dream layered associations. I need to “escape” by climbing the steps, but they go on forever…

Morning of November 29, 1970. Sunday. (Last checked and clarified on Friday, 12 January 2018.)



In my dream, I had been wandering around in my backyard in Cubitis, seemingly around nine o'clock on a clear morning, becoming more and more lucid. I start to think about taking advantage of this state and enjoying physical interaction with Lisa (who is not present in my dream at any time). I marvel at the clarity of my dream’s environment, finding its realism stunning and wondrous.

I am eventually seated on the ground inside an area within the unfinished part of the large cinder block shed (which my father had built and added to over time), which does not have any roof or walls. I am seated near one of the cinder block columns that is to my right (west). As I am sitting here, facing south (looking in the opposite direction as the main part of the shed) and feeling happy and expectant in my anticipatory musings, I turn slightly to my right to look westerly towards the carport and notice an unfamiliar stray dog walking around and sniffing the ground. I believe it is possibly a black Labrador Retriever. The dog huffs upon noticing me, but does not bark.

I become extraordinarily frustrated. “You dogs are always ruining my dreams,” I bravely shout, with the tone of my frustration dominant and echoing throughout the dream space (though still with my young boy’s voice), expressing my irritation at the presence of a dream state distraction and potential virtual threat and as such, my attention drawn from my previously hopeful lucid intent of feminine contact (even though I spent a lot of time with Lisa in real life).

After a menacing deep growl, the dog teleports from just beyond the east end of our carport (a good distance away), to reappear right behind me. The dog jabs me in the small of my back with his hard nose, triggering the deep tickle spasm in my lower back, which causes me to spontaneously jolt awake. I was annoyed at having such a vivid and well-rendered dream truncated.

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Questions Answered:

What does the aggressive unfamiliar dog in this dream symbolize? The dog is this dream’s RAS (Reticular Activating System) factor. RAS is that which is responsible for regulating wakefulness and sleep-wake transitions. (I had no fear or wariness of dogs in real life and no expectation of such an encounter.) On the one hand, the dog’s assumed lack of obedience symbolizes my dream self’s expectancy of my dream’s non-compliance with my conscious self identity’s desires and potential will. On the other hand, by exclaiming, “You dogs are always ruining my dreams”, I lucidly caused the dog to serve my negative expectation of this dream’s outcome so quickly, that the dog teleported and triggered the waking jolt in my lower back.

Why did you shout “You dogs are always ruining my dreams”? The reason for me negatively addressing the RAS factor was that I was already familiar with the nature of the dream state (and its many different levels) at this time - even as a child (though had not mastered it yet as I mostly have now, though it depends on the level of unconsciousness and the particular stage of the sleep cycle). RAS had already been rendered as dogs in a number of dreams by this time, again, symbolizing my dream state not submitting to my will, analogous to an untrained dog. This sort of aggressive RAS symbolism eventually diminished as I got older and learned more about dreams. (In fact, in a number of recent dreams, a passive German Shepherd had appeared, standing near a a thin vertical pole displaying a pennant at the top, symbolizing my dream’s obedient nature within certain levels of unconsciousness.) Still, RAS does get aggressive and dominating at times (though is often personified rather than being rendered as an animal), as waking is a biological necessity.

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Morning of November 7, 1970. Saturday.



Although this was one of my favorite dreams of this time period, I guess I really was not very good at coming up with more precise titles (or even interesting ones) in many cases (the original title, here, had never been changed to any other title in other transcriptions to sometimes allow for more detail with similar dreams). The song from my dream, which I actually recorded a few times when younger (unfortunately, without any sense of musical taste) - brings fond memories of hilarious incompetence. Then again, this was a “movie soundtrack” in a sense (or more of a “dream soundtrack”). It opens with a showing of not-very-realistic stars as if the camera is moving through space at a fairly slow speed. The higher mid-range male voice moans somewhat slowly and sadly, “Thi-yi-yi-yi-yings…from outer spay-yay-yay-yay-yace…may bring truh-uh-uh-ooh-ble…for the human ray-yay-yay-yee-yace…”



June 2015 UPDATE: After all these years, I have decided upon an interesting viable association with the human hand. Apparently, it was a giant land-going cuttlefish.

The main first scene is a “giant human hand” (the right hand - with bulging but human-like eyes and a crown placed on its “knuckles” with special effects of some kind) that moves from right to left, spider-like (as I have decoded spiders to often represent negative associations with human hands due to their visual matching as even the “Alien” movie did with the “facehugger”, though in a few dreams they had a positive association with human hands in connection with “The Eensy Weensy Spider”), with an eerie stop-motion-like effect on the sand in the area it is “walking” but not quite as much with the “alien monster” itself. The imagery seems to have the same overall mood as the scene from “Dinosaurus” from 1960, where in-dream, I reflect on the sand moving in a similar way as the dinosaur’s body is dragged along the beach (which may be an augmented sense, “amplified” in-dream). The fact that I know this “alien monster” is actually a human hand (moving through a model of the school grounds?) seems to remove all sense of any possible threat from my dream. I find it intriguing how some of my dreams were able to “amplify” the very clear but somewhat artificial feeling of some of these movies from the early 1960s, especially the stop-motion ones like “Mysterious Island” (1961) and “Jason and the Argonauts” (1963), two of my favorites.

Later, however, I am in the high school building where I and other West Elementary students sometimes went to the auditorium in real life to see various shows and such. I am trying to “hide” from a large orange “octopus man” (also with a crown) who is mostly moving around in the dark because of a teacher having sent me to turn the power off to possibly “trap” him due to his supposed poor vision. I am doing this by staying to the right outer side of the doorway as a tentacle moves out from the doorway now and then, moving near me but not touching me. I suppose that I could move to the left and leave the area, but for some reason, I remain near the doorway.

The crowns were quite plain and similar to crowns in several other dreams. Mostly orange-tinted and with a seemingly engraved triangle waveform on the band, similar to the zigzag pattern on Charlie Brown’s shirt, but not quite as thick. Sometimes, I get the sense of two short antennas on either end of the crown, with a lightning bolt moving between them. I had drawn pictures with this feature during this time period.

There are a few other scenes involving Toby T and the fact that we will probably still be going to school even with all these strange creatures moving around town. There are also parts of music playing, from the song “Aquarius” from “Hair” - and I get the sense it is related to “this movie” in-dream. At one point, there is a giant bat and human composite, which was not mentioned in all documentation instances.

New research implies that “Zontar: The Thing from Venus” was also possibly an influence. It had aired after “Dinosaurus” on the previous evening on “Shock Theatre”.

Night of October 30, 1970. Friday.



There is a knock at the front door of my Cubitis home seemingly at night, which may be a trick-or-treater regardless of the possible later time (and the implied in-dream date may be a day later). My mother answers (I may have been doing something earlier in my dream but I do not recall that part). It is an allover short-haired orange monster standing there in our carport (but otherwise has all the anatomical form of a human). However, it soon turns out to be my older brother Jim, holding the full-head mask in the bend of his left arm like a helmet after removing it (and I also have a vague idea that it actually is a motorcycle helmet, though he did not have a motorcycle in real life until much later). He seems happy and optimistic. (I had not seen him for some time in real life, since living at North Monroe Street.) In real life, he was jovial and never “monster-like” in any way in my perspective, though he was overweight most of his life.

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This rather short dream had two precognitive layers. You might find it strange that saying a visitor showing up on Halloween after my dream was precognitive. However, this really was the first and only time we ever had a trick-or-treater (and it was after dark) while living in Cubitis for nearly ten years - and my mother answered the door. Not only that, it was an older and stockier teenager (high school student) who neither my mother nor myself knew the identify of, but he was wearing a homemade paper mask and not a costume of any kind. It seemed a bit eerie (and of the same slightly anxious mood as the door was answered while I had been in the same location as in my dream). The second facet was that my older brother Jim came to visit us later, which was the first and only time he had been in Cubitis. We did not know at the time that he would be visiting as such.

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Night of October 19, 1970. Monday.



I am at a cocktail party very late at night on our carport at Cubitis even though I am only a young child. It may be around two o'clock in the morning. I had been playing with a friend (Eddie from my class), with a large, rubbery and mostly hollow all-orange toy racing car with driver (the “midget” kind that looks a bit like a shoe and the person leans way back to drive them). I clearly hear the glasses and ice-cubes clinking and party chatter, and see that everyone is fancily dressed. Suddenly, there is a much enhanced silence as I suddenly feel lucid. My dream becomes extremely vivid, of the “like real life” perception, even after waking. The silence ends with a few whispers and talk of the ghost of a wolf that haunts the railroad tracks just beyond our back yard beyond the usually weedy area. Soon, there is an eerie howl, and the white, glowing wolf moves quickly down the railroad tracks, going south. For a moment, he seems frozen in time in mid-leap. This is not nightmarish at all, but very enjoyable in its intense eeriness and nonthreatening event.

This dream is type EC2. The orange (associated with October, the month of this dream) toy racing car seen at the adult cocktail party on my carport (while fully in-body throughout as a remarkably stable dream self) foreshadows the waking transition as a downsized conduit symbol. The train coming down the track is my emergent consciousness. The ghost wolf that could be perceived as either “leading” the train, or being “chased” by the train is the hybridization of my temporary waking self (a ghost almost always being a thread of the “incomplete” conscious self in the dream state) and sublimated dream self, offset from the adult cocktail party as reflecting the “pack” - yet as a singular ghost wolf. The imagery is beautiful and extremely vivid and seems to occur in infinite night. The transition echoes as an eerie, but beautiful and very “familiar” howling sound.

Morning of October 17, 1970. Saturday.



It seems to be late morning. I have two small pet bats and I am walking around otherwise on my own in the main part of Arcadia. They are on my arm shooting small but long and forking lightning bolts at each other from their mouths. They express various funny faces when the lightning hits their eyes, mouth, nose, or ears, and eventually even a public US mailbox (which seems important for some reason). There is a vague feeling that I may become embarrassed if this continues in public, but only based on the idea that someone could come along and accidentally get struck by the tiny lighting bolts and blame me. At one point, they sit on my left shoulder (and now it seems as if I am seeing myself while incorporeal) and one licks its “lips” as small lightning bolts from the other bat hit it near the mouth.

As I start to focus more on the mailbox than my pet bats (though I am unsure if I have a letter to mail, though perhaps one my mother gave me to mail for her - though in reality at this time, it was usually my mother that mailed my letters), I begin to wake.

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Note One: The mailbox “seems important” to my mostly non-lucid dream self because it is a symbol for a sustained conscious intent for dream self communication with my conscious self identity to trigger lucidity and augment awareness (first put into practice in December 1966, around age six), though never intended to be rendered literally as here. However, there is duality in this dream (the two bats). This makes me suspect that I am in communication with someone in addition to myself.

Note Two: Lightning is often a real-time dream state metaphor that represents increasing neural activity (dendrite synapse analogy) as a RAS precursor as well as an associated play of the same symbolism based on lightning supposedly “bringing something back to life” (as in the movies “Dinosaurus” and various Frankenstein movies) simply (and obviously) analogous to waking up. (Though in some cases, it reflects physical pain or the residual memory of physical pain.)

Note Three: The very common (over one in five of my dreams) “return flight” waking symbolism factor is here, as the two bats (though they had not been seen flying). In this case, they seem more of an induction remnant, as bats are nocturnal and a symbol of being unconscious. (They are also a circadian rhythms factor which seems out of phase here as my dream’s setting is late morning, probably because of sleeping later on a Saturday yet still focused on the wonder of nighttime.)

Note Four: When Zsuzsanna was a child, her father caught bats in a large jar. Additionally, as there is duality in this dream, I feel that the mailbox is prescient of the fact Zsuzsanna and I wrote to each other before meeting and marrying, especially as bats also symbolize prescience (as in a few other dreams, especially the recurring “Patches” series, which had very detailed long-term prescience relating to Zsuzsanna before I met her or even knew of her real-life existence).

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Resupplemented on Sunday, 8 October 2017.

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Morning of October 11, 1970. Sunday.

Dream #: 1,392-02. Reading time (optimized): 1 min.



“The Visitor” is my original dream journal title from childhood.

There is a house with a supposedly haunted kitchen. I am unsure whose house it is or where it is, though it could be a sister’s house even though there is a commercial venue association at one point, vaguely causing me to think of the Coney Island restaurant in La Crosse where I had not been since 1967, though the rest of the house seems residential. (Houses with commercial features are not uncommon in my dreams.)

People believe in the haunting due to reports of a ghost drinking a glass of root beer from a straw. No one saw a ghost, but other people and I saw root beer lower in a glass until it was gone.

I eventually see that the “haunting” is the result of a daddy-long-legs spider at the top of a drinking straw. It is somehow drinking a full glass of root beer but never grows bigger. Seeing this amusing event creates a cheerful mood. There were resets of my dream, but this final scene was silly. (At one point, the spider seems to have a cartoon face.)

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My dream has subliminal associations with perseverance (as with the “Eensy Weensy Spider” song and fingerplay, the drinking straw being analogous to a water spout). I was unafraid of looking more closely at the presumed haunting. “Out came the sun and dried up all the rain” is another association with water (melatonin) lowering over time (though root beer in this case).

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Morning of October 3, 1970. Saturday. (Original date validated.)



Brenda W (female classmate and friend, as well as an in-dream precognitive “stand-in” for my wife-to-be) is supposedly kidnapped by aliens. I go to find her (somewhere in Arcadia on or near Imogene Street) and “wake up” within my dream to discover that I am aboard a spacecraft and had also been kidnapped. It is apparently the one from the movie “Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster” from 1965 (often misremembered as a child as “Frankenstein Vs. the Space Monster”) but looks a little more like the one from the original “The Day the Earth Stood Still” on the outside. The “space monster” is also the same (but is somewhat orange), but is kept in a cage next to Brenda. She is still threatened by the creature as he reaches through the bars of his cage and through the bars of her cage.

The “aliens” (who appear mostly human as in the movie and are basically the “same” ones) attempt to render me unconscious again, trying to get to me when they see that I am awake and walking around. However, I “defeat” them by waving my arms about and somehow outrunning them in the fairly small room. The “monster” somehow escapes from his cage, but I chase him around in a circular comedic scene so that it is not obvious who is chasing whom (much like a scene from the little “magical” walking cane dream relating to the two escaped prisoners). Eventually, he jumps from the spaceship (which is seemingly flying fairly high in the sky above a forest) through a wide doorway. The other “aliens” have also apparently left the spacecraft. I wonder about how to fly the spacecraft for a time and worry about crashing. I look more closely at the forest below. I let Brenda out of the cage and think about jumping.

We do jump - I go first, but I quickly and safely land on the ground - a sidewalk, actually. The forest was a small-scale miniature fake forest and the “spaceship” was only a few feet from the ground and held up near the center by a large post. I then motion for Brenda to jump out as she looks down curiously and with a bit of dawning amusement. It turns out we are near an entrance of the shared (elementary and high school) large cafeteria; the middle area near the longer covered sidewalk that extends over the school grounds. The “aliens” and “monster” were kidnappers in costume and makeup it then seems, but rather of an elaborate setup - perhaps being a part of some sort of hidden camera show, but I still sense they were criminals with intent to do harm. I do not see anyone anywhere and we are apparently safe from further confrontations as my dream eventually fades.

This was a very amusing DDR experience. Brenda was kidnapped, followed by my own kidnapping. Here, my emergent consciousness is associated with the “solving” of the alien event as a mundane fake created and utilized by the kidnappers. It was only a short jump to the ground (rather than the falling transition in many dreams). This is one I made into a story, though from an adult’s point of view, it was probably obvious from the beginning.

Sunday, 13 September 1970. 1,364-M1. 1 min 11 sec read.



A tornado approaches Arcadia, Florida, from the southwest in the morning. I do not consider it a threat to my Cubitis home about four miles north of Arcadia, but I wonder if it will reach my school.

At the end of the driveway of Kenny and Karen’s home; is an elevated podium where an unfamiliar dark-haired man of about 30 gives a cheerful lecture about tornadoes. He faces Highway Seventeen. A small crowd stands on the wayside. The man’s head and shoulders are about three feet above the audience as I watch from my bedroom windows. I zoom in on the scene. He uses a pointer stick on a picture of the “tornado” on an easel to his left.

The “tornado’s anatomy” picture is only a series of sparse horizontal lines on a white background. The simple diagram suggests a tornado’s shape, but I am puzzled by its lack of detail.

I think about how the tornado will affect my school. I find myself in my school’s playground. The tornado arrives but is only as high as a single-storey house. I neither feel its wind nor sense peril. I stand on the south side of the hexagonal merry-go-round, thinking I could save my schoolmates.

I grab the merry-go-round’s metal bar and run in a circle to counteract the tornado.

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Note: The end of Kenny and Karen’s driveway is where we waited for the school bus in some semesters.

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My dream begins with the physiological influence of vestibular-motor sensations (from REM atonia). It changes from spontaneous vestibular-motor responses to controlled and more defined.

A tornado approaches, but I know it will dissipate when I spin the merry-go-round. Also, I associate the area where we waited for the bus with expecting the vestibular-motor sensations of riding a bus.

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Morning of September 7, 1970. Monday.



A giant lobster is approaching my school from the west and we all have to leave (I had been in a class on the second floor). When I am outside, east of the building and at a fair distance from it, the giant red lobster approaches from the other side, but the scene does not look right. It is as if the school is now only one large wall with windows (and perhaps now implied as four storeys high), since I can see everything supposedly on the other side rather clearly as the creature bashes his claws on the building. Realistically, I should only have seen the building and not what was behind it through any windows to the other side, as I was down on the ground.

Not only that, the movement in each window seems to be the exact same partial scene and movement somewhat like a fly’s eye view, including what is seemingly duplicated sections of the same pieces of blue sky and arc of lobster claw in the background in each and every window. The simultaneous imagery and movement in each window is almost ominous in itself. Still, I actually enjoyed this dream because of its unusual “rare” nature. Although the “fly’s eye view” has occurred in other dreams (this being only one of two more vivid instances over a lifetime), it seems very rare.



This dream, I think, amusingly enough, was perhaps more influenced by the restaurant commercials shown during “Shock Theatre” than by any monster movies at the time, though “The Black Scorpion” (from 1957) might have had an influence.

Morning of August 29, 1970. Saturday.



In a number of repeating similar scenes throughout what seems a very long dreaming period, I find myself somehow arriving on an island very early in the morning before sunrise, each time for “the first time”, though the repetitive nature of the “resets” is not monotonous or of any type of negative effect. I seem incorporeal for the most part, though sometimes standing on the beach in my physical body. Regardless of my mainly unresolved redundant arrivals, I do not become impatient. There is mainly a feeling of perfection, happiness, and timelessness. I have a vague sense of my “mystery girl” (who may be living near the central area of the island) but I do not see her at any point.

Always in the distance no closer than thirty feet away, is a shadow in the form of a man but is also implied to be feline, with cat ears, and I sense it may be half panther and half man. There is no threat or negative emotion. The overall feeling the character is mostly projecting is neutral though seems to imply a beneficial future and even nostalgia (which seems unusual from a child’s point of view but has happened often with me as a boy). It seems like the creature is somehow always walking along the beach at this time on this seemingly isolated island. There are times when I more vividly perceive that this entity is my own shadow somehow cast from where I am standing on the beach (sparsely recurring including in much later dreams).

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Entry and additional notes confirmed and updated Wednesday, 26 October 2016.

• Mainly influenced by the movie “Terror Is a Man” (November 1959) though again, completely lacking in anything either frightening or threatening.
• Additionally influenced by the Money Cat scene from the animated movie “Gay-Purr-ee” (October 1962).
• Additionally influenced from a previous dream from the night of Friday, December 23, 1966 (“Money Cat” minion saves me).
• As of this writing, my last dream to feature an association with the Shadow Cat as the preconscious essence was “Catlike Shadow Creature and Shopping” from Saturday, September 10, 2016, though it has appeared in a number of other dreams, typically in a dream’s final minutes.
• A beach in a dream represents liminal space and in fact is the most powerful setting of this nature. (See off-site link: The Beach, part 3 - Liminal Space.)
• A cat (or in this case, a panther) mainly symbolizes the nocturnal form of the preconscious (especially in this shadow form), where its origin seems to be (even though cats are active during the day).
• Shadow forms in my dreams are often friendly, helpful, and even radiate love, the opposite of what the majority of other people claim.
• This form of the preconscious sometimes seems to be my own shadow, but in this case, I do not consider that a shadow could not appear in this way (for example, with no wall behind it for it to be logically cast upon), the same fallacy that has occurred in a number of other dreams since early childhood.

Morning of August 24, 1970. Monday.



This dream, I consider one of my most significant and “unexplainable” childhood dreams, as well as it being one of the longest of the time period. I called it “The Old Shack” in my original childhood journal. My dream’s back story started by three classmates and I (Tina L, Brenda W, and best friend Toby T) doing a real-life-based childish routine on the song “Sugar Shack” and pretending to mess up in timing, and going “whoops, it exploded… boom!” …“accidentally” (on purpose) flowing into the Nancy Sinatra song “Sugar Town”. School had gotten out June 5th this year.

My dream featured a strange old (fictional) wooden building (a “sugar shack” I had supposed - but not really - one room had an old bed we all “slept” on which seemed to be oriented from the middle of the south wall) where one room on the north end of the main room seemed sort of “burned” or dark, with very loose and missing floorboards as well as missing wall and ceiling parts - and appeared in different ways at different times (in terms of age). The only other feature in this shack of note are ragged curtains with only about fifty percent of the cloth left. There was a strong emotional focus on my dream at the time, but I did not know why. My dream also had typically recurring elements. The juvenile (in this case) “four in a bed” concept likely but innocently could have been inspired by promos (or newspaper theater advertisements) for “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice”, though I had no idea what the movie related to other than from the Mad Magazine parody us four read in real life (and of course did not really find that amusing - and it certainly did not encourage us into looking forward to being “idiotic” adults, though I usually enjoyed most features in Mad Magazine), though I do not know the day it was bought - the cover date says September 1970, but it likely was available in June 1970 or earlier. The hair color (three dark, one blonde) matched, and I had a brother-in-law named Bob and a sister (not Bob’s wife) named Carol.

In my dream, a normal rabbit (possibly modeled after my mother’s pet rabbit Cindy, though it seemed wild in my dream) had gone through the doorway that led in and out of the unusual room (though the floor did not seem strong enough or complete enough to walk on or even to actually enter the room). Later, it was a giant rabbit (bigger than a horse), but was not dangerous in any way. There is also a part where a snake grows larger but does not threaten us - though we do see it crawl past the open front door (on the east side of the building - the back door being on the west side), being about half the height of the doorway and this concerns Tina. At one point (when events are getting to a point where we need to leave), she says (in her “fake” British accent) “…but what about the rabbit?”

Tina had placed a sparrow with a broken wing through the doorway at one point, and it had begun to grow larger. It eventually becomes a pterodactyl after flying over the shack and she seems a bit concerned about what she did. She also puts an old wilted bouquet of flowers (from the southwest dusty corner of the large room) through the doorway and the blooms become fresh. I am not sure how the room works at any point. Does it move through time (thus causing other things to change), or just make things bigger at times? I can understand how the sparrow became a pterodactyl if prehistoric “throwbacks” (as well as futuristic ones) are implied with time shifting, but that does not explain why the rabbit (and snake) - as well as my thumb near the last scene - just became larger.

My friend Toby (who is wearing a cheap wristwatch) sticks his hand through the doorway to “test” it somehow (based on curiosity about how other things that had happened - such as the restoration of part of the torn curtain to becoming complete and like new) and ends up with a changed watch that is complex and computerized - there even seems to be a miniature slot machine video game on it (before I ever saw or heard of computer games as such). In real life, years later, such things actually existed as seen in my dream years before, which I found quite interesting.

Near the final scenario, I had placed my right hand through the doorway and my thumb cramped up in great pain and grew nearly twice as large (I do not typically experience this level of pain in a dream).

My dream had ended by me trying to reach an apparently known “portal” after running out the back door (though I am not sure what influenced this - possibly a “Star Trek” episode) and across a mostly featureless large grassy field, around the same time that the reddish pterodactyl (that had transformed from the sparrow) made a shadow on the ground near me as I was running (and I assume that it was ready to attack me) and I just made it through the old isolated trellis which was being used as an arched gate as part of a broken fence - which was supposedly the “portal” from my dream into reality (and probably the “cure” for whatever the room in the shack had changed) - though I am beginning to only become slightly lucid at this point (the situation nearly identical in mood and physical awareness to the event in the “Dogpile” dream of 1972 where I leaped through the front door of my Cubitis home) as I saw the pterodactyl become a sparrow again, and fall to the ground just after crossing above the supposed “portal”. (The pterodactyl shadow is likely a replay of a real-life event concerning a buzzard flying over me, of which numerous dreams were influenced by.)

The outcome:

Exactly six years later in real life (August 24, 1976)…I was in the hospital, my right thumb enlarged to nearly twice the size (exactly as in my dream) due to a completely unexpected medical condition, caused by an unexplainable series of four (and a half) cysts, all the same size except for the new one just starting, which all apparently had embryonic properties as if my body suddenly decided to grow a few other siblings from my thumb (though this followed other dreams which were also precognitive to this event). There was not the slightest indication of this until the summer vacation of 1976 when I first noticed the first one growing (with no hints or known causes beforehand), but did not get it checked out until there were four in a row, and by that time, a fifth had started closer to my wrist.

The CBS late movie that was playing the night prior to the morning of my operation was “Night of the Lepus” from 1972 - about giant rabbits of the same size orientation as the one from my dream. There is more, but the detail is minor compared to the significance of the two main synchronous links.

Though this pales in comparison to nearly endless unexplainable “mystery girl” associations and numerous other mysteries (including my present knowledge of fractals in the language and certain types of patterns), I still find this one interesting, all in all, relative to the main reason I started paying attention to my dreams when very young and why I started dream journalism in the first place - because no adult could be honest or tell me how dreams continuously “echoed” into reality, often with precise visual detail of something not seen (or even existing) until later. There is no excuse for such ignorance or denial (or replacing personal experience with incompatible religious beliefs) - as each person has a will to make a life for himself - and to validate his own understanding successfully.

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.