Blue_Opossum

Night of March 2, 1974. Friday.



I am in my room in Cubitis very late at night (possibly a couple hours before dawn). I am in my bed, with my head to the north, and on my right side, my bed along the west wall. I am looking out my window into our large front yard. I maintain a very vivid state of awareness but I am not lucid.

I see a shadowy form move through the sky over our front yard (from the northwest) and land on a branch of one of the three young silver oak trees (aligned north to south and a few feet from my windows), the rightmost one from my viewpoint. I am trying to work out if it is a hawk that has caught a snake or if it is actually a flying snake. It turns out to be a flying snake, but is somewhat awkward in its movements. It has large bat-like wings. I mostly only discern its silhouette against the background of the sky. It flies toward our neighbor’s house to the south. I vividly feel “privileged” to have seen it and also feel a sense of both mystery and increased well-being.

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Resupplemented for a clearer and more detailed explanation on Saturday, 2 December 2017.

My dream starts with me being in bed. This obviously means I have a residual thread of conscious self memory at having gone to bed but without viably remembering I am asleep.

My act of looking out my window directly relates to a subliminal attempt to look through my real eyes or link to my conscious self identity (and recent memory thereof), which is presently inactive to some extent despite my dream’s vividness.

The flying snake is a real-time composite of two RAS-related factors. A snake is the primary mechanism of RAS (though depending on the dream type, a snake may relate to real-life associations, such as a warning about a frayed electrical cord or an intestinal issue - due to its shape and coiled appearance, though if a snake is rendered vividly or realistically as one of the last features, it is likely only RAS and thus completely unrelated to “interpretation”), typically rendered to induce enough emotion to trigger waking (as a biological necessity, including to attend to real physical needs, but sometimes as a result of a real environmental noise of which the source is unknown to the unconscious). Flight is related to inner ear dynamics and the nature of not correctly perceiving the physical body while unconscious.

Because of my near-lucidity (though not viable lucidity), the RAS dynamics are intriguing in this case. The typical perception of “falling” out of the dream state (the natural dynamic of becoming conscious) is transmuted to this otherwise unique feature and as a result, I have a soft, enjoyable awakening from the illusion of the dream state. This is “exit flight waking symbolism”, which is a very common type of waking symbolism (and typically unrelated to real life or the conscious self).

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