ErraticHopper

This is the last dream this month. I've been slacking. Oops...

From the street I walk into a shop with a person I know from school. The shop front is about two bays wide and completely open, no doors, one single storey. It reminds me of the entrance to an underground car park. The name of the shop is four letters, beginning with A and lowercase. I've forgotten what it was.

We enter and I see that the shop is wider on the inside and stretches far, far back. We begin walking through a section filled with clothes on racks seemingly grouped by colour. As we get to the edge of the clothes I reach out to feel a turquoise skirt with a yellow daisy pattern between my fingers. The fabric feels slippery and textured. I let go and keep going past several clear stands of hairbands and sunglasses and trinkets. There aren't even any paths or open space - the floor is chock-a-block with racks and stands and rails. I can barely see ahead and have to shove and squeeze to make my way.

We step into a big square area of open space. It's broken up by barriers of the kind you see in airport security or any long queue, into several straight lanes each leading towards a till. The tills are along a long, shiny counter - its sides are white and the top is black. The tops of computer monitors peek over the counter at each station. I can't quite be sure, now, whether this area was filled with orderly and motionless queues or completely empty.

We continue straight through the till area and into a mass of white shelves piled with coloured goods. Shelving units facing in all directions fit together like Tetris. There's barely any space to push through. I look up and the ceiling is white and shadowy, starkly bright lights suspended from it on twisted cables and the vented openings to air conditioning pipes. The ceiling is crisscrossed with narrow black beams. I look down and the floor is grey lino flecked with white, and tiny scattered triangles in red, blue, green and yellow.

It seems we are nearly at the back of the premises (though I can't see a wall ahead of me - the view fades to black not far off) when we abruptly turn left instead. Several large, black openings to food kiosks can be seen with rows of screens advertising their menus, like you'd see in a shopping centre food court. Directly ahead is a burger place. Above the kiosks is now an upper floor with full-length tinted windows, up there I can see padded booth seating and faces pressed against the glass. There's a new path right in front of all the kiosks which leads away behind the shop floor and tills. I can't see far down it until the hall becomes enclosed and completely dark.

We turn back and go the way we came, shoving past the merchandise and other customers and walking all the way until we leave the store. Outside the daylight seems blinding. The sky is white and all along the sloping street the shop fronts are single-storey and topped by huge signs. All the colours are bright and vivid. I see a green shop with lettering in a fun red font, and a black man with dreads in jeans and a bright green shirt. Downhill are more shops and cars passing in both directions, but uphill there are no more buildings to be seen beyond the intersection immediately to the right.

It's a blue, sunny morning and I am following my school librarian through the city. I don't think she knows I'm behind her. She's wearing low heels and a flared below-the-knee dress with a book pattern on it, a bag on one shoulder and no jacket to cover her wavy brown hair. Cars are driving past while the sun glints on the glass exteriors of office buildings, cafés and small shops are opening up.

We turn away from the main road and down a smaller street. I recognise it; I took a photograph of it once. The street is perhaps poured concrete and is uneven, with imperfections here and there as though it's been pierced with a fork or blown up by a big bubble. Looking down it the buildings shine and seem to merge with the sky beyond, reflecting the blue and the white clouds. At the top is a stop sign: EXCEPT CYCLES.

Some ways down the street she turns and enters through the double doors of a green-blue glass building. Inside the lobby there's a glass reception office, empty, containing a shiny black desk and a window to allow visitors to speak to the receptionist. The floor is that kind of carpet with metal ridges in it. She enters the office and sits at the desk - looks like she works here. But I realise this isn't where I'm meant to be. A crowd of girls in a dark-coloured uniform different to mine spill into the lobby from within to greet her.

I feel confused and register that she should be working at my school. I ask her about this and receive some explanation in return. The thought vaguely enters my mind that I am late to school.

Lately I haven't remembered many dreams because I've lost control of my sleep schedule a bit. Tonight's New Years but I do intend to start going to sleep at the right time again. I've begun studying some lucid techniques and will update my workbook very soon!

School pool. We are having a swimming lesson, though the person teaching us is not a swimming or PE teacher. The pool is small, two metres deep perhaps, and raised off the ground, the water is blue-green. Beside it the surrounding floor is built in something like sandstone. The floor at the right side of the room is a step below the pool, but that at the back is raised by a big step and what seems like low bollards are spaced out along its length. I look closer and each one has a name on it in slightly raised stone letters. They are memorials. The nearest name looks like 'Marjorie'.

Below the raised pool is a very shallow one, the water is completely clear.

We begin swimming, but now we're not in the pool anymore. It's like we're swimming in the air over the city. Below me I can see skyscrapers and the biggest buildings of the financial district, and lots of houses with red tile roofs. I'm in a group and we float around, laughing, every now and then stopping to rest our feet on the roofs of the buildings. They seem much smaller than us at this distance. I place my feet on a group of houses and feel the roughness of the surface on my skin.

Now it does feel like we're in water again. But we're still above the city. I don't quite get how this works but I feel that the water's surface is far above these buildings. There doesn't seem to be any water down here. It's like two spaces overlapping one another.

I swim slowly, but I keep bumping into a girl in my group. I apologise to her and try to swim a bit further away. She's laughing a lot and with her friends seems to be communicating with someone else far away, I don't know how. While swimming away I turn around and realise she - and she only - is now naked. I'm shocked, and then, I bump into her again. It's much more embarrassing this time.

We are finally back in the murky school pool. I swim around a bit more, feeling good, I can hear my teacher talking. I look up and realise I am the only one left in the pool and everyone else is sitting on the side farthest away at the front of the room. That feels awkward and I quickly get out. The small pool is between me and the others, so I slide in, bracing my hands against the bottom to avoid hitting my head. This pool is really too shallow to swim in. I get over to the other side and get out.

I didn't remember this one at all when I woke up, which was disappointing. But then I was reading in the morning and came across a scene which involved a severed head. I thought of the head and then I thought 'Taxidermy' and everything came back to me. This dream was so strange. The second part wasn't at all gory to experience but I suppose it could make some feel queasy.

Fragment 1:

I remember being in a boarding house with classmates from school. The building has two floors and is painted white or grey all over. There are no lights on and the sky outside is dim white, so inside it's shadowy. It's just us here, no host.

My room is on the ground floor and I step outside into a long hallway. The doors too are smooth and white, with pull-down handles. Recessed inside their frames they are dark with shadow. I walk past a pink laundry basket and up the single flight of stairs.

The upper floor is just as shadowy and plain. I pass along the hallway by closed white doors. At the end of the hallway is a dark, empty room with a window on the opposite wall and off to the side a doorless doorway into another empty space. In the wall opposite the doorway are two white doors, and one in the adjacent wall, all closed. I see two of my friends come out of this latter door. They are laughing and carrying a laundry basket.

Fragment 2:

I arrive at my street with a friend from school, we get out of the car. I see that there are two naked corpses, each splayed out face down on top of two cars which are next to one another. One of those cars - the blue one - might be mine, the other is grey. My friend has some reason for these being here. She wants to preserve the corpses so I offer to help her. I take a short scaffolding pole out of the boot of the car and push it into the anus of the nearest body. It enters cleanly and easily with a long part still sticking out. She pushes another into the other end of the body. I'm not clear about this part - in the dream I was sure this was the vagina, but it can't have been, more likely the mouth. But I'm sure it wasn't the mouth. I'm not sure these bodies even have heads. I suppose that's dream logic. At the end of this process poles stick out of both ends of the body, as if it has been impaled.

She asks if I'll help her with the other one too. I look down at the pole I now have in my hand. The pole is dented at the end and has some smudged black marks on it so I tell her it might not be suitable - I'm worried about it causing an infection. I walk up to my house leaving her to finish up on her own.

Outside the open door of my house I stand talking to my mum. She looks out and asks me what that's all about. After a moment's thought I tell her that my friend is interested in taxidermy.

Looking back I can see that both corpses have now been 'impaled'. From here they seem in a sort of spread-eagle position, toes pointed and arms stretched backwards, faces looking up.

Day 14 (Night of Friday 01.12.2023) is too fragmented to merit an entry.