Night Vision

This dream is like a video game, but the scene I’m watching play out seems more like a model than something taking place on a screen. I’m in an ancient building, your standard video game temple-like structure. I have been playing for a while and there’s only one way I can go to explore further—up a staircase. I steer my character there. This triggers a couple events, including a bunch of animate skeletons coming in and filling up the room—quite a lot of enemies to face alone. I figure I should configure my spells so I can take care of them more easily—but pressing the button doesn’t do anything. Oh, right. I’m also an animated skeleton right now, and until I get this little problem taken care of, I’m not going to be able to access spells.

Plan B: a couple of these guys are carrying weapons. I can go for one of them first—the one with the spear, I think— arm myself and take on the rest. I leap into action.

Actually, the fight is a lot easier than I expected—it seems the skeletons have got soaking wet somehow, and they fall apart after only a couple hits each. I can continue to the next area now. But my first priority is to find an antidote for my companions. They’re lying around the area—currently represented by cats—having been drugged or poisoned at some point. I was hoping there’d be something to help them in here, but since there hasn’t been so far, I may as well go look around town before continuing - see if anything's changed there.

Just then, my attention is drawn away from the game to the music on the radio. It sounds like that Mathews guy they’ve been playing so much lately. He’s been growing on me, even though I usually don’t care much for contemporary classical music. I look at the display on the XM radio: it reads MSO Mathews. Looks like I was right.

Shortly afterwards, my alarm wakes me.

(Later that day, I try googling MSO Mathews out of curiosity—and find it points me to a cellist in the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra. I figured it was the guy’s initials in the dream, and I have no idea whether this person writes music as well—but that's still surprisingly relevant.)

It seems as if I’ve been assigned an assistant. (Although I couldn’t say who was doing the assigning. It’s almost as if the dream itself was.) He is called Ortig. I'm dubious about this arrangement, as I have done fine without an assistant until now, but I have to admit, over the course of the dream, that it seems to be working out well. I never see him—we seem to be communicating as if via headsets from separate locations as we cooperate on something—but I have the impression of a nice person, unobtrusive to the point of inscrutability, who really knows what he’s doing.

(23.2.18)

Almost all of the details of this dream faded from memory when I woke up. All I can remember of the earlier parts was of a complicated plotline that seemed to involve three main character and ended with everybody getting onto buses.

I was watching everything take place, and I knew that something was going to happen soon—some conflict, I think. I now had a sort of abstract representation in front of me, a rectangular box filled with a blue sand-like substance. It was arranged in little wavy lines, most of them going only a short distance before being interrupted by other little wavy lines going in different directions. I traced a wavy line going all the way from one corner of the rectangle to the opposite one, cutting across the other lines. This would allow the people in the dream to move into action quickly once it became necessary. Their reinforcements would be able to arrive in the same amount of time as it would have taken them to travel along only one of the hundreds of tiny lines.

22.2.18

I am in what seems to be a dorm room set up for three people, although there are only two of us living there. Above the doorways, I can see red text continually scrolling by, which is then replaced by new text—records of conversations, it seems. On the walls, there are a few posters, different pictures, but all with the words “conserve merriment” at the bottom. This is a reference to something familiar to the person I am in the dream. I walk from the room where I am to the one where my flatmate is sitting.

He/she—this person seems rather androgynous, and the dream itself offers no clues—wants to know if I’m interested in going to do something with him/her. I reflect that I do seem to have been learning more from the things I spend my free time doing than from my actual classes. But I still feel reluctant. It has to do with things I experienced before getting here, I tell my flatmate. In a way, it’s like I’m telling about everything that’s happened to me up until now, but all compressed into a sentence or two—a lifetime spent as a fugitive, never being able to stay in any one place for long, just one bad thing after another.

And then he/she replies: “Is that all?” And actually, when you put like that, it really doesn’t seem so bad. Sure, I guess I’ll go to your thing.

We then talk for a bit about the place we’re at, which is called Campa Piri, and another place I can’t remember the name of now. Then I find myself reading a transcript of the conversation rather than experiencing it. I glance a bit further on, where we’re talking about yet another nearby place called Stone Sway and joking about how it totally sounds like a double entendre. And at that point, I wake up.

In the next dream of the night, I also seem to be a different person—a young boy staying at a large house with a group of other people, all adults, apparently. There was a lot that happened in the early parts of this dream that I can no longer remember, but it seemed to involve finding some kind of special thing in this house—I want to say it was a book, but I’m not entirely sure, and so from here on out it will be known as the MacGuffin.

We are all preparing to leave, and it seems that my uncle—my actual uncle, the only familiar person in this dream—is going to be taking the MacGuffin back with him. I don’t like this: I think that it would be better off in the hands of literally anyone else in the world, and it really ought to stay in the house here. But he’s intent on it and, as usual, impervious to arguments.

He’ll also be taking all the paintings that were in the dining room. It’s a wood-paneled room with a long, wooden table in the middle of it, and pretty much all the space on the walls was taken up with paintings, which illustrated various stories. But now he has them stacked in a closet there, ready to be taken out to the car. I’m not happy about this either. I tell him that he wouldn’t have the space to hang them up, and they’d probably just sit in his house, not even properly stored. He claims he’ll hang them up, but I don’t believe him. What strikes me as particularly unfair about this is that it was only by means of the paintings that we had managed to understand the MacGuffin’s true nature and gain possession of it—possibly from some dark sorcerer type, but that’s also escaped my memory. If the paintings aren’t available, the MacGuffin may never be able to make its way into the hands of someone more suitable in the future.

But then it occurs to me—I can make sure the paintings never make it to his house. There are many people here who also feel this isn’t right, and with their cooperation, we can have the paintings mysteriously back on their walls. Maybe we can spook him into returning the MacGuffin. I pull someone aside to tell them my idea, and pretty soon, the plan is ready to be put into action. But we need a diversion so we can get our hands on the paintings.

It’s announced that I’m going to be talking about a painting in a nearby room, and so everybody—minus a few co-conspirators—files in and sits down in rows of chairs. I have the painting there at the front of the room: a fairly small one of a winter scene with trees. I begin talking. I am a kid and don’t know a thing about painting, but I confidently B.S. my way through it.

Just as I’m explaining how the branches of the trees in the painting are reminiscent of the branches of knowledge, continually reaching out and producing new shoots, an older man with short, white hair stands up and approaches me. He is a professor of art history, and he thinks that the branches are nothing of the sort. I tell him that that’s what one of my philosophy professors had said about them. I definitely have the impression that he, too, is in on it, and that this, too, is part of the diversion.

Once I’m done, we head out towards the door. This requires us to pass through the dining room, which I had forgotten about, but I see that the walls there are still bare. That’s good—right now, it’s still too early. But I’m sure the paintings will be back up once everyone’s gone through.

16.2.18

The dream begins with a line floating in midair, semitransparent with a pinkish fringe to it—a little like an ostrich feather. I compress it down to a point and store it away somehow. This thing has a long history behind it: back in the 14th century—there was a precise date, but I can no longer remember it—any number of these things were deliberately left out of an important document, like a charter, maybe. This was a political maneuver against the aristocracy: they were traditionally associated with it, and leaving them out rendered them invisible.

That was 400 years ago—as my dream self reckons it—and nobody cares about any of that stuff anymore, but all those things have been floating around invisibly ever since. But I’ve just found this one. It’s nothing important—maybe some quirk or mannerism is all—but the workmen seem happy that it’s been brought to light again.

They’re working on the garage door: that’s where we are, a garage—one that could pass for the garage in my current house, other than not having any junk in it. It’s time to see if the door is fixed: I press the button. The door comes down—a surprisingly complicated process—but in the end, some parts of it have come out of alignment. It looks like it still needs some work.

15.2.18

A meeting is taking place beside a river between a knight and a woman. His name is Gawain. Her name is Lotus. It seems like the beginning of a relationship between them. But she can see into the future, and she knows that one day, he will kill her. And yet, she doesn't attempt to break things off.

I am seeing things from his perspective and from hers, and also from somewhere outside of it, where I don’t like the way things are going. And so I pull the scene apart, untangling all the little mental streams that are contributing to it and recombining them into three separate bundles. It will be easier to work with this way, I figure. Now I am in the kitchen of my old house in M--- with my mother, preparing a meal. I’m making the salads. But as I tear the lettuce into smaller pieces, I can still see the river there, and a little point of red light shining in the grass beside it. It’s easy to see and easy to avoid, but it still makes me uneasy.

In a different dream, I’m in a grocery store, although the building seems to be serving multiple functions. I’m there shopping with Saimi’s little sister, who seems to be around seven years old. After a while, I figure I’ll let her take care of a few things. She gets to do something all on her own, I get to read for a little bit—it seems like a pretty good arrangement. I tell her to pick out some plums—maybe three, whatever kind looks nice—and I sit down at a table there with my book of Rilke’s poetry, which I apparently have with me. She goes off and comes back a few minutes later with a single plum in a plastic bag. She places it on the table and then leaves again. A few minutes later, she’s back with another plum in a bag. Kids. You know there’s got to be some sort of weird logic behind this.

But now something else seems to be happening: there’s going to be a horse race here, inside the building, and Saimi’s little sister is participating, along with three other people. But the horse she’s on is a rather strange one: it seems to be made of some embroidered red material with yellow patterns in it, while still behaving like a living horse. But the race doesn’t begin immediately, and I awaken before it actually takes place.

I can’t remember how the dream began, which means that I can’t be sure whether I had realized I was dreaming and decided to fly around for a while or whether I had somehow realized that I could fly and stabilize my surroundings but not the full implications of it. But either way, that’s what I ended up doing.

It seems to be early evening, and I’m on a street where all the buildings are lit up with small, multicolored lights. The street is steep and winding—a little reminiscent of Nerudova Street in its topography and architecture—and it has a vibrant and exciting atmosphere, as if it’s a Saturday night and this is the place to go on a Saturday night.


(Click to enlarge (because I can't figure out how to make it bigger here))

I fly all the way up the street and then turn around and fly back down again. But it doesn’t feel quite as real as I know it could be. I focus harder, and I imagine hearing music as I fly along, and that seems to help—this time, it feels as if I’m actually there. I fly back again, and this time I try it while spinning around—something I’ve never done before. It turns out to be a lot of fun, seeing the ground change places with the sky.

Sometime later—in another dream, probably—I'm on a bus on some kind of a trip. I’m with a large group—many young children, some teenagers and a couple adults. There are also some children and teens there who are exchange students from another country. I have the impression this is a trip for the kids, and the teens and I—not sure of my age in the dream—are there to help out with it.

At some point, we make a stop at a large grocery store—the sort that’s often still open in the middle of the night, which it seems to be now. A group of us, including me, goes in. But a woman—maybe the person in charge—asks me if I could take the dog outside for a bit so she can have a chance to burn off some energy before we’re back on the bus. She has the dog there—a big, black dog, female, I think. I agree to it.

Once in front of the store, the dog goes sprinting off in a big loop, eventually coming back around to me. She immediately runs off again, and this time she returns carrying a stick in her mouth. Looks like we’re going to be playing fetch. But just then, I hear barking coming off from to my left. Two smaller dogs are there—neither one on a leash, I note—and the one that looks like a half-size pit bull is barking up a storm. I am instantly on alert: I have seen scenarios like this one end with furniture being toppled. But the black dog is not acting threatened or aggressive, and so it seems unlikely that a fight’s going to break out. I have a vague impression of the dogs’ owner nearby—but just then, my alarm wakes me.

8.2.18

Attached Thumbnails