Night Vision

I seem to be staying in an apartment, apparently some kind of temporary accommodation, with a woman and a third person I can remember even less clearly. Something strange is going on, but it isn’t clear what. At some point, we go out and are on a sidewalk going past a number of similar apartment-style buildings. But we’ve barely left when I realize that leaving was a bad idea - we’re playing into their hands. (Whose? Can’t remember now….) And it’s already too late. Two figures are rapidly approaching me. One is an enormous, threatening dog, controlled by the other, although there’s something human about it too. It’s clearly too tight a spot to get out of, and so I successfully manage to negotiate instead. In return for not giving them a fight, they’ll come by the apartment for me later instead.

After that, we’re back in the apartment, or at least some version of it, trying to figure out what to do. But I’ve realized something: this whole thing is about the woman, not me, and so there may not be much I can do. (I haven’t explicitly realized that I’m dreaming, but it’s pretty clear that I’m operating on the assumption.) It’s as if there’s some mystery we don’t fully understand, but we’ll have to solve it, or rather she will, to achieve a good outcome.

I’m suddenly struck with a realization. The biggest problem here is that this experience-space is being conditioned by the expectation that only things that make real-world sense can happen. Other possibilities are being excluded, and I can see that if that logic is allowed to dictate what happens next, failure is practically guaranteed. But if I can manage to de-condition this space, then - well, it might not solve the problem. That’s out of my hands. But it will at least make the problem solvable.

And so I begin to talk. Not to anyone in particular - the woman is within earshot, but I’m keeping out of her way otherwise, as this seems to be the extent to which I can help, and anything further is probably just going to interfere. I say whatever weird, off-the-wall non sequiturs without the slightest connection to the present situation happen to pop into my head. I am always happy to help, especially if it’s by doing something that under ordinary circumstances would just be obnoxious.

I can feel it working. Little by little, the space is becoming less rigidly structured and predictable; dream logic is reestablishing itself here. I can hear, in another room, new characters, having arisen out of nothing, are speaking with the woman. Previously intangible aspects of the situation are beginning to manifest, and accordingly, she now seems to be making actual progress.

(This was another entirely-over-by-2-am dream, for the record)

2.1.24

…or at least the parts of it I can still sort of remember.

I am with a group of people in a large space. There seem to be many small groups here, spread out in a number of seating areas, I guess you’d call them, except it’s more along the lines of cushions on the floor. The best comparison I can make would be an evacuation shelter in terms of the scale of the space and how it’s configured - although that isn’t what it is. There’s no sense of danger or conflict or anything outside of the ordinary.

The people with me, all women, I think, are DJs, and at some point, I take out my field recorder and offer to make a recording of some strange sound they’ve discovered and are messing around with making and send them a file of it later. (Because everybody likes to collect sounds, right?) But first, I check the settings to make sure I’ll be making a high-quality recording in the correct format. The interface is an unfamiliar one, which I rationalize by thinking that this isn’t the recorder I normally use. I also lose another chance at recognizing that this is a dream because, in spite of the fact that I’m looking at text on an electronic display, my recorder does not seem to be suffering from dodgy dream device syndrome. Far from it. Everything looks stable, and quite detailed - it’s actually the part of the dream I have the most precise memory of - and I don’t have a hard time adjusting the settings.

1.1.25