Night Vision

I am on an unspecified Greek island with people I know to be my classmates. We are outside, in a rocky area - the context is rather vague. We talk. There are also some third-person views of the landscape at some point, which prominently features a volcano.

My father has just invited me to go visit him on Corfu for the week, which is something out of the ordinary. My mother is apparently on a different island. It occurs to me that there’s something symbolic to this - to all of us being so far apart, on separate islands….

At some point, the volcano starts to show some alarming signs of activity. People close to it are running. I’m afraid for them, and hope they make it far away in time - they need to make it past the water separating them from the rest of the island before it gets too hot to pass. But I should be getting as far away as I can too, just in case.

The landscape has a number of small canyons threading through it - the only real paths we can take, which is definitely kind of unfortunate since that’s where the lava is bound to be channeled as well. I can already see it, not far behind a group of people running past where their path intersects with mine. For some reason, I’m sure it’ll only follow one path, so I wait at an intersection, ready to go down the path it doesn’t take.

The group approaches, now followed by a big wheel of flame - just a large circle made of fire, rolling along on its rim after them. But it doesn’t follow the group, doesn’t go down either one of the paths: it stays at the intersection where I am. Not only that: it actually seems to be shadowing my movements. Something clicks. This clearly isn’t the situation I had first thought it was. What now?

I do what feels right: I hook the wheel around my right leg and spin it around. It turns blue when I make contact with it, and as it spins faster, it contracts from being a bit larger than a hula hoop to being around the size of a tire. After some time, I switch it to my left leg and spin it the other direction, and finally, I set it back down. It stays blue and small, and sits there looking slightly wobbly and indistinct for a few seconds before dissipating.

My father has picked this moment to arrive. I start to tell him about what just happened, but he interrupts and doesn’t really give me a chance to talk. It occurs to me - maybe it would be better just not to mention the whole fire wheel thing. He probably wouldn’t get it anyway. I wonder what my classmates must be thinking now - there’s a whole group of them nearby, their attention still focused on me.

I kind of wish he’d just stop talking and at least let me take care of the burns, though. I was doing that with bare legs, and yeah, I can see marks there, even though the burns don’t look too serious, and I’m not feeling any pain from them.

A false awakening after that, in which I make notes about the dream and then various other things happen.

There were so many dreams after that, many of them full of conversations, and without awakenings in between - at least that I can remember - I just didn’t have time to write them down after having already woken up around 5 to record that one. But the last dream of the night involved being in (probably) a gym, where I was doing an exercise that involved jumping over a yoga mat and then jumping backwards to the starting position in a certain posture. NR came over and set a timer down on the floor set for half an hour - an analog device, kind of like a big egg timer. The implication is clear. I don’t think I’ll have trouble keeping this up or half an hour, but there is another problem: I seriously doubt that I’m going to be asleep for another half hour to keep doing it.

Actually, I only stayed asleep for another minute or so. You have no idea how much I’m looking forward to a time when I can devote more attention to dreaming and get back to moments like that actually resulting in full lucidity.

(Additional note: this was not my first volcano dream, but this one was almost certainly triggered by having seen video on the news of the port explosion in Iran the previous day, since that’s what my aunt had going on the TV in her hospital room when I went to visit.)

28.4.25

Together, Y and I emerge from what seems to be a metro station. We are in the Netherlands – apparently, because this is the only place where I am going to be able to have a fully fledged music career. I know this somehow. She seems to be the one taking the lead, though.

I’m going to enroll in a university here, and it seems as if the staircase leads directly into one of the buildings. I examine my surroundings – white tiled walls with mosaic patterns as the staircase ends, leading into a hallway. This building is where art classes are held. The two of us walk into a large studio classroom that’s filling up with students as if the class is about to begin. She takes a seat, and I take one next to her. After a few minutes, the professor begins speaking – English seems to be the language of instruction here – and students go to a series of large wooden bins along one wall, pulling out various kinds of bones. They take the bones back to the tables and begin to sketch them. I go over, grab what looks like it might be a vertebra, and also begin to draw.

Later, a lot of time seems to have passed – maybe a year. I’m checking an electronic billboard in a campus building.

13.4.25


The dream started as a sort of school/workplace dream, I think, but shifted at some point to a setting like an abandoned barn. I’m here with a man who seems familiar, as if maybe he’s based on people I actually know, and we’re talking. A black cat with a red collar that I recognize as L is also here: he comes over to sit next to me, and I pet him.

Planes are passing by overhead. I can see them through a hole in the roof – too close, it seems to me, and very loud. I don’t like it. I don’t like the look of the sky, either. It’s too dark for this time of day. A storm is brewing.

The wind picks up, and keeps picking up. I can feel the building beginning to be pulled up into the air. So it is here, about to upend my life the way it has so many others. I’m not afraid. I knew it would only be a matter of time. I just have to stay calm and focused.

I am up in the air now, which is full of debris spun by the winds in the strange light of the storm. As I’m blown by the winds, I let the world spin, as if I’m the point of stability, and it’s only everything else that’s moving around relative to me.

Unsurprisingly, this level of focus is pulling me into latent lucidity. I am flying now, making a beeline for the source of all this trouble. I don’t know how exactly to describe it – it must be a bit like it would be for a dog or something following a scent trail, but more abstract than that – some kind of recognizable trace left behind in the mindscape, becoming stronger as I approach.

I land in a neighborhood – not an especially nice one. Small, prefabricated houses jumbled too close together, a few completely inadequate attempts at greenery. Barely a step above a trailer park, really. It is now late out. I walk to the house the trail leads to, stepping straight through the door. I’ve never been here before, but I can see it all in my mind. The trace leads into a sort of narrow office past the kitchen – a closed-off, unpleasant, musty, crawly kind of mental signature that the whole place figuratively reeks of. It’s strongest around the computer, which has a big, boxy kind of monitor of a sort that probably went extinct years ago.

But in the kitchen, I run into A and C, an older couple I’ve known for a number of years. This is their house. Suddenly, it’s as if the scenario not only is different, but has been different the entire time. I have come here to warn them about what is going to happen. And so the question of what exactly would have happened to that computer will forever remain a mystery....

17.4.25