memorable

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

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

I’m staying in a house with a group of people. It’s late at night, and the host tells me a person we’re all here to meet will be here at 5am, which isn’t far off. I get ready - or try to, anyway. I can’t find the clothing I’m looking for. The clothing I brought along seems to have gotten mixed up with everyone else’s clothing and piled indiscriminately on the floor. Eventually, I stop trying to find the specific shirt I had in mind and just look for something that will work, but nothing seems right. In the meantime, it seems that everyone else has gone out already to meet the person we’re waiting for.

Then, out the window, I see a commotion outside, and people running - something is happening out there, something unexpected and possibly dangerous. I decide to go down to the basement, where I won’t be visible to anyone out there, but someone is already inside the house. He’s an Asian man, maybe in his 40s, wearing a martial arts uniform - white, I think. He heads for me, and I prepare to meet him.

As soon as we make physical contact, though, I can tell I don’t have a chance. I can feel it in his hands. I know enough myself to be sure I’m dealing with someone who’s achieved complete mastery. I stop and back off. Naturally, he can also tell where the situation stands and feel that I’ve sensed this. He smiles and beckons me to keep going, as if we were just sparring. But while he doesn’t actually seem aggressive, as if he’d hurt me just because he could, under the circumstances, I still don’t trust him enough to want to use force on him that I know he’d be able to turn back against me more effectively.

“I’m a musician,” I say. There is no point getting in a useless fight that could result in getting my hands messed up. I repeat it to make sure he understands, as I have the impression that English probably isn’t his first language.

But something is happening outside requiring his attention, and he leaves me to go deal with that, so I take the chance to go down to the basement.

27.10.24


A group of people are standing in a room. I’m identified with a young woman there, but seeing things play out in 3rd person. They seem to be an extended family with an upper-class vibe, in a large, old-fashioned house, and everybody is wearing elaborate clothing reminiscent of Japanese traditional dress. I can’t remember what the conversation taking place there was about, but it was fraught and unpleasant.

In the next scene, I’m experiencing things in 1st person as the woman. I’m in the kitchen as the back door opens, and in walks the ghost of Madame Mambeau, muttering to herself in French. There is nothing particularly ghostly-looking about her, but I recognize her clearly from stories others have told, from when she was alive. She’s a short, sturdily built middle-age woman with wild grey hair, and wearing a black T-shirt and shorts. She’s closely followed by a man who seems to be some kind of attendant. He’s very tall and fat, with thinning hair pulled back in a short ponytail. They ignore us completely - my father is in the room as well - and walk past us to the table in the dining area, where the man proceeds to serve up the contents of the compost bowl for the two of them.

I watch as they eat - at first in horror, but it is already starting to turn into curiosity. My father also stands and watches. My brothers’ voices and the sounds of Super Mario Bros drift in from a neighboring room. I’m sure this situation represents some kind of calamity that has befallen us, but at the same time, the damage is already done, and there’s probably no further harm in playing host to the two of them and seeing what will happen next. Knowing my father, I’m sure it won’t be long before curiosity gets the better of him too.

5.11.24


In a city, probably in the afternoon. I’ve arrived with a group of people onto a bustling street where a lot of preparations seem to be taking place. We enter a building - it mostly seems to be row houses here - and enter a large, undifferentiated space with a raised area like a stage in back. While they get things ready, I go out to explore the city.

I’ve been here before, maybe just once, to go to a restaurant with others. I recognize it as I walk past it on a nearby street. This seems to be a hilly, well-kept area with a view of the sea, but oddly deserted other than the street from the beginning. At some point, though, I realize I need to be getting back, and I have no idea where I am. I stop in the middle of a broad stone staircase to get my phone out and pull up a map. But nearby, I can hear a police officer telling somebody else on the other end of a walky-talky that I’m here, as I guess this counts as loitering. Yeah, I don’t want to draw too much attention to myself, so I just move on.

But it turns out I was just around the corner from the street I started out on anyway. A couple of the people from before are standing just inside the doorway and beckon me to come in. They close the door behind us. It looks like everything is ready to start now: people are sitting on the floor, with someone standing in the middle about to speak to them. I sit down as well.

A lot happened after that, but I don’t remember much of the details, except that at one point, the dream’s entire visual field is white and filled with colorful geometric shapes reminiscent of confetti moving past. I’m not present in the scene, but am aware of my right hand near the arrow keys of a keyboard, which I can use to have some control of the sequence of events I’m in the middle of, which is part of what the people from before have prepared.

20.11.24


Some other people and I have moved into a house in the fairly recent past. From an upper story balcony overlooking the city street below, I watch as a group of people sets up what appears to be a spontaneous picnic on the roof of their car. Then NS drives up and parks behind them. I call down to her. She was taking the household laundry out to be cleaned and has been gone an unexpectedly long time. She tells me there was an unfortunate incident involving a robin right as she was exiting the laundromat. “I hope it wasn’t my laundry,” I say. She says it wasn’t.

In what was probably a distinct dream later in the night, I’m in a school. I’m in the office, waiting for one of my students to arrive. It seems he accidentally left on the bus when school ended but soon realized his mistake and is on his way back.

When he arrives, he immediately runs off to where the others are. I start to follow. A woman is standing nearby - someone who seems to be a well-known figure in some way. There’s a whole lot of unspoken subtext as we exchange glances. Aren’t you going to ask me, the way so many people do? No? Well, this is interesting enough to where I’m just going to tell you anyway.

She says that I have a fire inside of me, and that it needs to be concentrated and refined before I can bring it out into the world.

I wake up.

(After thinking the dream over, I remembered that I’d been looking through the first couple lucid dreams included in the appendix of Charlie Morley’s Dreams of Awakening a couple days previously, and one of those had probably inspired the turn this one took. That dream was also set in an office, although a different kind of office. The woman is a representative of my subconscious mind, like the figure he summoned once he’d remembered what he’d planned to do in the dream. That explains some of those otherwise puzzling details.)

26.11.24

(Note: The longer my dreams are, the harder it is for me to remember details, particularly conversations, and this was a long one. There’s several hours’ worth of material here that I can only remember happened at all because I can remember remembering it in a later part of the dream, and this does raise questions of whether they ever actually played out. But, for what it’s worth, it doesn’t feel to me as if that’s what happened, and I do have many cases of knowing dream memory is working in that way to compare it to.)

The earliest part I can remember is of a disaster taking place, a flood sweeping through a public building of some kind. Everybody is trying to get out. I’m one of the last out, but I wait, holding the door open so that the waters don’t forcibly close it and trap the one person who’s still there. It took him a while to believe this was actually happening (understandable, considering how weird it is), so he didn’t get out as quickly as everyone else.

After this series of events is the biggest memory gap, which seems to mainly consist of meeting up with a large group of people and preparing for some kind of expedition together. I become lucid not long before we’re going to set off, although it’s not so much me realizing that it’s a dream as it is the unconscious knowledge that it’s a dream, which I’ve been acting on this whole time, becoming conscious. And this sort of makes it feel as if I’ve been lucid the whole time, if that makes sense.

I’m looking out the window of a house onto the rolling fields beyond as it happens. I still have some preparation to do here, though, so I’m still here packing as everybody else is leaving. I’m taking my hiking backpack, the black one with yellow trim. It occurs to me to wonder whether I need to do this in a dream, since I can just make things appear if I need them. But I have the impression, based on earlier conversations, that I might not be able to do that in some of the places we’re going, and so I’ll want to make sure I have essentials with me, at least. The last thing I grab is my brown aviator-style jacket, which I fold and pack into the backpack before buckling it and heading downstairs and outside.

I can just see somebody disappearing past the other side of the house, down a broad stone staircase. That’s where everybody’s gone. I try flying part of the way, but perhaps because of the hiking backpack—even though it doesn’t feel heavy—it’s hard to get more than a couple feet off the ground. But flying seems to be slower than running anyway, so I just run around the side and down the stairs.

I’m now in an area with several platforms rising a distance above the ground. Next to one on the far side is a cliff wall with a small tunnel partway up, a little above head height. A young women is nearby – it seems she had to stop to do something before going onward. I jump onto one of the platforms, where I see some piled-up clothing. I recognize it as a kind of uniform for us to wear. It looks a bit like a karate gi: loose pants and a shirt that ties around the front, white, though a little discolored with age and threadbare in places. On some of the edges, flowers are embroidered in pale colors. I put it on over my clothing.

Jumping onto the last platform and up to the tunnel—taking off the backpack and pushing it in first—is practically effortless, much easier than it would be in waking life, which makes it kind of fun. The tunnel is not tall enough to walk in, and it narrows considerably not far ahead, so I push the backpack in ahead of me. It barely fits, and I can see it slide down once it gets past the narrow point, where the tunnel slopes downward. I barely fit, too – I actually have to turn my head to the side to squeeze through. But soon, it’s large enough to where I can crawl again, and then walk upright.

The tunnel is made of squares of some smooth material, solid black in the center but with a stripe of red-orange around the edges that glows, lighting the way. As I walk, it slopes further downward and eventually drops me into a corridor with a grimy, institutional feel to it. All dimly and artificially lit, as if I’m somewhere underground.

It has a distinctly unpleasant vibe – although part of the reason may be because of what I know about this place. It is actually a sentient environment, and not a very nice one, and now that I’m inside of it, it’s going to be tracking my every move and shaping itself according to my actions and reactions. It’s not the destination – just somewhere we have to pass through on the way. There’ll be a test at the end that has to be passed before we can get out – but this place doesn’t like people leaving it and will be actively throwing obstacles in our way.

My backpack isn’t here – the place probably hid it somewhere, and so I’ll have to be on the lookout for it. I turn towards the right, reading the plates on the doors as I go by, deciding which room to enter first. The place looks to be some sort of school judging by what they say.

As I walk, faint, unpleasant feeling-tones arise, like the ghosts of memories with an archaic, dark quality to them, although they definitely don't involve my personal past – not in this lifetime, anyway. Or maybe they’re anticipations of what I’ll find here, behind the doors. Or maybe both. I also see a set of stairs leading downwards, but I don’t want to leave this floor just yet.

After reaching the end of the corridor, I head back, still making up my mind. It’s not terribly important where I go first, but I am aware that, as the first deliberate choice I make here, it will give the place some insight into me, will establish the course of how things will go. I decide on a room about midway between the end of the corridor and where I started from labelled “Faculty Lounge.”

As I open the door, I’m surprised by what I see. It’s a little room, somewhat like the bedroom of a hostel, with two bunk beds, a table off to one side and some assorted furniture – overall, quite nice apart from the lack of windows. But the really surprising thing is that it’s already occupied by two people from the group I started with.

Sam is there—Sam, maker of ukuleles, fixer of anything with strings and frets, host of concerts and an accomplished musician in his own right. His dog is there with him. The other person isn’t waking-life familiar, although he does somewhat resemble one of my coworkers, with dark hair, pale skin and some kind of facial hair, I think. A dog has come in with me as well, a large, black one. I don’t pay much attention to it besides noting that it’s mine and hoping that the room isn’t going to be too crowded now.

Sam greets me – but he uses a different name, a man’s name. They must be seeing this place and this situation differently than I do, I realize. It had been mentioned at the earlier gatherings that it would appear differently to everybody – but I had assumed that we would also be going through it alone, individually, and so it hadn’t occurred to me that I’d find myself in this kind of situation. But I can roll with it.

We talk for a little while. At one point, one of them advises me to be careful not to give this place “the impression that I’m somebody it can f*** with.” Sam mentions that he’s working on a puzzle—it seems to be set up on the table there—and I say I’ll leave him to it. I mention, though, that I’m good with puzzles, and he invites me to come help put it together. This must be part of their test, I realize – and it strikes me that maybe it isn’t a coincidence I ended up here to help them with it, although from everything I’ve heard, it would be uncharacteristically benevolent for the place to intentionally direct me to them.

The puzzle seems to mainly feature cute baby animals, and it is close to being finished. I help assemble the remaining pieces as Sam tells me some anecdotes he’s heard about a 20th century Viennese composer. He can’t remember which one they’re about. I notice, though, that the bottom edge of the puzzle isn’t complete. Sam is stirring some sort of gooey blue liquid, and I realize that that will also be part of it: the tests, though different, all have one thing in common: incorporating two bowls of these brightly colored mixtures into them somehow.

14.7.20

I am hanging out with co-workers and getting to know somebody who’s apparently just been hired. Her name is Marie, and she’s from Canada. In addition to working here, she’s a grad student working on a music degree, which she's now almost done with. She's currently working on the composition that will be her thesis. She shows it to me – via some sort of electronic device, I think.

The music is notated on manuscript paper, but instead of the usual note shapes, there are little horizontal rectangles that stretch out for as long as the note is held, rather like a midi display. The inside of each rectangle is patterned in ways that indicate something about the music. I hear it in my head as I read, with the patterns calling up images and connotations in relation to it.

The first bar begins with two long Gs an octave apart played by instruments in the violin family – I don’t identify them explicitly in the dream, but given that it’s written in the bass clef, almost certainly cellos. The rectangles contain the patterns signifying darkness and light. The impression this makes is hard to describe. Poignant, maybe – a suggestion of a cavernous space vast enough to hold them both at once. It continues, but I can’t remember the part after that so well.

16.5.20

In the earliest part of the dream I can remember well, I’m with a group of people from work. We’re in a house rather than an office, a mostly empty one that’s not in the best condition and which strikes me as reminiscent of somewhere in the past (it's not a vague memory in the dream – rather, my waking self can’t pin it down to anywhere familiar). There’s something in the way everything is happening that suggests we’re maintaining order in the midst of a chaotic situation and extemporizing as necessary. Some disaster has struck the world – although it seems less like this is the aftermath than that it was so bad that what remained of humanity actually had to flee to some sort of parallel dimension.

Kate, the director, tells us we should all go outside to see something. Stepping out of the house, I can see what looks like a large town square across the street, round-ish in shape, possibly cobbled. Above the old-fashioned buildings on the opposite side, the sky is turning pink and purple in a certain area. In the middle of it, a black spot appears, clearly visible against the light. I recognize it, as does everybody there: this was what happened before, the thing that came and destroyed the world.

But something is different this time: instead of appearing large and far away, the spot now seems to be quite close, in the square itself. Somehow, I know that I can make things turn out differently this time around. I run towards it, the others not far behind.

The dark sphere is floating there, too high to jump for but close to a flagpole on the far side. I scale it. The flag, which is dark blue, isn’t flying – rather, it seems to be tied to the pole, and (on later reflection) entirely too large for it. The thing actually looks more like a mast than a flagpole. But I manage to make it up with no trouble until I'm level with the sphere. It’s very small now, smaller than a cotton ball. I reach out and grab it, enclosing it in my hand.

The moment I touch it, it changes, becoming material, taking on a definite shape. It has become a key on a keyring.

I know what to do now: the keyhole can’t be too far away. I actually find it on the way back down, on the base of the pole. I put it in and turn, and keep turning. And as I do, something is happening to the building closest to the pole: the whole façade is unfolding, revealing a large airplane inside. It looks like a typical jet, but in the dream, it strikes me like something out of another era, concealed here for who knows how long.

A dirty, light brown liquid is pooled near the nose. An inner voice that seems to belong to the plane itself tells me that it needs an oil change. I think that it probably needs rather more than that, considering how long it’s been here. But I’m aware that this situation is out of my hands now. It will be others who fix it up and who make use of it somehow to avert disaster. I’ve done what I can.

10.5.20

As usual, I seem to have become aware that I’m dreaming without being able to remember how it happened. I’m in a house along with two other people. I believe that they’re other dreamers—not sure now on what basis.

In one part early on, I’m looking at a still scene in front of me, like a picture. It takes me a couple minutes to puzzle out what’s happening in it. A young man is shown looking into a body of water like a lake. The sky is colorful and full of varied light, with a couple odd-shaped clouds in the foreground. I figure out that the cloud that looks like a unicorn’s head is going towards the cloud shaped like a dragon’s, which represents an attack on the sun by the moon, and the man is watching it through the reflections in the water.

When I’ve realized this, the scene comes to life in front of me. The clouds converge, and the sky darkens, with the moon appearing. It behaves strangely at first before taking up a normal course in the sky. The man gets up and heads in the direction it has gone. He’s going to try to fix the situation.

A lot of the dream faded from memory when I woke up, but in the subsequent parts, I was with the two dreamers. I only remember one person well, a guy. He is apparently already familiar with this legend—I get the impression he knows a lot of them.

At some point quite a bit later on, the others are somewhere else, fighting a monster of some kind. I guess some people don’t feel like they’ve really accomplished something unless there’s an epic boss battle at the end—but I just don’t find those things very interesting. While that’s going on, I’m standing near a grove of palm trees, above which the moon is floating in the form of a little, glowing crescent shape. Once we get ahold of that, we’ve won. According to the man, however, there’s something odd about the palm leaves, and a person will die if they touch them. But they just look like normal palm leaves to me, and so I figure I’ll take my chances with them. Anyway, I can fly in from above and avoid the leaves that way.

First step: make wings. I’ve been using shortcuts so much lately I figure that this time, I’ll do the full procedure like I used to. I stand facing my shadow on the ground, and will it to grow wings. Immediately, I see them unfolding, and unfolding further, out to their usual considerable span.

But this time—perhaps in response to my wanting to get a better view of what happens when I do this—there are also reflective surfaces nearby, although I can’t say now just what they were. I can see the wings themselves reflected in them—and since I’ve never set an intention for anything beyond generic wings, it’s a bit of a surprise to see how they’re turning out—red-gold in color, and faintly glowing. I climb up onto a nearby object—again, I can’t remember specifically what it was—and from there, hover over to the trees and grab the crescent moon.

In the process, though, I brush the tips of a couple palm leaves. And, perhaps because of that— or perhaps not— I soon find the dream fading around me until I’m in complete darkness. I’m still lucid, though. It feels as if I’m moving forward, but with nothing visible except for occasional faint shapes in the darkness, it’s impossible to tell—or, for that matter, tell how much time is passing. But after a while, I feel like it’s a good time to go back. I open my eyes, intending to be in the previous setting.

And I’m there, as before, and so are the two people. I can remember even less of this later part than I can the previous one—although I can recall the second person definitely being female in this one, whereas I can remember nothing at all about them from the first. There’s a series of events involving a deep pit filled with boiling water that opened up in the house. At some later part, the others seem to have lost lucidity. They're acting somewhat zombie-like, and are unresponsive to my efforts to get their attention. Not long after that, I wake up.

8.12.18

I’m walking down the metallic corridor of a spaceship, carrying a small backpack and some other item with me. I spot a door on the left-hand side and walk in. It’s a little room with a bed, a sink and various other useful things along the walls. I set my things down. It looks like nobody’s claimed this one yet. I’m glad because I like room #2—they’re all pretty similar, but I just like this one more for some reason.

I look at the bed—just a molded bit of plastic, no sheets on it yet. It’s pretty uncomfortable. I could have brought some extra bedclothes, knowing in advance that it would be, but I figured I’d just pick some up along the way.

All of this is so familiar to me because I can remember all of it happening before, even the things that haven’t happened yet. If déjà vu is like seeing a firefly flickering in the darkness, this is like being in broad daylight. I remember all of it, although not everything seems to be set in stone—little things like my being the first one here and the outcome of one very big thing that’s still a long way in the future.

Somewhere out in space, there’s an odd device wired into the workings of a satellite devoted to climate monitoring. The device had originally been with me, but some time back, in the midst of a chaotic situation, some group had managed to get their hands on it—not a hostile group, exactly, but not overly friendly either. They had managed to figure out that it was a powerful device and even how to get it to do some interesting things, but they really have no idea what it was capable of.

This situation doesn’t bother me too much. An unmanned climate monitoring satellite isn’t a bad place for the thing for the time being. They’ve taken great pains to keep it a secret, and nobody is likely to find it there. And when it leaves dormancy and begins to destroy the satellite—it is a matter of when rather than if—there’s only so much damage it can do.

That won’t be for a while yet. It will also take a while for them to trace it back to the device and figure out just what they’re dealing with. And that’s when they’ll come to me. I have some kind of connection with this thing, which is how I know all this, and I’m the only one who has a chance of destroying it. I won’t have to bother about getting it back. All I have to do is make sure I’m ready when the time comes.

Someone else enters the room—a young woman, tall with short, blonde hair and a punk-ish look. I’m one of four people who have just been brought here, possibly as some kind of training program, and she’s another of them. She tells me the people in charge here found something out about her past and are making her take some kind of test—something they needed a blood sample for. She hasn’t got the results back yet. I don’t know anyone here that well yet, but I have the impression she just needs someone to talk to.

We go out together, through a door in the ceiling. We aren’t actually in space now—we’re parked. It’s definitely not earth, though: we move through the air like swimming, as if gravity is very low here. It’s dark out, and there’s nobody else around. Not far from us is a park with a playground. We float over to it. I notice my companion is wearing a purple pair of flippers, which strikes me as a smart idea—she can probably move faster that way.

I grab ahold of a colorful children’s play structure and maneuver through a hole in it. Might as well get a feel for what it’s like moving through the air like this. I think that this, in a way, is also preparation for what I’ll eventually have to do.

The woman heads back to the spaceship at some point, but I stay out a bit longer.

5.6.18

In the dream, I’m watching a film. I think I was watching it on a screen at first, but in the part I can remember well, I’m just standing on scene, watching as events unfold—or, rather, fail to unfold, as this seems to be the kind of film where nothing much happens.

The main (and only present) character, a man, is in a kind of apartment with a desk or a dresser that he’s sitting at. There are no walls: I can see directly into the strange landscape beyond, where the horizon is dominated by mountain peaks, including two volcanoes. The action is divided into distinct segments, with each one ending anticlimactically. In the last one, the man calls his girlfriend on his cellphone, but nobody picks up. This seems to illustrate the unremitting futility of life—or at least you’d think it does, based on the dramatic treatment it gets.

But once that comes to an end, all sorts of odd things start happening: a nearby pool of water starts to bubble, and one of the volcanoes erupts. I’m now in the backseat of a car with several other people, trying to get somewhere safe. But then the other volcano, which is straight ahead of us, also begins to erupt, the bright magma spilling over the rim. The woman who’s driving comments on it. I tell her she’s got the name wrong—she’s thinking of the other volcano. The one ahead of us is Vesuvius. And then I start laughing because of course what matters in this situation is making sure we get the name of the volcano that kills us right.

I’m also laughing because I’m fully aware of how ridiculous this geography is. I know none of this is real, and that makes it hilarious. As if in acknowledgement, all kinds of odd and impossible things are appearing out of nowhere around us, even as I watch. A gigantic man wearing a striped shirt materializes off to our left, over a large body of water. He steps from island to island, striding in the same direction our car is going. I’m still laughing too hard to speak, and so it’s someone else in the car who says it: “I found Waldo.” They also seem to find the whole thing funny.

28.4.18

This dream was interesting: it was like I was playing out a role in a story, aware that it was a story (but not aware that it was a dream). It was being narrated—not by anybody present, but a voice that I could talk to and that seemed to be indicating what I should be doing as much as describing it.

The setting was a building like an airport - at least, in the only part I can remember. But it only appeared that way from the standpoint of the people there: it was really two separate buildings, split by a wall they couldn’t see. Inside the wall were rooms where there were people—people who could see through the wall and observe what was happening on both sides, and people in offices who were presumably working to keep the place going. The camera—for lack of a better word—seemed to make a point of showing this area, even though nothing much was happening there. At one point, it slowly panned across it so that you could see all the people as well as a window showing an entire world outside that didn’t exist from the standpoint of the people in the building where I was.

Right now, I’m concerned with getting into a special event that’s being held by people whose land borders mine. I approach a man I know—maybe in his late 30s, wearing some kind of complex, vaguely tribal outfit—and ask him if he can take me along. He’s happy to accept. He just seems to be a good-natured person who likes helping people get what they want. He probably thinks I just want to get in with a certain crowd, but I have other reasons for needing to be there (unfortunately, not ones I can remember after waking up).

He’s going there now, and I’ll be coming along on a – well, I’m not entirely sure what it is. It has a special name (that I forgot) and seems to be a bit like a jet ski, but attached to a helicopter and with things like leather shields I’m supposed to hold onto. As I look it over, I’m glad this is going to be broadcast over the radio because that gives everyone in the audience a chance to imagine something less stupid-looking. But I get on it, and we head off.

24.4.18

I seem to be back in my old house in M---, in the dining room/weight room area (an odd combination that is actually true to life rather than your standard oneiric mash-up). I'm reading a poem that is supposedly by Heine. It’s a sort of varied, complex, allusive thing that somehow manages to be beautiful while also having real matter to it. But as incredible as it is, there’s also a real sense it which it doesn’t speak to modern people anymore. That means there’s an opportunity for a modern take—which is an intimidating prospect since whatever I’d write would inevitably be held up next to this one.

While pursuing this line of thought, I’ve gotten up and started walking towards the front door. The part about the different Chinese dynasties—well, no question what that would have to be now. In the original, it was totally an indirect criticism of his government—you had to be indirect about it in those days.

I now seem to be packing for a trip I’m going to take with some friends. The next part I remember clearly is being in a train station rather like the one in Kassel, waiting for my train. But I notice I haven’t brought my heavy coat with me, and since we’ll be camping, I could really be missing it if the weather turns cold. I also have some plastic boxes, one of which is filled with cheese? Why is this even here?

Looking at an analog clock, I see I still have 20 minutes left before my train arrives, and that’s enough time to pack more sensibly since I only have to go down a hallway to get to my house. I picture the hallway: it’s reminiscent of the one between Penn Station and Madison Square Gardens in NYC.

There seems to be another shift here: I’m now watching a video— like animated drawings, black and white. It’s about three girls, one of whom I know is me, although they are all represented identically. There is also music in the background: a bouzouki playing a cheerful melody.

According to the narration, the three girls created a world together. But this doesn’t seem quite right to me. The images are definitely showing them doing it one at a time, but the narration seems to be referring to it as a single event. Perhaps the video is just showing it that way in order to make the levels of ontological priority clear? No, the video clarifies, it really did happen three separate times. The one who is me did it the first time, and then, a while later, each of the others—but it was somehow harder for them because each time, it had grown colder there.

And now I actually seem to be there, walking through the scenery as it’s snow falls. There are graves there, marked by headstones—the graves of the two other girls, I realize. This does not compute—especially the incongruity with the background music, which has failed to reflect the dark turn this scene has taken and is continuing on as cheerfully as before—and I wake up.

But the last phrase of the music was still clear enough in my memory to where I was able to record it:



As of waking up, it was on its second repetition. My guess is that this isn’t an original creation. It just seems so familiar—but then, so many things in dreams do.

18.3.18

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 am traveling in a foreign country, driving a car down a dirt road—although there’s a bit of a traffic jam at the moment, and nobody is actually moving except the pedestrians, who walk between the cars and on the side of the road. Two women wearing some kind of sari-like traditional dress walk past. I think about giving them a lift—something I wouldn’t ordinarily consider doing, but they seem particularly trustworthy somehow.

At some point, I suddenly find that the car is full of people, and I’m in the backseat. The two people in the front seats are wearing police uniforms, and two or three other people are standing between the rows of seats. I ask a man in a white business-type shirt standing to my left if this is a police chase, and he confirms that it is. I have heard about this—of officers requisitioning vehicles so they can go after somebody who would otherwise escape them. I suppose that’s OK—not that I get any choice in the matter.

The next thing I remember is walking through a public building, talking with the same man. He’s asking me questions. One is, essentially, whether I can take any time off work. I reply that I can’t. I’m working remotely even now, on this trip. He is concerned that I’m not recovering from something, which he seems to feel is my fault, and wants me to undergo a scan of some kind—he’s holding the equipment now, beside a machine there. This is a little exasperating, as I’m already pretty sure this has to do with some kind of control issue, which isn't exactly news. But what’s more troubling is the fact that he’s mentioning things that happened since the car chase, and I don’t remember anything between now and then. I try to determine how big of a memory gap I’m dealing with. Very shortly afterwards, I conclude that this is not something it’s possible to do without knowing what happened during that time. And at that point, I wake up.

It’s an hour or so after that—after recording the dream and after listening to people being typically noisy atypically early downstairs—that my cell phone rings. Or vibrates, rather, since that’s the setting I keep it on. I’m annoyed since I was almost asleep, and this is such a good opportunity for having a lucid dream. If I ignore it and don’t move, it’ll stop soon enough. But it doesn’t stop after the normal number of rings, and so I finally give up on the dream and get up to shut it off. And that’s when I realize—this is a dream.

This is the part where I figure out what to do, now that I have this opportunity. And right now, what I want to do is go back to the setting of the last dream and figure out what was going on there. I head over to the window and step onto the windowsill, disregarding the glass pane, which obligingly acts as though it didn’t exist.

It is dark out, but the setting I see before me has nothing else in common with what I’d ordinarily see out my window. For one thing, it’s a long way down—the ledge where I’m perched isn’t as high as an airplane would fly, perhaps, but it can’t be that much closer to the earth. The landscape spread out before me is also unfamiliar, and remarkably strange. The ground is uniformly flat, with nothing but houses and trees as far as the eye can see. But every so often, there are tall, thin spires, each set of them closely grouped, apparently made of rock— like giant needles stuck into the earth. Their tips are about level with where I am—in other words, incredibly high—and they’re so disproportionate to the rest of the landscape that they look unnatural.

Looks like I’ll be flying, then. But first—I will it to become daytime and wait for a little while. Nothing happens. Well, that was probably a little unrealistic, but it was worth a try. Anyway, I can see just fine, even with no discernible source of light: everything below me and in the distance is clear and crisply outlined. But seen with night-vision, it’s all dark blue, which will make it less interesting to fly over. (Later on, after waking up, I’ll recall that I intentionally enabled myself to see in the dark in a lucid dream a couple months ago—could it be that it was a lasting modification? That would be interesting.)

I ready myself and launch outwards, extending a set of muscles I only have in dreams, when I choose to: wings. It’s a smooth glide for the most part. There isn’t much in the way of wind up here—as empty and still and silent as it is on the ground far below. Trees, houses, more trees, more houses, and the nearest set of spires, coming ever closer. It’s an odd feeling, being up here in this lonely place, poised and sharply aware and secure somehow.

The next part is difficult to remember—I’m not exactly sure how I managed to find my way back to the building from the first dream, but it seemed to involve flying in a pattern around the spires—a little like dialing the combination of a lock, a little like grabbing the fabric of dream-space and twisting it in exactly the right way. But one way or another, I'm there. The building was full of people before, but now it is dark and empty. And a woman with brown skin and dark hair is standing beside me there—she will take me to the man I want to speak to.

And that’s the point where it would be best to end this account, I think….

(29.1.18)