Non-Lucid Dreams
In a forested area by a wide, shallow river with a large group of people. I’m not sure exactly what’s supposed to be going on, but at some point, it looks as if there’s some kind of attack on us. People are gathering at a couple of large pavilions nearby, so I go there as well. It’s now dark out, lit only by a couple of large bonfires. Someone is heading towards me. They lunge, and I see that they have a knife. Reflexes take over, and after a brief struggle I’m standing behind her, pinning her to the ground with the knife at her throat. I can see it’s a woman now - physically larger than I am, but younger, maybe early 20s, with sandy blonde wavy hair down to her shoulders. I really don’t want to do this. But if I let her go, will she just go and attack someone else? No. I don’t think she will. She looks terrified. “Are you scared?” I ask her. She says yes. I let her go, and she runs off, past the groups of indeterminate fire-lit people. I continue towards the pavilions. — I’m moving into a new flat - possibly at the beginning of a new university semester. I look around at everything: there seems to be a main area, with kitchen, dining room, and a living room area in an open-floor arrangement, then a bedroom/office separate from that. Someone else, a woman, seems to be there with me. I’m thinking about how I want to arrange the furniture here - everything seems to have come with the space. At some point, it looks like a new room has appeared, so we go in to check it out. This appears to be a dedicated bedroom, meaning I can make the other one into just a study space. Apparently, we can’t leave again until I’ve checked out this new space and made sure that everything is in order here. But even though I can’t find anything that looks off about it, I seem to have gotten hold of the wrong end of the lucidity stick or something because I can’t shake the feeling that new rooms aren’t supposed to appear out of nowhere, and I should not be taking this in stride. Possibly I’m also still a little on edge from the whole someone trying to kill me thing from earlier in the night. No matter how many times I check the room and find nothing wrong, I just can’t convince myself that everything is OK, and so the whole thing just keeps dragging on. At some point, though, I wake up in the bed there from what feels like a long and deep sleep. No one else seems to be around. What ended up happening? I try to remember, but the impressions are too confused. Some other people were here at one point, I guess? And I feel as if I should at least remember falling asleep here if that was what happened, which I don’t. I get up and go into the main area. Maybe now I can move that table somewhere else. I’m sure I’ll never use it for anything there if I have an actual study. But it’s such a weird shape - where else would I even put it? I wake up. 8.9.24
I am in a large room where many people are gathered, where the wall I’m facing is almost entirely windows, and a forested area is visible beyond. A woman sits in a chair in the middle of the room. She is in bad health, and seems to be the center of attention. I have the impression that everyone here is family. Through the glass of the windows, I see a shadowy figure appear. I shout at it and make gestures, trying to “catch” it. I can’t allow it to come any closer to her - although I’m quite aware that nobody else here can see it, and this probably looks pretty weird right now. Not that it’s there, in any kind of objective sense. But I can only perceive using the senses I have, and so it’s got to “be” somewhere. But whatever. I’ve just got to make it go away - that’s what’s important. I finally manage it, at which point the thing splits into two and vanishes. It isn’t over yet, though. I see a disembodied arm very close to the glass, grabbing for a necklace. I run over and grab the arm, which is extremely hairy, and pull. I tell the others that they need to pull too, holding onto me, for it to work. I’m not sure if they’ll believe me and do it, but they do. One woman reaches out to try to feel the arm. She can touch it, as I thought she'd probably be able to, although it still isn’t visible to her. It actually seems to be working. 7.7.24 I’m in a museum with my aunt and uncle. It seems to be a museum of techno. Various displays are set up in a large, open space, but the different music playing at each one seems to be the focus rather than anything visual. The default language here seems to be German. I want to go off to explore on my own, but if my uncle also decides to go off alone, I’m not sure how my aunt will do by herself. Later, I’m on a train. I didn’t manage to find a free seat, but I really don’t mind too much. In another part, Nina approaches me, holding a bottle of hand soap she found in the bathroom, showing me that it has some kind of punny train-related name. — In another dream later in the night, I seem to be a university student. A group of students approaches me, having discovered that I’ve taken classes in “the French room”. They have apparently heard stories about this place and want to see it for themselves. I say I’ll take them there, although it isn’t clear to me what’s supposed to be so special about it. I ask one young woman why everyone is so intent on going there. She gives a couple reasons, one about it being where somebody’s finger was pricked. I don’t outright realize I’m dreaming, but the fairy tale reference still makes me take notice. I realize that I need to understand what she’s saying in a symbolic way. She seems upset - so much that I ask her if she really wants to go there, when just talking about it is that bad. 28.7.24 I’m lying on a couch, reading a book. From where I am, I can hear my aunt and uncle talking downstairs. My aunt says that she’s going to drive herself to an appointment she’s made with a doctor. I don’t think she’ll follow through or get far enough to put herself in danger, but my uncle should probably hide the keys anyway. (I’m probably thinking of my grandmother and her car crash on some level.) Sure enough, I can hear him going over to the cabinet by the door and getting them out. The keys fly up over the half-wall and land somewhere soft. I get up and go find them. In the next part I remember, I’m somewhere else - a landing, apparently in the same house. I set the keys by the top step of the stairs, where my uncle can get them again if he needs them. He’s just downstairs, and I tell him as much, then go to get changed. I’m still wearing the shirt I’ve been sleeping in. I take it off as I head back. It seems to be the only thing I’m wearing. The setting is once again different - it seems to be a school gym. The gym leads into an enormous cavern. I recognize the cavern as mine somehow - it belongs to me, it’s my home - and just being there makes me feel more clear-headed and spacious. I can recall previous times I’ve been to this place, and I’m already acting as if I’m aware I’m dreaming, although the realization hasn’t explicitly dawned yet. The entrance is very wide and tall, and the area inside is vast - like an entire city with a nocturnal atmosphere. In the entry area, I see a group of people, two women with a group of teenagers. They all look a little lost. I figure I should offer to help them out - although maybe I should put on some clothes first? Then again, this is a dream - I realize - and does that really matter? I decide that I’ll offer to help, and also say I’ll put on clothes if they’d prefer - and proceed to do so. They react as if I’ve just confirmed something they suspected, and one tells me that they can get out on their own, so I go further into the cave, going over the dream-familiar areas as I pass, now flying. There are six or seven in the front area I have memories of, which I revisit mentally, one by one. But I’ve only explored a small part of what’s here. At some point, my parents seem to be there as well, also flying. I don’t have a strong visual impression of them. There is a fire burning here - I can see more fiery areas as we go upward, through what now seems to be an unrealistically large space for an underground area. It doesn’t spread, but it’s still not safe to get too close. They now take the lead, flying ahead, further in. More memories arise of a location supposedly from an early dream of the night, also with fire - but we’re going to put that out, and that will also make one of the larger ones in the area we passed go out. This is how it has to be, I recall - they need to be the ones to do it. By the time I land, they’ve already put it out. The air is smoky now, and I’m concerned for one of the cats, T, who is now there as well. 20.8.24 I’m walking along the streets of a city at night. My long-haired Manx cat, C, is with me, keeping pace but exploring on her own as well. There are other cats around, and even a dog, so I’m keeping a close eye on her as we go. Inside the building that’s my destination, I start to realize I’m dreaming, and I can do whatever I want (continuing from a dream even earlier in the night where I became aware but awoke soon after.) I head back out, going through a hallway. At a doorway, I pass a large Black man in a suit - he registers to me as some kind of security guard. We non-verbally acknowledge each other as I pass. Another guard stands by the door leading outside - but I decide to go up instead. It occurs to me - not fully consciously, probably at least partly because this is still a dream from early in the night - that I’m in a state of natural creativity, and so I start to hum/sing, letting the music spontaneously take shape. It’s partway between imagining it and hearing it performed - although it’s mostly instrumental, and I’m aware of the filter automation and gating that are expressed symbolically in my inflections. Outside, it’s dark, as before, but well-lit. I’m in a plaza with a fountain in the center, and nobody else seems to be around. Where to go? Maybe to the top of the clock tower some distance away. I fly upwards, but gaining height feels too slow. I experiment with pushing off with one leg at a time as if there was something solid under me to “jump” upwards. It seems to work well. As I rise, I notice a tall, narrow cliff ahead of me, going up even higher. Where is it leading? It seems to be narrowing out to a point towards the direction I came from. I change my mind - I’ll go there instead. I’m curious to see what might be at the very top. I turn around and rise still further until I’m hovering a little above it, almost climbing it, and then I’m at the summit. There’s nothing there, actually. How anticlimactic. The dream seems to be unstable now, and I know I have to keep moving, so I fly away, towards other spaces, but it still turns into another nonlucid dream not long afterwards. 1.9.24
Melody Fragment (with lyrics) I awoke around 4 am from a rather confusing dream in which I may have been singing this, although the conscious ‘me’ seemed distinct from the dream ‘me’, and I have the impression that I woke myself up intentionally at this point since I always try to be on the lookout for dream music. This is what I can remember of the melody, with the approximate tempo: The accompanying lyrics were: ‘Sam, you are lucky. Sam, you are empty,’ with the first three words corresponding to the initial three notes of each phrase. As a note, it’s fairly normal for me to listen to, play or write things in 7/8, but I can’t say the same about Eb major. 15.8.23
All the most interesting dreams from this week involved music in some way. These included: -Applying a temporary tattoo of the notation for the amen break to my face, apparently for some event I was going to attend. -Working on a piece of music. As the dream progresses, the different parts become associated with characters, and a story plays out among them. The characters all travel somewhere special, like the moon, a number of times. I think it ended with everything being absorbed back into the composition again. Unfortunately, I can’t remember many of the details as I woke up to one of the cats getting ready to cough up a hairball and had to immediately turn on the lights and make sure she didn’t do it on my bouzouki. -Programming a couple weather patterns on something that looked suspiciously like a groovebox. I’m doing this at somebody’s request, at the shop he owns. There’s a sense of the machine making the process much simpler than it would be otherwise, just a matter of pressing a few buttons. When I’m done, I make a mental projection of the future to check that my proposed patterns won’t screw up the weather in other places, and since everything looks OK, I confirm them. At some later point in the dream, I gain lucidity flying over a place that’s a cross between a highway and a waterway, with cars going one way and ships going the other. I decide to go back to the scene from the earlier dream, and I speak with the man to find out if he has anything else I can do there. It strikes me as an interesting thing to do while focusing on maintaining lucidity. I woke up not long after, though, which wasn’t surprising as it was actually getting rather late into the morning. 27.6.23-3.7.23
Touched by a Yeti I have traveled somewhere with a large group of people, possibly by ship. I’m a different person (male, early 20s, with a Spanish-sounding name). We’ve just arrived here. It’s unclear exactly what kind of setting this is, but it’s clearly not contemporary, and maybe entirely fantastical. Everything is currently covered in snow. I am happy because I have a new sword, and it is awesome. It’s a long, slightly curved blade, and there are etchings of animals on it – wild boars, maybe others. I have it out, showing people, when a strange creature appears – I know it to be a yeti. It’s white and shaggy, but actually a little smaller than an average human – overall, a very vague visual impression. (Although maybe not vaguer than my visual impressions of dream characters in general. Or, really, people in general, as I am pretty much face-blind and have had to work out other ways of recognizing people.) Anyway. The creature is lightning-fast and moves in unpredictable ways, including short jumps between locations. In the brief time they have to react, people are trying to get away from it, but it just moves straight past them and appears right next to me. It touches my arm, which it does something to me that makes me lose consciousness. I’m woken up by someone what seems like only a short time later – same setting, only more people are around now, and the yeti is clearly not. I go with some people to have a conversation with someone who can explain what’s going on. The person (who seems a lot like NR) explains that the creature is the guardian of this place, and it didn’t like the sword – or, rather, its symbolic charge, so to speak – what it represented, which was being an outsider here and coming in intending to fix problems as an outsider, without being a part of it, which is arrogance. This makes sense to me. I now feel as if I understand the creature – not just from the explanation of its behavior but because I can tell that I now have some kind of connection with it. I know that it’s here all the time, even when it’s not manifesting physically. At some point later, as I’m talking with some other people who haven’t yet heard about the incident, I mention the yeti to them, and I turn around, expecting to see it there behind me, and it is – and from their reaction, I can tell that they can see it there too. I also know that eventually, when the time is right, I’ll take the sword out again, and use it this time, but in cooperation with it. 28.5.23 Cycles I’m in a room in a house at night, sitting at a keyboard. (It does seem to be me this time. Probably.) I’m playing with settings, designing sounds that I’ll be able to use for projects later on. While I’m doing this, I have a strong sense of my aunt’s presence, which seems connected with the keyboard in some way even though she isn’t there in the dream. Later, I’m somewhere like the dining room table of my current house, also at night. My parents are there, and I’m showing them something on a laptop: a vst instrument that I’m thinking about getting. It is called The Curse. The sound has an evolving quality to it, and it is accompanied by simple images that change alongside it as it cycles through its various stages. It had six different settings, all represented by images of people shown in bright neon outline against a black background going through different transformations. The first was fairy tale-like – that’s all I can remember about it. Another image was of a woman holding a baby: it showed the woman growing old rapidly and then becoming young again as the baby continued to look the same. Some of the images I didn’t see the cycles for were of a young man and woman holding wineglasses in a celebratory pose, and of a woman in a short dress wearing a helmet like the one Athena is portrayed in – one of the only lone figures – and a man and woman I surmised were in some sort of muse/artist relationship, since the woman was holding a quill pen. 1.6.23 Smell Epiphany I am a different person (female, Asian, maybe around eight years old) living in a house with my family. The house is somewhat similar to childhood home #5, at least in the size/location of the kitchen area. Something is bothering me – I’ve forgotten some of the points related to this – so I go outside to sit by the garden. There’s a steep, rocky slope lined with trees that leads down to a small garden where vegetables are growing. I sit on the slope, shaded by trees, and stay there for a while. Later, I’m in a building with my father and older brother, walking down a hallway. It’s a busy area, and many of the walls are lined with shelves full of bottles and boxes. He seems to be some kind of medical professional, and he is giving us a lesson, something both my brother and I find boring. He tells us to take a certain amount of a certain kind of powder on a shelf, so we do, putting it containers we have with us. He asks us how we can tell whether it’s good quality or not. I know the right answer, and so I give it: by its smell. He tells us to go back to where we got the powder and smell it. We do. My brother goes first, and when he’s done, I lean down to smell it. The stuff looks, and also kind of smells, like curry powder. As I smell it, I realize for the first time just how many dimensions a smell can have. It’s like a whole world. The idea that people can extract meaningful information doing this was just abstract to me before, but now it’s real. 5.6.23 Also a Couple Lucid Dreams I won’t describe them in detail, though, since I don’t think walking/flying around and looking at things would make for very interesting reading. The first (10.6.23) had an interesting setting – I get lucid after the dream’s ‘plot’ seems to come to an end, fly through a wall, and start exploring. I gain height and fly around an industrial park at night – brightly lit in different colors, with the reflected light from the overcast sky giving it a vivid atmosphere, while lightning flashes in the distance. I go in and out a number of times and make my wings appear at least twice – notably, just based on my shadow, they seem to be smaller than normal, which maybe makes sense as I can fly perfectly well without them, and so there’s no real need to make them look like they’re actually serving some purpose. In the second lucid dream (13.6.23), after some dream events I can’t recall very clearly, I’m leaving a school and happen to see by NR looking at children’s artwork hanging in the hallway. He’s wearing a wide-brimmed hat, and so I can’t see his face. I walk past, but then it occurs to me that I should really take the opportunity to talk with him. I turn around and see that he’s begun to vanish, and I realize that I’m dreaming. I decide that I’ll go somewhere else, just leaving the location up to the dream. I keep walking towards the entrance, close my eyes, and let the dream fade around me. My sense of having a body, and therefore of having my eyes closed, vanishes completely, and once it’s gone, imagery begins to arise again. In a flash, I see bare tree branches in a thick, white mist. Accompanying the visuals is a strong impression of early spring. Then everything comes into full focus again, and I’m standing in a bare garden underneath a bare-branched tree by a pond. I (wrongly) identify this as the backyard of childhood home #5 and am a little disappointed – just think of all the more interesting places I could have ended up. But maybe there will be some value in revisiting the place here in a dream – it’s not exactly one I have good memories of. And so I walk up to the house, jumping through the garage doors but then opening the one to the inside normally for some reason – maybe I just expected it to be unlocked. The layout of the house does not resemble the one I’ve mistaken it for in any meaningful way other than having hardwood floors. I walk through the various rooms, ground floor first, then upper floor. Nobody is around – I only see a couple cats in one of the rooms. My alarm awakens me before I can explore the whole house.
I am somewhere like a dorm room, which I seem to share with around three other people. The beds are really low, maybe just mattresses on the floor, and we’re sitting on them, listening to a woman in some kind of position of authority who’s speaking to us. She takes a feather comforter from somewhere and hands it to me to replace my current one. My bedding is all extremely tangled and twisted - I’ve slept badly. I tell her that it wouldn’t be that difficult to untangle it, but she still wants to give me the new one, so I take it and set the old one at the front of the bed. She then leaves. My old friend Ona, who seems to be one of my roommates, is trying to tell me something now, but she’s wearing something over her mouth sort of like an underwater breathing apparatus, so I have trouble understanding her at first. Eventually, with the help of one of the others, I understand that she’s saying something about a concert she saw me play in yesterday – also something about how she had previously been familiar with only one of the composers whose pieces were played there. This next part may or may not be part of the same dream – there were definitely parts after that one that I forgot, anyway. But I’m in a restaurant now. It’s a large, bright space, lit mainly by daylight streaming through full-length glass windows, but a little crowded – all the tables seem to be filled, and there isn’t much space to move between them. Saimi passes by the table where I’m sitting and makes some kind of signal to me with her hand. This somehow clues me into the fact that I’m dreaming. I get up and follow her out to the balcony to talk. As I pass through the glass window, I can feel some sensations from it, especially the dividing metal bars, which is unusual and a little surprising – possibly it has something to do with the overall level of realism seeming especially high this time. Saimi watches, pauses for a second, and then opens a glass door and walks out. I jokingly say that I haven’t used a door in a dream for years now. We jump down from the balcony and walk around while we decide what to do. It’s now clear that the restaurant is located on a college campus – one that’s dream-familiar to me from at least one dream I know I’ve recorded. Saimi says that before meeting up with me, she was waiting for my Aunt O so that they could see something together. She seems to want me to guess, so I do. A play? No. A movie? Also no. Apparently, it’s something like episodes from a TV series being screened somewhere on campus. She still wants to do this now, while lucid. I don’t think this sounds like a very good idea – looking at a screen for any considerable length of time seems like a pretty good way of losing lucidity to me. It could be interesting to see if my aunt shows up, though, and to talk with her, so I agree to wait with her. Since they agreed to meet in the restaurant, we head back there, flying back up to the balcony and going back where we started. I figure I should probably do something to keep engaged with the dream. This doesn’t strike me as a very interesting situation to work with initially. I wonder, though: what if I try to read these people’s minds? I look around the room, getting a read of the atmosphere – just in a way one might in waking life. How should I do this? I focus on one woman sitting at a table near me, trying to access her mindstate. What happens is that the dream imagery itself seems to transform so that now I’m seeing her in something like a large version of a baby’s high chair, chewing a mouthful of food with evident displeasure. So the form of the dream changed to reflect my intention, rather than my experiencing her thoughts as some kind of verbal overlay – fascinating. I wake up soon after, but quickly fall asleep again and find myself in the same setting, this time with my cat Ronnie. I’m trying to tie something around one of his paws, but soon I remember that I’m dreaming. I wake up again before I can do much of anything. -16.12.22
I am dreaming a story out. In the story, a village was destroyed, and a small group of children were the only survivors. A woman who was actually a goddess with a special relationship with the village was going to take care of all of them. She was apparently Skuld. All the gods had been gradually losing their powers, her included, so she was (I thought) really more of a demigod. A man who had left the village some time back has independently decided to return to take care of the children as well. (I was playing with the idea of his actually having been exiled from it at some point.) He had not been a particularly responsible person up until then and had led a rather rough life but genuinely cared about doing this. He was a bit suspicious of the goddess-woman since the village wasn’t large, and he didn’t recognize her, and so he didn’t see why she was involved at all. Both of them were portrayed as characters from a story I thought of sometime when I was a teenager but never did anything with. They played notably different roles in the dream. -23.6.22 Other interesting dreams recently: -Cleaning under my bed in childhood home #4, I find an open box of graham crackers. It turns out to be full of cicadas, which makes me happy because I like cicadas and because I was thinking at first it was going to be wasps. -While visiting a friend, I go out looking for a coffee shop in a location that’s dream-familiar but accidentally end up in a public area overlooking congress. I discreetly leave at the earliest possible moment and find the coffee shop nearby. -In another dream-familiar city, I go to higher ground to avoid rising floodwater and end up near a tent city. Notable in that I could smell it as well as hear the people talking there. -Descending a staircase into an underground area, accompanied by full orchestration. Unfortunately, all I can remember about the music was that it was in 4/4 time, and timpani were playing on beats 1 and 3.
I’ve gone to a school building to hold a chess club meeting there. It’s dark, like an early winter morning before school hours, and it’s drizzling out. The layout of the building is reminiscent of the second high school I attended. I realize I’ve left my equipment in the car, but I still have plenty of time to get it and set up before students start arriving. I’m still setting up when Coach A arrives. (He taught math there, as well as coaching track and cross country.) He’s apparently going to be here for the lesson today. The students start arriving as well, but I still haven’t got my board up. Looking around the room, I notice that I also seem to have brought my bouzouki along, in its hard case, as well as a Jolly Roger on a short staff (which, in retrospect, was maybe the first sign that things were about to get a little weird). I hang my board in the front of the room, but some students say they could see it better in the back, so I move it there instead and begin the lesson. I start with ladder checkmates, asking whether anyone is already familiar with them. Some are. I continue, but Coach A comes in with an explanation of his own which seems to be a bit of a digression. I’m not really happy about his presence, but he does work here, so I just have to work with the situation. In what follows, I give a version of the lesson which is recognizable, though a bit twisted in places, explaining how the rooks work together to trap the opponent’s king on one side of the board – I recall comparing the rooks to clumps of dough around the king when the checkmate has been accomplished. I’m aware that this seems to be taking an unusually long time, and most of the students who would really benefit from it aren’t here today, and at this rate I don’t know if I’ll have time for the rook and king checkmate, too. I then proceed to explain the checkmate again, in a different way, by launching into a long, elaborate story about a man who is walking along the street one day, minding his own business, when he finds himself closed in by an impassable wall. He tries to escape, but he is already trapped, and the walls keep getting closer and closer without there being anything he can do about it. The visual aspect of the dream is now the story’s events rather than the classroom. I can’t remember many of the details now but you can probably get a good idea of what it was like by watching a video on ladder checkmates and then reading Kafka’s The Trial. -24.5.22
Boat on a Stormy Sea I’m at an event taking place in a large, white tent, with people sitting at long tables in rows. I can’t remember the earlier part of the dream any longer, but at some point, a man on some sort of machine, kind of like a large tractor/open tank, bursts in and starts threatening people while riding up and down the aisles. He doesn’t actually seem to be trying to hurt anyone – yet – but it’s clearly a dangerous situation, so I head off to prepare properly before taking care of it. I go some distance away to a much smaller tent, where my own things are, and start by tying my hair back since that thing has exposed moving parts on it, and I want to be able to get close to it without having my neck snapped. While I’m getting ready, I plan, although I don’t think this will be very complicated. I figure I’ll just jump on and start messing with levers. But I’ll want to take out his grapply thingies first so he can’t just move them back. When I’m done, I go back a different way, past some fairly large buildings. The area is reminiscent of a university campus, and life seems to be going on normally here. A woman holding a number of small cards approaches me, wanting me to draw one. I do, knowing that she’s trying to help in some way. The cards are made of cardboard and are of varying sizes, as if they’re from multiple decks. I draw one which turns out to have a picture showing a boat on a stormy sea.* There’s accompanying text – I’m aware of having to focus more than usual in order to not instantly forget it (although, unfortunately, I did forget it between then and awakening). I take this as a positive sign. It also somehow suggests to me that it might be a good idea to see if I can get some of the other people in the tent to help out regarding the grapply things. * Note: this is the symbol for chords with dominant function in the app I use to practice improvising, which is something I was doing the night before this dream. 13.5.22 Cemetery Campsite I seem to be camping in a cemetery. Another tent is staked a few plots down – a mother and a young boy, who's three-ish, are staying there. I wonder whether I should tell them they’re camped on one of the graves that’s supposed to be haunted. We eventually do meet up somehow, and I show them the way to a local bank at her request. She meets with a couple of her relatives there, including an older woman who reminds me of somebody I know, who is looking after the child (who I now know is called Eliot) while she does something there. Eliot suddenly runs out of the building, and the woman follows, chasing him. I think she may need some help though, and so I wait around the opposite corner of the building and catch Eliot as he rounds it. He immediately starts crying. Sometime after that – back at the campsite – the woman has given me a bone with some meat on it to cook over a small fire. However, as I hold it over the flame, I notice there’s hardly any meat there at all – just a couple little scraps. Upon awakening, I also remembered a piano ostinato playing – not as a background of the dream, but as if it had somehow been going through my mind at the same time, apart from it. I didn’t check the pitches soon enough after the dream to be able to put it in a definite key, but this is what it sounded like: -15.5.22 Lots of interesting dreams lately. I'm not going to copy them all here, but highlights include: -Preparing for a chess match against a guy who likes to send his bishop in for a sacrifice on the f-pawn early in the game. I find this annoying and intend to make sure, through my own choice of moves, that this is not going to be an appealing option for him. -Lots of hostels and hotels. -Attending a concert on a campus but leaving after my rowdy friends got kicked out since it’s not really worth being there without them. -A lucid dream mostly consisting of talking to people and exploring.
I seem to be staying with a large group of people in a sort of vacation rental house. It’s late night, early morning, and having woken up, I’ve checked on the cats to make sure they’re still here, where they’re supposed to be. (I notice at some point that I’m not wearing pajamas, but an olive green cargo vest over a multicolor shirt, which strikes me as a little odd.) The cats are fine, but it looks like other people are up and about as well – the other young people there seem to be gathering together in an unused room, and there’s an atmosphere of anticipation, as if some spur-of-the-moment plan is being put together. I don’t really feel like going in to see what’s going on, though – I walk past to the bathroom down the hall. After that, somebody actually comes along to invite me to join them, and there’s a jump to another location, this one outside, along a street of what seems vaguely like a small city. We’re near an ice cream vendor and his cart, and somebody has apparently managed to get a really good deal on a large quantity of ice cream. The man scoops different kinds out and hands it over to the people who are also out here now. An older man explains to me what’s going on: everybody is planning to travel together to Prague to see the Pablo Neruda museum. (This places the location firmly in Dream-Prague, as no such thing exists there, as far as I know.) He has a picture of it, like a newspaper clipping in black and white showing the front of the building, which strikes me as familiar. There are four odd statues out front, roughly human-shaped. One seems to have a head the shape of a crescent moon. The man states that the museum is located in the Place of Right. This confuses me for just a second. Then I tell him that the name would probably be something more like “Law Square” or “Legal Plaza” translated into English. My memories of the place suggest that the association with the law comes from a former era and is not representative of the present-day location, that it’s located near the Mala Strana area (possibly by association with Nerudova Street) or a bit south of that, and that there’s a Gothic tower in the square as well as the museum. All of us are in Croatia, and I’m not sure if I feel like traveling all the way to Prague, especially since I visited the museum relatively recently. But it would be an interesting experience in its own right, traveling there with all these people. And maybe they could use someone who knows their way around there. Somebody brings me a cup of ice cream, white with flecks of chocolate or cookies in it. I take it. I don’t really like ice cream that much, especially not first thing in the morning, but it would probably just sit there and melt if I refused. -12.5.22
I’m in an unfamiliar house with my mother, showing her some pieces of music I’ve written using a playback program on a computer. As the dream goes on, the physical setting apparently vanishes in favor of the scores scrolling before my eyes. Unfortunately, I can no longer remember any of the music except for the clarinet part in one. The clarinet is holding a single note, and as several measures go by without it stopping, I make a mental note to modify the part as soon as we’re done listening. The computer may be able to play it back as written, but a clarinettist does actually have to take a breath at some point. -27.4.22
The dream seems to be set within some kind of video game world, and as part of the game, I have to go out swimming in the sea and do something with the various fish swimming below the surface (I am no longer sure precisely what the point was supposed to be). One particularly large shape seems a little too interested in me, and it’s only after repeatedly beating it off that it gets the message that I’m not dinner and comes to the surface. It is a shark, and it proceeds to tell me a story – one that I can already tell is unlikely to have a happy ending from a human point of view, although the shark itself is completely oblivious to these implications. I am annoyed with the game for making me come all the way out here and do this. I do not enjoy punching sharks. I do not especially like being buttonholed by them, either. But, I reflect, that is always the problem with open mics. -20.3.22
Reflect Part of a longer series of events involving travel from one place to another. The only part I remember well was towards the end, where I’m being chased by a young woman in a rather video game-ish setting. As I run, a handful of parallel memories arise, showing various outcomes to this event, which are all variations on her catching up. Looks like this is a mandatory fight. I also notice that something is different from the memories, something important: I know who she really is. I make sure she doesn’t catch up until an open area up ahead, and then we’re both standing there, facing one another. She initially has brown skin and straight, dark, shoulder-length hair, but the image dissolves, and she changes to a shorter figure with grayish skin, rather like Zimmy from Gunnerkrigg Court. There’s a short conversation here, which I can no longer remember, and then she attacks, throwing some sort of enormous summoning spell at me. I raise an arm and deflect it back at her with a gesture. What happens next is rather like a lengthy animation playing out, temporarily turning both of us into passive observers as it takes over the screen/dream and practically defeats my opponent all on its own. Moreover, at the end of it, the nature of the encounter seems to have changed, so that now I just have to complete three small, easy puzzles to win. My opponent actually contributes to solving one, in sort of a “yeah, yeah, let’s get this over with” way. Poke Another vaguely video game-ish one of which I can only remember the later part. In this one, I’m with a small group of people in a town, and there is a man there we have to fight, although it isn’t clear why, and he doesn’t actually seem to be an enemy. I can’t remember his appearance (or, really, the specific visuals of the dream in general), but something about him was reminiscent of Zorro somehow. A woman in the group demonstrates to me how to attack via a menu. There’s a list of attacks, most of which seem to be elementally based, but the woman indicates the one that he is apparently weak to, which is color-coded purple and labeled “Quiet”. Oddly, all the attacks just seem to be summoning various ensembles of musicians, who then play music. I select the most powerful option, which summons three of them. I then poke him in the back, which takes a small chunk out of his remaining HP. He’s just standing there and not responding in any way, so I poke him a few more times until he is defeated – or maybe just until I’ve got his attention, which seems as if it might be what this whole thing is actually about.
In the earliest parts I can remember, I’m traveling on a ship with a friend when the water underneath starts to swirl. Soon, a whirlpool has formed, and we’re spinning around as the wall of water grows higher around us. It now seems to be just us in the water – the whole dream was a bit iffy on continuity – and I see a smaller spiral under the surface near me. I move away, but it follows. It strikes me that this thing is only after me, not my friend, so I pass them something which is supposed to be a useful tool of some kind and encourage them to leave. I am alone now. The ship (or something, anyway) seems to be back, and there’s nothing to do but wait, I figure. I pull out a book—The Hobbit—so I can read until it feels like manifesting. At some point, a dark, oppressive energic atmosphere begins to form—not something visible, but a feeling hanging over everything—and it does show itself – in the form of Bilbo Baggins. Simultaneously with this, I now seem to be Frodo. “Bilbo” starts going on an exaggerated diatribe about what an awful book “The Hobbit” is. This goes on for quite a while, interspersed with my occasional sarcastic responses. The continuity continues to be rather sketchy, with “Bilbo” occasionally disappearing and subsequently reappearing elsewhere, and once, apparently accidentally, walking into view undisguised before the previous one has finished talking, appearing as a figure cloaked in black, face hidden beneath a hood. But then, a little later, it’s back to “Bilbo” again. He now has his own copy of “The Hobbit,” enclosed in a bubble wrap packing envelope which he’s holding by one corner as if it’s something disgusting. There’s a whole tub filled with bubble wrap beside him. I haven’t been taking anything that’s happened the least bit seriously so far—I’ve been treating it as if it’s some kind of unavoidable everyday nuisance rather than an actual threat—but somehow, in this whole improbable series of events, it is the bubble wrap that gets me thinking critically about what’s going on. “Bubble wrap. Why?” I say aloud. There is no bubble wrap in Middle Earth. I think it over just to be sure. No, it’s quite impossible. Couldn’t happen. I then proceed to do the only logical thing one can do under the circumstances: transform myself into a cat and leap into the bubble wrap-filled crate. But it’s just then that the dream ends, and I awaken. 4.11.21
I’m in a library, doing research for a school assignment. While I’m still not sure what materials I’ll need for it, I figure it would be a good idea to get some likely books since I happen to be here anyway. The assignment seems to involve music, specifically the composer Borodin, so I return to a shelf on the floor directly above the ground one where I had been earlier in the dream. About all I can remember of that earlier part was listening to a song with a couple other people, including my aunt. It had a heartbreakingly beautiful ending, but when I asked my aunt for a translation from the Russian, the text turned out to be a rather banal folk song about two mice. Anyway, once I get there, I pull a book from the shelf and flip it open to an analysis – probably a violin part, in either D or E. A very simplified reduction shows the staff with the I note, the IV and V above it a little later on, and then the ii on the octave below. The text explains how the melody avoids these structurally important notes (IV and V) and instead goes in a series of dark, ambiguous spirals that land on the ii each time. 27.10.21