The Fourth Factor

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.