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Night of December 13, 1969. Saturday.



Ralph the Carpenter from “Green Acres” (played by Mary Canfield) is in my room in the middle of the night. She needs to do work on my bed (obvious dream sign) but which is also a wooden airplane (flight symbol and typical autosymbolism for vestibular system correlation) that apparently flies. She apologizes for waking me after I absentmindedly look up at what sounds somewhat like hammering. The boards are at different angles including several over my head but apparently my airplane is still okay to fly. She says something about the school bus (or catching the school bus) at one point (even though it is the weekend - which I try to recall the nature of in the back of my mind) and something about my cat Snowball. Soon, I am aware my bed is flying - with not that much concern (or focus) over her probable incompetence, though that is only a very loose association as I do not feel much movement and I am seemingly still in my room in the same position. I hear a soft engine which sounds in the distance (or underneath me and not very loud) though it is somehow meant to be “my airplane” of which I am supposedly in. I am not doing anything (that is, I am not acting as a pilot) even though my “airplane” has eventually supposedly gone a far distance. I am in bed as I was, with my eyes closed wondering where I am going. There is the typical essence of indoor-outdoor ambiguity (somehow being simultaneously indoors and outdoors).

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I explain this dream type further in “Dreams of Type PRECONAV-VSCPCEL, 01-15”.

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Morning of March 8, 1969. Saturday.



Sgt Carter (played by Frank Sutton on “Gomer Pyle”, the television series) is aboard a small airplane (though unrealistically implied to be a jumbo jet) which looks more like the inside of a school bus (which is very typical of my dreams, even years later after I have actually been on airplanes). He is on the right side of my perspective (from the front of the “airplane” as I am “standing” and looking toward the back of the “airplane”) and perhaps on the second row back form the front. I seem to be disembodied or at least not interacting with the situation in any way, though it is not really like watching television because I am “there”.

Frank is suspicious and nervous of a person behind him on the row to my left, probably the very last row. Apparently, the people on the airplane have just escaped the devastation caused by the blob (though the town was not really devastated in the real movie from 1958) and down below are big shadows and small fires, though the other people seem cheerful including an unknown businessman in glasses on the first row to my left. The blob has the ability to change into different things (also unlike the movie where it remained a gelatinous mass). What is first seen as a person reading a newspaper is possibly the blob…that is, the “newspaper” ready to devour that person. For a time he sits in his seat covered by the “newspaper” (which now seems more like a cloth blanket with a newspaper design printed on it), seeming somewhat like a “ghost” wearing a “sheet”, unmoving. Frank does not directly look at any point yet somehow seems aware of what is going on behind him.

The scene is not resolved. Frank (as Sgt Carter) disappears but no explanation is given. The blanket/blob/newspaper, assuming it is “real”, may still be hungry, though it is quite small. For a time, it seems more like seats in a movie theater (though somehow ridiculously a “flying” movie theater - that is, the building with no implied wings) rather than on an airplane - then the “movie theater”/“airplane”/“school bus” is empty. Everything is quiet, though the newspaper is on the floor, fluttering, sticking out slightly to the right of the seat of the original “blanket man” (from my perspective). (From here, things go “frozen” for a time, then abstract hypnopompia.)



Probable influences:

“Peanuts” comic strips where Linus’s blanket is “alive” and attacks Lucy (cutout from 1965 and taped in a notepaper binder collected and owned by my mother)

plus

“Newspaper Blanket” by the Cowsills (I owned the 45 of; flip side of “Indian Lake”)

plus

the episode of “Gomer Pyle” where Sgt Carter acts this way on an airplane (heading towards a nervous breakdown, supposedly)

plus

the movie “The Blob” (1958 version)

equals true weirdness via pop culture overkill perhaps. Being cruelly and surreptitiously dominated by entertainment has never really been my goal; just endless meticulous self-examination. It is good to discover the synthetic sources of your own imagination, or make that, the dream self’s “mind”, which does not even know an airplane from a bus.

Morning of September 17, 1978. Sunday.

Dream #: 4,290-02. Reading time: 55 sec.



It seems to be late at night or very early in the morning before sunrise. I see the front of my Cubitis home (though I am living in La Crosse at the time in real life) from near the highway. My father is near the southwest corner of the house. After a short time, I see a navy jet (possibly an A-5 Vigilante, though only about half the size or smaller) has somehow stopped in midair so it appears “frozen” at about a forty-five degree (diagonal) angle about eight feet from the ground, close to where my father is standing, though to his left by a few feet. The unfamiliar male pilot starts talking to my father, and they cheerfully converse. The jet hanging in midair does not cause incredulity, but there is a vague, indirect thought of whether there is something wrong about the scene. There is a vague wariness about the jet dropping a bomb, but not in our immediate vicinity. Overall, the scene maintains a positive essence. I get the impression the pilot is asking my father for directions (as people sometimes do from a car) so he may continue his mission. I do not consider how it is going to move from its compromising position near the ground. (I wake while it is still motionless though I get the impression it will return to its usual flight path.)

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Morning of June 13, 1978. Tuesday.



In this dream, I am aware that aggressive hippopotamuses are continuously swimming about and eating people near a beach as well as capsizing boats (apparently called “eights” or rowing boats used in the sport of competitive rowing) that seem to be part of a local competition. People are warned about the danger including with a few signs near the shore, but nobody pays heed to either the signs or the actual threatening appearances of the hippopotamuses in the large river (though they mostly lurk under the water and none of them are ever onshore).

There is eventually a scene where I am on a small airplane (not a Cessna but some sort of older type I have seen in older safari movies, at least as the exterior). There are several people on the airplane, perhaps as many as ten in close proximity. The unfamiliar female pilot (of only about twenty), though she has the appearance of my “dream girl”, is having trouble with the airplane and just manages to avoid crashing into the Eiffel Tower by dramatically flying under it, almost as if in slow motion. This feels interesting and exciting, perhaps because my dream is almost bordering on lucidity at this point and the vestibular system ambiguity of the dream state, though I slowly wake up after this near-miss event. The airplane seems associated with being on a school bus as from years before and seemed more like a bus inside. There is also a vague association of school with regard to the airplane, as if it might be part of a school field trip (though I was no longer in school at this point in reality).

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Morning of August 15, 1967. Tuesday. (Daughter Amelia’s birthday in 1998.) Rough overhead “map” now included. Confusion stems from the fact that Amelia is supposedly in the airplane as well as on the ground with me (though on one level it may be her spirit on the ground with me rather than her implied physical form otherwise “duplicated” in the airplane) and we are facing away from the event even though it is also “clear” that we are watching it somehow.



I dreamt of being in my yard with Amelia Earhart. This is in the southern part of my yard at North Monroe Street in Florida. We are facing directly to the south even though the plane seems to need to be viewed north of us, but it seems as if I am (while disembodied) viewing the scene at one point from south of where I (physical form) am standing, my “real” incorporeal self looking northward and seeing myself (that is, my “real” incorporeal me - and my actual view - is facing the other dream-rendering of me in my physical form) and the plane is gong down to the left from my “real” view - yet she acknowledges this as if facing the event (rather than it being behind her as it is in my dream view). Amelia stands on my “other self’s” right. An old-fashioned Lockheed plane is going down diagonally in the sky as if in distress, with sparse smoke trailing behind it somewhat. I am somehow aware that she is my mother, even though I am informed by her that she is my daughter, which creates an intense puzzlement in the dream state, as it was also as if she was watching her own plane (with her own self in it) burning out and falling from the sky (with the likelihood of crashing somewhere in the distance). She is telling me how she crashed (or possibly only landed roughly without that much damage) on an island and something about the Japanese possibly shooting her down. There is an unusual mood that she may have been my “real mother” (possibly implied by the idea that on this date Will Rogers, a relative on my mother’s side, died in an airplane crash with Wiley Post, the first pilot to fly solo around the world and Amelia wanted to be the first woman to do this). Near the end, the imagery of Amelia and myself takes on a sort of grainy monotone appearance.

In real life, before we met, Zsuzsanna and I had decided our first daughter (if we had one) would be called “Amelia”, but not because of my dream (and it was in fact the name Zsuzsanna already chose and gave me over the telephone before she knew of “my” Amelia and dream history). At any rate, the August 15th marker regarding the foreshadowing of my daughter’s birth exists every year from earliest childhood up to the time she was born, as do most precognitive markers and is something I have never seen other people honestly address (other than with shortsighted denial and no viable understanding of dreams).

For a closer look at this dream and its real (native) meaning (as well as lifelong markers that many dreams have as well as unexplainable synchronicity related in the next paragraph), it is a very basic and very common (for me) “failed flight” waking transition; that is, something falling from the sky as representing the dreamer waking up (a subtle variation of the primary biological waking mechanism sometimes inclusive of a falling sensation and a hypnic jerk). The airplane (which most often represents a deeper potential of the dream state) is on fire because fire also represents light of day and dawning consciousness in this case. “Failed flight” does not typically mean anything negative as it simply means naturally waking from the “flight” (and “displacement”) of a dream (and this same waking transition can be seen in tens of thousands of other dreams, including those with meteors which is directly analogous to this dream’s content as well).

Additional layers and long-term markers: Wiley Post and Will Rogers (my mother’s cousin) died on this date in a plane crash (and information on my family connections, father as well as mother, can be found in books such as “The Papers of Will Rogers: From vaudeville to Broadway” and “Cowgirls of the Rodeo”). That does not invalidate the synchronicity with our daughter’s birth date; in fact, it confirms it since there are over fifty other date-relevant markers for her birth, most prior to my meeting Zsuzsanna.

Morning of November 23, 1974. Saturday.



This was not that clear of a dream (that is, not that vivid regarding dream self awareness). I wander into an area near a small city in possibly another country (possibly in the Middle East though this is not certain) and it is very narrow even though there are many tall commercial buildings. Everything, including every building and structure, is “unrealistically” narrow, almost as if it was purposely designed to be about half the size of a typical alley width. There is at least one outdoor area that seems to be selling clothes but with the seeming essence of a magazine vendor. I see a jetliner fly overhead (from my left to my right) at one point in the final moments (with even a vague awareness of white noise), and I see several people walking around. However, just on the outskirts of the main part of town, I am somehow aware that there may not be enough space for me to even walk down the street or sidewalk. I do not really feel trapped, just puzzled and slightly annoyed.

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This short dream, though somewhat unique in my own lifelong dreaming history (though there have been other settings with limited space, sometimes relating to narrowing or truncation leading to instigation of the waking process), follows the same generic pattern in meaning as hundreds of other dreams.

Typically, coming out of an alley in a dream brings on astounding vividness. That does not happen here as I remain in the same general area for the most part.

Anything relating to the selling of clothing relates to the waking transition and "preparing” the temporary waking self (even though this form is sometimes incorporeal or hybridized into unusual forms, not necessarily even human).

The typical waking sign of the airplane flight (sometimes rendered as a flying bird or other feature including a model airplane or very distorted airplane parts) is seen here near the ending.

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Morning of July 3, 1974. Wednesday.

Dream #: 2,753-03. Reading time: 32 sec.



I had a shorter than usual dream of a “flying elephant’s head” that is a sentient cloud that is also like a living creature at times. It chases a small airplane (probably a Cessna) across the blue sky. I seem to be flying alongside the plane in an incorporeal form. The pilot can get to freedom, as small parts of the cloud (almost like smoke puffs) come off in the pursuit until it begins to break up to the point that it is nearly nonexistent. The cloud creature is seemingly named “Gumbo,” which is likely a play on “Dumbo,” the animated flying elephant from the Disney movie.

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A Harvey comic book story about a big cloud “bully” partly influenced this dream. It began to break up when trying to maintain the form of a human.

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Age 11. Morning of November 4, 1972. Saturday. About 8:00 a.m.

Dream #: 2,147-07. Reading time (optimized): 2 min.



My emerging consciousness and waking-life identity exist, but I am still dreaming, though I correctly recognize the location of my body as being in bed in my Cubitis home. It is morning.

An airplane flies over the area, its flight path and linear distance from the front of our house (though as high in the sky) correlating with my school bus route. (I am aware of this correlation as I dream, though it is Saturday. I had let go of my expectation of attending school.) I see the airplane’s underside as it flies from north to south.

A cage falls from the airplane, though moving slightly east as it falls so that it lands in our front yard about ten feet from my windows. (I vaguely consider it a gift from my dream girl, though possibly a mistaken delivery which replaced my gift with someone else’s). Inside the cage is the Warner Brothers cartoon character, the Tasmanian devil, though he is Pepto-Bismol pink. He seems about my height. He does not make any attempt to escape. I do not perceive him as a threat to me, despite his behavior (like exercising his mouth and waving his arms). I awake with a sense of amusement.

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“Something coming down” is a prevalent dream event as a result of vestibular cortex arousal during the waking process. Associations with flight occur throughout every sleep cycle as a result of my lack of physicality. This status also results in the rendering of a cage in this instance that represents my emerging awareness of how I cannot move my physical body as I sleep.

The Tasmanian devil, as the cortical arousal simulacrum, represents a visual association and expectation. I often woke around this time to watch “The Bugs Bunny Show.” There are influences from “Devil May Hare” and “Bedevilled Rabbit.” (In some cases, a tornado would represent the process, though it is important to note the Tasmanian devil cartoon character travels about in a miniature tornado.)

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On a personal spiritual level, I saw a Tasmanian devil at a zoo not long after I met Zsuzsanna (my dream girl). I had traveled to Australia by airplane. I only include this because of the correlations. For example, “When Worlds Collide” (1951) had aired the night before (November 3, 1972, though I had chosen to watch “The Valley of Gwangi” again as it was on at the same time). “When Worlds Collide” was the chief influence of my dream “The Pink Planet” from November 6, 1971. It had aired the night before in that case as well. In that dream, a Pepto-Bismol pink twin version of Earth was coming in view as I looked up to see Australia. In my “Wild Weasel” dream from 1969, a “real” Tasmanian devil (called a “weasel” as I did not know what real Tasmanian devils looked like at the time) traveled in a small tornado, and Brenda (validated stand-in for Zsuzsanna) and I hid from it as it remained beyond a frosted glass door (wall mediation).

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