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Night of September 29, 1976. Wednesday.



In my dream, I am fishing at El Jobean in the afternoon. The weather is very nice at first. There are a lot of other people of various ages, some fishing, but not that close to where I am.

Over time, I notice that I get a bite now and then, but every time I reel in, it looks like a tiny piece of tin foil moving just under the water and is not there later on when all the line and hook comes fully out of the water, as if something is following my bait, which may be a minnow or tiny shiny fish. This annoys me somewhat. It seems to be a strange and growing mystery. Other people are not noticing what is happening and a few people are leaving now and then, as it is getting later in the afternoon. The scene is very vivid, yet I cannot work out the reason for the small tinfoil-like “creature” under the water or what sometimes seems like an actual gum wrapper section somehow moving in consistent patterns (or maybe someone is playing a practical joke).

Oddly, there is a utility pole to my left, with a three-digit number painted at an odd diagonal angle about chest-high and an additional mark of some kind. It seems sort of out-of-place near the beach.

It is getting darker and darker and time seems to be compressed a bit. Everyone has left the beach but me and it has grown slightly cooler.

Once again, the silvery, reflective form is under the water, but as the sun has just gone down, things change a bit. A very large and strange silvery manta ray, which is somehow walking like a person, “slimmer” than a real manta ray, and about as tall as a person (or a bit taller) is coming up from the shoreline with its “wings” out. I see it as potentially dangerous. It is very vivid (not quite lucid - but almost). I manage to back up and grab some sort of gig or harpoon with my left hand and am able to send it into the creature and kill it. I feel “heroic” somehow, as if I am part of a legend of some sort. There is a subtle sense of rain and motion of waves as if the scene is being “painted” by those aspects. It is an eerie scene, yet somehow not nightmarish to me.

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There is mostly only moon symbolism here. This includes the silver manta ray, the fact it came from deep levels of the ocean (unconscious mind), the fact that silvery “moonlight” was glimmering from under the water’s surface prior to its emergence, the fact that I was fishing (seeking connection with my unconscious state to resolve my eventual waking transition), and the fact that a telephone pole appeared in an unlikely place near the beach - as a telephone pole represents communication between different levels of consciousness while in the dream state. The nature of this dream firstly going from afternoon to nighttime is also obvious in this meaning as it is analogous to “the moon coming out”. This is validated by the fact that the manta ray is an intriguing flight symbol which represents a very specific level of consciousness. The rain adds to this effect as rain also represents communication from deeper levels of consciousness and flow of thought while in the dream state. To conclude, this is a circadian rhythms dream with adolescent factors.

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What was interesting about this is that the next afternoon, the utility pole near the highway (but still a part of our front yard area) had the exact same white paint markings as from my dream and at the same height. Unfortunately, I do not have a photo on hand and did not sketch out the somewhat oddly painted number (could not fully tell what it was - only that it looked the same as my dream image and had at least one six - or what looked like one). It had definitely not been there earlier (even my father mentioned it and confirmed it was brand new). This is one of those times where I just reflected on how curious that was (especially since there was no seeming connection with any “silver manta” in any way - and that part of my dream was quite “mundane” compared to the “epic battle”). It mostly seemed to me as if they had worked at “marking” the poles for when they were to put in the small green utility boxes relating to underground cables (which I did not hear about until later). It did look a little like a graffiti tag, but we were “in the middle of nowhere” and it had never happened before.

Morning of November 7, 1975. Friday.



I am focused on both walking through the hallway (related to getting ready for school) and reading the day’s newspaper’s comic strips. There illogically seems to be more than one instance of the Peanuts comic strip though I only remember the contents of one with greater clarity. The style and general look of the art is exact (which is not always the case in these types of dreams).

There are three panels of Snoopy setting up a beach blanket and umbrella. In the last panel, is only the shape of Snoopy’s head implied to be covered with beach sand as his body from the neck down is also in the ground itself. A thought balloon clearly reads “I hate the sand”.

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As is often the case, this relates to coalescence and the waking stage. The sand covers him “at the end” (projected static dream self perspective no longer viable). I did not find any comic strips that could have influenced this dream unlike my dream where exact remote viewing occurred prior to seeing the same gag in real life (my utterly unexplainable Nancy Comic Strip dream with the exact same gag and wording). Comic strips are ordinarily the downsizing of the dream state to render it static for whatever reason (perhaps a subliminal attempt to “freeze” the dream to remain asleep for longer and yet still with a potential for continuity, the focus from panel to panel). Sand also relates to the passage of time (due to association with erosion), so in a way, that backs up the other implications (in wanting to sleep longer).

Night of January 1, 1972. Saturday.



This dream was the rather unfortunate result of having seen some of “The Mole People” (from 1956) and “Bikini Beach” (from 1964) on our black-and-white television in Cubitis on the same day (though I only saw about the last half of “The Mole People” as I got up too late - about eight o'clock - to see it from the beginning - though my mother had watched it from the beginning yet did not think much of it except for mild amusement, I thought). In my dream, Annette Funicello is in the main role of the fictional in-dream version of “The Mole People” and apparently her boyfriend is one of the mole people though looks fairly normal, and there is a scene where the slightly more human-like heads (than the creatures in the actual movie) are sort of moving side to side with their bodies otherwise buried in the sand at the mostly featureless beach. There is something somewhat ambiguous about the scene in that it seems more like a foreign desert at one point than an American beach, though it does not seem to be horror; only some sort of low-key drama. I only remember about three distorted fictional scenes, which is typical of such movie-influenced composite jumbles. What a way to start the new year (1972), as my mother used to say.

Morning of August 29, 1970. Saturday.



In a number of repeating similar scenes throughout what seems a very long dreaming period, I find myself somehow arriving on an island very early in the morning before sunrise, each time for “the first time”, though the repetitive nature of the “resets” is not monotonous or of any type of negative effect. I seem incorporeal for the most part, though sometimes standing on the beach in my physical body. Regardless of my mainly unresolved redundant arrivals, I do not become impatient. There is mainly a feeling of perfection, happiness, and timelessness. I have a vague sense of my “mystery girl” (who may be living near the central area of the island) but I do not see her at any point.

Always in the distance no closer than thirty feet away, is a shadow in the form of a man but is also implied to be feline, with cat ears, and I sense it may be half panther and half man. There is no threat or negative emotion. The overall feeling the character is mostly projecting is neutral though seems to imply a beneficial future and even nostalgia (which seems unusual from a child’s point of view but has happened often with me as a boy). It seems like the creature is somehow always walking along the beach at this time on this seemingly isolated island. There are times when I more vividly perceive that this entity is my own shadow somehow cast from where I am standing on the beach (sparsely recurring including in much later dreams).

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Entry and additional notes confirmed and updated Wednesday, 26 October 2016.

• Mainly influenced by the movie “Terror Is a Man” (November 1959) though again, completely lacking in anything either frightening or threatening.
• Additionally influenced by the Money Cat scene from the animated movie “Gay-Purr-ee” (October 1962).
• Additionally influenced from a previous dream from the night of Friday, December 23, 1966 (“Money Cat” minion saves me).
• As of this writing, my last dream to feature an association with the Shadow Cat as the preconscious essence was “Catlike Shadow Creature and Shopping” from Saturday, September 10, 2016, though it has appeared in a number of other dreams, typically in a dream’s final minutes.
• A beach in a dream represents liminal space and in fact is the most powerful setting of this nature. (See off-site link: The Beach, part 3 - Liminal Space.)
• A cat (or in this case, a panther) mainly symbolizes the nocturnal form of the preconscious (especially in this shadow form), where its origin seems to be (even though cats are active during the day).
• Shadow forms in my dreams are often friendly, helpful, and even radiate love, the opposite of what the majority of other people claim.
• This form of the preconscious sometimes seems to be my own shadow, but in this case, I do not consider that a shadow could not appear in this way (for example, with no wall behind it for it to be logically cast upon), the same fallacy that has occurred in a number of other dreams since early childhood.