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Morning of September 13, 2012. Thursday.



I become lucid in a slow entry transition (the usual lucid and willfully manipulated hypnagogia after making love in real life) and our bedroom takes on different features.

Of course, there is still the residual energy of wanting more intimacy and sustained harmony. Zsuzsanna and I eat strawberries (on a small yellow plate) at one point.

After our romance and intimacy, I am somewhat in a non-lucid state now. I become puzzled, more over my decreasing level of awareness (but which vivifies in the last scene) than by the fact our bedroom is rendered with the wrong layout (not directly linked to the lounge room and kitchen as it is in real life). The paint on the horizontal wall boards is peeling (yet it was not before) which I vaguely recall means that my dream is beginning to ebb, yet my lucidity is no longer viable.

I feel an urge to see if the door is open and it is. I approach the doorway. There is nothing visible beyond. I feel puzzled by an anticipatory mood emerging from within me.

The Cat in the Hat’s hat appears in the doorway, though with no cat. It floats in the air, tips slightly forward and I feel amused, waking with cheerfulness and humor.

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This dream has the usual dynamics as have been in the same sequential components (through tens of thousands of dreams) since early childhood, though I have grown to appreciate, enjoy, and greatly respect how the nuances are always slightly different.

Firstly, it is doorway waking symbolism, where a doorway is rendered as the dream’s implied exit point as an emergent consciousness factor (sometimes triggered by real-life environmental noise but not always, as the reticular activating system often uses the memory of a door knock or door-opening sound to activate waking, though no door knock occurs in this case).

Secondly, the sense of puzzlement is what causes the stovepipe hat to be rendered. Although “The Skunk” is an early childhood dream from 1965, it has very similar dynamics, where the white part of the skunk formed a question mark when I entered the higher liminal space of unconsciousness while becoming closer to consciousness (and also ends with doorway waking symbolism). Stovepipe hats represent the emergent consciousness and the concept is related to “put on your thinking cap” as analogous to waking from the dream state (emergence of thinking skills which the non-lucid dream self does not possess). They have featured as such in a number of my dreams since childhood.

Finally, the essence of a cat is linked but not fully. Depending on the dream of course, cats often serve as a liminal space symbol. This is mainly because of my childhood association of a cat sitting on a fence, a fence being the division between unconsciousness and emerging consciousness.

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I’m going on vacation with my family, I think to Cape Cod. The rest of my family is riding in one car and I’m going in a car with my dad. While my dad is driving along, I think I see my 9th grade English teacher out the window, but then it turns out to not be her after all. We stop at some movie theater because for some reason, we’re going to a movie before we leave. But then I’m like, “Or, we could just go.” So then we agree to skip the movie and just leave.
We end up in some vacation house, and I think my aunt and uncle are there, too. At some point while we’re there, I watch “How I Met Your Mother” on a tiny TV in the house’s kitchen. Eventually everyone joins me and they’re all sitting around the TV.

There’s some other part where my family and I go to some carnival. There’s this guy dressed as the Cat in the Hat who is going around making everyone sign his hat. None of us actually want to go on any rides, so instead we all sit in front of this glass class filled with … something. I don’t remember exactly what. I want to say it was sea shells, but that doesn’t seem right. Oh, well. It was something shiny.

I remember another snippet of a dream where my friend and I were running down the stairs of our dorm building, and I was wearing my slippers, and I was telling her about “My Little Pony.”