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Original dream dated 5/18/2008:

Had 2 nightmares the past 2 nights.

One of them was about college. Sort of normal. The usual - I'm taking a class, paying for it myself and running myself into debt to do it, yet can't get to class on time and never get my homework done. I can't get the motivation to do it, and have missed so many classes that I can never catch up. I live 30 minutes away by car and want to move closer, but can't afford to. My lease is coming up, but I don't want to sign a new lease when I'm failing the class.

Then, for some reason, I'm wheeling a motorcycle through the university buildings. Nobody notices. I get it up several floors, when I realize that the elevator I intend to use to get farther up only has a weight capacity of 250 lbs. and can't possibly support its weight, and the stairs are too rickety. Somehow, I wind up wheeling it across a narrow beam several hundred feet above the lobby floor.

Which brings me to the weird thing about universities in my nightmares - I'm always on the edge of some high precipice, because for some reason they have many many floors but all of them end at sheer drops with no railings, or else they're in bizarre configurations that you have to climb from floor to floor like a bug... I'm almost always terrified of falling when I'm in a university-like building in my dream, and the drop is always hundreds of feet. There are always narrow, rickety stairs, or broken elevators, etc. It's an ongoing theme that bothers me.

Anyway, the next dream involved Clarissa from Clarissa Explains It All, who was for some reason on a cruise ship fishing for squid, and was talking with her friend via text message before her parents showed up with her brother and her friend's brother. I have no idea what the point of the dream was.

Morning of September 12, 1997. Friday.



I am fishing amidst much man-made debris in the shallow water (not sure of location), although I do catch a rather large fish. Whenever the fish jumps, there is a larger splash that reaches me and a couple other males (one unknown who may be with the military, the other possibly from my maintenance job at a college). (Much of my wife’s dream of this date had the same aspects as my dream for no discernible reason.)

There is a giant black derby “cloud” that “rains” over parts of the ocean and eventually goes more inland, continuing over rivers and smaller streams, mostly. Very briefly, it seems like a UFO, yet continues to function as a raincloud. It seems familiar as if I may have seen it in an illustrated book of dreams in real life sometime in the past (though I am not certain).

I take a large jar of olives to an Italian wedding reception. I carry it in my left hand. I have something else that is smaller and in thin plastic wrap - sort of near my right hand (something sweet I think; I get the vague impression of a small amount of caramel popcorn), but floating it along near the jar with telekinesis, I think. An older male (who gives the impression of being at least part Transylvanian) comes to the door. I do not go in to the actual party.

Morning of January 21, 1997. Tuesday.



My dream’s setting is a new and unique composite of La Crosse and Cubitis (which are over 1,500 miles apart in reality).

My dream’s induction is the typical nonthreatening flood, a dream feature that has occurred in at least one dream virtually every night since earliest memory, so it is obviously an autosymbolic induction factor that is usually unrelated to waking life, especially as water autosymbolism correlates with the dynamics of sleep and the sleep cycle.

Curiously, our front yard does not seem flooded at one point but our carport does (as a distortion of a Cubitis feature). I am fishing in it (which of course is a ridiculous concept, as the front yard and carport would otherwise be at the same level in real life, but water replacing ground or floor at the same level, yet implying depth, is a common dream distortion, another factor of water as autosymbolism for the sleeping and dreaming process by the transformation of ground into the essence of fluid).

At one point, it seems I have caught a large striped bass, which is a kind of silver fish I used to catch in America (often using orange florescent fishing spoons as a lure).

The “fish” gets heavier over time (as is often the case in my fishing dreams when I hook something). However, it eventually turns out to be a large white cat, though of which does not appear to be injured from my “catching” it with my fishing equipment. It comes near me and purrs and my focus shifts as I move more toward waking.

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Fishing is a type of autosymbolic preconscious mediation when my dream self seeks to find the conscious self identity to initiate the waking process. In this case, it is paired with another form of preconscious mediation, which is the carport - in representing the liminal space buffer as a factor of the waking process. A cat has often served as a preconscious avatar (and “witness” to the dream state), though in this case becomes the emergent consciousness factor.

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Morning of August 23, 1987. Sunday.



I am with Leonard S on a fishing trip at Pettibone Park, across the bridge from where we live on the south-side of La Crosse and where we often fish in real life. I believe it is late morning. There is an idea that the authorities might soon be here to “investigate” our fishing methods even though we are not doing anything wrong. After a short time, a helicopter appears in the sky overhead. Soon, it seems to have some difficulty staying up. It ends up moving down onto the ground at an angle, close to the riverbank, so that the rotor blades hit the ground and then seem to become like some sort of digging machine as dirt flies up - and the helicopter goes farther into the ground almost like it was designed to (and the rotor blades do not break, they just keep turning and digging, pulling the helicopter deeper into the ground).

From here, for some reason, my dream then only focuses on Leonard’s profile which takes on a rather odd insect-like appearance and his eyes seem to project visible dashes (a series of short “lines”) in the air, moving out horizontally from them in an old-fashioned-comic-strip-like indication of where he is looking (as if he is extremely puzzled by the helicopter’s “slow-motion” accident unfolding before him). He is still supposedly completely human. My dream becomes vague and partly abstract at this point.

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Leonard in this case stands for my dream self and temporary waking self hybrid (present in many dream types but not all). He is very puzzled over why the waking mechanism failed as a result of the association with sleeping longer (including anticipation of the return to slow-wave sleep), the short lines that project from his eyes create a virtual highway (or an implied linear pathway), a highway (or in fact any implied pathway) being a conduit for either deeper induction or the waking transition.

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Morning of October 1, 1980. Wednesday.



My main dream sequence was somewhat abstract and mostly involved looking around in an unusual store that was a distorted composite, with what was being sold together in the same store as such not making much sense. There are craft items, fishing tackle, and possibly school textbooks on certain shelves, and possibly food. However, the waking transition was very clear as it usually is and can easily be decoded.

I am later fishing while standing on a roofed sidewalk. I am at the front of the store (facing east) but which also mainly looks like the entrance to my middle school in Florida. The parking lot has been replaced by a large body of water which comes up to the level of where the parking lot’s surface would otherwise be. This is where I am fishing.

After a short time, I hook onto something that feels very heavy and large but does not fight that much. Soon however, a huge catfish slowly emerges from the surface of the water, slides on its stomach up onto the sidewalk and swallows an unknown chubby male (of perhaps forty) who had been standing about eight feet to my right. There is a sense of awe but I am also somewhat amused.

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I would rather experience coalescence autosymbolism by watching another (typically unknown and presumed fictional) dream character being swallowed than experience it as my dream self. This is otherwise autosymbolism for the illusory dream state being swallowed up by the conscious self identity and the distorted dream self coalescing back into consciousness. The parking lot is liminal space (autosymbolism for being in a specific level of unconsciousness between dreaming and waking), and water lowering waking symbolism eventually commences here as in many other dreams. An area of land being replaced by becoming the surface of a body of water has happened in a number of my dreams, and other people have reported this as well.

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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.