Thread: Dream sequels

Well, I don't want to type up a whole bunch of dreams and, with how slow the forum is right now I don't even feel like trying to find some in my DJ and link to them, but this definitely happens all the time for me. I'll just post a brief synapsis.

Last night for example I dreamed that I looked out the window of my house and saw a bunch of cows standing in the yards all up and down the street. One in my next door neighbors' yard was in fact tied to a ring in the front wall of my garage - weird. I went out to ask the neighbor what was going on. A little later the cow started bucking wildly, which connects it with a dream from many years ago.

It was when Mad Cow disease was a thing, and I dreamed of a cow enclosed in a small barn-like room that was bucking insanely, flipping end over end and kicking the walls furiously. The dream supplied the name Bad Cow. So last nights' dream referenced it but didn't comment on it or add anything of value.

I've had dreams that re-interpreted or re-imagined earlier dreams - those usually happen immediately after each other, sometimes several in a row, and I believe at the time it was because I was working on my dream recall. I had developed the habit of telling myself the dream when I wake up in the middle of the night, which puts it firmly into your conscious awareness. It was an alternative to writing the dream down so I could get right back to sleep, then in the morning I would write them all down. Well that worked extremely well, but then I started having a whole series of dreams each one a sort of re-boot of the earlier one. That got really confusing because all these similar but different dreams made it impossible to remember the original one properly. Each re-dreaming was more cartoonish and stupid than the last. It got really out of hand for a while. Eventually it stopped.

Then there are the series dreams. The main series for me was what I call the Plumber dreams. There was this plumber who showed up in 3 dreams in close proximity, starting out ragged and dirty, but in each dream he seemed more powerful until he emitted a sort of glow in the third one and I thought he was a sort of God figure or something Archetypal. These dreams dealt with the split between creativity and drudgery (aka 'shit work' - clever eh?) Then some time later I ran into a similar figure who was an ancient museum curator. His museum was in a sewer with very high walls and they were loaded with hundreds of paintings in frames. He spent all his time on ladders and scaffolding dusting the top edges of the frames and tried to force me to take over the job for him.

The Plumber had started off by standing beside a urinal in a crowed department store - right out in the open, where men women and children would line up to use the urinal, and when each one was done he'd flush it. He tried to make me take over that job but I floated away instead. At the time I thought he represented my mom, who had supported my creativity when I was young but wanted me to drop it and just get a crap job as an adolescent/young adult. I also thought he represented society's tendency to push people the same way. Now I have a new insight on it - now I believe it wasn't so much about giving up the creativity and getting a crap job but more about developing the craft aspect of creativity - without good craftsmanship creativity can't become a career, and while I was being very creative at the time I wasn't developing my skills thoroughly enough.

Oh yes, certainly.

I’ve had a few, but the longest running group of sequel-dreams I’ve had follows a single dream character, who is vaguely related to the character of Dale Cooper from Twin Peaks.

The first dream had a plot of a killer who infiltrated dreams and murdered them, and traveled from person to person via a cursed video tape (essentially a combination of Nightmare on Elm Street and The Ring). The local police were attempting to solve the murders, with FBI Agent Dale Cooper running his own investigation, and two Croatian spies using the false names of “Hans” and “Stevie” on their own investigation as well, seeking to claim the dream-infiltration powers of the villain for the glory of Croatia. This dream was notably the first time I even THOUGHT about the nation of Croatia, so I have no idea where that aspect of the dream came from.

The dream resolved with Cooper engaging the demon-dream-murderer in mental combat, eventually defeating the enemy and locking him into a “mind-prison”, intending to interrogate the demon to learn its powers. The two Croatian Spies confronted Cooper, only for Cooper to then reveal that he had ALSO been a Croatian spy all along, and was, in fact, the "grandmaster" of the Croatian Spies.

The second dream took place in Milwaukee, where Cooper was now undercover in the local “Baha’i Mafia”. Cooper’s interests here were not the Mafia itself, but he was after an undercover policewoman who had also infiltrated the Mafia. She, for whatever reason, had the “ironskin” ability of Chinese Wuxia novels or movies. Cooper and the policewoman had a series of interactions that ended up with Cooper (I think) ultimately victorious. His goals in this dream were unclear, I’m not sure why he was after the policewoman. Once again, though, his explicit allegiance to Croatia of all places was made clear in the dream.

Third dream I only remembered pieces, Cooper was after some sort of arms and high explosives dealer in Southeast Asia, as well as some other persons. He inexplicably had also gained some supernatural powers, he could phase through walls and destroy things by “denying reality”, whatever that means. In part of this dream, he murdered a man and escaped through a wall in this way, denying the murder weapon out of existence to cover his tracks. He also appeared to have the Wuxia-policewoman’s ironskin from the last dream.

Because of this, and the fact that the character seems to have more and more abilities every time I see him, I came up with a metanarrative to explain his actions. He seems to primarily target persons or entities with supernatural abilities, and seems to be trying to learn their secrets. The Croatian Spies of my dreams are, it seems, collecting and hoarding supernatural powers for the glory of the Croatian State.

My theory on trying to explain why the dream character was acting this way seems to have concretely established that this is what he is doing, as in all future dreams trying to hunt down the supernatural for the purposes of adding their abilities to an ever-expanding list of ridiculous superpowers is EXACTLY what Cooper is explicitly doing. It’s like whenever I dream of the Twin Peaks character, my subconscious remembers not only the former dreams, but my interpretations of the motives of the character, and then projects it back into the dream itself, ensuring that every time I dream of Dale Cooper he is inexplicably Croatian.

In the Fourth Dream he used a phone call to summon another person, who he recruited on his current mission. In addition to phone-aportation, he now had shape-shifting abilities as well. This mission involved tracking down a spirit who could possess multiple persons, and was hiding in a group of children. At some point in time he also made a phone call to David Bowie, or a version of David Bowie with a rotting face and exposed skull (I think the dream merged the skull-mask he wore in Labyrinth with his regular face to create a horrifying apparition).

The Fifth Dream (months apart from the last) seemed to follow even more closely to the Fourth, and featured Cooper trying to track down David Bowie, who was on the fourteenth-floor of a hotel and had some strange sort of time/space warping abilities. The dream featured a time travel plot that actually managed to maintain flow and continuity… but perhaps I’d need a bigger post to describe what I mean by that.

Given that there are five of these dreams that followed the same plot I am, of course, leaving out quite a bit of detail and general dream weirdness to all of this, as well as a few other dreams I think are “canon” with these ones, though not following the same character.