The dream log for 2017
What would they look like all together? Say, only the ones from 2017 (well, so far)?
Let's see... (doing a keyword search, pasting in)
(finished) Well, now. This is slightly more informative than I expected - which is almost more irritating. It seems to confirm a vague prejudice I have about summer being a relatively dead zone as far as dreams... except it doesn't mean anything, because I haven't had a consistent policy about noting my dreams in Facebook, these were purely impulsive posts, and I just don't know why I didn't write anything in summer.
And the main mystery I've wanted to get a look at - it just hangs there, confirmed but inscrutable, and I can't even find a good word for it. I keep mumbling the word "recursive", but the word doesn't quite point at it. I mean the way in which (here is where I get in trouble) the way in which the dreams, or successive stretches of a dream, change, or operate on the basis of, previous stretches of the same dream . . . in a way that isn't like just morphing the furniture. It often seems to be based on an actual understanding of the elements of the dream - one that I do not have at all when I'm dreaming the dream. And on . . . something I'm going slower on, which is the nature of the activity. This series of dream-mentions does incorporate some star cases of the weird, but the snapshots don't nail it. Sometimes it actually seems as if the dreams are built deliberately artistically on some level... and at other times it seems instead as if there's no such entirely witting arrangement, but as if there's a parallel awareness to mine that is "innocently" experiencing things completely separately from my own. Do I split? The dream is not a mindless situation. I want to know what I'm doing when I'm dreaming.
Frak. The "recursive" changes are pervasively exampled, anyway. (Maybe I should have gone back further.) (I've always been able to pick out apparent patterns, the unreliable kind. Never go back to the same hotel room in a dream, has seemed to be one. You won't get what you want. One way or another.)
Jan. 8, 2017:
Dreams over the last couple of nights:
The events of some sort of vacation on a South American mountainside, a hotel on/along the slope, turned out to be a recapitulation or resolution of some religion I cannot identify.
It was a good dream. Things turned out happily. I woke feeling - briefly - that I understood what the whole thing was about uncommonly well. It left a glow. I don't know why; all the bits have gone.
... Another dream I woke up from almost snickering about, already disparaging it(!), because of the already emerging picky consciousness of just how many ways it didn't make sense, but also relieved at being released from a picture visually beautiful but otherwise pretty horrible. (I wish I'd forgotten more of this one and less of the other.)
A travel agent for a gas giant's beautiful moons found that a hated ex of his had booked a trip there. (No, I wasn't particularly seeing this from his point of view.) He allocated her a campsite on one of the moons, calculating the spot very carefully, on the basis of knowledge of a quirk of the orbits that was about to happen. Two of the moons were about to come so close that they would actually barely touch. And, as this woman he hated slept, the other moon bellied slowly down and smushed her in her sleeping bag.
Feb. 3, 2017:
Dream:
There was a narrationless music-and-media-montage documentary looking back on the Trump Administration - in the manner of Brother, Can You Spare A Dime? about the Great Depression, or another one I think I hazily remember about the late '60s. The title of the thing was Yammer Gong.
Feb. 13, 2017:
Dreamed of a female Australian equivalent of Indiana Jones, Oodnadatta Watkins. She was quite short, and her hat was AMAZING.
Feb. 17, 2017:
Dream:
Stuck at my editing work, I was unable to attend a massive costumed gathering of my high school friends and could only see video clips of the event erratically posted through the night. I remember Don McCoy as the Tin Woodman - an *awesome* Tin Woodman - and Carol Carruthers Owensby as a combination of Glinda and the Scarecrow (big gauzy blue arm-puffs, tiara, and wand, with overalls). An intermittent news feed kept breaking in across the top of my screen, informing me that Donald Trump was holding a competing event at another venue and lying about the size of the crowd.
Mar 1, 2017:
Two dreams:
The first a nightmare, my first in many years. There had been a fragmentary dream before it of an unfamiliar cousin who was a secret agent of some sort and who had taken me on a road trip.
But now I was waking up in my own bed, everything was clear and concrete, and the cousin had entered my room and was just picking up one of the pillows. I prevented him from pushing it onto my face, but somehow he got it round my neck and was twisting it savagely. I kept fighting, but I could feel the anoxia weakening me, and I knew it was robbing me of the strength to stop him. His face was intent - eager - interested. I knew that if he killed me he would go to Mom next. I woke up with a yell and my cat came over and curled up next to my face. The feeling of anoxia vanished instantly as I came awake.
The second was a dream of being a kid who had just moved into a house on a quiet street. I had fun roaming around the neighborhood, meeting other kids, picking berries. There was a really big house across the way from ours, four stories or maybe even more. What I slowly discovered was that the back half was a ruin and that inside the shell - mostly sleeping, or drowsing - sat Godzilla himself, the secret adoptee of the deceased old lady who had lived there, next to a stuffed teddy bear of equal size. It was an uneasy dream of discreet playing and trying to be quiet, with various angles sometimes giving me a view of that huge eye, sometimes slightly open to various degrees.
Mar. 19, 2017:
Dream:
A tangled, loud circa-1960 political controversy around technical issues and mishaps at NASA, experienced montage-ish, during which one of the clips that played was of Barry Goldwater (who had at least one friend who was an astronaut and had informed him): "Our space program does indeed have its problems, but not because of tanks settling, which always happens..."
(This had been a core of the uproar.)
I have no memory of any technical problems with rockets or with the early space program that had to do with tanks settling, and (awake) I have no general impression of such a situation. I'm not sure what fuel or fuel mix (or what?) this would apply to, or why. l'm not well-informed, let alone actually conversant with this stuff, but it's not an unimpressioned area, and, from my memory of random reading and notably the book Ignition! by John D. Clark, my first (and I think my first four) vague or spitballed guesses about a problem with rocket fuels would have been along different lines.
I'm often struck by how many levels back my dreams seem to start in knitting things afresh.
(Or, if that one did come from a dreamer, it seems like it would have originated with *some other dreamer than me* and drifted across. :-) Which... longtime suspicion. But, really, there may have *been* some real seed of this, that maybe should even be obvious, but if there was I'm unaware that I know it.)
Mar. 27, 2017:
This morning I was spending some time contemplatively floating three feet off the floor - drawing my knees up and wrapping my arms around them, bobbing slightly in midair. Sunbeams washed the room as I drifted.
It occurred to me that I usually assumed I could only do this while dreaming.
I thought about this.
Weight crashed suddenly back, as if I had fallen. I was lying on my side in my untidy bed.
There's no temptation more insidious than overthinking.
Apr. 1, 2017:
Dreams:
1. One of those annoying ones with a complexity that cannot be brought back, except for the clear theme that, in many unexpected ways, the ability to cast spells would be bad for relationships. I'm making a note.
2. An unpleasant office boss (who looked just like David Suchet's Hercule Poirot) had gone insane. (Not unassisted - I think it was with the aid of hostile agents using strange drugs and hypnotism, to further an agenda of their own.) There was a long scene of him, in slow motion, getting off the elevator and making his way among the desks toward his private office - with a strange cheek-straining savage ecstasy on his face... because he believed he was surrounded by a group of duplicates of himself who were armed with shotguns and assault rifles, under his orders, and methodically murdering all of his terrified employees and gang-raping the women first. Only he could see them, and no one particularly noticed the boss as he strolled with this fixed grin through the office, nodding slightly at this employee or that. At the door to his sanctum he shot his executive assistant with his finger - he believed he had used a revolver and blown the man's head off, but the man thought it was a jocular gesture and, after the boss had gone in, said "Hell of a job!" and made it with a wink to his secretary, who returned it without a pause.
In his private office he looked out through the Venetian blinds for a few minutes - at delusional scenes of rings of his duplicates surrounding and attacking helpless pedestrians down on the street, while MIRVs drew branching lines in the sky and great white bursts of light bloomed on the horizon. Then he sat down at his desk, his grin growing even more hysterically wide, while he believed that he had taken a magnificent jeweled crown out of his desk drawer, shining with diamonds, and was now lowering the crown slowly, slowly onto his head - drawing out the triumphant moment endlessly - when in fact he had taken a real revolver out of the drawer, cocked it, and was putting it just as slowly to his temple.
Apr. 5, 2017:
Died in a dream. Was skiing in fast circles, not slowing down - and there was a flat broad spur of white rock, I don't think ice, sticking out into the snowfield. I came closer and closer to it in my fast circles. Giddy, I paid it no mind. Then I actually ran into it but the snow at its edge must have worked as a ramp and I jumped over it by what must have been millimeters. I came around again -
Then I was in violet-gray emptiness, looking at the words of my own grave marker hanging in front of me.
Then I woke up in bed, but I couldn't get my eyes to open - even when, frantic, I used my fingers to try to pry at my eyelids. If I couldn't get back to the world of sight I hadn't yet gotten away from the dream death -
Then I woke up again.
Sep. 4, 2017:
Night before last, as I was dozing off, one of those off-dream phenomena: an oddly muted report, like a gunshot but as if I'd only heard part of it. It was associated with a precise circular spot, the diameter of a pencil, just forward of the line above my right ear. It woke me up.
I've been touching that spot ever since.
Contextless wondering. Did someone get shot there? Did I get shot there? Am I going to be shot there?
As always, I don't expect answers to be forthcoming.
Oct. 5, 2017:
The palpably busy unremembered dreaming of the last few nights broke the surface...
It was (that I recall) my first delusional state inside a dream. During the quietly disastrous end of a semester in college (I don't think I've ever dreamed a final-exams period that wasn't like a ghost ship), I became obsessed with the awareness of impending death. Then I went along on a sort of holiday retreat of two or three days, just before the last week - and at a certain point I became convinced, absolutely certain, that I was actually dead. My heart had stopped, a little after I had arrived, and, though I continued to move and speak and eat and so on, I was just going along like a person with extreme insomnia or jet lag; this was a strange biochemical tag-end, and at any moment, any second, it would end and the lights would go out.
I mentioned it to people. They were either in a very mellow holiday mood or they humored me. And I wasn't panicked or worried; I mean, the worst was already true. It was an epilogue. I was just bemusedly watching my limbs carry me around - for a while.
I only came out of it after I returned home. I was on campus trying to buy a burrito before class and the food-cart cook told me that it was later in the day than I thought and the class was actually over. Then I realized I was alive. I think my reactions balanced themselves out there too.
Oct. 7, 2017:
Second remembered dream in a few days that referenced death - and the first that's left me snarled in a roiling neurotic internal controversy:
I had been kidnapped or captured by sociopathic criminals of some sort. In some sort of cave, naked, tied up, cold, and afraid, I was about to be murdered by a bullshit-improvised firing squad.
Leader, with a sadistic smile: "Any last words?"
Me: "Toodles."
A sizeable part of my ego is *very* unhappy about this valediction - *horrified*. "Good grief, after everything, at the end of everything, that was *it*?"
BUT -
Lifetime high point for aplomb, in *or* out of dreams.
Oct. 21, 2017:
I don't understand voices you can't understand in dreams.
(To win a minor lottery-like arrangement in a supermarket, I had to call a phone number, but I got a recorded response that I couldn't make out, although I know what the indistinct sentences sounded like.)
A dream is not a deliberate fictional puppet-show proposition. No one is writing "INDECIPHERABLE SPEECH" into a script. From the specific sound, it was apparent that some intent organized the sounds; it *was* some actual string of words said. So, if there was an intended meaning - generated by my head, therefore in my head - and if my listening point of view was also in my head, what garble in between could there have been that prevented me from hearing/understanding it?
There are always too many layers in dreams. They warrant a look...
... which it is completely impossible to take.
Between yesterday's hopeful, harried email and this morning's letdown, I had a peculiar dream. I remember much more of it than usual. The dreams where I’ve retained more than usual have tended to be on the uncomfortable side. This one fit the pattern. It was . . . stressful.
To look at, grossly, it shouldn't have been like that. It was beautiful.
In a way.
I should mention that it's quite rare that in a dream I am distinctly and identifiably my specific self, Alex Russell. Usually I'm a much more generalized identity, or I am a definitely different person, or more than one, or there may not even be a clear personal viewpoint. But this time I was the person who is typing this now.
I sort of paid for it.
The basic concept seemed to be a perfect match with, or to be outright lifted from, the miniseries The Lost Room.
(But a motel room wasn't involved.)
In the dream, I had somehow discovered that, at will, I could open any door and step through it into a particular place, the same place.
(And I think, though it didn’t come up, that when I left I could emerge through any door I wished in the normal world, as in The Lost Room.)
No one else was ever there.
It was a vast sandstone complex, under a sky like a blazing blue dome. It always seemed to be day there. I think it was surrounded by level sand to the horizon, but I can't remember actually looking beyond the outer boundary.
Great walled courtyards. Mighty vaulted interior spaces like the largest cathedrals - numerous spaces of such size. Unbelievable expanses of floor, of tile or baked brick - the kind of place that makes you feel like a gnat. Most of the doors and archways could have accommodated the kaijus from Pacific Rim, or it seemed like they could have.
And . . . herein the problem . . .
It seemed to be a temple complex.
And the temple was apparently (no, more than apparently; evidently; plainly) dedicated to - me.
Me.
I was everywhere. Gigantic murals, mosaics, carved friezes, and statues were in every space - you couldn't get away from them. All showing me, suspiciously better-looking than I've ever been, doing heroic things not a single one of which I've actually done.
There was one titanic statue in dark stone that seemed to defy gravity, showing me, top-hatted, locked in wrestling battle with something very like a dragon, both of us twisted together in spiral fashion, my left foot the only part touching the floor.
What was this dream like? (Maybe anyone who will understand this will already understand by this point.)
It was a dream of fretting.
Horribly awkward, uncomfortable, embarrassed, agonized fretting.
I remember telling myself to shrug it off and roll with things, but it didn't stick, even for a few steps.
What did I do?
Well, obviously I had to move some of my stuff into this omni-accessible space, so that I could get it no matter where I happened to be. You don’t ignore something like that!
But what I did was - everything I brought I jammed into one tiny space, that was almost the only small room I found. It was about the size of a college dorm, or smaller, maybe like a broom closet. It was inconveniently distant (distant) from the spot where I always appeared when I entered, and with all my stuff packed in there it became as abysmally cramped and messy as anywhere I've ever inhabited, which is saying something . . . but I think it only had one little frieze, which got buried in my stuff. And it had a door that could be closed. That was the point.
I had a mattress in that room, and when I slept there the door was always closed. It had to be. I needed it closed. It didn't have a lock, and I wished it had a lock (for no reason that made any sense; I had no thought that the complex wouldn’t always be as uninhabited as I had found it), and I remember an intense neurotic tussle with myself over whether to go and buy a chain I could put on the door. I felt if I actually did that it would be some sort of confession of non-coping insanity.
So I didn't get the chain, and most of the time when I was in the magic place longer than briefly I stayed in that tiny, cramped cesspool of a room, hiding from the rest of my vast egotistical temple behind that non-locking door.
Egotistical. Vain. That was the problem. It was Trumpian out there. Ravingly Trumpian. Me Trumpian. Not in luxury but in grandeur and scale.
It was horrifying.
And the core obsession I had, that was not even rooted in this situation or in anything real - my mad fixation - I was continuously thinking about this, whether I was there or I was here at home or walking around in the normal world - the horrid thought that made no sense but kept returning, that nagged me, that haunted me:
What if there was some kind of disaster?
A cataclysm? Nuclear war, or a cometary strike, I didn't even know what, killer bees, just ANYTHING . . .
. . . specifically where my friends and family and loved ones (including some people reading here) were in immediate and terrible danger?
And where the only way I could save them would be to evacuate them out of the normal world into this mysterious place?
And of course I’d have to do it.
They’d see.
They'd SEE.
They'd KNOW.
And they'd NEVER BELIEVE THAT I HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH IT.
NO.
Mysteriously gifted with this power or with this place, a palace, a refuge, and an incredible sorcerous travel advantage . . . and this dream was mostly a dream in which I walked in neurotic fear and horror that never left me alone. Even the wonder of the varied art, of which I still retain traces, was tinged with this appallment when I first saw it . . . and then I was wracked, and wracked, and wracked with this quiet social-horror panic all the way to waking.
End notes:
We wear unusual hats in dreams, and I sort of hope I over-spoke when I said I was the exact same Alex Russell who's typing. :-) Maybe I did over-speak; that may have been a really extrapolatory Alexian. As I take my own temperature now, I don’t think that I'm that horrificated by the thought of my . . . what? self-fondness? . . . showing somewhat. Or I hope I would @#$%& deal. I hope the real me has a sense of humor that gives me enough flexibility to evade that degree of trapped-in-a-corner emotional obsession.
But I do have my tender spots. Some exquisitely social in nature. And my rigidities. And I have to admit that my reaction to the situation in the dream felt natural.
You can take my telling you about this flattering-iconography dream of mine (yes, doing so is a bit uncomfortable) as me voting not to be @$%&* controlled by that sort of thing.
The only other thing: Possibly in context with surrounding circumstances . . .
Have you ever had the suspicion that a dream might have been heckling you?
1. A sunny roomful of semi- or non-ambulatory cannibal mutant people, all with a clear family resemblance, all big smiles, none speaking, festooned with bandages and gauze-covered stumps and brightly eyeing their visitor's extremities!
(It seems they had been being bred for years to derive some sort of contraceptive. If you want to affect human systems, go to the source, I guess. Their discoverer, a young woman, afterward figured out that she was herself part of the family, and she decided that reproduction might be a bad idea going forward... using a strange brown hormonal goop to make sure of this, that I think was the result of the research.)
2. A city bus made a clever detour through a couple of buildings, navigating strange hallways and inching through narrow store aisles, in order to beat a knot of street congestion. I tend to think this sort of thing is safer with trains.
I was a rider at first, but when I tried to grab some groceries (for someone?) I managed to get myself left behind, despite my arrangement with the driver.
A lawmaker who had been staunchly opposed to relations with non-human civilizations was forced to admit, on camera, that a hostile force had just carried out a series of savage attacks in several star systems - a progression clearly leading directly to our own - and that the only resistance, that had saved some planets and that might have successfully blunted the advance, had been provided at great cost by the extraterrestrial groups she had so distrusted. (We had no space forces of our own - really just some penny-pinching tinkertoy NASA/ESA/JAXA stuff, barely uplifted by a primitive hyperdrive.)
On waking, what I was concerned with was reaching for the laptop and Googling to make sure her "beehive hairdo" is a real thing and was not just a dream concoction.
(A voice in the back of my head is saying "Typical.") (Look, it's an outlandish thing, and I couldn't immediately remember!)
________________________
Dream:
a group of people, especially the ladies, was inadvertently trancelike-involved with altar-like place in a river cave (open cave, big overhang). the altar-like spot was just a particular place where you could stand on the sloping rock over a pool, but it had strange significance.
initial uses give powers/gifts, but the influence over you is gradually increased.
if one resists (a man did, the viewpoint man), it seems to offend the cave, and a force keeps trying to cloud your thoughts and get you to make speech like an apology and then commit suicide in pool in cave.
manages to resist, group eventually gets clear
when they extricated selves from control and left, they were met by a police person they'd talked to before, who had been inquisitive - but who was now oddly incurious about their long absence, and who talked mostly about the very recent discovery of endless crypts discovered right along the bank of the river. a boat took them along the river, where they could see all the freshly uncovered buried brick crypts, almost a continuous string of them just above the waterline, on all manner of properties, some dismantled. some very old, others (perhaps) much more recent.
one of them, the man, was taken straight to another river cave, with a strange pink window in one side with a small odd auditorium-like space visible behind it. In the cave, a strange older man talked to ____, explaining that things were different now, that society was now at peace.
(implied: the strange man somehow knew they were new to all this, that they'd missed whatever had happened - this was puzzling at the time)
then they just entered their new lives.
like a telepathic This Perfect Day. no money. everyone just constantly, calmly knew where to move and what to do. the newcomers experienced constant nudges like everyone else.
nature/identity of universal mental control never known.
but they were slightly more conscious than everyone else. and there were strange *covert* nudges too, or inklings. different tone, like from a child/a friend who was trying to stay hidden.
this source of the inklings could also *briefly* conceal them from the larger control, as when they were acting on the inklings, or (much less certain) guardedly/quickly talking about them with each other.
the mind-guided society had geographic outsiders/foes outside the territory/along the river (saw them take a boat like a tugboat, literally lift it out of the water somehow, w/crying citizen who didn't want to be taken) (maybe competing mind-controlled society? was never clear),but the inklings weren't from outside.
inklings - two plots.
1. the viewpoint man yelled at another of the exception-folks in frustration in a narrow corridor that the needed details of an inkling clue could be anything, they could be *his own* home town and hair color. he realized later that maybe that was the actual answer.
he used those details, plugging them into another clue, and the result guided him to an obscure museum (or tourist attraction?). he was admitted, and found that a little elevator took him to one of the rooms - a small pink auditorium facing a familiar window looking out into a cave. the modernistic room had a sign inset in the sloping carpeted floor that read in glowing pink letters:
"... and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time."
he did not find the strange older man who had spoken to him before (though for a moment he expected to), and an angry martial artist came, with cohorts - mute? not speaking English? i think mute - and gave him to understand, through interpreters, that he was not supposed to be there.
Met the martial arts guy later on the street - guy indicated it was okay. (hadn't detected full strangeness, cover not blown.)
2. three of the people got an inkling clue (I THINK first half is right): "if any is only, does aunt need uncle?"
there was the viewpoint man, and another man, and the third was kerri, who was a gay woman.
they were talking about the secret inklings - and one of them suggested the first half of that clue meant the answer to the second half of it was "not necessarily". they rushed to some old video arcade games, which they'd also been cued to. a couple of them didn't know how the old video games worked, but they all got into different ones in the row. the arcade games were fully enclosed kinds. bafflement from one person at first, nothing happened, and viewpoint man yelled to try having the door closed. once the doors were closed so that they were "private" in the chair chambers, the viewpoint man touched the coin slot and a vision came...
thought of "Does aunt need uncle? Not necessarily." led to two different visions of a man-less woman dealing with child:
FACT:
A FEMALE CRAZY KILLER HAD FIXATED ON A CHILD AND HAD GONE UP TO THEIR APARTMENT ON THE FOURTH FLOOR AND HAD MURDERED THE PARENTS AND WAS STILL THERE.
(the universal mind control hadn't prevented this)
also there was a a secondary, uncertain?possible? vision in which an unknown woman ended up taking care of the child. and somehow this woman was the girlfriend of kerri lesbian. but that was only a dream/thing that might be, the reality was the CRAZY KILLER WOMAN IN THE APARTMENT RIGHT NOW, THE. CHILD TRAPPED WITH HER.
viewpoint man rushed to the building, rushed up the stairs, busted in, BIG fight, and ended up smashing the crazy woman through the window 4 stories up. child still OK, though parents dead. knew he had to run immediately to escape lest the mysterious rogue inklings be revealed. ran downstairs. **strange doubling/changing flash.** outside on street, met kerri lesbian - who asked "where have you been?" kerri didn't know anything about last batch(?) of inklings. kerri leads viewpoint character away from the building, and they pass someone she knows. kerri says flirtatiously "I'm talking mr. butterfield to get his hair cut." But "mr. butterfield" is facetious name, doesn't refer to a man. Original character realizes that he's been transmogrified/body-shifted into the woman he saw in vision who ended up taking care of the child.
(woke upon deciphering joke/realizing situation)
And what kills me: I had NO sense or suspicion of this during the dream - it's only a reviewing-the-notes thought... but that damn bright-lit quotation in the auditorium reads like a specific on-the-nose "this is the case" nod about it!
(While I didn't think of ANY interpretations of the line during the dreams. Or even try.)
There was a gaming environment with a list of amazing rules. Gwen and I read them together, I think.
But one fragment nags at me.
There was an insane bridge saboteur. Creepy fellow. Varied his methods from subtle to crude depending on the bridge. Frighteningly ruthless toward anyone nearby.
I thought I *recognized* him *from more than one previous dream*. I don't mean other dreams the same night; I mean *going back*.
I saw his home address and it seemed to be a match with previous dreams.
And evidently he knew me too, and he tried to eliminate me (possibly with success on one turn - you know how it is).
And I tried very hard to hang on to that address and bring it back with me, I kept saying it over to myself, but I've lost it now, and that strikes me as a bit sub-optimal.
As long as he didn't have better luck.