Category Archives: Dreams

Memory Lane

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It’s always a surprise what my dreams will bring to me in the night. Tonight’s fare? A trip down memory lane. I was back in college, back at SUNY Buffalo. Walking into my dorm, Clement Hall, on the venerable South Campus. There was the usual warping of memory, some details were utterly wrong but the sense of the place was intact. Lots of memory was dredged up for this dream. Waking up carried little threads back to those memories and I woke up smiling. My time in college was probably the most wonderful, frightening, and liberating thing I’ve ever experienced.

This must be how alumni get those dents in their memories. Dreams bring them a highlight reel to enjoy and then only those memories of the good times get reinforced. You forget about all the goofy awkward junk as it fades and in time you get this antiquing patina on the best of the best of what you remember. I bet in time most alums get around to idealizing what memories remain, deny the awkward stuff and that is why when you recall college you get all warm and fluffy about it. None of the negative, all of the positive.

And this has a sidelight to a greater commentary on memory in general. Taking a trip to Lethe before you get to Styx. There is a blessing, perhaps it’s just that we elect to have it this way, that we are given things like this and go with them. Naturally allowing your memory to fade, recalling the good things, denying (nay eroding) the bad memories and then idealizing the entire structure. A life remembered of only the happiest things. Memories are the context for your present. Perhaps this is one of those keys, brought by dreams, that bears including in a wider discussion on how best to pursue happiness. Not only to live in the present and not be cynical and negative, but also to actively prune the bonsai tree of your memory and trim away the unpleasant memories until all that’s left is a highlight reel of your favorite and most cherished recollections.

Leftovers

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The Wheel Of Time dreams have begun. Being hunted, chased, traps, unseen plots and most delightfully a new series of dreams where bad personal assistants are beheaded, heads wrapped in aluminum foil and then sectioned up using a breathtakingly sharp cleaver while the big bad, apparently played by a middle aged Adrienne Barbeau, dressed in a white silk blouse and white pants reclines in a simple chair, holding a fork and picking at the freshly sectioned decapitated head. All the while calmly, almost thoughtlessly menacing the hapless next personal assistant as they sit across the table and witness the spectacle unfold. It’s creepiness amplified by the context of humdrum boredom at eating a sectioned decapitated human head wrapped in foil. Like it was a half-forgotten ham shank that you found in the fridge and nearly forgot all about.

Yeah, bits of WOT, bits of the Dresden series and some classic horror movies, but this stuff is way more disturbing. Thankfully for these sorts of dreams I am more like an audience than a participant, so there really isn’t a nightmarish quality to any of this.

Yippity do dah, yippity yay!

LJ – Math Dream

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From 9/16/1999

Mathematics. I had dreamed that I was in a high level mathematics class and that I had aced the test except for the very last questions which I could not answer for the life of me because I had no clue what the subject matter was it was that complicated. The odd flow of the dream was that the professor had put the solutions up on the blackboard just as he expected to see from us however after seeing these I still could not solve the problems. After a while I found that the solutions were washing away of their own accord and near the end I left the last question half-finished. When I looked beneath my desk I found most of the blankets that I had used to cover myself the night before hanging beneath me. When I went to collect them a big clear plastic bag appeared and I put all my blankets in the clear plastic bag. For some reason this wasn’t a surprise to anyone and I had planned on going home anyways. The dream fell apart when I began to involuntarily drift out of the dream and wake up.

Splints

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I was in England and was exploring an old house with friends (didn’t recognize them) and came across a series of rooms that were exact copies of our childhood homes. Everything was perfect right down to the sinks and mirrors.

I met myself as my “splint” walked through the door to the rooms that were from my past. He was an exact copy of me. I had my iPhone and was taking pictures. I asked him about being a splint and if he knew why he, or the place he inhabited existed. He didn’t know but wasn’t upset and seemed to enjoy my presence and felt that my questions were entertaining or at least worth attending to. I was exploring my childhood bathroom, taking pictures and I turned to him and asked him if he had anyone in his life. He blushed and I had to ask if he was serious with someone and for some odd reason I was really interested in TMI derails. As he was about to tell me I was fumbling with my phone, trying to get it to take a video and as he was about to share with me intimate details the dream dissolved and I woke up.

Dreaming about Watches

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Have you ever dreamed that you had a watch and looked at the time in your dreams? I just woke up from a dream like that. It had a number of other qualities 😉 but at the end it also featured me looking at my watch. In my dream I could have sworn that the time was 10:30 in the morning, but actually it is 8:46 AM.

This dream has got me thinking about the physics of that existence. I carry around my self-monitor even when I dream so when the dreams are offering me a chance to explore something I wouldn’t normally feel alright exploring I usually don’t elect to go forward with whatever it is. Its the flow of time that interests me. If everything in a dream is constructed out of my mind, then a watch, indeed the flow of time itself is completely malleable and up to me. There has to be some basic irreducible moments in dreams because you can’t spend an eternity dwelling in a dream-state, you do move forward despite the notion that time is a complete construction in that state.

I think the jury is still out as to the phenomenology of dreaming. I’ve seen competing theories ranging in meaning from dreams as prophetic tools, diagnostic tools, all the way down to a bored cortex that is clamped down with a motor inhibition yet continuously gets input from other parts of the brain that are accidentally firing due to their functions as part of the restorative part of sleeping. I think dreaming is more than a bored cortex making up bits and pieces to keep itself occupied while the limbic system and the hippocampus are busy refining the days memories, chatting up the immune system, and pushing brain chemistry back to a point where we are unlikely lot run into pink elephants.

I do certainly believe that the brain is actively occupied in a lot of maintenance procedures during sleep. Resetting neurotransmitters, dealing with chemical deficits here and there, and conversing with the immune system, but for me, dreaming feels more than just a random series of inputs making my cortex come up with a set-dressed stage to entertain me. I think that when we are in a dreaming state, that we are much closer to the reality that exists purely in our minds. Existence there is not really bound by reality in the real world. I’m sure a more spiritual person would approach this argument that when you dream you are in direct communication with your soul. In a way that is compatible with what I imagine, as the physics of the brain have to point almost by default to the existence of a soul, I just don’t go that far. When people dream, the only real thing that your mind has to go on for stimuli has got to be the noisy click-clack chatter of cells that are firing “accidentally”. I put “accidentally” in quotes because it’s actually very much a quantum mechanical thing, these cells are so small, their connections so fine that a portion of what they are firing for might be the foamy background noise of virtual particles being created and annihilated in the very small spaces between synaptic clefts between neurons.

I can’t escape the theories from David Bohm, that perhaps these tiny spaces between synaptic clefts or even along neuron cells themselves are an interface between classical reality and the implicate order. That the soul is a part of a holographic superstructure that lies independent of classical reality and needs a brain of sufficient complexity to access these special conditions. That it is our larger, more convoluted brains that lead us to consciousness, sentience, and that dreaming is a natural epiphenomenon of that sentience.

If all of of this supposition even has a whiff of being true, that means that the soul is immortal, and that our experience in the world, our persistence in it despite how often our bodies are effectively replaced and how much of our bodies aren’t really ours, but mostly bacteria is all because we are expressions of the implicate order inside flesh. Here we arrive again, like a big circle and back to a really awesome statement: All Is One.

It would be certainly something if our ability to dream Implied a soul, that our bodies were constructed to tune the implicate order and that our consciousnesses, our sentience is not only a fundamental structure of the universe itself but that we are actually all connected in a fashion in the implicate order. The ramifications for ethics and morality are mind boggling. If we are all in a certain way intimately connected to each other wether we are alive or dead, then we are never truly alone and when we do violence to each other, we are doing violence to ourselves.

There is no way to prove any of this. It’s pretty to think about and perhaps someday science will demonstrate wether the brain actually does what I suspect that it does or rather the opposite, that it’s all just a flash in the pan. I really find the entire notion of my soul being a part of the implicate order to be very comforting and puts a rather fine set of clothes on Buddhism.

Fey

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LiveJournal – 3/21/1999

I find myself before the front door of my best friends house, Mark. I knock on the door and he answers – walking out into the driveway before his door. We begin to talk of old times as we start to walk out to his car. What I remember to be a simple Buick form is replaced by a terribly helter-skelter chopjob vehicle with disparate parts all welded together and unpainted except for patches of blue around the top of the garish vehicle. I look back towards Mark’s house and the ground is covered in ghostly afterimages of champagne glasses occupying each square foot of the ground around my feet. [SCENE SHIFT]

Standing beside a large dark rock I recognized off into the distance what at first appeared to be simple fireflies. These fireflies got larger as they approached and stopped appearing anything like regular fireflies. The warm diffuse of peach flavored light surrounded their heads and rolled about, from the inside to the outside carrying small flecks of silver and blue dots in the peach fuzz that surrounded their personages. Spotting me and my companion they started towards us cautiously until my companion started after them. They immediately flew apart like a murder of crows to an oncoming hiker. Filtering into the surrounding woodlands I watched as they flitted about – with such dexterity and speed as I’ve never experienced before. I explained to my companion that these were most likely Sidhe fairies and that we’ve crossed one of their trods by mistake. At hearing my voice the fey came coursing out of the woodland and surrounded me. My companion leads us to a church where under the guise of contacting someone else, he contacts the authorities. He tells us all what he has done minutes before the authorities arrive to the church. I stare at the Fey surrounding me and most appear to be very small and very young looking children, some look to be quite aged – but only so in the eyes. If you gaze into their eyes you can almost make out on the periphery of your field of vision their true natures, making out the deep lines that mark their very old faces. However by simple gaze or even a glance they appear to have the cast of a child surrounding them. I explain to my companion that these creatures have been around since Prime and that they serve no ill purpose whatsoever. I admonish my companion with talk of human curiosity and the raping of discovery that will most definitely occur when the authorities apprehend the Fey we have corralled. The authorities are almost upon us as I look to the strange congregation before me and explain to them in friendly terms how they have to approach this situation and outlast it. I tell them that they have to apply a bit of glam to their personages in order to generate an even heartbeat, for Fey do not have hearts. They nod and smile, each face an innocent reminder of childhood in both myself and my companion. My companion now is starting to shed tears for his mistake at calling the authorities. The peach colored halo that surrounds their heads flickers stronger for brief moments with rivers of silver and blue running like liquid electricity around this peach torus that surrounds them. When the authorities open the door the halos evaporate.

Grow Lights

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LiveJournal 2/13/2003

What I remember from last nights dreams don’t add up to much at all. I was back in Buffalo wandering across a grassy field in front of fraternity row. I had tickets in my hands to watch some kind of field sport played between two teams and the “gist” of the game was “the fighting eagles”. I turned to the first open field I saw and I saw people playing a field game, and asked someone at random who was playing and their response was “the buzzing mosquitos”, then the scene went all wobbly and I could see a whole series of fields going up like a ladder, each one expressing some type of larger conflict. I’m not too sure what was at the end, wether it was indeed the eagles or the flying wooly mammoths. After that dream I slipped into another one in a hardware store, where everything was covered in a fine dust and the clerk behind the checkout counter was so old and stationary as to be covered in the same layer of dust, all that was moving was his big white eyebrows, as if he was dreaming. I asked him if he had any grow-lights for plants and he beamed, ran into the back room behind the counter and came out with a dozen boxes all containing a grow-litebulb for plants. He commented that nobody wants them anymore and he starts to scrape off the old pricetags, $90.95 the stickers say. He puts them all in a bag and hands them to me like it is some kind of gift, then I pop awake right after that.

English Dreams

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From six to seven this morning I had one of the deepest most memorable dreams I’ve had in a very long time. I was with Scott and several other friends and we were in London, England visiting as tourists. I don’t remember arriving, but the first thing I did remember was being in a suit having dinner with someone of importance. Like with many of my dreams sometimes they are multi-threaded and contain two realities at once. The other reality was me in London at an old theater of some type, and that setting was blending in with the “Old Big House” setting that frequently occupies a lot of my dreams. Elements of both blending together. As I was walking into the Theater/Big Old House everything shifted and I was in the Long Big House, which is even more established than the Big Old House is in my dream lexicon. So in this setting I slipped into bed with a rather flimsy blanket on and the room was filled with strangers who were, ahem, exceptionally friendly, and then somehow I put it together that they were the acting troupe in the theater. I had to use the bathroom, in the dream, and so I walked down the steps (apparently it was a stadium-style theater) and out to the bathrooms. I met up with Scott and suddenly we couldn’t locate the bathrooms. Once we were out of the theater bouncers appeared at the doors and wouldn’t let us return. I was telling Scott about these people I met inside the theater and right when he was going to comment, I lifted my head off the table, as I was back in the first reality. Scott and my friends were gone and I was still in my suit, lifting my head off the table it felt like I had either passed out from too much alcohol or I had simply gone to sleep and just woken up. With a start I stood up and started to walk away from the dinner-setting area and then I was in raggedy street clothes and I was with a young woman. I didn’t know her but I knew she was in the same condition I was in. We were both Americans in London, England, utterly lost and cut off from our friends and in a situation we had no anchor in. I was walking and thinking to myself “I wonder who I’ll meet, now that I’m lost, I could meet anyone” and I watched people as they shuffled by. Eventually I followed a group of people and the girl onto a bus. It was a strange bus, the seats were plush and overstuffed and rotated on a pinion, they could either face to the back of the bus or the front. The girl was sitting in the front row by the driver and I was several rows back. We were driving along and another common dream trope hit me, the “being stuck on the bus” trope, which almost always either happens in Buffalo or somewhere in Europe. So I was on this bus and out of the blue the girl asks the driver if he can drive to the US Embassy. He grunts and assents to her request. I come to out of my reverie and as we approach the US Embassy. The sky, which was not noticed before suddenly is, and it’s the slate-gray drizzling kind of sky that you see sometimes when it rains slowly and interminably. We arrive at the US Embassy and the bus drives off. The US Embassy resembles an old Greyhound Bus Terminal, with the used-too-hard plastic and metal-frame chairs running along the wall. We’re sitting and I look for anything to contact Scott or my other friends and there isn’t anything at all. I get up from my seat and go exploring the building and after I walk out of the waiting room I wander into a kitchen, tile floors, marble countertops, an empty wine refrigerator, it seemed like someone was just about to move in. I look for a phone or some device to send a message and I get the feeling I’m being watched. I return to the waiting room and sit down and a woman in a very tight pantsuit, with a very tight face puts a travel alarm clock next to me and says I can use that to communicate with my friends. I start looking at it and it’s all black without any buttons, just a continuous shiny lump of black plastic. Then I wake up.

 

Favorite Lantern

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Last night I had a complicated knot work of dreams and a central theme was this epic-level conflict that happens cyclically between ages of time. It was, I’m sure, inspired surely by The Wheel of Time, but there were elements dragged into the dream by DC comics twin events Blackest Night and Brightest Day. A pillar of this dream was a central figure that provided a safety net and a structure to ensure that the conflict was always won by the right, and not by the wrong.

I woke up with this idea in my head and I started to muse about what this might mean in the fictional DC Universe. It’s been a story theme that my favorite Green Lantern, Kyle Rayner, has served to hold up everything in the bleakest of times. For a while he was the only Lantern in the stories and the writers seem to enjoy using him as a character for these situations. Now that we’ve entered The GL War we’ve got all these emotions floating around and Kyle has already proven himself capable of surpassing fear in his willpower, so he’s one of the few who can cope with actually feeling things while maintaining his abilities. While the GL universe falls apart, it struck me that Kyle could once again play the role of torchbearer-in-dark-times by handling all seven emotional-spectrum rings, and there is a little part of me at thinks that Kyle could carry the White Lantern and play the part temporarily as he did when he served as the vessel for Ion. It’s just a shot in the dark, but perhaps that’s where DC will take the GL War. I’m always very excited whenever my favorite lantern gets some action. It’d definitely be gratifying to know that Kyle is always the go-to-Lantern leaving Hal in the dust. One can hope. 🙂

D’oro

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Right before I woke up this morning I was enjoying a rather exciting dream in the mode of spectator and this dream was about a very interesting chemical called D’oro. D’oro is a colorless, tasteless, water-like liquid that served as a kind of industrial fuel in the dreamworld I was in. One of the actors in the dream mixed a few drops of this chemical into a glass of water and handed it to a villain in the dream. I instantly knew what was going to happen as it played out before me, that D’oro, when ingested causes a person to become more and more thirsty, and as they drink more water they expand with the mass, unable to stop. Eventually the thirst wanes and the D’oro and the water combine in the body, the ignition point of the fuel drops beneath body temperature and the victim spontaneously combusts leaving a patch of muddy water-soaked ash in a little heap on the floor. The villain drank the mixture and instantly started to puff up, then he looked surprised and after a few moments there was a fantastic blaze of light and all that was left was a little patch of muddy ash on the floor.

I woke up soon afterwards and decided to write it down so I could share this with all of you. It might make a great plot point in any RPG’s if people want… 🙂