Category: Dream

dreamstate writing 15 May 2018

5/15/2018

During one of this morning’s dreams, I and a handful of other entities were on our way to the airport to board a flight. On the way, we stopped to go hiking on a path that ran alongside a tall, vaguely circular, wooded mountain that looked strongly familiar. In order to reach the lot where we’d parked our car, we had to pass through a long tunnel, which featured a roofed bulletin board from which paper messages and bags that people had forgotten were hanging.

Recognizing a white canvas bag as one my father used to own, I lifted it off of the wooden peg from which it had hung and opened it up, rifling through the contents. Out came reams of loose papers as well as a few old-fashioned photographs. The latter I kept turning over in my hands until I could see the images they bore, mostly poor-quality pictures of my siblings and me in our youth sitting amongst our parents in darkened rooms.

Suddenly, I became aware of a large and threatening shadow-shape lurking under the steel walkway that lead through the tunnel. My initial attempts to flee were thwarted by my companions, who soothed my fears. Then, during the same or a subsequent dream, I heard with my waking ears someone that sounded just like my deceased mother say my first and middle names, to which I responded, aloud, with, “Hi, mom.”

[After this dream, I meditated for about fifteen minutes then did my travel yoga session. Huzzah!]

[ americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan ]

dreamstate writing 11 May 2018

5/11/2018

During much of this morning’s dream I was worming my way through the hallways and staircases of a vast series of interlocking, cliff-mounted structures. Sometimes I was alone, and sometimes hordes of other people crowded into the structures’ rooms, making it hard for me to move around. I was trying to get from one disc golf tee-box to another, but these were spaced far apart from one another and the layout of the place was confusing, causing me to climb many stairs and squeeze down many tunnels built into and through the homes of the people living there. Each time I threw my discs, they sailed out of view. Although I knew were they had landed, I had a difficult time figuring out how to get there through the maze of interlocking buildings.

At one point, I was standing at the top of a staircase conferring with some of the people judging the event (or who were at least doing something officious). Turning around, I found the stairs behind me so impossibly packed with people that my only recourse for descending to the floor below was to jump out over the side of the railing and hand-carry myself on the outside edges of the individual steps to the floor below. As I reached the bottom my legs brushed against the stockinged feet of a lass resting with two other women on a couch. She immediately stripped her socks off whilst giving me evil looks, to which I responded (as I was walking out a nearby door) by mocking her concern for her striped and colorful socks, saying something like “My legs aren’t that dirty.”

Later in the dream sequences, I was in an alpine city built onto level ground that was covered with a few inches of slushy snow. Despite the presence of frozen precipitation I knew the city was on Bali, the Island of the Gods, somewhere high up the side of one of its towering volcanoes. The city was party ruined, many of its sparsely-placed high-rise buildings damaged or collapsed, but its streets were packed with cars, buses, and people attending to business. Twice whilst in the city I stepped up into a burnt-out single-family home in which stood a representation of my deceased father, an older man with grey hair but strong arms and big hands who embraced me in a great hug and asked why I was groaning in pain and weeping loudly. (After the second time meeting the older man I indeed lay awake in bed crying, hugging myself about the chest, and basking in the memory of those who have died before me.) Falling back asleep, I found myself sitting in the slushy snow talking to a bypassing woman wearing a tan overcoat, who had stopped to admonish me to seek a drier place to sit lest I catch the sniffles.

The thick wool socks I was wearing, though they like the rest of me sat in mounds of cold wet, were nonetheless bone dry, which to my dream-consciousness seemed slightly odd.

[ americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan ]

dreamstate writing 1 May 2018

5/1/2018

This dream occurred sometime in the early hours of this morning.

A dark-haired boy and what appeared to be his father were sitting next to a water-filled channel running across the descending edge of a sand dune. Beyond and below them was a flat beach upon which a few dozen bathers lounged. As I was walking up the mound toward them the boy climbed onto the rim of the channel, which collapsed, sending him tumbling head over heels into a trough of water at the bottom of the dune. I yelled at the father to alert him of his son’s plight, but he never turned to look, instead sat facing away from us the whole time. Swallowed instantly by the trough’s quicksand-like substrate material, the boy disappeared until only the very top of his head was showing.

Clawing into and digging away at the golden liquid sand, my efforts hampered by freely-flowing water, I managed to free the boy’s head, then finally after more frantic excavations his whole body. His eyes were closed and his face and neck were turning blue from lack of oxygen. Gathering his rag-doll body into my arms, I picked him up so that his head rested to the right of mine and his limbs draped around the right side of my torso. Standing up, I shouted down to the lounging bathers, who seemed unable to understand me. I tried different languages, saying things like Police, Polizei, Polisi, call for help, ayudame, rufe einen Krankenwagen, and tolong sakit.

Then, the scenery changed and I was ascending a tall tower of glass and steel, still holding the unconscious boy, mounting flights of stairs and riding upward in elevators, climbing ever and ever higher into the sky. Upon reaching some sort of top-floor control center packed with blinking computer terminals and walled in with slanted slabs of glass, I was approached directly by a small blond woman who finally offered to help me revive the unconscious child in my arms.

[ americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan ]

dreamstate writing 26 Apr 2018

4/26/2018

The following are particulars from this morning’s dream.

I and another were in the crystal clear, aquamarine ocean trying to figure out where waves might be breaking that we could surf on later, but the current near the beach was very strong and the rocks that formed part of the ocean floor there were sharp and jagged. A traditional Indonesian outrigger boat arrived, whereupon I am my companion left the sea.

Then, I was sheltering from the noon sun in a partial clearing under palm trees and other tropical vegetation, near the ocean, sitting on a wooden park-bench with at least one other entity, who was dark blue in color and sat behind me and to the right. Seeing movement to my left, I looked over to find an orange-skinned local woman turning a suckling pig on a spit over a fire. When I greeted her in her tongue I heard a voice say Selemat Pagi, which means Good Morning, to which I responded with Selemat Soreh, which means Good Afternoon. The voice near the woman echoed my response. Without ceasing in her task of spinning the small roasting pig and with unseeing eyes staring right at me, she opened her mouth, out of which white fluid flowed unabated to splatter on the white-gold sands below. I turned away from her to make a comment about what time of day it was to the blue-skinned fellow behind me and to my right, at which point we were approached by an entity resembling an old friend of mine from Bali who has long dreadlocks. The newcomer tried to drum up enthusiasm for a surf trip on his friend’s boat to the reef, where the were breaking.

From right to left across the clearing walked a very pregnant woman with dark hair and light skin wearing a light blue and white floral dress whose hands were covered in a dusting of a white substance and whose forearms bulged with thick muscles. The blue-skinned entity told me that the forearms are controlled by the front edges of the ribs, which in the physics of the dreamworld made sense to me.

[ americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan ]

Wednesday - morning rundown

4/4/2018

Had dreams about the inner gang having adventures, vivid conversations and intensive face-to-face interactions. I awoke at 444 am, the first ring of my alarm, then voided my bowels and made the bed. After morning supplications I poured the first cup of tea, drank it quickly, then sat down to meditate despite a weak urge to go back to sleep. After the 9th step of Qigong, I went upstairs to say happy birthday to my buddy, who about to head to work. Then, I finished the Qigong, had another cup of tea, adjusted the blinds to let in more sunlight, and did my travel yoga session as the sun rose through the window in front of me. Huzzah!

[ americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan ]

dreamscape writing 29 Mar 2018

3/29/2018

During the dream this morning I was bicycling to a familiar location, making my way through a crowded city. Halfway to my destination I decided to use a different bicycle, as the one I was on wasn’t going fast enough. I turned around and started heading back to where I kept my other whip, which turned out to be a big locker with a two-storey-high glass and steel roof built into a long strip of grass that ran down the middle of two major avenues. The locker was surrounded by a wood and steel fence that I accessed through a gate that I could open by running into it with my front tire.

As I was passing back out through the fence on the new, racing bike, I held the gate for a young woman wearing a baseball cap atop long brown hair, who thanked me on her way into the enclosure. In order to get back to the road that was leading to my destination, however, I had to mount a spindly metal platform (that was suspended over a pool of water built into a depression in a steel-ribbed glass structure ) then wait for a stream of people to climb a steep metal slide (which was below me and to the left). As I was waiting, an attractive young Han Chinese woman wearing a peach-colored shirt and stonewashed jeans who was mounting the slide made eye contact with me and smiled, which sent my heart to racing. Then there was a lull in the crowd, I grabbed the railing with my left hand and the bike with my right, announced my intention to leap, then jumped down onto the spindly metal walkway below, my bike narrowly missing a group of people who were waiting at the bottom of the slide.

The walkway was narrow and so I had to hold my bicycle out over the water as I squeezed past people. At one point, my buttocks were pressed up against the face of a young woman with dark hair and a red shirt, and I apologized to her verbally, trying to explain away the size of my buttocks by saying ”Sorry I have… jungle butt.” Someone in the crowd said “yo that’s racist,” at which point I stopped to apologize, then turned back to find a dark-skinned man with a hi-top fade afro haircut and round spectacles giving me a peculiar grin. I smiled at him then opened the glass door to the tunnel that would lead be back out to the street. Into the tunnel was built a food-court that was packed with people. On a row of tall stools on the left-hand side sat a dozen people wearing red shirts and white hats who all looked up at me as I came inside. Holding my bicycle aloft with my right hand I started easing my way through the crowd. A male figure behind complained out loud that I had touched him with the bike, his girlfriend reaching out to soothe his anger by putting a hand on his chest. The man got madder as I kept walking away from him, to which I responded by telling him “I’ll be outside by the curb in about two minutes. If you want to make something of it, meet me there.” I finally made it to the sidewalk, made sure everything attached to my bike was still in place as I waited for a minute for the man to come out, the rode away.

[ americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan ]

dreamscape writing 1 Mar 2018

3/1/2018

[This dream occurred after I had gone back to sleep following my morning thankfulness ceremony, having eschewed my morning meditation practice due to poor sleep and being in a foul mood.]

I and a handful of others were in a steam locomotive working our way through a long system of tunnels. We’d come far already, having traveled a great distance under what felt like a vast mountain. Reaching a fork in the path, the train split into two part, each with its own locomotive. From an initial position at the front of the first loc my perspective switched to the cow-catcher on the second engine, from where I could see and hear the engineers running them talking to one another. The first loc was driven by a dark-faced man, the second by a woman with dark hair. They were both wearing World War 1 style doughboy helmets and had to duck back into their compartments repeatedly due to the tightness of the translucent white tunnels through which we passed. (The tunnels were open at parts, bisected here and there by pillars that seemed organic, as if they’d grown into place.) The trains rapidly decelerated, and the female driver informed her counterpart that the tracks stopped just up ahead.

At least five people left the trains and walked into a large cavern located at the tracks’ terminus. Both tunnels opened up into the cavern via vaulted passageways. The rear and side walls of the cavern were of rough-hewn, living stone about five meters high and ten meters wide. Its ceiling was shored up by rough timber scaffolding and sloped in a rounded fashion downward from the rear wall forward, which I could see had a door of wooden planks set into it, locked with heavy iron chains. (The cavern was shaped like the quarter of a cylinder.) I and the others began to explore the cavern, finding a running spring to our left (protected by a rusted iron fence whose gate stood open) and four separate raised garden beds, two on each side with a shallow trough running between them. I began planning out where we could sleep and in which beds we could plant crops. As the others continued to explore, I floated over and examined the locked door, at which point I discovered that some of the planks had fallen aside, revealing through a square of intact mosquito netting (set into a framework painted red) a suburban street beyond (the street was one located on a hill above UCLA in Westwood, CA). Our group rejoiced upon finding that our journey was nearly complete.

Using a power-drill I then began to try to pull out the large screws that secured the chains to the crude planks of the door. They were slotted screws and my bit kept slipping, as I was using a Phillips-head. Suddenly, I and two other unseen presences were sitting on a vast mudflat which stretched ahead of us for at least five hundred meters, terminating in a coastal road with tall green mountains rising above it. The screws I was trying to undo secured not a door but chains wrapped around a gambling machine the size of a 1980s boombox. The machine had slots for coins and bills, the jackpot being a million dollars. I asked one of the others for a dollar to feed into the jackpot slot and was rebuffed. Attached to the rear, right-hand side of the gambling machine were various removable implements such as a multitool and an old-fashioned label maker, both of which slotted neatly in grooves designed for them. (The label maker was marked with the numbers, 1, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 19, and others.) I was attaching a slotted screw-bit to the multitool (for some reason, it featured a low-quality, full-sized steak knife), removing other tools so that I could manipulate the screws using the short bit. At that point the seawater started to rise around us and I patted my left pants pocket, dismayed to find my mobile phone located there. The unseen others and I grabbed the gambling machine and scattered tools and rushed for a mound of mud behind us, at which point I saw at least two others, the dark-haired woman and a man, bathing in a pool of blood-red liquid to our left. (We became halfway submerged before reaching the mound, which caused me to fear for my mobile phone and plan for ways to dry it out using rice.) Once reaching higher ground, a blond-haired woman jumped carelessly into the aforementioned, gated spring, which now filled a deep basin of tan sandstone, the roof and one of the sidewalls of the cavern having disappeared. The dark-haired woman, still dripping with red fluid, entered the pool as well. When she resurfaced her hair was also blond. I turned to look at the far shore and reckoned it would take us at least an hour to swim over to it, the mudflats upon which we’d been sitting have been entirely filled up by the sea.

[ americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan ]

dreamstate writing 28 Feb 2018

2/28/2018

[This dream occurred at roughly 7am, after I had crawled back into bed following completion of all twelve steps of my morning qigong meditation.]

We were driving down a steep hill in a grey vehicle. I was in the passenger seat greatly concerned that we would crash into the debris that dotted the grassy hill - beams and bars of steel, piles of sandstone blocks, and stacks of cut wood. At the top of a rise we stopped, where I voiced my concerns to the driver, who merely stared forward, his face an unreadable mien. Below the rise stood the first tee of a disc-golf course next to a dead tree, but my companion turned and walked back up the way we’d come. I followed him back upward onto a dirt path that lead along a ridge covered in snow, from which we surveyed the surrounding countryside of cultivated fields, scattered woods, and distant farm houses.

Walking back down to the tee, we came upon a half dozen other persons kitted out for disc-golf. Somewhere nearby but out of sight a person was screaming with horrible urgency, which scared me enough that I ran for shelter. The formerly dead tree had grown tremendously, great reaching tendrils of a hardened, textured, grey plastic that dug back into the ground, forming a wall. Finding my exit blocked, I turned to find the others standing close by, a massive newcomer in their midst. (He reminded me of a figure from my childhood, a giant scotsman dressed in battle fatigues.) The newcomer apologized for the screaming in a way that took my fear away, at which point the dream changed radically.

[ americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan ]

dreamstate writing 16 June 2017

6/16/2017

I was in a house that was in the process of being renovated. With me were people I knew well. We talked for a long time, the people and I, whilst sitting cross-legged in a circle in one of the nearly finished rooms. The others and I were wearing tan colored ankle-length robes of some kind. The room had many windows, it was brightly lit, and its walls were painted white.

After our talk was finished we stood up for to have a stretch, whereupon I for some reason entered a smaller neighboring room, to change clothes or just have a look around. The room was empty but for a floor lamp burning a standard incandescent bulb that cast a yellow light. The room had wooden parquet flooring, wooden panels that covered the walls to hip-height, and dark green paint, above. Someone entered the room behind me and I had the feeling I wasn’t supposed to be in there.

When I turned around to leave I saw that a square section of the roof above the green-walled room had been crudely sawed away, leaving a yawning gap that someone had tried to cover with a blue tarpaulin of some sort. Knowing I could mend it better, I went to a closet where supplies for fixing such a hole were kept, gathering up a ladder, hammer and nails, a square piece of plywood, some fiberglass insulation board, as well as roofing shingles and metal flashing. As I was removing the blue tarpaulin I discovered it was instead a heavy-duty Manduka yoga mat I had once owned. The mat was thinner than I remembered and smelled of ozone and heat, however, having sat under the hot sun for so long. I started shoving insulation into the gap and installing bridge-beams to carry the plywood and replacement asphalt shingles, which I had to wedge up under the existing clay tiles.

americanifesto / JPR / whorphan / 場黑

dreamstate writing 31 May 2017

5/31/2017

Two others and I were working in a brightly-lit living area. It was a single room bifurcated by a shaft that opened onto a less-well-lit area below. The right side of the bifurcated room was fully furnished and finished, whereas the left side needed sleeping accommodations as well as work done on the walls and floors.

The man and I worked inside for a while setting up curtain rods and curtains, then exited through the tall, wooden front windows to unload mattresses from a truck parked outside. The mattresses were inflatable models, a light blue bladder underneath a darker blue woven covering, complete with tie-down straps.

He’d hand them to me, I’d heave the mattresses up onto the railing above us. and then the blond-haired woman would pull them inside. After I had delivered a couple, though, she closed the blinds. And when I leaned up to pull them back, I disturbed her in the process of fixing something, or setting something up, in a corner.

americanifesto / JPR / whorphan / 場黑麥