Category: Dreams

The Pilgrim Effect

He awoke in a leather recliner that he didn’t know and stared at the large television screen.

White on black, 04/08/04 was shown. Beneath it said 3:02 AM. The two pieces of information floated around the screen like they were tied together.

The room was cold around him. He needed to pee. He needed to drink. He felt parched but also like his bladder was ready to burst. He stood to attend those matter.

Mental cohesion began undoing. He didn’t know the chair or the floor. The walls weren’t familiar, nor was the other furniture. He didn’t know them, but then, he did. They came to him like long ago learned and forgotten information, forgotten because it wasn’t used. Then he was saying to himself, “Oh, yes, I remember buying that recliner.” He regarded it with deeper thought.

But then, he didn’t remember this body. Taking in his hands, he processed their shape and condition. He understood, these are not the hands I fell asleep with. He understood, but these were the hands I fell asleep with.

Trying to reconcile the dichotomy between what he saw of himself and his furniture, he looked again at the television. At 3:04 AM, he should be going to bed. He should turn off the television. He looked for the control to do that, asking with irritation, “Where is the remote?” It should have been with him at the recliner. With that reasoning, he considered, maybe it fell between the cushions.

As this was thought, he saw a remote in his mind and knew that it was a virtual device generated by a chip in his skull. He just needed to think of the remote and what he wanted it to do, and the remote would do it. This was information that he should have already had, because he’d been doing that for years.

He reconsidered the date. He’d fallen asleep in twenty seventeen. That date said 04/08/04. The oh four was for twenty one oh four. Yes, because that’s what year it was. His hands looked different because he’d received a new body in twenty fifty-six for his one hundred birthday.

They’d told him this might happen. Becoming unstuck in time, he’d time-traveled in his dreams.

4

Messy Dream

What a messy, messy dream.

Setting was a combined use hotel and commercial center with offices and conference rooms. A huge, old building but in good condition, it was almost empty. It was constructed on the coast. I think it was built before World War II.

Something had just finished. There were only a few left, five or six, including me. I knew all the others but rarely saw them. All were people from other times in my life. Cast of dream stars:

  • A short, female creative writing teacher whose name I can’t remember. She was in charge. I took her classes in Germany.
  • Thomas. We were assigned together in the military at Onizuka. He was involved with the operation and situation regarding Blackhawk Down in Somalia.
  • Shawn Spieth, father of Jordan’s Spieth, the pro golfer. Shawn and I worked together at Network ICE and ISS.
  • Patricia, who worked with me at Onizuka.
  • I can’t recall the names of two others but both were male and were with me at either ISS or IBM.

So a large stretch of my careers and activities are covered by these representative people.

The conference – I don’t know what it was about – had ended. A major storm was forecast for the coast. It was well on its way.

The others were planning to leave. I didn’t think there was time. I was in my dark small room, alone, planning. The room was cluttered but comfortable and familiar. I knew that the complex was built in a series of tunnels. They were essentially constructed as a Survival, Recovery and Reconstitution Center.

The dream gets really messed up. One of the co-workers receives news his young son has died. Shawn’s son (but not Jordan) is at the shelter. He’s very sick and dies during the night. Shawn is terribly upset because his cell phone didn’t wake him. He believes he could have saved his son if it had.

It’s night, rushing toward dawn. Weather and evacuation orders have been issued. I tell the other about the tunnels. Discussions circulate about what we’re going to do.

The creative writing instructor calls us all together. We’re free to do and go where we want but meanwhile, food remains from the party. She and Patricia show us a huge stash of cakes, pies, chips, cookies, and pretzels. There is cherry pie calling me. There are other pies. ‘Help yourselves,” she says, “let’s not let it go to waste.”

Shawn signs out. His son is dead and he no longer cares. He’s leaving and taking his son’s body with him. The instructor has me sign some small plastic cards. One, green, is my membership card. On the other one, which is white, she wants me to note the date and time and some small comment about what has happened. Her instructions confuse me. The card is too small for anything meaningful, and its plastic, except for a strip where we can sign our names.

Someone notices there is ink on different surfaces. It’s Michael’s pen, they realize. Mine, I realize they’re saying. The instructor asks me, “Michael, is your pen leaking?”

“Yes,” I answer, considering the pen, my hand and the cards. The pen is a Biro. “It looks like I’m bleeding ink.”

Thomas comes to me. “Tell me everything you known about those tunnels.”

“There’s not time for that.”

“Tell me what you can.”

“This place was built on top of a warren of tunnels to survive a nuclear war. Miles of tunnels are beneath us. They go into the mountain and under the sea.”

“Then that’s where we need to go.” He nods and goes off.

I don’t care; the tunnels are where I’m going.

I look out windows. I have a radio. I can see the black storm coming. I tell the others. I began making my way down to survive. The tunnel entrances are off a huge ballroom with marble floors. I head for an entrance and see Thomas walking on the other side.

“Time to get to the tunnels,” I tell him and anyone I encounter who will listen. “We need to close the doors.” There no longer seems to be anyone else there.

That’s the dream’s abbreviated version, notes about what I remember, the highlights. I was confident throughout the dream, puzzled by the others, sad that I couldn’t help Shawn, shocked that two children had died, and also aware that I was in a dream. While I dreamed, I was trying to understand what it meant. The part about bleeding ink amused me. Yeah, open any vein.

Second, I have dreamed about coming storms and surviving before, multiple times in my life. Per this dream, I’m usually the aware one while others are oblivious.

The other element that struck me was a recurring facet of my life. I almost always worked alone. I would begin with a team but then someone would tell me, “We need someone to take care of this for us,” and would put me into a unique position where I had to work alone to resolve some problems or manage a project or situation. I hadn’t really noticed it was happening when I was in the military; it was my wife who noticed and began joking about it. I rarely knew others in my units, but normally worked with the commanders. They directly oversaw my tasks and responsibilities. Later, with ISS, IBM, and other companies, I often worked with technical directors, marketing VPs, and the CFOs and the CEOs. I was always working alone, in an unusual position, with an unusual title.

Now I work alone as a writer.

 

0

Coffee Dreams

A mug of hot coffee warms my hands against the April’s winter shadow. I sit with my dreams and myself to think.

My dreams took a different turn last night. It feels like a turn for the better. Although multiple elements seen in past dreams, like being in class to learn and working with technology, were present, the dream most sharply recalled featured spilled coffee.

A thirty year old version of myself, I was at a huge room. I thought of it partly as a classroom but also as a work center. It was enormous, as large as say, an NBA basketball area. It was dark, with low task lights doing most of the illuminating. Rows of consoles with work stations filled it. Each work station feature a personal computer but also a link to a master computer. They also had television monitors, telephones, and CD/DVD players and burners. Most were unoccupied.

I’d never seen them before but now was working at one, or trying to make it work. I was holding a cup of coffee. The cup was plain, low and white with a handle. It seemed to be ceramic, nothing fancy. Coffee kept slopping out when I moved. I became aware of this and mildly frustrated. Most of my frustration was that I didn’t want to spill on the work station. Magically, the cup didn’t seem to actually lose much coffee between drinking and spilling from it.

A man and a woman who I didn’t know came up behind my station. They talked about me like I wasn’t present, yet were watching my work and commenting on it, with the woman, slender and white, with dark hair piled on her head, and dressed in a pale yellow and white gown, was telling the man, a white guy in shirt sleeves, khakis and glasses, that she was thinking of helping me. She noted how I made some of the same mistakes that she’d made. This prompted me to focus harder and think more carefully about what I was doing, which was typing. The keyboard was wrong, with the keys spaced awkwardly, even haphazardly, forcing me to struggle and repeat the typing.

When I spilled coffee for the third time, she commented on it, almost as a joke. I explained that I knew why I was spilling coffee, observing that the handle was too small for my fingers but didn’t extend enough for me to grip with more of my hand, so my grip was precarious and not balanced. The cup had a shallow draft in my opinion, with a wide mouth, and that’s why the coffee easily spilled out as I moved around. She seemed impressed with the explanation.

Walking across the work space, I came to where a teach sat with students. The teacher wasn’t anyone I know, but was young, white with dark hair in a bob. She was talking to the students in a chatty, happy voice. The other students were my age or a little younger. I was dismayed that they all seemed to be on a break. She was using the break as a teaching and bonding opportunity. I heard her say, “We all have work to do but you can work at your own pace.” I was happy working, because I had a problem and I wanted to solve it, so I decided to return to work.

But then I thought that I’d watch a movie. I had a DVD in hand. I don’t know what movie it was. I realized, though, that I could put the movie on at my station and watch it there, while I worked, so I turned to do that. When I did, I spilled coffee a fourth time.

That made me smile.

Awaking this morning and thinking about the dream, I felt empowered, invigorated and optimistic. I can’t say why. Was it the spilled coffee? I put a lot of faith in coffee to help me think, focus and work, but that was usually around preparing and drinking it, and not spilling it.

Coffee is associated with get up and go with me. Drinking coffee is part of my rituals for preparing to do multiple things, from writing, cleaning and yard work to washing the car and traveling. So the coffee in the dream is about entering a new stage of activity. The moments of sitting and taking a few sips of coffee is always the cusp of a new beginning for me, a signal to start. Spilling it was important because it didn’t matter to me or anyone else. The cup was limitless; more coffee was always there.

From all that, I decided, I’m ready to step up my pace of work and activity. I have the coffee, now let’s get to it.

0

Dream Magic

My theme music for yesterday was Seal’s ‘Crazy’. The recurring refrain, “Yeah, we’re never gonna survive, unless we get a little crazy,” became my dream’s theme music last night.

Literally.

Last night’s dreams was like a television series. I binged on an entire season. Each episode followed its own arc. Each featured ‘Crazy’ as music after the episode’s climax.

The dreams began with one in which, I thought, how funny, I’m not even in this dream. I was witnessing a convention. It was a packed, happy, energetic crowd. Displays were being set up. Demonstrations took place.

I drifted into one demonstration, making my first appearance in the dream. It was about hacking. Interesting and amusing. No, not just about hacking, my dream persona observed, but hacking magic.

I was with friends. Everyone was perplexed about what was being demonstrated. Suddenly, I grasped it; when three cubes could be aligned and turned into one color, magic took place.

Like the old computer game, Tetris.

Okay.

But more magic hacking was being demonstrated. Fascinated, I separated from my friends to pursue learning this magic. Each episode took me further from there and deeper into a quest. By the season’s end, I was alone at a black magic convention. Other people were present but I didn’t know any of them. I was broke, gaunt, dirty and unshaven, with long, disheveled hair and threadbare clothing.

The setting was a dark, wet and decrepit abandoned arena. Others seeking magic and energy were present. An intense scene, we all knew of each other but didn’t know one another. We wanted to help one another but were also leery of the others. But this is where my quest for more had taken me.

Needing rest, I slept on the second floor, sharing a urine stained mattress and Army blankets with a stranger, another man. Although younger, he seemed in worse condition than me, sleeping the entire time while I tossed and turned. I was specifically seeking…a magic manuscript.

Three times, I tried finding and acquiring it. The fourth time, I succeeded.

And then I lost it.

The others knew this and were sympathetic. There were suggestions the manuscript had been stolen.

With some detective work, I found it.

But I was running out of time. The convention was ending. I wanted to present the manuscript to the convention leaders. A bus would take me to them. I missed the bus once…twice…. The manuscript disappeared again. I found it again but missed the bus again, even though others had helped me.

By this point, I was almost a filthy, barefoot beggar. On a tip from another, I learned that the convention leaders were coming through on their way to leave. I could intercept them. The rest encouraged me to do that. Which I did, presenting my manuscript.

It was a big, black, fat, unwieldy document. The leader, a suave man who looked like a young Jon Favreau, glanced at it as he walked by. “It’s not what we’re looking for.”

Yet, this was the magic. I knew it was.

Defeated and out of time, I headed home. I was broke and exhausted. It was a hard journey.

My wife was in the bathroom, getting ready for a party behind closed, locked doors. I could hear her humming. Others began arriving to set up. They were bringing in food and cakes. All were people I knew during my life, friends from other eras.

They were in good spirits, which spread to me. I began cleaning myself up to join the party. At that point, I knew the season was over, but the series was not. More was to come.

Cue ‘Crazy’ and the show’s ending.

I awoke despondent and sat alone in the living room for a while, watching the day grow brighter and thinking about my dream. Clearly, I thought, this was about my writing efforts and my career. I was seeking the magic. I’d missed.

But, it wasn’t over. As ‘Crazy’ streamed through my head and I began my daily routines, I took some solace from the hope, it wasn’t over.

There are more seasons to come.

0

Dreams of Resistance

New, powerful dreams swept in to replace the soul-dragging sprawl of dreams endured my previous three nights. Now I was once again enabled and empowered. Confident in my understanding of what had happened and what needed to happen, I began installing order on others in my dream.

In one of the dreams, someone who was in charge and outranked me began chastising me for some bizarre local rule. I’d taken my boots off. As punishment, he’d stolen in, taken my boots, wrapped them up in a package and hid them. Now revealing what he’d done, he began lecturing about their rules and procedures in a galling pedantic manner. I gathered from his ridiculing subtext that he thought he would emasculate me and put me in my place.

I didn’t accept the situation. I waited until he finished. Then I politely replied, “But I just arrived here this morning, hours ago. I think you should have set up an immediate orientation for me to know what was going on, if you want me to know your rules and follow them. Otherwise, you would just playing a silly game of ‘gotcha’.”

A person beside me leaned over and whispered, “Right on,” in my dream. Two other dreams from last night were of the same ilk, encouraging me to stand up for myself. Together, the three instilled greater confidence in me. It’s a wonderful sensation to awaken with the belief I know what I’m supposed to do and will do it.

Happy Tuesday, writers!

0

Dreams of Ineptness

What a night of dreams. Given scales of one to ten, where ten is the highest, these dreams were around eights on the vividness and intensity scales. They left me feeling emotionally, mentally and physically exhausted. Dreams of these types trigger speculation that I’m living in the dreams, and the dreams are the reality. So while I’ve been here, living with all of its entanglements and needs, I’ve actually been asleep there. Once I awaken there, I experience that life through my dreams.

Makes sense. In the dreams, I was bewildered about what was going on and expectations for me. Everyone liked me. Nobody was concerned about me. I was just there, part of the landscape. It was an incoherent landscape. Some others and I were in the back interior of a giant parked 1982 Camaro. It was so large, we were standing and moving around without being encumbered. Things were sometimes written on the car’s immense rear hatch window. But I knew I wasn’t doing what I was supposed to be doing. Fueled by guilt, anxiety burned through me. I was going to be found out at any moment. 

Leaving the Camaro, I raced around in a covert frenzy, attempting to cover my tracks and do what I was supposed to be doing all along. The office made no sense. Everything had been moved outside. Meanwhile, new instructions were being introduced. I struggled to stay abreast of the new ideas. I was supposed to be understanding this stuff, using it and explaining it to others. I had little idea of what was going on.

I sought out the people in charge and the files. The files were supposed to be locked up. I didn’t know the combination. One of those in charge confessed to me that the locks didn’t work. They were a facade. She laughed as she explained this. As I tried catching up on my tasks and correct everything, I began learning through intimate encounters with others, nobody else knew what was going on. It was chaos with a veneer of normalcy and knowledge. Nobody else was doing it correctly. Most barely understood what I talked about and laughed when I mentioned it. A series of giggling confessions were shared with me to that end.

Understanding that I wasn’t going to be discovered because I was an inept fraud, I began relaxing. My errors and shortcomings weren’t going to be discovered because everyone else had shortcomings and were making errors. None of them cared about it.

Writing about them, I chortle with insight. Ah, yes, the classic dreams of inadequacy and our latent, perpetual fears of being exposed as a fraud. Do writers ever experience anything like this? I suppose not. Most writers are powerhouses of security and self-confidence.

I should just move on. I would, but I feel too tired. I need to sleep to recover from my dreams.

Now there’s a metaphor if I’ve ever read one.

2

Dream Web

A caterruption broke my sleep. I’d been dreaming of watching a high school play. I was part of a large audience in a small cafetorium. Most of the dream attendees weren’t watching the play but chatting as the play went on. It was a light comedy and I was watching and chuckling.

But now, awake, I thought about the dream’s meaning. I found nothing but dream strands returned me to high school. I’d been the lead in our junior year play, ‘Brother Goose’. At one point I was supposed to enthuse about winning a contest and a year’s supply of cereal. I always broke character in rehearsals when I said the detestable, corny line, and then, in the action’s climax, I kissed the female lead.

In rehearsal, I was aware I was breaking character. I didn’t during the performances. My ex-girlfriend was in the audience during the production for the school student body. She said that when I kissed the other girl on stage, she looked down at the floor. She could feel others in the audience looking at her. They knew we were broken up. It was a small school, with a few hundred students.

I had lunch with her yesterday after our protest against Trump’s budget outline. We’ve been married since 1975.

Meanwhile, dream threads pulled me along from the play to a creative writing class in Germany. The teacher wanted us to do a 1940s radio script. I was selected as the narrator and decided to channel Gary Owens. That surprised and delighted the class but it was a natural choice, given the exposure to him from my years of watching ‘Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In’.

I learned a great deal about creativity and active writing in that class. I consider it a breakthrough class for me. Yet, I can’t remember the teacher’s name.

That’s going to distract me all day.

I blame it on the dream.

 

0

The Reality

Khalvin rolled out of his bed with a snort and dropped to the floor.

Something had awakened him.

Everything seemed normal.

He moved to the reveal and transparented it.

Starry skies held outside. The ship still moved. Moonlight lapped the dark sea. He pinged his Backhand for the ship’s location. Systems confirmed they remained over the California Sea. Airspeed was ninety. The outside temperature was eighty-four degrees. Their destination was forty-nine minutes away.

Ordering a water bulb, he plucked it out of the air as it arrived, massaged his head against lingering sleep, and considered what to do as he sucked up water. He didn’t know what had awakened him. A dream’s wreckage drifted through his consciousness. He’d dreamed he wasn’t himself, Khalvin, but another person. He didn’t know that name, and he didn’t look as he now looked, but he knew it was him.

He’d been somewhere he couldn’t fully perceive. It seemed like a shop. Others were there, but he didn’t know them and didn’t speak with them. Music he didn’t recognize played above burbling conversations and crisp clacking and clinking noises. His dream self barely noticed. Sitting and bent over a keyboard, he was busy thinking, typing and talking to himself.

The image lingered with him, powerfully real. Wondering it meant, he considered the California Sea and thought of the ruins purported to be under its surface. In many ways, being here on Earth, about to explore ruins, seemed more like a dream than the dream he’d just experienced.

He realized he’d been Human in the dream. He was a Cat. He’d always been a Cat. To be Human….

He smiled. That seemed like the strangest dream of all.

***

Sorry for the shaggy cat story. Blame it on my dreams. Cheers

0

Pieces

In last night’s other part of featured dreams, I found pieces of blue, red, yellow and white. Large but lightweight, they seemed to be plastic. As I collected them, I noticed some fit together. 

I next encountered a plaza. After some exploration, I noticed it was a huge board and realized the pieces I’d found could fit on the board. I began organizing, sorting and testing pieces in the way of puzzles, but building structures as tall as myself. Each was either red, yellow, blue, green, et cetera; the colors weren’t mixed in the structures.

Stepping back to gain a greater view of my work, I saw that the pieces I put together had formed people. I realized the pieces were from people and that I could use them, put them together and fix the people. 

The epiphany sent me into grinning delight. I began noticing others walking around and saw I was in a busy city on a sunny day. The people walking around were strangers of all races and classes of life. I could tell which pieces belonged to which person. So I began calling to them, “I can fix you. I know how. I have the pieces that can fix you.”

Then it was on to the other dream, where it took a weird turn.

Perhaps the weirdest turn is that I suspect I’ve dreamed these dreams before. 

0

A Turn Into the Weird

Once again, my dreams took a hard turn into the weird. The one dominates my waking thinking.

There are six lanes of highway. I’m overlooking them with friends. One of these friends is Randy Moore. Randy and I served twenty years in the U.S.A.F. and were together at Onizuka Air Station, Sunnyvale, CA, in the early 1990s. He passed away from colon cancer the month of his sixtieth birthday.

He was alive and the Randy I knew in my dream. The six lanes of traffic have five ‘support lanes’. That’s the only way I can explain it. It’s a fast highway. But, while studying it, Randy and I (and others) realize there’s a huge gap in the road. Basically, it ends in a black chasm.

Then we realize we’re in an enormous cave. Then, we find, oh, wait, the highway continues on the other side of this chasm. The catch is, that’s several hundred yards away. That’s a helluva catch.

So we’re chatting, what a weird design, is it by design, what else could have caused this, and end by saying, “We should stop cars coming down because they can’t make it.” But we were also noting, “They see it. They’re stopping.”

But the driver of an old van guns his engine. Tires screaming, smoke billows out and the vehicle launches down the road into the dark sky. “He’s trying for it,” either Randy or I say.

“He’s not going to make it,” one of us say.

“Oh, wait…maybe it will.”

The van flies through the air like a scene from ‘The A-Team’. We watch.

“He’s not going to make it,” I declare. As I make the statement, a red Ferrari screams past.

“What the hell is he doing?” Randy asks.

I’m amused and appalled. “He’s trying to save the van.”

The Ferrari catches the van as both land on the other side. They bounce and skew sideways before slamming into the cavern wall in a ball of flame.

Randy and I begin wandering the cavern lanes. Examining the structure, we wonder, how will we ever get to the other side.

0

Blog at WordPress.com.

Up ↑