Tag: revelations

A Made-for-TV Movie Dream

This dream stretch started first with a vignette of me traveling. I’d just settled into my destination when I jerked awake. Paralysis gripped me as I saw where I was and reacted with shock, This isn’t where I’m supposed to be. Where am I? How did I get here? Within a fist of seconds, I knew that I was home. But dream imagery held a little longer, requiring more time for my bafflement to drain. Then, back to sleep and another of Morpheus’s deliveries.

I was not in the next dream at all. This was the movie dream. A man and woman, white, thirtyish, were traveling together in a narrow RV. Ragtag clothes covered them. The man carried a thin, cheap pink cotton blanket while his companion carried a blue one of the same sort. These were the same sort of blankets I saw on many homes in my childhood’s earlier years, when we lived in poorer surroundings, usually on a bed in a small room with sparse furniture.

The couple were stopping for the night and wanted to sleep in a place rented for the purpose. Strangely, not hotel or motel accommodations, nor a house, lodge or cabin. Just a room, twenty feet long and six feet wide (guessing at those numbers), all mattress, dark, with a door on either end. Lacking money, the couple didn’t want to pay for it but wanted to use it so the concocted a plan to sneak into the room, use it for the night, awaken early, and sneak out. They parked their long RV around the corner, where it would be out of sight.

Watching this sequence, I asked, why are they doing this? Why not sleep in the RV? Isn’t that the purpose? I also thought, they’re not going to get away with this. They’re going to get caught.

Yes, they were spotted as they executed their plan and tried sneaking out. The man distracted them, going in one direction as dawn was rising, allowing the woman to reach the RV and drive off. They would meet up on a road outside of town.

But the man needed to get there. He scurried among the shadows around tall buildings and narrow alleys, hiding, working his way out of town. The final hurdle required him to dash through a lobby occupied by the very people hunting him and then sprint across a rocky, open field to a gravel road and then up the gravel road. Dust and sun ruled that space, and five men warily scanned their territory.

Yet, he judged his moment, raced across the lobby’s polished marble floor and fled between two window. Yes, some strange design plan allowed a wall with open space between two tall plates of glass. He’d spotted that and utilized it to get away. Several chased him but he had momentum, distance, and speed.

“That’s alright,” the one man said. Portly, large, with graying hair slicked back over a predominantly bald head, he wore a flowery ‘Hawaiian’ shirt. He was in charge and spoke through guffaws, snorts, and snickers. “Billy gave him a gift. Ain’t that right, Billy?”

“That’s right.” Billy was a lean young man in tight blue denim pants just entering the lobby.

“What was the gift?” a third asked.

The leader said, “A concoction of chemicals that’ll at least make him sick enough to wish himself dead, if he doesn’t die from it.”

We don’t know what happened to our man, whose name was never given. He didn’t make another dream appearance. Instead, his traveling mate, the woman, came in. Dressed in a suit, she had several tall, large men in suits accompanying her. Holding up a badge, she identified herself as a police officer. She’d been working undercover to get evidence on their operation and now arrested them for multiple crimes, including poisoning people. She revealed that she’d come back after them because they’d poisoned her on a previous visit.

The dream began scrambling at that point but I have a sense that the final piece was a report that the man who’d been with her was found by a patrol car.

Dream movie end.

0

The Revelations Dream

Once again, dreams thundered in like tornadoes, leaving much to contemplate in their wake. The most prominent dream was about unknown talents and changes, in my mind.

  1. I could see things that others couldn’t see, including the future.
  2. While I was demonstrating this to a friend, I used a wrinkled, old Montgomery Ward Christmas catalog to show her.

Many people were present in my dream. Most were strangers, but friends and family were present. We seemed to be in a large room in the upper floors of a tall building. Windows were on the two outer walls. This vantage let us look out across a cityscape. Crisscrossing white cement roads connect business parks surrounded by manicured green spaces reminiscent of places that I worked at in San Mateo, Palo Alto, and Foster City, California.

Inside, we were looking at long gray counters located under the windows. Strolling along, we were looking at these. To me, they looked blank. I don’t know what others saw, but looking at the gray counters absorbed them. Seeing an orange button on the table, I pushed it. Silver metal boxes arose at regular intervals on the counters. They had controls on top. Feeling bold, I examined the controls of one. They seemed simple. Although I didn’t know what they did, I pushed one.

The light changed, revealing other objects around us. Turning to another box, I pressed another button and exposed another aspect of our hidden reality. My thought was, these machines help us see the world. I was excited and wanted to talk to others, but when I did, I discovered that they didn’t see the boxes or their influence.

Taking my mother by her shoulder, I pointed to where the boxes were. When I did that, the boxes became visible to her. Likewise, when I guided her to the two boxes that I’d used and pointed out their influence, she could now see them. Understanding that I seemed to be a connection, I went to others and showed them. Excited conversation spread as more and more people were engaged. I pressed more buttons. The lights shifted into something dark that revealed bright strips of existence and threads running from the people to the sky. I couldn’t see where the threads ended, but I thought that the strings went to stars.

My friend came in. A college professor who teaches network security and cyber-forensics, I told her what had happened. She was astonished. As I told her about this, I realized that since I’d been exposed to the machines’ influence, I could now see these things without the machines.

To prove that to her, I found an old Montgomery Ward Christmas catalog. Using it, I told her, I can see the future. Then I knew, it’s not the machines or the catalog, but using them encouraged me to see.

I was astounded. Even as understanding seeped into me and epiphanies bloomed, I grasped that if I touched some of the exposed objects, I could peel away more limitations. Touching the closest thread, which was connected to my friend, I saw her future flash into existence like a giant movie screen. Gazing up into it with amazement, she and I said, “Wow.”

The dream ended.

0

After the Revelations

This is not how I thought writing would go.

I had a romanticized, glamorized vision about the writing process and a novelist’s life. I thought I would be dictating the story, making it up and writing it down. Instead, here we go again. Philea finishes her wide-ranging tale and brings it back to the moment where it split away,  and joins two other paths. One path was forged by Pram when he told his part of this story, and the other path was forged by the six primary characters on the Wrinkle.

I’ve been waiting for this re-connecting. I’d seen and heard, experienced, if you will, what they were going to say and do once they came back together. Honestly, Philea’s side-trip astonished me. She went into a life that I didn’t know existed. It’s also surprising that it startled her as much as it startled me.

But, at last her side-trip is done. It’s time for those long-awaited next scenes. But before I go into writing those scenes, I need to soak in what Philea and the other characters experienced. She and Pram shared more examples of parallel life-experience-reality-existences — a LERE, their shorthand for other Now events that that lived (or are living) and share with the rest trapped in this cycle.

They’re trying to understand what will happen to them. They’re attempting to take a piece of information and fit it in with other pieces of information to create a substantive, believable cause and effect tale for what they’re enduring. That’s human nature, to fill in the gaps, color them with some form of logic or explanation, and make it all whole.

I feel for them, pitying them, because I know that’s not their nature. That’s not what they’re living. Even as they draw closer to the truth, sometimes even stating it in incredulous terms as a possibility, the six don’t always agree on the verbiage or logic. The logic argues against their standard expectations about reality, existence, and the arrows of time. Besides, not all of their experiences will support the truth, in their minds, because they don’t remember everything that they experience. Remembering more answers less by introducing more complexity and gaps. At this point, I think all readers will understand that.

So listening  to — hah, typing — my characters’ struggle to resolve these new fragments of information, I really feel for them. The passages of their thoughts and dialogue that I’ve typed leave me oddly reflective.

That’s a first, raw, impression. On greater thought, it’s not leaving me oddly reflective. Instead, I’m taking what I learned through my characters’ learning, and applying it to my existence, here in the real world.

We’re all pieces. We see ourselves as pieces that comprise a whole. Yet, few of us ever fit fully, completely, and comfortably. And when one of us goes, we struggle to see the new whole, because we remember the whole that we knew, and lament its changes. We search for answers and rarely find closure and resolution. We remain wondering.

With these notes softly echoing in my mind, I sip the final dregs of cold coffee and end my day of writing like crazy.

4

Blog at WordPress.com.

Up ↑