Black Vegetation Arm

I had another really complicated dream which I need to tell you. I soon as I write it down I'll probably go back to sleep because I haven't had enough sleep yet. In my dream, I am married and living in the suburban house with a son named Brian. It's morning . My wife who is white is trembling very hard. She holds 2 cups of coffee and one of them is about to spill.

I realize why it is. Every morning my son, who is Chinese, waits in the kitchen. He's a holy terror and always feelings himself at home to surprise her when she comes into the kitchen every morning. This time is no different. He wears an orange anorack and is waiting to spring on her. 

But she has out what it him she comes in from behind. She's holding the coffee and the baby. When he springs he misses. It's because she has painted fake eyes on the baby's head so that he miscalculates his jump.

My wife calmly sets the coffee on the table. My son is very hyper active because his trick didn't work. He grabs me by the hand and pulled me out of the back door and says we're going to the park.

We get into a subway which is completely green. I mean the train is green. Suddenly I realize that I am dreaming because the train doesn't stop in subway stations. Instead it stops right at the destination where people want to go. So now it stops right in the park and we get out and we are in the park itself.

Holding his hand I walk alongside the green wooden wall. Now that I know I'm dreaming, I tell myself to wake up.

But when I wake up, i'm still in a dream and I wake up in a bed I don't recognize. I want to get to my own room. I stagger out of bed and I have to avoid Mikey's legs. He appears to be sprawled on the floor next to the bed. I open a wooden door and go out. On the other side of the corridor to the right, that is my real room.

When I go in however the room is windy because the window was open. Outside it is night. I'm just in time to see a round red fluffy thing fly out of the window. I know it's not a bird because it is so round. 

The floor is covered with unfamiliar undergrowth. In fact my room appears to be somehow in nature as well as in the house.

Suddenly, what appears to be a black zombie hand but is actually composed of some kind of vegetation, starts crawling towards me. It's neither alive not dead. I pick it up and it's fingers are quivering. I scream at it who are you? In Thai. As i scream I think to myself I'm still dreaming and I want to why I'm speaking thai tonight because in my dreams I rarely do.

I shake and throttle the black vegetation arm. It still moves. I fling it out of the window. Then I wake up.

An Inner Anime

I dream I'm inside a heroic Japanese anime with large-eyed youths and dragons. Suddenly my perspective shifts and I'm not *in* the anime, but watching it on a small screen leaning against a glass balcony in a huge Korean shopping mall. 

After a while, I realize that the mall is itself animated when a line of electric blue letters hanging overhead seem to start twisting and shifting. The walls, the shops, the floor, all are part of a larger animated image, and so I step back and I realize I am watching this larger animation.

I hear a boy laughing and, stepping back more now, I see that this animation is being watched by a young blond boy and his teenaged older brother and the young boy has created the animation somehow to "trick" his brother. "Haha, I fooled you! It was all an animation!" he is telling him.

Stepping back again, I see that I am watching the conversation between the kids on a computer screen. So it's an animation within an animation within some kind of live action film. And it turns out that it's an edit screen in Finale Cut Pro and I'm dissatisfied with it because it's been shot on a single, unstable camera.

In the shot on the computer screen, the screen (in which the boys have been watching the animated Korean shopping mall inside of which there is a small screen with a Japanese anime going on) ... becomes an upright piano that he is playing as well. I decide I will edit the film by chopping it up and cropping some sections to look like it was shot on a multicam system.

I selecta portion of the video where the camera is moving rapidly from a shot of one kid to the other kid. I use the cropping tool to turn one of them into a closeup, but when I run the segment, the first kid keeps morphing into the second.

Then I wake up. CNN is on and North Korea has tested a hydrogen bomb... I wonder if this had anything to do with my dream. Also, while I frequently have dreams within dreams, this is my first dream of a film within a film within a film....

Laurel and Hardy

So, I had a dream last night but forgot it before I wrote it down. Then Mikey started to tell me about the dream he had, this afternoon, and it made me remember bits of my own...

So in this dream, I am watching a TV movie. The movie portrays a fat straight man and a skinny gay one, but they are twins, and they're wearing identical orange jump suits as though they're in jail. So after setting all this up, they cut to a commercial. But when the movie comes back on, they are still in orange jumpsuits, and nothing happens ... nothing at all ... I'm watching all this and telling myself, why am I watching this, nothing is happening after the interesting setup ...

Then I wake up ... apparently BORED into wakefulness....

I'm surprised I remembered even this much....

Film Noir

I had an incredibly detailed dream and I am rushing to write it down before it fades because it is so bizarre.

First, the WHOLE dream is in black and white, which never happens with me. In fact it's in very stark, exaggerated black and white; it seems to be happening inside a film noir. In fact throughout the dream, I am sort of speaking in a Humphrey Bogart voice.

I'm in a messy office, and an old fashioned 1930s style phone starts ringing I pick it up and its a faint voice, an operator, from America. "It's your son William John Raitt, from L.A. You need to help ... instantly ... there's terrible trouble ... a murder...."

"Put him on," I say.

But instead, he walks into the room. He's wearing a swimsuit and holds open a tabloid newspaper. "Sorry, I had to contact you this way ... I had to make sure you were home."

I'm very happy to see him. "Hi, Johnny" I say. "You're getting fat." (But actually in my dream he more lean and buff than I last remembered him). I look around me and actually we're not really at the desk anymore ... the desk is still there but we're at the edge of an Olympic pool (which is grey = it's a black and white dream.)

Johnny says "Read the tabloid. You're doomed. It's all been discovered."

I start reading. In the article, someone has uncovered some emails, and receipts, proving that when our orchestra went to Carnegie Hall, I somehow submitted an invoice to pay for a Chinese restaurant to someone twice. "But this is not only minor, but it's untrue," I say. I read on. The paper begins to lay on huge charges of corruption based on this invoice. There's also pictures of bills and invoices, like a prosecutor building a case.

"What are you going to do?" he says. (In between taking dips and using the diving board.)

Suddenly a tiny slip of paper falls out. It's the name and address of a lawyer named GADY WILLIAMS. It's not a business card, more like typed up, obling rectangular slip of paper, sort of like an errata slip. I look at the slip and wonder whether this is the name of some kind of blackmailer or of the lawyer who will salvage this situation.

The unusual aspects of this dream include the whole film noir look and feel of it and the fact that in the dream I sit down and read an entire article in a paper and much of it was sort of coherent in a dreamlike way.

More Cats

Friends, the cat-dream continues; I woke up from a vision of a calico cat found behind a large book case when it is being shifted to the wall...

For cat-dreams within a month ... and all four cats quite different; all seemed to inhabit my real space (eg the corridor outside my bedroom, the landing next to my home office, the hotel room I was staying at.) Most cats appeared in fleeting moments before awakening and often as the most surface layer of dreams within dreams.

Can any oneiromancers explain this?

Flinging the Dog

I had another dream about a cat and a dog, suggesting that someone is trying to tell me something. This dream started with a bunch of us looking a board on which were pasted some recent reviews of my work. One person said, Oh you must sent this one to this journalist guy and I said, Why him? I was shocked and woke up from this dream only, once more, I was still dreaming. 

In that layer of the dream, I was in my bedroom and went outside into the corridor which leads to my home office and a landing. In the corner of the landing, I saw that my dog Gustav had peed on Sun's violin case. Only it wasn't a hard black case, but a soft, blue one.

I saw Gustav scampering down the stairs and I angrily reached out with my hand - my arm got longer and longer and got all the way down the stairs where I pulled Gustav back up by his tail, but retracting my arm back into my body. But, as I caught Gustav in my arms, there was a strange cat tangled up with him. The cat was white and golden-colored and strangely calm (Gustav was looking very guilty because he had just peed). The cat was huge ... the cat turned and SMILED at me.

I woke up. I had only been asleep for a couple of hours, so I went back to sleep. Yet when I woke again, 5 hours later, the above is all still vivid, though there is much more of an earlier part of the dream that I have forgotten.

Cathedrals

All I can remember about last night's extremely elaborate dream is a Japanese woman telling me I have permission to use a hidden cathedral to perform a concert of sacred music with our choir.

The curious thing is, I do not know this woman. But there was another unknown Japanese woman in a different dream a few days ago who had redesigned my house.

This is not the same Japanese woman, because this one has sort of a round face and is chubbier.

However, as soon as I set foot in the hidden Cathedral which had to be reached through the vestibule of a more public church, I immediately recognized the Cathedral. It was a circular stone building in which there were many levels encircling the center like the levels of an opera house. The reason I knew this cathedral was that it has been in a different dream of mine along time ago. If I can look up that old dream, I can connect the meaning. 

For some reason, the Japanese seem to be playing a big role. I don't know why. Anyway, although I know the dream was elaborate and complex, the scene is all I remember.

A three-layered dream

I slept fitfully last night and had a dream. It began with a discussion I was having about the Oxford and Cambridge dinner in which I was explaining that I had managed to invite VS Ramachandran to speak. The person I was talking with kept saying, "But no, we are getting George Orwell" And I kept insisting Orwell is dead. The argument grows heated and I wake up ... or I think I do ...

And when I wake up I'm still in a dream. It's a mysterious hotel room with blue velvet drapes. I lie there thinking about my dream. Suddenly, a naked man (on my left) rears up beside me and terrifies me. I thought I was alone. He fades away. It might be a ghost or a nightmare but it frightens me and I wake up. Or think I do....

Still inside my dream I get up and I try to put on the lights so I can sleep without being afraid. I wander over to my right where there is a hallway and bathroom. I seal the hallway off by pulling some blue velvet drapes that are the same color as the curtains.

As I walk back to bed, a huge, neon-green Persian cat is purring against the wall. It can't be real, I think, yet I think to myself but this is no dream, I just woke up. I pick up the cat which is soft and delicate and stroke it. i start chanting to myself, this is no dream, this is no dream. With the cat in my arms, I turn around to go to bed and suddenly I see a dog on the floor.

The dog seems to be a collie. It is a beautiful large dog and completely motionless, even its hair, as though frozen in time. As I watch the dog comes to life and stretches and turns to me. I wake up for the third time and I'm in the real world.

My Secret New House

My dream:

A tall, beautiful Japanese woman who is a friend of Miho Fukutame has been the new interior designer of my house. There is a big reception going on to celebrate this design. The reception takes place in a large living room with wooden stairs that go up to an interior veranda, and on the left there is an entrance to my secret headquarters, a library, bedroom and a toilet accessible through a French window.

Me dream starts in medias res with the Japanese lady explaining the new color scheme and its meaning. Miho is watching. There are some very meaningful potted plants, but on waking I forgot their meaning.

I go out of the secret area and mingle with the guests for a while, then I slip back inside to use the toilet, but while I do so one of the guests, a tall German who appears to be some kind of ambassador or diplomat (but it's not my friend the German ambassador because this guy is bald) accidentally walks into the private area and sees be through the French window. In alarm, he leaves.

I continue in the toilet for a while, then I get up and go back to the guests. I can see, on the balcony, back through to my private space and I wonder why there door is glass. Through it I see the shelves of an enormous library with green and orange books. There are so many guests, the party is becoming cramped.

As I feared, my guests open the glass door and flood into the private area. I run ahead hoping to stave them off. I haven'd had time to fix it all up, I think.... but, as I enter, I see that an empty, sunken space has now been lined with an elegant, purple sofa with a zig-zag shape, a modular sofa thrown together to fit the sunken space. 3 or 4 steps lead down and the guests enter the new area, oohing and aahing about the design of the room. I realize that my staff have, in the last few moments, redecorate the private area with old furniture that had been hidden or discarded and it fits the new space and looks completely new ... as Miho's friend explains to the guests the color scheme, I turn a corner deeper into my private space and see more furniture I thought was lost, including a white sofa I had thrown away long ago, and now it's mix-and-matched with other old furniture and looks like a new design completely.

Thank god, I'm thinking, I've fooled all the guests into thinking this is all part of the new redesign....

Then I wake up.

Secrets of the Universe

My amazingly vivid dream. I was working as an apprentice to a mad scientist who was collecting all the most powerful secrets of the universe and hiding them, disguised as ancient artefacts, in an antique store, a very ordinary looking store in a strip of shops along a boring city street.

The time has come to gather all the secrets and use them to build the machine that will hold the ultimate truth. I go to the shop and realize that the interior is on fire. The fire is burning brightly but nothing is charred. Next door, there is a Chinese restaurant where everyone is eating and laughing, but I notice that they are frozen. My boss has slowed down time.

In the split second that has stretched and stretched, a long line of purple robots march into the antique store and each one carries out one of the ancient secrets. They move, slowly, majestically, in a long line down the street. The leader stops and each one walks into him and the robors connect one by one to form a massive, purple tank like vehicle. 

Then the vehicle moves off and we follow in what appears to be an old jalopy but is actually a high-tech device, also in disguise.

Suddenly, we are being followed by another high tech device disguised as a jalopy. She is chasing us down the highway as we follow the huge purple robot tank. The driver is a determined woman. She's wearing like a gendarme cap. 

She fires various projectiles at us and finally there is a magnetic disk attached to a chain. It flies over and strikes our car, reeling us in.... we are stranded on the side of the road and I wake up....

Wheelchair Class

I also had a dream the previous night, which I only remembered because I told Stacey Tappan over lunch.

I this dream, I'm confined to a wheelchair but I've been invited to a special display of a handicapped business section of a plane. We're in the air and the cabin has no seats, just railings and windows, and I'm able to fly around on my automatic wheelchair from corner to corner. I'm whizzing about on the wheelchair and the stewards and stewardesses are standing around beaming and applauding. They tell me how much work has been done to accommodate wheelchair customers in business.

I say, "But what about economy?"

And I look past the crowd of stewards and stewardesses to what looks like a dark and crownded cabin with rows of cramped seats.

The chief steward says to me, in an arrogant tone, "Oh, THOSE people don't have the same objectives when they travel."

Then I woke up.

Release the Tapes!

I dreamed that I was invited to what I thought was a writers conference. I was thrown into a room and tortured to reveal what they characterized as fascist secrets. I noticed a video camera. But thought nothing of it at first. 

It was a very painful session and I screamed and said many things that I wished I had not.

Afterwards, the rest of the conference was kind of fun. It was a free exchange of ideas. But towards the end the newsletter was shown to me. In this newsletter that was an ad, with a little box you could check to order tapes of my being tortured.

I completely lost my cool and said that they didn't have permission to publish the tapes. I was screaming at them. They said, "but all the other writers have agreed." I said, "this is a moral issue. I have to refuse." I was screaming my head off when I woke up.

The Bus Home

I can hardly remember any of this dream except the last scene, which is that I am with a large crowd of people waiting to "go home", standing in a kind of big concrete plaza. A bus comes up and everyone piles in, but I and my sister are unable to get on before it leaves. We wait in the empty square for another bus.

When the second bus comes, we get in the side near the back of the bus (left hand side) and I immediately see two (or more) terribly wounded soldiers lying on the back seats, deeply scarred and with awful wounds, their flesh looking like it's been in a grinder, ill fitting bandages, greenish-khakhi-ish uniforms.

We sit down in the first available seats which are black leather, foldable seats and they are really dilapidated and worn.

The bus leaves and we are jerked about because the square is full of deep potholes. There is an announcer voice, as if this were a tourist bus: "We are passing through the site of the Iraq war, the bloodiest in our country's history...."

Then I wake up.

That dream was preceded by an incredibly long and convoluted narrative which is all gone from my mind; only the final scene remains.

Songs of Praise

So my dream ... this is a full 13 hours later but I still remember one big part of what was a very long dream. It is that I am on a sort of inner veranda of a hallway and below me, people are singing a beautiful anthem. They're seated at a long table or in pews. Indeed, I'm overwhelmed by how harmonically pure and beautifully it is sung. So I walk down the stairway toward the singers.

Suddenly I find I have to accompany them on the "organ" ... but it's not an organ at all, more like a succession of shelves with abacus-like pegs and beads, and each shelf is in a higher key than the one below.

They start to sing an incredibly familiar hymn, but it has irregularly rhythmic phrases and I keep stumbling over it. When I wake up the melody of the hymn is ringing in my head but I can't for the life of me remember its name.

So now - 13 hours later - the words of the hymn come back to me as I'm getting ready for bed. I type the words "brothers and sisters draw near" into google and I get the whole text of the him which is: "Praise to the Lord, the Almighty, the King of Creation."

That's the tune which was stuck in my head all day long, the melody vividly remembered from Eton, but the words only just coming back to me hours after I woke up.

As I type this, I'm getting goosebumps, suggesting there's more to this dream than I think.... probably in the part I don't remember....

The White Room in New England

I had a dream so vivid that when I was dreaming I thought it was a memory. It was a white bedroom in New England, with the windows open, white curtains billowing, a gentle breeze, a white bed, white pillows. My friend Deborah Geithner was speaking to me. She was saying, "You're here at last, you really need a month to alleviate your stress."

When I woke up I thought it was a memory, not a dream, but I've never been to a room like that in New England, not exactly. And Deborah passed away. This is at least the second time she's appeared to me in a dream since she has gone.

Purple

This is what I dreamed this morning (I can barely remember it because I didn't write it down and it's now 5 hours later). 

I was living in a society where it was forbidden to wear purple. For some reason, to avoid this, our family were all wearing clothes made of old newspapers. We were all in bed when a gang of vigilantes sprang up from around our beds and began shooting at us with AK-47s. I don't know if I died, but in the next scene in my dream we were all enveloped in diaphonous, purple flowing robes that were streaming in the wind, standing among the clouds. I don't remember any more, but I know there was a lot more.

Stately Homes

I had another really complicated dream which I need to tell you. I soon as I write it down I'll probably go back to sleep because I haven't had enough sleep yet. In my dream, I am married and living in the suburban house with a son named Brian. It's morning . My wife who is white is trembling very hard. She holds 2 cups of coffee and one of them is about to spill.

I realize why it is. Every morning my son, who is Chinese, waits in the kitchen. He's a holy terror and always feelings himself at home to surprise her when she comes into the kitchen every morning. This time is no different. He wears an orange anorack and is waiting to spring on her. 

But she has out what it him she comes in from behind. She's holding the coffee and the baby. When he springs he misses. It's because she has painted fake eyes on the baby's head so that he miscalculates his jump.

My wife calmly sets the coffee on the table. My son is very hyper active because his trick didn't work. He grabs me by the hand and pulled me out of the back door and says we're going to the park.

We get into a subway which is completely green. I mean the train is green. Suddenly I realize that I am dreaming because the train doesn't stop in subway stations. Instead it stops right at the destination where people want to go. So now it stops right in the park and we get out and we are in the park itself.

Holding his hand I walk alongside the green wooden wall. Now that I know I'm dreaming, I tell myself to wake up.

But when I wake up, i'm still in a dream and I wake up in a bed I don't recognize. I want to get to my own room. I stagger out of bed and I have to avoid Mikey's legs. He appears to be sprawled on the floor next to the bed. I open a wooden door and go out. On the other side of the corridor to the right, that is my real room.

When I go in however the room is windy because the window was open. Outside it is night. I'm just in time to see a round red fluffy thing fly out of the window. I know it's not a bird because it is so round. 

The floor is covered with unfamiliar undergrowth. In fact my room appears to be somehow in nature as well as in the house.

Suddenly, what appears to be a black zombie hand but is actually composed of some kind of vegetation, starts crawling towards me. It's neither alive not dead. I pick it up and it's fingers are quivering. I scream at it who are you? In Thai. As i scream I think to myself I'm still dreaming and I want to why I'm speaking thai tonight because in my dreams I rarely do.

I shake and throttle the black vegetation arm. It still moves. I fling it out of the window. Then I wake up.

Music from the Dead

I had a vivid dream about two friends I love very much who are both dead. I dreamt that I was talking to Deborah Geithner on the phone and we were discussing making music together. She tells me to come to her house to pick up some sheet music. Her house is easy to find as it is straight down Sukhumvit Road. I see her in this dream and it's forty years ago, she would have just turned forty.

I hail a taxi and I get into the car with an old lady who in my dream is not identified. We set off but for some reason my mind wanders and I realize that I have not actually told the cab where to go. And the taxi has taken a long curved turn to the right and is now going down a long soi.

I realize that I no longer know where we are or where I'm going. I tell the taxi to let me off somewhere so I can call. The place I am let off is some kind of waystation, rest stop, or post office. Or clearing house. There are little windows with people in line waiting for things.

When I phone, I reach Peter Geithner, her husband. I tell him, "I'm just coming over to pick up some music. Can you tell me the address?"

"But why are you coming here?" he asks me. He takes an inquisitorial tone, as if trying to get me to say something I don't want to say.

For someone reason the conversation just goes around and around in circles, and finally I ask "Is it Soi 7?" and I realize I am wrong, that is an old address, and I never had an idea where they are living now, or any idea where to go when I set off.

Looking up on the wall, I see that someone has written the name Kanán 19119. (My memory is slipping in the exact number but it has ones and nines in it). The old lady who is with me (I still don't know her) says, "That's the address, write it down."

I say, "But it's not Geithner, it's Kanán. It is someone else."

Nevertheless, I follow her example and start writing it down. Then I wake up.