I had a dream in which I and my companion, a woman, not sure if she is a lover or an accomplice, discover that we have blundered into an alternate universe. Everything and everyone has different relationships and feels very strange. We are wearing medieval clothing. But the building we are in is modern.
My friend says this is because of the Queen's baby. What do you mean? I say. She said, We must sneak into the room where the baby sleeps. And we must reach the baby's Eye.
The baby sleeps in a very high story of a skyscraper. The penthouse I think. We find the baby's crib. This is what we must do says my companion, pulling out a hypodermic needle. Peering over the edge of the crib, I see that the child cannot be seen directly. An inflatable plastic cushion covers his face and on this cushion is depicted a single eye. My friend stabs the needle into the eye, injecting a magical fluid.
Suddenly we know that reality has shifted and we are back to our true selves. We hear the queen, outside the door, asking about her baby. My friend waves the needle and it turns into a long cigarette with a cigarette holder. She flourishes it in the air and smokes it and we walk out onto the veranda.
As I stand on the balcony overlooking a huge metropolis, there are many purple skyscrapers. Suddenly they turn different colors and different styles, switching between art deco and something more modern.
I wake up.
Composer's Conference
I had a curious dream. I was at some kind of composers conference or gathering. We all have to contribute a piece of music. My piece was I think dashed off. They were sitting around discussing it. They couldn't understand some of the directions.
Somebody said what does this mean? The direction was perform half of a hashed tag. I said well just think of any hash tag, and half perform it. What do you mean half a soprano asked. Oh never mind I said just sing anything.
They all started to ridicule the piece and another singer said to me it actually really isn't very good is it. But I had already started to compose another piece in my head. So I said, I'm going to switch out the piece. I wanted to begin with simple triplet D major arpeggios in the strings when I saw that there were only two string players but I knew I could make a clarinet Play one of the parts. Then I knew that I could place two sopranos on top and they would sing a peculiar winding atonal melody. The atonal canon would twist in and out above the tonal accompaniment.
I became oblivious to their taunts as I started to compose the new piece which I could see every note of clearly in my head. At this music unfolded in my mind, I woke up.
Safavids
In my dream it's during the Safavid Empire and I'm leading a huge rebellion against some Shah or other. It's a splendid dream with battle scenes and spectacular Persian dress, cast of thousands. I lose the battle and I am dragged before my nephew, a sweet and delicate teen, who apparently as a test of his loyalty must order me beheaded. We sit on coaches having a tender and loving last meal and then I am led off to my execution.... then I wake up.
Weasel
In my dream last night, it was definitely what you'd call an "anxiety" dream. I'm in a long corridor manning a ticket counter for a performance of my opera THE SNOW DRAGON and there's a growing queue of people behind me. I have a list of preorders. One of them is Witaya Tumornsoontorn and I can't find his name. Finally I realize someone has misspelled his name as WEASEL (all caps) and clumsily erased it and his own name is much fainter. "Don't worry," I tell him. "You have an E-ticket anyway and you can go straight in."
Thing is, this is a long narrow corridor and the door at the end which leads to the lobby of the theatre is latched and the queue is getting longer. I force the door open and march through the lobby into the theatre to tell them they can't start yet because the audience is trapped in this massive queue.
But in the theatre which is only half full and doesn't have proper theatre seats, just the plastic-cushion dinner chairs you find in office supply stores, there is a film going on, some kind of business presentation.
Back of theatre, an open bar is doing great business. I go up to the bar and give them my message, and they serve me a drink.
The Shaman Who Fixed Dreams
Many dreams last night which I only remember snatches. The last one was about A girl who I meet in her store. She is a shaman who fixes peoples dreams. She tells me that she must fix the princesses dreams because the princess is not dreaming right. She tells me that where she comes from dreams are just as real as the real world. We are in the shop. The shop is bisected with shelving full of brightly colored objects that I cannot identify. Another dream I had tonight was about a huge music competition. There's a boy who switches sides and becomes my spy, doing so by entering the competition venue, making an abrupt left turn after declaring his allegiance to the opposing side, and dotting down a hidden tunnel to where my musicians are. He says he can go back-and-forth and tell me everything about the other people.
I wish I could remember more. There were other dreams too.
Field of Diana
Last night I had performance dreams ... first the orchestra is preparing to perform in the basement of some hotel. A lady takes us upstairs and we find ourselves in a huge shopping mall lobby, but the shops are all closed. She says, "This is the Field of Diana." She takes me up and down twin corridors looking for what is supposedly a well known gay bar, but it is closed. Then in the front of the mall, there is a coffee shop or bar and it too is closed, but the lights start to come on. They are opening specially for us.
Then I dream that I've been invited to play a cameo at the Met. In it, I am hidden under the front floorboards of the proscenium, which can be opened up like a lid. I emerge magically to present something to the leading lady.
When the opera ends, they open up the floorboards and I discover I'm missing a golden shoe, and maybe another golden object, perhaps an apple. A boy in a toga peers curiously as I try to retrieve them. I think to myself — this boy has no armpit hair. He scurries off. I think he's one of the three boys from "The Magic Flute." Suddenly I realize that the floorboards are crammed with irretrievable golden shoes and apples from all the people who were asked to do this cameo.
I climb out of the narrow gap and walk into the theatre itself thinking, "What joy! I've performed at the Met!"
KARM
I dreamed that after profound meditation on the meaning of existence, I had come to know a sentence that explains everything. I cannot remember the sentence except that contained the tetragram KANT. The word was written on a white grid and was the only sky-blue square. It didn't seem to be in the center of the grid but in the top center. The idea was that the blueness of the square would draw you away and in the end you would concentrate only on that single sentence. Later the same night, I dreamed that the word was either KAZT, or KARM.
My Dream House
Last night I had a dream that can only be described as wish fulfilment. I dreamed that I was moving into a new house. It only cost 20,000 a month in my dream but it was a stunning penthouse. I was looking through the bedroom first. There was an adjoining room so cavernous I was sure I would use it as my office even though it had no windows ... I didn't notice at first it was just a walk-in closet. There was a long corridor and at the far end of the house was another huge living room. It was only the rugs I didn't like — they were sort of fake, but I knew I could move in new rugs from my old home. In this big corner room, Paye Srinarong was playing the violin, He asked me how I managed to get this house for only 20,000 a month.
I left the house briefly and found a complex of other houses and restaurants, all very elegant. When I went back I told the people who were helping me move, "We won't starve here."
I went back to the bedroom. On the way there was an antechamber to the bedroom and I realized the rugs were much better here. There was a blue rug with a Turkish design (according to the dream, but the design was actually Persian) and at the entrance to my bedroom there was another blue rug. "Now THAT one is worth money," I said in the dream, "look at the abrash on it." It was faded but beautiful.
I walked back down the corridor again. Turning left and left again I found a second corridor. It was so narrow I had to navigate it sideways. On my right was just wall but on my right were weird machines behind heavy metal doors. There was also a master fuse box for the entire building. I realized that the entire complex was being run from my penthouse. When I arrived at the other side of the corridor I found a beautiful room with two recessed alcoves on either side of a beautiful inset column. I realized that this room could be the library. It was all done in sky blue. "But where will we have tea?" I was thinking.
Then I turned and saw on the other side of the corridor a beautiful room with blue Louis XV style chairs arranged in a circle. Why, there is the tea room, I thought. Moving further along, there was an identical room next to it. Perhaps a deeper hue of blue. I said, O good, one room for tea and one as a dining room.
As I woke up I began to realize that 20,000 a month wasn't so cheap; I had been thinking it was Thai baht, but in fact it may have been American dollars....
Anne Frank
In the wee hours this morning I saw Anne Frank in a dream. She was an old woman, but she still had a freshness in her voice, a childlike quality to her demeanor. She said to me very clearly, just as I was waking, "If I had survived the Holocaust, I'd be the same age as your mother today. Remember to tell everyone this isn't something that happened in ancient times. People are still here who were there."
It's almost true. Actually she would be three years older than my mother, but in my dream, the year of the diary was 1947... three years later than the actual events ... and the war was still going on.
It makes me think that the dream came from an alternate reality where history was a little different. Maybe, in that reality, she did survive, and was speaking to me across an intercosmic chasm.
Defining Love
What a dream. I was watching a production of Siegfried. I was watching from a box that overlooked the stage so intimately that I could reach out and touch the singers. It was a somewhat avant-garde production.
The scene is not in the opera as far as I know. Siegfried is being asked to define what love is. The person he was talking to was not a character in the opera, but was some kind of supernatural being such as a dwarf or elf. He starts to sing, in German, "what is this feeling that makes you shudder, tremble, flare up, burst into flame?" These lines are in fact somewhat reminiscent of Mime's description of fear in act one. The music however sounds a little bit like Helen singing about love in the third act of Michael Tippett's King Priam.
As Siegfried sings, he is eating slices of duck and noodles which he removes with chopsticks from a glass cabinet set in front of him, similar to the cabinets found in Chinese noodle shops. There are also dim sum in the cabinet.
As I intently lean over, a chef in a tall hat comes to the front of the stage. To my annoyance he places a large round flan of bread on a cutting board in front of Siegfried. He pours sauce and mincemeat topping over the bread as if he's making a pizza. But then he takes a squeeze bottle of ketchup and squirts it all over the right half of the pizza. The smell rises up and as I'm allergic to it makes me very ill. He folds the pizza. This covers up the ketchup and fixes the smell.
I lean over to my companion at the opera who appears to be the stage designer Stephanie Mielchen. I tell her this kind of thing is completely normal on stage.
Tea with the Earl
I dreamt that I was at a posh party, possibly one thrown by the Earl of Warwick. At this party it wasn't quite clear whether I was one of the guests, or the Butler. In any case, at one point I was being called upon to demonstrate the proper pronunciation of "your majesty". An American lady in a tiara was imitating me without success.
Another guest said to her, "you will never be able to say that because you didn't go to Eton." She began complaining. The guest explained, "you couldn't have gone because only boys went there."
There were some huge glass windows looking out onto the lawn where other guests sat. They were at elegant tables, with white clawed legs, and glass tops. A man in tails with a bushy white beard said to me, through the window, "there are only two Etonians at this party. So why are you the Butler?"
I responded, "I shouldn't be, but as I'm the only miserable Oriental in the room, I'm forced to play the role of a miserable domestic."
"Oh I see" said the bearded man. "Then
You must recall this obscure publication called the unitary papers. This fellow, Broadley Spearley, was a member. They were very controversial."
I was laughing. I said, "oh you must mean Aubrey Beardsley. I remember him well."
"You're that old?" He said
"No no, I don't remember him literally. I studied about it. He was with Byron." (by the way Byron went to Harrow so this was a mistake in my dream.) "They had this publication which was very sexually liberated."
I could see the publication in my minds eye. It was tabloid size, with an illustration of a bright orange flame.
At that point something very crucial happened but now I'm desperately trying to remember it. Then I woke up.
Thais and Turks
So I continued to dream this night, but they were less fantasy and horror. I dreamed I was in a small room in an armchair and to my right, a girl was using a computer. She stood up from her chair and another girl walked into the room (an L shaped room). The other girl said, "I have to watch TV." She breezed in and grabbed the cushion from the chair where the computer girl had risen from, and just sailed out of the room.
Incensed, I follow and there's a small corridor that leads left and opens into a small room where a bunch of girls are all watching TV. Their faces are covered with blankets. I start shouting, "Don't you know she was using that pillow! How dare you! You are a bunch of unmannerly women, not properly brought up!"
The odd thing was that the whole dream was in Thai, which is unusual for me as English was my first language.
The next dream I had, I was at a Turkish fast food stand trying to order a Soltani (something I've only had in Persian restaurants). I was trying to speak Turkish to the girl behind the counter and wondering whether I should call her "hatun". Then I went round the corner to the men's room. I was telling someone while peeing that I was addicted to this Turkish mini-series.
Then I woke up....
Everyone Knows
I had an amazing dream. First I was in a bookstore and I was reading a magazine that told that the origins of my fame where in sleazy horror films even though they are all obscure now. It was a strange magazine because the text was in four squares of print instead of two columns. It mentioned my old film "The Laughng Dead" and claimed it had made me a household name after an obscure past.
Then I was standing outside in the night under a lamppost with a guy named Stephen and telling him I read that magazine. I said, "Yes in those days I took any monster job I could get. One time I played a ball of grease in a gas station. I would lie in wait and attack the wheels and gasoline and metal of cars."
As we stood there there was a view of a car with bright headlights along a deserted country road at night. The road had a railing and I think it overlooked an abyss.
"Funny," he said, "there was a gas station like that in my old school. In fact the grease ball monster was well known. Everyone knew to avoid that gas station at night. Only ghosts used it. It was known ... we had one gas station for the dead, and one for the living."
"Yeah," I said, "Everyone knows that kind of thing."
I woke up.
You are Mine
A recurring dream last night in which I am sitting in a restaurant facing a wall. At the next table, there is a family with two children, one of them a baby. It's a small baby, looks like about 1 year old, but we recognize each other. The baby keeps looking at me and smiling and has bright eyes, he's wearing an orange shirt. I say, "I know you. You are mine, but somehow we weren't born in the right place."
Triplets
I had a dream that I and Mikey were sort of the same person and we (I) was being raised in an orphanage. A murder occurs in the orphanage and we are all assigned a public defender, a plump, dark-skinned guy who talks very loudly. He is dressed in green.
Now Mikey and I are separate people and I'm campaigning to have him get a separate lawyer, and a woman in a white business suit is hired. She is clearly a top laywer. We walk into the courtroom and the accused kids are all being barked at by the dark-skinned lawyer, loudly disturbing the courthouse. So Mikey's lawyer says, "Not him, he as his own counsel." She takes Mikey to a different part of the room which is elevated, with a bar counter, all wood, wooden panels, wood plank flooring.
The other lawyer is perfectly willing to get rid of one of his clients, but there seems to be some resentment.
We all hear that from time to time, the circus comes to the courthouse, but it is legendary; no one has ever seen. But the court calls a recess and suddenly the walls are gone and we are standing in a forest clearing ... only everyone is gone and only Mikey and I are left and now we are the same person again.
Suddenly, running in from the right across our view, the circus does show up. Or is it an army? First there is a troop of mysterious people cloaked from head to toe in turquoise coats, then a band of soldiers in bright red Ottoman Empire clothing, then more and more color-coded regiments. They are all running across what looks like a wooden bridge. I don't see a body of water though, just a sea of leaves.
I (and Mikey) decide to walk forward, to see these people up close. We cross the clearing and enter the forest pathway. They are all standing now, a kind of mediaeval army with knights and lords, very brightly colored, mostly crimsons. They seem hostile, but I begin to sing a national anthem - a cappella - very boldly. It's a militaristic kind of anthem and the words are in a weird language, but the second half is repeated, with triplets decorating the tune. As I walk towards them singing, their hostility becomes acceptance. I wake up.
Railway Station
I had a complex dream sequence last night. First, I was in a magnificent waiting room and I was ushered into the presence of a powerful, richly dressed king. He was seated at a business desk and in the process of writing a check for one million baht. He said to me, "I'm leaving the addressee blank. You can either pay the foundation, or yourself."
I knew it made no difference because virtually every penny that comes my way somehow ends up working for the foundation anyway .... I woke up.
When I went back to sleep, I was trying to tell people about my dream (this was in another dream!), but they wouldn't believe me ... not even my mother.
Then I suddenly found myself in a huge — railway station of some kind — in the company of a group of travelling musicians. We were all journeying towards the place where we would perform. There was a huge communications system in the station with mouthpieces scattered around the station, connected by a system of tubes. They were information systems; you speak into the mouthpiece and an answer comes out.
The musicians have been testing the machine's ability to speak Turkish and they all told me it's not good. "Maybe it's having a problem with your Uighur accent," I tell the main musician who oddly enough appears to be Daniel Draganov who as far as I know speaks German, Czech, and maybe Russian.
I tell him, "I've picked up some Turkish from watching this miniseries, but it's only useless words like "hünkârim" and I wouldn't have anyone I could actually address as such. Although I've also figured out that çok means 'very'."
We pass through very narrow alleys. I wonder why we have to walk, why the organizers of the concert didn't send a car. Suddenly the alley opens out and there is an angular grassy slope that leads straight to an ocean of incredible blueness. Our goal is on the opposite shore.
I wake up.
Visa to Nowhere
My dream — I had a nightmare. I was standing with Mike at a counter which looked like a Post Office counter, and I was trying to get Mike a visa. But instead they said to me, your visa to Thailand has expired. You must leave in 100 days. I said, "But this is a Thai passport!" They said, "Didn't you look at the stamp when you last came in? You must leave!" Then in my dream, the head of the PR department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was on the phone and said, "Shame on you! You must leave!"
Quartet...
I have a dream. The shounen thai quartet was rehearsing in my house. One of them was missing. They were all wondering who could play. They looked across the street and called out the name of someone who used to play in the quartet. But it wasn't him. Several more people walked by.
Secondly the quartet was actually rehearsing but it had a lot more than four people in it. It had a conductor too. The conductor was my orchestra manager, Now. Also, they were playing not in my house, but on the pavement across the street from my house. And I was watching from the other side of the road.
They began to play a piece called Quartet no. 4 in g major by Jay. One of the violinists said, but what is the piece called? The conductor said ask Ajaan.
I said, it doesn't have a name as such. It's just a quartet and a number and it is in G major. It doesn't need to have a name.
That violinist, who had never been a member of this Quartet, and was a little bit chubby, said, I don't understand it. How can a piece of music not have a name?
I said classical music is like that. It only needs to have a number and a key and what kind of piece it is. In this case, it's a quartet.
They started to play. I woke up.
House by a River
It's 4:53 AM and I woke him up from this terrifying and beautiful dream which I'm trying to write down before it fades. First, in the dream I am a woman living alone and I have three encounters with a killer who's trying to move into my house. I've already forgotten most of the first encounter. In the second it's a sort of Victorian mansion and I succeeded in getting away. The mansion is full of red velvet walls and golden baroque molding.
In the last encounter, I'm escaping to a house by a river. It's a house with white washed walls next to a pier and a river. The killer follows me. I send him away by forcing him to sing a sort of cursed song in D major which makes him unable to stop moving and he and a woman he is with go away by boat when they leave a strange woman enters the room and begins dancing in a jerking way. She is in white. I'm thinking St. Vitus dance. Thrashing around. Then she stops and the killer returns. I realize that I have a choice of sending him and his friend away with the song, or forcing the mad dance to enter them. I send them off again with the wild song.
I run into a room, a breakfast room in a hotel. And try to write down this dream. And I do so my sister shows up and starts telling me a story. Please don't please don't I say. I'm trying to write down this dream. It's so important and I'll forget it. She keeps talking over me. I finally leave the room and start writing the dream out in another room. In this dream, I can barely remember anything except the third encounter. I keep writing that I'm a suburban woman. Then I keep correcting myself. Because there's not actually a suburb. As I do so, I wake up.
I've already forgotten so many of the details. I'm going to go back to bed now and maybe more will come back to me.
4 hours after the last dream I woke up from a different dream ... still staying at some hotel, I am on my way to breakfast down a path with flagstones under an awning, but I have to vacuum the path as I go. The "vacuum cleaner" is a pole with a flexible joint and a completely circular metal plate with a sort of gauze pad that has contact with the ground. The vacuum cleaner doesn't work well (indeed I can't see any visible power supply or source), and by the time I get to the breakfast area my gauze is worn. I shout out to a busboy, I need a new vacuum cleaner. I wake up.
Another Journey
I had a dream. It started when I and Nath and some other people were trying to cross a huge muddy river. There were bridges ... rickety, dangerous ones. One in particular did reach the other side where there were red sandstone cliffs and caves. We left it too late and the I could see that the end of the bridge was now submerged, but I thought that I could still cross and leap across to the other side.
We walked. It took forever. It was a black, asphalt bridge, a thin ribbon, and the distance was really far, and reaching the end, more of the bridge was underwater than I thought. There was no way to walk. I jumped. The water was awful - it was dirty and it stung and was full of lacerating objects. It was agony and I screamed "No, no, it's dangerous!" But I managed to make it across.
The next obstacle was a cave mouth. We entered and were looking for a lever or button so that the cave would open out further or there would be a doorway. Other members of our party were pushing at various slits or holes when suddenly a huge metal door came flying up with a huge clang, trapping those people when their whole floor flew underground and they perished. Only Nath and I remained.
We were on either side of a low barricade and we decided to keep moving until we reached a restaurant. We had heard of an Indian restaurant that was right nearby by a wall prevented us from reaching it. I'll just go on until this barricade ends, I said, and we'll connect up when there's a gap.
The barricade ended up stretching a long way. It was a dusty journey. All along the barricade, to my right, workmen were building something. The whole city was constantly under construction, shifting, with soaring mountainsides and doorways in the cliffs that seemed to be inaccessible. I kept waking until I noticed that the barricade where all the workmen were building something was really an entire river; I could see the water flowing through gaps in the planking and the water was the color of emerald. I had lost Nath completely.
I kept walking and presently reached a new part of the city where the barricade had ended. I was apparently no longer over the river. I reached a T junction. Across the street was a black-walled mountain and on the street corner was a frosted glass store front called "Wada Science Fiction."
I know this place, I thought. (At first it looked like the Other Change of Hobbit bookstore in Berkley.) I called Nath on my cell phone. I said, I'm fine now, I've found a science fiction store that I recognize, remember, I wrote SF in the old days, this is familiar territory. Nath tells me he and Muay are sitting in a restaurant just on the other side of the science fiction store.
So I cross the street (it us an old street, perhaps cobbled or at any rate very worn). The door of the science fiction store is open but I don't recognize any of the objects. I realize it is not the store I knew before.
I walk to the right where there is a turn (the mountain ends) and I can round the corner. All of sudden there is the back of the store, but they are not selling science fiction. It's an assortment of Hindu gods, brightly colored, many heads and arms, statues that line the path and then there are steps up to a plateau where thousands more gods are on sale. I realize that I am already carrying a golden, heavy god statue in a black shoulder bag (I haven't been aware that I had this bag until this moment.) The gods on the hill are gleaming, glistening, very colorful. The shop is more like a pagoda, with steps and levels (not a Thai pagoda but more like a Japanese one). I go on past the shop, heaving towards the restaurant where Nath is waiting, though I have a feeling I am still not close to where he is.