Dream: October 17, 2011 (the co-narcissist)

I am in a man's house; he is quite wealthy, an official. A small group of 60s style secret agents - sort of KGB-like, swarm about. The agents warn me about the man, "He's dangerous." I counter, "But he's always been nice to me." They caution, "You've only been to Level I with him, you've no idea what happens at Level II."

While he is an 'important' man he seems a classic narcissist, and perhaps even worse than that. In the dream he is hypnotic, and like a snake, dangerous, and I don't know why I don't heed caution.

The man asks me to go away with him for a night or two. I agree, despite the consternation of the agents. The man doesn't seem to notice the agents, or, if he does, thinks them unimportant.

We, the man and I, are sitting in the back seat of a car, a chauffeur ready to drive us.

An agent in a dark coat appears suddenly at the open car window, and despite the attempts of the other agents to stop him, plunges a hypodermic needle into the man's stomach - only I put my hand in front to protect him and receive the shot instead.

The agents outside the car don't know what has happened. I try to speak. There is some chaos. I can feel the poison overtaking my nervous system. The man barely notices, clearly doesn't care. I can hardly move, and then I go completely blind. In the darkness, I try to whisper that I am dying but my lips no longer move.

                              

Dream: July 30, 2011 (The man at the door)

A man comes to the door a few times but I ignore him. Then he is knocking insistently. Only my daughter and I are home. I sneak downstairs and hide below the window of the door and say we're not interested, sorry. He persists, though. During the conversation I realize the door isn't locked and slowly slide the lock, hoping he won't hear. It's an old fashioned lock, not my new dead bolt. My daughter is on the stairs behind me, watching. Once the door is locked, I rise up a little to peer through the window to see who is trying to gain entry. The glass is obscuring glass, thick, old, and fogs everything. I see a man, average height, good build, in an old cotton orange shirt, short thinning auburn hair, blue eyes, leathery skin that's reddish in colour. But blurry, out of focus, due to the glass. While I can't be more than a slight opaqueness in the shadows, a bare movement at the base of the window, he sees me and becomes angry that I won't let him in. I don't know who he is or what he wants or why he thinks he can come in.

_
It came to me suddenly. The man in the dream resembles the man at the computer repair shop. Yesterday when I picked up my dead LaCie EXT HDD, the electrical cord had not been in the shipment from the technician. I wasn't happy about that. The man behind the counter asked where I lived. I mentioned the cross-streets. He offered to deliver it personally. I said no. The conversation went on. He offered three times to deliver the cord to my home today. Of course, I refused.

But there is also another situation of persistence, which I'd rather not talk about in my public blog.

Clearly this requires a resisting energy, like in the dream. It's so exhausting.

The Science Behind Dreaming: Scientific American

"...participants who exhibited more low frequency theta waves in the frontal lobes were also more likely to remember their dreams... This finding is interesting because the increased frontal theta activity the researchers observed looks just like the successful encoding and retrieval of autobiographical memories seen while we are awake. That is, it is the same electrical oscillations in the frontal cortex that make the recollection of episodic memories (e.g., things that happened to you) possible. Thus, these findings suggest that the neurophysiological mechanisms that we employ while dreaming (and recalling dreams) are the same as when we construct and retrieve memories while we are awake."

"...dreams help regulate traffic on that fragile bridge which connects our experiences with our emotions and memories."


The Science Behind Dreaming: Scientific American

Dream: July 25, 2011

An empty apartment pool, high up, maybe the 20th or 22nd floor. The building is thin, constructed of whitened concrete. Light from the slits of windows shines on the water. My ex makes me swim naked. He is in a bathing suit. He is in his late 40s; I am more like my 20s. It's okay because we are alone. I swim in the blue chlorinated water around the bend. The pool is shaped like a half moon.

Then we walk down the street, where, again, I am naked and he is dressed. I don't like this, am embarrassed.

I rush back to the building, trying to hide my body. We are in the elevator rising. On the screen in the elevator I try to edit the YouTube video. I want to put on the clothes I am carrying. Only I can't. I have to go to the YouTube studio to do that.

Rising Water

My table is set up in a dining area in a small carpeted room adjacent to an enclosed porch overlooking the lake. I take it away from the hands working on it and move it into the windowed area with the sun and waves close.

Alone, I continue preparing my table, perhaps for dinner for my family, although underneath are art supplies, brushes, tubes of paint, a disposable palette, primed canvas; it's on wheels.

The building disappears and I find myself on a spit of land in the room whose windows have now dissolved so that the air pours in.

The area around where I am setting up is becoming wetter and soon will be impossible to reach. The room has disappeared and I am standing on a low-lying bank beside rising water. The ground is muddy and grassy, soggy. I continue setting the table until I realize my family won't be able to get here.

When I look out towards the water, I understand how vulnerable my set-up is. One storm, one lash of water, and everything's gone.

I am considering how to move inland but slowly come to wakefulness in my warm bed in the pre-dawn darkness.

If only, before...

On a bridge, as if on the Great Wall of China, before a wide green valley and drop into a canyon of rock, the Siberian shaman standing beside me, sharp blue eyes, neck thick with middle-age, threw out the line with the sinker on the end, small metallic piece like a tiny boomerang, and caught floating flocks of ghostly men in black. They are like children's Halloween puppets, black cloth pulled over a head of cotton batten and tied, empty bodies. A group of them appear, drifting in the air. I am alone, the line and sinker in my hand. While I'd watched him throw it out and the way it looped around and back corralling the ghosts in black cloth, causing them to fall into the deep rocky canyon below, I hadn't been shown how. As I looked at the sinker in my hand, the ghosts caught a woman and took her out over the precipitous drop, hovering about her as if she were a doll, and cut her long blue-black hair and sliced the back of her white neck, a thin line of blood, and I couldn't throw the hook and line without catching her and causing her to fall into the pit with the flock in black. I woke with guilt, shame. I'm not used to warfare but I should have flung the line out, at least tried, when I had a chance. Before, before they got her...

Dream...

Not much going on muse-wise lately. But still enjoying my revealing dreams... this has much resonance with where I'm currently working. And makes me wonder...

I am working in an elevator as a receptionist for a large bank. There are three of us at a long desk. As the elevator goes up and down, the building shakes. The doors never seem to open, though.

On break I have to go to another building and take its elevator down.

Instead of a normal concourse level, I find a Third World-type mall that is empty. It's dark, and there are only a few lights. I walk around to the other side of the mall where there are fields that I can only see as far as the lights of the mall reveal. It could be a Caribbean Island. In the fields men are walking towards me. Dark-skinned men. They are walking like zombies.

I realize that, though I am an older woman, the place is deserted and I am alone, and I get scared. So I run back around the mall, and take the elevator up and go back to my job as a receptionist in the closed elevator in the building that is so high it shakes in the wind.

I am unnerved by what happened and want to leave, but a woman who's in charge looks at my chart and says, 'No, you can't go, you have to finish your hours...'