True, not fictionalized, to the best of my recall. (Because the memory function rapidly deteriorates immediately upon crossing the membrane from sleeping to waking — the sudden influx of sensory inputs taxes one’s will in an overpowering way.)

I am in the audience of a kind of talk show host program. But the venue is unusual. Outdoors, daytime, in a Florida-like setting. The audience is dispersed throughout comfortable cabanas and foliage, under palm trees and so on. I can hear the host, a sort of amalgam of Letterman and Jimmy Kimmel, as though conversationally via some technology through concealed nearby speakers. The tone of the show is not comedy at the moment. Nor entertainment. More like informational or investigatory, but light.

The host introduces a new segment. He is talking about an unusual special guest. A being (it is unclear whether human or something approximately human) who claims and seems to exhibit strange abilities. These were not specified well. It felt as though whatever remarkable qualities the special guest possessed were going to be shown rather than talked about. I became aware that from my vantage point, sitting, I could see the special guest by direct line of sight off to my left at not too great a distance. He was sitting calmly in a similar open cabana situation as I was. At first I expected a quite alien-looking presence. But he appeared human overtly, though unusually calm and with a presence.

The host continued his introductory remarks which were fading from my attention. I decided to focus myself upon the special guest whom I could see in profile as he looked forward at the host, waiting and listening. I tested him/it. Not in a challenging way. More in a playful or experimental way, not expecting to have any impact upon the being at all. I transmitted him a question… If you can notice me, detect my thinking, then show it. Turn to look at me! At once his head and attention swivelled 90 degrees settling directly upon me. His gaze and eyes were magnetic, almost alarming in their intensity. His eyes reminded me of those of the actor, Elijah Wood, who played Frodo in the very early scenes from ‘The Lord of the Rings’. I could not detect either malice or gentleness in him. I gathered no emotion, just intense scrutiny.

It continued a little too long. I began transmitting thanks for his satisfying of my request. Polite indications that I meant no inadvertant offense. I felt an inner awareness that he and I were free to communicate now, telepathically, regardless what else was happening with the audience or the host. He continued his assessing of me. His gaze was an assessment, a deep reading of my biography…

At this point the dream interrupted abruptly… My son walked into the room asking whether it was time to get up for school yet. 🙂

Waking Thoughts

From my experience, and also according to some of my researches, the experience of time passage differs vastly between the dreaming and waking conditions. What might seem like an extended complex drama while dreaming, complete with side narratives and backstory detours, actually transpire within a matter of seconds when considered from real life ‘objective’ time. This detail alone illustrates much concerning the radical nature of dream consciousness, and perhaps heralds something about what we are actually capable of. The other persistent thing I’ve noticed is that the great majority of recalled dreams occur within close proximity to the waking transition moment. Often directly before it. This leads one to suspect that our memory abilities, while awake, are fairly weak at penetrating deeply backwards into asleep time. Only what was immediately occupying us before we awoke is within the reach of normal waking recall. And even this will rapidly dissipate if we do not make an effort to imprint it.

Something about our constitution during the ‘asleep’ process derails our usual capacity for etching events which hold our attention into our being for later reviewing. The other point I’ll make here is that a deeper different sleep condition, beyond dreaming, is pointed at. This darker deep sleep condition perhaps occupies the lion’s share of our night, and carries with it an entirely different consciousness which we have little clue about. The dreaming is merely a kind of intermediate condition easing the transition between the two. Such transitions can also happen in the middle of the night as well. But these probably tax our later waking memory even more.

Regarding this dream in particular, I’d say the following. It was of intermediate lucidity, or brightness. I see dream lucidity as a kind of measure of the directness and significance of a dream. In other words: is it more like a direct communication, or a typical passive meandering endurance of a hodge-podge recombination of daily and long held memories. I think the degree or lack of perceived passivity is a key here. How unconscious are we? Also, I could agree that the vividness of the dream events seem to increase with the lucidity. The most amazing and profound dreams I have ever had seem to occur mid-night rather than near waking, and they seem to indicate the assistance or intervening of entities beyond human consciousness, for they happen when we are completely unable to ‘do’ anything and yet are colored by remarkable clarity and a sense of meaning. One does not feel alone in one’s own wilderness during them. One feels accompanied, observed, considered, offered a wise remark to mull over.

_______RS

Image : detail from Paul Klee’s 1929 painting “Strong Dream”, which caused a bit of a stir. I read recently that Klee was inspired by the drawings of young children, admiring their unfettered freedom from expressive rules. Klee was an amateur musician also and often practiced violin for an hour to work himself into the right mindset for creating visual art.

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