A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

...that a fantasy novel by Jay Williams had just been reprinted and I could carry it in my bookshop. (In reality, Williams wrote the Danny Dunn books and a wonderful, out of print children's novel, The Hero From Otherwhere. The book in my dream does not exist.)

Thrilled, I rushed to order it, as I remembered loving it when I was a kid. It was about a thirteen-year-old girl and a twenty-year-old man who become penpals, then travel to a fantasy world together. As that premise sounds potentially a bit sketchy, I decided to re-read it so I could confidently say, "I know what it sounds like, but it's a beautiful story of friendship and absolutely nothing sexual or romantic happens between them."

I settled in for the re-read. Here's the first sentence of chapter two:

Reading each other's letters, they both had plenty of orgasms.

This morning I woke up and was immensely relieved that...

- I had not bought a new car and then lost it.

- I am not being stalked by Shirley Jackson.

- I did not forget to get dressed and not realize that I was wandering naked around Tokyo until several offended elderly men informed me.

- I do not need to guiltily inform my therapist that I have forgotten to get dressed and wandered naked in public multiple times. (This was a new one - in the dream, I recalled other "naked in public dreams" as being a history of wandering around naked in public.)

- I did not randomly decide not to accept the free offer of a gorgeous if slightly battered original painting of a gorgeous pink and black comic book spread.

- I did not spend hours and hours inexplicably attempting to fit a horse skull given to me by Shirley Jackson, a live strawberry plant with six strawberries, and a handful of dirt into the same pot without burying the strawberries, and also without it ever occurring to me that I could pick up the strawberry plant, put in the dirt and skull, and then put the strawberry on top instead of endlessly pouring in dirt and then uncovering the buried strawberries.

So that was a restful night.

I have dreamed of forgetting to wear a mask at a large maskless gathering every night for at least the past week. STOOOOOOOOOOP.

If the pandemic is still affecting your daily life, what sort of pandemic dreams have you all been having? Or do you dream of going to movies and parties and other Before Times?

I dreamed that LA mounted a regional production of Hamilton, with easily available tickets at $5.00 each. Of course, I immediately dragged basically everyone I knew, including a group of visiting sf fans from other countries. Most of the people I brought (about 20 of them) were unfamiliar with the play, but I was certain that they would be instant converts.

When it began, I realized that the director had inexplicably decided to combine the play with Three Penny Opera, which he also didn't understand - for instance, "Pirate Jenny" was done as a strip-tease. Also, all the actors were white.

This went on for 15 minutes while I vainly attempted to communicate in whispers to my friends that this was not the play. "This is like going to see Hamlet and finding that they've actually produced Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead!" I whispered indignantly.

Then I was relieved that apparently they were actually going to do at least some Hamilton, as a black actor appeared and shouted "I'm Aaron Burr!"

Then the opening chords of "Alexander Hamilton" began.

I then found that the director had completely rewritten the lyrics to simplify them, and also to use an all-purpose, gender neutral pronoun of his own invention, "zoo."

All I remember was "Zoo are waiting around for zoo," when I woke up, greatly relieved that this travesty - and I don't mean Stoppard's-- does not actually exist.

Yet. (Thanks to Tool of Satan for the link.)

All I remember about this one was someone solemnly telling me, regarding some important person, "We call him 'the Jung of Irøn Lüng.'" The latter was not a reference to medical equipment, but a place name or possibly a title.

My subconscious may be snarking about the high proportion of untranslated, "foreign" words in Jung's The Pyschology of the Transference via what I presume are the completely nonsensical diacriticals in "Irøn Lüng."

I and some others were watching a martial arts demonstration in the open air, on a plateau - maybe a mountaintop. No buildings anywhere, just flat earth. We were all sitting on the ground. The person sitting beside me scooted back, and I leaned forward to see what he was trying to get away from.

I hadn't noticed it before, but there was a hole in the ground, like a sinkhole, twisting downward like a tornado bored into the earth, lined with jagged rock protrusions. It went down and down, thousands of feet, but I could see all the way to the bottom. The tunnel stopped short, so there was a space of open air with no tunnel walls around it, and beneath that was moving, foam-streaked water, like you'd see through the cracks in a pier. I wasn't certain, but I thought it was the ocean. I felt a sense of awe.

ETA: I feel like certain images have been recurring recently: bodies of water, the ocean, eels and snakes, and horses or horselike things like deer or centaurs. (I haven't written up all my dreams here - some I scribbled into my notebook and never got around to transcribing.)

Before I started the program, or maybe very soon into it, I had a dream which I remember because I wrote it down. (It felt significant.)

I was riding my bicycle along the Pacific Coast Highway between LA and Santa Barbara, where it's a narrow strip between the hills and the ocean. I somehow had gotten off the highway, and was riding on a perilously narrow bike trail on the hills, a long way up. The sea below was an intense, electric blue. I was frightened.

I came upon a group of people, and one of them told me, "If you got up, you can get down the same way."

Another school book, this one for Personality 1.

A manual for accessing one’s unconscious via dreams and “active imagination.” Johnson is a Jungian and discusses archetypes, but emphasizes that most dream symbolism is highly personal. Whether one believes that dreams are literal messages from the unconscious, or that one’s interpretation of the largely random matter of dreams is a method for accessing unexplored areas of the psyche, if one has any interest in exploring dreams and the unconscious, Johnson’s methods seem likely to be helpful.

He outlines detailed steps for dream interpretation, as follows:

Associations: Write down all the associations for each element of the dream, one at a time, not censoring oneself. That is, if the dream involves a blue car, all the associations for “blue.” Then all the associations for “car.” Etc.

Dynamics: Connect the images and associations with one’s inner life. Which associations seem intuitively valid? What in one’s inner life might relate to them? He suggests that real people in dreams typically don’t represent the actual people, but characteristics one associates with them.

Interpretations: Search for the central message that seems to be communicated.

Rituals: Do a small but concrete ritual action to cement the meaning of the dream and its message.

He also explains and gives steps for “active imagination.” Basically, this is doing somewhat directed daydreaming while writing down the daydream as it occurs. This sounds potentially interesting, and I will try it. (There’s way too much involved to try to summarize it here, but the book is easily available in the US, if you’re curious.)

Caveat: some mild gender stereotyping, and romanticizing of the past and non-western cultures.

Last night I dreamed that Anthony Bourdain and I were strolling around an indoor-outdoor food court somewhere in Asia, sampling and discussing all the food. We each tried a lamb skewer with different seasonings, his tandoori, mine spice-rubbed, then took a bite of the one we didn't get. He deemed mine "tough but good." I also recall ramen, donburi, and some very fancy wagashi.

Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth

I am supposed to keep a dream journal this quarter. First dream of the quarter below the cut.

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