For a review of some of the images from these dreams, please visit this entry in my blog preemie: my life's (a) dream.
Dream 1
I was in a nice department store with a group of people. We may all have been young. We may also all have been dressed in 1980s clothes. We were all looking for clothes. We may have broken up into groups. I may have floated around alone for a while -- not walking, but floating around a few inches off the ground. At some point I may have ended up in front of a row of four mannequins in nice, satiny, lacy lingerie.
Dream 2
I walked, probably with an old woman, toward the back end of what was apparently a video rental store. The walls and floors were dark grey. And I don't remember whether there were any video display shelves up against the wall.
The old woman and I were probably talking about a room we were looking for. It basically had all the really graphic horror movies.
I found the door to the room, on our right. I opened the door, probably holding it for the woman. The woman thanked me, said she needed to be going, and walked away from the doorway, back the way we had come. It didn't make sense to me that she'd just up and walk away after we'd gone to such trouble looking for the room. But I was kind of relieved. I didn't want the old woman to see what kind of movies I liked.
The room was kind of big. There were only a few shelves of movies scattered throughout the room. I walked up to one shelve that stood against a grey, cinder block wall.
I could barely see what the movies were. But I started to get a weird, eerie feeling. I felt like if I got too close to these horror movies I'd unleash some sort of demon or monster in the room. But I didn't know what to do. I felt like I at least needed to get some movie. I may have started to think that if I grabbed the right horror movie, I wouldn't unleash a demon.
I walked to a set of shelves off to my left and looked there for a second before turning around and walking toward a set of shelves in the middle of the room. By this point I may simply have been looking over my shoulder the entire time, waiting for some kind of monster to come out and attack me.
Dream 3
I may have been in some city like Venice or Verona, but in modern times. I was in some place that felt like it was entirely made of polished stone or marble, like the dining area in Grand Central Station or some mall-like area in one of the Las Vegas resorts. The place was crowded with people in business suits running here and there.
I stood off to one side of a walkway. Caddy corner from me was a table where some people sat. The table may have been low, like a coffee table. And the people may have sat in all kinds of chairs -- a big, leather chair, smaller garden chairs, etc.
A businessman, probably a bit older, maybe in his late forties or early fifties, walked up. He probably said something I thought was horribly stiff and cheesy. I knew the man was a salesman. But because of his cheesy joke, I probably was immediately annoyed by him.
The salesman may have started, even while he was standing, giving some sort of sales pitch. I thought the sales pitch was hideous! The seated people invited the man to sit.
As the salesman sat, I either saw through his eyes or was now he. The people around the salesman were kind of a mixed group. They mostly looked like upper-mid-level business people, especially a blonde woman with short hair and a deep tan who wore a black skirt suit. But some of them looked a bit more relaxed, kind of like tough guys who had gotten fat as they'd aged.
The people were eating from a huge plate of pasta. One of the tough guys told the salesman to grab a plate. The salesman grabbed a plate and piled on some pasta. The pasta was just long spaghetti noodles, plain, apparently, with lots and lots of mozzarella cheese on top. The salesman shoveled the pasta into his mouth, holding the plate at mouth- or maybe even eye-level.
At some point the salesman started giving his sales pitch again. I still (even though I was seeing from the salesman's eyes) hated the pitch. But time started to fade forward. And I knew, even though the conversation was blurring out, that everybody the salesman spoke with had decided to buy what the salesman was selling.
Having witnessed the salesman's success, I immediately changed my mind about him. I knew that I'd probably never like the salesman's personality. But whatever steps he'd taken to get to the deal's close, I knew he'd done the right thing.
I thought through the steps I hadn't liked (whatever the cheesy beginning was) and the steps I'd been uncomfortable with (having to randomly eat a lot of food) and figured I'd have to really integrate a lot of this stuff into my own approach, because it worked.
My view was separated from the salesman's again. I was in a room with the salesman and a young woman who was probably the salesman's apprentice. I stood maybe three or four meters away from them.
We seemed to be in some weird sort of control room or something. The wall behind the woman and salesman was black, with a white screen, like a projector screen, and possibly, but maybe not, some sort of sci-fi-esque control panel underneath it. But off to my right (the salesman's left) was some orange, translucent wall, which I feel was the back side of some back wall in something like a display diorama in a museum.
The man started to explain the process of the deal I'd just seen with the young woman. As the man began to explain, my view faded to white. Then lines started to get scribbled out, like old drafting lines in a Leonardo sketch. The lines started to form some garden chair, which, I knew, was the chair the man had sat in when he'd made the deal (even though I was pretty sure he'd previously sat in one of the big, leather chairs).
The drawing sketched out more and more. The view of the drawing may also have rotated a bit. At some point, the drawing sort of faded into a real view of the area again.
I may have gotten a feeling that the lesson from this whole drawing moment was that even the manner of fabrication of the chair the salesman had sat in while making the deal was a part of the salesman's process. This seemed a bit outlandish to me. I hoped we would just get to the actual elements of the closing process.
Dream 4
I was in some large, dark room with a group of people. The people may have been young. Many or all of them were black. The walls and ceiling were probably black. The floor may have been concrete.
Set up around us were something like modular walls. But the walls made something more like a maze with room-like areas than a series of rooms. These modular walls were all screens. Bright, monochrome imagery probably played on the screens. There may also have been some kind of music or sound.
We were all part of some research project, probably for some conceptual art piece we were creating. This place may have been the installation we were making. But it was also probably something like a library or research area.
A few folks were on the ground, working on something like a computer but also like some machine for effects for the conceptual art piece. One of the people, a young, black man, asked me to look into some specific artists whose work or personality we were referencing in the piece.
I felt like I knew exactly who the young man was speaking about. I may even have said so. But I wasn't quite sure of everything I was saying. So I knew I'd need to double-check it with some additional research.
Another young, black man asked me if I knew that I was looking for information on a specific group of people (probably Sly and the Family Stone). I said yes. The man asked me if I'd like some help getting some specific information on them. He probably knew exact moments from history the other young man had been looking for. I said yes and was really appreciative.
The man may have asked me to come along with him to another room. But then he must instantly have been in that other room. I had to walk through the maze of screen walls. But I got to the room. It was a big, square room with an upright projector screen standing in the center above something like a small structure, like a small set of shelves or some kind of small, mechanical device.
The man may have been in the room when I was there. But he may already have been gone. He may have vanished only an instant after I'd seen him in the room. He may have been upset that it had taken me so long to get here. Or he may have waited for me to enter the room, let me know the information I'd needed to see was queued up to show on the screen, and then walked out of the room.
I watched the program. It was something like a Marvel movie. I clearly saw a character like Iron Man. I may have seen some other characters. The view was from a high, but not directly overhead, viewpoint, like a camera was at a steep angle, almost a right angle, that would eventually quickly swoop down to meet the characters (maybe including The Incredible Hulk?) face-to-face.
This whole program, however, was also an historical document. This was real film, from some real event that had happened, probably in the late 1960s. I'd learned whatever I'd needed to learn about the people I'd been sent to study. So now I headed back to discuss the information.
But when I got back to the first young man, I felt like I had taken way too much time. The young man may not have been annoyed by my slowness. But I may have felt like he noted it and would probably trust me less to run research projects in the future.
To justify my work, I tried to express what I'd learned -- probably, again, about Sly and the Family Stone. It took me a little bit of effort, but I started seeing what I'd seen on the screen in the other room. I planned to say everything to the young man as I re-saw all the imagery.
But I really don't think my mind was comfortable with the imagery at all. The imagery looked like computer graphics. The characters were all shiny, like they'd been made in the 1990s or 2000s. And everything just looked so comic book-like that I couldn't find anything in it like the type of historical gravity that would make me assume it was real.
I really started questioning whether I had seen what I'd needed to see after all. Had I seen the truth? Or had I just been queued up to watch a comic book movie?
Dream 5
(This dream occurred after I'd woken up, turned off my alarm, started recalling my previous dreams, and fallen back to sleep.)
I faded out of a memory of the dark room with the screen showing the historical imagery. Again, it all looked like a computer graphics comic book movie rather than an historical moment. So I just felt really weird. It was like I was trying to remember what I'd actually seen. I kept trying to look deeper into the imagery in order to see the real images.
But as I tried to do this, I may have been speaking about everything I'd seen. The more I spoke, the more my view faded, first into a white-out, and then into a huge office space.
The office space was enormous, like a giant trading floor for some large financial institution. It was vast and wide, filled with long rows of connected desk spaces, as opposed to cubicle farms. The room was huge. But the ceilings were kind of low, maybe only three meters high.
The only other person in this space was a young woman, my coworker, who sat directly across from me. She was white, with blonde-brown hair. I had apparently been telling her about my memory, which I may have known to have been a dream.
But even though it was a dream, it was also a reality. It was like something we did, maybe our job, maybe our hobby, maybe something related to our job but only peripherally, may have been related to exploring these alternate spaces, like the one I'd just explored, that were dreams, but were also real.
The discussion may have come back around to Sly and the Family Stone. The woman may have asked me if I knew who they were. I said yes. I may have thought she didn't know who they were, possibly because I couldn't figure out why she would have asked me that question.
So to give an example of a Sly and the Family Stone song, I started to sing "Everyday People." For the first few notes (really, just the "I" part), I sounded just like Sly Stone. But when the notes descended (the entire "am everyday people" part???!!!), I went way off key.
I knew I'd somehow made the melody unrecognizable. And, for sure, my coworker didn't recognize the song at all. I said I'd try again. It was one of the most popular pop songs around. She'd recognize it if I could just sing it right.
So I tried -- embarrassingly! -- a few more times. Every time, I would sound just like Sly Stone until a certain part in the descending notes. Then I'd just get everything horribly off key.
I thought that I realized that where I was making a mistake was in that descending part. I somehow wasn't going low enough. So now I tried to go really low. I sang the melody again. The melody was recognizable. But now I slid really, really low, so that I probably sang the words "everyday people" an octave lower than I'd needed to.
But I thought that maybe this was right. After all, I remembered some song I really liked where the melody got really low, in a way that had seemed both inventive and irreverent at the same time. Maybe "Everyday People" had been that song.
During all this time, my vision had probably faded back into darkness, like I was in some dark area between the office space and the dark room with the video playing -- maybe with my face close to one of the screen walls.
But now my view snapped back to the office space. My coworker said that the screen maze and the historical imagery that had played reminded her a lot of the work of some recent (French?) philosopher -- someone whose name was like Georges Sumner.
I knew who my coworker was talking about before she'd said his name. So I may have tried to say his name before my coworker did. But I don't think I could quite say it. I think I may have felt a little defeated because of this, like I was just getting nothing right today.
My coworker said I'd really like the philosopher's works (even though I was pretty sure I'd already read them). She handed me two of his books.
The books themselves looked and felt nice. They had that slightly grainy feel, like the covers of the Vintage International Faulkners from the 1990s. But the art on the covers was a bit more abstract. The imagery had a handmade, collage-like feel, so that, by contraries, I got the sense that the books were probably theory or philosophy about the high-tech media age. So even though I was pretty sure I'd already read the books, I was kind of eager to read them again.
I probably sat down at this point. I probably also had the feeling that the fact that my coworker shared these books with me probably demonstrated that we were pretty good friends and colleagues. This probably made me happy, even though I was still embarrassed about not having been able to get anything right at all in our conversation just now.
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