Satori, dreams — Stephen on November 20, 2010 @ 9:55 am — 1 comment
I had a very odd dream last night. I was with a group of people taking a long hike up to the top of a mountain, apparently to participate in a paramilitary singing contest of some sort. On the way up were were asked if we had our tags, as they were important. All along our hike we kept evaluating each other’s singing until we reached a large old wooden shack near the top where we stopped to rest and prepare ourselves. As we were getting settled in the shack and our trainers were showing us around, I realized I had to go to the restroom and had to go to several of them before I found one that was clean, where the door locked, etc. Once finished I realized I had a small stain on the front of my pants and tried to clean it with water from the faucet only to now have a large water stain on my pants. Embarrassed, I tried to sneak past everyone to my room to change my pants, and yet no one seemed to notice. We then talked in various groups about the contest, and what sorts of things might be expected of us. Separately we all started to make our way up the wooded path towards the competition hall, which was more like a high school gymnasium building. On the way, I noticed one of my friends had transformed himself into a bird and was circling overhead. He stopped on the branch of a tree and asked me to help him practice. I gave him a few pointers and tried to come up with some octave range tests for him. Then he changed back into a person and we walked to the hall. Once inside, we were all dressed in sort of karate black belt outfits and were standing on mats awaiting instructions. Over the loudspeaker system came this booming voice to layout the rules, which were then immediately posted on large flat screen monitors on the wall. While most of the monitors were posting exactly what had been said in English, one of them was all in Russian, oddly. For some reason, I wasn’t nervous at all, I thought it was all kind of interesting. And then as the competition was about to begin, I woke up.
I was in the low-ceilinged top floor of an old house, looking out the small gabled window for the guests that were arriving and impatiently waiting for those still to arrive. This room had perhaps been an old attic that was converted, and although painted a light, inoffensive color, it felt a little stuffy and cramped. The event was possibly a sort of wake or memorial, but this was never mentioned. Food was laid out along the table for the arriving guests, but I couldn’t really make out anyone that was there. I kept talking to someone though, and we kept trying to work out these odd formulas that kept floating in the air like writing on a chalkboard, the letters themselves in grays, blues, and greens as we spoke of them. They all had a kind of mathematical notation about them (several of them ended with things like “= #b4″) even as they seemed not at all related to math, but were more about people, their names and their personal histories. They were somehow related to telling a story about the guests yet to arrive and what had happened to them. There was a light sadness in the air as people came and went. Shortly thereafter we found ourselves, myself and two companions, in the countryside (it may have been France) walking down half abandoned pathways because the bus were we on had broken down. It was taking us quite a long time to make our way back and we came to several unrecognizable areas and had to guess at which fork in the road to take. Still, we were unconcerned and making our way back in the summer air with slow determination. As we reached a sort of open, grassy, and stony area my friend Andrew showed up and started walking with us the rest of the way back. He was complaining a little about not having much work and asking me if I was happy with my clients and the work I was doing. I told him that yes I was and he seemed a little frustrated and sad at his own situation. Concerned, I started trying to talk him out of being glum about it, letting him know that it was ok and that he would soon find what he was looking for, and then I woke up.
I had this strange dream last night that I was with some boyfriend and he lived on some high floor of a building that we had just come out of. There was some sort of big street party happening and we were chatting next to a line of parked cars with my first boyfriend from Paris (Marc) about something when he looked at me in a funny way and said I had some smudge or mark on my forehead. Then I realized that I had left something inside the apartment, so I went back to the building to get it. For some reason I had to take the stairs instead of the elevator, and yet it wasn’t like stairs, it was more like I had to climb up on various countertops and surfaces to keep going up. The street party seemed to also be happening in the building, and there was lots of music and drunk people around everywhere. At each landing I would go into the bathroom and look in the mirror for the smudge on my forehead that Marc had mentioned, but every time I tried to look at it, I couldn’t make out my own face in the mirror clearly enough to see it. I kept asking people around me if they could see it, and some said yes and some said no, so I was confused about whether it was really there or not.
I had a strange dream last night where some sort of large, air-conditioner sized device was stolen from my place of work. It was a TV or computer or something I wasn’t sure, but it was a vital piece of equipment and I was outraged that it had been stolen. Fortunately the repair guy who was there told me that someone had just dropped that exact item off in his shop that very morning. We went to his shop to lie in wait for the thief and confront him when he came to pick it up, but events kept preventing us from completing the arrest or apprehension of the guy. At one point he came in and the repair guy motioned to me that this was him, but just then some blonde woman with sunglasses and a fur coat came in and pushed her way to the front of the line to see the repair guy, and so the thief said he would be back later. Then we saw him coming out of his new apartment (where he had clearly wanted to place my equipment) carrying moving boxes to the trash with a helper. Things kept getting in the way of confronting him, but I kept expecting to at any moment. I tried to imagine what his excuse would be, caught dead to rights in his scam. But we had to wait, and so I retired to a huge maze-like apartment that I was sharing with friends to wait for the right moment. And then I woke up.
Sometimes our dreams reveal clear aspects of our personalities that we are trying to work through. I had such a dream last night:
I was on a fun trip to someplace very far away, and I kept inviting friends to come join us. The apartment we were renting was a great deal arranged by another friend of mine, and we were happy to be there. Later, some friends came from a great distance to join us on short notice and when I went to pay my arranging friend for the rooms, I realized it was a crazy price and we were really being ripped off. I argued at length about it, and he argued back, and I was really upset at myself for having not been more thorough about getting all the info, and how I was letting people down. We were in a dump and paying 500 euros for it (each!), and it turned out just so they could share our space on a dirty floor in this now crappy place.
This is one of those dreams that is so clear to me. For whatever reason (the way I was raised, vague insecurities) I am often worried about negotiating conflict that involves two separate parties. If it is only between me and the other party, no problem at all. I am direct in expressing what I want. But when I am working out a conflict that involves two competing parties, I always want everyone to be happy, even if the competing desires of various parties make that impossible. I am not sure why this particular type of conflict causes me stress when most kinds don’t, but clearly my subconscious is having a go at figuring it out.
I arrived at some ashram in the German countryside with some tall blond curly haired guy that was with me at the previous place we were escaping from. We were in an area where there were these strange shaped cars, rusted out in places but very futuristic at the same time. I looked up and noticed there was a really beautiful light filtering through the trees. Some woman took us on a tour around the somewhat suburban neighborhood, and then we were asked to stay at the ashram for awhile, or forced to stay, it wasn’t clear. We went to our room to rest before dinner, and suddenly the tall guy was gone and my cousin Josh was there, and there were a bunch of people in this series of rooms and we knew that they were all staying at this place to fix something about themselves. They weren’t prisoners exactly but still were there to work through some kind of order or punishment. I was explaining to Josh the rules in a place like this, and we picked up this weird new age book about quantum physics and spirituality written by Dolly Parton that we had to read as part of the program here. People kept saying this was good because it showed that this place was based in science and reason, not kooky new age pablum. We were then all forced to take a nap although no one was tired, and we had to sleep on the floor with just a blanket and it wasn’t very comfortable. We then noticed a woman get up (in contravention of the rules) and walk past us to open a secret door that led to a long path through the woods around the grounds of the ashram. I explained to Josh that with so little to do here, we take walks a lot and they were really nice and lasted a couple of hours and helped the time go by. When we came back from the walk we were asked to help out in the kitchen making part of the meal for everyone. Josh wanted to be helpful but served up corn chips which he wasn’t supposed to, because the leader of the place was allergic to them. Everyone at the table was very polite about it though.
There was a large group of us in some sort of resort or shelter in a big city that was very dense with buildings like New York, but more futuristic. We were listening to some live program on the radio and kept commenting about what they were leaving out. We kept saying, “That’s not Hollywood, what is wrong with them?” We were all famous somehow, and two of our group went down to the place where the show was being broadcast, and sort of muscled their way into it and onto the air. When they were on the air they went through the archives in that building, reading off names over the radio of things they pulled out of the boxes at the station. Most of these things were people’s names. They then came back to the shelter where we were, only now we were outdoors in the city, looking up over a long bridge to a massive tower on axis at the end. It was nighttime and all the buildings were lit up, and it was snowing but not cold or windy at all. It was an incredibly beautiful scene, but also quite stylized and old looking, like an artist’s idea of what the future would look like from the vantage point of 1930. We kept saying to each other “Now that’s Hollywood,” as we looked around the city, satisfied that some names had been correctly read on the radio.
Satori, dreams — Stephen on April 20, 2010 @ 8:37 am — 1 comment
Often times dreams are just a jumble of the images that you were presented with the previous day. I had such a dream last night. Here are some pieces of it:
I was at a party saying good bye to lots of people from LA, but we were in Paris at a bank. The woman who was throwing it looked a lot like Jujubee. As people were arriving at the party she was telling them over the intercom what they could not bring in, and the list of things were odd. She told them not to bring pacemakers and bank slates and equipment. I saw a lot of old friends and even though we were in a stationary building, the party was moving like on a bus through the streets of Paris. We kept looking out the window to figure out where we were (somewhere near the Bastille I guessed) but couldn’t. I told some people that I was hugging goodbye that I didn’t miss LA, but I missed them (which was not true in the case of the people I said good bye to, because they were only vague acquaintances, not ever close friends. But I didn’t want to hurt their feelings and it seemed appropriate in the moment.)
Prior to arriving at the party a few of us were traveling around with someone close to me, I could not make out who, but someone I had known a long time. And we kept packing and unpacking suitcases with lots of old things, memorabilia in them. I kept asking my close friend if he or she had everything, hadn’t forgotten anything, as we looked deeply into the suitcase for things that had been discarded about the room. All kinds of things, pants, books, tobacco, lamps, plastic bags, moldy old photographs. Something was really important to find in all of this mess, but we couldn’t and the bus/building was leaving for the party, so we gathered what we had and left.
Satori, dreams — Stephen on February 12, 2010 @ 9:36 am — 1 comment
I had a strange dream last night with a lot of moving parts to it. It really ranged across a ton of subjects, but I can only remember a few details. I was in some sort of hunting lodge type place with a bunch of people, cozy around a fireplace having drinks. To my right was the Queen of England, and she was saying something about her father the King who had died in the year 499. I somehow knew she meant to say 1499, but still I called her out on it.
“You are telling me that you have been Queen since 1499? That is over 500 years. No way.” I said, with a fair amount of nonchalance.
“Of course not,” she said, “I became Queen much later, but my father did die at that time.”
Incredulous, I consulted with a couple of friends near me over a hot toddy. “She is either lying or crazy,” I said.
I don’t remember much else in the dream except some long house with a bunch of rooms where a group of us were staying. We were hanging out at one end and some middle aged, blond female benefactor kept calling me on the intercom from the other to ask me for help with something.
Satori, dreams — Stephen on December 12, 2009 @ 7:26 pm — 0 comments
I often will post dreams here on my blog. I love dreams and think they are fascinating for what they tell us about our current conscious and subconscious preoccupations. Sometimes they are quite mysterious with no apparent connection to anything we are experiencing at the moment. And sometimes they are crystal clear, like the dream I had last night:
I was in a very large warehouse type space that was in some tropical place. I had been renting it for many months, but the place was pretty much empty, like I hadn’t moved in at all. I hadn’t bothered in all those months to do anything other than place a mattress on the floor, and there were some vague piles of junk in the far corners of this vast room. At one point my brother came back with me to the apartment from an all night party we had been at. He took a look around the place and started making all kinds of pronouncements and judgements about what a mess it was, how could I live like this and why was I even renting this place! Then suddenly my cousin Josh was there and I was trying to get half the rent from him but he told me that even though we had rented it together, he had only actually stayed a few times. As I tried to talk to him about the money, he was on the phone talking to one of his friends and completely ignoring me. So then and there I decided to hell with everybody, I was gong to fix the place up, so I began pulling all this cheap but well designed, brightly colored furniture out from various places around the room. There was a ton of it, and I started organizing it around the huge space, making smaller spaces out of the arrangements of furniture. As I was fixing the place up, more and more people were coming by to see the space and taking things away with them. People were milling about everywhere and I kept asking them to leave, but more and more kept coming, even as the others were leaving. I had no money but the place was really starting to look good with the found objects I had placed there. Suddenly Oprah was there and I asked her if she needed my phone number just in case to contact me, but she smiled condescendingly and said no. Then Levi Johnston who was next to me leaned over to shake my hand. Finally some drill sergeant type woman (very much like Jane Lynch) started asking everyone to get in line, then started calling out my name dismissively. As I turned to face her, I was squinting and couldn’t see her too clearly. As I tried to open my eyes, they were hurting a bit. I woke up with the sun in my face.
So to break it down:
I have been trying to find a rental place in Puerto Rico with my cousin Josh, where we are going in a couple of weeks. I have some money concerns about the whole enterprise, as I have had with money in general recently. My brother has been a bit judgmental with me recently about several things, and it has been upsetting me. And the rest? Just the pop culture debris and refuse that fills every nook and cranny of our brains. Although I was a little bugged that Oprah didn’t want my number. Who does she think she is?
