Dreams are weird

Woke from a dream in which I'd written a profile of Russell Crowe for Rolling Stone

There was a formatting issue and they needed me to resend the piece and I couldn't find it.

I was living with Taika Waititi and came home to go through my laptop, only to find he had friends over.

They were watching TV loudly and I needed quiet to look through my files in a panic.

Embarrassingly I started yelling at everyone.

Taika kept his cool, but his friends began chastising me.

I think my subconscious is telling me not to apply for the feature-writing mentorship that I saw yesterday. 

Cryptic

Woke from a dream where I swerved to avoid golden emu chicks and their mother of Gobbagombalin Bridge 

There were also a couple of young roos and we ended up sliding backwards into the Murrumbidgee River. 

I opened a window to get everyone out and Eden didn't answer, 

Had a feeling I'd seen emus on the Bridge in a previous dream. 

Apparently they're a symbol of family and it's interesting that male emu will raise chicks. 

Dreams are weird.

MIDI camera

Woke from a dream with this image in my mind

Can’t remember the scene now, but there was a group of people.

Someone was using a camera and I noticed it had a MIDI input.

As my mind pondered why they’d want to record MIDI information, it occurred to me they’re a spy.

It was a spy camera for stealing music! 

Dreams are wired?

“These brain circuits are self-organized at birth and some of the early teaching is already done,” Crair said. “It’s like dreaming about what you are going to see before you even open your eyes.”

Dreams are weird

Dreams are not logical. They speak to us about the other side of ourselves, the side that has been so fervently abandoned in modernity’s pursuit of explication. This is the fertile darkness, the lunar mind, the unconscious, which the tools of the underworld assist in exposing. Dreams and psychedelics support us in making the unconscious conscious, and, with proper assimilation, thus ladle some much-needed water into psyches parched by solar consciousness.

More weird dreams

Woke from a dream where I interviewed Kid Koala ahead of his tour of regional Australia

Eric was showing his website analytics that demonstrated spikes in searches for the towns on the tour as they were announced.

When asked why he wanted to visit these smaller locations, I saw the venues would be golf courses and the events were less like a concert and more like a picnic with an Easter egg hunt.

Except, instead of finding chocolate, the audience were playing golf with balls that broadcast drum breaks as they flew threw the air to seek out samples for the performance as they landed.

Dreams are weird

Woke from a dream in which Prince had written a book about sexuality for teens

It was written in that conversational style of his ‘Raspberry Beret’ lyrics and had scenes about people dealing with relationship issues.

One scene recounted his father as a younger man taking two girlfriends to the swimming pool.

They differed in a funny way, with one having large breasts and the other having a pronounced arse.

The young man overheard them fighting in the pool and realised he could avoid having to deal with their jealousy by staying in the change room.

Later in the dream I was sitting down to watch a TV adaptation of Prince’s book with my kids.

I was confronted to find that the lessons about recognising sexual energy were being told by characters in ’80s-style leather outfits with headbands, who walked around with their hands on their erect (but clothed) body parts.

Then, in a plot twist, I realised the Prince character was a young woman.

Dreams are weird.

Dream are eternal

My friend Nick posted an interesting observation about dreams:

Another reality filter.
We're all eternal beings, and our dreams are the experience of that eternity.
Eternity is living a life where everything is possible, as in a dream.
Being 'awake' is when a tiny subset of those possibilities are acted out in cooperation with other eternal beings - it takes effort.
Death returns us to eternal dreaming, to 'resting in peace'.
Pictures like this are so misleading, you don't dream 'in your head'.
Dreams are a full reality, they're eternity.
In our 'waking lives' little parcels of eternity still appear - our memories, colours etc., what some philosophers call 'eternal objects'.

Dream within a dream

Yesterday I awoke from a dream in which I awoke at a friend's house and discussed the dream I'd been having -- a dream within a dream

That nested dream had been about learning to fly on an eagle, which was a beaut image and I wrote a haiku to remind myself of it.

However, the conversation with the friend also included pointing at a newspaper written in Sanskrit and identifying a swastika on the page.

The friend had replied that it had another meaning.

I'd shared this detail with my partner yesterday morning, then it unsettled me when we watched the film Inherent Vice last night:



I'm not sure but I think the response in the film is word-for-word what was said in my dream.

Dreams are weird.

Transcending

Had a nice moment at life drawing last night

We were listening to music and Elton John's 'Song for Guy' came on, which normally seems a bit overdone.

Usually I hear the drum machine and the flanger effect and the percussion and think the song is overcooked.

Last night though, I was able to feel more absorbed in my drawing and for a brief moment forgot where I was.

Interesting to read just now that Elton wrote in the liner notes for the single:

"... As I was writing this song one Sunday, I imagined myself floating into space and looking down at my own body."

Last night I had a dream about having an out of body experience.

Full moon dream

I've observed dreams are weird and this morning I had an interesting experience

The setting was an old family home from my childhood but I was holidaying there with my father and his current wife.

I was in the kitchen, checking on my homebrews and find many of the bottles were leaking gas.

My stepmother came home with a pet cat and I joked it was their child.

The cat began stumbling into the kitchen cupboards and my stepmother said "the child doesn't know it's asleep."

At this point I think I realised I was dreaming and, as usually happens, my conscious mind kicked in and I awoke.

It was early morning and I didn't think I'd get back to sleep, so I got up and started watching a movie.

Around the time of the full moon, I stopped the film to pee and started crying.

This was a sustained sobbing in the backyard under the moonlight.

I went for a walk and cried around the block.

Then I came home and wrote a series of haiku.

There were a variety of things going through my mind but I felt that I've turned a corner in my life.

I feel I've taken a large step away from my childhood as throughout my sobbing I felt surprised to hear my voice was that of an adult.

Later, while on Facebook, I was surprised to get a message from a burner who I see at Modifyre asking how the moon had been for me.

He's a lovely bloke and one who models a very different energy, a caring and calming kind, which seems to contrast with his big Maori presence.

I've been feeling quite emotional all day and thought I'd write this down so I can think on it again in the future.

Dreams are weird

I've written this here before but I'll write it again: dreams are weird

This morning I awoke thinking about a retreat. It was led by Laura, who has led previous retreats I've been on but we were in a high school science class.

Laura and I talked about a scary feeling we were getting from the darkened corner of the science lab. She suggested that a woman at the retreat might use her spectrometer to investigate.

This woman drew an old SLR camera from her bag and took a photo. As the flash lit the dark area it revealed a bear skeleton lumbering towards us.

When I told my partner Jo about this dream, she suggested I should look up the symbolism of bears.

Some sources see them as symbols of earth, others as representing transformation for the way they seemingly die when hibernating and spring to life again.

Anyway, it was a great scene.

Photo from http://www.dalerogersammonite.com/

Dreaming about trees

In recent years I've had a few dreams about scarred trees

It's a theme that's surprised me because they are the symbols of this landscape being Wiradjuri country.

The other week, the night before the poetry reading in Narrandera, I had a dream in which a Wiradjuri man I know was showing me tree hollows and explaining how they were used as shelter by Aboriginals.

The conversation was sorta based on one I'd had a week earlier, when I quizzed this bloke about the scarred trees that I see in my travels around the Riverina and their significance.

The bit where the dream got weird was the following day, when I drove into Narrandera Common for a swim and spotted these hollowed River Red Gums.

There they were, trees from my dream the night before.

Mugwort

This leafy shrub has contributed to many amazing dreams over the years.

If you use it instead of hops in beer, then it creates a light and euphoric drink.

It's also good infused in boiling water as a tea.

Dreaming to survive

In recent years the role of dreams has started to become a theme on my blog.

It mightn't be as common as talking about music or media releases, but I thought I'd comment on how satisfying I found it to read an essay by Sue Llewellyn on the role of dreams.

Particularly this bit:

During REM dreaming, our brains are better at identifying the probabilistic patterns that underlie the behaviour of living creatures. These patterns are portrayed in unconscious images, which are retained for the awake state. Whenever fast, instinctive action is required, archetypically in dangerous situations, unconscious images associate past experience to predict the probable significance of, for example, an ambiguous flash of yellow. This gives rise to a somewhat surprising conclusion. In our evolutionary past, we dreamed to survive.

Click on the hypertext quote above to read the full essay at Aeon.co.

Dreamy soundtrack

This week my body has been fighting a viral infection, which has required a lot of sleep and led to a number of vivid dreams. Dreams are weird, as I've observed here and here.

On Monday night I dreamed I was walking around a town on the Murray River at night with a guitar. I saw these scars on the large River Red Gums that looked kinda recent and realised they were doorways.

On Tuesday night, after an angry email to an authority figure, I dreamed he was showing me a crypt and telling me it was mine.

Then this afternoon I awoke with a song in my head. It was a simple arrangement, a light guitar chord with a bass groove. Anyway, it took me a little while to remember it was a song I'd recorded earlier this year.

Dreams are weird

I've written elsewhere on the weirdness of dreams but this blogpost will take the discussion to a new level of weirdness.

When I was a kid and I had nightmares and I started training myself to wake before it got too scary. I still seem to do it. So on Saturday morning when I awoke from a dream where I was confronted by a burglar, I woke up feeling a bit agitated.

The dream involved spotting through a window a burglar going through my stuff. I have these internal windows in my house, so I'd assumed it was my current home. I went to the phone and dialed for the police and received an answering machine message with a woman's voice. The burglar discovered me and came rushing over, as if to grab or attack me. He sat on the couch next to me as he did this, seemed to to hear the woman's voice and then turned to leave. I awoke at this point but not before he turned his head, revealing a second face. The face was familiar and male and on the back of his head.

This two-faced figure has resonance with me because as I child I went to London, where I saw an advertisement on the wall in an underground train station of a male with eyes in the back of his head. I remember hiding behind my mother to avoid looking at it. Interestingly, the ad was for insurance -- promoting the idea you could watch out for threats where you wouldn't normally be able to see.

Now the really weird part is that on the Saturday morning I awoke from this dream, my partner's brother Ben was staying the night. In hindsight I think the second face on the burglar may have been his face but I'm not sure.

On Saturday night we got a call from Ben, saying he'd returned home to find he'd been burgled. Ben lives with his parents at present, in a part of the house I've often lived in too and had dreams about in the past. It has a lot of windows. A guitar amp I'd lent Ben was stolen. The burglar had been interrupted by a friend who lives next door, who even spoke to him.

I've had dreams that felt like premonitions before but this one seemed to anticipate news of events that had happened but hadn't yet been discovered. Maybe it's a coincidence but it's an eerie one for me.

My great great grandmother (my mother's mother's mother's mother) was a medium and I've often thought it would be an interesting idea to research. I've also thought I should stop some of my behaviours that reduce the likelihood of dreaming but, frankly, it kinda freaks me out to think about having dreams if they're like this one.

This dream features in my Disquiet Junto piece this week. Have a listen and read more on the Bassling blog.

Dreams are weird

A friend once remarked that he didn't think there was much more boring in conversation than people recounting dreams. He has a point, Carl Jung thought dreams were specific to the dreamer and my experience has been that the conversation is usually a monologue punctuated with the words 'and then...'.

I read a theory that dreams help us prepare, like some teaching tool for unlikely events. It cited that many people talk after accidents of how it was a dream-like experience. I guess this would be a way for the brain to create neural pathways to cope with challenges.

I like this idea because I sometimes think I see the future in my dreams. It's a crazy idea I know but I guess I like thinking it. This started when I drank a bottle of mugwort beer that had been given to my partner but she couldn't have it as she was pregnant. I drank it and had the most vivid dreams but I won't bore you with the details.

Since then I've had more dreams that seem prophetic but also some I hope aren't. Like after my first child was born I had a heap of dreams where he died or suffered accidents and I guess it was either a sign of my subconscious coping with my new role or it was a way of preparing me for the possibility I will need to react to a seriously challenging circumstance.

Dreams are weird.