Dream Journal
September 19, 1999
It’s Saturday night, after going out drinking:
I dreamed that we moved to Oberlin. We were on the second floor, as is actually the case. It was night and people were going by outside our window looking for parties. Rebecca’s sister came by and crawled up the wall to the second story window, then talked and left. Then a crazy lady on her way somewhere came by and we told her to leave. Then this mussed-hair bleached-blonde fellah came in for a while, then left, walking about a story off the ground. Then all these people started arriving. They came in through our open front door, a balcony which appeared outside the window, and another open door leading to the hallway. Soon it was packed, like an Oberlin party. Everyone was college-aged and out for fun, telling jokes and playing tricks. Many were drunk, carrying 40s. I was drunk, too. I kept mis-recognizing people, then catching my error before going up to talk to them. Truth is, I didn’t recognize any of them. I worried about my things. I once walked past this couple and heard the guy say “I’m sorry I didn’t recognize your stuff” and the girl took it sexually and started snickering for a while as I went about.
After a while people began to leave, but then a few more would come through. Half-awakening, I felt strongly as if this were a true dream, that I wanted them all to leave, that this was an astral continuation of Saturday night partiers, now drunk and asleep in the early AM.
A car drove by in the physical world and it sounded as if filtered through an effect that made it sound like “zhaowm”, pulsing in and out in a definite manner around 2 pulses per second. The sound was as if slightly muffled, as if from behind a barrier or a veil. Wondering, “Is that really a car?” I awoke more and sat up. Rebecca went to the kitchen for water and the light in the door crack thinned and widened to the same rhythm, as if my entire consciousness were wavering back and forth at the same speed as the sound flux. Before long it settled.
Upon waking, the “Oberlin house” felt much like it was this one.
What We Do in Dreams: Here we see dreamers continuing their drunken revelries as if they hadn’t fallen asleep.
Misrecognition: Here I catch myself misrecognizing almost everyone I come across, and this is a very common phenomenon in dreams. In real near-realm interactions, this is due to similarity of appearance. Our desire to see people we know can project their faces onto nearby people with similar appearances, as it does in this near-realm scene. Here I catch myself making this mistake several times.
Taken together with the emotional meaning substitutions in rotes, a good amount of the time the person we dreaming about isn’t really the person we think it is. That’s not to say that we don’t have true dreams about the people we know — we certainly do. But we have to see without the interference of expectation and desire to know when it’s really them or not.
Dream Flux: I’m not sure what this is but it’s very interesting. It must be the cycling of the mind’s slow brain wave such as theta or delta affecting my audio and visual input. It’s a frequency I was tuned to in the dream state — one which modified my physical perceptions.
An Oberlin Overlay: My dream of moving to Oberlin is revealed as taking place in the near-realm version of our 2nd story apartment. Notice how people deal with our second-story apartment. One guys leaves and continues walking a story off the ground. Sarah comes to visit and climbs up the wall to our window. Others walked up to a non-existent balcony on our second-story window.