Dream Journal
July 25, 1997
Chrissie is my girlfriend as this begins. We were on our way to a youth group event. We’re driving around this dark neighborhood AND . . . simultaneously we’re fast-traveling through a mall. The powered-off TVs are houses and the car is a thought form. We come across a video billboard (it’s simply a large TV in the mall). I get enthralled watching this hilarious Popeye sketch in The Best of Saturday Night Live. Chrissie gets mad waiting for me and I decide to just forget the trip. I look back at the TV, which has this woman in a hot tub, and I travel into the scene. This is rationalized by me “remembering” that I traveled there by bus.
So I’m in the room with the hot tub and I take it to be the youth group event we’d been traveling to. There’s a cat in the middle of the tub half drowning and half repeatedly scratching like a robot. The woman is pretending she’ll take off her bikini top to tease the viewers. The joke is that whenever I try to get to her, there’s the cat’s paw in the way. Then the filming is over. [I attempt to interact with her] Now the tub is a bed, and the girl is shifting between Tech Writer Jen and Joleen.
Awake: A single image can become anything via shifts in context. It can begin as random hypnagogic patterns or even solid objects. A shift in context, in how you see it, can completely alter it. Rice becomes sumo wrestlers. Your car becomes a village of people. Believe me, it can be anything, even action from a static image. The new scene is transformed through and effected by the original at all times.
References: I used to work with Tech Writer Jen. Popeye is an old cartoon/movie.
Two Contexts: In this dream I’m repeatedly experiencing double context. Everything I see is something specific from each context. I’m in a mall and believe I’m in a neighborhood.
It even continues after I pass through the TV/billboard, where I arrive at a movie set but believe I’ve arrived at the youth group retreat. The woman there begins in a hot tub but it changes to a bed, and then she shifts back and forth between two entirely different people.
What you believe is so much more powerful than what you experience. While high or in the dream state, if you expect me to hand you a baby, and I hand you a microwave, you’d somehow find a way to see it as a baby — maybe a strange baby — but a baby nonetheless. The sensory input matters far less than the belief.
TV Gateway: Here I travel through a TV (which is also video billboard in a second context). Oddly, I arrive at the set of the show they’re filming.
Rationalizing Gateway Travel: Not realizing that I used a screen gateway, I explain my presence in the studio by recalling my recent experience of traveling in a bus and thinking that must be how I got there.