Another dream last night. This one seemes to be more about home structures than about travelling, as my last dream was chock full of. Also, it’s nonsense what they say about reading in your dreams. I actually had to shut down my computer in this last one, and I read a few items on the screen quite clearly. I’m not going to exaggerate and say I read a paragraph or anything, but I certainly had strings of recognizable latin characters hit the lens in my dream eye. I READ in my dream, so we can scratch the whole “this hemisphere is for reading, this hemisphere is for dreaming and THE TWO NEVER INTERACT” theory. I was shown the contents of my hard-disk on my computer in my dream. (Pretty sweet, no?)
SLEEPOVER
I couldn’t put my finger on the structure of this place. Looked like I was in a small urban setting. I had my old futon bunk-bed from ten years ago. I had the bad carpeting in my room from 10 years ago. Only thing…was my room outside? Like I said, I couldn’t wrap my brain around the architecture here. it almost looked like I had a fully-furnished “room” at street level. There was a loft ladder leading up to a 2nd level, which was also partially outside. Didn’t go in, only climbed the ladder once to get a better view of the street.
Now when I say street level, I mean out in the open in like an L-shaped alley. The alley was really clean and I wasn’t at all uncomfortable by the setting. It felt really warm. I was at home. The openness didn’t bother me. People my age, most of whom I couldn’t recognize, were either lounging around or playing video games or screwing with a computer, etc. I saw a figure approaching from one end, and for some reason I took it upon myself to see who it was before they entered.
It was an old friend from my class, another I haven’t talked to since graduation. I welcomed him to my place and led him in. When I returned to my “bedroom”, however, there were more people. I had been sitting on the lower futon part of my bunk bed, but when I came back there was a girl (a modern day version of a girl I knew 10 years ago) relaxing on it. She had also converted the futon into its bed form.
I thought about taking the top bunk, but there were other people looking for a place to sleep, so I grabbed a blanket and tried to lay it out on the floor. Every time I tried to lay it out it would wrinkle up on me. I spread it out by hand, and someone on the floor accidentally kicked it up. I spread it out again, and the blanket seemed to get smaller every time I did so. Now I was working with this strip of blanket fabric two feet wide by 5 feet long. I looked back to the upper bunk, and sure enough, another girl had taken it. I didn’t care. I laid down and I was content laying on the little strip of cloth.
LABYRINTH HOUSE
No smooth transition to this step. I remember climbing a set of outside stairs into the 2nd floor of a building that had the same kind of construction as The Muir House, the restaurant I rented a room above when I lived in Milford.
The first time I entered, I found a room that I identified as “my room,” even though it looked nothing like my old room in real life. I just knew it was mine. The outer walls were ceiling to waist-level glass, almost like this had been a porch that was built into a three-seasons room. All of my stuff was there, albeit in boxes or crates. The only things set up were my two computers, which I didn’t find odd since the first thing to go up and the last thing to come down in any place I live in is the computer.
I went to investigate other parts of the house. There were two or three older women I didn’t recognize, but I knew they were my landlords/hostesses/whatever. I didn’t really understand what my situation was or how long I was staying, but one of them asked me if I wanted breakfast. I said “no, I’d rather look around if you don’t mind,” and she told me to explore all I wanted.
Room after room after room. I got to the back half of the house and found a lot of it open-air structure, like an house in Southern Italy. There was a kind of garden in one part, and a maze of little passageways and paths that were seperated by fence or wire. When I say passageways, don’t think dark and damp, think more open like the netting separating the chambers in those old discovery zone mazes. Crazy stuff. I saw an old man sitting in the sun at the back of the house, kind of reminding me of my great-grandfather. I kept going in circles trying to find my way back to my room, exiting the rear of the house, going up the first outside staircase I found (but not the original stair leading to my room), going back through the garden and doing the whole thing over again. The old man warned me to watch that I don’t step on the bulbs in the garden, telling me that he had spent a lot of time on them to get them just right. I promised him I’d be careful and continued looking for the way to my room. Eventually I figured out that the staircase I was taking led to the third floor when I wanted to go to the second. I found my room again when I made this realization and picked the correct staircase–the one I went up when I first arrived at the house.
BEING COOL WITH NAKEDNESS
Now a couple people were in my room that were at the other place: I think the girl that was on my futon and an unrecognizable guy. I wanted to change into shorts, so I started doing so. I was asked a question about the house right in the middle of changing, but I didn’t care. I dropped my clothes and wandered halfway down a hall to answer the question, and oops, I was naked.
I’ve only ever experienced two kinds of naked in my dreams: the naked where I’m embarrassed to be naked, and the naked where everyone else is embarrassed. I’m happy to say that in the last three years or so, it’s always been the latter. Same with this time. After the reactions of my two guests, I half-laughed, apologized, and put on shorts and a t-shirt before I explained the rest of the answer I was giving about the house.
The girl asked me if I had seen the barn out back, and I told her I hadn’t. We walked to the back of the house, and I could see a little hill and just the very top of a barn in the distance. I started climbing the hill when both the girl and guy said, “no, go this way,”
pointing under the hill to a passage beneath.
PASSAGE UNDER THE HILL
I’m an explorer, so I was happy to do it. Beneath the hill was a man-made cavernous space about 30 feet wide and the height of a normal floor in a building, maybe 10 or 12 feet. As we walked back and back and back, it still seemed like there was dimmed sunlight pouring in from above us, something I didn’t understand as I knew we were now beneath the hill leading to the barn. I could see little gaps in the floorboards beneath me, showing that there was another level to the connection between the house and barn–another passageway on the floor beneath us. When I asked about it, the guy told me to wait and see–we were going to go down there next.
We got to the barn and didn’t spend a lot of time there. I climbed a stair into the main part of the barn, which looked like a huge hayloft with a couple stables on the side, much like a barn I knew from my youth. I didn’t care. I wanted to see the next level down in the passage under the hill.
We went down another floor which, again, didn’t seem to make it any darker. (Maybe a sign that I was totally comfortable with all this?) Now when we crossed the long passage back toward the house, the floorboards were bigger and more poorly linked together, leaving big gaps that you could accidentally step into if you weren’t careful. I ran ahead of the others, ignoring the fact that I didn’t know the place and that I could step into one of these gaps and fall even farther down into this subterranean passage. I got to a point where I had to stop dead–there was a part of the floor that had collapsed, and I could actually see the bottom of the passage, another two stories down with kind of a chalk-grey color. (still plenty of light to see something like that despite the fact that I was two stories down AS WELL AS beneath a mound of earth. I turned back to the two and laughed, telling them I almost made a flying leap into the hole (and I did, too. I was really moving across those planks.) I took the rest of the way back a little more slowly until I got back into the house.
YOU WANT HOW MUCH MONEY?
Now back in the house, I found my girlfriend Katherine packing some of my stuff into boxes. I followed along and started bringing stuff down to my car, no doubt an emulation of my real life move from two weeks ago. When I came back up the stairs, I was stopped by one of my hostesses, asking if I was going to take care of the bill or if she should send it to my father.
I asked her how much. She responded, “340, 350, 370 maybe?” I complained that I had only stayed one day (truth was, I didn’t know what the situation was or how long I had been there) and told her that if I gave her that, I would be left with about negative 190 dollars. I shook my head and walked away in disbelief. She didn’t stop me.
COOL WITH NAKEDNESS II
When I got back to my room, Katherine was still packing things up. At some point she decided that she was going to go to the house kitchen, only naked. I warned her not to, but she ignored me and wandered out into the common area where she was scolded by one of the hostesses for not having any clothes on. She walked back into my room with a smug look on her face, and I told her–“See, told you. They’re not down with the naked thing.” Her reply was probably the best moment of this entire dream when she explained: “Not many people are, but it’s always worth seeing their reaction when they have to deal with it.” I laughed as she put some clothes on and wandered out of the room.
STRUCTURAL STABILITY
I took one more trip around the house, navigating the little wire maze in the garden area just to see if I had missed anything. Once again I got to the rear of the house, walked around to the front, climbed the correct set of stairs and was back in my room.
(It’s worth mentioning that when I woke up, I was astonished by how concrete the structure of this place seemed to be. Usually when you have a static structure in your dreams, it’s a pre-existing structure [school, old house, etc] that you know inside and out from real life. More often the structure is a dynamic dream construct, either part-artificial [with elements of real places you know] or completely artificial [you’ve never been there before]. With places like that, when you try to walk over the same ground twice, you find that it’s changed. This place was unique in my dream settings–it was made up by my mind, but my mind locked it in–once I knew it I could actually find my way around…once I knew it, it maintained its structure. I would imagine that’s rare for a place this big.)
DREAM-STATE LITERACY
Strangest part of the whole thing. When I returned to my room, the computer was all that was left. I looked at the screen, saw the start menu, saw the word “start”, and grabbed it. The menu wasn’t EXACTLY the same as the real life one, but it had words in it that I could read…My Network Places, Settings, My Documents, etc. I actually got to the “shut down” menu and clicked the shut down button. The computer didn’t do it, so I tried it again. Nada. I eventually just hit the switch and took the monitor, carrying it down to my car.
So despite the fact that the computer didn’t shut down like I asked it to, the real point of this last segment was that I READ the characters and navigated menus with small writing. It’s only happened once before in my dreams, and it was a sheet of paper with a couple words on it. The computer screen thing is a first.
ANOTHER detailed dream that I remembered! I’m on a roll!