Dreamlife

  In the first part of the dream, I’m
visiting a modern city with mum–not one I’ve seen in waking life. A policeman
in a futuristic armour (Roboccop?) instructs me to lie down to perform some
medical examination on me, attaching a tube to my neck. (In retrospect, it
would make more sense for it to be a drug test but that doesn’t cross my mind
while I’m dreaming.)

  
Then I’m inside a large residence where the IQ and many others live.
Typically, I can’t find her. But I enter a long, well-lit room where
people go to expiate their faults. There are large, thick boulders,
almost as high as a man. Each penitent, with a string around his waist,
walks up to the boulder, hugs it and then a trapdoor opens beneath him
and man and boulder fall–I don’t see what’s below. My old teacher L.T.
is there. He tells me he has undergone this ritual several times but I
don’t remember what he says of his motivation for doing so.

  I’m living with my parents
in a somewhat dilapidated area–not exactly a slum, but more squalid
than our waking-life ‘hood. In the dream, I have a cousin who is an
Indian witch. Although our relation is not antagonistic, bad things
start to happen while I speak with her on the phone. The one I remember
most clearly is that my friend Dave, who must have been visiting, gets
sucked down the bathtub drain, leaving something that looks like a
dried up tree.

  I think the dream begins
when I’m in a car with Santiago and another person driving toward a
library in a stately citadel. The narrow roads are brimming with cars
and people and we make very slow progress. I don’t remember what we do
in the library. All I remember is a scene too striking to forget: I
feel something soft moving in my mouth and spit out a bright red
scorpion. It lands on the floor and immediately scurries off to hide.

  My first memories of tonight’s dreams are very indistinct–something about a man who cheats on his wife using hi-tech.
  Then I’m kissing … someone who sporadically reads this
dreamlog. She grows and shrinks before my eyes, rather like Dr. Hank
Pym, although not by as many orders of magnitude.
  Then I’m running through a public place that is crowded (but
obviously not enough to preclude running). At one point, I realize my
course will bring me within strinking distance of a tall, thin, dark
man. On a perverse impulse, without slowing at all, I reach out and
strike his jaw. Before I go too far, I look back and see him standing
still, nursing his jaw. I feel guilty and go over to him to apologise
and ask if I can do anything for him to make it up to him. He assures
me he is okay, flashing a smile that shows his teeth intact. But he
wants to take me up on my offer to do something for him: he asks me to
accompany him to Oslo immediately. I object that it would be
inconsiderate to leave without giving my parents any notice but he
insists it will be okay. I feel somewhat put upon but agree to go
along. Somehow we board a flight–I don’t recall any trip to the
airport. En route, my companion’s manner becomes unpleasant. He leaves
it unclear whether we are actually heading to Oslo or to Praga. After a
surprisingly short flight, we land at an unidentified destination. We
sit down at a small shop/caf

  My first fragmentary
recollection is of being in my dad’s office and hiding away some secret
information in his briefcase.
  Then I enter a vast
auditorium (a leit motif of my dreams lately) and take a seat near the
front. Ahead, on a platform is Professor K., an analytic bigot who
dismissed me from my old school. Here, however, she is acting contrary
to form, imparting mythic wisdom. She asks about the lost continent. I
raise my hand and mention Atlantis but it turns out the allusion is not
to Plato but to another text. Then she tells us about someone, again,
not the canonical, not Odysseus, who spent years wandering in the
Badlands away from home. She points out on the map terrain where he
wandered, calling attention to the forbidding, arid, mountainous
topography. Then it is time for a performance. But in this hall, the
performers occupy the seats rather than the stage. To my right, I
notice Lind__oo and it seems to me she is singing rather badly.

  I’m visiting an unfamiliar
city with MV; I marvel at her presence. (Why will my psyche vouchsafe
such a dream of her but not of the IQ?) We’re in an underground level
of a building when we decide to split up; I agree to phone her later to
meet up. I board the lift, ascend to ground level, exit and begin
walking. The landscape, however, is quite unlike a city: I’m walking
along an arcade between a continuous row of buildings and what appears
to be a boundless garden. Occasionally I pass what appear to be
entrances to subway stations, the only confirmation of the premise that
I’m in a city. At some points the corridors of the arcade are
enclosed–almost all light is blocked out and I become disoriented in
the darkness. Then I am no longer in the arcade but simply walking in
front of houses. In front of one of them is a gathering performing what
seems to be some kind of dance. They are distributed in small
groups–in one instance, a group of one, a woman who is the only one
who catches my attention. None of the groups seem to pay attention to
the others but they are well synchronized in spite of that. Their
motion seems simple and repetitive, rhythmically advancing and
retreating.
  Then, I’m in bed in a room
not my own, looking out the window at a darkening or brightening sky,
sunrise or sunset and think I should call MV. I choose the pseudonym
Charlie Skasz and then a voice says something (or I think a voice says
something) about a skeleton key unlocking things in my subconscious.

  In last night’s dream, I
walk into some kind of seminar room, large but not overly crowded. I
discover there is a guest speaker, the IQ. There is a saintly aura
about her, her voice is mellifluous, her demeanor gentle. Quite a
change from past dreams, not to mention waking life! I don’t recall
what she is talking about but the audience seems to regard her words as
authoritative. I realize she’s blind and is in some sense beyond strife
or whatever it is may have lain between us.

  In the most recent dream I
can still recall, I am living in a rather squalid flat in an
unidentified city. I walk out but something prompts me to return. Did I
forget something? I notice that people on the street around me are
walking rather unusually; their limbs are stiff, their movements slow
and jerky. My own motion also seems to me slower than I’d like and I
feel impatience but eventually get back to my flat. I have some doubts
about my ingress being possible–have I mislaid my keys?–but manage to
get in. Then, the landlord knocks on my door and comes in to discuss
something I don’t recall. I find his presence vaguely disagreeable but
that is not my principal response to him. There is a small animal in my
flat with me, although I don’t think it’s my pet, and I fear the
landlord may pose a threat to it. I am worried but not for myself.
  I will allow waking life a
rare intrusion into my dreamlog because I want to record details that
are important to my dreamlife. First, since May the 23rd, I have again
been suffering anguish over MV’s silence. I wonder if, in retrospect,
that will turn out to be significant? Second, I found on the internet
that the IQ will be teaching a course at her school during my visit
there. A reckoning lies ahead and hopefully a resolution.

  Two nights ago, I attend an orchestral performance. I think I’m
with my parents but soon become separated from them. I ascend to the
top row of the nosebleed seats but somehow seem not to be too far from
the stage. The musicians file onto the stage and take their seats.
However, before they play a single note, it becomes clear that
something is amiss: the stage has rotated at an angle that hides much
of the orchestra from the audience’s view. The lights dim and the
musicians exit. Then it is announced that the stage will be deployed to
the opposite end of the hall. Seats begin to rise where the stage was
and soon I am looking at a section of seats like a mirror image of
mine. I make my way across to the hall, over to the top row again. I
speak with someone there but don’t recall the content of the
conversation or who it is. The hall is rather sparsely peopled. I sit
down to wait for the stage and musicians to reappear. However, a long
time seems to go by without anything happening. The audience grows
impatient. There are now two sections of seats facing each other and
taking up the entire hall. At the end of my dream, I have descended
again and sit in the space between them.

  The forgotten images of a
dream dissolve before a black silhoutte that emerges from them, as if
this figure had walked through a movie screen and ruptured the
projections upon it. I don’t visualize myself in contact with this
shade, but begin to feel strong pressure bearing on different parts of
my body, which I know he/it is exercising. I curse it and tense my body
to resist.
  Then, I am in a warm, ample
apartment (I don’t  know if I live there or am visiting). I
receive a letter from my friend Miss T. When I open it, I find inside a
small vinyl record of Ormandy conducting the BPO in Brahms and marvel
that O. could ever play this well. There’s a window, or what appears to
be a window with heavy wooden shutters, in the apartment I go to more
than once. When I open it, however, it does not give a view of the
outside but simply shows a section of a bleak, spartan wall.
Nonetheless, from somewhere, gusts of icy wind blow through this
window. The wind carries a voice I listen to attentively, but whose
words I cannot recall.