My Dreamworld 4/22/10 Revision

4/22/10 -

Some woman was gossiping. "He thinks it's true but..."

Later, I explained to my Aunt how I was always looking around, watching my back...

...flash to one of my Tae Kwon Do black belt fellow students, a little Asian woman with long curly hair, walking up unseen right next to me as I was lost in thought, poking me, and telling me I am supposed to be more aware of my environment...then the first Jr. High School, the one for smart kids that I failed out of...I am walking, lost in thought, looking down at the ground as I walk. My science teacher, a real cool dude...a "surfer dude" as one of the other students put it...asks me why I walk looking down...I tell him I like to think.

Flash to a police officer overlooking his partner as he arrests somebody. I avoid them while watching...to the overlooking officer I must have looked suspicious because he cranes his neck awkwardly to keep an eye on me as I walk behind him, eyes on him, full of curiosity and respect but apparently looking a bit threatening or suspicious.

Flash to the America's Army online shooter. I learn to look all around me for enemies...it increases my surviveability and kill count greatly. I set my mouse to move the cursor very quickly with only a small motion of the mouse so I can scan my environment faster.

Flash to a time I was two blocks from my building in the depths of night. I see them from far away. My alertness skill succeeded. But I don't do anything about it and they walk up right next to me as I walk home and threaten me. I should have run the two blocks home when I first saw them but I'm out of shape. I could have fought them but I didn't. I wasn't in the zone, and I could tell. Besides they had good tactics. The one who was threatening me was walking next to me, slightly ahead, and the other was behind us.

I'm not too worried but you never know so I give them five bucks I had loose in my pocket. I don't give them my keys and wallet despite their demands. As I go into my building and they walk on the other kid says "why did you bother that man?" to his companion.

Flash to the other one on the ground, bleeding, my foot ready to hit the concrete, passing through his skull on the way.

Original Entry -

H.P. Lovecraft writes of a magical dreamworld in some of his stories. Dreams are very powerful things in an emotional and psychological way. I’ve had lucid dreams, and the feelings of contentment and power within them are extraordinary.

Now, Lovecraft had his own personality, and his dreamworld is tainted by his mysticism, pseudo-religious horror theme, racism etc. However he has inspired me to find my own dreamworld. Much as I use religious figures as visualization aids in meditation despite my atheism, I feel I can use this strange biological virtual reality we experience every night to make my psychological flaws fade and virtues shine in the real world. In any event, I expect it to be a lot of fun.

Aiding and/or hindering me in my quest are the maximum dosages of two antidepressants - one of which causes cool dreams - and a lot of pot. I’ve been told to take them both in the morning but I find it works better for me to take the dream enhancing one at night before bed. This way, I reason, I get the full effect of it’s dream enhancing side effects, and I have an activity to do as a ritual before bed (take the pills). I have a difficult time getting to sleep early (it’s not the pills – it’s because I like to play on the computer, avoiding people, in the peace and quiet of night). It’s important to get up early so that I can get sunlight (good for depression) and do business during business hours. I hope to use pleasant dreams to help me with that as well.

Lovecraft writes of the portal to the Dreamlands being “descending down the seventy seven Steps of Lighter Slumber”, if I remember correctly, and being judged for worthiness by two bearded figures at the bottom. He also mentions the 777 Steps of Deep Slumber as well I think.

So, I start with a location in the dreamworld to visualize; the Steps. In addition I now and then spontaneously see a stone table in my mind’s eye. It sits in a dark forest (the forest of the Zoogs that the 77 Steps lead to?) and is covered with “runes” – not necessarily actual Runes but rather carved symbols and images of some sort. The table is suggestive of the stone table used to sacrifice Aslan (hmm, he's a cat) in the Chronicles of Narnia, and there is a sense of many Secrets about the region. Those who are initiated into a Secret often learn to unlock “magical” power. I write “magic” in quotes because there is no magic/nature dichotomy in my dreamworld. There are simply ways to harnass obscure natural laws through very specific and complex methods that are difficult to understand to produce marvellous effects. Those initiated into Secrets are often changed in strange ways as a result of the Initiation. Secrets are often incompatible with one another. Someone initiated into the Way of the Blade might, perhaps, never cover their flesh with anything tougher than cloth, for example, so that the Blade may split their flesh should it choose. These people may carve mystical and powerful symbols into their flesh in the form of scars, and might have a deathly fear of the tree canopy for no clear reason. Such Initiates, perhaps, could never learn the Secret of Stones, because the Blade cannot cut Stone…or something like that. I don’t remember details of their Secret but I do remember the Cult of the Blade. They never bothered me though.

The Table in the Clearing is a dark, scary place. The Seventy Seven Steps and their Bearded Judges aren’t scary but are tainted with horror simply because we’re talking about Lovecraft. The Forest of the Zoogs isn’t quite horrific, but it definitely has that creepy Unseelie vibe to it. All of this combined with my self-identification with Shub-Niggurath, the Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young, reveals a dark Lovecraftian horror theme I probably shouldn’t dwell on in my dreams too much. I need some pleasant places to visit.

I do seem to remember an image I associate with a lucid dream, but I’m not sure if I actually dreamed this one. I can identify where most of the imagery comes from and I am fairly certain I read about the bicycle technique of invoking lucid dreams while reading about them, well after I’d had several.

In any case it’s a place as vivid as the Table in the Clearing. The terrain is that of the Grapevine, or “the Dirt Road” from my childhood, or the pass from the Karanas to Highkeep (Highpass) in the Everquest game – a narrow road cut into the side of a cliff, high up in the lonely mountains, with a deadly fall on one side and a looming cliff face on the other. Sometimes there’s pea soup fog. Other times there’s snow and ice. Sometimes there’s both, and always the edge of the road is treacherously unstable (though sometimes there’s a fence, sometimes strong, sometimes not). Sometimes the dirt road gets muddy and deep ruts are dug into it, and sometimes there are rocks on or in the road that scrape the bottom of your car or even block the road. It’s a place where I am chased by a monster, but I have the power to make a bicycle appear and with it to escape the monster. It’s also a road in a mystical, magical place, where the sky has a flat, glass like roof and insanity and angels are above it…there’s the horror theme again.

When I’m driving in this region, and I want to avoid obstacles (like a roadblock of slow cars) or simply go in a direction the road doesn’t I can pull back on the steering wheel and make the car fly. Then I can fly over the undeveloped wooded canyons full of magical events, and even over the mountains (though there is a chain of mountains and tall walls which have chaos and angels on the other side…the Queen does not want me back there, but sometimes I have to go to fix things or protect myself). I can fly to the Elementary School at the peak of the hill, a very powerful and central place in my dreamworld. Sometimes I can teleport to certain locations (though it’s hard to remember how to do it), and the school is one of the more important ones. The imagery here is how Wizards could teleport to specific points in Everquest, and there’s a “land of gates” somewhere on rocky, rolling hills inhabited by gigantic fiery beasts. Fortunately they’re not horrific beasts…just dumb and animalistic. People hunt them for entertainment. They hunt people out of instinct. It's a dangerous place.

Teleporting to the School is less useful now though since our house isn’t ours any more…I’ve been there in the Dreamworld and it was empty, with a sense of anger at my trespassing. The backyard is a somewhat dangerous place too…I remember flying around there.

Sometimes the tide comes in and the ocean floods the backyard, and there is an organized enemy out on the islands and in the sea to fight in a lighthearted game (kinda like paintballing but far more complex and a little frightening and gloomy - I guess that's not lighthearted after all).

In the city, with all the tall buildings around, I can fly without the car, though sometimes I try and fail. The imagery is Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas when you use the Jet Pack cheat, combined with a Spiderman-like ability to leap and cling. I often look in and go into windows in the buildings high up, or go onto the rooftops where it’s safe when I fly in the city. Stealth and evasion of people is usually important when I do this. I have a vague memory of using a motorcycle while flying to go shopping (or maybe shopping for a motorcycle?) and having to go onto the roofs to escape…someone…there was someone else who could fly too, not sure if he’s the one I was fleeing…I don’t think he was. The place I had to go shopping, a toy store, was on the edge of reality, and I wasn’t supposed to go further. The imagery here is something like being at the edge of the playable area in a game, and being able to see fuzzy structures and roads beyond, but not being allowed to go there because the programmers couldn’t program the whole world in…except maybe I could go into this partially undefined region, and maybe it would undefine me. Thus, I don't go there.

The roof I was on was above the motorcycle/toy shop, possibly directly above, possibly across the street, ten or more stories up, and there was a little hidden area where stuff was hidden that I found slightly significant. There’s a hotel, creaky and tall, drafty and of old construction, which I have stayed in with friends or family. We were generally not allowed to leave our top floor, and it was cramped with ugly steel framed bunk beds. I don’t know why we had to stay up there but it was very frustrating.

There’s another hotel in Vegas I use as a base of operations whenever I’m there in the Dreamworld, though I don’t like it in Vegas much. Then there is Berkeley…the dorms I don’t belong in any more (and never really did, being older and a bit odd), which are even cooler in the dreamworld than in real life (in the Dreamworld sometimes I leave things in my room which the new students never find but I need to retrieve)…the students there are elf-like beings (as late teen college kids away from home kind of are) who see me as a mysterious and slightly unwelcome outsider.

There’s a cavern dungeon thing too…the “final boss” is a dragon of such fiery might it’s incomprehensible and witnessing it will snap the minds of the weak…he lives at the far end of a giant chasm with only one straight stairway going far up it to his personal cave. To face him you must walk up this sloped, narrow path in a straight line. He can of course hurl enormous gouts of flame straight down at you, causing you and everything else in the cavern to turn to ash instantly. He is godlike as well. I potentially have the power to defeat him, as my alter ego Raistlin did when he was his alter ego Fistdantantalus or however it's spelled...Jim Morrison is another alter ego) but my bones turn to jelly at the thought.

There’s another room…now we’re in a Haunted House that’s connected to the Dragon Caves, as well as to some spooky place that’s a combination of a meat factory and an amusement park, where people are crammed prone onto the “rides” (conveyor belts with only enough room to lie down on)…there’s a horror undertone here…imagery is the factory-like "school" that the clay-faced children go through in the video of Pink Floyd's The Wall...we don't need no, education, BUM BUM BUM) but in the Haunted House, most of which is innocuous enough, is a Dark Room that one can fall into via a trap, with a Demonic Being in it of godlike power…very scary (the imagery is something like the final boss demon thing on the old C-64 game Forbidden Forest, which can only be seen in the lightning). There are also many secret passages but they’re so hard to find…for example, little cracks in the backs of filthy closets which lead to ANOTHER set of cracks you need to climb up to slip into…climbing over dirty laundry and slime molds…and in those passages are mysteries, and filth, and mobility. Inside there are rooms with piles of dirt and rats. There are also ways to get here and there via the secret passages. There are also pale skinned, developmentally stunted People, like the People from the movie People Under The Stairs.

The spooky meat packing amusement park place is connected to a Raging Waters-like amusement park, which is a wholesome and fabulous place built into the side of a beautiful mountainside in terraces. All of these places are interconnected…underneath Raging Waters Park, deep in it’s bowels, is Meat Packing Park. This connects via dank tunnels to the Haunted House, which has some connection to the Dragon Caverns...some hidden passage down into them.

There’s another labyrinthian house with a beautiful landscaped yard which is a place of horror too (The Shining, anyone?). Terror is buried deep in my psyche, which is probably why I feel a connection to Lovecraft. This house is owned by “Father”, an unimaginably huge and powerful man-giant with a beard who wants to eat us (myself and my friends). This place is really scary because it’s cyclical. Clambering out of one room to the open outside to escape Father leads my friends and I to the yard. I had hoped we’d escaped but he is coming for us. I run, through the yard, into the trees, on to the roof, back into a window, and then through the house to the exit I came out of in the first place…and then I realize I have to go through the same thing again, and again, and again – forever – without varying anything even slightly. It’s the only way to keep out of his reach, and it will never end unless I slip up – in which case he’ll grab me by a leg, bite off the other as I scream in agony…and he’s always JUST BEHIND ME…at best I evade him for a few minutes before he finds me again.

(A side note - my father is a wonderful, caring man who stayed with his family and kept food on the table through really tough times. I don't think he even ever hit me. Now, moving on...)

A forested, shrubby stream leading from the edge of Lowtown Park up to my neighborhood on Green Hill was another place. I remember shapechanging to a dolphin or something to go up it (or down it) once. Going up it’s a useful and hidden path to get “home”. Going down, it’s a path to riverbank adventure and beyond.

Another place is a campground. Except for the steep wooded hills defining the valley it’s all very flat. There is a very still pond that touches the edge of the campground and goes off around the corner of a hill and off into the distance…finding a boat lets me travel down to fabulous and generally NOT scary pond-bank adventures…the pond and the land are all flat, about the same level.

Oh yes, there’s an evergreen Tree high, high above the world, up near the angels’ realm, possibly or partially above the crystal ceiling of reality. It’s an interesting place with a building built into the branches. The windows let in witches who have their secret meetings way up there away from the mundane world, and which no mundane (like myself) can be permitted to witness and live. However sometimes I cling to the roof and look through the space between walls and roof (the eaves?).

There’s also a Tower which I identify with the nearby Indian Museum. It is mind-bogglingly tall and rickety, and perched on a mountain. Climbing up it leads to adventure but is more terrifying each step I go up. This is because I am terrified of heights. I don’t get far before I am crawling on hands and knees, having a hard time breathing due to an anxiety attack. I have never made it far in that tower. Just thinking of how high up it goes makes me uneasy.

Last night I had a nightmare in which my mother was cold and uncaring. I was really upset and tried to evoke sympathy by throwing a tantrum and declaring I was moving out, even if it meant I had to live in a shelter (running away from home I guess). She kept saying she didn’t care, never looking directly at me, with hard eyes and a straight back as she went about her tasks.

My mother is incredibly loving and sympathetic and her upper back posture is terrible, due to age, osteoporosis, lifelong bad habits and lack of exercise as well as the fact that she doesn’t look around her, but instead thinks, or reads, or cleans. I am sure the dream is about her sickness, which was probably (along with poverty) central to the creation of my anxiety disorder. I never remembered the time she was sick when I was little.

She has always evoked great passions in me – whether love and affection or rage and hatred. I am emotionally dependent on her. Everyone else in the world seems so damn uncaring, and I’m emotionally needy despite my desire to be alone most of the time and my cold mask. I’d probably seem uncaring to myself. I need to be able to go into the next room and have people I care about be in there, but not constantly chattering at me, looking over my shoulder, forcing me to stop thinking and pay attention to them, when I have fascinating thoughts to think and people are generally boring and fairly irritating.

The Beatles sing of the Dreamlands in Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds, and the cartoon Yellow Submarine, while disapproved of by the Beatles, shows them (e.g. the Foothills of the Headlands) to us through the artist’s inspiration. This is a more colorful land that melds seamlessly with the brilliant colors of Munchkinland in Oz. The deserts around Oz border the land of the Calormen from the Chronicles of Narnia. Balloons on the wind have great power but generally stay up high, hidden in the clouds, spying on the lands below.

Somewhere there is a balloon so huge that even though it carries tremendous weight it still floats in air! This is because as an object gets larger, the surface area to volume ratio changes, as polar bears often tell us.

There is a fortified city upon it, and the entire balloon is armored with heavy steel plate. Once this city collided with a cloud city. The Giant was enraged, and he waged a war with the things in the city on the balloon.

The Irishman Lord Dunseny saw into it before Howard did, and opened Howard’s eyes and Tolkein’s as well.

And then they opened mine.

Moorcock understood too, and Morrison when he Broke on Through, and in another reality so did the Monkees.

"Come with me
I'll take you where
the taste of life's obscene
and every day new horrors to be seen

Remember that feeling as a child
when you woke up and morning smiled
It's time you felt like this again

Time to leave yesterday behind
and take a giant step outside your mind

You say for you there's no relief
you stare out There with no belief
I tell you what
I'll prove you wrong

Don't sit in your lonely room
Staring at the screen in silent gloom
But that's where I belong
It's where I'm strong

And someday they'll kneel at my feet
Because I have Secrets

EDIT 2/14/10 Strawberry Fields where nothing is real and nothing to get hung about...