The dream academy awards

[hirez]

There's a dream my subconscious makes me endure once in a while. It's a bit like a migraine, in that within a couple of minutes (subjectively) I know full well what's going on and exactly how badly it will end. However, my dream-self lacks the power to actually fix anything due to the multi-layered nature of the beast.

I and a couple of braver/faceless chums decide to have a poke around the gardens and outbuildings of an abandoned, tumbledown and suspiciously Worcestershire house. I say 'decide' when I mean 'self dragged along for the ride' and for 'Worcestershire' read 'timber-framed but retrofitted with bricks and scabby rendering'. This feels like a seriously fucking bad idea because there's just something wrong about the place. Anyway. We poke about for a bit, discover piles and boxes of junk and are generally being pre-teenage until the feeling of impending doom ratchets up far enough to be more than a chap can stand. I/we scarper with whatever treasures we've picked up. In my case, a hardback book. As we sod off, it becomes apparent that we're being watched from an upstairs window by a tall grey presence.

Later, I can feel that presence looming over me. I struggle awake and try to lob the book at the thing, but it's not having any of it. In the blind panic, I get a full-colour flashback where I'm standing near Hanna-Barbera a cocktail bar with H-B women lurking outside. Part of me feels it should go inside with the book, but mostly I'm terrified and try to hand the book to one of the women.

Then I wake up properly, somewhat alarmed.

Comments

[moral-vacuum.livejournal.com]

ALL my nightmares for as long as I can remember have involved a "presence". Never anything anthropomorphic, only a general idea of something shadowy and nebulous that wants to suck all the life and joy out of me (a bit like one of JK Rowling's Dementors). Sometimes they get me and start to put tendrils of black cold despair through my body and mind. Thankfully Jo wakes me up if I whimper too much. And I don't get this anywhere near as much as I used to, only two or three times a year.

I often get dreams/nighmares happening in the same place. There's an alternate version of my old house that's a lot bigger and more rambling, there's an alternate London that's full of dark corners and huge thoroughfares.

I'm sure Freud would have a lot to say about all of this.

[bogwitch64.livejournal.com]

So--you've taken something from childhood, represented as a book though not necessarily writing or anything literary, but this something has never fully formed. It remains a murky presence you try very hard to ignore or escape but it won't go away. Do you open the book in the dream? Ever?
Trying to hand it off to the women could be you trying to hand something over to your other half, the X-chromosome men don't like to fully acknowledge within themselves. But handing it over terrifies you as much as it does that inner X.

So say I, the bogwitch. /g/

[avocadovpx.livejournal.com]

You have a much bigger budget for dreams than I do, apparently.

Have you read anything about lucid dreaming? If you are already able to recognize it as a dream, you're halfway there.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

I think you're disturbingly close to the truth. The attempted handover is a new feature, and I think that's a small amount of self-knowlege asserting itself. Maybe.

[bogwitch64.livejournal.com]

Dreams can be just a brain's processing the days' events into memory--or they can be insights supercoded into symbols our more efficient dream-selves can interpret much better than our waking-selves.

I don't think this is a bad dream, no matter how flustered you are when you wake.