I was sitting on a sofa in a first floor room, next to the kitchen of “the house.” The room was bright and cheerful, and yellowish colour with some sort of floral pattern on the wall. I’m not sure what the room was. It seemed that it could have been a dining room because it was next to the kitchen, but it wasn’t done up so. I was going to read some to Kevin but there was a lot of noise coming from the stairwell because there were workers doing some sort of restructuring to the stairs between the first and third floors.
I walked into the stairwell to close the door in the ceiling and ran into one of the workers. He told me that he wouldn’t be able to leave it closed for long because he was going to need to do work there soon. I told Kevin the situation and were discussed going to another part of the house to escape the noise. We talked about the fourth floor. I still had a little bit of a lingering odd feeling about the fourth floor because that’s where the ghosts used to be. I had now been all renovated, painted yellow and white, and the ghosts were no longer there, but there was still a memory of what it used to be liked which I was not quite comfortable with. Regardless, it was still unfurnished so there wouldn’t be anywhere to sit. We talked about the third floor which was still dark because people hardly went up there, but it was nice and quiet in the far corner of the house and we looked at each other agreement that it would be a good place to go.
I was from the eastern part of the US, travelling westward with my wife and son. I was an musical instrument maker, mostly wooden flutes and guitars. I had a practice of using very substantial wood when carving the flutes and the necks of guitars and mandolins. When we reached the west coast, my son was studying with another instrument maker and showed me a technique he learned about carving out the flutes and the guitars and mandolin necks where he made the walls very thin. Next, he would create a very thin and long piece of wood like a very long tooth pick that he called the heart string and attached it inside of the neck or inside the flute. This created a vibrating counterpoint to the instrument that increased it’s harmonic potential.
I was in a parking lot on a street corner surrounded by junipers, inside a copper coloured Vanagon. Mel and I were going thru boxes of clothes and we were intending on selling. The clothes were very colourful and I was wondering whether I truly wanted to get rid of them. I remember seeing shirts in yellow, bright green, and orange. I recognized some of the clothes and was thinking that I liked them, yet still felt compelled to divest of them. Mel was in a similar situation with his clothing, and there was a lot of it. We finished going thru the boxes and closed up the Vanagon and walked across the street where we met my Mom and Brad in a type of bed and breakfast. We were chatting and packing I believe. I was thinking that I may have left something in the Vanagon and walked outside to the corner and noticed that the Vanagon was not where I parked it. At first I thought that maybe I’d forgotten moving it but then I realized that someone had stolen it. I was shocked. I ran back in to tell Brad.
I awoke in jail but didn’t at first know where I was. There was a very skinny black woman next to me. She had that “I’ve been doing crack for 20 years” look about her so I couldn’t honestly tell how old she was. I asked her where I was and she told me that I was on Death Row. I couldn’t even fathom what I could’ve done to end up here and was a bit panicked. All I had was a cardboard box with some junk in it and I wasn’t sure where it came from.
Suddenly there was a horn blowing. I asked the woman what it was for and she told me it was the call for lunch. I picked up my box and followed her into a small cafeteria where there were others congregating for food. I look for someone who worked there to help me figure out why I was on Death Row and see if there was anyone from the outside I could talk to. I found and authority who presented me with some paperwork that defined my incarceration. Apparently I was going to be executed because I had accrued $63,000+ in parking tickets. I was astonished that someone could be murdered for parking violations, not to mention the fact that I can’t remember receiving a parking ticket in years. I was paranoid. What could I do about this?
I kept asking to talk with someone but I wasn’t getting much help. Somehow, my consciousness went outside the walls of the prison where I came across Marcel standing there. He had grown his hair out really long and bleached it. He looked quite odd but I told him what was going on and asked him if he could help me.
I was standing around an enormous piece of red cloth. It was probably 15+ feet in diameter and there were people underneath it. I was being trained how to work with a lion that was on the other side of the cloth. My goal was to keep it at bay so that it wouldn’t harm anyone. I was asking how to do this but the answer was that it could only be taught in practice. I was basically trying to keep it opposite me across the distance of the cloth and keep it distracted while the people underneath could keep safe. It seemed that I was called to leave thru a hole on one side of the cloth which meant that I needed to give up staying opposite that lion and give into having to approach it. I went over to the hole and laid down at the face of it and curled up to get ready for the lion to approach me. I laid there as still as I could. I could sense the lion approach me. Then I felt it sniffing me and could feel it’s hot breath on me. I waited and it started to walk away. I proceeded to crawl thru the hole and as I did, I heard a loud echoing voice bellow, “Kumara.”
I was in a back yard of a small house. Lauri was standing in front of a dark plastic trash can. My hair was really long, probably almost two feet in length. I grabbed a hand-full of it and in a stroke, cut it off and dropped it into the trash can as a sacrifice, tho to what I wasn’t sure. As I did so, it thickened into an almost spaghetti-like wad. Lauri turned and dragged the trash can away around the house toward a back door to the garage. I asked her what she was going to do with it but her response wasn’t clear.
Next, I’m standing in a very dimly lit bathroom of slate and gold. It was beautiful of what I could see of it, but it was only illuminated by a small led light standing in a power outlet. I was holding a hair dryer in my hand and immediately wondered what I was doing here. The bathroom was opulent and very large and I was standing in front of the mirror with the door to my left. I felt out of place and walked thru the door into a large foyer near the front door of an enormous house. Standing around and sitting were a group of men that seemed to be in a sort of trance. Mel was there near the front door. I had a sinking, uneasy feeling about being there and realized that I need to leave immediately. I walked over to Mel to coax him to leave with me but he sat there with a blank look about him. The other men started to descend upon me as if to prevent me from leaving so I rushed out the front door to a sidewalk and proceeded to turn right away from the house. A young man that looked of East Indian descent with long, black hair came out to persuade me not to leave. He told me that I was very important to them. I told him that I was not returning. He became even more persuasive, telling me that they would give me anything I wanted. I told him that the only thing I wanted was the only thing he could not give me… freedom.
I was in a very large Victorian house that had been converted to a hotel with a meeting hall. I was chatting with a young lady who was sitting behind a desk checking in the visitors to an event that was being held in the hall. In between check-ins, she was telling me about winning the lottery. She was only work this desk because it interested her to participate in this activity and not because of any monetary compensation. She asked me if I wanted to know how she won. Well, of course I did… duh! She told me to invest $10,000 in lottery tickets, spread out over the course of a year. That was how I’d be able to win, as that’s how she did it, and she’d won millions. I needed to get more details on this procedure so she got up to go for a walk with me, but every time we’d rekindle the conversation, someone would walk up and start talking with us about something. It took so long that I eventually woke up without ever getting the change to hear her whole story.
I was staying in a very large and extravagant hotel somewhere. I think the situation was music related and my mom was there. The day before we were concluding our stay, a large film crew checked in. They were there to film a new version of American Beauty, but with the edginess of The Virgin Suicides. I ended up in a clothing shop of some sort along the lines of Abercrombie and Fitch, the kind of place where you’d shop if you were 18 and had wealthy parents. I was laying back on a long cushioned bench chatting with my mom when a young Norwegian man and woman walked in and sat nearby. Both were very pale, slender and blond and had that Northern European character of everything having a proper place about them. As it turns out, the couple were working for wardrobe for the movie. The young man wanted me to try on a shirt for him because he was unsure of the size and whether it would fit whomever he was dressing. It was a polo style shirt with royal blue and white horizontal stripes. I told him I was a medium, but he wanted to see how the large would fit me. I took it and went into the dressing room which was more like a bedroom. There were benches, clothing hanging on the walls, and there was a salesperson in there. The shirt the young man had given me was part of a package; a hat, belt, and some other accoutrement all hanging from the same hanger. The salesperson was upset that I was trying to dismantle this set to get the shirt off just to try it on and insisted on finding the shirt apart from the package. She looked around the room and became exasperated at not finding the shirt in there.
Next thing I know, I’m in The Poet & Patriot in Santa Cruz. I’m walking thru the bar with a bicycle, thru a group of performers. I realize that they having an open mic and I’m thinking of checking in to see if I can play a song or two. I walk toward the bar and have this knowledge that the bar is different than I know it to be, that the beer is served deeper into the back instead of the bar that I’m accustomed to. As I proceed toward the back, I’m stopped by a young brunette twenty something with a clipboard who insists that I can’t proceed with the bicycle. I ask her why not and she starts talking about the number 1, and examining her clipboard. She finally acquiesces because she can’t give me a justifiable reason why I can’t proceed to the bar with the bicycle. So, I walk to the back and the bar is similar to a horse stable with corrals on both sides of the room. On the right were three of these where the dividing walls had been removed and there was a menu up above. In the corrals were large kegs where the beer was stored. There were all boutique beers. I recall looking for Newcastle but it wasn’t there. I settled on a beer with a green label that looked similar to Sierra Nevada, but I don’t recall the brewer, but the name of the beer was something like Bright Buffalo at Wounded Knee. It was a light ale which isn’t something I’d normally go after, preferring dark ales and porters, but it seemed to fit for some reason. I could order at the time because the servers were all in a corral on the left side of the room filling beers so I walked over to the wall to the left of them where there were rows of shelves filled with elaborate steins. On in particular caught my eye. It wasn’t particularly large but it had a button on the handle that activated a top the slid back allowing just enough space to sip the beer from the stein. I picked up the stein to examine the mechanics of this mechanism and see how hard it was to clean. I was impressed with it and it’s emerald green colour and decided to get it. I proceeded over to the other side to get the beer and asked the server who was now present how much it was. He wasn’t sure whether this was my stein or whether I wanted to purchase it. I told him I was interested in the stein the the light ale on the sign to me left, so he walked over to a cash register, punched in something and told me that it would be $3.50. I said, “I’ll take it,” surprised at the lost cost of the item. A guy had perched next to me at the bar so while the guy was filling my beer, I told him about the film crew in town to remake American Beauty but it didn’t appear to know about the original. I reflected on how many people have so little knowledge of the brief past.
This dream came about the same day that I had done an EMDR session which went way back in time to unearth some dirt. I was in the big house. A family appeared to have moved in and they had two children, both under 10. They were playing upstairs when I came across them. In the back of my mind was a shallow memory of the house being haunted, but it was so vague, kinda like painted over wall paper. You may find a seem somewhere but the original image is gone. I looked at the children and realized something new was taking place and I was okay with it.
On the morning of Sept 23, I had an interesting dream: I was in an automotive repair shop standing at the counter talking to the manager, who just happened to be my real-life manager at my real-life job. He was showing me a picture of a steering wheel and a set of tale pipes. He said that I had to replace these parts on my car but that they didn’t carry these particular parts and I needed to go get them myself. I’ve been keeping a dream journal for about 20 years or more, so I’m pretty good at interpreting dreams. I remember waking up from this dream and thinking, “Wow, that’s a pretty clear indicator that my boss is telling me that I need to do my own steering, find my own means of propelling. I wonder if I’m going to lose my job?”
As it turns out, we’d just had a re-org the day before, so I could say that I was having an anxiety dream. I went to work that morning, logged into my computer, and no sooner had I been there for 10 minutes, my boss grimly approaches me and tells me he needs to talk with me, and it’s not good news. I remember my skin crawling as I followed him downstairs to an empty conference room, where he informed me that there was no easy was to say it so he was just going to come out with it. I got “the package” as I call it. I throwback to the dot bomb days when I worked for another company that laid off about 75 people in one day. I remember standing in the stairwell with other co-workers, waiting to see if the whomever was behind the closed door with exit with or without a “package.” I always wanted to submit that to Wired Mag’s Jargon Watch. Maybe I still should.
Sept 28: I have to set the stage for this to put the experience in context. I needed to get a new receiver for my stereo system because the old one ate CDs, ate tapes, and was now sending the volume in all sorts of directions when turning the volume nob. I was done with the Awai POS so was scouring the craigslist ads and trying to learn about latest connections on receivers in a short period of time while trying to find something modern to support them and at a reasonable price, since I’d just lost my job the week before. The day before, I’d called on an Onkyo that looked promising. The guy who owned it lived quite far but worked fairly close to my home, so we agreed to meet at or near his work the next morning.
Dream Sequence, Sept 29: There’s a woman that I’m observing, and yet is a part of me. She is a living on a compound with a group of others. The compound building in which she is in the courtyard, is ranch style; building on three sides and open on the fourth. Her building is under siege and she’s just been shot while she was going to retrieve what looks like a large off-white Nerf football. She picks it up, presses it against her injury and pleads with the person who shot her to not shoot her again, that she’s already very well injured. I guess because she’s female, the perpetrator holds off shooting her again and gets up and starts to cross the courtyard as she is heading down a short flight of stairs and into a doorway. But instead of stepping thru the door right off, she turns and blasts the guy with the M16 she’s carrying. He’s really caught off guard by this and protests at her shooting him but he explains that she made no deal not to shoot back if the guy was going to be stupid enough to expose his whereabouts. She finally steps thru the door, leaving her victim in whatever state, and shuts it behind her and starts walking up the hallway toward the infirmary. Even thought she’s walking past people, no one notices her because the critical nature of the siege.
So, the guy calls me at 11am, right on time. He gives me the location where I’m going to meet him. The timing is perfect as I’ll be heading to my therapist’s office for my appt. at noon. I get in the truck and I’m about 10 minutes into my journey when my cell rings. It’s the guy. He tells me that he’s changed his mind and that he’s decided not to sell the unit. My normal reaction would most likely have been fairly passive and I would’ve said, “That’s okay, I understand that you’re having a change of heart, it’s a pretty good deal.” But no… not after I’d already spoken to him on the phone earlier, and I’m close to 15 minutes away from home driving in the opposite direction of my noon appt. I was kinda pissed. I said, “Couldn’t you have reached this conclusion at some other time when I’m not already on the road to meet you and I’ve arranged my morning to do this?! Jeez!”
After I’d hung up, I decided that it didn’t make sense to go back home so I drove to my noon appt. and made a business call along the way that gave me time to conduct. I discussed the dream with my therapist and realized that the dream predicted the occurrence with the guy over the stereo and that I’d take the dream to the infirmary, i.e my therapist.
Dream Sequence, Oct 6: I’m with George and we’re at an archeological and anthropological site where a tribe of natives to the area once lived, and now is an historical preserve of the tribe’s living environment, complete with tree houses, with ramps leading around the place, kind of like an Ewok village. We’re there, looking to discover some unfound remnant of this tribe and talking about not going into the preserve where the possibility of finding something is most likely futile. We’re walking down a ramp from the village and I stop because I see a very large cat that would be best avoided. It’s dark gray with almost black stripes on it’s back, and has the appearance of a bobcat with an even larger body and tail. George just continues talking and not even seeing that huge creature, and I’m telling George to watch to his right but he’s completely ignoring the cat. He walks to the bottom of the ramp and turns to the left with his back to the cat and still, not a clue that this thing it a mere 5 feet from him. I’m expecting the worst when suddenly… the cat turns around and walks the other way. I’m astonished, nearly peeing myself at this point. I walk down the ramp and grab him and drag him back up to the top where I can see the cat walking away thru the slit in a couple pieces of stacked timber. I have George look but he still doesn’t really see what he’s looking for. I’m gabberflasted and wake up.
This was another therapist day, and with this dream still on my mind, I get to the office and start talking with her. She’s not happy with me because I’d not made my Paypal payment for my previous two session like I was supposed to. She was telling me that it was affecting her personal feelings toward me and that if I wasn’t able to keep my end of the agreement, she may need to terminate our relationship. I apologized and told her that I understood how she felt and that I was a complete airhead for not remembering and that it wasn’t right for me to not follow thru. Also, it was difficult for me to remember such things because all of my finances are on auto-pay and auto-submit, just so that I don’t have to worry about not making payments. Once this conversation was concluded, I mentioned that I’d had a dream this morning and proceeded to tell her about the dream in detail. She asked me what George represented too me. I told her that he was an airhead and boom, I completely connected the whole dream to the conversation we’d just had 5 minutes prior. She was the cat. Our conversation could’ve turned into a nasty conflict depending on how both of us conducted ourselves, and the preserve was representative of the exploratory uncovering that we did in her office and my psyche.
Now, you could say what Robert Anton Wilson says, “What the thinker thinks, the prover proves.” But I’m not so sure, especially the first dream which I had interpreted before the occurrence happened. I’ve been dreaming like crazy lately but haven’t held onto them for memory’s sake. The dreams just haven’t seemed that juicy, but… isn’t it interesting?
