One aspect of achieving my “dreaming every night” power up badge months back that I wasn’t at all considering has to do with the fact I have a slightly harder time figuring out what I should and shouldn’t be writing down at this point. As of this month I’ve been keeping a regular public running dream/vision/synchronicity journal for an entire decade. I used to write down near everything and now that’s not even feasible on the dream front as constant action has become the norm rather than the exception. Getting better at separating the signal from the noise is something I've had to put some work into because of the continual visionary murmur beneath the surface.
It's not all gold and that’s sort of where I’ve landed. There are normal (albeit mostly sort of strange) dreams and then there are heavy ones. Heavier than heavy. Mostly I’m operating in rote levels of expanded consciousness but there are other times where a dark weighted living energy pulls me into a fifth dimensional arthouse extravaganza. As the late Mark Lanegan put it:
“There is no morphine I’m only sleeping
There is no crime to dreams like this.”
January 12th, 2023 would be one of those times. In this excursion I’m exploring what seems like a fairly normal astral art museum with some fellow unidentified spectral compatriots. When we hit the basement there’s this well composed Brooklyn witch with curly dark hair tending a grey velvet rope in the middle of a white walled mostly empty room with impeccably clean wood flooring. I only know she’s a witch because she’s projecting as a waking world witch I’m peripherally familiar with, not because of her appearance. The choice of her as a character is a metaphor in itself. She comes off like any other dressed up museum attendant as she cordially welcomes a group of us into the display room. What’s off is that she’s tending a velvet rope in the middle of the room, not at an entranceway or anything.
She informs us that the exhibit she’s tending is the new Cronenberg film and inquires if we’re ready for a showing. Obviously I’m pretty stoked out but we just got to the museum and there’s no way this isn’t going to be the climax so I’m not sure if we should dive in yet or continue to explore before committing. I believe only 2 in our group are going to make the showing but the witch seems excited so we sort of look at each other and go, fuck yeah why not.
And with this a crowd of about ten of us all sort of gather into the corners of the room, casually encircling the big city sorceress and her velvet rope to nowhere. She waits until it looks like we’re all ready, unlocks the velvet, and gently places the gold metal clasp on the planked floor.
We’re all sort of confused for a spell but then on my left hand side, this floating red vaginal portal entity starts phasing into our reality from what seems to be a translucent layer of conscious experience directly parallel to ours. We see it there hovering midair and only half a part of our world before we start to feel it. Remember when I was talking about things getting heavy earlier? Here I mean it literally. We can feel the thing and it’s this heavy dark quicksand sensation that seems like it’s pulling us out of ourselves, which it sort of is. And here’s where it gets exquisitely fucking strange. Look, I love David Cronenberg’s stuff but it’s also undeniably some of the most intentionally creepy and unsettling work ever committed to film.
And yet, as mentioned, he’s also made some of my favorite movies of all time. This is no different. Holy fucking god is the feeling of us being pulled into an alternate dimension unnerving. Buuuut? It’s simultaneously goddam delicious. There’s a transcendently weird bliss energy radiating throughout the excursion that repels and delights in equal measure. Something feels so decidedly wrong about it, yet also unquestionably expansive and entrancing.
Suddenly we’re in this circular high end party architecture. It’s like a fancy hotel restaurant/bar with a windowed viewing area on the one end and an inaccessible inner area, presumably where the kitchen and bar would typically be. But all of our personalities are sort of half merging together in this obsidian psi ooze. Impossible to explain with words but Jesus Christ is it a fucked otherworldly spectacle. I can’t tell who the hell I am or what in the absolute fuck I’m supposed to be doing, nor do I have any idea where I am or why I’m here.
It seems to be some sort of party but there barely is a me. My entire essence keeps getting torn asunder. Eviscerated. Am I the floor, the wall, the painting on the wall? Am I one of the other 100 or so people attending this event? The only goal I can seem to find in all this is that there’s an attractive woman in a classic little black dress that I think I’m supposed to be connecting with. She stands out in the crowd and has a slight illumination about her, so I guess that’s the point. No clue. I wander around this circular establishment feeling like crackling spastic molasses. No words. It’s not something that’s supposed to be happening. Impossible to get anywhere and I don’t even know why any of it is going down in the first place. All memory of this taking place in the basement of an astral art museum has faded into this new disturbing persona.
Eventually I accidentally stumble into the windowed room directly across from the illuminated woman and somehow manage to make my way over. She’s happy to seem me and takes me through a black hallway back to the line we stand in to order our food near the entrance of the place. It feels like I’ve now been there, stood in line, and ordered a hundred times at this point but sure. Why not again? What the fuck is going on anyway?
With her help I am managing to move around this bizarro hell world with slightly more ease. As we’re standing in line I ask her what I should be ordering and she leans in seductively to tell me:
“Pancakes”
And with that I wake up. I feel like I’m swearing more than I normally do here (which is a lot) but Jesus H. Fucking Christ! Absolutely insane and again, as horrifying as it was, I am not disappointed. It was utterly astounding from an artistic perspective. As a matter of fact, in a state of lingering hypnagogia it strikes me that it was almost like an Alzheimer’s arthouse horror film, except with weight. Feeling. The more I thought on it, the more I realized the circular nature of the architecture represented a day in a fragmented mind in an assisted living facility for someone who has no clue how to even conceptualize any of that any more. Or was it a week. A Month? I finally found the illuminated woman who lead me through a dark passageway back into the meal line again. For what? Breakfast. Was the illuminated woman some sort of spirit guide leading me through the night?
Later in the day the profundity of the other metaphor hits like a black bolt. Cronenberg. Body horror. What’s more horrifying than slowly losing your goddamn mind. And yet as mentioned, it also was quite the otherworldly experience. There are some sick fucks on the writing team of the talking monkey show and some potently freaky shit they allow in the basement. Just remember it’s only a show kids. You’ll pull out of it. This has been a message I’ve received on multiple occasions that I imagine would piss off a lot of folks. As awful as some of this shit seems down here? Some entities of cosmic consciousness are just that far out. Arthouse horror isn’t everyone’s genre by a long shot but lots of people eat it up.
Of course after this experience, an ad for Brandon Cronenberg’s new film was one of the first things in my Instagram feed. Both his last film, Possessor, and his dad’s latest Crimes of the Future are both fairly excellent. Looking forward to it and when I watched Possessor I laughed for about 10 minutes afterward at the fact that people often go into the family business and in the Cronenberg family the business is batshit disturbing cinema.
Our realm is a vibrant nightmare but not all of these weighted dreams have been nightmarish. On another occasion in December of 2022 I found myself wandering around what felt like a very European city, albeit one that’s sort of caught between the past and future in terms of design aesthetics. It is fairly interesting that I often have dreams of being in European cities despite the fact that I have to this day never been to Europe, so I have zero point of reference there. Ancestral spirit residue I imagine. This sort of felt like a futuristic Rome with rather anachronistic architecture.
As I’m strolling down a yellow cobbled stone street I encounter this guy who has a pet land blobfish. Honestly, I had to look up what on earth a blobfish is actually called after this encounter because I did not at all consciously remember the name of those weirdos but I know I'd seen them before (and as I later learned only look so odd after being desiccated from being pulled to the surface from great depths).
In this context though, everyone found the thing absolutely charming and adorable. But wait? How can a fish be cavorting around a dusty street out of water and brightening the days of passing strangers I inquire to the gentleman.
Oh you see, it’s actually a parasite that’s simultaneously a part of him he tells me semi-telepathically as he’s showing me how the smiling pet recedes into his leg. It lives inside of him and in looking at him I can actually see how this drains his energy and ages him slightly. Even though there seems to be mild darkness there. Nope. There is also a feeling. Everything involving their relationship is absolutely goddamn adorable and we’re all better people because of it. The smiling alien land blobfish parasite just slays that much.
After this encounter I find myself in another old stone building. Today is the day of the coup and they suspect nothing. There is a ruling order and security personnel right within our midst. They are our friends and we act as if everything is normal. It’s just another day for them but we know today is the day the oppression ends. We’re revolting. I’m in charge of relaying the signal as I get the impression there might be some variable that delays the uprising. There isn’t. I get the word and relay the exact time of the insurrection. It goes smoothly and bloodlessly. There are just so many more of us than them. If we all act in a coordinated manner, there’s nothing they can really do and they know it.
After this my perspective fast forwards many years in the future. I’m much older now and hanging out in the terraced back patio of another coup participant. She’s a woman with long grey hair and a flowing multi-colored dress. I don’t remember what we discuss while sipping glasses of wine and gazing out at a pleasant painted sunset, but I know why I’m here. Whatever revolution we’d helped usher in was clearly quite financially beneficial to both of us. I do not know whether the whole metaphor was intended to imply that everyone was better of because of our “heroics” or if there was an ere of selfishness to the whole endeavor. I’d love to believe it’s the former.
What else, at another point in January I infiltrate this neon mushroom cult on the Seattle waterfront. Man, there are entrances and then there’s flying through the walls while being able to see all the strange machinations of the cult’s drama play out in my minds eye as I phase shift through supposedly solid walls. And the thing is, they all know I’m here and I get the impression can sense my strange invasion of their inner thought spaces. Like I said, quite the entrance. Why am I doing this? Sheer curiosity. I could sense the presence of the psychically infused architecture that was their temple and wanted to take a look at the back end.
These people were certainly onto something but as I could immediately decipher, were also totally out of their depth. The point to what they assembled was some sort of apocalypse or transformation. I went through the motions of it myself. I could initiate a process of physical and internal ritual gestures that would take the whole thing to orgasmic explosion mode and blast off into the higher dimensions. That was the purpose after all and I intuitively understand this immediately.
But is that what they wanted? I’d say they built this thing but I got the impression it was already there. They cultivated it though, and were lead by a thin blonde woman with short hair who had a loyal inner circle. She understood that I was operating far beyond her abilities pretty much immediately and accepted that reality. But could she deal with it? Could any of them?
That’s what I was now digging into. The fact is, I didn’t fucking know what to do. These people don’t seem ready for some grand pleasure spasm in the sky. There’s definitely resentment from the leader lady to my very presence. She’s been their guide for all this time and now I show up, quite clearly her superior. I’m just going to have to see how it plays out, although I’m not entirely sure how much of a choice I have. Getting them to the point where they can accomplish this themselves would probably take longer than the rest of their lives and I could just do it whenever. It's a living device that was supposed to be used and this is also in fact exactly what they’ve wanted and have been working for.
There are factions forming within them. Some are totally on board with my X games surf ride to the outer reaches, others are loyal to the head witch. I pull one of her loyalists over to sociably interrogate her psyche with my abilities. They think I’m going to die of some kidney ailment before I get around to taking them skyward, which is weirdly what some of them want. There’s a cowardice. Thanks for the info but also, I know you’re not going to get out of this situation that easily. Nice try. All you’re doing is running and this isn’t something you should be running from. I get it though, I really do get it. Shit’s freakier than you could ever imagine. As I pull away, I realize we’re having a totally different, purely superficial conversation on the surface level. Nobody knows I’m scanning her mind for invisible info other than me. Perfection.
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