Does anyone remember how back in August of 2021I was told that I'd leveled up as an oneiromancer and that because of this I was going to start dreaming every night. Truth? I'd completely forgotten when exactly that'd gone down as well until I just looked it up and wow. This has been going on for nearly a year and half now and whoever you want to call "they" weren't fucking around. And no, I don't dream "every single night" like they promised but I'd wager it's roughly in the 95% range. The fact is, I'd never kept a detailed record of the phenomenon until just now so you know, this is that. Here's a week in the dream life and I have no idea why I decided to start it on a Tuesday but I did. Dive in to the waters where the mystic swims:
Tuesday January 17th, 2023 –
I’m on a vacation with my family and I desperately want this vacation to be over. I’ve packed up my things and am so ready for it to end because I’m bored out of my goddamn mind. But nobody else is packed and everyone seems to be planning on staying for much longer. I’m crawling out of my skin as I try and get them to hurry up and get their shit together because we were supposed to be leaving soon. Apparently we’re not and they’re all enjoying a gorgeous cloud streaked pink sunset. At the end of the dream I’m still annoyed but I do have to admit, it is a pretty cool sunset.
I’ve had variations of this dream a ton at this point and honestly, it makes perfect sense in the context of my family life but I’m not going to get into it here. The one thing I will add is that so many people would define looking at a gorgeous sunset in the skin world as a transcendent “spiritual” experience but I’m like, nah. I see where you’re coming from but that’s happening in your waking state, externally. Spiritual experiences are inherently an inner and subjective thing. Staring at a gorgeous sunset in a lucid dream? Now that’s a spiritual experience.
Although I must confess that this dream was not lucid.
Wednesday January 18th, 2023 –
I’m having trouble getting back to sleep after getting up to go to the bathroom. This isn’t very common with me and I’m literally thinking about how I might not actually have a dream tonight, which is also fairly rare at this point. But as I’m struggling to get back down I start dreaming about lying in bed and trying to get to sleep. Not the first time this has happened honestly. In fact, I unintentionally get into this thing where I’m lying in bed listening to phantom music, which has also happened before but the implications of the seemingly simple experience are rather astounding.
So I’m listening to Failure’s Fantastic Planet, except there are songs on it I have never heard. Are the songs I have heard even the same as the one’s I know in the waking world? Hard to say, but they sound exactly like Failure songs that could have been on Fantastic Planet. Meaning that a part of me can effortlessly create material that sounds indistinguishable from the real thing. Again, this is something I’ve experienced often in various altered hypnagogic states of consciousness, sometimes with my own work, sometimes with others. Listening to alternate versions of songs you’ve written that sound very similar to the real things is incredibly trippy and the important part has to do with how I put a lot of effort into creating these tracks but in these states they emerge instantaneously, with zero effort whatsoever.
I continue to have dreams that I am lying in bed trying to get to sleep for several hours and the main thing that finally gets me hip to the fact that I’m dreaming involves my bed detaching from normal reality. It sort of separates into an alternate dimension and now I’m chatting with my wife by my bedside from an angular detached Twilight Zone perspective above her. There are some mild sexual undertones to the conversation that I’m not complaining about at all. Fairly tame on the dream front but as always, having dreams about how you’re lying in bed and really need to get some sleep are definitely oddsville.
Thursday January 19th, 2023 –
This dream starts with me embarking on trip to Amsterdam for unknown reasons. That it. That’s the premise. I’m with a group of people and we’re going to take a trip to Amsterdam. But then something happens and I’m for some reason finishing a beer with my breakfast at my favorite local establishment in the Invisible College. This always manifests as different places I’ve gone to school or just schools in general but it’s increasingly come across as Columbus, Ohio, which it does here. Also, I have not drank beer with breakfast for what seems like an eternity now but in this sitch that’s exactly how I’m getting down. I’m thinking about how much I love this place (which I’ve never been to in my dream life before as far as I can remember). But for the moment, this is my joint. Which is why it’s odd that when I get up to give the server a cash tip he’s completely disengaged.
What the fuck? I think that was a pretty good tip but the dude acted as if I wasn’t even there. Anyway, as I’m walking out of the establishment and onto the city streets it suddenly hits me:
“Wait a minute. Wasn’t I supposed to be going to Amsterdam?”
Then I realize, yeah, I totally am and with that I proceed to turn my own world upside down. This is seemingly a fairly unremarkable excursion on the astral plane but wow is this process anything but unremarkable. It literally feels like I’m turning my entire world upside down. I concentrate hard, channel this dark energy and all of the scenery around me now warps in a cylindrical fashion, while I’m frozen at the center, almost like James Bond at the end of the tunnel in those classic movie intros. Everything just sort of swirls around me and although it takes a considerable amount of energy, I know how to do this intuitively. When all the scenery’s in the right place, I now snap out of the eye of the mind and flip into the new locale, which is genuinely draining.
And with that, I’ve gone from alternate world Invisible College Columbus to alternate bizarro world Amsterdam (where I have never been). This is sort of funny because I’m now with this group and we’re waiting in line outside for our bags. But we’re like putting money down on other people’s bags as if we’re betting on them or some shit. All of us are pretty sure this is a custom in The Netherlands but none of us know exactly how it works. Oh, and one of my fellow travelers looks a lot like a young Terrence McKenna and is apparently traveling with his girlfriend.
Friday January 20th, 2023 –
At first I’m involved with this almost like coup type situation. A bunch of us are engaged with some sort of coordinated dissidence but the environment is also collapsing and we’re realizing it’s a losing fight. We need to get the fuck out of here and soon. So the process of organizing operation blow this pop stand commences which is mildly stressful and continues for a spell. But in the midst of it, I suddenly jump through this translucent wall into the past. Very strange as I’m basically like on this riverfront with an urban area on one side and nature on the other. I jump from the nature side to the city side and I’m now also a ways in the past. I’m not actually entirely sure when this happens. I just have a memory of it.
Now in the past I’m on this riverfront walkway with a few other peeps and we all agree. We need to GTFO of dodge as quickly and efficiently as possible. There’s a child near us and I run over to rescue him. It’s a beautiful day and he doesn’t understand at all. No, I explain to him. You have to get out of here. You can come with us. I know you don’t see it now but this all goes to shit. See those forests out there? They all burn. The stability of the society here crumbles. It’s awful. Trust me, we need to get the hell out of here now before any of that happens. I honestly can’t help but think this is a metaphor for one’s higher timeless self rescuing a younger version itself from a bleak and impending future.
The way I jumped through the translucent time barrier in my dream memory was in fact quite exquisite though. In the dream, I didn’t do this, I just remembered doing it and it was almost like jumping over a rainbow or some shit.
What follows are some general anxiety dreams about trying to get out of the country and to Europe. I know at one point I realized I couldn’t find my passport which actually reminded waking me that I do in fact have to renew my passport this year. Second time in as many nights I’m traveling to Europe. Definitely peculiar.
Saturday January 21st, 2023 –
I’m bored and I log into social media just to happen to catch this event posted by a guy I know who used to constantly book shows around Seattle. The Grey Daturas are playing a super small venue? In the dream I consider the odds of me actually seeing this post fairly low so it feels synchronous. Fuck it, I’m going. When I get there though I realize it’s not a party but really this almost like DIY club. Very odd honestly because on one hand it seems like a DIY type venue but on the other a straight up regular rock club. It definitely looks like a regular freaking rock club from the outside with it’s fancy sign and slick exterior. Also, it’s in Los Angeles and I have no idea why I’m in Los Angeles.
This is never explained but as I get inside the place, the whole scene is confusing. Is this a venue or like a vegan co op type sitch? I’ve gone to shows by myself so many times in my life it’s ridiculous but I must confess in this instance I feel a bit out of place. What the fuck is this venue? I’ve been hanging out here for a while and I still can’t tell. I mean, I’m just here to see a show but that’d be the other problem. I can’t actually find the stage where the Grey Daturas are going to throw down. This space is so weird and labyrinthine. There are a shit ton of stages and at one point I think I find the right one but then all the seats fill up so quickly I don’t even get one. There is no place to stand without getting in everyone’s way. But wait a minute, this isn’t even the right room or the right band.
Well, what fucking ever. I eventually give up and head back to my car but when I get there and sit down at the wheel my head starts spinning. Wait a minute. This sense of confusion. I’ve been here so many times. It’s supposed to be telling me something and damnit, I know the answer to this question. I’m dreaming and I can use this realization to make the dream go lucid, which I do. In fact, I remember that I was just recently taught how I can remove myself from my more human perspective in these type of dreams and sort of enter cheat codes that quite quickly illuminate the purpose to whatever odd astral enclave I find myself wandering through.
Holy shit, I’m doing it. I’m doing the thing they taught me and not only is it working, but a black hole psi portal opens where my windshield once was and starts sucking my consciousness through it with a crackling grey electricity. The whole sensation is amazingly similar to the weed meditation portals I’ve been unconsciously warping through for years. I’m eventually pulled back into the venue front and center. I was just writing about how on certain occasions dream states ramp up into the higher frequencies. This would be one of those times. I have never seen so many colors. Impossible to put into any sort of words and of course, I know I’m dreaming and lying in bed the whole time. This is not a thing that should be happening per the warped worldview of Joe Sixpack and Suzie Stripmall but here I am. Alive in the superunknown.
And what am I witnessing? I’m in the main showroom of this hipster venue and all of the kaleidoscopic products have assembled to perform a few musical numbers just for me. No, the products are singing to me and it’s this enormously coordinated stage production. Exquisitely weird. What are they singing about? Well, not only the rich history of all of the individual products they represent but also their own individual histories. Sort of like, I’m ball point pen and I was invented by this guy in this year. Then this corporation started making me. I was personally created in this factory, then shipped to this warehouse here, then this store where I was bought by these LA hipsters to write things down at these sort of shows.
An entire choir of supposedly inanimate products joining together to sing the glories of their collective and individual histories. What in the absolute fuck? Do I remember any of the individual melodies or any of the specifics about what these stories entailed. Not at all but I’m pretty sure at least one of them was a signing piece of candy in a red wrapper with white twists on the end. It seemed to be one of the featured soloists. They all sang in an otherworldly tone that sounded like it was coming through the peak of a nitrous mind explosion. Beautiful and otherworldly.
This unfortunately didn’t last super long and as mentioned, there seemed to be almost sort of a willed amnesia regarding the details. What do I make of it in a waking state? Well, there seemed to be a message that all these cool DIY kids are really just capitalists when you get down to it. Also, I did go to see the Grey Daturas who are a band I hadn’t given a second thought to in probably a decade. Some of those plants will take you to some odd places. As a matter of fact, I read through a thread of salvia trip reports on Twitter a while back that involved people turning into inanimate objects and products quite specifically. Absolutely freaking insane.
Sunday January 22nd, 2023 –
So this starts off as a call back to a dream I had months back. A group of us are invited to get a guided tour of this surrealist artist’s creepy horror movie hell realm by the artist himself. There are four or five other people in this group and they’re all in on the opportunity, like, how could we pass this up? I am the lone dissenting voice and I’m not just out but I’m all the way out. I think these other people are fucking insane.
Like, it’s a creepy fucking hell realm? Why..the..fuck..would I voluntarily get involved with something like that? Why? I don’t even understand. Why are we even considering this? Like wow, we get a guided tour by the creator himself. It’s a goddamn horror realm. Why would we want that? Y’all have completely lost your minds. And yet I’m somehow either talked into going along with the group or outvoted or whatever and so off I go. This dream starts off sort of replaying this scenario and I’m again completely flippin’ out and pleading with them to reconsider.
And with that I’m now wandering around an airport looking to embark on this trip into the lower realms. This segues to me waiting in line at airport security who’s seemingly only looking at how much booze we’re taking with us when the lights start flickering and everything gets menacing as all get out. There is a telepathic message and that message is:
“Welcome to the Hellraiser world!”
This predictably creeps the shit out of me, to the point that I immediately go lucid. There is an understanding that I can just pull myself out of the situation and I instinctively do, waking up feeling a little skeezy but no big deal. I then get myself back under and it’s no longer as terrifying but rather gets into the prototypical astral confused meandering territory. I’m in this airport and I’m supposed to be catching a jet to somewhere but I have no idea what jet and where to find it. As far as I can tell I’m just wandering around in circles and of course all the signage and cell phone data that would normally be helping me navigate keeps mutating whenever I attempt to pin it down.
After blindly wandering through this bizarre airport/bus station structure for what seems like hours this guide suddenly appears and I approach her. I can tell she’s not like a dream NPC as there’s this glow around her but here’s where it gets weird. I’m not lucid at this point at all, and yet in a way I am. I understand exactly what’s going on. I’m in the lower realms and she’s come down to help me navigate. Except that she doesn’t seem super happy with me at all and I sense this immediately.
“You’ve got to understand, I do not know what the fuck is going on down here? I have no clue. Sorry I’ve been freaking out but I’m completely lost. This game is impossible.”
She’s sympathetic to this because she knows that I’m right but she’s still not super thrilled. She tells me she’s been communicating with my dog Zeke, who was sent here to help me heal and he’s told her that I’ve been “skipping steps”. She also tells me I need to be developing “better habits”. I honestly agree as I fell into some terrible habits to cope with the horrors of my Hashimoto’s disease that I’ve been trying to break in the 4 months now that I’ve finally felt better.
I then transition from this encounter into another situation in a seemingly higher realm where a young man is trying to make sense of a dream he had. I start to educate him on the subjective nature of the astral realm and how it’s comparable to the human concept of an inside joke. I explain that if someone you know is in your dream, particularly someone seemingly random, you can’t think about what that means in a general sense but what the person means to you specifically. He takes this into consideration and I can essentially see the light bulb go off in his mind as his dream has taken on a new coherence.
Now I’m climbing the stairways of a surrealist MC Escher-esque office complex. Some of it seems very familiar and some of its entirely novel but it’s all perplexing. I stop on a few floors, do some unknown work, then keep ascending. Now I’m in The Invisible College, replete with the classic old world polished wood paneling at all. I haven’t been in anywhere near this sort of classic academia architecture in years but here it is and that’s the point. The metaphor.
At some point a student comes up and sort of fucks with me in regards to my relations with daemons and I’m sort of like:
“Do something!”
He doesn’t. After wandering these halls while continually going up and down between floors for a while I end up having yet another heart to heart with a spirit guide. She has short red hair and black glasses and we chat for a spell in a situation that very much feels like office hours with a professor. At the time all of this is amazingly lucid and I find her quite helpful but goddamn it, for the life of me I cannot remember a single thing we discussed the following day. In retrospect it all very much seems like it was the same entity and it pulled me into a higher astral state so she could have a more civilized chat with me. Okay professor.
Monday January 23rd, 2023 –
From a liminal state the phrase:
“You are a Galadrian time monkey!”
Jolts through my headspace with a feeling. I very much get the impression this is the Invisible College professor from the night before trying to help me understand what’s going on down here. The slight problem being that I’m not entirely sure that Galadrian is the term she used at all. I tried to piece it together as best I could. It was something like that and although seemingly nonsensical I did in fact get it in relation to something they’ve told me before.
I’ve always loved the fictional concept of a space captain traveling to strange exotic worlds. Hell, I played through all 4 Mass Effect games 2022 and my entire existence has in fact been explained in those terms. Your soul wanted to travel to bizarre alien realms and you are currently existing in the most outlandishly whacked out one imaginable, inhabiting the body of a “Galadrian time monkey”. Pull it together captain.
A few hours before I have to get up I realize I haven’t had any dreams yet and contemplate how maybe this will be one of the rare nights when I don’t but nope. I soon find myself in my old apartment hanging out with some guys who are seemingly working out. We’re just hanging out bullshitting which is fun for a bit but I realize I don’t live there anymore and have to get back to my place.
So I head out and in doing so find that in this scenario I have a whacky neighborhood who’s always getting drunk, watching sports, and having people over. I have never had such a neighbor in my life. But as I get to the street to walk home I run into my ex-girlfriend from way back. We start walking together for a spell and have a chat. She doesn’t live too far away so I’m just going to walk her back home. I ask her about her dog and she says that he’s still hanging in there but he has some new dog roommates and kept her up all night yowling at them. I only mention this because it’s a very odd detail and this dog most likely passed away at least 7 years ago.
Anywho, we turn down this one street and out of nowhere the crazy drunken neighbor pulls up in a rickety old blue van with a friend. They want to go play some unknown sport and are recruiting us. We’re kind of resisting but eventually cave and get in the van. A few blocks later, we’re at the park and the dude just plows right through the high chain link fence surrounding the park’s exterior, to which we’re like:
“What on earth my dude? Jesus Christ why did you do that? The parking lot is right over there!”
As we’re basking in the absurdity of the situation I then wake up. Seemingly sort of nonsensical but the more I contemplated it I realized that the van was very similar to a band van we had a million years ago when I was in fact dating my ex. Yup, if I would have kept partying like that with those people, something shitty and amazingly stupid absolutely would have happened. They even hypnagogically tell me specifically who from my past the whacky neighbor represented and I’m like, that tracks.
More to the point, the last two nights of dreaming really did seem to have to do with booze and there’s something I wasn’t acknowledging. I accidentally scheduled 2 drinking events on consecutive nights a few weekends back. Some friends were in town and I had a work party scheduled over the same weekend. What are you going to do? It went fine but I did in fact get yet another cold a few days afterward. I have come so far in regards to regulating my booze intake that it hardly seems like an issue at this point. They seem to be telling me that I can do even better.
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