March 2001. Dream or quasi-nightmare. I had this dream while I was house sitting alone for some friends in their large and very old house. I had to go in the basement at one point during my stay and became instantly aware that the basement was really creepy and I certainly didn't wish to linger there, but didn't think much more about it. It was late afternoon when I fell asleep, upstairs, on the couch. I dreamed it was very dark in the house and I was going toward the basement and I didn't know why, but I knew there was something happening down there; I could feel there was some kind of activity--people. I also sensed that an eerie sort of glow was emanating from below the house, though I couldn't actually see it. I hesitated at the top of the stairs and listened. I could hear voices but not what was being said, yet the tone seemed friendly enough like it might be a poker game or a small party of some sort--occasional yelling and laughter. I walked down and encountered a smooth, round, white tunnel, just big enough to walk in, which curved and descended gradually toward levels unknown below the basement. Now I could hear splashing, and the voices were getting clearer. One particular male voice stood out, deep and strangely more resonant than the others, almost like the voice of a giant. I finally came to a low opening in the tunnel which revealed another similar tunnel descending even further and about half full of swiftly rushing water. I don't remember how I got in the water, but the rushing sound and the feel of it and even the intense chlorine-like smell of it was very inviting and I found myself up to the neck in it being wooshed along through the winding hills and valleys of the long tunnel. I shortly came to a larger chamber, a lagoon-like area fed by many such tunnels and here I first saw the boats. They were clustered together and seemed to be preparing for another 'run' through a 'sluice.' Before I could realize what was happening I was back in a tunnel, this time surrounded by a cluster of eight or nine of the boats. The boats were made of some solid, thick, lightweight substance and painted white. They reminded me of the floating 'cars' one might see in a carnival ride, like 'The Tunnel of Love.' More or less appropriate to this association, each boat had a human head, larger than life, protruding from the stern and some had slight 'carnivalesque' decoration around the head. These heads were very much alive, talking, laughing, yelling--even though they were obviously made of the same painted material as the boat itself. They were a very curious mix of cartoonish caricature and very real, animal, beings.  The boats could swing the weight of their heads around and most of them were strenuously engaged in such activity, crashing into each other and against the walls in the turbulent water. One of the boats--the one with the low booming voice, was a perpetually angry, older, bald man and was 'head butting' and even biting the other boats, and several of the other male boats seemed to be nearly equally rambunctious or at least delighted by the activity. Other boats were taking the situation in a more leisurely fashion, having conversations and just 'going with the flow.' Some of these boats would engage the more violent boats in battles as they passed in and out of the cluster and others would just roll their eyes and allow themselves to be pushed around. They talked about each other amongst themselves in pairs and groups throughout all this activity, all seemingly as normal as could be incuding the outrageous turbulence of the sluice. It was like a round of 'bumper cars' with me floating, head only above the water in the midst of them and clinging now to this one and now to that one, a very chaotic and exhausting enterprise. The boats obviously knew I was there among them, but none spoke directly to me. At one point I clung to a boat with the head of a very tired and sad looking older woman and she looked down at me with great compassion but could offer me no real help. It occured to me to try to get into one of the boats but the water was too turbulent and couldn't get any purchase. Several of the boats thought this was funny and they talked about me in a condescending tone, but they all seemed rather determined not to take too much notice of me. I felt a little like a small wild creature who had inadvertantly stumbled into their game and was incapable of comprehending it. This all went on for what seemed like a very long time. I couldn't really recall any of the exact conversations that had taken place among the boats, but I came away with a profound sense of a number of their personalities. They very eerily seemed to be actual people, so much so that at some point I began to wonder at their origins and found myself thinking of the words "boat" and "ghost" as nearly interchangeable. It was very clear that it was their inevitable lot to be 'trapped' here, together, perhaps for eternity, a strange and chaotic family. When I woke up I was beset by a very macabre feeling. The presences of these beings were still very palpable and I had difficulty remaining in the house. I had a walk around the neighborhood and sat on the veranda for the remainder of the night. This dream turned out to be possibly precognitive on two completely different levels. When my friends returned home I told them about my dream. They knew quite a lot about the history of the house and its previous occupants and some of the personalities and appearances of some of the boats as I described them seemed to correspond remarkably vividly to a number of these people--especially the angry bald man who had passed on a few years previous. After this conversation I began to feel even more, rather uncomfortably, that I had been at a virtual convention of past occupants of the house. Then, about a week later, some of my friends online told me to check out a "virtual chat program." I downloaded this program (called "Onlive Traveller") and a group of us explored it on and off for a few months and had great fun with it. This program gives each user a three-dimensional customizable graphic 'avatar'--a floating head--which moves around as you direct it with the keyboard's arrow keys through the virtual space of the program's many different 'rooms.' The rooms can be anything--forests, castles, deserts--and the users float around and can see and meet each other's avatars, talking through a microphone which even causes the lips of the user's avatar to move. On the evening of my first experience with this program, my friends took me to a virtual space that was a model of a tropical island. Far out over the virtual water in the virtual harbor of this virtual island was anchored a virtual white, empty sailboat, rocking on the gentle virtual waves which you could hear virtually splashing and gurgling against its three-dimensional form. I met another user there with a solid white faced and serene looking avatar who happened to be one of the technicians of the program and we had a conversation for several hours just floating there above the water. At some point I realized that I was talking to a disembodied white head which was floating with the stern of the white sailboat directly behind it. The unforeseeable visual resemblance of this situation to my dream of a few days before was unmistakable. August 1997. Vivid Dream. I was very ill with the flu when I had this dream and the image dealt with here is a tiny part in the middle of a much longer dream. I was walking outside and it was twilight, the sky very beautiful and pink. I was walking along beside a low building covered with Mimosa trees--the trees seeming to form part of the building. I found an open side door to the building and entered it, knowing that the building 'should be closed.' The building was only lit by the pinkish light streaming in from the side door, which I left ajar, and a low long glass window in the front. Its interior was one large room with different levels and filled everywhere with linear rows of austere wooden cabinets, most shoulder high but some lower, containing every size and shape of drawers--these reminded me of the 'card catalogue' filing cabinets one sees in libraries except that the drawers were mostly quite wide and flat. I remembered being here before and it seemed that I had come here a few times to retrieve some kind of art objects which had been made and stored here by several dead male ancestors. Simultaneously I had the feeling that even though I had been here before, I had never been aware of it, and the large room, even though fairly unremarkable, seemed completely amazing. It had a slight, dank smell of ancientness, like an old book, and dust motes swirled in the failing light. I felt there were all kinds of really interesting objects embedded in these drawers and cabinets and that I was free to take anything I wanted, and I felt a little surreptitiously giddy. I felt that no one had been here in a long time. I seemed to be drawn specifically to a certain place through the rows of cabinets. As I began to stroll through the space among the rows I noticed that a thick coat of dust covered everything. I began to see very clearly various disruptions in this dust on the surface of the drawers--fingerprints and other marks. Some drawers had obviously, from these disruptions, seen a lot of activity and been opened many times while others had been largely ignored. There was no real pattern to this activity, but as I walked on I could see that I was coming upon fresher disruptions, drawers that had been opened fairly recently. Now I seemed to be following a 'trail' along the right side of more and more recent activity.  Finally, these disruptions stopped altogether and I had the strong impression that the drawers beyond this point had never been opened, it not occuring to me at all that this idea would be in a sense absurd. I was drawn instantly to a particular drawer a few vertical divisions beyond any tracks in the dust. I simply opened it; it was slightly sticky at first and then slid smoothly open as if on rollers. The drawer and a couple I opened near it were full of brass cymbals, various shapes and sizes--from flat modern 'rock drum' cymbals, to more bowl shaped and crude, perhaps a bit like Balinese or Tibetan gongs, big and small. There were also pairs of various kinds of drumsticks and mallets.  Like someone who had won a prize at a carnival--I somehow innately knew that I would only have time to open a few drawers--I sort of tried to convince myself that this was pleasing and that I had some use for these cymbals. I was inspecting them and noting they were all quite worn and deeply tarnished when some part of my consciousness which knew I was dreaming asked the question "what are these symbols of?" I was absolutely delighted at this pun, and can only say now that at the time it made way more sense than it does now--it seemed not only a pun but a profound sort of cosmological principle that cymbals should be symbols, and vice versa. CONTINUE |