TURN UP THE VOLUME!

I’m in a series of situations I must solve or resolve. Puzzles, problems, tasks. They’re realistic, not fantastic, though I can’t remember any. Tiresome after several. Accomplish one, here is another.

Then I’m with a number of people—acquainted with each other—in a sparse room or an outdoor open space. They’re sitting or standing around, talking, reviewing, going over . . . what? What’s going on and what’s next. I realize they have been helping me with the tasks. Suddenly I know: We are a dream.

The protagonist is dreaming this. But I am the protagonist. Why now do I, in the dream and in recounting it, stop thinking “I” and report on a protagonist, a character my dream and I created? Because I’ve become lucid. Inside and outside the dream.

She&I realize that to end the endless cycle of dilemmas or conflicts or whatever, she simply has to wake up. But then—poof, the other people will be gone. They all realize it. Are they lucid too? This lucidity is different from stopping a nightmare character’s action, as in telling the snarling tiger, “Back off. You’re not real.” Everyone recognizes it’s a dream. They decide to try my&her waking up, to chance it, because after all, they can come back: I can dream again. Awakening can—may—end the endless cycle without ending them. Apparently the dream people have had enough too. Let’s move on. [The awake me writing down the dream finds this dream logic hilarious. Not so much later.]

So she wakes up. Then the scene shifts to the future dream. [In reality I am still dreaming, never stopped.] The characters are alive again, though in a new dream or a new dream period. They must meet and recognize each other. [Who is making these rules?]  The dreamscape holds an empty bench, a visual as uncluttered as a bare stage, and indeed I am watching from the outside—so far. 

A man and a woman, vaguely middle-aged, enter separately. He is younger and slim, with light brown hair, straight, a ‘90s look. She is somehow unremarkable, in style or at least memory, a bit beyond slim in a loose blouse and skirt. They eye each other, recognize each other, and sit on the bench, talking. I think they are waiting for the others, or waiting to see if they appear. 

Then the absolute ordinary gets strange. Their voices begin to lower, as if the volume is being turned down, and I also realize their faces are changing, not exactly aging, more the flesh becoming loose, malleable, falling into folds. The woman is more changed, or perhaps the melting is faster on her. She now looks very different, definitely aged. He’s slower. But the urgency for me is to hear. They’re moving their lips but silent. What are they saying? Turn up the volume!

Then they fade entirely and I realize the dream is over. I’m in my bed. I have awakened, yet as if I were not allowed to finish or follow the dream—my dream. I lie there in confusion. I feel someone ended the story before it was over. Turned it off. Or did I? I drift in another hypnopompic state entirely new, difficult or impossible to take in, know, grasp, recognize.  2024

With time and attention, I’ve better “taken in” this curious, disorienting dream and its lucidity. Fruitful possibilities, if no single bright-light revelation. Neither analysis nor divination is the aim of this website, though sometimes connection and comment emerge. In this case, conversation with the dream helped me clarify its puzzling being. Puzzles of my being are mine.

Waking within the dream is meant to end its plot, the entire story. I and cohort aren’t seeking to end particular situations (perhaps why they’re not memorable) but to end the endlessness. In my notes I drew three arrows forming a circle. Over and over and  over. Later, I think of Sisyphus.

In Part II, I am definitely separated  from my dream. I may know I created it, but I am not in it, not participating, not directing. I’m just watching. Supposedly I can enter at any time; obviously I can’t. Poof, I’m awake, like it or not.

Life is certainly navigating endless episodes until The end. We create them, receive them, deal with them, alone and with help. As with dream group. To what end?

Listen well. Time passes. Wake up.