"Listen to your dreams, they are talking to you!" Patricia Garfield E.l.e.c.t.r.i.c D.r.e.a.m.s Subscribe: electric-dreams-subscribe@yahoogroups.com Unsubscribe: electric-dreams-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com Subscribe Online: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/electric-dreams =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= E.l.e.c.t.r.i.c D.r.e.a.m.s Volume #8 Issue #6 June 2001 ISSN# 1089 4284 =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= http://www.dreamgate.com/electric-dreams =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Download a Cover for this Issue! http://www.dreamgate.com/dream/ed-covers =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= C O N T E N T S ++ Editor's Notes ++ Notes to the Editor/Dream Airing Computer Survey ++ Interview: Patricia Garfield, Ph.D. The Universal Dream Key Interviewed by Richard Wilkerson ++ Poem: "early dreaming" By Alan Sondheim ++ Column: An Excerpt From the Lucid Dream Exchange Beyond Lucidity By Lucy Gillis ++ Article: The Waking Lucid Dream By Tony Crisp ++ Column: The Dream Doctor By Charles McPhee, Ph.D. ++ Article: Special Section: C.O.M.P.U.T.E.R D.R.E.A.M.S Digital Dreaming: Emergence or Replacement Imagery? Plus selections from the Computer Dream Survey By Richard Wilkerson G L O B A L * D R E A M I N G * N E W S - Peggy Coats NEWS * RESEARCH & REQUESTS * WEBSITE & ONLINE UPDATES * * DREAM CALENDAR for June & July 2001 * ASD News Update! D R E A M S S E C T I O N : This issue includes volume #173 - #222 D E A D L I N E : June 20, deadline for JULY submissions M.U.T.U.A.L D.R.E.A.M T.A.R.G.E.T We are re-focusing on the Mutual Dream Circle, which meets the 21st of each month. See details below. XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX Send Dreams and Comments on Dreams to: Richard Wilkerson Send Dreaming News and Calendar Events to: Peggy Coats Send Articles and Subscription concerns to: Richard Wilkerson: =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Editor's Notes =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Welcome to the June issue of Electric Dreams, your portal to dreams and dreaming online. If you are new to Electric Dreams, please see our January 2001 issue for an introduction and guide to dreaming online. http://www.dreamgate.com/dream/ed-backissues This month we are fortunate to have with us one of the Dream Titans, Patricia Garfield, Ph.D. Dr. Garfield's impact on the world of dreaming is now beyond calculation, and any summaries or estimates I might make are sure to fall short of the real scope and range of her influence. Still, I have included a quick summary below. Here I will only mention that her new book is out. In this, her seventh book, The Universal Dream Key, Garfield synthesizes a lifetime of dreamwork and provides a set of thematic categories with which to discuss our most common dreams. In an interview below conducted by Electric Dreams, Patricia Garfield discusses the book and many other topics in dreamwork. After such a wide ranging discussion, you may be ready for a poetic break. "early dreaming" is a poem provided by Alan Sondheim, who is a poet, critic, and theorist who writes on and about the Internet. His books include Disorders of the Real, and the anthology Being on Line, but he is best know as one of the most on-line writers/posters of the Internet, creating, distributing, re-writing, re-distributing and reproducing the differences that make up life online, making sense and sensuality through text. In this poem, written like an update of Henry Miller's Black Spring, Sondheim not only captures so many funny dream themes and dream theories, but releases them down a personal dream stream, distributing a flow of recurring puns, thoughts, observations in an oneiric river of sense and nonsense. Tony Crisp and his fellow researchers are pushing the boundaries of what dreams and dreaming mean and discovering healing processes in this journey. "We have noticed that as people learn the way of dropping the suppression of their ability to dream consciously, they can begin to tap the functions of dreaming when they wish." Crisp feels that he has begun demonstrating that these abilities can extend into what we normally call waking consciousness as well. Be sure to read "The Waking Lucid Dream" by Tony Crisp. The excerpt from Lucy Gillis's "Lucid Dream Exchange" also focuses on the outer reaches of lucid dreaming. In this month's example, the dreamer attempts a meditative state inside of a lucid dream experience. Read the results of this experiment in Beyond Lucidity. Charles McPhee, author of Stop Sleeping Through Your Dreams and the director of the Dream Doctor website returns to comment on dreams. http://www.dreamdoctor.com The Computer Dreams this month include selections from the Feb-March survey and an essay I have included on computer dreams. Researchers that need the full collection can contact me for the raw data and many variables not included here. These dreams re-printed here are to facilitate discussion and ideas on how to move ahead with the project, which includes not only studying computer dreams, but all the effects of the Digital Revolution and the human-machine interface. This includes abstractions such as the viral infection of the digital in the analog, as well as the connection/interface in our dreamscape of computers, cyborgs, robots, Borgs, androids and other human-machine concoctions. It is quite fascinating how the computer has leapt into both our waking and dreaming lives. Are these dreams, as some feel, simply an appearance and reflection of our concerns about computers in the waking world, or is it, as the inner world explorers suggest, a new symbol that is rising up from the depths to give us new meaning and value in life? Or are they something else quite unexpected? Be sure to read "Digital Dreaming: Emergence or Replacement Imagery?" and then look through the dreams yourself. Our news directory, Peggy Coats, from dreamtree.com, has gathered dreaming news from around the world, events, conferences, and seminars. I wanted to point out two news items here. The first is the ASD Dream Time Live with Stephen Laberge, Ph.D. on June 6th, 2001. For details, stop by the ASD site http://www.asdreams.org Also, the final day to register for the ASD Dream Conference, 2001 Dream Odyssey, is June 15, 2001. This conference (July 10-15) is NOT TO BE MISSED! Drop whatever plans you have for anything else this year and come to the conference! Besides the BEST education in dreams and dreaming, you will also get to meet the top dream researchers, clinicians, authors, artists, writers and dreamworkers in the field! And the fun just never stops. At the end, there is a Dream Ball, where we all come dressed as our favorite Dream Characters. Some people come to the conference just for the Dream Ball, it is that fantastic. Come as you are, but be sure to be in Santa Cruz UCSC for this event. http://www.asdreams.org/2001 If you have news items about dreams and dreaming for Peggy, send them to her at pcoats@dreamtree.com Our dream-flow Dreams this month come from all around the Net and have been organized by the software developed by Harry Bosma. Be sure to look through the dreams and see what on the mind and soul of dreamers in Cyberspace. If you would like a cover for your Electric Dreams, the cover is at http://www.dreamgate.com/dream/ed-covers If you have ever wondered how you can contribute an article to Electric Dreams, here is your chance: We are having a special issue on the Future of Dreaming. Get your thinking caps on and send me your essays! Details below in the Global Dreaming News. -Richard Wilkerson /////////////////////////////////////////////////////// =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Dream Airing: News, Notes and Events =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= ////////////////////////////////////// Strephon Kaplan-Williams now has a weekly dream related newsletter that looks into issue of spirit and soul. To sign up stop by his site at http://www.dreamwork2000.com/Sitemap/email.html ///////////////////////////////////// Want to chat about dreams? So you have seen it all and done everything there is to do in dreamwork. For you, Electric Dreams offers the further reaches of dreamwork. On the outer edge, the community explores postmodern dreamwork, transhumanist dreamwork, mutual dreaming, lucid dreaming and psi dreaming. Imagine dreamwork at trans-warp drive speeds. Open a sub-space portal and teledream though. A good place to start here is with the dreamchatters@yahoogroups.com list. Stop by http://groups.yahoo.com/group/dreamchatters for more information. //////////////////////////////////////////////////// Survey online: Are you having dreams about computers? As I mentioned last month, I have expanded the Computer Dreams survey to include not just digital dreams, but also dreams about robots, cyborgs, androids and other beings and scenarios that look at the human-machine interface. Be sure to drop off your computer dreams and fill out the survey at: http://www.dreamgate.com/computers/ ////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// Patricia Garfield, Ph.D. is now offering TWO free chapters from her past books: Dreams and Children as well as Childbirth/Pregnancy Dreams. http://www.patriciagarfield.com Also, you will find Patricia Garfield's many other books, her public appearance schedule, notes and information about the making of the book The Universal Dreams Key. ---------- =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Mutual Dream Healing Circle =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Dreamshare members ( a moderated, egalitarian on-line group for exploring the life and meanings of the dream-world) have initiated a dream-healing concentration, to be held in the consciousness of participants on the night of the 21st. of each month. Before going to sleep at night, please hold the thought, prayer, or concentration in your consciousness of bringing healing energy to those who have so requested. you may use whatever practices are important or helpful to you in effecting this healing state. There will be a list of names or circumstances of those who have specifically requested to be included in our thoughts and prayers. Please observe the general decorum of distance healing work in many traditions and do not add anyone to the list without his or her express approval...you may wish to hold in your consciousness someone else you know who is in need of healing energy and send them that energy, but please do respect everyone's rights to self-determination and privacy. my feeling is that someone who has asked you for thoughts and prayers can be included here as well. Feel free to contact Judith, c/o if you would like to be included in the list or for more information. On awakening, you may wish to pay special attention to recalling your dreams and, if you wish, you may submit them to< Dreamshare-owner@yahoogroups.com> for inclusion on our list. Anyway, that's about it for now. Take care, Judith //////////////////////////////////////////////////////// =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Interview with Patricia Garfield, Ph.D. The Universal Dream Key =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Interviewed by Richard Wilkerson Since the early 1970's Patricia Garfield's influence on the development of the Dream Movement has been monumental. She is a co-founder of the Association for the Study of Dreams and has been publishing her research for nearly 30 years. Her work has always been acclaimed as providing a balance of research, personal experience and clear understandings of dreaming and its creative applications in life. Her first book _Creative Dreaming_ is still in publication and continues to bring new dreamers into productive relations with their dreams and lives in thirteen different languages. The creative dreamwork approach has been a model for most dreamwork taught since that time. Her continued efforts and research into the creative wisdom of dreams over the years have produced some of our most important and in-depth dreamworks. In _Pathway to Ecstasy_, Patricia Garfield drew together many of the developing trends in the 1970's, such a feminism & the goddess movement, lucidity and spiritual transcendence, and the growing awareness of Eastern spirituality and Jungian psychology. In the 1984 _Your Child's Dreams_, Patricia Garfield returns to the very practical matter of how to raise children in a way where we don't abuse their dream life and tell them "Its just a dream." However, the book is more than a how-to guide for handling nightmares, its a journey for all of us back through our childhood and the dreams we left there. In 1988 _Women's Bodies, Women's Dreams_ came out and provided a companion piece to women's attempt to see themselves as having a unique passage through life as seen in the unique cycles, births, deaths and healing that are unique to women. By 1991 her research on healing expanded to include the dreams of all-bodies and souls. Her commitment to bringing her personal experiences and research to the general public in the service of healing and wholeness is found in _The Healing Power of Dreams_. In 1997, her exploration and research had covered the full traditional developmental cycle and began to focus on how dreams of the departed not only address the wounds of the death of others, but can help us develop our own spiritual journey. This research was published in _The Dream Messenger_. (See a full bibliography and notes about finding these books below). Perhaps it was only natural at this point for Patricia Garfield to note that dreams seemed to collect thematically like folktales and myths, butterflies and birds. (Actually she says in her book a question like this had been simmering for some time.) The results of this research, the themes and the meaning people attribute to them, is the topic of her latest book, _The Universal Dream Key: The Twelve Most Common Themes Around the World_. --------------- Richard C. Wilkerson [RCW]: We are indeed fortunate to have Patricia Garfield, Ph.D. join us for an electronic interview here at Electric Dreams. Dr. Garfield, hello and welcome! Patricia Garfield, Ph.D. [PG]: Thank you, Richard. It's fun to chat with you about dreams. You always have a fresh slant on things. [RCW]: For those who haven't read your book, or visited your website : http://www.patriciagarfield.com I thought you could give us brief list or overview of the twelve types before getting into questions about them. [PG]: Yes, see below for the list. [at the end of the interview -R] These are the types of dream themes that I find are shared by many cultures, across time what I call "universal dreams." [RCW]: About the origins of the book. You wrote that this idea had been simmering for sometime. What brought these 'simmerings' together to the point you knew you wanted to research this more? [PG]: I think it was being invited to be the President of the Association for the Study of Dreams for 1998-9. I knew I'd have to give a presidential address in Hawaii at our annual meeting. Wanting to present something new and intriguing forced me to mull over the ideas on my back burner to cook up a new dream dish. [RCW]: You are one of the first dream researchers in dreams to realize that the Internet could be used for research. How did that work for you? Do you feel others who read your book will also do more online research in dreams? [PG]: As we know, the possibilities of the Internet are staggering. What better way to compare a limited number of dream themes in different cultures with a standardized survey? Time and expense constraints made the net a good choice. Of course, in-depth dream work with individuals adds value. This is where my many years of dream exploration with people of various cultures over the years became useful. The method of collecting dreams via the Internet worked amazingly well for me. I was truly astonished at the breadth of information people provided, the number of people from different countries who participated, and the multitude of languages they spoke. I wouldn't be surprised to see other dream researchers using a similar effective approach. In the same way that information can be collected rapidly over the Internet we can distribute it swiftly. For example, I've provided a free download of the most requested chapter from my out-of-print book Your Child's Dreams at the Library on my website. Distributing new or hard-to-find information or ideas over the Net is quick and easy. [RCW]: Do you have any advice for other dream researchers that would like to conduct research online? [PG]: Yes, make the analysis as automated as possible from the outset. At the beginning of my study I simply recorded the collected dreams into a table, computing the results by hand. After I set up Excel worksheets to enter a summary of the dream, it was infinitely easier to calculate the results, such as percentages of people who had this dream, how many were males or females, what the dreamer's age was and the country of residence. This had to be done for each of the twelve categories so the paperwork/computerwork got to be cumbersome. Any automation of it makes the task easier. [RCW]: Why Twelve? How did you come up with that number of Universal Themes? Is there an order to these from one to twelve? [PG]: When I considered all the types of repetitive dream themes I've heard over the years, twelve seemed to finish the classification. Of course, twelve is a number heavy with symbolic significance the stuff of dreams. Symbolically twelve is a number of perfection or completion. It shares with the circle the idea of wholeness. It's cosmic. Think of the twelve months of the year, based on the twelve moon cycles; the twelve hours of the day and of the night; the twelve Zodiac houses. Then there's the twelve Apostles, the twelve nights of Christmas, the twelve tribes of Israel, the twelve knights of King Arthur, Hercules twelve labors, and so forth. We are even told there are twelve nerves to the human brain. When I started to formulate this classification, I thought there might be an order to the twelve categories of dreams, but only the first theme, being Chased or Attacked, proved to be first for most people. [RCW]: There are positive and negative sides to each of these themes, like the Being Chased and Attacked has its flip side of Being Embraced or Loved. Can you tell us a little about why they have two sides and are now just more categories? [PG]: Yes. Every action has its opposite action. In a dream of being Chased or Attacked, we are usually running away from the frightening animal, object, evil person or force; we try to prevent their harmful touch. In a dream of being Loved or Embraced, we move toward the animal, object, or loving person; we want to touch and be lovingly held. The direction of our behavior is reversed. In some dream themes, the positive pole is actually more commonly reported than the negative one. For instance, people often describe to me dreams about being Guided by a Spirit, whereas dream about being Menaced by a Spirit are less frequent. However, I have included this dream category among the twelve basic negative ones because they are so traumatic to the individual who experiences them. They are important not because they are so common but because they are so significant. [RCW]: What suggestions do you have for those who have dreams that they can't fit into these categories? [PG]: I think of the twelve Universal Dream themes as being basic building blocks. Our incredibly complex minds often weave stories using these basic units as part of larger structures, with additional, highly imaginative elements. If we can better understand the basic themes, we'll have a head start toward comprehending our more intricate ones. I do find that some people don't readily recognize that their dream contains some basic elements. One dreamer for instance wrote to me to complain that the disturbing dream didn't fit any of my categories; the dreamer went on to describe a horrific nightmare about being operated on and damaged. To my mind, it fits perfectly into the category of Injury or Death. When a dream truly doesn't correspond to any of the Universal Dream themes we need to work on it using other approaches. Break down the dream into key images. Then explore each of these step-by-step. It's like getting definitions for words in a foreign language. Soon the meaning of the entire message begins to emerge. I've provided a couple of my favorite dream work tools in the Appendix of The Universal Dream Key. [RCW]: There is a difference between the larger themes and what you call motifs. Can you explain the difference and how this works in the system? [PG]: Yes, the larger themes are comparable to a broad general class. In biology, we call this the genus. The motifs are comparable to what we call the species in biology, different variations of the overall theme. For instance, we may dream about having trouble with a car or some other form of transportation. I call this general class of dream Car or Other Vehicular Trouble. But the specific examples of it vary: we may dream about losing our brakes, going too fast, crashing into another car, being driven by a crazy driver, or many of the other minor themes. These smaller themes I call motifs. A Universal Dream theme may make up the entire dream. Recurrent dreams are often a single theme of this type. However, and here is where it may get tricky, one Universal Dream theme (or more) may be only a part of a larger dream, thus becoming a motif. For instance, we may dream about Car Trouble as the whole dream. Or, Car Trouble may be only one part of an involved dream which may also include Being Naked in Public, Injury or Death, and other motifs. The basic Universal Dream themes may become elements, or building blocks, of an overall dream with a complex structure. [RCW]: And what other factors do you see affecting these? [PG]: I think there are four components that shape our Universal Dream patterns: our biological heritage; our general cultural heritage; our local subculture; and our personal experience. To give one example of the latter, a man who violently lost his temper during the day dreamed that night about a cap to his car's tank exploding. All the elements of our physical being, our beliefs and ideas, as well as our daily life are condensed into the images of our dreams. [RCW]: How do you see dream researchers using your new system? [PG]: The system probably needs a lot of refining before it's a valid research tool, but I've tried to organize a beginning. A researcher who wants to explore one type of Universal Dream could start with the array of motifs I found in this theme among the dreams of the 500 people from 40 countries; these are given in the Appendix. Collecting his or her own material, or examining material already gathered in the same category, the researcher could see whether the same motifs emerge, and note additional ones. Comparing and contrasting results almost always teaches us something useful. If we compile several studies on the same theme, we may gradually expand our understanding of it, as expressed in different cultures. I was fascinated to observe how the villains in Chase or Attack dreams varied according to local threats, local myths, and local television and movie input. [RCW]: I liked the added graphs and graphics in the book. The icons in the book for each Theme make it easy to use and fun to read, but that appendix is really elaborate and well organized. How do you see people using the Theme Appendix? [PG]: Of course, my main audience is not researchers, but dreamers who want to understand their own dreams at present. I hope people who have a dream with one of the universal themes will be able to recognize it as such, locate it in the Appendix, and consult the meaning given there for this variation of the theme. I also hope the graphics or icons for each dream type will make it easy to refer to the section on that theme. [RCW]: For dreamworkers, it is a small step from dream theme to dream meaning, but for some not familiar with dreamwork, this may be a larger leap. Can you say a little about how you assigned the various meanings to each of the themes and motifs? [PG]: You know that I've been studying dreams for a long time. I started a dream journal when I was fourteen, and I'm still keeping it at age sixty-six, more than 50 years later. Naturally I've noticed correspondences between what was happening in my waking life and the dreams that emerged around the same time. So part of the meanings I give is understandably personal. They are also based on years of professional dreamwork with individual dreamers, exploring their associations to the dream images. Sometimes people who participated in my website survey volunteered information pertinent to their dreams that clarified their meaning. There is also a large body of dream literature I considered. Remember that, with Universal Dreams, we are mostly dealing with dreams that are widely reported and frequently experienced. This allows us to rely more heavily on the meanings they seem to have for most people. However, there are always idiosyncratic differences we need to consider. I've tried to provide a guide to lead the neophyte dreamer through the maze of meaning; I think skilled dreamworkers will also find new and useful information. [RCW]: It turned out from your research that the most common dream theme was being chased or attacked. Why do you feel this is such a prevalent dream? [PG]: We don't really know, but I suspect it may originate in experiences of our ancestors who were literally chased by wild animals or enemy tribespeople, in danger of our lives. The imagery of being Chased or Attacked has become a metaphor for feeling threatened in our waking life. The actual situation may be relatively mild, such as a sensed competitor for our job. In some cases, the threat is all too real, as I've found in studying the dreams of sexually or physically abused women. [RCW]: The Telephone and Machine Malfunctions vs Smooth Operations theme is one we often explore here on Electric Dreams. It is not, however, one of the more frequently reported themes, is it? [PG]: You're right. About twenty-five percent of the 500 dreamers in my study reported this type of dream theme. Although that's not an insignificant number, I anticipate that this theme will occur more often as electronic communication becomes even more widespread than it is now. You and readers of Electric Dreams will be in a good position to follow this theme over the coming years. [RCW]: The notion of the machine as a metaphor of the body seems very interesting and productive. How did you come across this idea? [PG]: I'm not sure where or when I first became aware of the connection, but as I recorded my dreams I often noticed a close association between the operation of machines or equipment in my dreams and actual menstrual periods, pregnancy, childbirth, and physical illness or recovery from it. To give one example, I dreamed about a faucet stuck on, causing a sink to overflow, one night just prior to the onset of my menstrual flow/blood. [RCW]: So Patricia, what was your favorite theme to write about or dream about? [PG]: I particularly enjoy having dreams of the type I call Natural Beauty, Miracles, or Rituals. They are the opposite pole of Disaster Dreams. The ones that I wake from feeling uplifted and full of wonder are a delight both to dream and to re-experience when I write about them. These dreams give a sense of connection with something extraordinary, almost magical, mystical. [RCW]: Do you have any favorite dreams of your own in this theme you can share with us? [PG]: Happily, yes. One of my all time favorite dreams is one I call "The Ritual Dance of Loga-Shana." It was a powerful expression of a wish to blend beauty of spirit and wisdom, not something I consciously thought about, but that emerged in the drama of a dream dance of invoking goddesses. And the flying dreams "The Great Steering Wheel" and "Flying to the Moon." And and [RCW]: Electric Dreams readers always want to know what dream researchers and authors are reading themselves. What's your favorite dream book written by someone else? [PG]: Hmm that's a tough one. One recent book I like very much is Anthony Steven's book Ariadne's Clue: A Guide to the Symbols of Humankind (Princeton University Press, 1999). The dream reference I like for its mythological and folklore content is Ad de Vries Dictionary of Symbols and Imagery (Amsterdam: Elsevier Science Publishers, 1984), but it's very hard to find. [RCW]: When you originally began working with others to create the Association for the Study of Dreams, there was very little going on in the world in the way of coordinating efforts in dream studies. Did you think that it would become an international forum for so many fields; psychology, anthropology, biology, writing, arts, dreamwork, spirituality and telecommunications? [PG]: We did think an organization like ASD was possible and needed. It has certainly fulfilled that "dream." However, we had no idea what hard work was involved in developing an international forum and how much business and administrative skills were needed to keep it functioning. [RCW]: Besides pioneering dream organizations, research topics and new areas in dreaming and dreamwork, you have also inspired many people to join the field and create a career for themselves. Do you have any advice for people who are interested in dreams and want to make a career that is related to dreams and dreaming? [PG]: Study your own dreams intensely, along with how they vary with your daily experience. There is so much you can learn from yourself. Those dreamworkers who have gone before can provide a variety of tools and techniques, but the motivation to understand yourself, to discover how your mind creates its own language of pictures, is something only you can do. It's a wondrous adventure. [RCW]: Dick Cavet said this was an author's least favorite question, but I have to ask anyway: Do you have plans for another book? [PG]: Well, there are some other pots of book ideas still simmering on the back burners. I'll sample the contents and see how they taste now. [RCW]: I know you are quite busy now with your book tours and appearances, and so I wanted to thank you for taking the time to being with us here at Electric Dreams. If our readers would like to meet with you, is there a listing of your appearances? [PG]: Yes, you can always stop by my website and look at the Schedule of appearances. Your readers will also probably want to know about the ASD conference being held this July at Santa Cruz, California. It's a great place to meet fellow dreamers, learn new approaches to dreamwork, and polish old dream skills. They can get more information about it at http://www.asdreams.org/2001 [RCW]: OK, and we are providing more information below about your site and books. Thanks again! [PG]: That was fun, Richard! As usual, you make me think. Thanks for asking. --------------------------------------------------- Universal Dream Themes : From the online questionnaire 1.0 Being Chased or attacked by something or somebody? Wild animals, evil persons, monsters, supernatural beings, "things" and so forth. 1.5 Embrace or Love? The mirror opposite of dreams of fleeing from a dangerous pursuer are those in which the dreamer happily embraces another. These figures may be animal or human (celebrities, movie stars, politicians, royals), angels, imaginary people, or the boy or girl next door. The defining element of this category is pleasurable physical contact. 2.0 Being injured or dying by accident? Falling, getting hurt, being hit by a car, being sick, dying, etc. 2.5 Healing or Rebirth ? The opposite to dreams of injury or death are those dreams in which we become healed or reborn. 3.0 Having trouble with a car or other vehicle? Finding your brakes are gone, running out of gas, obstacles in the road, etc. 3.5 Driving Well? Few dreams fall into this category, but when they do they are extremely significant, suggesting easier access to skills for coping with difficult life situations. 4.0 Losing valuables or having damage to your house or other property? Your purse or wallet is missing or stolen, a special ring is gone, your house burned down, your plants are destroyed, books torn up, household goods broken. 4.5 House or Property Improvement? The opposite of dreams about House or Property Damage or Loss is House or Property Improvement. Here, also, is where our dreams of reconstruction and remodeling occur. 5.0 Having trouble taking a test or performing onstage? You can't find the room where the text is taking place, you haven't read the books for the test, the questions are for a different course, you are in the wrong play, etc. 5.5 Performing Well? Of course, dreams about speeding through a test and knowing you're doing well, or performing superbly in an event, speak of a different level of confidence in the dreamer. These dreams may serve as rehearsal for an approaching performance. 6.0 Falling or drowning? You are falling through the air without support, you are sinking in water and can't breathe, etc. 6.5 Flying, Swimming, or Dancing Joyfully? Whizzing along in space, feeling the wind, sensing a delicious freedom is probably the all-time favorite dream. Although this theme may evolve as an escape out of a fearful situation, dream flying soon becomes a joy-filled activity. A similar feeling of pleasure can emerge in dreams of moving effortlessly through water. 7.0 Being naked or inappropriately dressed in public? You suddenly realize you have no clothes on while at the office, school, or market, you are only partially dressed, you are wearing the wrong outfit for the occasion, etc. 7.5 Well-dressed? The opposite of naked or ill-dressed-in- public-dreams are those in which we find ourselves wearing beautiful clothing. These dreams sometimes refer to satisfaction with the appearance of our bodies, or may refer to a situation in which we feel that we "fit" well. 8.0 Missing the boat, train, bus, plane or other transport? You are rushing to catch some transport and it leaves without you. 8.5 Travelling Happily? The opposite of dreams in which problems arise around a vehicle are those relatively few dreams in which travel proceeds exceptionally well. Trips to fantastic places and past or future times also are featured here. 9.0 Having trouble operating a telephone or other machine? You have trouble getting through to your party, you get cut off, loose the connection, have a fuzzy line, struggle with some malfunctioning machine, etc. 9.5 Smooth Machine Operation? The converse of trouble with machines is dreaming in which we make easy, clear connections or machines that operate smoothly suggest improvements in our emotional connections. Many of the dreamers who participated in my study of dreams during bereavement reported dreams of clear connections with their deceased parent, spouse, or child. In these cases, the dreamers received messages in the dreams that dramatically helped them cope with their losses. 10.0 Being in a natural disaster or in a manmade one such as war? You are caught in a tidal wave, flood, earthquake, fire, you are in the midst of a war, exploding bombs, pollution, etc. 10.5 Natural Beauty, Miracles, or Rituals? The opposite of dreams in which natural or manmade disasters occur are those dreams in which the dreamer is inundated by the beauties of nature, rather than by destructive forces. The dreamer may observe or participate in miraculous occurrences. 11.0 Being lost or trapped? You are unable to find your way in a strange setting, you are trapped with limited movement, you are paralyzed, etc. 11.5 Discovering New Spaces? The opposite of dreams of being trapped or paralyzed are those in which the dreamer discovers marvelous new spaces. There are several versions of this universal dream. 12.0 Being menaced by dead people that you knew? You are threatened, criticized or berated by images of dead people you know. 12.5 Guided by the Dead? Some of the most powerful dreams we have are dreams about loved ones who have died. Men and women have changed their life paths, and sometimes their non-belief in an afterlife, based on dreams in which they felt they received direct messages from the departed. -------------------- If you would like to order _The Universal Dream Key_ or learn more about the book and dream themes, stop by Patricia Garfield's site at http://www.patriciagarfield.com Also, you will find Patricia Garfield's many other books, her public appearance schedule, notes and information about Universal dreams and a free chapter on Children's Dreams AND a chapter on dreams about pregnancy and childbirth. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= early dreaming alan sondheim =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= i of the dream; troubled i would awaken gauge dreaming of it shape- riding as the dream of transference stuttering of being much as i dreamed i was in a foreign land and had a foreign hand the fury among the dreams of bodies placements signifiers i am suspicious of among the poets whose footsteps are hardened by sea the question is and my dreams revert to it among neighbors with limited arousal and communication at night i dream still late at night i dream as flesh introverted cyborg dreams (which i rarely if ever have) are back in upon itself a klein here i write into the dream screen of no capabilities and i dream of monster machines running at fell through the coalesce and ascii dreams livid dreams maroon dreams of womb interiors cracks spit out on some floor clara says i dreamed saying? who's saying dream i imagine myself displayed ruptured cock you can hold your motion dream i think that it will be a nightmare i think dream will be a dream of her and she's with me night and day i can't believe she's dream of the multitudes! i swarm among them alas only in my dreams! i dream steel or iron or what they dream something momentarily precious dream unfinished work born as such claws perch in my back i dream of dreamed hysterically embodied the body at the other end is the machine dreamed not have nightmared i sleep tight dreaming of you each hour of dreaming texts all texts are dreaming texts coming from elsewhere dreams forget your mouth it is gone you will never again dreaming the dreams of classification conflagration they among illuminations uneasy dreams sexual depressive twists of the body with extended net dreams uneasy dreamer mirrors here i dream of this body sutured embrace the world small dreaming in my inscription the dream of it everything in my dream i imagine myself inside-out displayed dissected examples falling asleep as a leap into dream i dream'd falling with the stars i dream i dream into this as a slide farther father at night i dream; i dream of the practice drawn dreaming finally note how cyborg dreams digital dreams machine dreams are to happen to any of us i dream pixels a woman they separate back into the happened previsioned two days ago with a dream of last night it began harboring it dreamlike or real community of waiting in my dream any history at night they dream rust or coal or stone at night they have the language furrowed across historicity in dreams real and virtual i had no shoes until i dreamed a man who had a tree remember returning in i just feel it's too dreamy to metaphoric cyberspace third in my dream i can imagine being a stain on your wall viral crawl through in my dream i'm available always available from dreams lists emerge in one that does the dreaming (and capital does the rest) things are inchoate/chthonic hovering in what may be seen through the dream of me beneath her and i dreamed an open plain a field a meadow a woods a intensity %n dreams nightly even during the day it is backwards from the dream that something uncanny appears it it is backwards from the dream that something uncanny appears it dreams darkly through the night visions of great languor occupied by another the wall reading rising and little is needed to implement all of this now it's not future dreaming loveliness of the day melding into the sweet all thewy around; nor means perhaps dreaming myself of an ending your day as proclamations of the symbolic decathect everything balanced between most dreams of solidity and dissolute program- ming walking along of voice and murmurs as my uneasy dreams turn clothed in violation fabric clara has long uneasy net for the dissemenation of their wildest dreams and desires some never possessed surface as such we are everyone's dream i wept because nightmare i wake up rigid with fear i have had far too many dreams that are the self that is the immortal dream that of cuneiform ascii which might not be all dreamlike sourcelike in pure flight and transportation what occurs within the dream is one's absent body past reconstructing the problem of time as the dream direction to the phenomena of dream and dreamless sleep introspection is one and knows presently i dream of you you are with me with my waking sleeping the release of desire this is the dream the real and dream obdurate and imaginary nature and techno recognized the conundrum a dream realm of easy dreams and stirrings; reflection theory dream screen mirror stage we are bothered by regional economic downturn the gathering of the tribes unreal-istic as relation to current words and numerous there's a dream at work remember that i had dreamed a beginning at this point in the return this night's dream sometimes at least in this case which is the dreaming the transparency or temporary hiatus beyond what one does not dream it turned towards itself the body hovers as well i dream of models of voices making demands voices occupying dream spaces after months softening my exterior as i slid into dreams off the terminal the whale was white but might have been any color some i could not have with spikes for protection none of great size a dreaminess to all writing that is also a ghost clos-ing my eyes i dreaming minamikyushu your motion in my dream i'm available always available this gone on any dream [slightly re-formatted for Electric Dreams] Reprinted with the Permission of Alan Sondheim Sondheim, Alan (2001). Early dreaming. Retrieved Apr 10, 2001 from Philosophy and Psychology of Cyberspace Alan Sondheim is a poet, critic, and theorist who writes on and about the Internet. His books include Disorders of the Real, and the anthology Being on Line. He co-moderates several email lists, including Fiction of Philosophy, Cybermind, and Cyberculture. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with cat and cacti. For more information and texts by Alan Sondheim, see http://www.anu.edu.au/english/internet_txt/ http://lists.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/internet_txt.html =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= AN EXCERPT FROM THE LUCID DREAM EXCHANGE By Lucy Gillis =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= The Dream C.A.G.E. features lucid dreaming Challenges, Aims, Goals, and Experiments. One of the on-going challenges is to try to go beyond the state of lucid dreaming, to see where that takes us. Are there other levels of consciousness we can tap into when we chose to explore beyond our lucid borders? Here is what Clint found when he attempted to go beyond lucidity: Clint 12/17/2000, 4:59 Beyond Lucidity DREAM CHALLENGE In LDE 16, we were challenged to go "To Lucidity and Beyond" to see what lies beyond our usual personal levels of lucidity. I'm walking along the road with a couple of guys. They want to go one way and I want to go another so we split up. I take the road off to the left, which is a loop that will come back to the main road where we plan to meet again. A bright blue corvette passes me just as I turn off the road. As I walk along the road I pass a pretty little lake. There are some unusual looking small birds walking around the edge of the water; I don't recognize them and I wonder what kind of birds they are. As I continue walking I come to a small hill. I jump up to see if I will remain in the air because if I stay afloat I will know that I am dreaming. I don't expect to remain in the air because it doesn't feel like I am dreaming. To my surprise, I do stay up in the air and I realize that I am in fact dreaming. I continue flying slowly along the road. A couple of people pass by me on the road below; I say hello to them but they don't seem to notice me. I then yell loudly, "Hello, I am dreaming!" At this point I remember to perform the LDE exercise in which I'm supposed to look for something that reads "Beyond Lucidity." As I look around I see a small wooden building with a couple of row boats hanging on the front. I look to see if "beyond lucidity" is written on the boats. I do see some writing, but it says, "Pull on knob." I see a knob on the side of the boat and pull on it. A long rope is attached to it and comes out as I pull on the knob. I read what it says on the boat again and the complete instructions read, "Pull on knob and place in water." I go up to the door of the building and imagine that it says, "Beyond Lucidity." I open the door and behind that is another door. I think I hear people behind the second door. I open the second door and there is a large white plastic curtain, like a shower curtain. I part the curtain and go through. Now there are no visuals in the dream scene. There is only gentle white light that seems to have a soft cottony feel. I don't want to wake up so I try to feel with my hands in the vacancy to see if I can detect any objects; but I don't find any. Now, for a brief moment I enter a deep meditative state in which there are no thoughts but only pure consciousness. There are no feelings of ecstasy or joy or really any feelings whatsoever - just "being." Just before I wake up I "hear" the words to a verse in and old Incredible String Band song: "Dreaming - All creatures are. Brighter than the brightest star - You are - By far" When I get up to record this dream I feel very good and very happy. ********************************************************** The Lucid Dream Exchange is a quarterly issue featuring lucid dreams and lucid dream related articles, poetry, and book reviews submitted by readers. For further information contact Lucy Gillis at lucy_gillis@hotmail.com =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= The Waking Lucid Dream Tony Crisp =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= In January of 1972, two friends, Mike Tanner, Sheila Johns, and myself formed an experimental group. We wanted to research into the probability of the dream process breaking through into waking consciousness with ourselves as the subjects. Our main reason at that time was to see if the therapeutic functions of dreaming could then be more fully exploited. I for one was seeking personal healing from depression and psychosomatic pain. I had started my own interest in dreams six years earlier, and had explored, individually and with others, various methods of working on dreams, their symbols and meaning. I had particularly worked with Jung's active imagination, and had discovered the power of spontaneous fantasy erupting into consciousness. My book, Do You Dream? was written around the work of those early years. My interest led me to study the work of Franz Mesmer. Subjects placed by him in a relaxed condition experienced spontaneous movements, fantasy eruption, vocalisation and abreaction of trauma. All of these connect with the dream process, in that during the dream we spontaneously experience a dramatic fantasy, movements, vocalisation and sometimes the abreaction of trauma. Having watched humans and animals move while dreaming, I theorised that during the dream, in most people the movements being experienced only partially express through the motor nerves and muscles. I had watched a dog, for instance, make obvious running and barking movements and sounds while it dreamt. But the movements and sounds were faint. Yet in sleepwalking, the spontaneous movements and vocalisation are much more complete. So I wondered what connections existed between dreaming, sleepwalking and Mesmer's subjects. I found other mentions of these phenomena in as diverse places as early Christianity, in which during the Pentecostal phase, worshippers allowed spontaneous movements, vocalisation and connected phenomena. In Indonesia a group called Subud had started, that exhibited the same type of experience. And Dr. Wilhelm Reich, a student of Freud, had similarly found that patients who were helped to relax muscular tension and hold an open emotional state, experienced spontaneous physical movements, fantasy, vocalisation and abreaction. During a visit to Japan I found there a traditional practice called Seitai that has the same format. The modern teacher, Noguchi, even connects the spontaneous movements with the movements made during sleep. See: http://dreamhawk.com/mmcha9.htm Our problem as an experimental group was to find a way to allow this type of breakthrough for ourselves. To start with we tried two approaches. Jung had already suggested that to break the intellectual resistance against the eruption of fantasy from the unconscious, it was helpful to let the hands start moving where they wished. It is also a fairly well established fact that nightmares frequently reproduce the movements or postures that had been experienced during past trauma. So we tried a form of fantasy that would allow, not just hands, but the whole body to take part. Also we used the technique of reproducing the position experienced in a nightmare to see if the dream would rise into consciousness and continue. My own experience in these first experiments was based on a nightmare I had of being strangled. My head was pulled back. Also, prior to the experiment I had noticed that as I fell asleep, a powerful neck tension pulled my head back. So I reproduced the posture in which my head was pulled back by tension and left my body, emotions and voice free to express spontaneously. My body soon began to tremble. This was something we were intellectually ready for, as it was described often in cases of this type. Then the trembling developed into powerful movements. My head pulled back hard, my mouth locked open, and my voice, quite without attempt on my part, cried out for my mother. I then relived my tonsil operation I had as a six year old. It was an amazing experience, rather like a record being played, only my body, voice, mind and feelings were the amplifier. This began a process which we entered more deeply into over the years, and with it my personal journey to healing - but also to waking up in and exploring the world of the unconscious. Not only did I find childhood trauma, but also a vast unity of minds of which I was a part. It was a unity that spilled into my life as visions and insight. So that was the beginning. The dream process could break through into waking consciousness. But it was clearer and it was healing. A long standing neck tension and feeling of loneliness disappeared. It wasn't a nightmare - like Mesmer's subjects, and Reich's - it was an abreaction or catharsis. So one of the keys we used to unlock the dream process into consciousness was the release of muscular tension. I discovered that most people have unconscious muscular tension. If this is made conscious by having the person become aware of it, what was unconscious is already emerging into consciousness. If the tension is then given time to release, with a body and mental attitude of acceptance, spontaneous movements begin. See: http://dreamhawk.com/mmcha8.htm With further research with numerous people we found abreaction was only one of the many aspects that spontaneously emerged into consciousness. The range was as wide as the subjects covered by dreaming. i.e. sexual pleasure; experimental consideration of a life problem; creative fantasy; ESP; happy play; the exploration of the depths and heights of the mind and body, etc. I suspected as our experience grew, that in normal dreaming, there is a suppression of motor impulses to the body. I also felt that the people we worked with, ourselves included, learned to relax this suppresser, so that full movement could emerge from the dream maker in us, along with often amazingly rich emotional and mental experience too. Later I came across the work of Adrian Morrison and his research team at the University of Pennsylvania. They found that a small area in the brain, the pons of mammals, acts as a suppresser stopping the limbs responding to signals from the brain during dreams. When this tiny area of the pons was damaged, the animal lived out its dream fully in physical movement. From this, researchers have been able to observe what the animals - cats - were dreaming from the movements they made during REM sleep. The cats played with dream toys, attacked or pounced on invisible adversaries, and expressed aggression. In our own research, our observations of what emerged during periods of conscious dreaming were aided by the subjects themselves being able to give information on what they were experiencing. From these descriptions and from the privileged standpoint of being able to look directly into the dream as it happens, three main functions were observable. See: http://dreamhawk.com/transf-8.htm Firstly, the dream process is an expression of the self- regulatory or compensatory function active throughout our being. So dreaming provides an attempt at maintaining health of body and mind. In normal dreams this may be interfered with because we interiorise fears, restraints and goals. During waking dreaming one can recognise and choose to drop the fears and restraints and thus allow the self-regulating action to complete itself. This may sound rather uninteresting, but there is nothing dull about the process which constantly keeps our body in balance and dealing with the environment and food we eat, as well as managing to spontaneously lead us through growth of body and mind. Secondly the dream process is an expression of the growth process at the psychological level. The dream can be observed to feed upon experience and integrate it into wider understanding and a freer identity. i.e. freer from anxieties, rigid viewpoints, etc. Thirdly dreams express a contact between ones individual sense of identity and the living consciousness of our total environment. So the dream process is creative in that the individual experiences contact with the process of life, and can learn to relate to it more effectively. Also out of this contact emerges a creative response in action, emotion, art, speech, music, dance etc. In this area the dream acts like a microscope or telescope, through which the dreamer can literally explore the cosmos, or the depths of their own psychobiological being. This has all the characteristics of the deepest of spiritual experiences. We have noticed that as people learn the way of dropping the suppression of their ability to dream consciously, they can begin to tap the functions of dreaming when they wish. For instance, the dream process has a much fuller access to total memory and subliminal impressions than normal waking awareness. So once one has learnt to dream consciously, one can actually ask a question and have a direct response from the process. People who use this technique have said it is like a very accessible intuition. As an example of using it, my wife and I located where she had dropped her glasses on moorland seventy miles from our home. People dealing with the public can much more easily discover what impressions their unconscious is picking up from the person, without having to sleep on it. See: http://dreamhawk.com/lb-6.htm The more I observe this process, the more it seems to me that past cultures used it, but did not recognise it as being an extension of the dream. They considered such movements and vocalisation or intuition as being the work of God, Spirit or spirits. (I am not disagreeing with it being a holy experience at times, but want to stress that through understanding its connections with the dream process, one can avoid many pitfalls and misunderstandings.) It was violently crushed in some ages, being so feared. In our own culture, which has a fairly recent record of terror and persecution regarding any spontaneous expression of the unconscious, we are only now beginning a wider exploration of its potential. Having closely observed the very direct connection between the process of dreaming and the experience of ESP, religious experience, spontaneous healing, racial memory and cosmic consciousness, it seems the dream, and especially this conscious lucid dreaming, is one of the richest areas to explore. I also feel that any investigator of lucid dreaming is limiting themselves if they hold the concept this can only occur during sleep. Consciousness can enter into the dream state in such a way as to bring about lucidity. But dreaming can also enter into consciousness in such a way as to bring about the same result. My observation is that after practising waking dreaming for some time, the quality of sleep and dreams changes. One of the observable changes is the total vibration of the body while sleeping. As our group has never been able to afford the equipment to monitor this, we only have a subjective and physical experience of it. Also, the process in some cases leads towards lucidity, first within the symbols of the dream then the awakening beyond any images or symbols. To myself as observer of this, and avid follower of the work being done by other researchers, I feel we are on the edge of opening a territory -consciousness - which had never been scientifically explored before. Have other human beings in the past created a bridgehead in the dimension of sleep and death, in which they now live, just as we live in the physical world? Can we learn to wake up there and develop, not simply a few minutes of excitement, but a dwelling place, a work within the realm of consciousness, and an exploration? These questions I hope the years ahead will unfold to us. If we work together on pushing back the boundaries of human awareness, it might be we who answer them. Visit Tony Crisp's website - http://dreamhawk.com - or e'mail tony@dreamhawk.com See Tony Crisp's in-print books - in the USA - http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/external-search/002- 0225381-1301211?tag=waves&keyword=Tony+Crisp See Tony's in-print books - in the UK - http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/external-search/026- 4917122-5856429?tag=waves04&keyword=Tony+Crisp&mode=book -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- The Dream Doctor Charles McPhee, Ph.D. http://www.dreamdoctor.com =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-==-=-=-=-=-=-=- "Abducted!" I didn't find anything on the site that related to abduction dreams. But I have had several dreams throughout my life (usually when I am at my parents home) that I wake up and have a feeling of "they're here. " I don't ever see who "they" are, but in my dream I know it is aliens. I usually see bright lights outside the window and I am paralyzed. I can only move my eyes. It's a horribly scary feeling. And then I wake up. I am wondering what your interpretation of this dream will be. My family teases me that I am really being abducted. But of course I don't want to believe that. I don't recall if any changes are going on in my life at this time. It seems I just have these dreams from time to time, usually when I'm at home at my parents, where I grew up. Michelle, Oxford, MI, USA Hi Michelle Welcome to the always perplexing world of sleep paralysis! I hope I don't disappoint too many abduction devotees, but your recurring dream is an excellent example of things that go "boo! " in the night, that actually have a fairly simple explanation. Each of us, when we sleep at night, traverses a very regular series of sleep stages. First we fall into deep sleep, then we rise into lighter sleep, and then, after about 80 or 90 minutes, we have our first period of dreaming. All night long, this sequence of sleep stages repeats. First deep sleep, then light sleep, followed by a period of REM (rapid eye movement). One of the curiosities of sleep learned in the 1950's (when scientists began measuring sleep with EEGs), is that we actually become paralyzed during each and every one of our REM sleep periods. Back then, REM sleep was known as "paradoxical sleep, " because the signals scientists observed during REM seemed to be sending a mixed message. During REM, brain activity was intense. It was so intense, in fact, that it was indistinguishable from the activity of an awake person's brain. The body, on the other hand, was profoundly relaxed. Much more relaxed that deep sleep. As research into REM progressed, scientists gradually realized that the relaxation of the body indeed, its paralysis was necessary to prevent movement during all the hallucinated activity of REM. In 1968, a French research scientist named Michael Jouvet demonstrated that the brain does indeed send commands for movement during REM sleep. The reason why we don't get out of bed and "answer" these signals, is because they are intercepted at the top of our brain stem, in an area called the reticular formation. When we wake up from a dream, accordingly, two events must occur. We must gain waking consciousness, and our bodies must release us from the grips of REM paralysis both at the same time. Usually everything works fine, but every once in a while (and most often when we are tired) our brains can wake up before our bodies "are released. " It can be a terrifying experience, because not only are we paralyzed which prevents our movement, our breathing, and even our ability to call for help but we also frequently drift in and out of REM, and have dreams that reflect our feelings of vulnerability. So we dream there is an attacker or intruder in the room. Or that someone is standing behind us with a knife. Or that there are bright lights outside The aliens are here! The reason why you can move your eyes during these "attacks" is because your eyes are the only part of your body that isn't paralyzed. (Rapid Eye Movement sleep!) What's the solution for sleep paralysis? Stay calm, and recognize that your body is just tired and taking longer than usual to wake up. The longest sleep paralysis ever lasts is a few minutes (if you are really tired!), and usually it is thirty seconds or less. In medieval times sleep paralysis was believed to be a temporary possession - by "incubus, " by evil spirits, or by witches. (It was never a "friendly" ghost!) Today we can add UFOs and aliens to the list of possessors, but the real culprit is much closer to home: some tired nerve cells, sitting right up there at the top of the spinal cord who are trying to get some extra ZZZs! =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Special Section : C.O.M.P.U.T.E.R D.R.E.A.M.S Digital Dreaming: Emergence or Replacement Imagery? Richard Wilkerson =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Included below is the collection of computer dreams sent into Electric Dreams and DreamGate from February 14 to March 15 of 2001. These dreams arrived through several channels, though most came from the online survey page at http://www.dreamgate.com/computers/ The study is still active. Please fill out the form. You will also find previous collections of computer dreams on that site. Note to researchers: If you need statistics for these dreams, the raw data is available from Richard Wilkerson. This study includes: Dreamers age, state, country, sex, marital status, Dream plus title, date and pen-name, religious beliefs, political beliefs, perceptions of most important issues today, how they spend their time on the computer [ranked, 1-5], hours spent on the pc, personal rating of quality of time, how often they recall dreams, favorite dreams, comments, permission to publish. The data samples in this article here can be referenced as Wilkerson, Richard C. (2001). DreamGate.com Computer Survey 2 :: 02/14/2001 3/15/2001. DreamGate Publishing: San Francisco, CA Here is the suggested reference for this article: Wilkerson, Richard Catlett (2001 June). Digital Dreaming Series: Computer Dreams VI :: Digital Dreaming: Emergence or Replacement Imagery? Electric Dreams 8(6). Retrieved May 26, 2001 from Electric Dreams on the World Wide Web: http://www.dreamgate.com/electric-dreams ------------------------------------ Emergence or Replacement Imagery? As our culture shifted from horse and buggy to Ford and Chevy, our dreams shifted as well. People didn't stop dreaming about horses and buggies, but the frequency of the older vehicles dropped as the newer vehicles replaced them. Was this just a simple issue of vehicular substitution, or do dream cars function psychologically in ways that horses and buggies never did? This question is now being raised in this preliminary study of Computer Dreams for computers and the Digital Revolution in general, as well as for the new mixes and interfaces between human and machine, such as cyborgs, implants, prosthesis, transplants and a host of other robotic/human mixes. Outside of Jung's exploration of the emergence of Flying Saucers as a contemporary symbol of the Self, (1) I am not familiar with any content analysis studies at this time exploring the issues of symbolic dream evolution. But we can posit some general assumptions. At the most abstract levels, the symbols of cars vs horses may operate in similar ways. Simple equations such as losing one's breaks in car and losing control of the horses in a buggy are bound to elicit similar reactions of fear in the dreamers. Or put in a more associational context, abstracting the loss of vehicular control constellates a set of relations that will be similar in each case, such as fears of death and damage to oneself and others, fear of loss of control in general, heroic and creative attempts, successes and failures to re-gain control, abandoning control issues altogether, and so on. From the viewpoint of a critical theory, we can also make the assumption that those who do interpret either their own or other's dreams will apply similar abstract categories to either automobiles or horses and buggies. That is, an interpreter can be expected to look for a familiar abstract category such as vehicles, means of conveyance, control of destiny, control of oneself and other such abstract categories which are suggested by, and then applied to the dream image. A question arises here whether the dream image can supply a new abstract category (can function psychologically in a novel way) or whether the dream image is forever condemned to conforming to categories the dreamer or interpreter has prior to the interpretation, prior to the assigning of the image to category. It may seem that this question would be beyond the dream as categories are usually developed before the dream and applied to a dream from the outside. But dreamwork has never been so dogmatic, at least not in its best applications and uses. Dreamworkers often emerge from an encounter with a dream image with a new category, a new perspective, a new viewpoint, a new psychological structure or attitude, a new sense. This occurs even when at the beginning of the dreamwork, old and common categories are initially assigned. We now have three worlds or realms that are being juggled. The first is the realm of content. Usually this is referred to as the empirical, concrete realm of the dream objects. [To be truly empirical, it is the recorded dream texts in this study, but let's not split hairs yet] The second realm includes the way these dreams are expressed, the way they are recalled, recorded, retold, as well as the way they are interpreted and otherwise encountered. The third realm consists of the relations of the first two to one another and to other content/expressions which they envelope or are enveloped by in subsequent encounters. This leads to a reformulation of the original question about dream and computers. Originally we asked whether computer dreams were simply replacing some earlier image the way cars replaced horses, or whether there was something more fundamental occurring which would produce a new category. This question became problematic right away, even with the simplistic car/horse as means of travel analogy. Further, unlike the horse/car exchange, computers serve several functions. They "replace" (at least time-use wise) telephones, televisions, typewriters, magazines, newspapers, records and CD's, tape recorders, clocks, billboards, calendars, cameras, videos and more. This is even further complicated by the way the computer invests itself in the very structure of these other functions and objects that were once analog, converting them all over to digital. The digital revolution is not just much about having new weird objects in your house that are hard to use, but rather in the massive change in the infrastructure of culture and cultural products. Conversion to digital is not swapping an analog clock for a digital clock, but the creation of a digital plane of being. In a sense, the Digital Revolution is somewhat like a virus itself, which invades analog production and reproduces itself within the old analog objects and processes, replacing all analog functions with digital processes. And along the way, new processes are discovered that were not possible with analog functioning, the most important right now being that digital reproduction can be exact, collapsing or imploding the map into the territory, the copy with the original. With analog production, there was often the attempt to exactly reproduce the original, but with digital production, their is no difference between the copy and the original, thus imploding the whole concept of originality. As Baudrillard (2) has noted, we begin to drift from dealing with objects to maps of objects, from reality to simulations of reality. Thus there are two significant complications with computer dream images and the investigation of novel categories. The first is that we can look at computers as not being in any previous category and not replacing anything that came before it, or we can view computers as replacing all things that came before it, all culture products and processes, including the concept of category itself. There is its novel aspect, and its viral aspect. In the novel-object aspect, the car/horse analogy is shown as incorrect. Attempting to say that cars replacing horses is like computers replacing X would be a fallacy of Orders. A more fair analogy than cars vs horses would be something like mechanical engines replacing animals. The Digital Revolution is more akin to the something like the Industrial Revolution. A comparable dream study in history will have to be something like the replacement of animal dreams with machine dreams. The horse and car would simple be one example of this larger process at work. In its viral aspect, the Digital Revolution is more akin to the Neolithic Revolution. Not only is there a change in the materials that make up the cultural objects, but also a whole new set of cultural objects. The cultivation of plants and animals is akin to the cultivation of information. Fields of information are now cultivated and circulated and exchanged. Just as stone objects give way to metal objects, analog objects give way to digital objects. Sometimes it is the same bowl, but the substance it is made of will dramatically alter the society that uses it. Computers as symbols, as engines of psychological production, will tend to both mimic in dreams their daytime uses, and to go far beyond these uses. We can see this in computer dreams where people fall into their computer monitors like Alice through the Looking Glass (3) or where the computer becomes a flying carpet that takes the dreamer to distant lands. Although there are binary dynamics at work in animal biology, by the time the dream is formed, these digital codes probably have little to do with the dream's content. Still, simulations of digital functions continue to operate at the level of the dream. And so an interesting collision of forces appear in the computer dream, those forces which will attempt to simulate digital computer operations as they exist in the waking world, and those which attempt to give other expressions to the dream computer. The results are themselves a human- machine mix, which is bound to differ from either and produce novel processes, to produce breaks into the flow of each of the previous processes and open new planes across which these symbolic cyborgs will exist. References: (1) Jung, C. G. (1978/1964). Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies. (RFC Hull, trans). Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ. (2) Baudrillard, Jean (1983). Simulations. Semiotext(e):New York, NY (3) Wilkerson, Richard C. (2001). DreamGate.com Computer Survey 2 :: 02/14/2001 3/15/2001. DreamGate Publishing: San Francisco, CA THE DREAMS ------------------------ http://www.dreamgate.com/computers NOTE: Dream texts are given before name and date. Wed, 14 Feb 2001 18:58:40 EST ------ Dreamers Computer Dream = Back in the rah-rah days of the startup I worked at, I frequently had dreams where I would be going about in some normal way; when all of a sudden, windows would pop up: IM windows, application windows, notepad would pop up with html written on it, etc. It was crazy! Invariably at the end of these dreams, my teeth would fall out. This happened quite a few times...and didn't leave me with an altogether great feeling. Other, better, computer dreams mainly consisted of me actually being inside a computer network, but on the client side. So I could literally push pixels around a screen, and I could physically go to websites and do things and such. These were better because I felt more free and more creative throughout the dream. I've also had dreams where I saw html or pictures and such...or thought of solutions to various problems I was encountering while building and maintaining a site. ----------------------------------------------------- Dream Title = poorbob dreams ----------------------------------------------------- Dreamers Computer Dream = I remember a dream I had about a chat room. It was my first experience and I was verbally assaulted. I was shocked. I immediately got off. It involved sucking a certain part of the male anatomy. I told my husband, and he said "never go there again", of course I didn't listen. ----------------------------------------------------- Dream Title = My cyber experience. ----------------------------------------------------- Dream date = 1996 ----------------------------------------------------- Dreamers name = Anonymous ********************************** ----------------------------------------------------- Dreamers Computer Dream = I remember a dream I had about a chat room. It was my first experience and I was verbally assaulted. I was shocked. I immediately got off. It involved sucking a certain part of the male anatomy. I told my husband, and he said "never go there again", of course I didn't listen. ----------------------------------------------------- Dream Title = My cyber experience. ----------------------------------------------------- Dream date = 1996 ----------------------------------------------------- Dreamers name = Anonymous ********************************** ----------------------------------------------------- Dreamers Computer Dream = I recall having dreams where I would be instant messaging my now ex-boyfriend and he would try to answer but it would keep getting stuck and all these pop - up boxes would show up. ----------------------------------------------------- Dream Title = IM Interferance ----------------------------------------------------- Dream date = about 1 month ago ----------------------------------------------------- Dreamers name = britty80 ********************************** ----------------------------------------------------- Dreamers Computer Dream = i had a dream once that i was using a messenger service in red ink but i was talking to someone that i didn't know. They were a stalker or something and were threatening to kill me. all of the words kept running down like blood on a mirror. i heard a knock at the door. so i answered it. they told me that they were the stalker. they pulled out a knife and blood was dripping off of it and i woke up. ----------------------------------------------------- Dream Title = stalker ----------------------------------------------------- Dream date = 2-15-01 ----------------------------------------------------- Dreamers name = Anonymous ********************************** ----------------------------------------------------- Dreamers Computer Dream = the systems were going down at work. I was frantically rushing about trying to discover the problem. No-one would listen to any of the souloutions I had. My g-friend said that in real life I was muttering computer codes in my sleep. ----------------------------------------------------- Dream Title = Chaos ----------------------------------------------------- Dream date = recurring ----------------------------------------------------- Dreamers name = Anonymous ********************************** ----------------------------------------------------- Dreamers Computer Dream = i was with a friend in my room and he wanted to watch t.v. on my computer.... I wanted to ask the computer a question because I had the game taipei on it and it gives a fortune at the end when you win. We use to play the game when we were younger... ----------------------------------------------------- Dream Title = fortune ----------------------------------------------------- Dream date = last week ----------------------------------------------------- Dreamers name = Anonymous **********************************no ----------------------------------------------------- Dreamers Computer Dream = I am a data analyst at a large company [no, really, I am] and in my dream I am working, but I am the computer even as I am typing at the keyboard, it is as though I am entering the data into my own head. I feel powerful, and alarmingly fast. Everything goes faster and faster, but everything around me is slowing down. ----------------------------------------------------- Dream Title = Intraday ----------------------------------------------------- Dream date = I've had it several times, most recently feb '01 ----------------------------------------------------- Dreamers name = Anonymous ********************************** ----------------------------------------------------- Dreamers Computer Dream = i dreamt that someone had sent a virus to my Napster program, and it was big lion that ate my songs, and it was terribly upsetting because i have dial up and it takes forever, and every time the lion ate a song it roared a bunch of times and this message would flash on saying " didn't you finish high school? why cant you stop the virus?" and the lion would keep eating my songs. ----------------------------------------------------- Dream Title = Lion Virus ----------------------------------------------------- Dream date = February 20th 2001 ----------------------------------------------------- Dreamers name = Anonymous ********************************** ----------------------------------------------------- Dreamers Computer Dream = i dreamt that i married a key board put it looked like a computer and our kid was a mouse pad ----------------------------------------------------- Dream Title = computers are bad at sex ----------------------------------------------------- Dream date = last night ----------------------------------------------------- Dreamers name = Anonymous ********************************** ----------------------------------------------------- Dreamers Computer Dream = A few months ago: I was looking at a guys website. He had done it in FLASH. I was looking at it to get ideas for my own site. There were two layouts on his page you could choose from. The layouts were on the same page...and now I can't remember what the difference was. That's all that I remember now. ----------------------------------------------------- Dream Title = FLASH design ----------------------------------------------------- Dream date = about two months ago..so, in December 2000 ----------------------------------------------------- Dreamers name = Anonymous ********************************** Dreamers Computer Dream = In my dream, my computer basically started making insane booping noises while I lay in bed trying to sleep (in the dream), which scared me for some reason, and then it escalated until the computer was jumping up and down and screaming Satanic references at me, asking me to "Submit" to it. It was a very scary realistic dream, and I felt like I was awake, because it all took place right in my room. Then there was fire outside my door apparently caused by the evil computer, and my parents running away from it, and the computer continued to jump up and down making strange noises, so I threw a rock at it (non- descript, I don't think I could see it, I just felt for it). For some reason, throwing the rock was a gesture of submission to it, and so I was defeated by that action somehow. Then I woke up. I keep my rock collection beside me bed, and in the morning, I discovered the rock I had "thrown at the evil computer" laying beside my computer, so I guess! s I must have been doing things in my sleep. Oh, and colors were mostly black and gray, because it was dark in my room, except the fire was brilliant red and orange, and I think the computer had a reddish glow surrounding it, but this is an old dream, so I may be wrong. ----------------------------------------------------- Dream Title = psychotic computer ----------------------------------------------------- Dream date = a few years ago ----------------------------------------------------- Dreamers name = Anonymous ********************************** ********************************** Dreamers Computer Dream = I was sitting at a desk not normally used for a computer in my house and wondered about the strange shape, A year later Apple came out with the iMac series but it still was not right as the machine I saw was white. In October of this year my wife bought the Snow version of the machine and set it up on the desk. There it was... In the next dream I had we were working on a bunch of computers, trying to get them up and running again. The screen was activated by touch on the bottom of the screen, BY THUMB ONLY, as fingers did nothing. To even see the activating icon, one had to (look through the machine as one does on the prints that have images buried in them and do not look like pictures at all. These machines seemed to be voice activated after the icon was found. There was no keyboard... There were no new machines being built after the severe geophysical changes we were fighting... only the salvage of what we had left intact. ----------------------------------------------------- Dream Title = Mobius Dreams (computers) ----------------------------------------------------- Dream date = Both were within a year of 1997, both the same week ----------------------------------------------------- Dreamers name = Anonymous ********************************** ----------------------------------------------------- Dreamers Computer Dream = I was in bed with my laptop computer. Chatting in a city chat on MSN. My instructor was in the room. He was wearing on neon blue shirt. The blue was the color of blue that looks like it had 10 cups of coffee. ----------------------------------------------------- Dream Title = neon blue shirt ----------------------------------------------------- Dream date = December 2000 ----------------------------------------------------- Dreamers name = Anonymous ********************************** ----------------------------------------------------- Dreamers Computer Dream = Being assmilated by the borg, then being liberated from their collective mind but retaining all advanced features the borg offer. ----------------------------------------------------- Dream Title = Being assimilated ----------------------------------------------------- Dream date = 1/25/01 ----------------------------------------------------- Dreamers name = Anonymous ********************************** ----------------------------------------------------- Dreamers Computer Dream = I think this dream was precipitated because of my work pager; it went off, and I woke up briefly to shut it off, then went back to sleep. When I started dreaming, I was at work. I was inside my cubicle, standing up. I looked all around me, and everything in my cubicle was inside out. The computer monitor was inside out, the keyboard was inside out, the computer was inside out. A terminal server normally sitting on the floor is sitting on my desk, with all the components normally on the inside on the outside. Then, quite suddenly, there's a square table inside my cubicle, with people sitting all around it. I don't recognize any of the people. And I suddenly realize there's no enterance to the cubicle anymore. Two people walk up; My boss's boss's boss, and a person directly underneath him in the scheme of things. Neither of them say anything, but they stand just outside my cubicle and stare at me. None of the person sitting at the table say anything at all. They stare at me with absolutely no expressions on their faces. I look down at the ground, then at my body, then back down at the ground again. I get the oddest feeling something isn't right in the world, and a doorway opens up in the cubicle wall, and I walk out into the walkway. Every where I walk, people just stand (or sit) and stare at me. The feeling I just experienced comes back again, and I mutter to myself, "I'm dreaming, aren't I?" It's the only rational explanation for everything that's going on; so I ask myself, "How can I prove to myself I'm dreaming?" I tentatively lift up my right foot, and I place it in the air approx. six inches off of the ground, and I do the same for my left foot. I'm suddenly standing on air, and I feel a rushing exhaltation from the discovery of me being asleep and dreaming. I suddenly get a huge grin on my face, and I can't stop laughing. Everyone continues to stare at me. I ignore everyone, and start flying around the building at blinding speeds. The dream turns very sexual for a brief moment when a lovely young lady in a red dress shows up, but then I quite suddenly wake up. This was my first and only lucid dreaming experience. I very rarely dream of computers at all, which is suprising given I work with them every single day. This is probably the only dream I've ever had (which I remember) about computers. ----------------------------------------------------- Dream Title = Lucid dream at work ----------------------------------------------------- Dream date = 2/29/2000 ----------------------------------------------------- Dreamers name = Anonymous ********************************** ----------------------------------------------------- Dreamers Computer Dream = Sometimes I dream I am part robot. Basically I can use the phone line or my computer without touching them. I think this is just the result of being lazy and using the phone and my computer too much. ----------------------------------------------------- Dream Title = At night I am a lazy mobile phone. ----------------------------------------------------- Dream date = common. ----------------------------------------------------- Dreamers name = Anonymous ********************************** ----------------------------------------------------- Dreamers Computer Dream = I dreamed I got a message from my daughter's school, that it was urgent I call there. I dialed the number, couldn't get through; dialed again, no luck. Dialed & dialed, no luck. Suddenly: WHOOSH! Wow-- where am I? What is this place? Everything is pink and white here, a pink sky with white puffy clouds, a tiny bit of orange too... it's rather sunsettish here. This "sky" is all around me, even below my feet... Oh, and I'm floating effortlessly, suspended in mid- air, weightless hehe! This is wonderful! And what is this in front of me... icons? Yes... rows and rows of them. Icons of folders and other things... Oh, I get it! I have entered someone's computer program! That's what this is. This pink sunset is someone's "background," and I have simply entered his webpage. Yes, it's a "him," all right; I sense him. I think he's working on the page right now, in fact. But he doesn't know I'm here. Oh here we go, switching to something else now... poetry? No, maybe not... song lyrics? Yes, it looks like song lyrics. Oh, and there's a picture-- a young woman. Oh, haha! I see, this guy has created a web page in honor of this woman he's in love with. Or rather infatuated with, as he barely knows her. But he has quite the crush. These lyrics-- oh my! And there are some words of her! He has plastered her words everywhere. He can't get enough of reading her words. And these colors he's chosen for this cyberspace "background", the pink & white, little bit of orange... very romantic. I have basically walked into his secret shrine. Hmm... secret, yes. I'm feeling embarrassed now. I shouldn't be here. This is terribly private, and I am an intruder. I should be leaving. Oh-- oh my gosh! It's an oversized cartoon character, popping/ floating right up in front of me, haha! I guess this guy must like cartoon characters too. Maybe. Wow, that was soooo realistic! Hard to believe I'm only dreaming. I'm in a simulated environment, but wow, how real it seems. I'm bobbing up and down in this limitless pink cyberspace, no ground below me, moving only by the direction of my will. Oh, there's something else off in the distance, a mere fragment of an image... Oh, this must be something Computer Guy is working on right now, something in its beginning stages. Gee, I wonder what's behind me... If I were standing on my own 2 feet, on solid earth, I'd be able to easily turn around and look. But floating as I am in this cyberspace, it's not easy to turn around. I must focus my attention, concentrate... turn around... yes, here we go... turning to the right now... I can bob up and down a little... Ah-- here we are! Nothing? Nothing but pink sky and white clouds. Well I guess this proves I'm not on a stage, otherwise I'd see an audience. Well good, it's nice to be able to move in all directions, even if there isn't anything special to see. I just can't get over how real this is... an excellent simulation. But if a mere dream can seem this real, what then is my waking reality? Could it be a simulation too, a grand illusion? * * * * * * When I woke up from this dream I tried to get on the internet to type it up, but wasn't able to. I dialed and dialed and dialed, many times, no luck. I never have any problem connecting to my AOL, but this time I did. It was down for hours, was told it was probably earthquake (Seattle) related. So this dial-up problem was kinda coincidental, considering this was how my virtual world dream started in the first place! ----------------------------------------------------- Dream Title = Pink Sky Virtual World ----------------------------------------------------- Dream date = March 1, 2001, 10:15am PST ----------------------------------------------------- Dreamers name = Adondlei ----------------------------------------------------- Dreamers Computer Dream = The dream consisted of my taking a computer apart and actually repairing it. I spend hours on it when I am awake but if I dream about it, I don't think about other than it was probably just on my mind. ----------------------------------------------------- Dream Title = Asaliah's computer dream ----------------------------------------------------- Dream date = It's been about a month or so ----------------------------------------------------- Dreamers name = Anonymous ********************************** ----------------------------------------------------- Dreamers Computer Dream = i had a dream about having a computer in the car, like a lap top. The road was like open and clear,and it was dusk outside. I was driving and I couldn't keep my eyes on the road cuz I was playing with the damn computer. When I like realized that I was still driving, I looked up and we had almost hit something. It was weird. ----------------------------------------------------- Dream Title = Car Computer ----------------------------------------------------- Dream date = dont know.. months ago ----------------------------------------------------- Dreamers name = zerostar182 ----------------------------------------------------- Dreamers Computer Dream = i had a dream about having a computer in the car, like a lap top. The road was like open and clear,and it was dusk outside. I was driving and I couldn't keep my eyes on the road cuz I was playing with the damn computer. When I like realized that I was still driving, I looked up and we had almost hit something. It was weird. ----------------------------------------------------- Dream Title = Car Computer ----------------------------------------------------- Dream date = dont know.. months ago ----------------------------------------------------- Dreamers name = zerostar182 ----------------------------------------------------- Dreamers Computer Dream = Dream 1: I'm at home, and my mother walks in with a box. She says there are parts for me to build a new computer with. I take a K7 chip, 800mhz, etc... I build it. Then she walks in with another box and asks me to build another one and network them, she doesn't tell me why. I do it. Then with ANOTHER box of parts... finally I have built 3 computers (all K7s) and have networked them all, including my own (k7 700mhz). Now she tells me we have to play Counterstrike... (?) hehe Dream 2: I'm standing in the CounterStrike map cs_italy, and I have to marry my uncle coz his girlfriend left him, and he wants a marriage so he can get drunk. I tell my mom I DO NOT want to marry my uncle, we get in a fight and I tell her to screw-off. Then I'm walking around in the game map, shooting things. ----------------------------------------------------- Dream Title = CounterStrike dreams ----------------------------------------------------- Dream date = 2 days ago and last night. ----------------------------------------------------- Dreamers name = Syralid ----------------------------------------------------- Dreamers Computer Dream = I used to play an online game called Subspace, it was quite addicting and i played it during all of my free time. i had dreams where i was playing the game, and my eyes hurt in the dreams, just like they do if you stare at a computer screen for too long. ----------------------------------------------------- Dream Title = Subspace dream ----------------------------------------------------- Dream date = 1997-1999 ----------------------------------------------------- Dreamers name = fnord ----------------------------------------------------- Dreamers Computer Dream = I (on quite a FEW occassions) have had dreams about talking in a chat room i normally go to. It's usually just me, a friend, and some other people and we are tlaking about something, usually whos a lamer, who deserves to be /kill ed by someone, and who we hate... then somehow my parents showed up in chat and bugged me so i left, and went outside and walked to a bulding, ad once inside i found myself IN the chat sevrer, where i could walk from room to room to room and talk there and set furniture, all my friends were there as themselves and i could hug them and fool around and be myself. Then the prson whom i had a HUGE crush on showed up (net friend, we are bf/gf now), and walked over to me, he said hi.. then my DAD walked in.. "You gotta come back and set the table.." Well, he had to be living in his dreams cause i aint about to walk away from being with the guy i have a crush on, so i told him to go away and he got mad so i ran from room to room to ! room and eventually hit in a room mode +i +s, and +p. My crush showed up (since he was an IRCop) and invited dad in ebcause he kept on bugging everyone and i screamed and ran away, leaving dad there, and John (crush, real name, i love him so..) chased me, nabbed me and cuddled me, as he dragged me to the ultimate hiding spot... the operchannel... where.. strangely, the server admin was tlaking in citrust type of multi-colored text (those pale skittle type colors, light greens, oranges, pinks, yellows). He wrapped his manly, ircoppish arms around me and kissed me... Turns out he had a crush on me too... now we are a couple, adn wish to meet irl, weve talked on the telephone and all that stuff... he is really sweet... weve left the server that the dream took palce on and now are both ircops on a friends server, which is growing quickly. -kv ----------------------------------------------------- Dream Title = Chat Building ----------------------------------------------------- Dream date = Mid December, 2000 ----------------------------------------------------- Dreamers name = kvarn ----------------------------------------------------- Dreamers Computer Dream = It is all written down in a memoir in storage but the 'gist is as follows: The entire dream occured in reverse as we comprehend time to be. It fades in at some point in a "day" out in the open bays of a HUGE warehose in which humans and robotic /yet living and evolved Dinosaurs live and work in semi-co-existance. Be it that there was no utopia it was a "real lifescape" with the twists of a typical day just the oddities of etirely in reverse time wise; and a structural accomidation to the Dinos mobility, very large doors, and walls. These dinos were not ALL cyborged out, but rather a blending of reptilian(in a few cases amphibian and psuedomamailian) dino's with mechanical agmentaions... a broken leg was graphted with a bio-mechanical area as appearently the dinos evlution had "stopped" but the mental evolution didn't hence the self awareness, and socialogical elements of a society and the whole nurture "human" qualities.... it was very cool, just dinamicly odd in the whole Time reversal was understandable yet not.... ----------------------------------------------------- Dream Title = Dinobots in reverse ----------------------------------------------------- Dream date = Oh about 10 years ago ----------------------------------------------------- Dreamers name = Electryc_monk ----------------------------------------------------- Dreamers Computer Dream = I was at work, there were several desks, chairs, office equipment, etc. set out on a nice green lawn. People were going about their business as though there was nothing unusual about their location. As I walked through the "office" a panic broke out, the computers were not behaving correctly...as data was being input the output was coming out in the form of punched cards and nobody knew how to read them. We finally tracked down a card reader but then had problems feeding the cards into the reader and ended up putting them in sideways. ----------------------------------------------------- Dream Title = outside office ----------------------------------------------------- Dream date = 3 months ago (DEC. 2000) ----------------------------------------------------- Dreamers name = mzmouze ----------------------------------------------------- Dreamers Computer Dream = I had a dream at one point in time that I was taken into my computer, literally sucked inside of it. My computer was larger than normal, and normally it's very large. I kept seeing Linux commands and text... nothing else. Eventually I felt compelled to leave and I woke up. ----------------------------------------------------- Dream Title = Linux ----------------------------------------------------- Dream date = I don't remember. ----------------------------------------------------- Dreamers name = Anonymous ********************************** ----------------------------------------------------- Dreamers Computer Dream = i dreamed that i was in a chat room and i was talking to someone and then i found out that it was a serial killer in prison.i was afraid because i thought that somehow he might be able to find where i am and come after me and kill me. ----------------------------------------------------- Dream Title = serial killers on the net ----------------------------------------------------- Dream date = a week ago ----------------------------------------------------- Dreamers name = Anonymous ********************************** ----------------------------------------------------- Dreamers Computer Dream = i dream(ed?) that i was on my friends website posting messages. i like the page alot, since it`s fun and i`ve had dreams about it before. it`s an inernet wrestling thing. i dreamed that i was on it, and he made banners for everyone`s names, and that they all got really wavy and big and came out of the screen at me. then i woke up. ----------------------------------------------------- Dream Title = EHWF ----------------------------------------------------- Dream date = last night(3/9/01) ----------------------------------------------------- Dreamers name = Anonymous ********************************** Dreamers Computer Dream = i had a dream i was riding a IBM monitor from the 1990's through a field of orange grass and yellow sunflowers. a white unicorn came in and it's tail was made up of red, yellow, blue, and green computer wires. Then a duck came in and was made from a CPU unit from MAC. ----------------------------------------------------- Dream Title = ----------------------------------------------------- Dream date = 9 days before the birth of my baby ----------------------------------------------------- Dreamers name = nerual ----------------------------------------------------- Dreamers Computer Dream = Playing computer games (often, usually text based mud games), dreaming that I need to type "sleep" to sleep, or type "say hello", having drop down menus appear before me. Dreaming of intense swirls of numbers and colours and knowing it was inside the computer. These are often good dreams with little emotional input besides just cruising along in a digitasl world doing similiar dream stuff to other dreams. I do occassionally have a few dreasm where I am frustrated and trying to do something with a typed command or clicking a mouse but cannot get it to work. ----------------------------------------------------- Dream Title = Digital dreaming ----------------------------------------------------- Dream date = Since started getting into IT. 2 years every few months ----------------------------------------------------- Dreamers name = Anonymous ********************************** ----------------------------------------------------- Dreamers Computer Dream = i was inside my computer and all my friends were there but i couldnt see them i could hear them talkin and see their type then i woke up ----------------------------------------------------- Dream Title = where are they ----------------------------------------------------- Dream date = feburary 15 2001 ----------------------------------------------------- Dreamers name = Anonymous ********************************** Dreamers Computer Dream = I was in front of a large building in the parking lot and looked up into the sky. At first it was a UFO that I saw and then it turned into a computer screen that had some sort of windows programming software opened, I think it was Visual C++. It said something on the screen, but I was unable to remember when I woke up. ----------------------------------------------------- Dream Title = Unidentified Flying Monitor ----------------------------------------------------- Dream date = February 28, 2001 ----------------------------------------------------- Dreamers name = Anonymous ********************************** ----------------------------------------------------- Dreamers Computer Dream = Shortly after having learned HTML, as I was beginning to get seriously into Web development, I frequently found myself, in my dreams, unable to determine whether the situation that was occurring in the dream was "real life" or was a Web page I was working on. This didn't especially cause me any distress. In the dreams I thought of all kinds of inventive HTML tricks that I could use to tweak the scenery, people, even events in the dream. They weren't always "improvements" - sometimes they were purely experimental, just to see what would happen if I tried this or that. Sometimes I would also find myself, between waking and sleeping, not wondering "am I awake or asleep" but "is this my bedroom or is it HTML?" :) My take on all this is that perhaps dreams symbolize life in much the same way that HTML symbolizes the resulting compiled Web page. In a way, it almost seems like "knowing it's only a Web page and tweaking the HTML" was akin to lucid dreaming. Now that Web design is old hat to me (I make my living doing this now) I don't have these kinds of dreams as often - but occasionally I still do! ----------------------------------------------------- Dream Title = Is it real, or is it HTML? ----------------------------------------------------- Dream date = many times between 1996 and 1999 ----------------------------------------------------- Dreamers name = sleepymaggie ----------------------------------------------------- Dreamers Computer Dream = not a full dream, just a vivid image of the top of a Netscape browser from a few years back. the 'Location' bar was being filled with an ever- lengthening URL that was full of random characters and gibberish. it had the feel of one of those pumped-up information superhighway type commercials. ----------------------------------------------------- Dream Title = netscape browser location bar ----------------------------------------------------- Dream date = last night/this morning ----------------------------------------------------- Dreamers name = Anonymous ********************************** Dreamers Computer Dream = j ai commanc‚ a rever a messanger les petits bonhomme vert.Tres amusant et en meme temps terrifiant pour mon sphychique ,il semble s integr‚ de plus en plus dans mon spy. les (monitors,chat,programing languages...)Les couleurs sont vive aussi .Mais ,il faut dire aussi que sa ne fait que 3mois que je suis sur l ordinateur. ET je pense bien revenir a mon acienne disipline de comtemplation ,pour nettoyer mon spy.de ces vibration trop electronique comme vous le mensionn‚ ----------------------------------------------------- Dream Title = envaders ----------------------------------------------------- Dream date = frist week ----------------------------------------------------- Dreamers name = jplaniel Dreamers Computer Dream = First I would like to say that the link that brought me here asked for dreams that included dreams with robots in them, so if this one helps, here it is. If not, sorry. My best girlfriend and I were out of town. I was traveling with her through a few different cities for about a week while she attended some classes. The first few days of the trip went well. We ended up staying in a little bit of a seedy motel one night. When we woke up I packed up a lot of our stuff, we had a bunch of soda in the 12 pack and case boxes they come in, and some beer. I lined it all up against a wall of the motel room with our suitcases. We packed stuff into the car which I had moved into a spot real close to our room. There was some toilet paper on the driver's side rearview mirror outside with a dried up moldy orange, pieces of one with the rind, attached at one end. We joked about the car being teepeed and my friend took the orange and for some totally unknown reason she actually took a small bite of an edge of the orange. Back in the room, we realized that the door would not lock, it did not even latch fully when it closed. I thought about how lucky! we were to have slept without being burglarized or killed in our sleep. I tried to engage the deadbolt lock but the doorjamb and the door kept moving, almost like they weren't really attached to the wall that well. Then this robot thing, which came with the room, came over and helped me get the deadbolt engaged. That at least kept the door from being totally insecure. I thanked the robot and was happy that it came in handy for something. It went back and sat down on the floor. She got ready and left for her class, leaving me alone in the room. I looked at the clock and realized it was about 11:30 and check out was 12:00. So I called the manager and asked him if I could stay until about 2, and explained that I was waiting for a friend who would not be back until then or later. He said okay. I told him if the robot needed recharging or something he could have it because I didn't need it. I think it either went to the office itself, because its batteries were dead or ! the manager came and got it. I started to take off my clot! hes to bathe and took off my pants when the door suddenly opened and I grabbed a towel and wrapped it around my naked lower body. The guy who came into the room was apparently the cleaning person (maid), he had the cart and all. He was quite unkempt and didn't appear to be very clean. I explained to him that he would have to wait, since I got approval to check out late. I had trouble explaining to him, because he was Hispanic I think, but he finally left. I laid the towel down and started to prepare for my shower again when the door was opened again. This time I didn't have time to grab the towel and I yelled, "I'm naked, close the door" or "Get out" or something along those lines. This time the cleaning guy "just wanted to do something real fast" I don't know what. I was trying to cover my naked lower body with my hands and by sort of bending over and backing away from him. I made him leave, but not without difficulty. So then I tried again to bathe when the door op! ened again and this time it was a handyman, also Hispanic, who was there to fix the door. Before I had a chance to say anything to him, he had the door off of the hinges and struck up a broken English conversation with me. He appeared to be slow (mentally), but was pleasant enough. I still was holding the towel around me as we spoke. Something came on TV about a missing woman, who was presumed dead and they gave a short story about serial killers and their profiles, giving a profile on someone who may have killed the woman, who had the last name of Alvarez, or something close to that. He asked me what they were talking about, and I explained how psychologists were able to "profile" killers and gave him examples of profiles. He was lounging on the floor near the front door, which was now completely gone as was part of the front wall. The cleaning guy then came in and they both left. I was relieved because now I could take a shower, but then they came back with a third g! uy who I had not seen before, and were saying amongst thems! elves how the manager of the motel told them he used to date the missing woman and they were all surprised. I, still wrapped waist down in a towel, walked toward the doorway as they entered and they pushed me back in and were obviously planning to rape me. I cried and begged them not to, but the three of them would not let me go. They got me down on a couch and I continued to speak to them trying to talk them out of it, when I realized they would probably kill me because I could identify them. I was now naked and somehow I got away from them and ran out the door (which had reappeared) and ran up the parking lot screaming, naked. It seemed I could not scream or yell loud enough. No one was around. I ran past the manager's office and saw the door just closing with no one coming out to see what was wrong. I was desperately looking for someone even going by in a car, no one. There was a grocery store next door and I was going to try to get there to escape, I turned around! and saw one of them right on my heels and I knew there was no way I could escape. I woke up. When I dozed back off I decided that I was saved by a woman in her car in the grocery store lot. Addendum: The manager, the cleaning guy, the handyman and the missing woman were all of Hispanic origin, I can't figure that one out. Actually I can't figure out much of this dream. ----------------------------------------------------- Dream Title = Motel Hell ----------------------------------------------------- Dream date = 12 March 2001 ----------------------------------------------------- Dreamers name = DianeMRPD Dreamers Computer Dream = Sending the same tpye of email to my friend sover and over again but every time in a different font colur or from a different terminal. They would recieve my mail and send a similar sort of reply based on the type of font I used. ----------------------------------------------------- Dream Title = Repetative emails! ----------------------------------------------------- Dream date = repetativley ----------------------------------------------------- Dreamers name = Anonymous ********************************** ----------------------------------------------------- Dreamers Computer Dream = I was downloading a ton of songs on napster during the day, then in my dream i kept seeing listings of songs scrolling down the page, and i was clicking every song on the page, and then i broke the mouse! ----------------------------------------------------- Dream Title = NAPSTER ----------------------------------------------------- Dream date = 1 week ago....while i was sleeping ----------------------------------------------------- Dreamers name = Anonymous ********************************** ----------------------------------------------------- Dreamers Computer Dream = I slept with a guy I met on the computer ----------------------------------------------------- Dream Title = Sleeping with the computer friend ----------------------------------------------------- Dream date = last night ----------------------------------------------------- Dreamers name = Anonymous ********************************** ----------------------------------------------------- Dreamers Computer Dream = I dreamed that I was in the library at Drexel University in Philadelphia. There was a computer terminal in there with the name "CompUMate" on it. The screen was black with green letters. This was a semilucid dream so I was interested in playing with the machine and seeing how it would work. I noticed that any words I typed remained on the screen only as long as I looked at them steadily; if I looked away then back they would have disappeared. Pressing various keys would call up screens full of characters, which looked convincing in overview, but if I tried to read them the words would either be real words that made no sense taken together, or else nonsense words that looked like English but were quite meaningless. ----------------------------------------------------- Dream Title = CompUMate ----------------------------------------------------- Dream date = February 3, 1991 ----------------------------------------------------- Dreamers name = Anonymous ********************************** <<<<<<<<<<<<<<|||||||>>>>>>>>>>>|||||<<<<<<<<<<<< G L O B A L D R E A M I N G N E W S June 2001 <<<<<<<<<<<<<<|||||||>>>>>>>>>>>|||||<<<<<<<<<<<< If you have news you'd like to share, contact Peggy Coats, pcoats@dreamtree.com. Visit Global Dreaming News online at http://www.dreamtree.com/ This Month's Features: NEWS Ø Summer Solstice Celebration & Workshop Ø Club del Sueno Ø New Book: "Dreamweaving" Ø ASD A Dream Odyssey RESEARCH & REQUESTS > Applications of Lucid Dreaming Wanted WEBSITE & ONLINE UPDATES Ø Check out the new Dream Tree Ø Dream Guide Interpretation Service Ø Personal Dream Dictionary Ø Online Dreamwork with Spinner-Soft DREAM CALENDAR for June 2001 <<<<<<<<<<<<<<|||||||>>>>>>>>>>>|||||<<<<<<<<<<<< N E W S <<<<<<<<<<<<<<|||||||>>>>>>>>>>>|||||<<<<<<<<<<<< Summer Solstice Celebration & Workshop Sun. June 24, 1-4pm In Motion Studio, 813 San Pablo @ Solano, Albany. $10 fee for art materials Join Ellie Fidler for a Summer Solstice celebration & workshop with myths, folktales, dreams and art. Meet lions & leopards, lion goddesses, scarab beetles, eagle, raven, phoenix & more. Special slide show & painting in gold! Bring dreams. Advance reservations please. Call Ellie at 510-649-1971. Directions: From 80 or 580 take Buchanan/Albany exit to San Pablo. Turn left (north) on San Pablo. One half block north of Solano turn right into parking lot. In Motion Studio, 813 San Pablo Ave. is the red door behind Royal Caf‚ (The door doesn't face the street) >>> Club del Sueno Buenos Aires, Mayo de 2001 Agradeceremos dar difusi¢n a la siguiente GACETILLA: El d¡a mi‚rcoles 30 del corriente a las 20 hs., en nuestro 6o. Ciclo Annual de Charlas de Difusi¢n, la Dra. Margarita Blanco se referir  al tema: INSOMNIO: EL SUE¥O PERDIDO La reuni¢n se realizar  en el Sal¢n de Actos de la Fundaci¢n Alfredo Thomson, La Rioja 951, 1er. Piso, (1221) Capital . La entrada es libre y gratuita. Informes: Tel. 4957-4770; TelFax: 4956-0120, de 10 a 14 hs. CorreoElectr¢nico: club@rems.com.ar P gina Web: www.rems.com.ar >>> New Book: DreamWeaving "Dreamweaving: Using Dream Guidance to Create Life's Tapestry" was published in January byA.R.E. Press. DREAM WEAVING is unique among dream books because it is more than a "how-to" or a dictionary of symbols. This book takes readers on an intimate journey inside of the author's dreams and shows how dreams can be a source of wisdom, guidance, and hope for our daily lives. Rosemary Guiley, author of several dream books including "Dreamwork for the Soul", says: "The wonderful insights in this book go straight to the heart of life. Emily L. VanLaeys presents an engaging story of her personal and spiritual development, set against a backdrop of compelling dreams. If ever you wondered about the importance of dreams, Emily's book provides dramatic testimony to how God speaks to us every night, and how our dreams help us to stay on course to fulfill our highest expression and good." "Dreamweaving" is available from the Barnes & Noble and Amazon websites. >>> The Association for the Study of Dreams Presents: A Dream Odyssey, July 10-15, 2001 http://www.asdreams.org/2001 An international conference on dreaming with over 100 events and speakers on the beautiful campus of the University of California at Santa Cruz. The conference is open to the public and appropriate for professionals as well as those with a general interest in all aspects of dreams and dreaming. 1) Click for complete 2001 conference daily schedule, brochure, registration, accommodations, setting, travel arrangements, and Continuing Education (CE) information http://www.asdreams.org/2001 or call the 2001 Conference Hotline: (866) DREAM12 (toll-free) Visualize dreaming in a redwood forests and then log on and ponder over a hundred conference events including research symposia, expressive arts and personal growth workshops, extensive continuing education (CE) credits, PSI explorations and experiments, a Sunday children's Dream Fair, live web casts and international chats during the conference. On Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, a comprehensive overview of nightmare through human history and through the individual life cycle as well as multiple clinical approaches to nightmares, and a skeleton key to understanding sleep disorders that occur with nightmares. Help us untangle and tame the mysteries of nightmares! 2) THE SITE AND FACILITIES OF THE 2001 CONFERENCE: http://www.asdreams.org/2001/asd18_setting.htm 3) REGISTER NOW! Please register soon to guarantee your spot on ASD's summer 2001 Dream Odyssey. Register online or download registration forms, http://www.asdreams.org/2001/asd18_registrationidx.htm 4)CE CREDITS AT THE JULY 2001 ASD CONFERENCE CE PROGRAM TITLE: NIGHTMARES AND THE LIFE CYCLE 30 CE Credits in Dream Studies from the Association for the Study of Dreams. 15 MCEP Credits for California Licensed Psychologists is approved from the MCEPAA; 30 BBSE Credits apply for California MFT and LCSW Psychotherapists. MCEP Provider Number: ASN 015 Course ASN015-01 5) CHECK OUT OUR WEEKEND CONTINUING EDUCATION (CE) MINI-CONFERENCE FROM FRIDAY, JULY 13TH 7PM TO SUNDAY JULY 15TH AT 3 PM Geared for mental health and health professionals, dream educators, teachers, and pastoral counselors, a comprehensive update on nightmares from clinical and medical perspectives with updates on posttraumatic nightmares, theories about the functions of nightmares, children's dreams, sleep disorders linked to nightmares, and a comparison of different psychotherapies perspective on clinical work with nightmares including Jungian, Cognitive, and Contemporary Psychoanalytic approaches. 6) ABSTRACTS! 2001 Conference proposal abstracts are now online on our web site. Click here to read conference abstracts. http://www.geocities.com/asdreams_2000/2001/abstracts/index.htm 7) To join the Association for the Study of Dreams and receive discounts at the conference and many other benefits: http://www.asdreams.org/idxmembership.htm <<<<<<<<<<<<<<|||||||>>>>>>>>>>>|||||<<<<<<<<<<<< R E S E A R C H & R E Q U E S T S <<<<<<<<<<<<<<|||||||>>>>>>>>>>>|||||<<<<<<<<<<<< >>Applications of Lucid Dreaming Wanted What do you value about lucid dreams? Why do you care about having lucid dreams? There are a wide range of answers given to this question including inner adventure, fantasy fulfillment, creativity, rehearsal for living, overcoming nightmares, personal development, and spiritual practice. We would like to hear what you value about lucid dreaming, what you have done with the lucid dreams you have had, and what you would do with them if you could have them every night. In preparation for upcoming experiments, we are especially seeking examples in several areas: creative problem solving, rehearsal/ dream practice (e.g., sports, dance, martial arts, public speaking, etc.), and experiences of deep meaning or transcendence. Please email your accounts to whyld@lucidity.com. <<<<<<<<<<<<<<|||||||>>>>>>>>>>>|||||<<<<<<<<<<<< W E B S I T E & O N L I N E U P D A T E S <<<<<<<<<<<<<<|||||||>>>>>>>>>>>|||||<<<<<<<<<<<< >>> Check out the New Dream Tree http://www.dreamtree.com The Dream Tree, an online resource center for dreamers, has been completely redesigned, and now features even more opportunities for interactivity and community, with easier, more intuitive, navigation use a pull-down menu for the main sections of the website at the top of each page, scroll through the icons for individual pages listed at the bottom of each page, or use the new search engine. Come by and take the latest poll, join a regional discussion group, enter a dream forum, or search the website. If you find a page you'd like to bookmark, just click and save! For direct links to some your favorite pages, try these: Global Dreaming News -- http://www.dreamtree.com/News/GDNews.htm A monthly update of all the dream-related news worldwide, including the latest events, research requests, dream travel, online updates, and much more! Dream Calendar -- http://www.dreamtree.com/News/Calendar.htm Monthly listing of dream workshops, conferences, classes, and other events. Discussion Groups -- http://www.dreamtree.com/Community/Discussion.htm Tune into online dreamsharing groups, regional discussion groups, and many more internet opportunities to connect with other dreamers Forum and Bulletin Board -- http://www.dreamtree.com/cgi- bin/Ultimate.cgi Features five interactive forums: dream sharing, dreams & creativity, general forum, help the Dream Tree Grow, and networking. Dreamworkers -- http://www.dreamtree.com/Community/Dreamworkers.htm Need to find a dream group or a dreamworker in your area? Then check out this section of the website! >>> Dream Guide Dream Interpretation Service http://members.aol.com/dreamdiscernment/myhomepage/business.html? mtbrand=AOL_U Over twenty years ago, I began working on my own dreams after hearing Ann Farraday and after attending my first of three Intensive Journal Workshops (Ira Progoff). Subsequently, I was involved in a variety of Jungian workshops and, over the years have had exposure to many dream notables including several times Robert Johnson and Jeremy Taylor. Among my credentials, I am a National Certified and North Carolina Licensed Professional Counselor, a Certified Diplomate of the American Psychotherapy Association, a trained Spiritual Director and an ordained Presbyterian Church (USA) minister. I hold a Doctor of Ministry Degree from Union Theological Seminary. For many years now, I have been leading workshops and working individually with clients in the area of Dreamwork and Spiritual Growth. >>>The Dream Page http://fly.to/thedreampage From R. Kalisvaart, the author of the site: "This page was "born" with the fact that I had been having a lot of strange and wonderful dreams. Now, I've created a place where everybody can chat about their dreams and post their dreams on the messageboard for all the world to read. For some variation, I've also created a poetry section and an art section. I'm always willing to put poems or art from visitors on the site. The first two visitor contributions are from Madeline. She has submitted the two pencil drawings in the art section. There's also a "secret-section". But you'll have to find that yourself " >>> Personal Dream Dictionary Opportunity www.dreamershaven.com/page1002.html Dreamershaven.com is having a Grand Opening special on its personal dream dictionary service. Mention that you saw this announcement in Electric Dreams or Global Dreaming News and you'll recieve 20 percent off the final price of your personal dream dictionary. Order now, this promotional will only last until June 30, 2001. >>>Online Dreamwork with Spinner-Soft http://www.spinner-soft.com The Spinner-Soft website now functions as an online dreamwork group that is totally open to your timing convience. You can enter a dream at any time, comment on your own dream and or comment on others dreams. We use the respectful "If it were my dream approach and welcome all forms of dreamwork. You can also receive email notification that someone has commented on your dream so you only have to check back should their be a comment. In addition, you may link your dream to any number of metaphors and themes and give and receive comments on hose metaphors in general or the use of the metaphor in your dream. A library of dreams linked to specific metaphors and or themes can be built, allowing you tolearn much about the wonderful diversity of usages of metaphors in dreams. There is also a message board for dream discussions. >>>DreamBank http://www.dreambank.net/ This searchable collection of dream reports from UC Santa Cruz lets you peer inside the head of a bright seven-year- old boy, a natural scientist born in a small Midwest farming town in 1893, a sixty-year-old blind cook, or an eight-year- old girl ("many animal characters and relatively few aggressions"). For sheer novelistic intrigue, don't miss the dream diaries of Prudence, an English woman born in 1912 with a strong passion for literature: "Real buildings and landscapes known to me seldom appear in my dreams, which inhabit a country of their own, mostly of rocky sea-coasts on which tidal waves often descend, and wild empty countrysides sparsely scattered with castles and churches, across which pass pilgrimages, processions, and man-hunts." <<<<<<<<<<<<<<|||||||>>>>>>>>>>>|||||<<<<<<<<<<<< D R E A M C A L E N D A R June 2001 <<<<<<<<<<<<<<|||||||>>>>>>>>>>>|||||<<<<<<<<<<<< June 1-3 in Denver, CO Weekend Dream workshop. Contact Karl Kopp at 303.322.7738 June 6 Online Online Chat with Stephen Laberge, Ph.D. Dream Time Live For more information send a blank email to chat@asdreams.org June 22-24 in Puebla, Mexico Weekend workshop with Jeremy Taylor in Puebla (about 1 hr from Mexico City). Contact Irma and Julieta Azomoza at pnlazomoza@infosel.net.mx Jun 23-24 in Cincinnati, OH Ondinnonk: Honoring the Secret Wishes of the Soul. In the Huron language, ondinnonk means "a secret desire of the soul as expressed in a dream". A weekend workshop with Robert Moss. Registration and information: Please contact MiShalla (513) 697-9845, email mishalla@worldhshare.net June 29-July 1 in Danville, CA Weekend workshop with Jeremy Taylor. Contact Lorraine Steele at lor@sandamiano.org or 925/837.9141 x306 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ** DREAMS ** DREAMS ** DREAMS ** DREAMS ** DREAMS ** DREAMS +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ New Series begins with dream-flow@egroup.com Digest #1 09/29/2000 This issue includes volume #138 volume # 172 - # 202 Hello and welcome to the DREAM SECTION of Electric Dreams. This section is edited by Richard Wilkerson and the DreamEditor, a software creation of Harry Bosma, author of the Dream interpretation and journaling software "Alchera". (homepage: http://mythwell.com) Please note that we print these dreams as they come to us and that means we do not correct the spelling. Some dreamworkers find these spelling mistakes a great window on the dream and dreamer. The Electric Dreams DREAM SECTION includes dreams and comments from the DREAM FLOW, a project to circulate dreams in Cyberspace. Many mail lists participate, including dream-flow@lists.best.com dreamstream@topical.com DreamsRus@onelist.com The Dream Sack http//www.deeplistening.org/ione Usenet groups (too many to name, search DREAM) If you would like to send in single dreams for the flow, you can leave them at http://www.dreamgate.com/dream/temple If you have a mail list or would like to contribute dreams and comments on a regular basis, you can subscribe to the dream-flow by sending an E-mail to TO: dream-flow-subscribe@egroups.com You may get a note back to verify the subscription. Simply hit the return or reply key and send the note back. An Archive of dream-flow is available at: http://www.mail-archive.com/dream-flow@egroups.com/ Pre-November 2000: http://www.mail-archive.com/dream-flow@lists.best.com/ Pre-November 1998 http://www.mail-archive.com/ed-core@lists.best.com/ Pre-April 1990 Use Electric Dreams Backissues http://www.dreamgate.com/dream/ed-backissues ------------------------- BEGIN --------------------------- [dream-flow] Digest Number 138 [dream-flow] Digest Number 173 ____________________________________________________________ There are 4 messages in this issue. Topics in this digest: 1. Re: Some recurring dreams From: Leila Joiner These are older dreams from many years ago, but thought I would share them >with you,as I've always been fascinated by dreams and have written mine down >for many years, and really enjoy reading all of yours as well, "Angels fly because they take themselves lightly." ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ Message: 2 Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2001 22:33:20 -0500 From: "socaloca" wrote: > --------------------------------------------- > Attachment: > MIME Type: multipart/alternative > --------------------------------------------- Dear Chris Thank you for sharing those two dreams. They are especially interesting because they are not nonsensical, they seem like messages from you to you that are so clear.Perhaps this is because you have been so diligent in paying attention to them. The one I shared yesterday from october 95 is the only dream I've had where at least part of it made sense to me. Even so, I really enjoy dreams (my own and those of others) for their aesthetic as much as for any meaning they may impart. Here is another of mine from years back. I wrote it first thing in the morning before I was fully awake. This is one of the "nonsense" ones. Not that there couldn't be a message, (tho' I certainly don't know what it might mean) I call it nonsense because of illogical non-linear flow: Missed the metro. The new blue train pulled quietly away. The curtains in all the cars were drawn. The dirt down with the tracks was sloopy muddy. I threw a cone down there. Water started to drip into it. A man came out of his office and showed me his technical drawings of the metro. Walked through strange mall corridors. Had a date with Disa. We sat on a bench and pretended to knit her crochet. Nearby a dog was glued to a table display. He managed to pull himself free so I grabbed him and walked the other way. I wanted to find my street. I thought I'd know its name when I saw it. I got lost anyway. Classrooms for children. Libraries for art majors. Art projects everywhere. Light from the sun. Handsome serious man. The dog was white with short hair. I loved him. Performance art, Rock an' Roll group, a girl dancing with yellow chicks under her feet. Comments from fellow dreamers welcome! ~Carole ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ There are 8 messages in this issue. Topics in this digest: 1. Re: My Really Bad Bream From: mosseygirl 2. Re: mutual dreams, death speaks From: mosseygirl 3. Re: [Re: My Really Bad Bream] From: yes wings --------------------------------------------- > Attachment: > MIME Type: multipart/alternative > --------------------------------------------- FROM A BOOK. And you have a problem with that why? ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ There are 14 messages in this issue. Topics in this digest: 1. RE: to correct or not correct dream spellings? From: Anonymous 2. almost boyfriend material From: Anonymous 3. Re: hiya dreamers From: "P Ingerson / SolarPenguin" X-UIDL: 929f76dd6356bd298bf82d9069f6f55d well, I can throw in some thoughts on this. I'm a good speller and editor but a terrible typist, and I often record my dreams directly on my laptop immediately on awakening. some of my stuff, especially if it has entered directly from the Web "Post" site on Yahoo! rather than through a program such as Outlook express with built in spell check, reads goofier than I would prefer. so, while some slips of the fingers are indicative of something, (like my friend who wrote "I am somewhat bisexual but now very bisexual", when he meant to say "not very...."...or did he?) most of them are just about coordination. also...I have to admit to a certain amount of intellectual snobbism when I'm reading dreams, as well as other places in my life. I can generally tell sloppy typing from general ignorance about spelling, grammar, or syntax but though I'm not proud of this, I tend to be more dismissive of someone who routinely misspells what I consider basic words, etc. for me, even though it means "doctoring" the narrative some, it would be easier to let go of my ego-overlay on whether I think people are "knowledgeable" or "naive" if we had more uniformity in spelling. this being said, it's obviously a big job to have to spell check or otherwise edit all this stuff in addition to everything else going on! do you really want to take the time to do so???? or is there a volunteer? and in case of not being sure about something, when the spell-checker stops us, do we make the most educated guess at what it "should" be, or merely "stet" (leave it as is) when in doubt? take care.....Judith ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ Message: 2 Date: Sun, 22 Apr 2001 11:03:57 -0700 From: Anonymous Subject: almost boyfriend material Dream Title almost boyfriend material Date of Dream 4-20-01 Dream ok my guy friend and i have been really good friends for about 2 years and recently we have been drifting apart.....i dreamnt that me, him, my friend, and her boy friend were in a building. the first and second floor were this huge stadium. the stadium wasn't round but..pool shaped.we decided to go to the top floor, the third, and we descovered that it was a haunted house.we walked half way through and my guy friend and i were cuddling and kissing all the way through.we went down stairs half way through, and the stadium had been transformed into a huge pool. my friend wanted to go swimming and my guy friend said he'd go with her.so her boyfriend came and sat next to me in the bleachers and we were watching them.they were all over each other and they almost kissed several times. when they came back up they were totally dry and i got up so my guy friend could sit. he did and i sat on his lap and it went back to us kissing and cuddling and i woke up. the only thing is that they do flirt a lot in real life but he doesnt like her,he likes me and we have tryed to hook up twice and now he wants to try again. so im very confused. Comments by Dreamer Permission to Comment yes_share_comments Permission Comments ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ Message: 3 Date: Sun, 22 Apr 2001 23:06:16 +0100 From: "P Ingerson / SolarPenguin" Comments by Dreamer I am not sure what it means. ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ Message: 6 Date: Sun, 22 Apr 2001 16:16:53 -0700 From: Anonymous Subject: Buttons Dream Title Buttons Date of Dream 2/21 Dream I am walking with my girlfriend. We hear laughter out on Pepperdine's baseball field. I start walking down towards the dugout, where my teamates from the CCSN Coyotes are. Everyone is laughing. I ask Coach Chambers what was so funny? He didn't answer me. I turn to Chris Mower and ask him what is so funny? He starts laughing and then holds up my girlfriend's bra and panties. I turn to my girlfriend she begind to laugh. I turn back to punch Chris and suddenly my girlfriend and I are at a bar. She asks me "where are your buttons?" and then begins to sew buttons on me and touch me. I ask her what the hell are you doing? I start to get angry and then all of a sudden the fire sprinklers turn on ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ Message: 7 Date: Sun, 22 Apr 2001 21:17:38 -0700 From: Anonymous Subject: Snakes Dream Title Snakes Date of Dream april 16 Dream What does it mean when you dream of snakes?? ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ Message: 8 Date: Sun, 22 Apr 2001 21:16:34 -0700 From: Anonymous Subject: Decapitation Dream Title Decapitation Date of Dream 04/05/01 Dream My daughter has been having dreams of headless people. She has told me ones before that she had a dream of a womans head falling into a basket. Resently she has had another dream of a headless man grabing her one year old brother and putting him into a cage. What does this mean? My daughter is only 3 years old and we do not watch scary movies infront of her. ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ Message: 9 Date: Sun, 22 Apr 2001 21:18:22 -0700 From: Anonymous Subject: Egg and Chick Dream Title Egg and Chick artemis browndeer Date of Dream 4/16; early morning Dream I had an ordinary hen's egg in my hands, when it started squirming and changing shape. I got startled and threw it up in the air, and as the egg came back to earth, I realized that it was hatching! When it did hatch, the chick was a fuzzy black-and- white chick. Comments by Dreamer possible interpretation: a rebirth that I am fearful of? ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ Message: 10 Date: Sun, 22 Apr 2001 21:19:19 -0700 From: Anonymous Subject: TES' Travels Dream Title TES' Travels Date of Dream 4/20/01-3am Dream I'm at an airport in Japan with Mom. But I'm telling her it's Spain. I go look at souvenirs, but of course, everything I like, mainly elaborate beadwork, is super expensive. I tell myself this is just like the last time I was in Japan, always so concerned about picking the "right" gifts. So I go into a store, and just like at the airport, you have to get your bags x-rayed before you can go in. This one punky teenage boy just walks on through though, and the shopkeeper, a young Japanese lady, tells me that "he probably thinks it's a violation of his individual rights" but he's wrong- it's totally legal. I'm looking around the store and the boy is really mean to me. The ladies ask me about me and I tell them he's my brother, even though he's not. Then one of the ladies cuts my necklace off my neck. She thinks she's being helpful, but she's ruined my necklace. I think how bare I'll look without it, and start looking around the store for a safety! ! pin. But every safety pin I find is for sale, and they are expensive, designer, silver safety-pins. They tell me I can't use one of those. I finally find a normal safety pin lying around. The shopkeeper lets me have it, and fixes my necklace. Comments by Dreamer - I remember this dream very vividly. - I have been to both Japan and Spain, so the countries aren't random! ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ Message: 11 Date: Sun, 22 Apr 2001 21:17:58 -0700 From: Anonymous Subject: Amy Dream Title Amy Date of Dream 4/18 5:45 AM Dream I had a dream this morning that I was at my friends house. Except everything was under the ocean. And so we were doing something and He wasn't happy with something so in order to make him happy, I turned into a whale and swam over his house. After that he said he was so happy that he'd be happy forever. It was really kinda cool. Comments by Dreamer I think this may symbolize my going way out of my way to make my friends very happy in a big way. ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ Message: 12 Date: Sun, 22 Apr 2001 21:18:55 -0700 From: Anonymous Subject: New Dream Dream Title Alicet's Dream-Man Date of Dream recurringDream------------------------------------------------------------- -----------I have been having repeated dreams in which the same person is constantlypresent. The dreams are WONDERFUL -- not really sexual, just warm, kind andsemi-sensual -- almost like basking in the warm sunlight on a cool, clearspring day. If I wake during the dream, I am usually able to put myselfback to sleep so as not to lose the feelings. Since childhood, I have triedto do this - go back to sleep so that I may continue a dream and havealways failed, until now. I see this person regularly, and though we arenot particularly close, it is someone that I find interesting... The reallystrange thing is that I often find myself thinking of this person, notobsessively - but whenever my mind wanders, I seem to be involved in an"imaginary conversation" w/the person. Kinda strange, I know. Mornings thatI am unable to recall my dreams, I find that my first thoughts upon wakingare of this person and where they were, why not with me...then I fully wakeand think "how silly!" Stranger yet - when the person and I am together,topics that I have brought up ONLY in my head, questions that I wonderabout the person, are answered subtley (but concretely) in our nextconversation. I am not sure what to do...I am wondering if anyone hasexperienced anything like this before? Can this happen -- someone sharingmy dreams w/me? I don't feel that there is any malicious intent from thisperson, but it is confusing.It is strange, I can almost feel the person near me at times when the dreamis still fresh. I call out for the person to come back, sometimes theperson draws near to me but seems to hesitate amd usually pulls away again- then I wake. I was with this person yesterday for a time, and (as always)we shook and held hands momentarily before departing...my dreams arebecoming so real, it was tempting to say something because I feel thatthere is a very real, very deep connection somehow, somewhere, between us -but I don't know what to say (and also do not want to sound like a "nut")Comments by Dreamer The dreams come at anytime, immediately afterfalling asleep; middle of the night; early morning; or even while I amnapping on the sofa during the afternoon or mid-morning! ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ Message: 13 Date: Sun, 22 Apr 2001 21:17:08 -0700 From: Anonymous Subject: Ghost dad Dream Title Ghost dad/ Jessie Date of Dream April 11, 2001/early morn Dream Ever since my father left me when I was about 9 I've had the reoccuring dream of being at my old high school and standing by a wall I see a white car. I didn't realy take much notice to it until later somebody shot at the person in the car. I knew immediately it was my father. I'd run to the car to try to save him, but whenever I got to the car I woke up. Now I've switched high schools and haden't had the dream in about a year. Just recently I've started to have another dream. This time involving another member of my family. My grandmother. In this dream, I go on a hunt to find my missing family. We (my mum and me) go to a trailer park and find the one my grandmother lives in. When we get in it turns into this elaborate place. When I look around to find her, I go to this balcony thing and look down and see her. Instantly I begin to cry. I jump down from the balcony to her.Next thing I know we're in a living room talking. She hands me a baseball card of a very familar mad and I know instantly that it's my father. I start to cry again. I just can't believe that my father is doing so well and hasn't come to see me in 7 years. Then I'm in another room, this time at my old house, on the couch we got rid of years ago. Then I realize he's in the same room as me. When I go to see him, I wake up. Comments by Dreamer It freaks me out, I need to know why. Permission to Comment yes_share_comments Permission Comments go for it, get all the advise you can. ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ Message: 14 Date: Sun, 22 Apr 2001 23:57:13 -0700 From: Leila Joiner Dream Title almost boyfriend material >Date of Dream 4-20-01 >Dream ok my guy friend and i have been really good >friends for about 2 years and recently we have been drifting apart.....i >dreamnt that me, him, my friend, and her boy friend were in a building. the >first and second floor were this huge stadium. the stadium wasn't round >but..pool shaped.we decided to go to the top floor, the third, and we >descovered that it was a haunted house.we walked half way through and my >guy friend and i were cuddling and kissing all the way through.we went down >stairs half way through, and the stadium had been transformed into a huge >pool. my friend wanted to go swimming and my guy friend said he'd go with >her.so her boyfriend came and sat next to me in the bleachers and we were >watching them.they were all over each other and they almost kissed several >times. when they came back up they were totally dry and i got up so my guy >friend could sit. he did and i sat on his lap and it went back to us >kissing and cuddling and i woke up. the only thing is that they do flirt a >lot in real life but he doesnt like her,he likes me and we have tryed to >hook up twice and now he wants to try again. so im very confused. > ____________________________________________________________ ----------------------------------------------------------- ------------- There is 1 message in this issue. Topics in this digest: 1. The Journey Home From: "P Ingerson / SolarPenguin" ___________________________________________________________ _____________ ___________________________________________________________ _____________ Message: 1 Date: Sat, 12 May 2001 10:40:29 +0100 From: "P Ingerson / SolarPenguin" Subject: The Journey Home A very long dream last night, with lots of strange details. Looking back, I think it might be several linked dreams, but the storylines all fit together. ____ I'm in a caf‚ somewhere, probably central London -- although this will be contradicted later in the dream. Friends and family (especially my brother and father) are coming and going nearby. They'll stop and have a few words. I think we're all supposed to be going somewhere later. It's the day when we all get our A-level exam results. Everyone seems very excited by their grades: all "A"s and "B"s. I take my results out of the envelope. A large bundle of A4-size papers (not the tiny little slip of paper results come on in real life). There in big 72-point print is my grade, "C". The papers go on to brutally describe in detail why I only got a "C", why my studies have been such a failure, and why I'm so completely useless at them. I can't bring myself to read them. But I do notice that the examiners have also marked my life and hobbies, and given them a "D". They seem to think that the fact I like walking is specially dull. Anyway, I'll show them. I'll walk home from here. Yes, that's what I'll do. And I don't care what they say about that. (The text specifically mentions "fell walking" although I don't do that IRL. I walked most of the way home from my dad's house yesterday, although I did stop in a pub for a drink.) ________ It's evening. I'm walking along a familiar street, on my way home. The road is lined with the generic terraced and semi-detached houses that you can find in almost any inner- suburb of London, but this seems familiar. (Looking back at the dream, I'm sure I've been to this place -- or at least nearby -- in *other* dreams, but it's not anywhere real.) The sun is starting to set, and it's beginning to get dark. I reach a complex junction of main roads, lots of flyovers etc., which I have to cross using a foot subway. I go down the ramp into the gloomy tunnels. There are other people heading in the same direction as me, and some children playing. For some reason, the children make me nervous. The foot subway is damp, and there are large puddles in it. Every time another ramp leads up to the surface, the tunnel is open to the sky, and it must have been raining earlier. We have to go through one very large muddy puddle, and I don't want to get my best trousers wet. The children laugh at me, and that makes me nervous. I walk faster, up the ramp to ground level. It's now night-time, and I think that I've come out of the subway by the wrong exit. But it's too dark to be sure and I don't want to go back down there to try another one. The houses are all gone, and it's just a post-industrial wasteland. I continue along the road, looking for some landmark to tell me where I am. I soon find one. This road is following the contours of a steep hill. I *have* to reach the valley below. ________ The enclosed staircase, set into the side of an industrial building, allows pedestrians like me to move between the road above and the valley below. (It's similar to a real staircase on Holborn Viaduct, but I don't notice that at the time.) However, it is now the dead of night, and there is no lighting. As I descend, I notice that it makes no difference if my eyes are open or closed -- everything is pitch black. This darkness would make it perfect for muggers. And I just heard a noise from below me, as if someone was waiting there. Luckily, I'm on the last flight of stairs, nearly at the bottom, so when a train passes along the nearby railway in the valley, the light from its windows shines dramatically onto the foot of the stairs, revealing four football (soccer) fans. I'm worried they might be hooligans, but as long as I don't say I support a rival team, I should be Ok. In fact, they're walking away from me anyway. And as I reach the bottom of the stairs, I see why. It's not a street but a railway station platform. A train -- the one I saw earlier? -- is standing there, and lots of football fans are hanging around. I realise that a big match is going to be played tonight -- a final or an international - - and this is the special train that's going to take them there. (I think maybe it really is the FA Cup Final today, but I'm no sports fan, so I'm not sure.) There seem to be many shops, stalls and kiosks on the platform. Even the carriages of the train have been converted into shops. My mouth is feeling dry, and I want to by a pack of orange flavour sweets to suck, but the crowd of football fans is just to great. I can see the sweets on the counter, but I can't reach it. But there are other things on sale. I find a toy for young children, based on the Rugrats cartoon. It's a frame in the shape of the character Dylan's head, and you have to arrange magnetic shapes to make his face. I push the shapes around a bit, but just end up making it worse. I leave before his brother Tommy arrives and sees what I've done. ________ As I leave the station, I'm pleased to see that it's sunrise. That means I'll have light to see where I'm going. It's another generic inner-suburban street. There's a pub sign up ahead, The Mitre, which means that the station I've just left was Norwood Junction, almost back where I started from. (This contradicts the beginning of the story, where I felt like I was in central London. Norwood is in south London, a mile or so from my home. The station and surrounding streets are not like the real Norwood Junction at all. I've recently been reading a lot about Jack the Ripper, who killed one of his victims in Mitre Square which my be where I got that pub name from.) It's almost no time before I reach the complex road junction again, only now it's all changed. The foot subway has been totally remodelled, to make it less oppressive, more open and cheerful. But instead of ramps, there are now twisting, spiral staircases intersecting each other at weird angles. I nearly stumble and fall as I step from one staircase to another, and count myself lucky I'm not wearing high heels. I must remember to tell Ken Livingstone (the Mayor of London) that he's done good work getting this place rebuilt so quickly, but he really should do something about these steps. This time I leave through the right exit, and following another street, I arrive at a square. This square has also been newly built, so I don't know its name. I try looking around for a street sign, but I don't exactly find one. There are plenty of other signs, including above the entrance to the shopping mall. But they keep changing every time I see them, so they can't be important. One thing that I do see however, is a sort of map on a plinth. I can't quite make out what it's saying but apparently a wall of one of the buildings was once part of the old Slade prison, and that wall is still owned by the prison authorities. (Slade was the name of the prison in the seventies' sitcom Porridge, but I can't see the connection here.) And I must have been here before the square was rebuilt because the map says another building is named after me. Or rather, named after my Yahoo screen-name Solarpenguin_2000. However, it must be a mistake because I can't find the building on the ground. As I cross the square, I notice there are tram-tracks set into the road surface. I'm impressed that the Mayor is thinking this far ahead, putting tram-tracks down during the rebuilding even though the tramlines don't reach here yet. ________ However, the tramline has already been extended to a road just around the corner from there. There's a tram waiting there and I get on it. I notice that it's a new design, and the driver's console can be folded down when not in use, to make more seats at the rear. While I'm waiting for the tram to start, I listen to some of the other passengers gossiping. (I don't remember what they said, but I think Hitler was mentioned.) The tram is about to start, and there's a new street atlas that someone's left on the seat beside me. Although it's new, the maps are drawn in a very "retro" style, like old Victorian maps. But it's still new enough to show this new tramline, and I follow the route on the page as we go. (I won't bore you with the details of the route, but it would be totally impossible in real life. However, it does seem to be consistent with the distorted versions the neighbourhoods around my house in my other dreams.) I get off the tram just around the corner from my house, and walk back towards it. I'll soon be home. Finally. On my way there I pass another tram stop. This one has chairs and tables everywhere, like a continental-style outdoor pavement caf‚. There's a tram there, all its doors wide open and I can't tell where the outdoor caf‚ ends and the tram's interior begins. ________ ...And then I woke up. Interesting that the dream (or sequence of dreams) begins AND ends with a caf‚. And there's a recurring theme of things that are neither indoors nor outdoors: e.g.. the foot subway with its ramps, the staircase set into the side of the building, the train carriage that had been converted to shops, the prison wall that keeps it's own identity even though it's now part of another building, the tram that's indistinguishable from the pavement caf‚ beside it... Any thoughts? Cheers, P. ____________________________________________________________ There are 11 messages in this issue. Topics in this digest: 1. Drowning of Son From: Anonymous 2. Re: Drowning of Son From: Arlene S From what I understand, very very rarely are dreams of loved one's "death" prophetic. It's more likely that the death represents some great transformation with either that person, or your relationship to him/her. This isn't to say you shouldn't be cautious. I know dreams like this can be terrifying--I've had them before and they are hard not to take literally! Your son is 14--puberty is one of the biggest most awkward transformations or "deaths" I can think of! No longer a child, not really an adult either. This might be a good thing to look at: What are your feelings about your son going through adolescence? Especially as a mother--oftentimes when the son goes through puberty he shies away from the mother leaving her frustrated and hurt. It feels like he's leaving her, or their relationship is "dying." And as far as the ouija board goes, I wouldn't put any faith in that whatsoever. My sister plays with the ouija board all the time, and never once has it predicted anything of truth. Either it's the person who's playing, subconciously moving the mouse, or if there are indeed spirits out there, they're trying to scare the people playing by talking about "death" and or "satan." . Playing ouija is like dialing a random number. THe source is unknown, and therefore unreliable. I hope this helps! I don't want to discount the possibilty of this being a prophetic dream, but I want to urge you to look at other, more likely possibilities. Roma --- Dream Title Drowning of Son - Nicole > Date of Dream 4/23/2001at 4:04 AM > > 4/23/01 4:04 AM > 4/23/01 4:04 AM I woke with a start > Dream I was dreaming of being in > a outdoor church like > enclosure - it had a wooden roof and screened in > sides. People were under > floorboard and water was already about 3 feet high > and some could get out > others could not. I then saw sunshine and the water > retreated, to reveal > my own son, (who had not been in the dream until > this point) lying on the > floor, at the edge if the pew (as if he had been > trying to get out). He > was dead. This was so upsetting to me, I have told > friends about it, it > brought me to the point of tears and I can't get it > out of my head. > Comments by Dreamer This dream has me very > upset, my son is a talented > young man, age 14 and he recently related to me that > he and his step-brother had used a OuiJa board, my > son asked him what would > happen at camp this summer, it replied "He will > Die". Please help if you can. > > ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ There are 4 messages in this issue. Topics in this digest: 1. Re: Re: hiya dreamers From: "socaloca" To: Sent: Tuesday, April 24, 2001 11:03 PM Subject: Re: [dream- flow] Re: hiya dreamers | I am a visual artist and one of the things I enjoy most about my | work is other people's interpretations of it. ... So as one dream artist | to another, please tell me your idea about my blond cousins dream. | Ok. I'll post it when I get back this evening. (on remembering dreams:) | Share 'em when ya get'em. I don't remember mine from last | night either. | I remember a couple from last night. Both very different. Again, I'll post them later when I've got time. Cheers. ____ "I invited her to become invisible and have dreams that are associated with the Government" -- MegaHal. ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ There are 4 messages in this issue. Topics in this digest: 1. Re: My Really Bad Bream From: "artemis browndeer" Date of Dream 4-27-01 > Dream me and this boy like > ezchother but were kinda > waiting for the other person to make the first move > and we always stared at > eachother but i had a dream that when i went to my > locker my friend was in > his locker come to find that they have been dating > for a month. Maybe its > telling me to make a move before he goes or just for > me to give up after > that i got in a fight with cats. a gray and a white > one > > ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ There are 17 messages in this issue. Topics in this digest: 1. Re: Killing From: Arlene S