Long, involved, interconnected dreams last night about identity, transformation (both mental and physical), and minds/selves becoming more than solitary (dual in one case, well beyond thousands in another). Magic was heavily, heavily features as an assumed core.

I woke from one dream in which I'd become a POV character, a tall woman in a short red dress, sobbing in deep, heartrending way because she/I couldn't sing, couldn't get past all the self-doubt, hesitation, and all the history of gendered bullshit around voice and meaning.

What woke me was realizing it as a dream; I realized it was a dream because I rarely cry in the waking world, and almost never loudly or unselfconsciously.

I'm starting to have dream visitations/receive dream messages again. Sunday night there was a snippet I can't fully remember about looking for gods, or waiting for them. Last night, there were five "people" with me in a house mostly like our Decatur home, overlaid in important ways with my grandmother's Alabama lake house (where my memories of certain kinds of weirdness begin) who had things to show me, tell me, and who woke me up by playing some of my favorite songs on my own record player. Three were a unit: a silent blonde girl, a sandy haired bearded dude, and another brunette guy, then a soft, chunky curly haired guy who was super friendly and outgoing in a low key way, and lastly a bespectacled Indian woman who was with me the entire time, who definitely had a geeky/academic/intellectual vibe about her. No idea who they were, but the whole thing very definitely had a feeling of "communication from outside" to it.

Very messed up dream (broken up by waking and slipping back into it repeatedly) about family, guilt, accusations of causing the death of someone's son (vehicular)under circumstances I don't remember, in a place I wasn't near, and being openly manipulated to accept responsibility by the (unknown to me) grieving father. There was also something about being set near a lake that was 30+ feet low, and being furious at the culture and cultural participants who led to that situation and refused to see causes (oh yeah, and going to a steak house with my family for some important "role model" dinner). Not a good night of sleep, despite getting about seven hours.

Strange dream last night about being on a large wooded plot of land. Part of it was old growth forest, very green, with a suffused but dark light, greenish in tinge, coming from all around, not the sky. There was a roofed platform/gallery built between several large trees, complete with stairs, and a naturally terraced waterfront (ocean? large lake?) with a creek running through it along a cracked stone bed. On the edge of a property (adjacent to a fenced off government facility, maybe abandoned or underused) on the water there was a very large two story house (large rooms, peaked roof, high ceilings, but simple in construction).

Janiene and I were camping on an upper terrace at one point. I don't know if it was a part of a larger group/event, or if it had been before, but we loved the place, and had been coming back pretty regularly. I remember walking through the forest alone at one point, stepping out of one densely wooded section into an opening, either a wide meadow or a band between sections of forest, and feeling my attention drawn to the platform/gallery. There were a number of large, odd, whitish winged birds about, and I noted it and moved on, back towards the waterfront.

At some point, it became clear that we had bought the house, and maybe the property because we liked it so much. I remember passing where we used to camp on the way to the house and remembering it fondly. We went walking in the woods together and a lot more of the birds (ugly, large, ungainly) were around. Janiene casually picked up sticks and threw them at the birds with surprising force and accuracy; each throw was a hit no matter the distance, killing the birds and reducing them to a weird pile of feathers and almost cartoonish body parts. I remember being amazed at her abilities. At one point, she threw a stick at a bird on the rail of the platform/gallery. I glanced up and saw our cat Socrates (dead now for 4-5 years) sitting comfortably, if not happily, at the top of the stairs, and I thought, “That's going to be one happy cat, with all those dead birds” (he loved/hated birds).

We walked on back to the house, and were slowly winding down, talking like we've come to do at night before settling in, when I suddenly snapped to full, worried awareness, remembering that Socrates was outside alone in the woods. I ran around frantically (at speeds much faster than I can do, almost superspeed) looking for shoes. I remember running back towards the creek and stopping to put my shoes on at normal speed, then crossing and running again looking for him. I went back to the platform/gallery, but he was gone, and I felt deeply disappointed and sad.

At that point I woke up to Janiene sitting awake in bed next to me. I mumbled something about being worried that Socrates was outside in a dream, and rushing to find him, but not being able to. Janiene said, “It must have been a short visit, then”, and that seemed to make sense, at least that part of it. The rest of the dream was just weird.

Slept very strangely last night, with many shallow yet intensely specific dream fragments that kept trying to suggest a much richer, interconnected whole. There was something about secret subcultural traditions, a monster or monsters, connections to a given family or families, a strange language/dialect that kept trying to make itself clear, and some just off screen central figure, an older, maybe sinister, maybe helpful "Blagger Man". Freaky.

First one I recall had a weird feel, something like the north Birmingham of my youth (near my maternal grandmother's house) mixed with Stone Mountain. Something about me was ominously different; a curse, or something that made me nigh immortal, hard to kill, and something a touch removed or tragic. There was a gathering of people on a rocky outcrop, like a picnic or to watch something(?). Someone was talking about 'buy one, get one', an idea to which I'd been exposed and suggested to use as a conversational entry, so I was called over to talk to the slim German woman talking about it. As we were talking, I realized she (and a lot of others) were sitting under the cover of a low, large jutting cliff or balanced stone, and it made me very claustrophobic. I crawled out, just in time for it to collapse. With sudden urgency, I pounded on the rocky debris with the butt of my rifle(??), then began shooting the rocks to break them into smaller pieces only I could lift. The German woman eventually emerged, unhurt, and I realized she had become similarly nigh immortal and hard to kill, but by accident rather than whatever tragedy had befallen me.

Second dream I was in a large brick hotel/dorm complex. There was a large party in a public area, and at one point I'd wandered away looking for a restroom. I passed a very scantily clad dark skinned brunette woman, but she somehow avoided me in a way that suggested she was a part of another narrative. I found a restroom, but my eyes weren't working well, and I had trouble determining if it said 'men' or 'women' on the door. Based on number of characters, I thought it was the former and went in, but it was laid out like a women's restroom. I went back out, and somehow the door said 'ladies'. I managed to get out before anyone noticed.

I returned to the party and ended up near a strange, intense bunch of folks trying to work some phone/gambling system. The central figure was making insane, crazy predictions, they would make bets by phone or lottery, and then they'd win. It became clear by their conversation that they were all advanced math students, and the central figure was a complex systems theory genius who'd stumbled onto a pattern. As they got more and more caught up in the unbelievable predictions (some weird misfortune, weather, accident, etc. regarding sporting events), two of them peeled off and got romantic, and one pretty pale redhead with wide features ended up near me. We started talking, about math, and it became clear that the brunette in the hall may not have been in my narrative, but the redhead had just very much become so, and we very much hit it off. Math played a curious, strong part of the attraction.

I was in a big but "normal" house with lots of people. It was a party, the strange sort of sprawling all house, all members party of booze and maybe pot where no one is terribly concerned with being cool, just... weird.

The house was on a small lake, and the sky was very clear, reflected in the water when you looked out the window. At some point the party started turning unsettling/weird. There was one guy who kept speaking more and more ominously, saying that everyone needed to remember that at 1:30 the sky went out, and that he wasn't joking. People laughed at first, then became increasingly, grimly uncomfortable as he kept saying it over time. At one point, he looked directly at me and said I, in particular, needed to remember this, and it had the weight of some message, some out of context lesson for me.

There was some other guy, an older, charismatic Frank Zappa-like person who was friendly and seemed to give me more than usual consideration, but without the weirdness of the oracle dude. At one point I was wandering the house (coming back from the bathroom?) and opened a closed door. The Zappa guy was in there with a collection of people that, if he'd been less gentle or more of an egotist, would have seemed like holding court. When I apologized for barging in, he said they were just sitting around talking about Important Things, but that I was welcome because I certainly qualified (as an Important Thing).

(I'm not doing justice to the feeling oracle dude and the Zappa guy increasingly gave me, that I was not only not of these people, this time and/or place, but that the whole thing was staged for my benefit, that maybe it was even something that already happened but was being replayed so I got the message. It was increasingly disturbing and unsettling.)

I was in the living room, where the big plate glass window looked out over the lake, when suddenly everything out there went dark. The sky was pitch black, no stars, no light at all, and what little I could see of the lake from light from the houses was black like thick, menacing ink. Everyone in the house started yelling or freaking out, and the sense of menace, of gigantic, universal doom, was so sharp that it woke me up with my heart pounding. It took me a few minutes to differentiate dream from waking. When I could bring myself to look outside, I couldn't see any stars, but with a mental wrenching of my mind, I remembered the sky was cloudy when we came home, and that I wouldn't know for sure until the sun came up (I remember telling my sleepy self that the sun was a star, so if it rose, things were OK, even though I still worried that I wouldn't feel at ease until I saw a starry night sky.)

What the hell was going on in my mind? I still don't get it, even though the immediacy of the unsettling feelings have receded.

Dreamed about seeing Massive Attack with scottopic in a big open old house/anarchist collective. It was a second show, and the organizers were pleased to announce the noise ordinance had been lifted in negotiations with the police. The band loaded in their own gear, set up on the floor where there was no clear physical barrier between them and the crowd. They wore strange costumes from video games that made sense in the dream (I think 3D was Freeman from Half-Life?). There was the usual parade of folks stopping by and saying hi to S, but everyone was focused on the band. I woke up just as "Angel" got ready to break.

Weird.

Dreamed about going the fuck off on a friend's sister/sister in law about unquestioned sex typing and categorization. It was weird; in the dream I was prepared to just walk away at first, but then something changed and confronted her. Things escalated slowly, but at each point where it felt like I was giving her an out, pausing for things to sink in, she'd just dig herself deeper and I kept going. Eventually it was so bad that I finished my piece and started walking, through strange semi-rural pasture and back roads to get back to where I knew; it started off in my mind as just a mile, but ended up being like five or more, but I kept walking. My friend was not at all amused; it seemed to trigger some personal/past/family trauma.

There was a giant monster from space, much bigger but similar in shape to Godzilla, who was systematically circling the earth destroying everything in its path. I was on a government-esque science team (?) trying to find something with which to fight it. We ended up completing one set of solar powered armor as it closed in on the city, and were still trying to figure out how it worked. I thought maybe it let one grow to gigantic size, but didn't know how. As we flew away on a plane, giant monster tracked on the plane and took to the sky to catch us.



Then I was on a college campus that might have featured from other dreams. I was part of a team that drove a delivery truck into building and down halls (?). We pulled out to one courtyard only to see queued dump trucks full of something, some construction project. For some reason, we couldn't get past them, but I raised the driver's seat like six feet, out of the cab, and could see to drive, but was worried about driving through the halls.



Still on a campus, maybe the same one, as a student (sort of). There was a visiting trio of performers that played regularly, at one point three girls who sang and danced, at another point three guys who played balalaika and Romani/Russian folk music. Two of the guys switched instruments on a bet, and were struggling to make them work before the show, but only one really pulled it off. I was in the audience, having walked from my dorm with a small, orange and white, quite illegal kitten and a backpack of books. Once the band started playing, then broke up into three separate groups where people just talked to them. The orange striped kitten stretched out beside me and started attacking the skirt (and maybe thigh) of a red haired girl sitting next to me, so I grabbed him by the back of the neck and took him out, much like I imagine an embarrassed mother does with misbehaving children. I took him to a bench outside of an office in which someone was working, and set him down while I made sense of my books and repacked my bag. He was apologetic, stayed close, but when I picked him up to hide under my jacket to take him back to my dorm, he said, "Aw,mama..." and I had to explain why it was necessary.