Dreamscape
“Once upon a midnight dreary,
As I pondered weak and weary...” - E.A. Poe
Something is amiss with me. For the last several nights I have gone to bed at my usual, early, bedtime at 9 p.m. and awakened, fully rested and incapable of further sleep, at 12:30 or 1 a.m. It is just past midnight, after a three hour sleep, that I write these words.
I’m wondering if it doesn’t have something to do with the dreams. The incredibly disturbing dreams.
Everyone has weird dreams. I know this. Yet, I think mine are stranger than most. My dreams tend to be in color, which is a little unusual, and are fully fleshed out with sounds, smells, and tastes. Most singularly odd is the tendency for me to dream dark and twisted plots that are beyond strange, and are quite disturbing. My dreams have somber songs, and music, and dance, like something from the Tolken Ring Trilogy. When I awaken, I’m amazed that the music is completely original, the songs correct in meter and rhyme, set perfectly to the music I’ve composed spontaneously and perfectly in my head in mere moments of REM. How did I do that? Or did someone else do it before me?
Unfortunately, my inability to write music means my songs are lost to me after a day or so as I slowly forget them.
There’s a very creative author named John Connolly who has written a novel called Black Angel. I read it last week. It has a convoluted plot, but involves fallen angels, evil through and through, who are searching for one of their own who was captured by monks hundreds of years ago, imprisoned in silver, and hidden somewhere in Europe. The protagonist is a Maine private investigator improbably named Charlie Parker who tries to thwart the plans of the fallen angels at every turn. But we learn that Charlie himself may be a fallen angel, although he doesn’t quite know it yet.
This is what is disturbing to me - I’ve seen this movie. No, wait... it hasn’t been made into a movie yet. I’ve read the book before. But I haven’t. I know these characters. I know this plot. It is all familiar to me.
I have dreamed it.
Apparently, so has John Connolly.
Perhaps so-not-coincidentally, Connolly mentions in his novel the drug DMT (dimethyltryptamine). DMT is listed as a Schedule I on the federal Controlled Substances Act and is known about by only a relatively few people. Medical physician Rick Strassman has done experimentation on the drug and confirmed its street reputation. He had seasoned recreational drug users take the drug in a controlled clinical setting and then later report their experiences. Many had hallucinations that involved “entities” that were living, intelligent beings, but were not in any way human. This in itself is a very odd finding. Why would this drug, more than any other, create such a common, and odd, personal event? What is even stranger is when Strassman would comment “That was quite the hallucination,” the participants in the study would commonly reply “Oh, no man! I’ve had hallucinations before. This was REAL.”
If this research doesn’t give you the creeps, then something’s wrong with you.
Strassman hypothesized that DMT, or something naturally occurring like it, has been responsible for a human history filled with leprechauns, fairies, little people, space aliens, and the like. Or... that DMT actually opens the mind to other places and other dimensions not normally available to human perception, and that these encountered entities are indeed, real.
Have John Connolly and I tapped into a common source? Are evil fallen angels really living among us, mostly undetected? How do I know in so much detail everything about Connolly’s characters before I read about them in his novel? Do we share our dreams? Are there others who dream our dreams?
It is unsettling.
“’You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you can’t fool all the people all the time.’ Abraham Lincoln said that. ‘ I’ll let you be in my dream if you let me be in yours.’ I said that.” - Bob Dylan
Least I leave you completely wondering about my sanity, let me retell the dream that woke me but minutes ago. This dream is one of a more humorous bent.
In my dream I was a man of some wealth. A woman my own age but of great avarice had made numerous attempts to siphon off my riches to her own coffers, largely unsuccessfully. The dream begins with her repeatedly sending her 14-year-old granddaughter to visit me and “hang out” at my house; this I accept and tolerate because I can’t see that the young teen can do me any harm, and because grandmother and I have a distant “history.”
To my surprise, grandmother announces one day that the 14-year-old is pregnant, and that I am the responsible party. This is a complete shock to me, and the girl friend (as opposed to the girlfriend) I consult suggests that if the teen is indeed pregnant that I insist on and pay for a DNA test.
The dream ends with a scene in court in which all interested parties are awaiting the outcome of the DNA analysis. We all stand as the magistrate enters the courtroom, and he quickly brings the proceedings to order. He tells us that the results are back and that he is holding them in the small blue envelope in his hand. He makes a show out of slowly taking out his reading glasses, opening the envelope and he spends a bit too much time, for dramatic effect no doubt, silently reading the report. He then turns to me, holds out his hand to shake mine, and says “Congratulations, son. You’re going to be a daddy.”
My last thought before I awoke - “Busted!”
This was a joke on myself. I didn’t know the punch-line until it happened. My dream had set me up. But think about it. Presumably, if I were messing with the young teen, I’d certainly know about it. In the dream I was, indeed, me. But in the dream, I was watching myself as if in, well... a dream, with no access to my internal thoughts or feelings. At least not until the end. How could I dream this dream, about me, and not know what was going to happen to me until the punch-line that the dream had been leading me to?
What’s going on in my head? I’m beginning to feel like the main character of Guy de Maupassant’s The Horla. He was going mad too.
As I pondered weak and weary...” - E.A. Poe
Something is amiss with me. For the last several nights I have gone to bed at my usual, early, bedtime at 9 p.m. and awakened, fully rested and incapable of further sleep, at 12:30 or 1 a.m. It is just past midnight, after a three hour sleep, that I write these words.
I’m wondering if it doesn’t have something to do with the dreams. The incredibly disturbing dreams.
Everyone has weird dreams. I know this. Yet, I think mine are stranger than most. My dreams tend to be in color, which is a little unusual, and are fully fleshed out with sounds, smells, and tastes. Most singularly odd is the tendency for me to dream dark and twisted plots that are beyond strange, and are quite disturbing. My dreams have somber songs, and music, and dance, like something from the Tolken Ring Trilogy. When I awaken, I’m amazed that the music is completely original, the songs correct in meter and rhyme, set perfectly to the music I’ve composed spontaneously and perfectly in my head in mere moments of REM. How did I do that? Or did someone else do it before me?
Unfortunately, my inability to write music means my songs are lost to me after a day or so as I slowly forget them.
There’s a very creative author named John Connolly who has written a novel called Black Angel. I read it last week. It has a convoluted plot, but involves fallen angels, evil through and through, who are searching for one of their own who was captured by monks hundreds of years ago, imprisoned in silver, and hidden somewhere in Europe. The protagonist is a Maine private investigator improbably named Charlie Parker who tries to thwart the plans of the fallen angels at every turn. But we learn that Charlie himself may be a fallen angel, although he doesn’t quite know it yet.
This is what is disturbing to me - I’ve seen this movie. No, wait... it hasn’t been made into a movie yet. I’ve read the book before. But I haven’t. I know these characters. I know this plot. It is all familiar to me.
I have dreamed it.
Apparently, so has John Connolly.
Perhaps so-not-coincidentally, Connolly mentions in his novel the drug DMT (dimethyltryptamine). DMT is listed as a Schedule I on the federal Controlled Substances Act and is known about by only a relatively few people. Medical physician Rick Strassman has done experimentation on the drug and confirmed its street reputation. He had seasoned recreational drug users take the drug in a controlled clinical setting and then later report their experiences. Many had hallucinations that involved “entities” that were living, intelligent beings, but were not in any way human. This in itself is a very odd finding. Why would this drug, more than any other, create such a common, and odd, personal event? What is even stranger is when Strassman would comment “That was quite the hallucination,” the participants in the study would commonly reply “Oh, no man! I’ve had hallucinations before. This was REAL.”
If this research doesn’t give you the creeps, then something’s wrong with you.
Strassman hypothesized that DMT, or something naturally occurring like it, has been responsible for a human history filled with leprechauns, fairies, little people, space aliens, and the like. Or... that DMT actually opens the mind to other places and other dimensions not normally available to human perception, and that these encountered entities are indeed, real.
Have John Connolly and I tapped into a common source? Are evil fallen angels really living among us, mostly undetected? How do I know in so much detail everything about Connolly’s characters before I read about them in his novel? Do we share our dreams? Are there others who dream our dreams?
It is unsettling.
“’You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you can’t fool all the people all the time.’ Abraham Lincoln said that. ‘ I’ll let you be in my dream if you let me be in yours.’ I said that.” - Bob Dylan
Least I leave you completely wondering about my sanity, let me retell the dream that woke me but minutes ago. This dream is one of a more humorous bent.
In my dream I was a man of some wealth. A woman my own age but of great avarice had made numerous attempts to siphon off my riches to her own coffers, largely unsuccessfully. The dream begins with her repeatedly sending her 14-year-old granddaughter to visit me and “hang out” at my house; this I accept and tolerate because I can’t see that the young teen can do me any harm, and because grandmother and I have a distant “history.”
To my surprise, grandmother announces one day that the 14-year-old is pregnant, and that I am the responsible party. This is a complete shock to me, and the girl friend (as opposed to the girlfriend) I consult suggests that if the teen is indeed pregnant that I insist on and pay for a DNA test.
The dream ends with a scene in court in which all interested parties are awaiting the outcome of the DNA analysis. We all stand as the magistrate enters the courtroom, and he quickly brings the proceedings to order. He tells us that the results are back and that he is holding them in the small blue envelope in his hand. He makes a show out of slowly taking out his reading glasses, opening the envelope and he spends a bit too much time, for dramatic effect no doubt, silently reading the report. He then turns to me, holds out his hand to shake mine, and says “Congratulations, son. You’re going to be a daddy.”
My last thought before I awoke - “Busted!”
This was a joke on myself. I didn’t know the punch-line until it happened. My dream had set me up. But think about it. Presumably, if I were messing with the young teen, I’d certainly know about it. In the dream I was, indeed, me. But in the dream, I was watching myself as if in, well... a dream, with no access to my internal thoughts or feelings. At least not until the end. How could I dream this dream, about me, and not know what was going to happen to me until the punch-line that the dream had been leading me to?
What’s going on in my head? I’m beginning to feel like the main character of Guy de Maupassant’s The Horla. He was going mad too.
posted by Satterwhite | 12:48 PM
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