Taken At The Golden Hour

 

Another one that impressed me as being fairly surrealistic/dreamlike without being overtly weird.

Figatzi? Zigatza?

This morning I woke up directly from a dream in which a dignified older man was showing me the interior of a room that was well-appointed with impressive taste, except for two holes several inches in diameter, bored awkwardly through an angled wooden frame high above the mantle, maybe a foot and a half apart.  They looked somewhat like this:

He pointed to them contemptuously and said something that sounded like "Figatzi" or Zigatza".  It seemed a previous occupant of the residence had them done in order to have a light fixture installed.  It was admittedly completely out of place and kitschy-looking (personally I find high, naked light sources to be harsh, much preferring intimate lighting).  As it's unusual to remember words seen or heard in dreams, I tried looking it up using different permutations of the spelling.  After a few unsuccessful tries, I came across "fugazi", which apparently means counterfeit/bogus, or more broadly, messed up or ruined.  I guess that fits pretty well.  And leaves me wondering.

Another Dream Image

Double Dreams Starring William I. Newman, Ph.D

Yesterday morning I had an interesting experience -- two quick dreamlets back to back, separated by a short waking period, starring the same character.

First, I dreamt that my friend William came and started to tell me about the grindingly difficult qualifying exam his students had to sit (he's a professor of astrophysics at UCLA).  To show the awesome amount of work they had to put in, he held up his hand with the thumb and forefinger parted a couple of inches, to show how "thick" the exam was (I guess in my dreams Ph.D students still take pencil-and-paper tests).

Then I woke up, made a brief trip to the bathroom and came back to bed.  I soon fell asleep and dreamt again, and this time I was standing by the long edge of a narrow table or counter when William came in, wearing what looked like a white sailor's cap, sat down on the other side, and silently fixed me with an intense gaze.  I was perplexed and uneasy at first, thought maybe he was trying to weird me out for a joke, but then realized he was drawing me.  I cooperated by keeping the same quarter-profile facing him even as I moved along the edge of the table.

This double appearance of a character in two consecutive dreams reminded me of the time when I nearly woke out of a frustrating dream but through an act of will was able to #go_back_into_the_dream to resolve the situation, and in the process "doubled" myself.

As for William himself, he was an original member of the little group I once organized in the L.A. chapter of Mensa for the purpose of meeting once a month to dine and watch Korean movies together at my downtown flat.  I dignified it with the important-sounding title of "The Korean Cinema Lovers Society" (but only for personal reference^).  It was quite a diverse group at first, the membership including, other than Prof. Newman, an IT tech and his librarian wife, an Asian "tiger mom" and her young daughter, an ancient Jewish couple who I thought were married at first, but no, it turned out they were living in sin^ (they still send me holiday cards every year💖), and even a porn producer (it takes brains to produce good porn^;  come to think, my therapy group also included a porn producer, but he made gay porn -- before dying of AIDS).  As time went on the Society went the way of many such informal groups -- it gradually petered out, became smaller and smaller, and on several occasions William was the only one to show up^, but we kept it up for quite a while before life matters intervened.

More Dreamlike Images From Waking Life

 

A Few More Waking Dreams

Mermaid Dream

Early this morning I had a dream about a mermaid who longed to tread land under her feet and experience the world of humans.  So she managed somehow (the details are forgotten, if indeed there were any) to acquire the means to transform her tail to legs (painlessly), went ashore, met a man she loved, and settled down.

It was all on borrowed time, however, as there was a time limit on the magic that turned the mermaid's tail to legs.  The date of her forced return to the sea was known to the man from the start -- she had not hidden anything from him -- and when the day came he threw a grand farewell party for her by the edge of the sea.  Everyone had too much to drink and fell into a stupor;  the mermaid-woman was the only one who remained alert, and at the appointed time she walked into the sea.  And here is the part I remember most vividly, as if I had been watching a movie instead of sleeping:  she waded in until she was waist-deep in the water, then she suddenly fell back, indicating that her legs had turned back into a tail;  she took one last poignant look at the sleeping man, then turned and swam away into her original home.

That "ending" was so cinematic that after I woke I actually wondered if I hadn't been remembering a movie rather than dreaming.  I remember her long wavy black hair, her round face, her serious expression, and the bitttersweet mood of the ending scene.  I actually did an online search to see if indeed there had been a movie with such a plot (despite the fact that I had never read or heard of such a movie) but came up empty.

All in all, the dream seems to have been an amalgam of the Hans Christian Andersen tale of "The Little Mermaid" and another, obscure but exceptionally haunting mermaid story I once read as a child in a collection of Korean short stories.  That book was either lost or left behind when I moved to the US, but even though I could only vaguely recall part of the actual plot I never forgot the impact the story had on me -- at one time, many years later, I went looking for it in bookstores in L.A.'s Koreatown, but I never was able to find it again.

I also could not find an image online that illustrated something similar to that last scene, but then I found this shot I'd taken earlier this year, of a bicycle that aspired to fly like a bird, and thought it was a good visual analog of the mermaid's longing to walk on land.

More Dream-esque Images

Picking up where I left off yesterday.

 

More Waking Dreams

More Dreamy Images From Waking Life

 

A Blood Dream

This morning I woke up unusually early.  I didn't feel like I needed any more sleep, so I got up, made tea, and sat down in front of the computer as usual.  But then, after a while I decided I needed to go back to sleep after all, so I got back into bed and fell asleep.

During that extra couple of hours I had a dream about my cat Blood.  Yes, after all these years I still dream about my one and only pet now and then.  In the dream I had given him away to someone else some time before, but I'd come to their home for a visit.  Blood was glad to see me, and when time came for me to leave he followed me to the front door, seemingly ready to come back with me.  I had to lead him back into the house and close the door behind me.  It made me sad.

Once I woke, I noticed two things about the dream.  In the dream Blood had orange stripes, rather than tabby markings.  Also, his being dead was symbolized as "being away" -- he was out of my life and I couldn't have him with me any more.  This was similar to how my mother's passing was symbolically represented in a prior dream as her "going away".

Related posts:  More Dreams

                         Blood Comes Back For A Visit

More "Dreamlike" Images

With one or two of these photos I was very tempted to add some obviously "surreal" effects.  Ultimately I decided to leave them as is.  No filters, no impossible situations.

Ha, that sounded like a commercial:  "We never compromise on quality -- we will never use artificial ingredients of any kind!"

Which reminds me of a line I once heard on The Muppet Show.  I forget which character said it, and I'm probably misquoting it, but anyway:  "Shampoo?  Never!  We only ever use real poo!".