Friday, April 24, 2009

04-24-2009 Dream: Childhood Animals

...yesterday's Nazi Mountain Camp dream continues... sort of...

The setting was a low hill or mesa. Or possibly the side of a basalt quarry. The sun shone, and the day was relatively green and bright. I was a small animal of some sort -- like a ferret or an otter -- think slinky, furry, and small. There were other small animals with me, and I think possibly we were small "dentist animals." (In real life my childhood dentist handed out small rubber animals, I think they might have been erasers. My sister and I amassed a small army of them -- and if I look hard enough, I probably have them in storage somewhere next to Freakies Cereal figurines and my old D&D miniatures).

On the top of the cliff was a circular chessboard. The center circle was divided into four, the next circle out was eight segments. Next was sixteen, and the forth and final must have been thirty-two. In waking life I'm reminded of an old circular chess game I had as a young teen called "Time War" or something.

In the dream, placing the pieces in a certain way teleported one. In this case, we could teleport back and forth between the top of the mesa where the chessboard was to the green valley bellow. In an omniscient moment, I saw myself as if from the valley, sticking my head over the side of the cliff and yelling down to the others that I'd discovered a shortcut. (I have a vague sense we had to use dark tunnels to get to the mesa top.)

Back at the mesa, we started looking around. The turf on the mesa top had little pockets in it and at one point turned into a carpet or astrograss. I was back in my normal body and I lifted up a section of the ground, and underneath was "Batty," a black-construction paper bat I'd glued together in the sixth grade (also part of the Dentist Animal Menagerie). In the dream, I was really excited and happy to have found Batty's little cave.

But in real life Batty reminds me of Batty's genesis in the classroom of my crazy sixth-grade teacher -- the sort of "artsy-fartsy" teacher who would encourage you to be creative in one breath, but would publically deride your efforts if they strayed too far from what she thought your art should look like. And now that I think about it, being in her class was like being in a kind of group-therapy.

. . . and the dream moved on . . .

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