Dream Diary: Mind Control

This one was pretty extraordinary for how it ended.

I was on one of the older fairy boats that used to cross between PEI and the mainland. Naturally it wasn't one in particular, but a mixture of features and rooms from the different ones. I wasn't there with any particular group or with any particular purpose, just riding back home, presumably.

On the boat was a cafeteria, where everyone ate their food from trays, I don't remember eating, just holding the empty tray to carry to the back of the room to put away. As I'm walking past the other tables I clearly spot an ex of mine from a few years back. She stands out, as she always did, but wasn't looking particularly beautiful or ugly, just there. As I pass, I look down at her as if to notice her there, and she looks up and repeats an inside joke we used to share, about one of the lunch room workers at UNB who would repeat the same phrase over and over again to every student who passed her and emptied their tray and sent it on the conveyor belt. I forget the exact phrase that it was, in my mind I heard it as "Guardian? Guardian?" i.e., just a repeated nonsense phrase. We both laughed, and it felt nice, but I kept walking, put my tray away and that was that.

Then I wondered if I could run into this girl, v., again. Just to see if I could talk to her. I think I went semi lucid at this point, starting to be aware that this wasn't real and wanting to take agency myself.

So I walked by again past the table where I thought she was, but in her place was a particularly annoying young girl who brought back memories of very annoying people, and who smelled strongly repulsive.

This strange girl greeted me warmly and was very happy that I had said hello, I get up to move on and as I do, the familiar image of v. quietly comes and sits down across from me, to the right of this other girl, as I'm up and walking off to the left again.

Then it's time to get off the boat, but I make one more attempt to go and see v. to talk to her. I get to the upper card deck, there are two on this boat, and I see her car there and I can see her in there and hear her voice talking to some unknown other people, possibly including annoying girl. Then I hear an alert sound, which was to say that it was now definitely time to be in your cars to get off the boat, so I take off down the metal staircase with painted yellow steps to emerge into the lower garage and start looking for the car I was supposed to be in, not really knowing what it looked like or who even I was with, since I clearly couldn't be by myself.

But as I step off the last step and onto the lower deck, a vehicle that was actually a moving staircase blocks my way, cuts me off between the wall, the stairs I just came down, and itself. I'm now trapped, and it's coming down to crush me. At this point I think the phrase: OK, time to allow myself to be fully aware of the waking world again, so I don't have to feel myself being crushed.

Now something strange happened, I became fully awake and aware of my surroundings in my room, but the dream kept going. I could hear the machinery moving, I could see the mobile staircase come in to merge with the one I had just descended, I had tried to bold back up but there wasn't time and I was caught, and then I could envision moving gears all moving in one direction. I get the idea that maybe I could control the image of these gears with my mind and get them to stop. No luck, they keep going. But then I see an image of people walking by to the right. Then horses walking by to the right, and I think 'horse power -- horse power powers machines, can I control the horses and get them to move backwards?' I concentrate really hard, still in the half-awake half-dreaming state, aware that the machinery won't actually kill me, but wondering if I could stop it anyway. I concentrate on the image of the people and horses all walking to the right that I had in my head. I got them to slow down.. then they stopped. Then they started moving forward and to the right again, and I saw the image of the gears moving again.

Then I tried again They slowed down, then started moving backwards, very awkwardly, as I remember when I rode horses that it was rather an unnatural movement to get a horse to walk backwards. I was seeing this now, but also seeing that the gears were finally moving in the opposite direction, which meant I would be safe, so to speak, if I could hold control of the motion of the people and the horses, who were now walking slowly backwards along a beach. A couple of times I lost total control and they'd start forward again, I felt like their natural motion was forward and not backwards. Then I managed to get the horses to turn completely around and start walking forward, but back to the left instead of to the right. Their movement was much more comfortable now, and they moved quickly across my field of few, with the people following them. The gears were now moving in the opposite direction comfortably, and I was out of danger from the moving staircase machine. Then I let control go, and all the horses and people walked off in different directions.

Then I fade out of dreaming and am fully and totally awake.

This was quite an experience. I have only one memory of lucid, or semi-conscious dreaming, and that just involved halting the narrative of the dream and trying to walk around and explore, but the environment suddenly contained no people or living objects, I was just walking around a series of long warehouse or greenhouse-like buildings on a grey day.

This dream had people and objects, and I seemed to be aware, at some level, that they were all symbolic, and assembled from memories. Apparently something I picked up reading Man and His Symbols by Carl Jung just recently might have stuck. Wow.

It wasn't a particularly good dream, and running into my ex in real life would probably elicit the same reaction as my first instinct in the dream, to acknowledge, remember some common bond we shared, and move on. Where things started to get weird in the dream was when I was trying to talk to her again.

But the idea of using a symbol, the horses, to control another more foreign entity, the gears of a machine, and being successful by remembering the nature of the horses' movement and how to get them to move more comfortably.. this made me feel an incredibly charge of.. not power, but.. agency, which compelled me to write all this down at all, so I can be sure to remember doing it.

This is something I want to explore further if I could. This state of becoming awake but still going on dreaming, and being conscious in both worlds at once, strikes me as having incredible potential for extracting usefulness out of dreaming.

Phew. Not getting back to sleep tonight. It's 03:52. I should go and make a cup of tea.

Labels: Dreams, Jung, Psychology, Relationships