I am about 16 years old and have a younger brother and sister, both under ten.  We are homeless, I think, or without a place to stay permanently in an odd sort of IT-type large-town/not-city precinct that is all blue-green plate glass and chrome fixtures, spindly newly planted trees and fresh tarmac.  It is an indifferent rather than hostile environment and we wander through the largely deserted facilities without hindrance.  Except there are floating, translucent orbs, usually three at a time, following us at a height of about four metres.  They look like some sort of semi-organic thing, luminous ghostly silver-green, humming like a cycling appliance and occasionally arcing out loops of phosphorescent light like fuzzy tentacles.  They seem at least partially sentient, and intent on locating and following us, which I don't enjoy.

We can lose them by going into buildings as that seems to confuse their idea of where we are and where we're headed. Once inside a long glassy gallery-like library that grades into some sort of retail environment, I stop and watch one of the orbs trying to squeeze through a minute gap in the plate glass frontage panels, sizzling and emitting neon green light but finding itself unable to perform the manoeuvre.   Then I know we are safe for the night, more or less, and make my younger brother go to bed on a mattress covered with strange layers of fancy, brand new quilts, duvets and large-scale flower print linen.  The younger sister is nowhere to be seen and I seem to have forgotten about her anyway.  An uneasy sort of calm or stasis descends; everything is dark and silent and suspended.

R E M A R K S:  No idea where the floating orbs came from but their colours are lifted from the graphic I put together for an instalment of the book.  The dream siblings looked sort of 'stock' and not physically related to me, and I felt no real attachment to them.  By far the most striking image was the floating orb trying to squeeze between the glass panels toward us; the process completey negated both physical laws and the impersonal nature of the entity itself, giving it a strange and unwelcome impetus.  I suppose there is a vague theme of harassment or persecution but it lacked both urgency and specific, identifiable agency, so I'm drawing a bit of a blank as to where that's coming from.

Stupid oblique references!

The world is ending in four days.  Something is going to crash into it and there is nothing to be done; this knowledge falls on me from nowhere and few others seem to know.  I don't know who to tell or what to do.  I am somehow not of this world myself, hailing, along with a nameless and almost faceless companion, from somewhere else, another planet, but I have no notion or memory of this place.  

Inside me I can feel a mass of chocolate brown and velvet red plasma that trembles and ripples with every shift in my mood and imagined idea.  My alien companion opens their mouth and shows me what this substance looks like when they convey their desire to leave this planet (I don't know how, some airborne method that is never resolved).  The internal liquid lies vertically in their tall, stretched out maw and ripples rhythmically, defying gravity, expressing their wishes in lieu of spoken words.  

I am gripped with a terrible paralysing distress.  I feel as though leaving will not save me.  The knowledge that everything around me is doomed, no matter what I do, is felt in crippling, ever-tightening waves of constriction.

REMARKS  This happened about a month ago now.  I haven't had a bona fide nightmare for ages, but this woke me up in a small panic and I couldn't go back to sleep for hours.  The image of the dark liquid throbbing in my fellow alien's mouth will stay with me for a long time.  The idea that I was only somehow half-alien, neither here nor there and stuck between the two states is interesting since I've always sort of felt like a fraudulent adult, a non-grownup, suspicious of the certainty of others- maybe it's referring to that.  And for some reason, reading this over lights a fire under my wanting to get a fucking tattoo- sort of as a prophylactic measure.  Like nothing bad will happen if I do.  Lol.

Travelling sort of through India and South East Asia but also somehow South Africa very briefly, on a bus and crappy planes; everything is coffee-brown dusty and sweaty and dated and worn out looking.  We travel for too long to appreciate anything when we get there and have realised the ridiculous nature of our schedule.  At an old border control-style facility with ceiling fans, the actress Anne Hathaway, flanked by an army of paparazzi on one side of the customs desk, argues with a couple of Thai monks about her possession of birth control pills.  They don't agree with this immoral western expediency.  They are grumpy and taciturn and unmoving and she is dressed in brand new black and is full of disbelieving annoyance.

We go to India and see an evil mountain carved in the form of a sage or bodhisattva in an attempt to contain and mollify its resident influence.  We are taken to a shrine called a needle waterfall, which is a narrow shaft of sparkling geode-like white quartz, running vertically through the face of a dark brown cliff that foots another mountain.  A special caste worships there; elephants have been carved into the low stone barrier around where the vein of quartz disappears into the ground, as though to contain its power.  It is an ambiguous and unsettling place, full of strange energy that I can't decipher.

Then we come to a place we'll be staying at, this time deep in a western city with tall decrepit red brick buildings in a tightly-packed commercial/industrial area, down at heel and very old New York.  In the ground floor of our particular building is a shitty cafe run by an old woman.  We try to sit outside on a variety of shitty tables and chairs but the space is too narrow and it's too dirty and noisy with traffic etc.  

We go upstairs to a dusty old hotel room and discover that we need to attend some sort of ball or gala.  In the musty drawers we find an amazing selection of weird ball gowns with super heroine themes, constructed of rich vintage fabrics; they are folded in cushiony layers.  One has a Wonder Woman theme with prints of her on the vast skirt and a moulded plastic bodice that, no matter how hard I try to hold, it seems too long.  I think about how I can possibly steal some of these amazing dresses and go down the stairs for some reason.  On coming back up, I notice that someone has drunkenly scrawled instructions to a lover in blue chalky pencil on the stairs, directing him to her room and telling him to be quiet on his way up and not disturb anyone.

REMARKS  Well, shit.  This dream is about a month old now and I forget precisely what was going through my head at the time, but it looked and felt quite atypical.  Anne fucking Hathaway what?  The foreboding mountain is from a story by Jim Corbett about the demon of Tresul which we had recently reread, and that imagery has always scared me.  The great shaft of white crystal running up the cliff and into the ground was such a strange vision, titanic and impervious and imbued with a mighty, if indecipherable, energy.  Like a great glistening spinal column, though utterly inorganic.  It impressed me as something central around which my perception revolves, some indestructible influence or axis in my life.  It was very humbling.  Wish I knew exactly what it was.  image: wiki

I was trying on a pair of black or khaki shorts that seemed far too small for me, but they fit really well in an odd way.  Then I was sitting on the verandah of a log or wooden cabin type house on one side of wooded valley at night.  The forest was kind of munted and previously logged and ragged looking and the owners of the cabin were down at heel and sort of desperate.  Across the valley a huge oversized dead tree the length of the hillside virtually had fallen over and lay silver amongst the darkened vegetation; the people were talking about how disastrous a fire would be when I saw a glow starting under the huge dead tree.  Somehow we made a violent emphatic gesture which snuffed out the flames from afar, and I saw two deer through the trees indicate that someone was moving on the hill above them, looked up and saw four figures sprinting off toward the top of the ridge in the darkness.  Two dark- haired males and two females, I thought.  We screamed after them about what we do to arsonists around here, like maniacs.

The next day I thought I could identify them in the town nearby, so I went to the school and started looking around and asking the teachers who would fit the description.  I remember also looking through yearbook type things containing weird pictures of people at various ages in their lives.  It turned out to be a fifties style classroom and the two girls indicated were bad girls, their faces heavily made up and their hair and clothes strangely stylised in a manner I can't really describe.  I started asking them if they knew anything about what happened and they were initially rude, then offered to show me something secret; we went somewhere else, and one of them opened their white nurse-like dress and showed me her breasts, which were very large and white; she took my hands and put them on them and I remember being turned on but also really swirlingly conflicted because there was something about her that repulsed me, and I knew our association would be negative.

Remarks To be fair, we were extremely baked last night so all this could just be the good shit talking.
The shorts thing is just because I've lost weight and all my clothes seem too small now when I hold them up in front of me.  The rest of it feels sexualesque to me, the dead tree was pretty dick-y, and the lighting a fire with it was erm... yeah... and the nasty girls responsible were definitely up for it.  I don't know why it seemed so sort of conflicted and almost repressed, because my dream sex is usually straight up and graphic, and I don't really have any (well, many) hang ups or no nos.  The whole thing had a really strange and unfamiliar feel.  There are theories positing that everyone featuring in your dreams is actually you; I don't subscribe to this usually but come to think of it, those nasty girls look and feel a bit familiar.  Was I tracking down and talking to my gamey side?  Was I repulsed by my own boobies?  Am I unconsciously thinking about writing cheques my arse can't cash for the first time in a while and that's tweaking me in unexpected ways?  I have been wearing purple lipstick.  So many questions.  

Sitting in a box window with glossy white painted framing and astragals all around me.  I am eating tinned tuna from a white porcelain bowl.  Peripherally there is a dark green and quite flowerless garden to my right in what looks like a stretch of half-finished or neglected villa garden.  Behind my right shoulder and in the narrow lateral window opening there is a scuttling sound, then a speckled falcon.  I pick a piece of tuna from the bowl and offer it to the bird without looking, almost absently, and it is taken eagerly.  It climbs onto my shoulder then down into my lap where I let it eat more fish from the bowl.  Its beak is panelled and polished like cloisonné enamel. 

R E M A R K S: This was a stretch of much longer/extremely convoluted dream, the rest of which I can't remember.  The falcon- there is only one species in NZ and we don't see it here; this bird has no special personal significance or associations as far as I'm aware, although its presence did seem to be indicative or symbolic of something.  It was pale-ish and speckled, more like a Saker than a Peregrine.  I was pleased by the bird's confiding manner; raptors can be grabby and stroppy in person but this one was just quiet and deliberate.  I'm glad I fed it; it seemed the right thing to do.  I didn't recognise the house or situation, but I did make a tuna sandwich for my partner the other day.  The brain is a very strange place.  (pic wikipedia)

I am bathing naked in a narrow, shallow trickling stream bordered by a thin skirt of jungly growth; it is waist-deep at most, and there is a narrow bridge at the short distance with the odd person crossing, but I don't care and they don't seem to see me.  Then I am in some sort of pale tiled shower room in a resort nearby; it has a single inadequate hinged door panel for privacy, and at first I am slightly concerned, then I realise I don't care about that either.  Someone who looks like the actor Tom Hardy is there with me, also naked, and we use the same small white bar of soap.  We smile at each other.  Our bodies share a pale, robust quality and we are about the same height.  My partner arrives; I put on the strange dress he has bought me- black and white and sort of blotchy like ikat and tied on around by neck with a weird, webbed string arrangement.  We walk along the street for a while and I can feel my wet hair dripping down my back.

Then I'm at some sort of nightclub waiting for music, because I want to dance.  I'm sitting beside two performers who are dressed in black lycra and dark silver duct tape and I realise there's going to be some kind of show, so I take a seat. It's vaguely acrobatic, but quite low key until a troupe of silky white horses come on in unison; they are plumed and graceful but their sole purpose seems to be to withstand the great blast of noisy music that is directed at them, because they remain calm and exit soon after.  Now I am sitting much further back from the stage and the person sitting next to me is an annoying 70's lothario type with an open shirt, shaggy bleached hair and large formal shoes; he is leaning over and invading my space, resting one of his shoes on my shin.  I tell him to fuck off and push him back, then announce that I'm going to inform security; he is angry and follows me into what becomes a wooded paddock at night.

My accusations become more shrill and lurid as I try to deter him from following me; I encounter a young girl in a lavender night dress who is being followed by someone sinister and together we make for the doorway that will bring us back to the nightclub.  The room inside is like the interior of a cramped backstage greenroom divided into two parts.  Someone says that everyone with a complaint or a story should go to the larger area and we shuffle in together.  The man who wouldn't leave me alone is walking back and forth outside and his shoes are making leaf litter and dirt come in under the decrepit wall and onto the wooden floor beside me.

REMARKS: The first half of this dream felt quite peaceful and adventurous; I was slightly aware that I was dreaming while it unfolded.  As I've gotten older I've found I have far less fucks to give about nudity and my body and losing a bit of weight has reminded me what it was like to be hotter, lol.  I own an ikat dress and fancy a few more.  Tom Hardy- yes I would, but it would have to be with my eyes closed (that fucking ghetto ink just kicks me in the ladyballs) and I probably wouldn't tell anyone.

I used to be an inveterate clubkid who really enjoyed the shamanic/transcendent aspects of trance night.  Back then it was just about losing your little mind in a dervish-like manner but these days clubs just seem to be a big narcissistic shit show full of hard-posing rich kids and that killed my love for it stone dead.  Maybe I should take more drugs?

Horses represent my personal and artistic agency blah blah and yes, they're not doing much right now.

Creepy guys often have Lynchian significance in my dreams for reasons I won't bore you with; I am battling a sort of mild if extremely tenacious bout of depression at the moment that I fear is seeping into deeper layers, hence the debris trickling in under the wall despite the assumption of sanctuary.  Fuck.

Kicking a gold foil-wrapped chocolate easter egg up the dark blue baize ramp of a boarding tunnel at an airport.  I'm getting on a large commercial flight to Spain and Russia to meet my partner.  I'd just sort of walked around Christchurch and seen the earthquake damage there, but felt quite indifferent to it; it seemed so abstract.  On the TV monitors I walk past there are news accounts of gigantic primeval destruction as kaiju-like archetypes come lurching out of the ground, tearing themselves free of the earth, half the size of a city.  They are strangely one-dimensional, almost flat but acting upon solid mass like something more substantial.  They smash buildings and go along the ground eating the streets and cars and trees and everything, their lower jaws scraping up the roads and footpaths.  Some are horses, some are birds, some are hybrid beasts like minotaurs and chimera.

When we land in Spain a giant bull like something peeled off a Celtic shield kicks up out of the earth and swings it tremendous horns, scything them through skyscrapers.  The captain of the plane turns to me in that airport and tells me that 'they' have something planned for the 'Thunder Glider' (the name of our plane, apparently).  I sit down at a table with a bored family of arseholes who all have dyed red hair and are bickering with each other.  I leave them and sit between two strangers in a row of that weird jointed plastic seating, who turn out to be affectionate toward me.

REMARKS: This was a really swirling, involved dream packed with twice as many elements as I can think to name here.  The 'flat' archetypes come from a Nepalese chest I bought the other day covered in repoussé bronze animals.  The easter egg?  Maybe... looking at the leftover xmas chocolates at the supermarket?  The doom aspect is probably from my reading of the Chinese year of the Horse being especially bad for Rats (we're both Rats, but if you reverse the Chinese horoscopy thing as you're apparent supposed to do in the southern hemisphere, we're actually horses so what the fuck?)  Horoscopes mean jack shit to me beyond their preservation of various chthonic ideas etc. but maybe one part of my brain is more superstitious than the rest.

I have dyed red hair so I was probably sitting down to a table full of myself.  Erm... yeah.  I hate planes and airports and refuse to fly.  Why is my plane called the Thunder Glider? 

Why do I keep dreaming of a place called Trinity Apartments?  It's a red, almost shipping container-like complex, windowless from the rear where it is cantilevered out over the hillside that drops away steeply.  It's always undergoing renovation, not fit for habitation, or peopled with unseen strangers, their discontent seeping through the walls in a tangible psychic vibe.  I've been meeting someone there for about three dreams now, but nothing ever comes of it; either the dream ends and no dice, or it feels as though I've missed them by a short time.  The view from the hillside is indistinct, and I don't know if the landscape heads toward the sea or just more land.  There is a strange feeling of suspension, of slight frustration, indecision.

Remarks- I don't know of a place called Trinity Apartments, nor have I been thinking of these words in any conscious manner.  I really don't know what to make of this recurring business but it feels... significant.  Almost as though I'm in the thoughts of someone remote, perhaps known to me; if I had to describe that sensation, I would liken it to the influence of barometric pressure.  Sounds mad, doesn't it?
Probably is.

Riding four horses slowly with the vague idea that someone was following or trailing us, though we seemed to only go about a kilometre every day before setting up camp.  We carried everything we needed with us.  One of the horses was too small for its rider and burden and I worried about that.  While setting up our single, pavilion-like white tent I noticed the horses were thirsty and took them all to a creek where they drank; up the bank behind us someone was making cackling jokes about lesbians but I couldn't see them.

The person with me was small and nondescript, neither male nor female and he/she crossed the creek saying they were looking for someone and I let them go because I didn't care for their company.  I saw remotely that this nameless quest came to nothing and they were forced to shelter for the night in a faded old shed, painted peeling red, with a bunch of vagrants who were eating stale white bread out of a plastic bag.  My former companion broke off small pieces of it and scattered them on the ground, using a stick to strike the many mice that came to eat it.  He/she skinned and cooked the mice, heaping their pinky red bodies on a large round platter.  I experienced chewing their sinewy entireties and feeling the cooked innards spill into my mouth and remembered all the diseases carried by rodents.  

REMARKS: Not sure about the horses and camping.  Maybe a hangover from watching Game of Thrones?  Horses usually symbolise my personal creative volition in this sort of context but it didn't feel that way this time.  The lesbian jokes- we tittered our way through Basic Instinct last night and the gender-neutral companion was probably something to do with the discussions we've been having lately about the mutability of sexuality.  The horribly detailed process of eating cooked mice might seem like more sexual imagery but it was definitely more to do with my fundamental conflict about consuming pickled mussels, which I did at lunch; the rubbery deliciousness always countered by the knowledge you're chewing whatever that filter-feeding bivalve managed to sieve for its own supper in an equation that looks like this // mmmm/ewwww/mmm/ew ew ewww //.

In bed late at night.  I'm woken by a loud knock on the front door.  There are two black swan people waiting to see me; they are tall and covered in matte black and red and they are strangely prismatic, anthropoid in their basic shape when looked at directly but possessing great arched necks and bird heads and folded wings when obliquely observed.  They are unsmiling and perfunctory; they say that if I want to talk to him, I have to come with them right now, as though I am one of many visits they need to perform within a given time.  

I go with them.  They give me a pliant, misted, webbed sort of cowl to put over my head so that I am compelled to follow their shapes without being able to see where I'm going.  We are walking quickly; after a while I hear a strange dry rustling and know that I am walking through very long grass; spear grass, taller than me by a foot or two when I look up and see its vague blurry presence.

When we stop they take back the cowl and I see that I am standing in a bright, directionless sort of florescent light with a silvery lavender cast, by a river that looks like the Avon in Christchurch as it used to be- that bend by the Gardens where you could hire peddle boats.  The swan people tell me I can ask two questions and remain, as though they are waiting to convey them.  I sit down on the bank.  The grass is not grass at all, but short and thorny and when I look at it the blades are shaped just like miniature bay leaves.

I see him sitting on the opposite bank, in the unrelenting shade of great oaks that meet and keep that land dark.  I don't need the swans to take the words to him, and they withdraw, annoyed, I think.  So I ask my two questions and he replies, his voice low and plush and considered as always, and grief and longing are like a piece of half-worked iron, glowing from the forge inside my chest, unendurable.

No one is ever allowed to ask anything more, and I accept this without knowing why.  

I don't remember leaving the river but the black swan people take me back quickly, telling me I have to be in the house before the birds start singing.  The rasp of the tall grass against my ears and then the walk down alone from the hills between here and Waitati.

When I wake I hear a dunnock singing his little aubade outside the window.

I dreamed that I fucked Anthony Bourdain in a dark upstairs room with the window open.  He was good; slow and insistent.  I licked his tattoo.  Afterwards we sat and smoked strange little purply bruise-coloured handrolled cigarettes that turned our tongues and our lips and the tips of our fingers black and shiny, and we laughed at it.

Remarks: Ectoplasmic infidelity is so often awesome, and I have sometimes wondered about Anthony, but not lately, so this was unexpected.  (Something about not looking a gift horse in the mouth) Umm... alright.     

I walked into the front room and on the wooden dining table there lay a giant mermaid's purse, a transparent embryonic sac produced by certain shark species.  It was as long as my arm.  Inside were two different types of young fishes; to the right there were many small slim blue sharks coiled about each other, to the left, a mass of giant translucent galaxid species.  I opened the thick membrane with a knife and the fish were bathed in a tea-coloured fluid.  I took out a shark and put it into water in a red bucket on the bed, then returned to the front room.  From the plank wood of the table a rose bush had started to grow as though from a lopped trunk; it had already produced a flower and I saw that it was Variagata de Bologna, an old cultivar with red and white stripes.

I was pleased by the rose but as I admired it, I saw that I had neglected the fish and that they had begun to die.

Why sometimes we feel that we are falling in the sleep?

It depends if we feel this sensation during the transition from wakefulness to sleep or during REM sleep.

In the first case, the mechanism is physiological. When our body ceases to exercise  ”active” control (handled by the cortical areas of the brain) on movement our body is crossed by a series of muscular jerks —sleep starts or hypnic jerks.  If the transition occurs too early (i.e. when our conscious part has still not gone to sleep) these jerks may be perceived as a feeling of emptiness, and our “baffled” mind associates it with our perception of emptiness: falling.

Why this happens is not clear (according to some, it’s an evolutionary heritage from when we were sleeping on trees and muscles relaxation could mean a fall). Anyway, according to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, if the feeling happens too often and disturbs our rest, we must reduce: caffeine, stress, anxiety or hard physical activity in the evening.

The sensation of falling that we feel during REM sleep is not caused by a physiological mechanism and, in this case, for an explanation we should disturb dreams and psychology.

More info here  -  Asked by jugulator117

I was in a canoe in Papua New Guinea with him and a couple of local paddlers, going slowly down a forest river.  The dugout was level with the surface of the water and full of water itself, but we were in no danger of sinking.  The river was still and slow and we were trying to get the crocodiles to trust us, so we were leaving dead pigs and goats for them in the still little areas of backwater.  One of the men paddling pointed out that a large crocodile was coming to see us, and it slid beneath the surface and nudged the boat.  We left a pig for it.
The rain was late and people were getting worried so it was decided that we should go to a place in the forest that looked out over a small clearing full of bright green spear grass that ran toward the west and ask the rain to come.  We did this by whistling loudly and saying the rain's secret name, which I no longer know.  Nothing happened for a long time, and then a strange, dry, sistrum-like noise rolled toward us over the trees from a long way distant, and then we saw a whiteness moving toward us.  It was the rain, but it was falling as dry sleet and snow, battering the grass and all the tender tropical plants, and the local men climbed down and ran away while we stood and watched it come to us and felt it on our faces and hands.  I knew all the gardens would be ruined.

I was driving around a sort of notional Scotland, the highlands, it seemed, in a black London taxi with people I didn't know.  We were visiting a group of medieval villages called 'high towns' because each of them had in their midst a sort of small castle or redoubt situated on a giant stone outcrop shaped like a basaltic prism.  These keeps were all ruined and disused but drew your eye magnetically from wherever you were in the surrounding towns, which were themselves quaint in a strange, almost uncomfortable way, overgrown, slightly decrepit, the houses a little sunken on their foundations.
I was visiting an antiques dealer in one of these towns.  He had an old house converted to a shop, very dark inside and stuffed to overflowing with Victoriana and Continental pieces, stags's heads smothering the walls and dirty gilt frames everywhere.  As I was working my way through the place I looked up and saw a turquoise necklace pinned to the wall overhead, its beads as big as my fist.  I asked the dealer about them.
He was a strange man, decrepit in the same manner as the little fortresses, looking as though there was something biologically wrong with him.  He wore a white suit with narrow black stripes and started talking in a croaky frog-like voice; then the dream ended.  I don't know what he was saying but he wasn't talking about the necklace.


I think it's really interesting that I'm having all these graphic, narrative-style dreams during such a productive phase as far as the second book goes, which I'm writing now.  For me, these 'dream runs' often coincide with periods of imaginative fertility; I have a theory about our levels of consciousness and creativity and I will bore you with it some time soon lol.