Dreams

The Power Of Dreams

According to dream researcher Jeremy Taylor, dreams have great power, which, if it could be harnessed, could greatly improve people's lives. Check out this interview with Jeremy Taylor on the intuition.org web site:

http://www.intuition.org/txt/taylor.htm

Excerpt, where he talks about the power of Lucid Dreaming:

  "...I would say I succeed in getting lucid maybe once a 
  month.  There are certainly friends and colleagues of mine 
  who do it a good deal more often than that. I don't think 
  the frequency of the experience is necessarily as important 
  as what you do when you get lucid. For instance, if you 
  only had one lucid dream a year and were really able in 
  that moment to gather your wits together and ask the most 
  important question for your life at that moment, it would 
  probably then take about a year to manifest the creative 
  energy that was made available to you in that moment...."

Weird Dreams I've Had

My own dreams, when I remember them, tend strongly to the predictive, and in some cases to the blatantly precognitive. Yes, some of them have come true, even down to minute details. Some of them, I hope never come true, because it would be horrible if they ever did. What follows are transcripts of some of the weirdest dreams I've had over the last half century.

Most terrifying dream ever: "Coffee and Newspaper"

At the time of this dream, I was living with my parents in the Hotel Corday in Santa Ana, California, USA, in August of 1978. I was sleeping in my bed in our shared hotel room. I dreamt that my father came walking into the room with a cup of hot coffee in his left hand, and a folded copy of our local newspaper, the Orange County Register, in his right hand. He walked up to my mother, who was just waking up, and told her in an excited voice about something the president said, which he had read in the newspaper.

Then I woke up, and thought, "what an odd dream. That's actually sort of plausible. It would be kind of cool if my father DID walk into the room right now, just as my mother is waking up, with a cup of coffee in his left hand and a newspaper in his right hand, and told her excitedly about something the president said."

AND THEN IT HAPPENED!

My mother began to wake up. The door opened, and my father came in. He had a cup of coffee in his left hand and a folded copy of The Orange County Register in his right hand. He walked quickly over to my mother and told her excitedly about something the president had said, which he had read in the news.

I was reeling in shock and horror. This was raw, pure, unadulterated, unexplainable precognition. Not possible. When the absolutely impossible happens, it catches my interest in the extreme. I've still never been able to explain this dream. It was certainly not deja vu, and it was certainly not random chance. Every nuance of the event I dreamed about, woke up, remembered, and mused about, before it even happened. It was as if my father was acting to a well-rehearsed script. But in actuality, he had no knowledge of my dream, nor did I have any way of knowing in advance what he was about to do. But my dream predicted the whole scene in great detail.

Second-most-frightening dream: "2001-09-11"

On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was in bed dreaming. In my dream, I was at the corner of Bristol and Sunflower in Costa Mesa, California, USA. A very strange-looking airplane was flying round-n-round in tight circles at a low altitude over the Imperial Bank building (which, incidentally, somehow got moved from the southeast corner of the intersection to the northeast corner in my dream). The airplane was shaped sort of like a battle tank with horizontal and vertical wings on the sides, and huge propellers. (I later found that one airplane does exist which looks like that; it's called an "Osprey".) I thought, "He'd better be careful, or he'll clip the corner of that building and spin out of control!"

AND THEN IT HAPPENED!!!

The airplane clipped the corner of the building and spun out of control. It plunged into the Orange County Performing Arts Center across the street. I thought, "OH MY GOD! A CONCERT IS IN PROGRESS IN THAT BUILDING! AN AIRPLANE HAS CRASHED INTO A BUILDING FULL OF PEOPLE! THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE WILL DIE!"

And then I woke up. But I was to find that the waking was far, far, far more horrifying than the dream. While I slept, the United States of America I knew died, and will never return. I'm still living in this nightmare today.

I had some sense that this nightmare had reached out of the dream and into the waking world at once. The air was full of tension. On the way to work at 7AM, the streets were preternaturally deserted. On the bus, the people were unusually quiet. They looked sad and shell-shocked.

Then the bus driver announced, "Obviously, in light of what has happened this morning, we're not going into the airport. I'd like to, but I doubt the National Guard would let me."

I ran up to the bus driver in a panic and yelled "WHAT HAS HAPPENED???" The bus driver looked at me coldly for a second, then said "Buddy, if you don't already know, I'm not going to be the one to tell you."

I got off the bus outside the airport and ran to work, which was about a half-mile east of the airport.

My workplace was buzzing like a beehive that had been stirred with a stick. Some of the people were talking excitedly; some were walking around looking sad and stunned; some were crying; some were clustering around a small portable TV set.

And standing off to one side, looking relaxed and chipper, with a slight smile on his face, was Frank Secretan, our chief engineer. I thought, "Good! If ANYONE can explain this madness to me, it will be Frank."

So I ran up to Frank in a panic and asked, "FRANK!!! WHAT HAS HAPPENED??????????????????????????????????"

Frank answered, "Terrorists have hijacked two airliners, and have rammed them into the twin towers of the New York World Trade Center. One tower has collapsed, and the other tower may also collapse."

I said, "FRANK!!! That's a horrible joke!"

But Frank just smiled that half-smile of his, and said calmly and icily, "I'm not joking.".

I said, "OH MY GOD!!!"

Frank said, "Precisely.".

I thought back to the dream I had had just 90 minutes earlier, where I had thought in my dream, "AN AIRPLANE HAS CRASHED INTO A BUILDING FULL OF PEOPLE! THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE WILL DIE!"

Well, that had happened, and apparently about the same time as I dreamed it. If not "precognitive", this dream was at least "clairvoyant". It was as if some part of my being felt a terrible disturbance in The Force, and responded to it by dreaming that dream.

Most-recurrent dream: "Shadowy Death On The Arches":

I'm walking up Newport Blvd, from the Lido Cinema, in Newport Beach, California, USA, along the east side of the road. I get the feeling I'm being followed. I look over my shoulder and see two black, ill-defined shapes moving quickly towards me, veering from the street to the sidewalk. They look vaguely like black greyhounds, except larger, and they float more than they run. I run north, onto The Arches bridge, attempting to escape. They pounce on my and rend my body to shreds in about 1 second. I die.

Oddly, I've had this dream several times, spaced decades apart. Always exactly the same.

Maybe someday I will die on that bridge. Who knows? I've walked over the spot where I always die in my dreams many times, and it always sends a shiver up my spine. I look around for black shapes heading toward me, and I think, "is today the day that I die?" And when I don't die, I know the answer is, "not yet".

Most-violent recurrent dream: "Octagonal Death"

I'm a 10-year-old boy. I'm with two friends, both also 10-year-old boys. We're terrified, because we're being chased by the father of one of my friends. The father is very angry, and is prone to violence. We're in an apartment complex, with a wide open front courtyard, with a small octagonal-shaped rental office, with large picture windows in front, in the center of the courtyard. We run into the rental office and hide in the closet, trying to be silent. But the angry father comes into the office and opens the closet door. He has a shotgun in his hands and a look of rage and hate on his face. He shoots us all, many times. Our blood splatters all over the rental office, as our corpses sink to the floor. We die.

I had this dream twice, once at age 10 and once at age 30.

And later, at age 39, I stumbled across the location of the dream. It's an apartment complex in Huntington Beach, California, USA. When I saw that octagonal rental office in the center of the wide-open grass courtyard, I KNEW that death had occurred / will occur there. Some children were killed, or will be killed, by a man with a shotgun.

But I'd never been there before in my life! The first time I saw the place was about 29 years AFTER the first time I had the dream! Weird, huh?

A dream that (unfortunately!) came true: "Civil Defense Checkpoint #1"

I was in bed asleep, dreaming [a dream within a dream], in my apartment complex, which was a two-story L-shaped building with partially-covered catwalks on the upper floor. [Note: in real life, I've never actually seen a building shaped quite like that.] Then some noise wakes me up [from the inner dream]. It's an airplane flying overhead. But then there's a soft "boom", the engine noise cuts abruptly out, and there's the soft "whoosh" of the remnants of the plane tumbling out of the sky. I leap out of bed, jump into some clothes, and rush out of my apartment, fearing that the airplane is going to fall on my head. I run down the street. It's about 6AM, the sun is coming up behind clouds, providing a misty, diffuse dawn light. I look back over my left shoulder as I run, and sure enough the airplane is falling out of the sky, breaking apart, trailing thick black smoke. Small pieces of shrapnel from the airplane sting the back of my arm. I run faster to avoid the falling debris.

Once I get clear of the fallout zone, I look around me. I'm in a tent city. If there were permanent buildings here at one time, they must have been destroyed. I'm surrounded by tents and pavilions. Some of the tents house people, but most are shops selling goods. Lots of people are milling around. There's a feeling of tension, like that of a nation at war. The air smells of toxic smoke from the burning airplane, which seems to have crashed about a half mile behind me, a short distance behind my apartment building.

I start back home. But When I arrive at the entrance to my apartment complex, I find that there is now a wall just a few feet from the front entrance, a wall that stretches for thousands of miles in either direction. There's a gap in the wall in front of the entrance to my apartment complex. In the gap is a brown banquet table with a sign above it reading "Civil Defense Checkpoint #1". Sitting behind the table is a National Guardsman, a woman, in an olive-drab uniform, with a steel battle helmet on her head. She asks for my identification, which I present. She looks me up in a computer terminal, then says, "I'm afraid you can't pass." I say, "But I live right here in this building!" She says, "Not any more, you don't. You live on the other side now. You were on the wrong side of the barrier when THE EVENT happened. You can NEVER return. You are contaminated with radiation, and you are assumed to be a Russian sympathizer. You're not welcome here, Putin lover." I'm rather perplexed at all this, but I must accept it, because another National Guardsman is blocking the entrance, he's pointing a loaded, cocked machine gun at me, and he is beginning to squeeze the trigger. A look of cold hate is in his eyes. I ask the woman, "But where shall I live?" She hands me a key and says, "Room 224" and points to building behind me (on the "Russian" side of the barrier). "But I live in Room 124!" I said, pointing to my (former) home, behind the barricade. She just gave me the finger.

So I slunked off to my new room in a barrio in the Russian Quarter, wondering what the hell all this was about. That's when I woke up.

A few months later, this dream came true. I got fired from my job, ran out of money, couldn't pay rent, couldn't afford to move. My landlord filed for eviction. When I took the "Unlawful Detainer Complaint" to the clerk at the Orange County Courthouse, he gave me an "Answer" form, pointed to the first line, and said "Pay special attention to Civil Defense Checkpoint #1!" Turns out, Civil Defense Checkpoint #1 was the first line on the "Answer" form for defending one's self from a civil lawsuit! And the woman in my dream at the checkpoint, with a drab-green uniform and a gun, also appeared in real life. She wasn't a National Guardsman; she was an Orange County Sheriff's Deputy, who came to my apartment to give me a "Five Day Notice To Quit" order after I lost the unlawful detainer case.

So in reality, as in my dream, I was forced to leave my home, and told I could never come back, by a woman in a an olive-drab uniform with a gun. While I don't live in a "Russian barrio", I do live in a barrio of sorts. And while the apartment number isn't "124", it is "7425", which does have a 2 and a 4 in it. I really don't know where the "Russian sympathizer" or "radiation" parts came from.

Another precognitive dream: "Maroon Sedan And Sunglasses"

The following is yet another dream of mine that came true. Ie, it was a precognitive dream. Sorry if you don't "believe in" precognition, but the fact remains, it exists.

As for how precognition works, I don't know. I've heard it said that precognition is due to "intuition", but while I think that's true, it's not a very useful statement. It's like I had asked you, "Who killed Samuel Jacobs on the corner of 5th Avenue and 7th St. in NYC at 3AM Eastern time on the morning of Tue Sep 2 2008?", and you replied "a .357 magnum Ruger Redhawk revolver, with a 6 inch barrel". Yes, that much was clear from the ballistics report; but who pulled the trigger?

So while I'm sure that intuition is behind precognition, I'm not at all clear on how human intuition (pattern recognition) can sometimes allow humans to predict the future. But I know that it can.

An example is a dream I had I had a dream around Sept. 1, 2008. In this dream, I was a teenage girl, riding in the right front seat of her dad's car, which was an expensive late-model maroon sedan. Dad was a middle-aged businessman wearing a suit. Suddenly, I accidentally dropped my sunglasses out the window of the car. I asked my dad to turn the car around and go back so I could get my sunglasses. Dad made a U turn, went back, made another U turn, approached the spot where the sunglasses were lying in the street, and stopped the car in the slow lane with his hazard flashers blinking. I hopped out, ran around to the front of the car, and grabbed the sunglasses, which were undamaged. I looked up at our expensive late model maroon sedan looming over me. That's where I woke up.

The next day, i went to an employment agency to drop off a copy of my resume. (I'm currently looking for work.) As I was riding away on my bike, I noticed an expensive late-model maroon sedan stopped in the driveway. The driver, who was a middle-aged businessman in a suit, was staring at an object lying in the road. The object was a pair of sunglasses. On closer inspection, they were MY sunglasses. I'd apparently dropped them a few minutes earlier on my way to the employment agency. I snatched them up. The driver in the car looked startled, terrified even, as if he'd experienced the whole thing a few hours before in a dream, as I had.

What were the triggering elements for this bit of precognition? I don't know. Physicists say that information cannot travel backwards in time. But is that really true? In this case, it seems almost like information from the future somehow filtered back in time, and got into my dream of the night before.

Note that my dream was NOT completely true. I'm not a teenage girl (I'm a middle-aged male). My father is not alive, was never a businessman, never wore a suit, and never drove an expensive maroon sedan. But I DID drop my sunglasses the next day, and they WERE almost run over by a businessman in an expensive maroon sedan. My dream took elements of an event which would occur a few hours in the future, and jumbled them up. The burning question is, where did my subconscious get those elements? The only honest answer I can give is, "I don't know".

Possible future disaster: "N607AM"

In another dream I had, several months ago, I saw an airliner, painted red/white/blue/silver, marked "Welcome aboard American Airlines Friendship Liner, Boeing 757, 712", graze the top of a rocky hill north of Santiago Middle School in Orange, CA, USA. It lofted over the school, silently, both engines out, at an altitude of 75 feet and falling. It crashed in the grass field to the south of the school and broke up, killing all aboard. The nose section landed in the parking lot of the Bank of America at Chapman and Santiago in Orange, CA, USA. My dream cut to two policemen standing near the charred nose cone. They were talking:

Cop #1: How many people were on board?
Cop #2: 137.
Cop #1: How many survivors?
Cop #2: 0.

After this dream, I did some research. I googled "Boeing 757 712" and I got a lot of hits involving registration number "N607AM". It turned out that 712 is a "line number", meaning the 712th Boeing 757 ever manufactured. That airplane has registration number N607AM. N607AM is, indeed, owned and operated by American Airlines. N607AM is, indeed, painted red/white/blue/silver. N607AM is, indeed, still in active use. N607AM is, indeed, used on trips into John Wayne Airport. N607AM is, indeed, flown over Santiago Middle School regularly, on its way into John Wayne Airport.

Here is a picture of the airliner which I saw crash in my dream:

https://people.well.com/user/lonewolf/essays/N607AM.jpg

Will this airliner ever crash? And if it ever does, will it crash in the way predicted by my dream? I don't know. I hope it never crashes. I'd try to warn American Airlines to inspect the fuel system on N607AM, but they'd think I was a crackpot. They'd ask, "WHY do you think there is a problem in the fuel system of this airplane?" What could I say? "Intuition"? I doubt they'd buy that. And if they DID think I was serious, they'd probably call Homeland Security, who would then send FBI agents to my house to arrest me.

No, I don't think I'll call American Airlines. I'll just wait and see what, if anything, happens. But if 137 people die because of that, I'll wish I'd done something. Hopefully nothing bad will ever happen to this airplane, and that situation will never arise.

The only dream I've ever had in which I committed murder:
"Redneck And Suit"

I'm hiking in the desert with my best friend, Mike David. Suddenly a pickup truck appears with two guys in it, a redneck-looking fellow, and a foppish European-looking guy with long hair, a suit and round-lens wire-rim glasses. Suit pulls a black pistol with a silencer out of his suit jacket pocket and says "you want I should do 'em, boss?" Redneck says "no, I'll use my machine gun". Suddenly he's in the back of the pickup swinging this machine gun at my friend Mike. I try to say "LOOK OUT HE'S GOT A GUN!!!" but before I can get my mouth open, Redneck machine-guns my friend Mike to death. He points the gun at me and pulls the trigger, but the gun jams. He's pissed. I run.

Suddenly there's this building there, where none was before. I run inside and lock both the front and rear doors. It's a 1-story office building, about 100-feet square (that is, 10,000 square feet). It's walls are all made of glass. The roof is held up by slender steel poles throughout the building. The two doors both have "This door must remain unlocked during business hours" written above them, along with illuminated green "EXIT" signs.

I think, "Well isn't this stupid. I'm in a glass house. If those two guys want to get me, all they have to do is hit the glass with a baseball bat..." (at this point, Redneck wields a bat) "...or throw a rock..." (at this point, Suit wields a rock) "... and the glass will shatter. I need to get out of this place!" I looked around, but I was the only person in the building, and there were no obvious escape routes.

A phone rings.

"Hello?"

"Robbie, this is Hack. You got to get OUT of that place! RIGHT NOW!!!"

"But HOW???"

"Use the computer, silly. No, the one on your right. Yes, that one."

"This palm pilot?"

"It's not a palm pilot! It's a transuniversal transporter! You gotta get out of that universe IMMEDIATELY!!!"

At this point, Redneck and Suit see me with this little computer in my hand, and they're terrified. They drop their bat and rock and run back to the pickup. I'm wondering what they're scared of. I pull on the computer, and it expands out to the size of a notebook. It doesn't telescope or unfold or stretch; it just expands. There's no keyboard or mouse, just a stylus and touchscreen. I select "TransUniversal Jump" then hit "OK". Immediately I'm in another universe.

I'm on a parallel Earth. Same planet, same physical location, same longitude and latitude, same date, same time; but whereas before I was in a desert, now I'm in a humid, cool, overcast environment with plants and trees and buildings and a few people walking by. I see a pickup pull up to a curb ahead. Redneck and Suit get out of it. The see me and start running away. Suit is saying "we've got to get back to base!" I give chase, but they give me the slip. I'm mad as hell and want to catch up to them and kill them because they shot my best friend to death with a machine gun. But I can't see where then went. (Now I know it's stupid to suddenly be chasing two armed men when I'm unarmed... but hey, it's a dream. Dreams are often illogical.)

Suddenly, out from behind a bush strides a certain Internet friend of mine who often goes by the nickname "Hack". (I'm not 100% certain what his name is in real life, but I've heard rumors his first name is actually Bryan.) Now, I haven't a clue as to what Hack looks like in real life, but in my dream he was male Caucasian, 6 feet, 170 lb, lean and stringy, very-pale skin (almost albino), medium-length curly black hair, piercing blue eyes, black pants, white polo shirt. He says "Psst! This way! They went into the park!" I follow Hack into a sort of amusement park. We go creeping along a twisty walkway amongst bushes and weird rides. It is very foggy. Suddenly ahead we see Redneck and Suit. They see us and jump into a sort of fiberglass slide and disappear. We follow.

At the bottom of the slide we come out onto the sidewalk of a street between two businesses. We catch a glimpse of two guys running around a corner to our right, and give chase.

We go around the corner, but we don't see our prey, so we slow down and walk slowly along the street. Suddenly a white van comes up from behind us. It passes, slowly. We look in the passenger-side window, and there's Redneck (driving), and Suit. They're both smiling and giving us the finger. Hack and I give them the finger right back. I yell "assholes!" and Hack yells "pricks!"

"They're getting away! What should we do?" I say.

Hack says "Call the cops". I look around for a phone, but there is none. Astonishingly, the van has slowed to a crawl and Redneck and Suit are still giving us the finger. I should smell a trap at this point, but for some reason, I don't hearken to the danger.

A police car appears from behind. Hack flags it down. I tell the officers, "See that van ahead? Those men are murderers! Arrest them!" The cops pull the van over and Redneck gets out. "You a murderer?" First Cop asks. "No", Redneck says. "Look in the van, his accomplice is in there!" I say. But Second Cop looks in the van and says "there's no one in here."

Suddenly Hack, the two cops, and myself all feel intense stabbing pains in our heads, and the universe starts flashing between positive and negative (photographic negative, white is black, black is white) once per second. Hack says "UUUOOO, they're using a transuniversal transporter as a weapon! They'll send us to someplace unlivable!" Redneck makes a dash for the van, jumps in. The two cops jump in the van, but I see Suit fire his pistol (with the silencer) twice. It makes a soft "Thuck! Thuck!" sound. The two cops die inside the van.

Suddenly the van, with Redneck, Suit, and the two dead cops in it, vanishes. The universe is no-longer flashing between positive and negative, but Hack and I are now standing on a high freeway transition road (whereas before, we'd been on a quiet city street at ground level). The gravity is about 5G. Hack says "OOOooo, my head feels soooo heeaavvvvyyy. The ggrrravitty is toooo high." I look at my watch and the numbers are spinning wildly out of control, about 1000 times normal speed. I feel my thoughts and speech slowing down. I say "aaanndd tiimme is messsssed up, tooo." Oddly, automotive traffic on our transition road, and on the freeway far below us, is flowing at a sedate 55MPH. There's a city a few hundred feet in front of us, tall glass skyscrapers glowing in the afternoon sunshine. Hack looks up, and laughs. "Thhhhe skkky is ppppurple!" he burbles. "I allwwwways wannnted to die unnder a prrrrple skkkky." I look up, and sure enough, the sky is an even lilac color, with a few fluffy white clouds and a bright yellow sun.

Suddenly I notice a computer in the gutter. "Lllooook, Hack, Redneck drrrropd his cmmppputrrr!" I snatch it up. "Get mmmee back to TTTTEXAS!!!" Hack yells. I click some buttons and Hack goes ::POOF::, safely back in Texas. Then I click "Homing Beacon (Return To Owner)". ::POOF:: I'm immediately in a different universe.

I'm now under a maze of freeway overpasses so enormous and complex that they blotted out the daytime sunlight almost completely. Like being under the four-level interchange in downtown Los Angeles. There are surface streets and even buildings under here. A whole city under the freeways. There's an odd "building" here with internal partitions and granite pillars extending all the way up to the freeways above; but the only exterior "wall" is a chain-link fence. And yet I know somehow that this place is "Headquarters" for Redneck and Suit.

I climb the 12' chainlink fence, crawl over the barbed wire at the top, and climb down the other side. I sneak into Redneck's office area and hide behind a pillar. A van pulls up. My heart is pounding. The engine turns off. I hear Suit get out. He prowls around the area, reconnoitering, but fails to see me. I hear, "coast is clear, boss. I'll go around front." For some reason, Suit enters the front gate, but Redneck enters the side gate. They approach each other. Redneck is laughing and says "Well, I think this has been an enjoyable day."

That's when I lunge! I tackle Redneck from behind, knocking him into a surprised Suit. Suit falls over backwards and his pistol skitters out of his hand and slides across the waxed concrete floor. Redneck lands on top of him, and I land on top of Redneck. I think, "now isn't this perfectly insane. If I'm going to kill these guys, it would be nice if I had a weapon. A knife would be nice." Just then, I notice a white plastic table knife from Irvine Chinese Food in my pocket. I whip it out and cut Redneck's throat. I cut with all my hate. The knife goes clear through his flesh, all the way to his spine. (Now, this is obviously impossible for a dull plastic knife. But hey, this was a dream. Dreams are weird.) Redneck is squirting gallons of blood all over Suit, and Suit is trying to get up and go for his gun. But I jump up and kick Suit in the head, knocking him out. Then I cut his throat. Redneck and Suit both die.

That's when I woke up.

Weird dream, huh?

Now, in case you're wondering, I've never killed anyone in real life, and this dream was the first time I've ever done so in a dream. Nor do I know anyone in real life who is much like Redneck or Suit. The only "real" people in the dream were myself, my friend Mike David, and Hack.

I'll tell you, though, I'll be keeping my eyes open for a redneck-looking guy, and a European-looking guy in a suit, driving around in a pickup or van. If I see them, I think I'll discretely run the other way. I won't be attacking them with a white plastic table knife from Irvine Chinese Food.

(Unless, of course, they murder my best friend; in which case, all bets are off.)

PS: Hack: Thanks for helping me chase down Redneck and Suit, even if it was only in a dream.

"Special Powers"

I had the dream which follows in the morning hours of Saturday, March 4, 2006. I'd gone to bed at 10PM the night of Friday March 3, 2006, and didn't wake up until 3PM the next afternoon. I guess my body, brain, and mind needed the sleep. (The last week, I hadn't been getting enough sleep.) I only remember one dream clearly from this night, but it was a doozy! After I woke up, I immediately wrote a lengthy email about this dream to a friend of mine, before I forgot the details.

I was in a school bus (one of the old, round-cornered yellow diesel Crown school buses of the late 60s and early 70s). The bus was full of children, ages 7-12, about 40 of them. I got the impression that this was the entire student body of some small elementary school, perhaps private. (Not my school, though; I didn't recognize any faces.)

I don't know who or what I was in the dream. Man? Boy? Ghost? Imaginary playmate? One of the characters in the dream did see me and speak to me later in the dream, but that still doesn't tell me what I was.

The school bus was being driven slowly up a long, narrow driveway, winding steadily upward through a forest of deciduous trees, with dappled afternoon sunlight shining down on everything, and a fresh cool breeze ruffling the leaves of the trees. Everyone was in a good mood.

The only adult on board was the school-bus driver, who I got the impression was also the kids' teacher. I think we were on an overnight field trip to a mountain resort of some kind.

Then it happened. A car was speeding down the other side of the driveway, some drunken yahoo from the resort up ahead. A child wandered into the road and the driver swerved sharply to avoid the kid, lost control, and went into a spin. He was spinning and sliding, completely out of control, like a hockey puck on ice, and heading straight for our school bus. Our bus driver, who was a beautiful young woman, about 22 years old, with pale skin, long silky dark-brown hair in a pony tale, and an ever-present, honest, easy-going smile on her face. The kind of woman young kids get crushes on. She saw this out-of-control car spinning and sliding towards us, and she held up her right hand and made a pushing gesture and said "Away!". The center of gravity of the car made an abrupt change in the direction of its velocity vector, and the car was suddenly sliding AWAY from us instead of TOWARDS us. The school-bus driver looked at the diver of the spinning car, shook her head, and said "You'll get dizzy spinning like that. Stop spinning!" The car stopped spinning, aligned itself with the right lane of the driveway, and started rolling normally. The driver, startled, said "WOW! I regained control! I'm not going to crash! Thanks!" The school-bus driver just smiled. (Her way of saying "You're welcome.") (Of course, the two of them should not have been able to see or hear each other at all, but dreams are weird that way.)

Then a bloody great dog was running through a park on our right, chasing a ball, which rolled out into the driveway. The dog was going to run out after it, but the school-bus driver held out her hand in a warding gesture and said "Stop.". The skin, flesh, and fur on top of the dog's neck pulled up and back, and the dog came to a sudden stop; it's feet were still moving, going "skiff-skiff-skiff-skiff-skiff" on the concrete sidewalk, but the dog wasn't moving. It was as if a giant invisible hand had a hold of the scruff of its neck. The dog stopped trying to run. It cocked its head, raised its ears and eyebrows, and looked the school-bus driver straight in the eye, plainly asking "How did you do that?!" The school-bus driver just smiled and said "Now don't you go running out into any streets; you'll get run over by cars.".

Finally we arrived at a parking lot in front of a cafeteria at the top of the hill. We parked, got out, went into the cafeteria, and had lunch. For some reason, the school-bus driver was also the cashier. As the kids lined up at the cash register with trays of food, each child paying from hir own cash, one boy about 12 years old (Caucasian, 4' 1", 75Lb, short dark brown hair, brown eyes) stopped after paying for his lunch (roast chicken, mashed potatoes, brown gravy, dinner roles, salad w. blue-cheese dressing, milk), looked the cashier/driver straight in the eye, stared at her for about 7 seconds, and asked, "How did you do that?" The woman smiled, placed her right forefinger on the boy's forehead, and said "Special powers." Beads of green light formed along her finger and shot into the boy's head. The boy staggered for a second and stepped backwards. Then his eyes got wide and a big smile spread across his face, the kind of smile you'd see on the face of someone who just received a valuable gift. He said "WOW! Cool! Thanks!" The driver/cashier/teacher lady just smiled.

The boy with the newly-acquired "special powers" picked up his lunch and was walking along the aisle between the front window and the condiments rack, with the late afternoon sunlight shining in on the pale wallpaper, the shiny chrome rack of white plastic tubs full of stainless steel knives, forks, spoons, and little pink and pale-blue packets of sugar and sweet-n-low. To his right were two kids, a boy (about 10) and a girl (about 8). The girl was berating the boy horribly, saying shit like "YOU'RE NO GOOD! YOU'RE ALWAYS SO SELFISH AND BOORISH AND STUPID! AND YOU SMELL! ALWAYS DIRTY, NEVER WASH! AND YOU'RE MEAN! AND..." on and on she went. The boy being thusly hen- pecked actually looked rather kind and mild-mannered. The boy with the newly acquired "special powers" just looked at the loud-mouthed girl, focusing on her throat. She suddenly went silent. Her mouth was still flapping, but no sound was coming out. She clasped at her throat in horror and tried to say "I've lost my voice!" but she was mute. The hen-pecked boy looked relieved. The boy with the "special powers" smiled and laughed softly.

The dream jumped ahead into other segments which I don't remember as clearly, but the tail end of it got really weird and frightening. At one point, it was later the night of our arrival at the resort, and I was in a parlor with the teacher/driver lady and some other folks, both adults and children. There was some man arguing loudly with the teacher/driver lady, and at one point he was brandishing a knife and cussing, which frightened me.

But then the pale-skinned dark-haired boy with the newly acquired "special powers" came into the room, looked me straight in the eye, curled a finger, and said "Come here; I want to show you something." He turned away, looking back over his shoulder at me, and I followed. He lead me to his room. It was dark, except for the moonlight coming in through the window. I asked him "what did you want to show me?" He just looked out the window. It was dark outside, and there was not much to see, except for some vague light flickering deep down in the swimming pool, and gusts of dry air blowing leaves and dust around above the swimming pool. But I could sense electricity in the air above the swimming pool, and a growing sense of a presence of evil, evil of such magnitude that it could destroy us all.

I became so disturbed at that point, worrying both about the man in the parlor threatening the teacher with a knife, and the evil presence outside, that woke up. So I don't know how that dream turned out. Write your own ending if you like.

(My ending: The teacher made the man with the knife calm down by reaching into his brain with her "special powers". He suddenly stopped throwing his tantrum and said, "now what was I talking about? I don't remember. It must not be important. (Yawn) My, I'm soooo sleepy!" She lead him to a couch. He laid down on the couch, then he noticed the stiletto in his hand and said, "I better fold this up so I won't cut myself in my sleep. Here, you keep this for me." He handed the knife to the teacher, then he fell into a deep, peaceful sleep. I and the boy with the special powers then came and got the teacher, and she went outside with us and cast a magic spell, and told the evil presence, "Dissipate! Break down into your constituent elements, evil spirit! Rejoin the forces of nature from whence you came, and trouble us no more!" The evil presence then dissolved and melted back into the earth and the air and the water, and the night breeze once again seemed clean, gentle, and peaceful. We all went to bed and slept peacefully and got up the next morning and had a great field trip.)

I honestly don't know where most of the stuff in this dream came from. Certainly not from my daily life! I haven't been having adventures nearly so exciting! When I do have dreams which I remember strongly, they often have elements that are so bizarre, and so outside of my daily experience, that I seriously doubt the bullshit most psychologists spew about the nature and causes of dreams. What ever they are, dreams aren't what shrinks think they are. They're certainly not all just mish-mashes of daily experience. Some are; but some clearly are not.

"What Am I?"

The following dream is the only dream I've ever had while not alive. No, that's not a typo, I said "not alive". I was (briefly) dead when I had the following dream.

The date was sometime in 1977-1978, not sure which month. The time was about midnight. The place was Westcliff, on the west side of the Newport Back Bay in Newport Beach, CA, USA. I'd been hiking around on the top of the cliff in the dark. And when I say "dark", I mean very dark. Dangerous, to say the least!

AND THEN IT HAPPENED!!!

I caught my foot on an old rusty steel wire stretched along the ground, possibly the ground wire of an old chainlink fence from decades ago, long gone. I fell forward, and downward, because unknown to me, I was standing on the very edge of the cliff. (Yes, Westcliff is an actual cliff, with a sharp edge and steep drop-off of about 100 feet. On the other side of the bay is Eastbluff, which is a rounded bluff rather than a sharp cliff.) My left foot caught on the wire. My body rotated forward and downward and my chest slammed very hard into a baseball-sized rock protruding from the ground. I very distinctly heard and felt my heart stop beating. I died.

(No, the above three paragraphs are not a dream, nor are they fiction, nor are they mistaken; they are absolute fact.)

So there I was, a corpse hanging from its left foot by a wire over the edge of a 100 foot cliff, at midnight, with muddy bay water lapping against rocks and dirt 100 feet below. But I was not entirely without consciousness. I clearly remember leaving my body and hovering above it for about 10 seconds. I (thought?) (dreamed?) to myself, "What am I? And what is this oddly-shaped thing beneath me with the strange appendages?" Something (within me? without me?) answered, "That was your body. You were a 'human'. Now, you are what you are." "Did I enjoy being a 'human', whatever that is?" "Yes." "I think I'll go back." At this point, the dream ended, my consciousness descended back into my body, my heart started beating again, I regained normal consciousness, and I slowly and carefully scrambled back up the cliff onto flat, level ground. I laid back on the grass and gazed at the stars above. I was sore and stiff and exhausted, but I was also brimming with questions: Just what is human consciousness? (I didn't know and still don't.) Do humans really have a "spirit" within them? (Yes, clearly they do.) Is this "spirit" purely an epiphenomenon of the brain, dying when we die, or can it survive after our death? (I don't know. Up until this incident, I'd have said unequivocally "our spirit dies when we die"; but afterwards, I could never be certain about that again.)

"Space-Time Portal"

In this dream, I was an adult male, living in a sea-side town somewhere in an English-speaking country. A neighbor woman from two doors to the right of my house (if looking out my front door) came by and asked me if I'd take her two children (a 4-year-old boy and a 6-year-old girl) on a 3-day vacation to visit their grandmother on Mysterious Mountain. She couldn't take them herself, she said, because she had a 3-day symposium to attend in The Big City. I agreed.

(I really don't know why she couldn't have taken the kids herself on another date. Perhaps there was some reason the trip had to be on a certain date. And I don't know why she would turn her two young children over to an adult male neighbor whom she barely knew for a three-day vacation. But dreams are weird.)

On the day of the vacation, mom brought her kids over and promptly left.

The 4-year-old boy, Jeremy, was dressed in pale pink pajamas. He was about 3'3" tall, weighed about 35LB, had short silky chestnut hair hanging in straight bangs over his forehead, sucked his thumb constantly, and never said a damn thing or did anything interesting during the entire dream. He was just there. Maybe he was just a "lurker", observing life but preferring not to interact with it.

The 6-year-old girl, Ellen, was 3'10", weighed about 55LB, and had long brown hair, a chubby face, and dreamy brown eyes. She was wearing a pale-blue blouse with a white snowman embroidered on it, and a pleated knee-length pink skirt. She was quiet and introverted, but not shy. Unlike Jeremy, she chimed in with conversation and action frequently during the dream. She always had this mystical look on her face like she could see things that most people couldn't.

I asked Ellen, "Ok, how do we get to this Mysterious Mountain of yours?" She gave me directions to a place called "The Waystation". I drove us there in my car (which was some sort of mid-size sedan). It seemed to be a combination restaurant, hotel, and transit terminal of some kind. Ellen led us to a side door with no markings and no window, saying "I want to see my friend while we're here." She gave the door three knocks, paused, knocked twice, paused, knocked five more times. The door opened and we entered.

We were in a slaves' quarters. The room was hot and steamy and dimly lit. People were sitting and standing around working at various jobs. Many of the workers wore chains on their ankles or wrists. Some were chained to their workbenches. I remarked "I thought slavery was illegal!" Ellen replied, "Slavery is illegal in our world, yes. But when we entered that door, we left our world. This room is an annex of a different universe. How do you think this restaurant, hotel, and transit terminal can exist, much less operate with such affordable prices? All done with slave labor behind the scenes." I replied, "But that doesn't make it right!" Ellen just frowned sadly, seeming to at least partially agree with me.

Ellen walked up to an elderly slave woman, who smiled and hugged her. The two of them talked a while in a language that doesn't exist on our Earth, cried softly together for a while, talked some more, then finally hugged each other goodbye. Ellen turned back to me and said "let's go". She seemed sad and had tears on her face.

We exited the slave quarters through another unmarked door into the inner lobby of the transit terminal. The afternoon sunlight was gleaming into the room from the front windows along side the main front door, which we had bypassed. No one seemed to notice our unorthodox entry.

We went to the ticket counter. Ellen said "Three for Mysterious Mountain, one adult and two kids." The ticket salesman said "That will be $9.00, please." I paid. The ticket guy gave the tickets to Ellen and said "Portal B7". We went out through the back door of the lobby, into a square courtyard, about 40 feet on each side. The courtyard was full of tall green plants, fountains, rock pools of gurgling water, and tall stone rings. Each stone ring had a sign on top with a letter and number: A1; B8; C3; D9. Ellen led us along a path of stepping stones through a pool of tinkling water, to the ring marked B7, and the three of us stepped through.

Instantly we were in a different universe. We were still in a courtyard full of pools and fountains and stone rings, but this courtyard was about 200 feet square instead of 40 feet, it had less vegetation, and it had much larger pools and fountains. We walked along a path of stepping stones fording a large pool at the base of a low, wide waterfall. At the end of the path we came up onto a concrete sidewalk. Ellen hesitated and said, "If we go left, we'll go into the main lobby, which is really quite boring. I'd rather go through the zoo instead." Without another word she turned right instead of left, and Jeremy and I followed her.

(Yes, it's strange for an adult to be catering without objection to all the whims of a 6-year-old girl under his protection, but dreams are weird. And in case you can't tell, it was Ellen who was really running this dream. She was the "opener of the way", the "oracle" who introduced and explained each new thing that happened.)

We came to a door marked "No Admittance". Ellen opened it and we went in. When the door closed (and locked itself) behind us, it was very dark, almost pitch black, inside. Most of what little light there was seemed to be coming from a bend in the hallway about 30 feet ahead of us. We advanced forward to the bend, and turned left. The only light was now coming from the opposite end of a long, narrow hallway stretching on about 200 feet ahead of us. Both sides of the hallway were lined by animal cages. The air was hot and stank strongly of animal piss and shit. Various animal noises were all around us. As we walked down the hallway we could dimly see tigers, jaguars, pumas, cheetahs, bobcats, just about every kind of wild cat imaginable (and some that weren't) around us. Ellen talked softly to the animals. Some came up to the wire-mesh fronts of their cages and Ellen stuck her tiny fingers through the holes and touched them.

We advanced down the hallway, through the primates section (monkeys, baboons, orangutans, chimpanzees, gorillas), then through the ruminants section (gazelles, antelopes, elks), and finally, out through the door on the other end of the hall, which was propped open with a yellow plastic bucket full of dirty mop water, with a filthy mop sticking out of it. We were in a small garbage alcove, surrounded by concrete walls. A blue garbage dumpster was in front of us, a large metal door for garbage-truck access was on our right, and a small metal door was on our left. The alcove was open to the sky above, and the light and the fresh, cool air were very refreshing after the hot dark stink of the zoo. We went out through the unlocked small metal door on our left.

We were now in front of a transit terminal building, but a much larger and fancier one than the one we had started our journey from. The walls were of marble, and the roof, like the roofs of the buildings all around, was a dome plated with polished gold, which gleamed in the sunlight.

We caught a bus in front of the transit terminal. The bus was shaped like an old 1970s Airstream motorhome. It was chrome plated and mirror smooth all over, so that we could see our own reflections clearly in its side. It had no wheels and did not touch the ground. It seemingly had no engine, made no noise, produced no exhaust; yet it accelerated quickly away. We got off the bus when it reached the waterfront docks.

Ellen led us to a huge cruise ship. It was a trimaran design, with the center hull much deeper than the two outer hulls. Mounted on pylons on the outsides of the outer hulls were two enormous jet engines. We went to the ticket booth near the boarding ramp, and I bought tickets to Mysterious Mountain for one adult and two kids. We went to the ramp, gave our tickets to a young man in a nautical uniform, climbed the ramp, and stepped aboard.

Ellen introduced me to the captain, who looked a bit like Captain Smith in James Cameron's movie "Titanic". The captain explained, "She's exactly 1000 feet long from bow to stern, and she carries a maximum passenger load of 1000 souls. She's a trimaran, but when we're at our cruising speed of 300 nauts, the only part of the ship that touches the water is the keel and water-rudder; and in rough weather, we increase power and no part of the ship actually touches the water. Propulsion is by two large turbojet engines. Our high speed is made possible by levitation from a combination of anti-gravity devices, ground-effects lift, and lift from our engine pylons, which double as wings. In essence, she's nearly as much airplane as boat."

We left dock at sunset and sailed/flew across the surface of the ocean for a couple hours enroute to an island in the middle of the ocean with a tall mountain on it. Both the island and the mountain were apparently known as "Mysterious Mountain".

At this point the dream fades out, then skips ahead to the return trip. (Sorry, but the dream skipped over what this "Mysterious Mountain" was like, or what happened there. So it remains "mysterious", har har, even to me.)

When the dream resumed after the fade-out, we sailed back to the mainland, went back to the transit terminal, switched universes, and drove back to my house. The kids mom picked them up, said "thanks for watching the kids, bye", and drove off. The dream ended with me standing in front of my house, looking westward, watching the sun set over the ocean. (The Pacific Ocean, perhaps? I'm guessing that the town I was in was somewhere on the California coast, but I'm not sure.)

So on the one hand, this dream was disappointing in its incompleteness; but on the other hand, it was full of wild and exotic things (space-time portals, jet cruise ships, etc). My dreams are often like that. Pieces are missing, either in the dream itself or in my after-waking memory of the dream; but the parts that remain can be fascinating.

"Held Hostage"

I was with a bunch of people, including some of my fellow residents of the building in which I currently live. We were, for some reason, on another planet, inside a huge steel sphere, about 200 feet in diameter, sunk about 100 feet into the sandy soil of the surface of the planet. We were being held hostage by an army of large reptiles, who looked suspiciously like the "Gorn" from Star Trek TOS episode "Arena". ( picture of a Gorn) There seemed to be about 200 of us humans being held in this sphere, including men, women, and children.

At one point, two of the staff of the management of my current apartment building, Scott and Bob, came in to negotiate for our release. Unknown how Scott and Bob -- or any of us, for that matter -- ended up on this distant planet. Flew there in a space ship? I can only conjecture. They were apparently not successful in their bid to free us, however. We remained under house arrest (well, actually, "sphere arrest") after they left.

(For security reasons, I won't specify my current address, the name of the company which manages my building, or the full names of Bob and Scott; but yes, those are their real first names. I like them, and they have been very helpful to me in real life, so it's no surprise that they appeared in my dreams trying to save myself and others from bondage.)

About 40 of us, including myself, some adults, and some kids, went exploring on the lower floors of the sphere. (It had about 4 levels, each level being about 50 feet tall.) We were on the next level down from the ground level. Suddenly, the level started flooding! It was filling up with water! The trap doors in the ceiling closed and locked themselves! We were trapped, and couldn't get out! The air space at the top was 3 feet... 2 feet... 1 foot... then 0 feet. I was frantically trying to find some way out, when I noticed a smiling child swimming up to me unconcernedly. He had webs between his fingers, and fluttering gills on his neck. As we floated there looking at each other, I realized that I wasn't in oxygen debt, I didn't feel the need to breath, and I wasn't passing out or losing consciousness. I looked at my hands and saw webs between my fingers. I felt my neck, and discovered that I, too, now had fluttering gills on my neck. I was absorbing oxygen directly from the water! The smiling boy in front of me said, "I think there's something in this water that is changing us on a cellular, or perhaps even a molecular, level. I swallowed some of the water and I fell a hot glow flow through my body. It changed me somehow." Except, he didn't actually "say" this with his mouth, lungs, and vocal chords. He just thought it, and it flowed into my mind. I thought back, "Yes, and it seems to have given us telepathic abilities, as well." "Yes, isn't it cool?!" We eventually found an unlocked trap door, escaped back to the main level, and resumed breathing with our lungs. But our gills remained.

The child who had spoken to me got on his computer, which was, according to him, "hooked up to subspace radio" (another Star Trek allusion). He contacted his grandfather back on Earth. His granddad informed him that the sphere we were in had a secret escape route, always filled with "magic" water which would, he warned us, change our genes forever, causing us to become amphibians. We informed him that we'd already experienced the effects of the local waters, and that amphibianhood suited us just fine, and that the waters also gave telepathic abilities. He raised his eyebrows and said "the telepathic abilities are new information to me, but I suppose you'll find them useful". He then informed us that the secret passage led to an ocean where amphibians roamed freely in underground cities, far from the reach of the war-like reptiles on the land.

So I grabbed a bullhorn and explained the situation to the assembled group of 200 or so humans in the main hall. I told them that we could escape through a tunnel of special water which imparts webbed fingers (I held out my hands), gilled necks to breath water with (I stroked the gills on my neck), and telepathic ability (I whispered these last three words into the minds of all 200 humans without saying anything out loud). "Are you with me?", I asked them. "Will you escape with me to the city of the Amphibians, and leave this accursed prison behind forever?" They only deliberated for a few seconds, then every last man, woman, and child said "YES!!!".

So we left. We went down into the flooded lower level and found the secret control room that opened up the ancient secret tunnel. We opened the tunnel entrance, swam into it, and closed and locked it behind us. We swam for miles and miles, and finally came out into open ocean. Not far ahead was a huge gleaming city. We entered the city and were welcomed by its inhabitants as new citizens. We were no longer human, but we were free telepathic amphibians, living in a beautiful city, never again to be imprisoned or brutalized by the land dwellers. So ended the dream.

"World War Three"

I had the following dream-within-a-dream on the night of Tuesday January 25, 2011:

I was on a bus, traveling down a freeway (the I405 here in Orange County, CA, USA, I think) at night. There were about 40 people on the bus. Near the front was a man in a suit, a "leader" type. He was saying, "As you all know, our country is under attack. We are at war. It is up to us here to decide, by vote, whether or not to retaliate using nuclear weapons should it come to that." We continued traveling down the freeway for a while. I could hear the noise of engine and road, and feel the sway and rumble of the bus.

Suddenly a 2-way radio murmured on the belt of the leader, and he had a brief conversation with someone; I couldn't hear the words. Then he spoke up and announced, "I just got word that the enemy has begun bombing our cities. It's time for a vote. How many here think we should retaliate by starting World War Three? I vote 'yes'!" A few people, 2 or 3, myself included, held up their hands with thumbs pointed down in a "No" gesture. But nearly everyone else held up their hands high with a "stands with a fist" gesture and jubilant looks on their faces. The leader looked at me holding my hand with thumb pointed down. I said "No!". He scowled, but quickly looked back to the crowd and noticed that most of the votes were in his favor. He said "The ayes have it." He picked up a small black box connected to the dashboard of the bus by a cord. He pushed a button on the box.

Immediately the bus slowed down, pulled over to the right, and stopped, and the engine turned off. It was dead silent. The city lights all around us suddenly went black, and the wail of an air-raid siren could be heard. A missile streaked upwards a few miles away, leaving a trail of fire behind it. But instead of turning to one side and heading for a foreign land, the missile apparently malfunctioned. It went straight up, then it's nuclear warhead detonated, apparently at an altitude of about 50,000 feet nearly straight above us. I felt a sudden tingling and stinging sensation as the EMP and gamma radiation, followed by the slower beta and alpha radiation, passed through my body. I realized that I had just received a fatal dose of radiation, and I'd be dead within days, if not hours. I looked out the window and I couldsee the shock wave from the blast destroying buildings and knocking down lamp posts and telephone poles and digging up agricultural fields and basically destroying everything; but for some reason, our bus was not destroyed.

That's when I woke up to the next higher level of the dream. I was now sitting in an overstuffed armchair in the living room of famous Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung, in his house in Bollingen, on the shore of Lake Zürich. Jung, looking about 84 years old and very gentle and grandfatherly, was sitting back in a rocking chair, his legs crossed, his eyes gleaming, smoking a pipe. He was listening intently to me telling him all about the horrible dream I'd just had.

When I had finished relaying dream, Jung said "Oh, my. You should have tried much harder to stop that evil man, you know."

I nodded my head in shame, a tear trickling down my cheek. I said, "I know. I tried. I voted 'No', but almost everyone else was against me. Just one man, Caucasian, 5'9", with a lean face with shaving stubble, sitting in the back, voted 'No' with me."

Jung nodded and said, "Next time you have this dream, if all else fails, leave the dream. Don't stay to watch the start of World War Three; it is bad for the soul."

I said, "All right, next time I'll leave."

Then I woke up, this time to reality. My heart was beating rapidly, and I had a very vivid, clear memory of this dream-within-a-dream in my mind.

Often when I have dreams of this intensity, they tend to come true. I sure hope this dream never comes true, though, because it's horrible.