at school

          I was in a house where a woman was taking a shower. I went out onto the patio and noticed a few trickles of blued fluid seeping out of the wall. I thought it must be the shower water somehow leaking through. I went into the house to tell the woman, but as I entered the house I realized that  the shower was on the opposite side of the house.  I went into the room where the blue ooze seemed to be coming from, and saw that there was a steady stream of blue water flowing in around the sill of a window. I ran to the woman and banged on her door. I said “come quickly, don’t even bother to dress!”

She came and looked blankly at the water coming in the house. I went to leave, to look for the source, but the woman started to open the window, and even more water came in, and I shouted at her not to. I asked if the water tank was on the roof. I pictured the outside of the house in my mind, but couldn’t imagine how that much water could have been flowing without my seeing it.

          I went to a school where a lecture was going on. I stood in a doorway, looking in at the lecture. A sawyer beetle flew in by my head and startled me. It flew erratically past some other people who swatted at it. It landed on the floor and a girl stepped on it with her chuppal. I was sorry she killed it, but glad it wasn’t going to bother me any more. The girl looked back at me, and pointed. Another person next to me looked and stepped away, startled, saying something and pointing toward my shoulder. I looked and it was an orange spider, as big as my hand. It was very fuzzy, and almost mouse-like. I jumped back, and it leapt onto my hand, biting my finger. ‘Kill it! Slap it before it bites me!” I shouted, but no one did a thing. I could feel its little teeth clamping down on my finger. I used my left hand to grab it, pull it off and throw it to the ground.

          I was in a class with two other students. The teacher was conducting a sort of psychotherapy exercise with us. Each of us had to answer a series of probing questions. The first guy went, and was moved to tears by the elucidation of his pain that the exercise wrought. The second guy is the guy from last night’s dream, in which we lay down together and shared memories of music from our youth. It was very comforting. This time all of us were expecting this man to be smug about the exercise, and to not respond. Surprisingly he also was moved to tears. Just watching him cry made tears come to my eyes.

          The classes rotate from one room to the next. I got to the next room and the previous class hadn’t quite finished, so I sat on a stool in the corner. A woman from my class came over and sat near me, then moved her bag closer to her. I had sat in her seat, but she didn’t say anything. Our class began, but I wasn’t really a part of it. We were shown a demonstration of a new computer program which would be the operating system for all of our computers. All of our backgrounds were supposed to be the “wave” theme, with water shimmering. It was a security measure. Instead of using a mouse or arrow keys we’d be able to conduct searches by writing on the screen. We moved on to the next class, where again the previous class was not yet done. There had been a group exercise and the culmination was a woman revealing her naked torso, which had been written on by all of them, unknowing that they were writing on her body. The effect was revelatory to all. I noticed that she was not thin, but was very sexy, and I knew that she was a sexpert of some sort.

          In the next class we worked in pairs. There was a cupboard with drawers under it, and in order to either lock or unlock it, you had to put a pen in this nole to depress a spring, two other objects in other holes, and then insert a key and turn it. It was hard to get everything lined up so that the key could be turned. I had the three objects lined up, and asked my partner to insert the key. She tried, but couldn’t turn it. As we worked on it it became clear that she wasn’t trying very hard. We switched positions, and she purposefully bent the pen, and when I objected, she just sort of laughed and shrugged. I was furious and stomped around looking for another pen of the right dimensions. I slammed the cabinet shut and it bent. When I came back to try to get the thing done again I saw that the cabinet was not only bent, but now was falling apart.

          Somehow we got it done, and went out for a drive. My partner was driving, and she went through an elaborate safety check, based on the checklist that copilots use to be sure to launch a rocket ship should the pilot be unavailable. I was annoyed because we were in a hurry. We needed to go to Renee X’s house and I was trying to find directions on the computer. The screen looked different, and there was no mouse, so I asked someone how to operate it. A man took the computer and showed me. It was just like the demonstration we had in class earlier.

catching a trolley

          I was at a trolley stop with a man who was my father and two siblings. When the trolley came the father man got on and sat in a seat next to the street. He was a small man, with a short, dark beard and short, dark hair. He acted neutrally to the fact that we didn’t get on. There was a suggestion that it was a sort of test. The trolley left before we could get on. It was a dusky blue color. We ran after it to the next stop, and I managed to barely grab a hold of the grab bar above the back door. That car was packed full of people. I was holding a blanket or something in my left arm, and it was difficult to lift my arm up high enough to reach the bar. It was the feeling of being partially awake and trying to move but not having conscious control of your body. As the trolley moved on, I tried to push my way through the crowd to the front car where the father man was. The middle car was very narrow, but it was empty. I squeezed along between the seats and got through it to the front car. I sat next to the father man, who was and was not surprised to see me.

          He was reading a pamphlet about the museum exhibit which we were going to see. It was about witches and their persecution during times of hardship, or it was about shamanism. He wasn’t sure which stop to get off at to find the museum. We were traveling through a university campus now and I could see the names of the buildings, and we seemed to be in the right subject area. The buildings were arranged by subjects like books in a library. We got off and went into the museum. At the entrance the father man said he couldn’t go in, but I must. He started shaking violently and banging himself on the head – or maybe someone else was, or maybe his head was hitting something as he shook. He said that he meant for me to see the exhibit and it was very important, but he couldn’t go in; that’s why he was shaking.

 

The day before this dream I saw a man carrying something wrapped in a blanket in the crook of his arm like one would hold a baby. I also read an article about research showing that the amount persecution of witches in all cultures peaks when the economy is doing poorly.

 

Pushing my way through the crowd and squeezing through the middle car felt like a sort of birthing. The three segments of the trolley are like periods of my life. I can see it as representing my relationship with my family – being separated from them, and then reconnecting with my father, but  not finding satisfying relationships with my siblings (they are left behind)- but I don’t understand what the message is. OK, that happened. So what about it? I feel like I’m missing something.

wandering in Lhasa

           I was wandering in the streets of Lhasa. It was crowded with people. There were women lining up with sacks of barley, presumably to wait for someone to come buy them. It was the Chinese who were to buy them or do something for them at a special time. Some of the women were wearing pastel-colored burqas, and some were not. There was a craftsman with a table set up on the street. He had a bag full of bells, which he was going to attach to something, but he was disappointed with them, since they wouldn’t work for his purpose or they were defective, and he brushed them off his table in disgust. I watched them roll away, and thought I should pick one up to give to a kid, who would surely appreciate it. I had my eye on one, but was hesitant to pick it up because I was afraid people would think I was greedy, since I was a rich foreigner. I also realized I should just do it, and quit second-guessing and worrying about appearances.

          A tiny boy picked it up, and I stopped to talk to him. I played with him in some way, tinkling the bell. He laughed but was also scornful. He spoke little, but what he did say in English was very fluent. I said that his English was very good, and he said well, it should be, and he scampered off. There was a man just out of view who seemed to be telling the boy to lead me somewhere, so I followed him.

          He led me to a residential area. There were ramshackle houses bordering a lake. Even in my mind I thought of it by the Tibetan word for lake: Tso. It was turquoise. The houses were brown, made of wood, and bordered by a very narrow wooden ledge on which to walk, right above the water. We near enough to a doorway to hear what was going on inside. It was a party. I heard a man say that it wasn’t the kind of party he expected, so he was leaving. We turned around and headed back when we heard that. A man came along behind us, who was the boy’s father. He was quite westernized, wearing jeans and a tee shirt, and speaking fluent English. I said once again that the boy spoke great English and the dad said that he should since his mother is an Injie. We went to their house. We had to climb steep stairs in a dim corridor, and two more tiny children, both girls, were playing on the stairs. I thought the little one was too little to be allowed to play on such steep stairs, but the parents thought the older girl was capable of watching the little one, so I thought it must be fine.

          There were two American women, one the boy’s mother, who were wearing patched jeans. They had been cleaning the house. The father responded to something one of them said by saying ‘I know, I know, you’re saying how filthy the houses are in this old part of town’, but they weren’t. I could see that the women had been living abroad for a long time.

 

Time and Dreamtime

That we have three dimensions of space and one dimension of time is interesting. We might have ended up with a universe with just two dimensions of space, and one of time. This would the world of Flatland, as descried by Edwin Abbot in a book from 1880. Creatures living in Flatland could only move in left-right or up-down directions, having no height. They’d be like ants traveling across  a flat sheet of paper.

Another option is that there is more than one time dimension: time and dreamtime. If time is one-dimensional, then, like an ant trapped on a line, you can only go forward. If time is two-dimensional, you could circle around in the time-dreamtime plane and visit anywhere in time you wanted, like an ant free to roam on a sheet of paper. Normal causality would not exist in such a world.

That certainly isn’t the world we know. But what if the second dimension of time was just too small for us to notice in everyday life? To picture this, think of a soda straw. It has a two-dimensional surface; you can make a straw by cutting a strip of paper and curling it into a tube. To locate a point on the straw, one needs two coordinates: the vertical position along the length of the straw and the angular position around its circumference. Creatures living on the surface of a soda straw would really be inhabitants of a two-dimensional Flatland, but if the circumference of the straw was small enough, it would look to them like Lineland. Curl up that straw tightly enough, and it looks like a line, even though it does have a second dimension – its circumference – which is just too small to measure.

This is what String Theorists mean when they talk about the Universe having seven or eleven dimensions, only some of them are curled up and too small for us to detect. Going back to the ant on the straw, think about what it would mean if the second dimension of the straw was an extra time dimension: dreamtime.

When I dream I imagine that the second dimension of time is unfurling, and I can travel around the straw in ways I can’t when waking. And when I dream and look back at my waking self, I can perform a kind of meta-analysis of my psyche that is often stunningly perspicacious.

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