The Horse and the Rider

This dream happened about a month ago so I will back date it to that time.  It occurs to me now that it may related to the dream that came after it, the one about Superman being prone and unconscious, so I want this dream to show in front of that one in it's proper order (hence the backdating).

I am out galavanting around doing this and that, I know not what, when someone reminds that I have been neglecting my horse which I left back there and that I have to go back and take care of it.  Oh yeah, now I remember!  So I rush back to the city where he is in and find him on a piece of grass in a parking lot in a strip mall.  He is standing there placidly but I remember that he (she?) is pregnant and should be due any time.  I need to help him prepare.   He stands relaxed as if nothing is happening but I know the birth is taking place.  He is giving birth but now suddenly I am also giving birth, something opens up inside me, I kind of spiritual vortex and hole and I can feel something rushing out of me.  It happens very suddenly, such a very strange feeling, not like a physical birth at all.

Then I am standing there looking at a giant 2 foot tall 5 foot wide pile of excrement and blood laying on the grass.  It is disgusting and I know it is the side effect of giving birth.  I am embarrassed by it and quickly grab a garbage bag and somehow quickly cover/scoop it into the bag very easily.  Now it is cleaned and I can relax but then I remember the baby!  I turn to the horse but it stands there just the same as if nothing had happened.  Beside it is the calf laying curled and quiet on the grass.  At first, I am sad because I think the calf is still and dead!  But then I look more carefully and realize although it does not move, inside it is a type of hidden movement, something that is hard to see but is stirring and flickering and pawing and will continue to stir more and more and until the calf too will eventually start to move on the outside as well as on the inside.  But for now it's just a shadow of movement and a hidden stirring.  I am relieved by this and realize this is how it is supposed to be.  In the future, the calf will move when it is time. 

Yokubou

I was at some kind of carnival or big event with my brother, but somehow we had gotten separated.  In my arms I carried my big white cat named "Yokubou."  In my mind, he was a cat but he was very big and in some ways rather dog like.  Sometimes I let him down to walk around a bit but then would gather him up again.  If he got out of my sight, I would become nervous and look for him and call him, "Yokubou! Yokubou!"  This happened several times but I thought to myself at least he was well mannered and had not caused any trouble.  Whereas around me I could see dogs running free and tearing up the place, knocking things over and causing disruption, because their owners were not looking out for them properly.

Eventually, I began to look for my brother and eventually found him in one of the rooms.  We walked together for a while and then he met someone he knew.  The other person asked who I was and I told him jokingly that the one I was with was FORCED to play the role of my brother.  I could tell my brother thought this joke was quite funny on many levels.

Later I was by myself again with Yokubou late at night on the street where I saw a man threatening to punch another man in the face for some perceived little slight.  I told the threatening man if he was gong to do that, I was going to call 911, and I fumbled for my phone but became confused on where I had put it.

Then there was a brief break and I was in another street nearby and those 2 men and others were coming out of a bar.  They were all very friendly and at ease now and I greeted them with surprise because their attitude had become so different.

Between us on the street I saw a huge 5 foot wide ornate metal man hole cover.  The manhole cover was somehow attracting metal and other items towards it, as if it had some kind of magnetic power.  We would push items away from the cover and watch as the items moved back toward it again.  We thought this was very interesting and I wondered if it was some kind of secret government project.  We all decided to go down and investigate because it was so interesting.

Under the cover, there were complex surreal stairs and passages and crannies, as if done by a collaboration between Dr. Seuss and Escher.  We went down quite a ways and then the others decided to sit at a table and take a break.  At that time I realized I didn't know where Yokubou was and I became very nervous.  First I ran forward in the passages shouting, "Yokubou!  Yokubou!" I thought maybe he had gotten scared and ran ahead, but I did not find him.  Then I circled back past the guys at the table and then ran backwards shouting, "Yokubou!  Yokubou!!"  I thought maybe he had gotten scared and ran backwards.  I called his name over and over. 

Finally I found him and held him close to my chest with relief.  I returned to the guys and told them since I found him, all was OK.  But then I started worrying about Yokubou and wondered if we should go back for Yokubou's safety.  I was thinking I would let the others decide.  Then I woke up.

Online, I found that "Yokubou" is Japanese for "Desire/Lust."

Freaky Friday

Somehow, my consciousness had gotten into the body of a person I used to know when I was in high school.  His name was Lang, except now my mind was in his body instead of his.  I was tall now and I don't know if it was him or that I was not used to a tall man's body, but I was clumsy.   I tried to not move around too fast and I kept quiet because although I had tried to explain the situation to others, I figured they probably thought I was crazy or was just trying to fool them.  Since he was not even from my culture, I did not know how to act like him either, I couldn't even speak his language.  Walking along the path at school with Lang's friends, many of which I also knew when I was myself, I wondered how long this situation would last. 

Later at Lang's home, I was having even more trouble.  A family has its own pace.  Members instinctively know how to fit in and what to do.  The pace here was totally different than where I had grown up.  An old auntie was making fun of how I didn't apparently know how to use the dry erase board, but the pen had gone dry and was not marking sufficiently, how was that my fault I wondered?  I was irritated with her but I didn't say anything.  I had become a very quiet and depressed person.  I didn't know any of the people around me.  Although I had known many of Lang's friends as myself, their relationship with him was different and now I felt cut off from them. 

Thinking about it further, I realized sexually, I was still attracted to men even though I was a man now.  That would mean as a man, I would be a gay man, an added problem for fitting into society, and I didn't think Lang's family would handle it well either.  Looking around, the chairs seemed so small now and the room so closed in, I was a big man now and in comparison, everything seemed so much smaller.  I realized I would have to move out soon and live on my own.  I wasn't going to be able to fit in here.  It felt almost claustrophobic.

Someone came over to visit, he was an older African American, which confused me a bit because Lang's family was Asian.  The man teased me that I must have stayed up all night playing around if I was only now just waking up.  I said, "Why, what time is it?" and he said, "3:30PM."

I was shocked it could be so late!  So much so that I didn't believe him.  I roamed around the house looking for clocks and they verified what he said.  What did we do last night?  I couldn't remember.  But I realized I would be late getting products shipped by 5PM for work.  Today's buyers would have to wait until tomorrow for their items if I didn't hurry, but how to get to work?  Somehow I had gone from issues of a high schooler to work issues of the current time frame.  Where was I exactly?  I tried to think about work but couldn't even remember my vendors.  What if I couldn't source my product, how would I make my living?  I was getting more confused and anxious by the second.   I worked hard to convince myself it would work out somehow, just as it always does in the end. 

Then I woke up in my bed.  Still worried about time, I checked my clock but it was still early in the morning.  I was so relieved! 

The Real World

I woke up and saw rain on the window.  It was raining hard. I got up and looked out.  Behind the smudged window was a wide dirt road, wide enough for a 3 lane highway.  How did I get here?  The last thing I remembered was going to sleep in my bed, now I am here on this dirt road?  Cool!  It must be a lucid dream but yet it felt so real!  I was parked on the side of the road in this car I had been sleeping in.  I wondered if I was now stuck in the mud with all this rain.  I got out of the car to look around.  To the left, the road forked and there was another road about half the size of the main road.  Both roads were flat behind me but then suddenly angled steeply upward in front.  I wondered if the rain and mud would make that steep angle troublesome.  Right where the main road began to ascend, there was a big puddle of water and several cars splashed through it on their way down.  None of them got stuck.  I saw no plants or animals around, where was I?  I took a closer look at the vehicles driving by and realized they all looked old style, like Model T Fords and those kinds of very old vehicles.  I decided to get back into my car and get my keys out and lock it so I could look around, but as I did that, I could feel my consciousness changing. I was pulled back and woke up.

I was in a room.  In front of me was a tall lanky young African American man in casual clothes lounging on a couch joking with me.  His hair was starting to grow out, perhaps in a dreadlock style.  Behind the couch was a large smudged window.  I was standing in the room on an old musty brown carpet.  My head felt weird. I probed my head with my hands and it was covered with thick wooly feeling hair.  The texture felt strange and the feeling was like the hair was clinging to my head.  I wondered if I was African American too.  What was I doing here?  Then I woke up.

In front of me was a rain smudged window.  I heard a loud clicking noise.   A bird was repeatedly flying up and slamming it's claws against the window.  Ah yeah, the bird, it does that sometimes.  I jumped up, grabbed a piece of paper and waved it at the bird, chasing it off.  I was now on my feet, but disoriented.  But this was the real world this time.  I think...       

The Fiber Gods

I and three others were on a mission, similar to Star Trek, to explore this new world.  We had come down and were walking along a dirt road with a simple fence of old rickety looking black strung wire on the right.   A swampy lake lay just beyond the boundaries of the fence with the fence legs in water at many places. All around, lush leafy plants obscured vision, but for some reason did not grow at all in the dirt road, even though it looked unmaintained.  We took many measurements and pondered about the fence and what was beyond, but were not brave enough to venture beyond the road.

After about 5 hours, we decided to return.  All of us were nervous as usual when on a strange planet.  We had already been there for about 5 hours when I realized the lighting hadn't changed at all the entire time, an almost twilight kind of light as if the sun would soon set, but the high haze overcast skies would not let us see the sun or where it was at.  We could not determine the direction of the light source and pondered about the orbit and sun location.  One of my fellow travelers considered that if there were unusual day night patterns here, the computer back on the ship should surely have made a note of it in the briefing, but that had not happened.  He pondered for some time about the many areas of the briefing where such information should have come up but didn't. 

Another reason to always be on guard on strange planets!   Unexpected things often happened in such places and this place would soon prove itself not an exception.  On our way back, one of us taking samples along the lake edge, we could suddenly feel a rumbling and a strange kind of building of pressure in the ground.  We all stopped and waited and suddenly out of the lake in many places, plumes of super pressurized water shot straight up each pushing high into the air a clump of giant jagged boulders each several times larger than a man. 

Somehow, I ended up fallen down sitting on my butt and all of us had already been slightly scattered.  It was scary but the plumes we were all confined to the lake and we were basically uninjured.  But I was having trouble getting back up.  I realized my long spindly legs felt weak and a heavy pack on my back was weighing my down.  As I sat there trying to gather strength, two large grey beasts larger than elephants emerged from a small amount of water on the left unfenced side of the road.  The creatures looked like triceratops dinosaurs but with multiple sections of hard grey armor curved back over the head and shoulder region and no horns.  One was larger than the other one and they moved together as a pair.  

I knew I could not escape so I decided to remain perfectly still.  Their small rheumy eyes indicated to me likely bad vision and I hoped that lack of movement would lessen the chances of an aggressive response.  Luckily the creatures seemed oblivious by my presence and turned and moved calmly up the road even past some of my coworkers who were also holding still along the sides of the road.

Crisis past, we gathered again and realized we ourselves had actually created the water explosions.  We realized the fence was designed to block accidental dropping of heavy items into the lake but one of my coworkers had unknowingly disturbed the ground enough on that side to trigger the event.  Nerves running higher, we were eager to return.  I soon found myself lunging along a narrow path pushed through tropical plants and grasses.  My gait was a strange kind of sideways angled leaping and landing, as if my legs were half frog, long thing with large feet.  With the huge pack on my thin body, I could only run this way but it was effective.  The others followed behind me and for whatever reason, I have no recollection of having looked directly at the others at any time or what they looked like.   

However, we were surprised on our way back to run into buildings and civilization.  The large rectangle buildings of what looked like cement or stone were dwellings.  Even though eager to get back, we didn't want to pass up this opportunity, I in particular.  We talked with one of the residents and she said her relative would be willing to allow us to access to one of the dwellings.  My coworkers were hesitant but I decided it would be worth the risk and agreed to it.

We entered through andordinary rectangle door and were surprised by the setup.  The first room of the home was ordinary airspace, a nice room but rather dark inside with sparse furnishings.  But all the rooms beyond that were some kind of virtual reality rooms.  A slight shimmer in the air marked the boundaries between real and virtual.  Intrigued, I and one other walked through the virtual rooms.  It all felt completely real except for the slight shimmer and an extra crisp look to the edges of everything, as if one's vision had improved.  Unlike the entry room these rooms were also well lit with lots of grey colors predominating.  Furniture and fashion matched across the virtual rooms.  I spent some time admiring a long low coffee table type piece that looked like many intricate strips of different stained wood had been shaped and then put together. I repeatedly ran my hands over the top of it, feeling the perfect realness of the texture and admiring the realism of the satin shine finish work of the wood.  It seemed perfectly real.

As I walked through the virtual rooms, I was struck by how small they seemed, usually not more than about 13 feet in length or smaller and there were only a few of them, a kitchen area and several others.  I also advised the captain of our group that he should wait in the entry room and allow us other other two to explore the virtual rooms first and then when we were done, we would wait in the entry room and the other two could explore.  The captain's safety was the most important after all.  But I noticed after a while that he had gone off to explore anyway.  Figuring the danger was minimal anyway, I shrugged it off.

After a while I found myself sitting down for a quick interview with the head of the dwelling.  I saw him as a maybe 60 year old Caucasian man with hawkish features and longish slicked back silver hair wearing a well fitted silver jacket/suit ensemble.  Sitting in a chair, he seemed friendly and amiable and I felt relaxed.  We chatted and I began to ask questions.

I asked him who had created all this and he said it was the Five Fiber Gods.  He said he had never met them and it could be that they didn't even exist but that is what they say.  Then he amended that there used to be only 4 Fiber Gods but just recently a fifth one had been added.  I was surprised to hear of the apparent recent alteration to what I had at first assumed was long standing legend only.

So I asked him how does one become a Fiber God and here the difficulties of cross cultural communication became evident as I struggled to understand as best I could.  His style of communication seemed to jump from one idea to the next and that tendency was increased now.  The ideas he communicated were that it had something to do with the brain, that once you were dead that you had no more need of your body so it was just an empty vessel, something about computers or some such, and that he had more chance of eventually meeting the Fiber Gods than anyone else here, an idea he was mildly proud of.   The concepts were fascinating and I struggled to glean what I could.

And then I woke up!  (arg)