apparitions, lanterns, bumblebees

m had a dream last night that entailed a very specific part of san francisco. the funny thing is, this particular part of SF doesn't happen to exist.
there is this phenomenon every so often...when your (or to say the least, m's) mind maps some incongruous terrain during a dream (suppose we dub them - dreamscapes). it functions just like a lazily-drifting childhood memory...you know this place, somehow, this eerie place that seems so full and rich even though the walls are surely as hollow as your initial impressions of them. that, is an interesting point all its own; that a perception in a dream is not so much an orange-peel zesting scrape like impressions of real objects are...the visualizations in dreams are all that exists of that thing. if you are focusing on something, everything else must surely fade away until you whirl around to it once again. luckily our minds are equipped with processors supreme enough to filter all that data and make it cohesive in that precise moment, else the curtain would surely be lifted, the fog swept away.

back to the knowledge of the place. it's quite fascinating that mattress can find a dreamscape again; that dreams can be repeated ad infinitum depending upon the mind that is unspooling them. recurring dreams were dizzying in childhood; there was obviously some struggle, some lesson to be dealt before the visions would slowly fade away and be forgotten. a fistfight, an exam in school, an abysmally black deep-end of a pool with tentacled creatures of varying dispositions. now, though, it seems like there is less and less need for these self-taught lessons, these shock-therapy sessions. the insecurities lessen, or at least morph, on into later life. still, though, matches finds himself in these nietzschean recurrences when he slips from the world for a brick of hours. scenes replay themselves, but sometimes not necessarily in the initial patterns that they had laid out. on rare occasions, they manage to piece together trails and merge into one another. there is, it would seem, some sort of subconscious cartography being scrawled under the surface. and somehow, it manages to maintain an identity alltogether separate from the 'real' world. certainly, there are intersections in the realm of people or ideas or larger positioning schemes (SF, for example), but almost exclusively these snowglobular isolations hold their own barriers against outside infringement.

on this night, the barriers held but the contents shuffled themselves into new configurations. the map was the same; there were familiar locations and, oddly enough, an entire set of memories that were exclusive to the world of dreams. it is as if half of m's brain flickers off, and the agents of night light ringed-candlesticks in the more mysterious corridors of the estate. the cobwebbed library. the celestially-cryptic south wing. the moonlit garden with the overgrown shrubbery-sculptures (what gardener could be expected to regulate as meticulously through the passage of night). diprosopus (five bucks if you already knew that word) matches, turning new eyes towards ghostly figures.

but wait, there is evidence to support a theory. antimatter's mind catalogues these moments together; they are jarred adjacent to one another like so many curiosities and oddities in a stale back room. every once in awhile he trips into this place while he is still awake; daydreaming down the stairs with too much momentum, ka-thunk, whump, crumpled upon the floor in his own vertigo. he has related a few times (or tried, with little receptiveness and not a wisp of recognition) this curious mind-place, this papery honeycomb of rough charcoal dream impressions. imagine yourself a tiny, buzzing bee; you are trapped in a diamond-shaped hollow somewhere within your hive. each portion of the honeycomb is filled with its own sounds, smells, and pictures that are somehow alive and swirling around you. they are faint, until you move around a smidgen and start pushing on a wall. the wall intensifies the colors, the smells, the sounds; pushing it is pumping the volumes of all these things louder and louder. then you feel the wall giving; then the wall rips; then you are the same honeybee, tumbing facefirst into an entirely separate world that is just as cramped and just as quirky as the last. the two do not mix, there is no diffusion or pressure-balancing....you have achieved two different nooks in the honeycomb, and you can flutter freely between the two.

for some reason, m finds himself in this space with his dreams on rare occasion. when he recalls one vividly; when he can fasten his grip on even one small facet (this is while awake, requiring a brilliantly lucid focus and simultaneous haziness), he can try his hardest to remember, he can push and push against the boundary of what he recalls and, if he pushes hard enough, if he remembers the next step, the barrier of the dream shatters and he is propelled into an entirely separate experience...a different dream, completely removed and yet utterly on fire. he supposes that his otherworld experiences are all grouped together; all bound by some linearity or threaded with some string that he has not yet found a good hold on. but that shall not deter him from trying~

he would go into the dream in all its specifics, but what really would be the point by now? he has juiced the thought about all that he is willing to for the moment.
dream well, you select few.