Searching Buddha

The scene is Hogwarts and I am Harry Potter.

The school is in an uproar. It's the middle of the Blitz and planes are coming that are going to bomb the school. Air raid sirens are going off. Everyone is supposed to run to the airfields, where several planes, which are new technology, are waiting to airlift the students someplace safe.

I run to the first airfield, where I see the planes. Three are in great shape, but one is kind of rickety. I'm getting ready to get on one of the good ones with my class, but I realize that my sister Hermione is not there. I run away, looking for her.

When I finally find her and get back to where all the students are, the students are being divided. I go to a teacher and beg her to be sent on the same plane as my sister. She nods. I grab Hermione by the hand and we race off to another airfield, where the rickety plane is. We're the last to get on, but before we go, I see a bathroom and ask if I can go before getting on the plane. The teacher lets me, so I run in that direction.

Then phone then rings, waking me up.

The Renaissance is a particularly interesting time period for me, because I spent my youth working at a Renaissance festival. Even though that was a fake attempt at what Renaissance life is like, the period seems so much more alive for me now as a result of it. I close my eyes and I think about the mini-Globe theater we had and our ten minute Shakespeare plays, the roaming fish monger, jesters, musicians, our Henry VIII, the knights and the jousting, the period costumes (and mine was authentic!), just everything.

I really, really enjoyed the class on Renaissance dreaming and I thought the insights on the politics and literary culture of the time period added a good dimension to our readings. The fascination with mixed forms (hybrids, hermaphrodites, amazons, gender-bending, etc.) was new to me and I think may inform my essay choice. The pagan element of Midsummer was familiar, but I'd always wondered how much of the prohibition lifting was taken seriously in an academic context, but it seems like it was pretty serious still.

Facinating stuff. I could just lose myself in it, which probably means that it would be a good direction to move in for the honors essay.

This was not the first time that I took a look at the Dream of the Rood, though we were looking at it in a literary context and not from the aspect of dreams.

I found myself during class becoming riveted on the dream-vision overlap that we were discussing, particularly as relates to Christian mysticism. I began to think about some the great visionaries that have influenced history, such as Joan of Arc. She was a visionary, but also thought to have been misled, but no matter what, she influenced history to a tremendous degree. One possible paper topic would be to look at her visions from a dream analyst perspective and also from the medieval view of dreaming. Perhaps that would provide some insight as to the tragic course of her life and as to how a 14 year old girl managed to lead armies?

It's a thought, but perhaps an overdone one, since her visions are so famous. I am having a terrible time choosing a time period to focus on for the essay, although I know I want to do something historic.

I'm looking for my SO, who is busy working. I finally find him and we make arrangements to meet up later. He's supposed to call me and let me know when and where to find him.

Scene change. They're shooting a movie in the next room and I have been dragged into it as an extra. I don't want to be in the movie, but they just need someone to sit at a table with a bunch of other people, so I reluctantly say okay.

We're there as they continue developing the script and making it more and more elaborate. It's something about a dragon and a city being destroyed. There's a lot of red in the imagery.

Finally, I fed up and go talk to the director about when I would get to leave - I did have an appointment to get to, after all. The director stresses how important my role is and shows me where I have a small speech that's really important. "A speech?" I say. "I didn't know I had a speech." But I do, he tells me, and it needs to be delivered in a Boston accent, so no one could do it but me.

"But I can't do a Boston accent," I tell him. "I don't want to be a part of this anymore."

I reiterate my position a few times, trying to make him understand, but then I just leave, because I have a date, after all.

My best friend from high school and I are visiting somewhere (it looks like England, but I don't have a sense that it is England) and we are with a condensed figure that is partially my kid brother and partially the younger brother of my best friend in elementary school. In the dream, however, I know it's her younger brother, although she doesn't really have one.

We're walking around this town and we get to the edge of it. We come to a store where they're selling beds that have huge enclosures around them that make them into mini rooms. We go into the store and check them out, but they're expensive, so we start to leave, but the condensed little brother starts doing flips and swinging around in the store. I yell at him and we finally go outside, where are a couple of the bed-rooms sitting together.

We walk around the corner and we're outside on a bluff. My friend and her little brother continue up the path, but I slip down the bluff until I'm on another bluff looking down at the beach. I wiggle onto my belly and look down onto a flock of penguins! (But they're much bigger than real penguins). They smell me and they dig into the sand until you can only see a little bit of their backs, but it makes a pretty geometrical pattern.

A man comes up to me and he's clearly a tourist because he has a nice Canon DSLR camera and is wearing shorts and a t-shirt with socks and sandals.

He says, "Lady, you sure do know how to put yourself downwind of animals!" and leaves in disgust.

I roll my eyes at him and go back to looking at the penguins. Eventually a doescent comes along and she asks me to leave, but I end up dropping my red backpack (which in real life is my ex-boyfriend's backpack) down where the penguins are. She goes down and gets it for me and I thank her and join up with my friend and the little brother. I wake up then...

A page from my favorite comic series The Sandman. A kitten goes to hear a cat speak of a dream in which she met with the Dream Lord, who is represented as a cat in this particular episode, because the dreamers are cats.

"But revelation? That is the province of dream."

Art by: Kelley Jones and Malcolm Jones III

I really enjoyed Waking Life, although I was confused at the beginning as to when the plot was going to be begin. Once there was some consciousness on the part of the dreamer, I really fell into the movie.

Mostly I enjoyed it because it was like going to a bunch of different classes and having snippets of this theory or that theory that I don't remember well brought up again. Still, I found myself describing the "Let's have a holy moment" scene to a friend the next day.

The rotoscoping was such an effective technique - the wavery lines left me, as a viewer, feeling as disoriented as the main character.

I can't say I've achieved lucid dreaming, but I can say that I've actually remembered my dreams every night this week, which is very unusual for me.

It's the weekend, but I'm at work doing a maintenance in the server room. (I'm a network administrator and am singularly responsible for the entire server room, even in real life.) As I'm working on something criticial, though I don't remember what it is, the power in the building goes out. I can hear that sickening *whoosh* that means that all of the machines have turned off. (Apparently the UPS backup didn't kick in, but I didn't think about this in the dream.) Although it's the weekend, people I work with keep coming in to demand to know when I'm going to fix it, even though there's nothing that I can do about the power.

I notice that one tape drive still has power, so I start trying to think if I can get the SAN back up and working by using the power plug for the tape drive, but when I look, I see that the tape drive is plugged into a 220 volt twist-lock plug, which is not compatible with the SAN's power source.

Scene change. I'm now on a tropical island and I'm trying to get together with my SO to go to the movies, but he can't make it or won't come (it's not clear). So I go to the movies by myself, but I take my knitting. I'm working on what looks to be ribbon knitting, but the finished product is a cloth weave scarf (not knitted) that I bought in the airport in Guayaquil. I settle down to the movie, which there are thousands of people watching with me, and I knit through the movie. (I don't have any recollection of the subject of the movie). When it's over and the lights come up, I gather up my knitting, but a little boys stops and shows his mother. "Look Momma, look how beautiful that is!" I am pleased and proud of having accomplished something worthwhile.

As with most people, I'll be traveling home today, which involves a many hour long car ride to Virginia. I'll be staying at a friend's house.

Last night, I dreamt that we were at the end of the drive, but just as we were about to arrive at my friend's house, we took another turn and drove down a road that I know in Maryland, which is the state I actually grew up in. We drive down the road and end up at another friend's house (in real life, she just moved back to Maryland). We stay the night there and meet her husband. In the morning, I realize that I was supposed to show up at my other friend's house and that he had planned a dinner for me of roasted burgers (which he has), but I stood him up! Horrified, I call him and explain what happened, but I have no memory of his response.

Scene switch - we are in the car, with a bunch of my friends that have nothing to do with the circles of either of the two previously mentioned friends. I want to go to my friend who I am supposed to be staying with, but we're on our way to the National Zoo instead. We don't get there before my alarm goes off, but there's a sense of driving for a very long time.

It somehow doesn't seem fair that I've driven all night and will drive all day too!

Last night, my friend and I were out shopping. We're checking out the sales racks and looking at the fancy dresses. I try a few on, but I know that I'm not going to buy anything. As we're doing this, a few people from work wander by and catch me in various dresses, which is a bit strange.

My friend receives a call that her husband has died, so we leave the store and wander home, though not with any urgency. He's stepped on a jellyfish, which poisoned him. We get back to my friend's house, but it's on the beach now. We come in the back entrance, which is on the beach, but another friend is there (in spirit - I never see him) and he won't let us see the body. He tells us it's too disturbing, because of the poison. There was bloating and it's just ugly, but the coffin is upstairs. My friend says she doesn't care and she doesn't want to see it anyway and she and I go for a walk on the beach. We see a jellyfish...