Here's a whole night of strange dreamlets. It's my only dream record for mid-2001, when I was so busy building the World Dream Bank that for the first time in decades I didn't keep a journal. "Mentor" survived by a fluke: it was so vivid I scrawled the dream on an envelope in pencil, jammed it between two pages of a book, thinking I'd type it up later that day... and forgot. I found it five years later! It was faint and telegraphic, full of abbreviations, so this transcription is rougher than most.

I present it to show that brief written records don't necessarily mean poor recall--or dull dreams. They contradict the prevalent view that dreamnesia is purely biochemical. There are cultural, psychological, and practical reasons people actively forget their dreams, even as they're waking up.

In my case those factors are obvious. Building the Dreambank, I got so busy I lost touch with my dreams (like a real American! I felt so adult!) My recall dropped to zero; was this biochemistry?

Mechanistic dreamnesia theories can't explain how the moment I made an effort--just scribbling on an envelope-- I recalled six dreams in a night! While a couple of these (3 and 4) are probably scenes from one REM period, it's near-certain that these six records represent multiple REM sessions, yet from the handwriting I'm certain that I wrote it all down at once--half asleep in early morning. That means several of these dream-traces survived not just till the next nonREM period, but all night!

So don't tell me dreamnesia is inevitable! The water was there; I'd just ignored the well.

Have you?

THAT DAY

I have an appointment for therapy, but my car doesn't start. Call and say I'll be late. Have the car towed to the mechanic, ride along with my bike in the towtruck's bed. Bike from the garage over to Shelley's office; it's only a mile or so. Five minutes.

Shelley say she sees a pattern in my family: we never get promoted in jobs, because we offend our bosses. Blunt, undiplomatic, if we see injustice we just have to scream about it. Noble, but not lucrative!

She's right, I am unsubtle; but I'm afraid my unemployability (and in America, it takes a certain ability to stay unemployed) is deeper than that. My intuition says no to all the roads to work that I've seen. Either I'm meant to starve, or I have to find some non-job way to make a living. Art? Music? Writing?

Spend the evening working on the World Dream Bank. Like every evening... for months now. Obsessed.

DREAM 1: HEADLESS CORPSE, SHAPESHIFTING MENTOR

A huge stone castle. Looks medieval, but this is the future, not the past! Silent and empty, but I sense watchers as I enter the keep. Explore... and in what seems to be the throne room or main dining hall, find a headless body.

A huge hawk flies in an open window and circles the hall. Lands on a table. Preens, fluffs up, and... keeps growing.

An eagle, a dog, a wolf, a... man? Woman? Sitting on the table. "Hi," says the creature. "I'm your mentor."

Wow! For a long time, I've been looking forward to meeting this master of shapeshifting--but the time and place kept needing to be rescheduled, until I just gave up trying to arrange it. Now fate's brought us together!

I feel shy. All I can say is "Oh. I didn't recognize you." S/he guffaws. "What's the joke?" I ask.

S/he: "You can't IMAGINE how often I hear that!" S/he looks around, takes in the corpse on the throneroom floor. "Though not usually in THIS context."

Oh. Yeah, I guess a shapeshifter would hear that a lot. "Sorry. Stupid of me."

"We'll see, won't we? Listen to this! Your first lesson." And s/he explains a complex issue. Inside a minute, I'm dizzy and straining to grasp the complexity of it--and fail. Just too hard. This has happened several times in recent dreams. Damn. Maybe I'm just a washed-up dreamer.

S/he says "Don't be discouraged. You're doing well. Look at the LAST student." Waves at the headless meat on the stone floor. "Blew HIS mind!" s/he snickers. Then sobers. "No, sorry, just teasing. This isn't a failed shaman. It's a message for you. I'm afraid it means plague and war." S/he's quite matter of fact about it, with the sympathetic tone of an adult who knows a child will be heartbroken over news that grownups would take in stride; for it's just the way of the world.

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• Headless corpse = me, seriously ill and in denial about it. Dream rubs my nose in it. I'm not lazy or shy; only a quiet low-stress life prevents a relapse of the chronic illness that darkened my life for decades.
• Mentor arrives at last = even in my grim circumstances, there's hope. But is this mentor internal or external?

• Mentor: since then, I've found some peers--serious dreamworkers and shamans I can swap tales with--but no mentor. On the other hand, two days before, I'd met Ammaji, that Indian saint who's hugged 14 zillion people. I know three followers of Amma, and when I mentioned my dream to them, they said "Oh, Amma often pops up in dreams after she's hugged you. Her hugs unstick things, and then she can visit and guide you." Well, OK, this could be Amma--or my conception of her. But she hasn't reappeared recognizably in the years since, so I haven't bought a bumper sticker saying "What Would Amma Do?" My research-geek side (whose bumper sticker says "What would William of Ockham do?") sees the dream as a strong reaction to a mere hug, but finds shapeshifting telepathic saints a pretty convoluted explanation--after all, I meet lots of shapeshifters in dreams! Though it's true no others have offered to be mentors.
• Her predictions turned out to be quite true:
  1. War? Look at the date. Summer of 2001! Remember peace? Remember how pundits were announcing the end of war, and ideology, and history itself, how all would be peace and prosperity? Three months later the towers burned. Nightmares of medieval times, of death and plague and war, are common now; but back in the complacent summer of 2001, such dreams were rarer.
  2. Plague? The world may have averted an epidemic so far, but not me: I traveled too much, and caught a mystery bug rather like mononucleiosis but persistent, severely limiting my life for the next few years. The symptoms bloomed after the dream, but I may have already been infected. Diagnostic or predictive dream? Take your pick.

DREAM 2: THE DRAGON'S TEETH

I'm in a little concrete bunker on a ledge above the sea, on one of the Dragon's Teeth--green cliff-walled islets in a reefy tropical sea. Lush jungle, ferns, little waterfalls down the cliffs. Hikers on the trails. But the paths are dangerously narrow, overhung, rail-less, eroded and slippery in the wet. Stray off the path and you fall to your death!

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• The Dragon's Teeth are craggy jungle islets in David Brin's ambitopia Glory Season. The matriarchal government claims they were the site of a male-supremacist rebellion. Archeology reveals that's a lie; it was a space program!
• So the dream warns my mom's feminist rhetoric distorts my history--her voice inside condemns honest efforts to explore...
• Stay on the path, straying means death = Stick with art/writing/music? Getting a job isn't just tedious but dangerous--too much stress? Diversion of energy? Straying into territory forbidden by family edict? Whatever it is, the price is too high right now.
• ACTION: don't look for work. In fact, be very cautious about any changes for now.

DREAM 3: SEX WITH THE ART OF WAR: A SECOND MENTOR

My friend Yirko talks in the next room with two sisters--twins in fact. Or are they just two of a larger set of clones? Now they pass by the open door--wow, they're hot! No surprise; I knew they work as models.

I'd like to go out and join them but I can't--I'm all tied up. Literally: I'm hooked up to electrodes, naked on the couch, being sexually stimulated by a digital smartbook! It's using electrical readings from my cock for feedback and sending impulses back... It's not techno-masturbation, but a sort of sexual therapy or retraining.

You'd expect the book to be either psychology or smut, but it's neither: "The Art of War", Sun-tzu's classic on strategy! So that makes this... strategic masturbation?

I'm not sure whose strategy. Is this strange sexual situation MY initiative... or the BOOK'S? It's smart enough to decide on its own to do this. Looks creepy, a bit vampiric, or like I'm a cow attached to a milking machine. But I think it means well--some weird form of training.

And WHATEVER's going on here, it'll take a while before I can disengage the electrodes--or should.

NOTES

• Smartbook = another form of my mentor? In Dream 1, a traditional shamanic form--a shapeshifter. Here it's a futuristic AI--but just as in dream 1, I struggle with weird input that restricts my mobility for now.
• Yirko, twins/clones, fashion = Yirko is a fashion freak but doesn't know any clones. Do they mean making a good social impression, even if means conforming, fitting in, being like the herd? Still, my feelings were clear. Even if it's conformist out there, I wanted to be out dating, not alone in a sleep lab.
• Book on strategy this dream's one move in a long war with my family's brainwashing. They taught me never to act for my own advantage; and that's Sun-tzu's focus! To steer toward your goal without catering to others' judgments. Socializing or solitude, giving or taking, masturbation or flirting--all can be part of a strategy toward a goal, or even be your goal; but you have a right to choose, not be jerked around by others. Or by your own unexamined urges.
• Parallel dreams! Dream 1: shamanic teacher shows up and correctly warns of trouble soon--don't overwork. Dream 2: Stay alert and on the path; don't get a job. Dream 3, I'm all tied up trying to reprogram sexuality and social strategies; don't date or socialize!

DREAM 4: CHARMING SAN MATEO

I'm at a film festival in San Mateo, the suburb where I grew up, 40 km south of San Francisco. Behind me, in the movie-theater audience, a woman calls San Mateo "a charming town." Now the twin models from the previous dream get up and introduce tonight's film...

NOTE

• Charming town: conformist, sterile, lonely, full of little thugs... yeah, San Mateo was full of charm for me.

DREAM 5: DAD TOSSED MY ART SUPPLIES

A girl asks me about some books and cards and art supplies. I'd give them to her, but my dad tossed them out--without even asking me!

• Just a little reminder, as I sift through the damage my mom caused me, that although my dad sometimes encouraged my art, he too left a problematic legacy of self-sabotage. He grew up poor in the Depression; he had a sharp eye for pretentiousness and waste, but his make-it-do philosophy had its dark side--I compulsively give things away, even art tools I need. I should get by with three tubes of paint, one brush, a stick and a rock. Here I can't even give the stuff away; he's already done it for me. No wonder I need "The Art of War"! To learn reasonable self-interest, reasonable caution.

DREAM 6: CYTHEREAN TREES

I'm on Venus, after terraforming. Treeish things on ridges. A local denies that they're alive, but it's obvious they are... why are we even debating this? The only question is whether they're not just alive but sentient.

2006 NOTE

• This last, brief dream was the very first prompting from my dreams to figure out a way to terraform Venus into a habitable world. That seed grew for three years into the novel-sized webmaze Venus Unveiled. And yes, the only workable climate model I could design for Venus turned out hot and rainy over much of the surface--huge rainforests. With sentient trees.

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