Xanga Post 5: Sleep Cycle of Change

When you think about how much we can remember, and when you think of the countless fine-tuned emotions we have, and all the different things with which we associate them..... it's pretty amazing, what the average person is capable of retaining and connecting.

I associate the smell of summer heat with the taste of the water in the little pool that we had in my old backyard that I would run to, and how I didn't like to step on the grass when my feet were still wet.

I associate oak trees with pollen, and I associate pollen with allergies that made me nervous, and how I sometimes wouldn't be able to open my eyes that well when I was little.

I associate a certain polka-dotted blanket with the overwhelming happiness that I get when a baby laughs and wants to play hide and seek with me.

And I associate the concept of change over time with this dream, which has stuck with me for the past 5 years and made me wonder what I look like to friends new and old, and if this girl is the same as that girl in the past.

3.28.2005 __monday____
I had such a sad dream last night.
It's pretty long and there's a whole lot of detail that I have to include if I tell the whole thing.. Which you probably aren't interested in, anyway.
So the summary is that I saw everyone from my past who was ever in my class in S.C.I.S. from kindergarten to 8th grade. I saw the people who were always in my class. I saw people who were in my class for a few years or one year. I even saw a girl who was in my class for only a month. I saw them all gathered in one place. They were all changed, all different from the ones that I knew. I was the only one who didn't change.
In the end, I walked away from them and decided I had to move on and change myself.

There is an entry in my written journal that describes everything. Some of these people, I've noticed, somewhat resemble the people I saw in my dream. Others are way off. And yet others....I haven't seen.

I had no image of myself. Maybe that's why I always expect to see someone different in the mirror. I'm waiting for change. I'm expecting it. I'm calculating it.
But have I actually changed, or am I fundamentally the same girl that I think I was back then?
(I say "girl," but I'm hardly that anymore.)

I thought about typing it up in here, but I don't know if I want to. At least, not just yet. When I get around to typing up my written entries, maybe I'll have changed my mind by then.
As I said a little over 5 years ago, it's really long, and I feel like it would only mean something to me.

Sometimes I'm convinced that I think more deeply and seriously when I'm asleep. Even if the dreams themselves seem nonsensical at first, there is always at least a hint of an idea that I see. Like jumbled up words that make you think you know what it is that's supposed to be communicated.

It's just that in some sleep cycles, those hints are more developed and worked out than others.

Xanga Post 4: Running on Axons

When I go over entries that I've written before, and I mention dreams, they tend to be somewhat vivid. It's actually sort of a rare thing for me if I remember dreams with so much detail, as if it was real life. When I focus on recalling a dream in the morning, I try to concentrate on how/what I felt when I woke up, or what I remember seeing or hearing last. From then on, if I'm lucky and I remember my whole dream, that dream's trigger is the same trigger that helped me remember it in that first morning.

But the exceptionally detailed and vivid recollections of dreams are what drive me to write them down as soon as I wake up and remember the scenes in the right order that I dreamt them (it's funny that there's still a kind of order in how dreams are laid out -- there's still a sense of time, even though time doesn't matter when you live in your head).

There was no one thing that led me to remember this dream. In fact, there were several.

A brick wall. Two red fans. A man in a robe, with two black fans. A stage. More brick walls oriented to create a labyrinth. And a young man.

3.25.2005 __friday____
I found the place that I dreamt about two years ago. I wrote down the dream after I dreamt it, and I found out yesterday that it's actually the Northstar Bar, where the concert was! At least, I think it is. It's oddly very similar to it... o_O Freaked out, or kind of fascinated..? I don't know, myself. I've never even been there before yesterday. (I really felt like climbing the wall and seeing if I could get through that vent) Oh my gosh.. And I saw someone else that looked like a guy in the dream, and he went to the concert, too.. And now I'm never going to see him again.. Probably. Aah!

Of course, I can't honestly say that's what it was. But there's a 98% chance that.....my mind made it up, and the Northstar Bar seemed to be an uncanny resemblance at the time (but if I went there today, I'd probably still insist upon the two things being one and the same -- it's all just wishful thinking, with me).

In more detail (but still summarized)...
I had a dream that was like most of my dreams around this time -- it started with me climbing over my bedroom wall. I would fall asleep and "open my eyes" in my dream, still feeling like I was awake. I'd be facing up, staring straight ahead. But what I thought was the ceiling was quickly identified as the sky, when a boy's hand would reach over the wall and wait for me. I would climb up on my bed and hoist myself over the wall with his support, and we would climb into a vent and crawl into a dream.

In this particular one, we ended up finding our way to a dark room with walls of typical red bricks, old mortar chipping away. I went over to a far wall and noticed that there were footholds that I could use to climb up (there was a lot of climbing and exploring that occurred, back then).
Again, there was no ceiling -- just some artificial-looking sky that confused the brain until one saw a person standing on top of the wall.
When I got to the wall, I stood up and saw that there was more than what I could see from down below. The boy stayed on the floor, looking up at me nervously (I named him Alex in one dream, either before or after this one, because I'm almost sure that's what he told me his name was) -- I told him there were pathways. He knew what I was talking about, but he didn't budge.
I looked at a sudden wall behind me and saw that there were two red fans, whose radii were equal to at least 2/3 the length of my outstretched arm. I picked them up and understood them to be weapons. The edges of the cloth shone brilliantly in some light behind me. They were flexible blades that could slice so thinly that you couldn't find the line of its cut unless you studied it closely.

I looked up to see a slender, menacing man standing on the opposite end of the wall, wielding his own fans readily.

Now.
Think of what an axon looks like.
No, not the nerve fiber kind of axon, but the architectural kind: an axonometric projection.
Like this (the floor plan sucks, by the way....but this is apparently what Anne Frank's family apartment looked like....... ANYWAY)

Some of the walls continued above us, for another floor or two. Others stopped as they would in a regular axon. Now imagine balancing on .. hmm... 4-5 inch-thick brick walls while a 5'-9" man on the opposite side wants to fight you. With fan blades.

I don't remember how it ended now, but up until that point, everything was and still is crystal clear. I even remember the hand motions and the dexterity with which I moved, and which walls I stood upon -- we jumped around in our fight. Ran along walls. Sliced curtains with the fans. He cut my sleeve at one point, and so I cut his pant leg and saw a trickle of blood stain them a darker shade. That made him come after me furiously, but it slowed him down a little bit, since half of the fight was just running, jumping, and balancing.

It was a different kind of labyrinth study. Instead of wandering around between walls, I ran on top of the them.