THAT DAY

I write up In Io, an otherworldly dream-epic, in one long evening in the university computing center. (I'm shopping for my own computer, but they're still very pricy.)

While I have time on at the Mac, I also try my first true digital picture. Only have black, white and a few coarse halftones, so I go for contrast--a night scene, they don't need color. Horses in a desert under a crescent moon. Well, horse--I just draw one black mare. Cut, flip, and paste her to make a herd.

Not just decorative for me. This is really a digital portrait of Silky, my dream-guide, in her equine form. If I could draw better with a mouse, I'd have her human and cat forms here too, but at this point digital art is chunky, wobbly art.

To add to its original clunkiness, this isn't the digital file; lost that years ago. All I have is a crinkled, faded paper copy done on the school printer (vintage 1984; crude.) I scanned that and corrected the fade to mimic its original look on that low-res screen.

THAT NIGHT

I'm in the bathroom at my parents' house. Thought I was alone in the house, but I hear noises. When I go out to look...

I find a girl I know slightly, wandering through the house, seeking my sister Miriel. She's a guitarist in her late teens with longish brown hair. She has long sexy legs, and I feel attracted to her... so I get shy. Curse of my life. But I do manage to talk with her a bit.

But what I say makes no sense. For no reason at all I blurt "Miriel might be on the front walk," which is ridiculous--none of us ever hang out there, it's unfriendly, just ivy and gravel. But we go look...

As I open the door, a sudden crash: Miriel's white VW Beetle smashes through the front picture-window, then LEAPS like a tiger over the fence and hedge (two or three meters!) and lands with a thump in the ivy before us, then roars off down the hill. Screeches round the corner... gone.

But as it belly-flopped in a sea of ivy, I got a good look at the driver... and there wasn't one! No living one at least--but in the driver's seat I faintly saw a transparent GHOST. Driving Miriel's Bug.

I wake and write the dream. Then think "I didn't go lucid, despite excellent reasons to think it was a dream. I need to start being more critical in my dreams. Why not ask myself "Could this be a dream? Why would I dream this?"

And wake again! By the bed, my notebook's blank. Those insights were a dream too. Write it all out again, including the afterdream's advice.

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• Leggy dark-haired musician: Silky, my dream-guide, in human form. Not surprising she'd show up in SOME form after I drew her last evening. To draw is to summon; ask any cave artist.
• Miriel's car hijacked: really happened when she was a teen. She parked out front. While she slept, two drunk teens broke in, stole, crashed and totaled it. They were not, however, ghosts. That element puzzles me most.

I run into my sister Miriel at work. Since the dream was about her--well, her friend and her car--I tell the dream. She gawks. "Last night I dreamed of a ghost and my old white Bug." Hazy on details, but definitely the same themes. Did she pick up my dream, did I pick up hers, or was it collaborative/shared?

Coincidence, you say? Suuure. Ghosts with white VW Beetles... that universal theme.

The Ghost in the Machine

EDITOR'S NOTE

I posted this for two reasons. First, I'm enriching the World Dream Bank with extra samples of apparent ESP--shared, predictive and telepathic dreams--to annoy those who simply refuse to look at the evidence for such phenomena. Sorry, skeptics. The Ghost in the Machine is real--and not even that rare. Nearly all published book-length dreamjournals contain examples that the dreamers saw as ESP. Your models are inadequate to the data. That's your problem. Deal with it.

Second: that intriguing afterdream. It seems to trying to flag itself as a dream--aware of its own nature! I haven't seen others describe this dream-type, which I call self-flagging. Note that a dream need not label itself something controversial. If you dream your mechanic says "your brakes need replacing", and then adds "And I don't mean your ability to say no! It's not symbolic--fix your damn BRAKES!" that's a self-flagging dream too--flagging it's literal.

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