WAYAN'S DREAM

I'm trying to found a ranch where the animals won't be oppressed. But I worry it can't be done: the land's dry and rough--too rough to allow gentleness? There's a ranch house already, up on a wide shelf below big cliffs, where there are caves, maybe even a hidden gold mine!

We're organic, pay close attention to the soil, pests, weather. But another farm's on the terrace below us--and they just spray everything in sight! They're bad neighbors, too. Their son plays with a machine gun and an assault rifle, tossing them around like a drum major's batons. Loaded batons. He drops them carelessly on the stony ground... I see all this from the edge of our mesa ten feet above him, waiting for bullets to come whizzing by...

He's learning to juggle grenades, too. I almost hope he slips.

And then he starts juggling a HUGE sharp syringe full of who knows what drugs and diseases. He tosses that up to our level! It falls at my feet. Angry and scared, I pick the thing up and drop it in an arroyo nearby--back on their level. If he wants to kill himself with dope it's his business, but his dumping toxic waste on our land enrages me.

Above our main level there's a smaller terrace, right at the cliffs' feet. We have an oval horse corral up there. I see a thread of smoke from the high terrace and yell "FIIIIIRE!"

I'm delighted, because I'm sure it's the neighbors' fault--they trespass all the time, and now I'll get hard evidence they've been hurting our ranch. I can use this against them in court. I'm not worried--it looks small, there's only fence posts up there to burn. It turns out to be just that--one single fence post. Boot prints of the son, all right. I have them now!

Then, below me, I hear one of the Sleazies on the phone with a reporter or cop. "Those neighbors of ours are still causing trouble! Backward, incompetent, unsociable... They've been spreading false accusations about us..."

AWAKE

I'm stumped. No idea what that was about... until the next meeting of our dream group, two weeks later, when my friend Cecy tells a dream:

CECY'S DREAM

"My friend Helen, who I look to as a guide in some ways, was leading me through caves with pools. I liked them. We came out and found a ski-resort. Helen skis, but I don't feel safe; I want to try one of those metal dishes. Helen has two sons/lovers, one mature handsome and good, one immature rebellious and sleazy. They were embracing and kissing Helen; I felt attracted to one, I was confused. Mixed feelings? The sleazy son smoked.

On the river, there was a long barn or boathouse filled with beautiful canoes. I smelled smoke and realized the building was on fire. It wasn't big yet. One of the sons, I think the sleazy one, went into the barn to phone for help but the phone wouldn't work. I was mad that he didn't just douse the fire while it was still small--it was a boathouse! Water right there."

So! In a place with slopes and attractive caves, a small fire slightly damages a large enclosure where beautiful recreational transport is kept; then a sleazy son (who may have carelessly started the fire) upsets the dreamer by using a phone.

Whose dream did I just describe?

Also note the polarization between a virtuous and a "sleazy" rolemodel--we both used this exact word rather than "bad" when writing the dreams.

My dream did refer to day events: I'd been having noise problems with the upstairs neighbors. They wake me up, keeping me from remembering my dreams, which is serious for me. But the sleazy people in my dream are BELOW, not above! I live downstairs, so if the dream's about that, I have to conclude I'M the sleazy neighbor! The son's my own anger and irresponsibility; I haven't dealt assertively with the problem (since I happen to be attracted to the girl who's making most of the noise). The drug syringe? I think "hypodermic" puns on "hypocritical" here, since a recent dream used "hippie critics" for "hypocrites."

Cecy was stumped by her dream, though some group members felt a sense of sex smoldering through it like a small fire. Helen the guide takes sexual risks in waking life; Cecy had been dating a lot so the canoes might be relation-ships. This makes sense, as their counterparts in my dream, the horses, often mean sex to me. Or they could be dreams themselves--as the noisy neighbors make it hard for me to corral beautiful dreams, the bad son in Cecy's dream could be a part of her sabotaging her dream recall, which hasn't been great lately. The good son/bad son would both be parts of Cecy--just as the organic farmer and the sleazy neighbors' son were both me. We both focus more on the sleazy one than the good.

But only Cecy and I care about these details. What's you should note is how the two dreams illuminate each other, exactly as if they were one person's recurring dreams, dressing up the same issues in different costumes. One can apparently co-write interlocking dream scripts without the conscious ever suspecting--unless you tell the dreams fully! If Cecy hadn't used the word "sleazy," alerting me, I doubt if I'd have even seen the parallels--or understood my dream.

How many puzzling dreams only explain themselves when seen as part of a telepathic whole--a community of dreams?

And how many telepathic or shared dreams are like this one--elliptical, subtle cases? Dreamworkers naturally tend to write up spectacular ones: clear, blatant predictions and so on. But those are like bright stars in a dark sky. I wonder now if most telepathy is more like astronomers' "dark matter": a glue binding us together gravitationally, comprising most of our universe, yet undetected... and undetectable, by individual dreamworkers. It takes group research.

--Chris Wayan

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