I'm at the Potato Fest in Ulyanovsk, halfway down the Volga. By California standards, it looks subalpine, even down here by the river. Brr.

Our ancient Babushka's in a wheelbarrow, lying on turnips and beets, looking rather like a sack of them herself. A lumpy bed, but the ground's all mud.

Grampa runs the Root Race, staggering along the grimy beach, lugging the regulation sack of beets. He's going for a speed record, 47 seconds. "He's not only cracked 47, he may go below 40!" I hear "36... 37... 38.." Someone comments "I hope he's not below 40, nobody will come close for years, and they'll get discouraged."

Meanwhile a dog dying of old age lies on the hill as old friends come to say goodbye, including a cat and a girl. Only... the dog seems perfectly healthy! Midsize, rather pretty dog. I'm baffled. Dying?

The cat, her best friend since they were little creatures, pats her with forepaws. The girl comes up for her turn, but the Old Slavic Narrator intones dolefully "But when the child arrived, the dog was already dead."

The girl trudges off, tears on her cheeks, doubly sad. Didn't even get to say farewell.

The old man tries to tell his granddaughter he's won the Root Prize, but she's distraught: the dog apparently dying, the festival, Grandpa, some art she got as Christmas gifts... it's all too much. She can't take the emotional clash! She has snapshots of all her feelings and fans them like a card hand: the gift art aroused sexual feelings, the dog's "death" aroused grief (and bafflement; is she really dead?), Grandpa's race stoked competitive urges, and the festival's clunky attempts at fun in this sea of potato poverty is just depressing... she wants to forget them ALL!

I can't blame her. After just an hour in Ulyanovsk, I feel the same.

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• Ulyanovsk: a lot of what's demanding my attention seems small-time, not even second-rate. Not Moscow, not Leningrad, not even Vladivostok... Ulyanovsk.
• Tired dog, overloaded girl: me! Up late, pushed, overloaded with obligations--all as trivial & pointless as the Potato Prize.
• ACTION: save up & get out of suburbia! Under the comedy, the dream's assessment is bleak. There's no one & nothing for me here.

My co-worker Steven shows me his current favorite book--"Ladle Rat Rotten Hut", Little Red Riding Hood told in Punglish. That is... a tale of Northern Europe, rural poverty, roots, red (or should I say Red?), grannies, carrying food, grannies treated like food, and at the core, a girl told lies about a canine.

Which tale's themes did I just enumerate? Red Riding Hood, or my dream last night?

DECADES LATER

This non-literal predictive dream is like a magpie's nest, a mockingbird's song, a bowerbird's display--stealing bits far and wide, arranging them in a new pattern. My dream's gentle creatures and wry tone are unlike Red Riding Hood's savage parable about monsters of deceit. Yet the elements clearly are there--the same melody shifted to a new key.

There's a related dream-type (if little known today): Freud's contemporary Havelock Ellis claimed a night's dreams can play with a key word or idea, generating variations yet never verbalize it explicitly, so dreamers often miss the common source. Example: Ellis Critique.

Such magpie dreams aren't rare. The Maimonides study, detailed in Krippner, Ullman & Vaughan's The Telepathic Dream (and those details show how careful the study was), is full of this type--in their lab tests, dreamworkers could often glean the gist of photos that researchers tried to "transmit" to them, but the clues in their dreams were often indirect--broad themes showing up with variations in repeated dreams through the night. The most experienced dreamworkers scored highest above random; they looked past surfaces to recurring patterns. Ellisian dreams!

My own apparent psychic dreams are often more direct than this, so the World Dream Bank may over-represent that spectacular and more entertaining (if perhaps simpler) type. But I suspect I'm a minority and magpie dreamers the majority.

Why would ESP pull such a pointless stunt? No mystery there. Dreams like this (and I have a lot of them; one can be coincidence, but not a thousand; sorry, O Skeptic Reader) showed me I had abilities my conservative academic suburb (the Authoritative Narrator) rejected as superstition to be swept aside by Science. "ESP, that bitch, is dead." Well, no, she wasn't. And not a Big Bad Wolf, either.

The dream meant "Get out of Podunk Ulyanovsk. Nothing for you here, Little Red--you're better than this!" It took time, but I saved up and left the suburbs for San Francisco. Glad I did.

I'm still baffled why my dream took me to Ulyanovsk specifically. I'd seen the name on maps, that's all. Though now it's history; post-USSR, the town got renamed Simbirsk. But let this dream stand as a monument to... potato heads.

World Dream Bank homepage - Art gallery - New stuff - Introductory sampler, best dreams, best art - On dreamwork - Books
Indexes: Subject - Author - Date - Names - Places - Art media/styles
Titles: A - B - C - D - E - F - G - H - IJ - KL - M - NO - PQ - R - Sa-Sh - Si-Sz - T - UV - WXYZ
Email: wdreamb@yahoo.com - Catalog of art, books, CDs - Behind the Curtain: FAQs, bio, site map - Kindred sites