This morning I woke up at 3:19 AM — having a cold for two weeks has had some weird side effects. Got up, meditated and wrote. At about 8 AM I crept back into bed beside David and slept for about an hour.
What woke me was the oddest dream — if I were a musician I would have written it down as a composition — the opposite of a nightmare.
First these groaning beatboxing sounds. They were beautiful and musical. Then a part visual, part auditory bit — crowds rushing through a curved, tiled, underground tunnel, like a Metro. They’re coming around the corner and singing simultaneously in choral bursts something like “Ho! Ha! Ho! Ha!” These figures are dressed in business clothing. They aren’t actually live people, but sophisticated pastel cartoons of people in simplified shapes. The tiles in the tunnel are pastel yellow and the people are pale turquoise.
Meanwhile, I’m chanting to someone, “What are you revealing, Thomas?”
All three of these musical events are happening at once. I’m curious about the groaning sounds, so Thomas and I duck around the corner of a room and see a supine woman of middle age, who’s not me (I admit that I perceive her as not beautiful but interesting-looking) and is asleep, wearing a short jersey dress, in the same position I’m sleeping in. She’s the one making these musical groaning beatbox noises in her sleep. This exquisite ensemble of sounds repeats itself two or three times — the groans, the rushing stampeding chorus, and my chanted question. “What are you revealing, Thomas!” Thomas is a disembodied person. When I wake up, I’m excited by how exquisite and energizing the sounds were. The dream didn’t feel very personal or psychological and I was surprised by the artistic imagery, too. Later in the day, partly because of the odd sleep hours, I occasionally felt a little sideways, as if I might step into another dimension — the extra-dimensional feeling seemed related to this dream. Here’s a photo I took on Somerville Ave. today, walking near my house, that touches on the spirit of it.
