Dreamscape: Truancy presages abject failure

Why I was a truant

It is becoming like a haunting of my dreams, for in times past, I played truant. My absence from class could never be properly understood. When one school report included the word "truant," my mother, a secondary school principal at the time, took such offence that I had to check if we were sharing the same meaning of the word.

In secondary school, my truancy was borne of boredom: boring teachers, even more boring subjects, and a total lack of engagement. In my English class, for instance, the whole activity was pedestrian. I was probably not helped by the fact that English is my mother tongue, as opposed to a second language, even though it was the official language of Nigeria.

Later in life, I came to understand that while I naturally understood the language, I did not understand the mechanics of it. I knew why a sentence had to be a certain way, but not how the elements of language were arranged to make it so. This became evident when a Dutch teacher of English used my intuition as a native speaker to review his notes. I found myself learning about the scaffolding that gives English its structure and grammar.

The unpleasantness of bad English

Elsewhere, my disinterest was compounded by distraction. In certain classes, I was so clueless about what was going on that I drew a total blank. It would have been so helpful to have had a student affairs department that addressed emotional, mental, and psychological health; I might have been saved a lot of misery.

The worst culprit, however, was a lecturer in electrical materials. His teaching style rankled to the point of irritation, and how he ever became a lecturer in a tertiary institution baffles me to this day. If he had used sign language, I might have been more engaged. Nearly every sentence of more than two words contained a malapropism or a grammatical flaw, and I felt such an urge to correct him that I could barely listen.

I remember in primary school, a new pupil came to our class and announced, "Teacher told me to come to class." We all laughed, as it sounded different, strange, and odd. He ended up in another class, but we soon became good family friends.

Always found wanting in Maths class

The haunting that has invaded my dreams for a long time now is finding myself in an advanced Mathematics class with no idea of what is going on. The lecturer walks in expecting the submission of some homework and then continues a topic I cannot seem to grasp, with the final examinations only a couple of weeks away. It is never a comfortable place to be; in that dreamy world, you are left wondering how to avert the looming prospect of failure.

I do, however, remember one final Mathematics examination. On the Friday before, I was not convinced I had the wherewithal to tackle the subject to the best of my ability. I found a primary school blackboard and worked through each of the topics to fix the gaps in my understanding. By Sunday evening, I was sharing better proofs of equations and theorems with others. I got an 'A' in that subject.

Between the dreamland that occupies the present and the reality of old, where I got it all together, I think of copying my friend's notes to pay off the knowledge deficit. Yet, a niggling thought suggests that I will not be able to pull it off.

The dream never goes beyond the lecture class, but the foreboding of failure lingers. What is it in my life that is showing up as a parable of omission and unpreparedness in my dreams? That is the mystery, something to pray for insight about.

Dreamscape: I said hire me

Untouched by Touch

It was one of those contactless payment nightmares, and it truly was a nightmare. I was with a close family friend, and we had boarded a train within the city to travel from one location to another.

Upon arrival at my destination, my mobile phone simply refused to provide the NFC-related information and contactless payment interaction to let me through the exit barriers.

Despite my efforts, my friend easily exited and waited for me as I began to look like a fare dodger. However, I had indeed touched in where my journey began and was struggling to touch out.

A Free Pass Granted

One of the staff came to help, first directing attention away from us before moving us outside the perimeter of the checking system. Effectively, I was beyond the exit barriers and could go on my way.

However, having touched in, if I did not get a legal touch out, I could potentially be fined almost 10 times the cost of travel. I needed this resolved before I was subject to a cash grab from my account.

Finding a Solution

Upon reviewing transactions on my phone, I found that the entry contactless system had failed to register my touch-in properly, posting an Error 21, indicative of a fault with the system rather than a mistake of my own making.

I approached the staff who called in a technical architect to review the error. While acknowledging the error was not my fault, he opted to do nothing about it as he prepared to take his dogs out for a walk. As far as he was concerned, the cost was too minuscule to warrant concern.

Meanwhile, in my examination of the information related to the error, the company admitted fault and offered compensation for the inconvenience. As the architect was walking away, I inquired about the compensation, and he promptly signed off a few free tickets for daytime and nighttime travel.

Fighting My Corner

It was his attitude that was grating, inconsiderate, and failed to recognize the needs of the customer. To which I vocally stated, for all to hear, “If your company needs a technical architect with an eye for detail and solutions to help the customer, please immediately hire me.”

That was completely out of character for me; I am not typically one to express myself in that manner. However, I felt irked and disrespected; it needed to be said. All that agitation, and it was only a dream.

Dreamscape: Was this old Manchester?

Back to the yesterdays of yesteryear

The wonder of dreamland and what one can discover in almost hallucinatory repose is an interesting spectacle. The other night, I walked by the University of Manchester and landed in a picturesque landscape more than 40 years ago, buildings I recognised and things that had changed.

A distinct Manchester Business School sponsored by a large conglomerate, its hoarding atop the school, so unmistakable, yet I forget. Buildings that have been replaced, old in Victorian red brick or new with the facade of brutalist architecture in stark concrete, I was somewhere I knew and did not know.

A picturesque idyll, I recall

Oxford Road was a narrow and busy tree-lined avenue, looking like a forlorn escape from the city to a remote location that you might only visit on business or purpose alone. A village road with cottages from a bygone time, now lost to the sepia of a picture found in the attic of a long-gone ancestor’s home.

I walked up the nondescript pavement that looked more like a grassy verge, dusty rather than macadamised, dust swept up by the heat of summer, all the way to St Peter's Square that had the semblance of a motor park terminus bustling with the energy of an African city station.

In the wonder of dreams

It was full of confusion, I could not find the bus I needed to board, if I could determine where I was even going. I wandered around listless and thinking about why I consciously felt I had travelled back in time from a more familiar present.

Indeed, Manchester was different back then, before I ever came to live in Manchester, but between my dream and the reality, I cannot vouch for truth in my dreams. I guess it just brought many memories to play and create a dreamscape of a time it was best I never experienced. The power of imagination in dreams sends you to times and places you never knew existed.

Dreamscape: Where learning requires example

As you dream of it

It was eerily like real life, but then what are dreams but multidimensional realities played out in the vast mines of the mind where treasures are found and fortunes are created in ways that the imagination is tested of its limits if there are any?

I found myself attending a function at a girls’ school, probably a Founder’s Day and some girls were lined up in two columns as if to give a sword arch parade to their honoured guest, their worldly famous and most successful alumna.

The field was down below and access to it seemed almost impassable at first sight, just as you have in dreams, the easy becomes immediately impossible and the impossible suddenly possible, like you have waved a magic wand.

I was there unawares

I eventually found myself at a vantage point to view the proceedings as a guest of sorts and too prominent to be overlooked after chatting to some of the girls. I had a feeling of déjà vu like I had been at rehearsals for this event somewhere and nothing happened after I was first called to participate and so nothing was learnt about what to do.

I was apprehensive and the more I asked about what was expected, the less I was informed of protocol or practice, it was like everyone assumed I knew and thought my inquiries were unserious and silly. I did not even know what the guest of honour was going to do, I thought I would observe and maybe learn something.

I did not know

To the strains of music, the guest arrived and passed through the parade to the end singing an apparent folk song that was a traditional game at the school on that day. She had done this many times before and part of it was a call-and-response activity between her as the lead and the guests or girls she selected to ask to attend a function and what food they would prefer.

You were not to take the enquiry literally but provide an excuse for not attending and a back-and-forth of teasing and questioning in order to persuade you ensued until someone made the mistake of mentioning food. Guess what happened, I was the first she called out to and I mentioned food.

Hear the derisive laughter and astonishment that I should have known not to have answered as such and it was when she moved to the next guest and her answer was the typical excuse that I realised my faux pas, but I was never in that situation apart from the other time when no one offered to explain the rules of the game.

The assumptions that ridicule us

It transpired as I made conversation and enquiry that this was a core Yoruba tradition that I could have learnt and enjoyed in childhood. Though, when they learnt I was not born in Yorubaland, they somewhat accepted why I made the error. It left me thinking of the gaps in my learning of Yoruba cultural activities, my knowledge of the language was not enough, there was more to culture than that.

On reflection too, we agreed that phrasing an appropriate enquiry to get the kind of information to prepare me for that situation would have been nigh on impossible. If only the guest of honour had selected someone else first, as matters acculturation are best bequeathed through example. Just because my apparent oddness makes me prominent enough to be selected first does not imply, I would be ready or in the know of what is expected.

Do not assume if you have expectations, at least discreetly try to elicit enough information to be sure the game is not ruined by those called to participate who are totally unaware of the rules.

Dreamscape: Part messages and complete deception

Strange and familiar in one

The dreamworld brings a collision between reality and fantasy, within which some interesting codes can be read and maybe misunderstood, but we that dream and can remember our dreams including those that appear to repeat themselves replaying strange things and places that you now remember like you have been there too many times before can only wonder about the many worlds we inhabit at the same time.

A well-respected and renowned preacher after delivering a reflective homily decided to give some of the clergy or church leadership a parting gift of grace. The one I witnessed was where he was given a strip of paper with part of a message, and he instructed the man to engage in deep devotional prayer and the rest of the message essential to him will be revealed during solemn contemplation.

Making easy work of discipline

I thought it would be hard and ascetic, the honour and veneration in which the preacher was held would lead the person to follow the instruction at the earliest opportunity. However, as I left the meeting, I noticed that there were other people who had been given a part message and some were reading their apparently secret messages out loud.

It transpired that others were eavesdropping and connecting up the part messages without the required devotional activity and by stringing up together six or so part messages will get the full message the preacher was giving to the church, a kind of epistle for modern times.

Build in your requirements

At that point, I thought it was not enough to just give out the part messages, as written down, but each person should have been given a unique keyword that would different each message such that if anyone picked up the part message of someone else and used it, it would become obvious that the knowledge was acquired through stealth rather than devotion.

I thought about the dream and how it relates to computer encryption when the message meant for one can only be decrypted by another who had the key. How messages given should be private, probably done in secret and handled as confidential. Trust is not enough, it should have adequate security too.

As I probably should not have witnessed the sharing of message and the recipients should not have been reading out their messages, worse still as I was no party to any of the messages but as some passing-by and just observant person, I had by accident stumbled on something that should have been confidential and the impact of the message might have been lost in its becoming public through indiscretions and spiritual laxity. And the dream ends.

Dreamscape: Of friendships, in conflicts and strong voices

The outlay

I cannot remember how long ago the dramatis personae were in the latest dramatic episode of parasomnia where the script is an ad hoc exhibition of wild and vividly imagination occluding and folding time into a present continuous of endless juxtapositions and unlimited human abilities that science fiction will not dare to touch.

My father had gone away when his best friend who passed on last November had come round to ask for the use of his car. I promptly deactivated the security my mother having consented, and the deed was done. In dreams, there are backstories that come to view as memory during the playback of events you cannot place, and this one, I do not remember giving access to the car, yet I was bought into the premise.

The setup

When he returned, he had no knowledge that the car was used until it came up in conversation with his friend. As he is wont to do, he was completely sceptical that the car had been moved at all because there was no record in the odometer or tracking system that the security had been tampered with. That was where fingers were pointed at me by his friend that not only had I bypassed security, but I had also overridden all protective systems, it became a thing of jest that so seriously annoyed my father.

Rather than have a discussion with me about the issue, he took his frustration out on me resorting an instrument of corporal punishment that he handily wielded from our childhood to exert authority and respect. As it was in a public place, I was apparently conversant with customs not to resist or attack, I let him have his way, humiliating me as others watched without intervening even as what I did was at their insistence.

The fightback

Later, he came at me again in private and we got into a struggle, I was having none of it and then I went to bed. Quite overcome with the injustice of it all, I got up and was in a crowded courtyard where my mother was serving food to quite a few people. I attracted her attention asking to talk but gave way to a few desperately hungry and possibly homeless people hoping once their urgent requirement was served, I would be allowed a hearing, but I was altogether ignored.

I adjusted my voice and bellowed, “Can I have an audience?”, at which point, I could no more be ignored and the whole crowd fell silent to listen to what I had to say. I am not much of a public speaker, but I gave it my best shot occasionally losing my voice but recovering soon enough to make coherent sentences.

My statement

Uncle Jimi, though I have never called him that before, I said, was a father-figure such that if my father were absent, he would not have to be asked to take on that role. There was no way I would have refused him access to use my father’s car and with my mother’s consent, he did have the car when he required it. I was rather disappointed that they allowed my father to abuse me without even attempting to restrain him.

Whilst I was busy speaking, my implacable father came wielding a big stick again, but this time we had a full-on confrontation as I tackled him the apparently big stick shrunk into a length of flimsy string, his hand hanging down with the incredulity of how his instrument of power and enforcement became nothing of any threat. Yet, it was in the words I spoke than in any physical tussling that this happened.

Leaving the courtyard to return to my bedroom with my brother, along the way, he wanted to go to see my father as I worried that he might not have access to the house if we did not go together. Then across the stream just before a bridge that could be easily crossed, I saw a wolf with a colourful iridescent coat approaching as if towards prey. I growled at it, it cowered in fear and slunk away. My phone rang and that is how I was awoken from my apparent nightmare; it was Brain on the other end.

I prevail

All day, I have been reviewing the events in my mind as I narrated the dream to friends, the seemingly incessant conflicts between my father and I, caught in a time warp of when we were literally of equal strength and I always gaining the upper hand. The situation where the presumed reasonableness he possesses is quickly dispensed for the physical, but more pertinently, the bond of friendship with his best friend that we all celebrated.

Then, one thing I have realised and learnt through life is I have to speak for myself, for fairness, for justice and to arrest that abuse of power and authority by those who think they are unassailable and inviolable. The voice against oppression must be heard and it is there to disarm completely. Another dreamscape.

Dreamscape: Flying out to places

Fishing for dreams

Dreams can be an outlet valve of unresolved conflicts and bothersome conundrums. It is one of those things that filters through the gills of my mind as I sleep from which I get some oxygen of inspiration or the carbon monoxide of distress.

Strangely, I choose a piscine analogy in a watery existence considering I cannot swim. This is something others approach with ease that I am yet to develop any skill for. On the matter of ease, it is dreams where the easy becomes insurmountable or impossible, frustrated by thinking, people, events, or situations, sometimes working in concert.

Beyond your self

Such one strives to forget lest the concept takes any root and begins to impact the order of things. Yet, dreams can change you, in some settings your agility is legendary and superhuman, you can fly as long as you are far from those who think you might be a witch rather than challenge their lack of imagination.

Elsewhere, you are galumphing and hesitant, tardy and infirm, lacking in strength and resolve, contrary to what you know you can do. I want to believe the hard is resolved therein and in waking up, you are beyond it, that phase ending for something new to happen. You just lost 2 hours of sleep after that.

Dreamscape: A test I have to pass

Playing truant for reason

One school report in secondary school labelled me a truant, to my parents, that word seemed to jump out of the paper and take on a life of its own in their displeasure and disappointment. I was supposed to be in the class, and I was not, I was in the library doing other things that interested me, but that was no excuse, I had to suffer the regimen of class attendance whether I was engaged and enthused or not.

Then when I was at Yaba College of Technology studying Electrical Engineering, there were classes I did not attend as there were times, I was completely clueless as to why I was there. I now put those circumstances to when I suffered clinical depression for which there was no respite or recourse, it was strange I found distractions that helped me through.

In life and in dreams

There was one class I just could not attend after being there twice, the lecturer and I cannot understand how he rose to that position, possibly through nepotism or blackmail, I can not tell. He definitely had a practical understanding of the electrical British Standards, if he had to communicate in any vernacular other than English, he probably would have been excellent, but the medium of impartation was English, and he just did not speak it. He had no proficiency, none at all, maybe if he tried Pidgin English, it grated in my ears; it was intolerable.

Yet, I had to fulfil attendance credits to take the examinations, we had to reach some sort of arrangement in which the truth of why I hated his class could not be part of my cause of mitigation. Something of that episode seems to haunt my dreams and this for years.

Found wanting for testing

Any scenario where I am to sit an examination, there is always one subject where I did not have the notes and completely unprepared that I was a sure bet to fail, it filled me with trepidation.

It generally was a subject that I could not read up on, I needed someone’s notes to get a view of the topics covered so that my revision was aligned. What I am thankful for is I have not had to sit any of these examinations in my dreams to find that I had a pen full of ink but no words to write.

Then in real life, in my finals at the Federal Polytechnic, Ilaro, I realised on the Friday before my mathematics examination on Monday, I had no confidence I would pass the test. There were just too many things that were not in place. By the time I was in that school, I would usually have completed all my revision weeks before the examination week and simply allowed myself more relaxation or rest, maybe a bit of tutoring, but no stress.

Between reality and dreams

This mathematical conundrum bothered me, so I found a primary school and spent Friday evening and Saturday working through problems and finding ways to understand how the theorems and proofs worked, my insight opened up to new methods and better ways to do things, it was like I was blessed with revelation. By Sunday, I was giving tips and even reduced a brainbox proof from a two-page verbosity to the concision of half a page. I scored an A in that paper.

That said, I cannot understand why still in my dreams, I play truant for all sorts of reasons, I am unaware of what test I am about to take, I am aware of a subject in which I am too unprepared that I might just absent myself from the examination, I have to find a friend ready to share their notes and I am caused an unnecessary amount of distress. Just before I wrote this blog, it was mathematics, again.

Dreamscape: Parasomnia to the rescue

A low form of sleep

Brian is probably the most aware of episodes of parasomnia demonstrated in REM (Rapid Eye Movement) Sleep Behaviour Disorder that I have exhibited over time when I have vocalised, acted out or even kicked him violently in bed. My dreams can be quite vivid and the fact that during REM Sleep my muscles are not relaxed and temporarily paralysed could probably be related to my medication, but I have for a lifetime suffered a spectrum of parasomnia short of somnambulism. [Sleep Foundation: REM Sleep Behaviour Disorder]

After work, I took a nap and had classical music playing in the background, my phone rang waking me up, but I just turned over not to excite myself too much out of the slumber that had seemed to set in. Soon I was enraptured in the throes of dreamland.

Into dreamhood

There is a characteristic of my dreams that appears to link into episodes eked out of long-held memories probably from other dreams that makes certain encounters seem like a continuing story. I was walking up an exposed corridor with an overhanging roof when I noticed a lady I knew in some sort of distress, two men on either side of her appearing to threaten her, but since they were outside, I felt if anything happened, I could call up a crowd and the police on them.

One of the men happened to be Boris Johnson, and that might have been inspired by news of when he with a friend arranged to have a journalist beaten up. The stuff of dreams draws from inexhaustible material. [The Guardian: A couple of black eyes]

Soon, another man I did not recognise walked up and they now took the lady into a room. As they did that, I called out to her, by name and asked if everything was Okay, whilst she said she was, that is not what I heard in her voice, they were going to rough her up and I was reaching for my phone to call the police.

Acting out the dream

I could hear a bit of thumping in the room, and I suspect from what I overheard in the snatches of conversation in that room, they wanted to know how much I knew about them. I guess they were about to include me in their nefarious activity when that man I did not know came out and walked towards me, because I was not leaving until I was sure she was fine.

As he approached me, I could hear myself say in a loud voice, “Do you want to know who I am?” as I woke up out of the dream. Sometimes, this happens as a safety reflect preventing an escalation or a deterioration leading to harm for myself and stress on my mental and nervous system. I probably need to visit a sleep clinic to study the phenomenon better.

However, it was another bout of parasomnia and my sleep was over with me thinking if the dream had continued, as there were many people around, I was about to shout out to them. “Call the police on these thugs.” It is likely, that dream might continue in another episode of Dreamscape, the vivid dreams of I and the parasomnia that defines them.

Dreamscape: A Psalm of the stirred and troubled

 We are guarded by greater than you know

Take me to see what you were shown,
Tell me of the journey to that place,
For out of a dark hole that opened like a mouth,
He was pulled back out by the underarms,
In the uncovering of an act so unnatural,
Ere Abraham found the ram in the thicket,
Abraham was old and will not bury Isaac,
The hole that opened is closed from all sight,
The prayers of the congregations were strong,
For they prevailed upon the unholy sacrifice,
Averting the abomination of patriarchs,
Who are given to the rituals of the cursed.

That to which he was a witness in a dream,
Was made manifest as light shone on his deeds,
In it, he will not prosper or even survive,
The tree is one generation to raise new seed,
Come away from the place he was urged,
His shoulders rapped to bring him round,
As he woke his eyes were filled with tears,
Marvelling at the machinations of forebears,
We will not strive over things that do not last,
Not at this time or in a distant time to come.

He that keeps Israel neither slumbers nor sleeps,
It is by him that we are lifted from the pyre,
Even by the son of man who became the fourth,
After the heat is seven times strengthened,
By hand and foot and terror in their faces,
Their ashes not found dispersed in the wind,
What shall become the story told of them?
The past that attempts to consume the future,
Itself shall not be remembered or spoken,
Their hands were red and so involved,
The blood of the innocent now for justice calls.

Dreamscape: Twice the dereliction of responsibility?

Doors not closed

Maybe there is a cautionary note to it, as I am aware the dream world does portend a kind of awareness that should not be dismissed without consideration.

In that realm, I found that I left a temporary residence ensconced in my memory from my teenaged years on a bicycle late at night in search of activities that happened more into my 30s. Nothing had happened by the time I decided to return when I found myself in the company of other female cyclists who were tenants there too.

On getting to the house, the main garage door was ajar, and a thought occurred to me that I might have been responsible for leaving the place unsecured, but I could not tell. It meant I had to go in first armed with a chair to check if there was an intruder on the premises and thankfully there was none and it did not appear anything had been lost or stolen.

Realms within dreams

As I went to bed, I was troubled by the idea that I should have owned up to being careless with security even though I had no recollection of it. Then, within the same dream, I relived another instance when I had returned to see the door ajar, my reckoning then suggesting it was my fault.

My cousin then became a protagonist, saying the issue of the lax security had been escalated and he needled me about being the one responsible for the lapse which resulted in some valuable lost property.

Assume before it’s presumed

His magnanimous praise and elevation of a young man who at first appeared to have no prospects deepened my sense of guilt and regret of not immediately taking responsibility with the indication that I would be disgraced and punished, when I was delivered from the nightmare with wakefulness.

Whilst I can think of no interpretation of the dream, it crept into my consciousness that today is my cousin’s birthday, I am not laying too much store in this, but I could not ignore the distress it caused me; the possibility that there might be something I am responsible for that has been left undone requiring I immediately without hesitation assume blame for than prolong the mental agony of concealment in the search of exculpation or acquittal.

Dreamscape: In the shut-eye world

Sleepy follows

I sit quietly observing nothing, in particular, just caught up in my thoughts as the threat of slumber looms. The quarantine period is sending my body clock into a soporific daze, I have to convince myself I am not narcoleptic.

Then, the sleep did catch me away, I was on my settee just as my period of meditation slipped into the unaware, a dreamy world taking to places I had been before. Everything looked safe on the path I chose before a man looking menacingly at me decided to lunge at me with a knife in his hand. I felt myself draw in a deep breath and kick at his weaponised hand.

Acting out a thing

The crashing at the impact of my kick was my centre table kicked about a metre away, things on the tabletop and on the shelves below, strewn on the floor. I guess that was my first observation of movement from within my sleep demonstrated in the physical.

From within vivid dreams, I do at times speak out loud, I have apparently kicked my partner out of bed completely unaware of my sudden skill at Thai boxing. I wonder if I should be bothered or see it as par for the course.

As for my reflexes, a flea, a fly or a mosquito hovers within sight, I wave my hand closing it as a fist over the insect and I want to believe it has been caught and killed, it isn’t in my hand or caught between my fingers and it has disappeared somehow. If I thought I was a magician or an illusionist, I haven’t convinced myself enough to offer it as a party trick.

Thought Picnic: The realm of multidimensional simultaneous realities

In the world of the mind

The stuff dreams are made of, realities of mental experiences that if remembered might be reliving things that are exposed from the recesses of memory or dictated by external influences in the state of slumber during rapid eye movement sleep.

I probably do not sleep for long, but I generally have a quite restful sleep, I would rarely have a stretch of sleeping that lasts up to 4 hours. Brian, whose sense of time is at best suspect would say I barely sleep for an hour. If he wore a watch, I might just believe him.

What I must however avoid is ingesting any food close to when I take my pills at night-time, because there is some interaction between the medication and whatever little fat is in my food that creates hallucinatory effects and vivid dreams.

In dreamy consciousness

The kinds of dreams that has me caught in dreams within dreams, my flicking a light switch and the lights not coming on, and that is how my subconscious realises I am in a dream. Why I gravitate towards a light switch in many of my dreams, I can’t explain.

In these vivid, lively, and vigorous dreams are my engagements in battles of will and power, where, from within the deep sleep I voice out challenges and commands to defeat threats and fears. I don’t think I have suffered somnambulism, but I have exhibited motor skills whilst in deep sleep wielding weapons or exercised in martial artistry.

Multidimensional simultaneous realities do exist, usually as individually conscious experiences rather than shared ones. Some, I have shared as part of my Dreamscape blogs. [Instagram]

Answers to thorny situations in sleep

The multidimensional part of these experiences merges time and space, into a naturally inconceivable present. How people long departed and strangers I have never met before along with those I very well know meet up in a contemporaneous situation dealing with simplistic or complicated situation from which I might end up wiser or stupefied.

The imagination can take you places, just as daydreaming can, the wonder of sleep is still in the process of being better understood. One thing I find it does for me is it settles my mind is in turmoil, unable to make sense of the living reality I cannot control.

Having learnt through experience that worry solves nothing, I find the refuge of sleep a good place to find the wisdom of the ages to see beyond the clouds that obfuscate the brilliance of the sun or to shorten the night to bring on the dawn of a possible new beginning.

Dreamscape: An excursion to the factory of dreams

I can think it

When I consider it, I probably have lots of inspiration, much from unlikely things like thoughts, events, observations and circumstances.

The engine room of ideas and machinations in the cranial crenellations that provides the obverse of identity in my visage is constantly scheming position and opposition, purpose and dispute, decision and indecision, a battleground of conflict and agreement, it is a wonder it is not projected on the world as a deafening cacophony.

I often dream it

When it comes to the dream world, I have to be careful of what inspires the incredulous, my vivid dreams have an impossible script which if written may have the author immediately certifiable in the first act. I have dreamt dreams Joseph would not dare to go to sleep for.

It is not the haunting that gets to me, it is the remembrance, the fact that it gets to a point that I so many dream worlds deep, it is like my dreams are having their own dreams within dreams, my waking up is a series of wakeful episodes within dreams before I finally come awake.

This is most evident in dreams where I find myself needing to switch on the lights, my flicking the light switch yields no result and something in my subconscious tells my dream, you are in a dream, you need to wake up. I wake up and realise I am still in a dark room, so, I flick the switch again, where I am reminded by the central director of dreams, you are still in a dream.

Then I escape it

The process repeats itself until I come awake and aware. As I always sleep with the lights on, I wake into the light and then begin to ponder the dream I have just had. I cannot consider my dreams nightmares, though other people who dream my kind of dreams who probably be having nightmares.

In the stranger dreams, I have had are seeming recurrent chapters of the same people, events, circumstances and awesome architecture that has the capacity to drawf you into an insignificant Lilliputian. Thankfully, I am never lost in the corridors of those vast edifices, rather, I find myself a burrower attempting to traverse spaces and tunnels too small or narrow for my frame that I contract dreamy claustrophobia.

Now, that for me is terrifying that I wish I had an instant tap out or an Italian Job event where with the relief of freedom to a large expanse of space and untrammelled access, the stroke of luck allows me to express gratitude in those famous words, 'You're only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!'.

Yet, I love it

I love my dreams, for the impossible is effortless, the unthinkable is mundane, the insurmountable is rudimentary, the undefeatable is vanquished, the enemy never gets the better of me, for there are tools I could never have conceived or imagined that I wondrously adept at deploying. There is blood and gore, the macabre and the mediaeval, it is primal and primaeval, yet a magical fantasy of ability and capability you can only find in dreams, for which a reality can be conceived to extricate oneself from sticky situations.

The disputes I have been given the wisdom to resolve in dreams becomes manifest in circumstances where I would never have had the first inkling to resolve. Dreams are good, for, in all that, there is beauty, there is vision, there is achievement, there is hope, there is faith and there is love. It harbours a timeless landscape where all memories converge from all times with people of blessed memory and those to come.

The mind is a factory of unique and bespoke dreams.

Dreamscape: Of dreams within dreams

A gathering of old faces

In the ethereal world of the mind, as slumber took hold, I found myself on a journey to attend the wedding of a distant relation who only had a surviving sibling, her brother.

It appeared I had to fly there, but I ended up on a seemingly crowded bus and for the first time in a long time of memories that come to the fore, none of the occupants were from the Great Beyond.

Yet, I found an eclectic mix of people, all of whom I was supposed to know, but two of them stood out particularly, the first had only recently celebrated his 50^th birthday and this was the first time I was seeing him for almost 30 years. We embraced and had a quick chat before I found one of the most uncomfortable seats towards the front of the bus with my back facing the direction of travel.

The other was at the back of the bus, I had not seen him for decades and he had an engaging audience, seemingly having some very knowledgeable and agreeable points about current affairs. I did not go up to him to greet him because I was harbouring resentment at something he had done long ago.

The detail of events passed

In a chat with another cousin, we went over how he stole the identity of another close relation and successfully used it to acquire a British passport declaring certain guardians deceased. His chicanery was only discovered years later when the true owner of the identity decided to obtain his passport. With the system hot on his tail, he fled to the United States of America, even in our anger and derision of the underhand activity everyone was left embarrassed by it all.

We travelled through lush tropical forests and barren landscapes until we arrived in the centre of gridlock traffic in Paris which also happened to have a border post. The customs officer appeared to have collected our documents and looked in the bus and made a comment about how better attired we all were, though casual, compared to others she had seen.

A passport forgotten

Meanwhile, I was informed that there was a case pending against me in France that every visitor must have done or they would have broken the law. The person who I thought was conductor cum guide, these things do get conflated.

I enquired as to the substance of the charge and learnt that I was observed protesting outside the US Embassy in Paris, that sounded quite laughable because, not only did I not know where the embassy was in Paris, the last time I protested in front of an embassy was in the Netherlands in 2012.

However, just at that time I realised that I did not have my passport on me and that meant I would not be able to get beyond the checkpoint, I became frantic with distress as I imagined being taken off the bus and put in detention, all sorts of scenarios played away in my mind and then I came to, I was not on that journey, there was nothing to be worried or distressed about, I was dreaming within another dream.

I extricated myself from that dream, though still fast asleep in the envelope dream, I aroused myself to wakefulness remembering other dreams within dreams that I had had in the two hours of deep sleep. The informed commentary with inputs from BBC Radio 4 getting intertwined with my dreams.

Dreamscape: To Japan on a bicycle

Seeing my guests off

We had a wonderful evening together, friends and strangers about to be friends, and then it was time to go home. They had come a long way and we set off to the station.

There were two bicycles, that is what they apparently rode on to visit as we made for the station. It was late, we had to be quick. On getting to the station, I was in charge of one of the bicycles and we had difficulty going through the gates or finding the right platform.

In the process, we lost sight of each other and I was left with one of the strangers, in the confusion, as we ran up and down the escalators, one of us walked the way down an escalator as it was rolling up, I could not do that with a bicycle. We finally found our platform, two trains leaving at the same time, for Japan.

A toilet wonder to behold

I got on the train and found a seat as the stranger did beside me, only to be disturbed by a hawker who through the whole journey was selling snake-oil remedies using the context of Japanese fables of old, nothing that I heard was worth parting with my hard-earned cash for.

Meanwhile, the technology on the train could not be ignored, I could push a button, very much like the stopping bell of a bus, to initiate a bowel evacuation by wireless means, fascinating it was, that no one could tell who was filling the toilet with waste, it could really have been anyone else.

Time and station stops late into the night, we got to last stop and alighted. Then it seemed our none of our other company made any of the trains, they were stuck somewhere incomprehensible as we spoke on the phone.

A cab to nowhere sensible

I thought I could ride the bicycle back home when I realised I had left it on the train, the train that already left the station taking the staff with it. The other trains were pulling out that I just could not summon the courage to tell my friend that I had lost her bicycle.

The matter of getting home from Japan became a pressing issue, I had to get a taxi, the first shop had unhelpful people who pretended to offered a service of indifference and mockery, they did not care. When I found the cab office, the faces all looked familiar but I was not sure, the drivers unperturbed in every state of lackadaisical abandon until the controller was pointed out to me.

He asked where I was going, my home was a place I had not been in 27 years, the cost I could not meet because I did not have enough money and as I was thinking of booking a hotel room for the night, I did not have to do any of that, I was saved the ordeal.

REM - Rapid Eye Madness

For between Edinburgh where I am, the London Underground where we boarded trains for Japan, probably a suburb called Japan-town very much like Chinatown, a cab office that seemed to have Nigerian drivers to wanting a ride to Isolo in Lagos, Nigeria, I was caught in the landscape of vivid dreams, where distances are shortened and problems can be quite insurmountable.

I had jolted out of my sleep as the background activity coming from my computer playing Channel 4 on BBC was broadcasting the Japan season ended. Phew!

Dreamscape: The dream-wake

Winnie!

In what looked like a generation ago, we had a dog, a bitch, a canine with an aggressive feline temperament, she was big and fierce, masterly in territorial presence, a terror to the unwary.

She came to us a matriarch from family friends who had moved into town but without the space in which to keep her.

We had an expansive compound, high walls and sturdy gates, we accepted her into the household with rules that indicated an apparent lack of discipline from her former home. She came with an appellation, the name Winnie.

The taming of Winnie

I became the ringmaster to inculcate the better habit of dog friendliness in here because she had become a demigod to serve with trembling and never to be approached when eating. An infringement of that unwritten rule risked giving a digit or a limb to Winnie for her dessert. That was unacceptable behaviour in our household.

At one time, she nicked the head of the household’s finger as he tried to remove a fish bone from her food bowl, that called for an intervention and it was immediate.

Soon, she delivered a litter of puppies, but Winnie had no maternal instinct, we could not help the distressed puppies and within a week the whole litter of five died.

However, as a guard dog, she was menacing, even if when I took her for a walk, the looks from some of the neighbourhood signified a meal. As she protected us, we had to protect her, she was a well-loved family pet.

The mystification of Winnie

It transpired that one Saturday morning as we all were having a lie-in, I was in REM sleep, the subject of my dreams was telling off workers across the road from us where a building was being constructed for disturbing our peace. Our compound had the building materials and each time they needed stuff, they would knock on the gates for us to not only let them in but out of fear of Winnie, they would not access the compound until one of us had Winnie on a leash.

Into my dreamy existence came the rattling of the gate with a bit of hollering to have Winnie curtailed. My aunt, woken from slumber at the same time got up just as I did, she was going to give the workers a stern talking to, but since I was already on the roll from within my dreamscape, I asked her to let me deal with the situation.

If my words did not strike terror in the workers, they were left in no doubt that any other slight disturbance from them again would have them fed to my dog. They were warned once and it never happened again.

The dream-wake

This kind of arousal from dreaminess into wakefulness with a continuation of the same theme of the dream is what I have called a ‘dream-wake’. I had one such dream-wake today when having had a night of insomnia, it was well into the morning before I got some much-needed sleep.

In my dream, I had rushed to the train station to catch a train with just a few minutes to spare. There was a queue of undecided customers in front of me buying tickets and asking questions as I fidgeted about getting a ticket and making it to the right platform. When I was finally attended to, the train was pulling into the station and I had to go up a footbridge to board the train, I never really go on the train because I was suddenly aroused and awake.

In my wakefulness, I looked at my watch and almost panicked; my train was in 25 minutes and I have not even packed my bag, in fact, there were so many things to do. Empty the washing machine, take out the rubbish, turn off the water mains, lighten my baggage because I was having a short week away and I could not afford to forget some essentials for my journey. Luckily, I had picked up my tickets from Friday night, so I only had to make it to the station, some 5 minutes away and get my stuff to the right platform.

Phew! I made it

There was no time to waste, I unloaded the washing machine, jettisoned one suit, packed my bag, forgetting to take out the rubbish or turn off the tap, I was out of the house with just 13 minutes to spare. Panting like I had just done a marathon unprepared, I got to the station, with all the heft I had, carried my baggage up the stairs rather than wait to use the lifts at the far end of the platform and only had to wait 2 minutes for the train.

Thankfully, I could choose one of two stations to board the train and the easier one did not require a labyrinthic journey to the platform. I had to board that train to make a connecting train just under an hour away. My ticket had restrictions that meant I had to be on the particularly booked trains or I risked a full fare penalty.

I made both trains, but the dream-wake experience must have been the subconscious saving me the accident of misfortune at great cost. Whilst I do not seek meanings to my sometimes vivid dreams, I do not ignore the simple lessons, insights, warnings or triggers the dreams offer in terms of preservation, information and caution. Without my dream-wake, I would have been left in dire straits.

Dreamscape: Where the long departed are the newly arrived

Workings of the conscious mind

With the imagination of a conjurer able to create a new reality out of thought, the need not to augment inspiration with the depictions of others in the horror genre becomes self-evident.

Yet, thoughts can be controlled even if bizarre. Getting into a lift and thinking at the press of a bottom it would burrow into the belly of the earth and the floor at which the door opens reveals a fiery furnace of ghoul and spectacle beyond comprehension. Those thoughts must be banished.

Workings of the subconscious mind

Dreams, however, are another dimension in time and place. Bounding in strides that cover distances to be traversed in days, transported to worlds where the long departed seem to have just newly arrived. Mixing the contemporary with the past in a story that rarely gets told. Dreams are yet to be filmed and displayed, many of those recollections are best left shuttered away.

Then, whether a seat or a bed, it becomes an autonomous vehicle steered backwards into some place indeterminate. The consciousness aware of the movement and trepidation sets in, but nothing seems to be able to stop the slow advance into the unknown. A foreboding suggests wherever the vehicle is going is not where you want to be because you are bound by restraints you did not apply.

More battles of the mind

From the depths of dreamland come reflexes, you shall not go where you have not planned and definitely not in the anxiety and fear that begins to engulf you. Suddenly, you jolt awake, the memory already branded with the beginning of an experience and one you decide you do not want to see the continuation of.

Dreams are a battlefront in the subconscious, many wars have been fought and won therein. Until another dream slots into the dreamscape, the mind remains the mystery it always was of unique experiences and crazy outcomes.

Sweet dreams are made of these

A dream in turmoil

I can remember quite vividly two films I watched on television probably some 20 years ago, I cannot really recall the exact time, but they have made a marked difference to my life in what might have been unintended consequences.

I am not sure which one I saw first, I would deal with the first concerning dreams in this blog, it involved elements of remote sensing, science fiction horror where certain gifted people, probably psychics, were hooked up into Matrix-like devices to enter into dreams of other people.

In the experimental stages, they entered people’s nightmares to chase away the horror and help cure unsettled sleep, but every new technology is always accompanied with some evil machination, they found out that stabbing the dream-subject in their dreams induced a physical response as a heart attack which killed the subject in their sleep.

The dream weapon

So, it became a political weapon where some of those gifted people were employed in a murderous enterprise that left no forensic evidence, so others then engaged in preventing evil, such two or more gifted people occupy a subject-dream battling to kill or save the person.

In one instance a horrendously horrific and scary dragon was slain to rid a child of a nightmare; the president engaged that service to deal with a nightmare about a disaster of burning vulnerable people, some then tried to kill the president, thankfully, they were unsuccessful.

My dreams are my dreams

What I however took away from that film was the knowledge that I could control my dreams; not that it is perfected, but I can now sense when there is going to be violence I cannot handle and avoid, in some cases, my body is triggered to wake up than experience that nightmare.

Since, I sleep with my lights on, when I enter a room in my dreams and switch on the lights, interestingly, they do not come in, sub-consciously, in my dream, I reckon it is a dream and I have been in situations where I have been in a dream, which is in another dream, which is again in another dream and I have to come out of each dream to the point where I finally wake up to light.

Those are areas I can control, the ones I still have not yet resolved are where extreme brain activity creates complex mathematical equations based on straight lines – I tried to deduce formulas and equations that allow parallel lines to meet or worse still, straight lines to meet in more than one place.

The second, I think I can resolve by putting the straight lines on a sphere, that way, they can meet twice, I would not go into how they can meet thrice or n times – that would surely make anyone mad.

A mosquito of a dream

I first had these mathematical dreams when I had to switch from Nivaquine – the malarial drug – to Fansidar, a sulphur-based drug, because the side effects of itchy palms and soles which Nivaquine induced were less so with Fansidar.

However, I still had to take additional anti-histamine, analgesic and soporific drugs with Fansidar to deal with the itch, the headaches and the sleeplessness. Now, when I am seriously restless, I could have these mathematical monsters which could create skull-cracking migraines.

That I do not have to use anti-malarial drugs is more than a blessing, you cannot wish worse on your enemy for the rotten side-effects – if these drugs were already tested on animals and they created such mental mayhem, I wonder what would happen without animal testing.

Dream a little dream for me

Now, I believe that even when you are asleep, you can “consciously” determine what you want in your dreams. In my case, I usually sleep with some sound in the background; however, I now choose that carefully, when at one time, Radio 4 began reading Steven King’s Pet Sematary at night.

That was no bedtime story, tame as the book title sounds, it could take your sleep away for ages, especially if you have a crazy imagination as mine, the more reason, and it needs to be curtailed within the limits of background sounds.

Besides control, there is also authority, you have to exercise authority in the domain of your dreams, refuse to allow uninvited or unintended situations that you think you might not be capable of handling – but then in dreams one can be extremely resourceful in dealing with all sorts of situations.

The worst I would accept is a draw in my dreams, if I have to run away, I wake up, never in cold sweat though.

Postscript

After searching for “film about entering dreams of others” in Google, I have now found out that the film was Dreamscape (1984), amazing what you get when you purpose to write about something.