James
Green-Armytage
40 Dreams
This is the shorter version of the dreams... click here for the longer version.
OLDER DREAMS
# from an unknown time in early childhood
Somehow I’m
separated from my parents. I remember a rain-soaked city street at night, lit
by red and white lights of cars and their reflection in the black pavement.
# from an unknown time in childhood
Our
mothers had sent Nicholas and I away in a flying basket, like the basket for a
hot air balloon but without the balloon. We were being sent off on our own, and
we were kind of scared. We reached some sort of distant alien place and were
taken in by these two somewhat hostile alien women. They were going to eat Nicholas,
but I convinced them not to. I remember looking out their window into the
night; there was a windmill outside.
Another night, I had a dream where the two aliens had become friendly and come to my parents’ house. They got bad sunburns from sitting by the pool. The second dream was much more lighthearted than the first.
Daniel and
Zack keep disappearing to go to a pool with some people who I don’t know. I go
in the pool once without being invited. I sit in the pool and realize that I’m
naked, so I stay there and do nothing while everybody else has this weird kind
of fun. Later I imitate it accurately and in disgust to Zack: “Let’s all go
under water! HAHAHAHAHA!!!” (They go under water.) “Let’s play with this beach
ball! HAHAHAHAHA!!! (They throw around the ball.)
FROM NOTEBOOK H4, DECEMBER 1995 - EARLY FALL
1996
Floating
around in a cathedral while music played. The music had a lot of counterpoint,
very cool stuff. I was kind of frustrated, though, by the fact that I wouldn’t
ever be able to remember the music. (I knew, I think, that it was a dream as I
thought this.)
FROM ???
I am in
New York City, in the streets. Everyone has just found out that a nuclear
attack will hit in a minute or two. For those in the city, including myself,
there is no way to get out in time.
I give up
trying to find a way to escape, and focus on trying to understand the fact that
I am going to die. I’m very frightened, with a sort of sinking feeling in my
stomach. I wonder what it will be like when I die. I believe to some extent
that there is no essential difference between my own experience and someone
else’s, that both are real and experienced in terms of the same ‘I’ or the same
kind of ‘I,’ and therefore my individual death isn’t the end of what my being
actually is.
But still,
I wonder what it will be like once I die. Will I just suddenly wake up as
another person, or a newborn baby, without any memory of my life now? I can’t
wrap my mind around it really. I see the bomb beginning to descend.
FROM BOOK OF DREAMS FEBRUARY 1998 - JUNE 1999
There is a
war. I don’t want to be in it so I come in late. The drill sergeant yells at me
for being late, and I still have to go, although without my gun. I realize that
this is even more dangerous, especially when I am caught between some thing
with poisonous claws and someone with a gun.
#
I come in
to check out the end of a Hollywood party. When I get in, it's the big penthouse
ballroom upstairs, and empty. I take huge slow floating jumps, often kicking
off a wall at the top, that cause a thrilling rush of weightlessness in my
stomach on the way down. I am very glad that I can really do this in my waking
life, as I think that I am not dreaming.
# May 10, 1998
In a
stairwell in school fighting some kind of monster man who is hunting me. We
have an argument about who will win. He says it has to be him as he lives
forever and there’s nothing I can do to kill him so it’s only a matter of time.
I say that I might be able to find a way to kill him. I seem to have a gun
which only sort of slows him down. I run, turning corners, losing him. I go to
these locker rooms on the second floor to hide.
#
Luke
Skywalker prophesizes the death of millions. He notices something fucking up
his future-vision (is it a tractor beam?). In a strange and dangerous new city.
Two incomplete globes in Columbus Circle, back in time, a benefit concert that
isn’t on the radio.
#
At a
restaurant, I buy an ounce of marijuana, I’m looking for a secluded table,
watching out for undercover cops, the laser system is shutting down, are the
frying electric monkeys alive? Skyscrapers, laughing gas area.
#
I was
looking through a magazine from the 80’s and right at the front is an ad for my
parents like they were a rock group. I’m in the picture as a little kid with a
leather jacket, all of us looking down.
#
Taking
trips to the moon. Big chunks of ice gather on the ship and we have to knock
them off.
#
With Zack
and everyone all of a sudden in a circle: Alex Mike and Evan. I weep with joy
that we are all together again. Zack asks me why I am crying and I say
‘nothing,’ but I think it is clear to him. Then the others have already run to
some sunny dock that is supposedly from my memory and I am real happy about
getting there though of course I delay a bit, changing or something like that.
#
I yell at
Mike: “You haven’t said one word to me all week!”
Mike:
“That’s because you’re crazy!”
Zack says
I’m not, Mike argues with him.
Zack's
father comes in drunk and interrupts by taking about the nature of accidents.
FROM SUMMER 2001 FOLDER
#
A
relatively long period of dreaming while I actually knew that I was dreaming.
One interesting part is that I was able to sustain my effort to stay asleep in
such a way while still examining the process and content of the dream. Paying
attention to the way in which the dream is continually created.
FROM INDIA NOTEBOOK, FALL 2001 (C6)
I am in a
locker hallway at Hunter, back in time, and everyone is just going to class. I
recognize a lot of people whose existence I am kind of amazed by, and I feel
lucky to have grown up with such bright people. I also feel that sort of
sweet-painful desirous love for people, the desire to fully embrace and realize
them, loving people as I would love phenomena or a memory, the desire for them
to fully come forward, to be absolutely realized, in actual not just potential
- all the appreciation of them.
Alex walks
up to me (still in the locker hallway) and says that he’s not sure that he has
the same kind of love for things that I do. I try to explain that the love I
have for things doesn’t mean that I don’t feel shitty and angry and despairing,
that I don’t feel bad also, but that the love in somewhere in there. That it’s
kind of like a kernel of its potential, that it’s not necessarily realized or
consummated. I might have said that it’s not necessarily even something I feel.
We start talking about different phenomenological and Buddhist text which list
this sort of basic love among the many elements of consciousness.
#
I’m in a
room and with Hunter folk. Mike is talking about how he must do something or
other, he’s excited about some idea of making a video or something. I’ve got my
back to the room, drawing on some chalkboard or something. Alex comes in with
some others, postpones Mike’s idea by say he really really wants to play some
video game to calm down or something. Some rap music is playing, and I say
(still drawing) that “phatty” is a ridiculous word. Zack laughs. I try to turn
around. I’m feeling like I like this group, like it’s normal and calm and sweet
like when we were kids.
It’s like
a weekend night now, a party. Girls come in. I notice that though the guys are
dressed normally, the girls are dressed really sexily, like in party dresses,
evening wear, nice silky stuff showing skin. But they also seem kind of sleepy.
We’re on couches. Someone sits down on a couch next to a girl. She stirs as if
waking up and sleepily says her name and shakes hands.
The thing
turns into some kind of crazy Muppet thing. There are a bunch of crazy Muppets
- like of two different kinds - at the head of the room, and some kind of
exchange breaks out with everyone getting chatty and animated over some issue,
like a debate or future plan. But I see this as kind of ritualized, preset,
everyone chattering, noise moving to back and front like waves.
But then
somehow things start to fall apart. The room clears out. Something’s about to
explode. I say that this must be the work of Oompa Loompa. A wise elder says
“Yes of course, he’s a very powerful elf who’s at the back of most mischief.” I
try to stop the explosion. The elder says that I’m out of my depth, I should
get out of there. I’ve got something attached to the machine, trying to save
it. I can’t get it detached. The elder says I should leave the pen (which is
what’s attached) and get away. Yes of course, I think, just leave it. But I am
struggling to pick up all my other stuff, like my luggage, books, folders,
etc., and meanwhile the rumbling noise of the machine about to explode is
getting louder and louder.
FROM SPRING 2002 NOTEBOOK (C7)
There is
an ancient subway station which is all the way up in the Catskills, all
abandoned, spooky. I’m amazed, I tell someone there that I’m amazed, but he
doesn’t answer, withdraws emotionally.
I think
about the deeply sad fact of the limits of happiness. In the dream I can sort
of fly around and I have a girlfriend who is neat, but we still feel lost, we
don’t know what to do with the time...
After the
subway station, I try to find my way back to my girlfriend. It’s totally dark,
like underground. I don’t know how long my light will last. I’m looking, my
light shines into caverns of endless endless statues, tiny statues some of
them, visually very striking. I call them Shiva statues, and I think they
belong to my girlfriend.
I hug my
girlfriend and play with her, but we feel lost.
#
I’m trying
to take care of this ball of flesh. It is spherical, about 1-1/2 feet in
diameter.
There is a
man who is like guiding me, telling me where to go with it. The ball of flesh
has a limited life span, but my guide is telling me how to convert the
temporary value of the ball of flesh into a kind of permanent value.
The
beginning of the trip is lost in my memory, I have an impression of remote bus
stations at night.
Eventually
we are on a city bus, traveling through Manhattan. The other passengers tell me
that I should store my ball of flesh in one of these incubators on the side
wall of the bus. I hesitate, unsure that it will be good for it, buy they
insist and convince me. As soon as I put it in the incubator, the ball reacts
badly: it turns from a pale color to having dark veiny lines, and parts of its
flesh spike up jagged like mountains. I wonder if I’m going to feel any pain as
the ball gets injured, because the ball is me. I turn off the incubator and
touch the ball gently; it’s hot. The people on the bus say “well, that’s what
those things do, they die.” They seemed to feel that since the ball of flesh is
a mortal thing anyway, then there is no particular reason to take especially
good care of it. I am mad at them for their irresponsible attitude.
My guide
gets out, and is standing at an intersection. I can’t get off the buss just yet
because I don’t want to hurt the ball of flesh by picking it up while it’s
still hot. So the bus pulls away with me on it. I look up at the street signs
and try to make a note of the intersection, and I hope that I can get back
there before he leaves. I don’t even know whether or not he’s waiting for me,
but I hope so.
I gently
try to pat the ball down in the jagged areas, to soothe it. Eventually I think
it’s cooled down enough to take it out without hurting it further. The ball is
less of a ball now, more a droopy shape that hangs down on either side of my
arm as I hold it.
I get out
of the bus and search for the intersection, but I can’t remember the name of
the streets, so I am almost walking around aimlessly, just following hunches.
Two people are talking on the street. One of them says that all we can really
do is chose how we die. I am searching through the streets and I agree with
this, and start thinking about it.
FROM MID 2002 NOTEBOOK (C8)
In New
York for a few days only... Driving with my parents, can’t park for some
complex reason. My mom yells at my dad and leaves. Time with my dad. He says
that when he was a boy sometimes the wind on the water would look like rain.
We keep
losing keys in this pool, I dive in trying to fish for them.
I fish out
sheet music. Time with my mother. She talks to me about piano music, says she
taught me how to play so that we could play duets. She’s overwhelmed by the
beauty of one duet she can remember.
#
Life
without life?
I somehow
thought I walked into the darkness without life to see if there is still being.
I thought there was? A light beyond the darkness, I stepped into it. Yet I thought
it seemed lonely, as if it was solitary somehow.
Later I
had my doubts, a feeling that maybe life beyond life was implausible.
FROM LATE 2002 / SPRING 2003 NOTEBOOK (C9)
I go to
catch up with Micky et al but instead of a hotel it’s a bowling place... But I
come in and just see this weird short-range bowling where the lane is just like
10 feet or so. I go downstairs and see a much bigger area. There a huge area
full of full-sized bowling lanes but also I see endless chickens placed
everywhere, pretty densely covering the area. Many of the chickens are alive,
and people pick them up at whim and kill them by tearing them up and then cook
them over fires. Some of the chickens are just dead laying around without heads
or just with big bloody patches where a wing was ripped off. I walk upstairs
and try to leave but I run into problems. Maybe I need a ride or something. And
the people are scary, not just carnivorous, but vaguely cannibalistic, at least
in some sort of emotional way. They seem like they’re trying to harm me somehow
and I think I have to fight with some of them.
#
On Central
Park West at night, we find a porthole which leads into a different and perhaps
much better world. But we can’t fit through the porthole. A friendly dog comes
up to us while we are there.
Later I
come to think that maybe the dog is my salvation - I am terrified of it but I
think that maybe if I let it bite me through the neck I will not feel pain but
rather be transported somehow. I have formed this plan and I am making all this
crazy artwork on the computer.
But when I
let it, it doesn’t bite but is rather gentle and friendly; we adopt it...
#
I am
gazing up at the moon. The sun is apparently just behind it, so perhaps it is a
solar eclipse (although actually my sense at the time was that it was night). A
gentle halo appeared around the outside of the moon and I think it is very
pretty. Then, all of a sudden, there is a series of very violent explosions
which seemed to be originating behind the moon. I and the people behind me all
gasp in terror. We don’t know what it was, but we speculate that something
terrible is happening to the sun.
The next
scene seems to take place somewhat later. If it was in fact night before, then
this would be the next morning. We are talking about finding out if anything
catastrophic had happened. We are inside now, and one of us points out the fact
that there is in fact some light coming through the window, and that hopefully
the sun hasn’t exploded after all. For a moment, this seems hopeful. However,
Micky, actually seeing a part of the sky through the window, says wait, doesn’t
the sky look red? We look out the window and in fact the entire sky is a deep,
uniform red. We are looking out onto a city street, and all the light cast from
the sky has a reddish hue as well. It is snowing furiously. You’re right, I
say. It’s over.
Apparently
the sun has undergone some kind of sudden change whereby it has stopped giving
off anywhere near the amount of heat necessary to sustain life on earth. It is
going to get colder and colder, and there will be no hope of its ever getting
warmer. Everything will die soon enough. Perhaps my instant reaction is not too
different than it would be if this really happened. I have a sense of intense
fear, and also intense sadness at the loss of any future whatsoever. I also
briefly wish that we were in a warmer climate to begin with, so that there
might be a day or so of bearable outside warmth before the final cold set in.
In the dream I don’t think that any of us have much more than a few days in
which to live.
#
I was some
kind of orphaned ape, maybe a gorilla, maybe the product of some kind of
experiment which had since been destroyed.
At one
point some guy was trying to call around to see if were are any places that
will take me in, like zoos or something. Apparently there weren't, because he
killed me then.
I feel the
point of a knife at my back, and I am terrified, I ask what are you doing, and
say please don’t but he runs it right through my stomach / chest. I died and
woke up. I think he wasn’t killing me out of malice but just because of the
fact that there wasn’t anything else that could be done with me.
#
A brief
period of lucid dreaming. I am in a strange sort of apartment building. There are
some other characters on the floor: male, not especially friendly or
intelligent (henchmen of some sort of enemy?).
I ask one
of them, “Are you God?” because I know it is a dream and I am fascinated by
this otherness, this force all around me which creates my reality. Since I knew
I was dreaming, for some reason I felt like I could examine this force close up.
The guy I
asked, however, answers “No,” and they walk away.
#
During my
dream it suddenly occurred to me that I had lived beyond death, and I felt
reassured. That is, I felt that I had died as one person, and now I was another
person, remembering a moment as the first person where I wished for life, was
self-aware. I guess this gave me a sort of assurance that what is most
important / valuable about my own life is present in many other lives as well,
and possibly infinite in extent.
Later on
in the dream it occurred to me that I had been mistaken: I was still living the
same life as before, still the same person. That made the reassurance go away.
FROM SUMMER 2003-SPRING 2004 NOTEBOOK (C10)
It’s an exciting chase through city
streets at night. I’m in a horse-drawn carriage trying to elude pursuers. I’m
with a friend. We’re even riding this crazy carriage up and down stairs, very
fun. I believe that I am one of the twelve apostles, going out on a journey in
lieu of St. Peter, who has been killed.
#
When I need to do something, I
spiral inward, and when I don’t, I spiral outward. There’s nothing else that I
can do.
#
I am dead and in the land of the
dead. Was I alive at the beginning of the dream, and did I trust a dead person
only to have her kill me?
The other dead are trying to
convince me to let them mutilate me, stab me with a big knife, so that I can
get over my fear of being injured, which they say is useless once you’re
already dead. After preventing them from cutting off other parts, I ask one of
them to cut off my ear, which she does. But now I’m not even sure if it’ll grow
back. Then I get in a vicious knife fight with another one, both getting really
bad cuts. I’m trying to cut off her hands so that she won’t be able to fight
anymore.
It’s kind of a sad land of the dead.
There are some girls standing at a desk and praising the effects of a
particular brand of painkiller pills which help to dull the pain. I’m not sure
if I had any hope left of coming back to life; maybe I did.
#
I look at a map of midtown
Manhattan, and see that I’m close to a large circular area called “the Desert
Hole”, around east 42nd street. I try to get there and I find it. I’m in a
building, at an observation window that the public cannot pass beyond. The
desert stretches out for miles and behind that, mountains. The hole itself is
actually more of a bowl-shaped depression, not extremely concave but enormous in
size. I have quite a feeling of vertigo and I am in awe of the whole scene. I
understand and am thankful that this observation window is the only way to see
it, because if there was an open-air platform, people would be likely to fall
off. Somehow the hole can only be seen from this one place.
#
Watching a very intense anime movie,
in which subject and object are somehow so compressed that time doesn’t move,
in a frightening way. Someone says hello to a man on the street, and the man
says slowly and with intense rage “me too...” His point of view is represented
as sort of infinite layers of really fine cloth between himself and the world,
the sun shining through dimly.
Later a tuft of hair floats down
from the sky - it fell from a powerful demon.
#
I’m some sort of mental patient, in
heavy confinement, believed to be highly incapable, etc. There are some sort of
intensely sinister dealings going on. There are various people covertly
fighting over the outcome. Perhaps one of them even allows himself to die in
the interest of his plan. Some kind of evidence is buried.
I become a subject for some kind of
intense dream and sleep research. It is frightening because they seem ready to
keep me pumped full of drugs and confined so that I stay dreaming all the time.
I plead with them to at least let me outside for some time, and they do. I’m up
on the roof of the building, desolate beige concrete with broken glass here and
there.
It isn’t clear whether I am actually
this mental patient or whether I’m only temporarily inhabiting his body.
#
A lucid dream. I’m speeding down a
highway which I realize is the West Side Highway, going north. I’m looking east
into the city. I’m really overwhelmed by the beauty and impermanence of it, the
fact that this alternate version of the view my mind is creating will never be
seen again. I think back to other lucid dreams I’ve had, and feel that my
verbal descriptions of this beauty are inadequate. I walk to a place near
Broadway in the west 60’s, a place where there is a ramp that goes down from
street level into a tunnel. I have a sense that this is a significant place
where I will find something important in real life. Around the corner it
suddenly looks like daytime.
Semi-lucid. I have a girlfriend in
this dream, but I know that she is a product of the dream itself, and I need to
maintain the dream in order to keep her in existence. I’m having a hard time
doing it. We’re on a couch together and all these dangers come from outside.
Dogs are wandering around and I have to fight them off. I go back to the bed
and she crawls out from under it with her hair fallen out, looking miserable
and sick. I try to restore her but the dream fades.
#
I’m at a football game, and I see
George W. Bush in the stands, drinking wine. TV cameras are pointed at him, but
he’s drunk off his ass and he seems really depressed. He says that he’ll give
anyone $20 if they’ll go out with him. Which is doubly pathetic, first that
he’d take anyone, and second that he’d pay them for a date. Everyone watching
is scandalized.
#
I’m old and immobile. I wonder
whether this is the final descent into tiredness, or will I get healthy and
active again.
A man stabs a woman who he was
pretending to love, stabs her with some kind of poison on the blade. I wince -
it’s scary. Then a girl comes in, dazed, who doesn’t seem to realize that some
of her body parts have been replaced from organic matter to some grotesque wood
and string simulacrum. The man did this to her whole family. The man, actually
a woman now, seems to be extremely powerful, with some vast plan of world
control. I’m going along with whatever she orders me to do, waiting for an
opportunity to kill her. I’m crawling in a circle around a vast thing that is
either a miniature model of a town or a vast circuit board. There is a gaping
hole / tear in the middle. Also there is a cut on the edge where I smashed at
the circuit board with an axe before I was co-opted. This woman wants to expand
the simulacra to choke out and replace other life.
#
Zack, Mark, Alex and I are discussing some sort of heavy
psychological issues, near the inside of the doorway of a brownstone building.
Suddenly, some sort of popular psychology / guru guy comes in the door. He’s a
famous TV personality and he’s doing a show outside. There is a big crowd of
people on either side of the steps, and this guy comes inside and points the
microphone at me. He wants me to tell him about the psychological issue we were
discussing, so that he can ‘solve’ it.
I don’t exactly cooperate with this, though. Instead I take
the microphone, look around at the crowd and yell “How’s everybody doing?” and
they cheer. Then I pause, look up at the sky (it’s night), the trees, get into
the ‘suchness’, the momentariness... then I yell into the microphone “Why not?!
Why not?! Why not?! Why not?!” looking around at the crowd. They cheer
enthusiastically. What I meant was something like "why not live live to the
fullest? why not try to make it as good as you can, to be as good a person as
you can? what do you have to lose?" Somehow, the people in the crowd under
Triumphant, I step back inside to talk to Mark and Zack and
Alex about it, but it turns out they weren’t paying attention. Disappointed, I walk up the stairs to my room. It’s a shame, I
think, we were having a good conversation before it got interrupted. I’m having
a hard time climbing up the spiral stairs in the wrong direction.
#
It seems to be my job to take group
after group of people to see Zeus, and in seeing him, to die. Some die seeing
only his back, and thus die in a kind of ignominy. Some see his radiant
glorious (even loving?) face, and have a brief experience of happiness as they
die.
#
I’m walking with Alex down the
hallway of the elementary school. Kids are lined up with traveling bags. I ask
them whether they’re going to Club Getaway (the place where we went for our
sixth grade trip). One of the kids says yeah, that’s where they’re going.
I start crying, I mean really crying
hard, bawling, about how it’s all gone, the past, about how its ontological
status is unknown to us. (It's funny to me that in my dream I actually use the
phrase "ontological status of the past".) Does the past still exist?
Has it been destroyed, never to return? How does the existence of the past
differ from the existence of the present?