Complex Narratives and Unexpected Visitors, by Jennifer
During the first part of the night, after drinking the delicious calea zacatechichi liqueur, I had a very complex, detailed dream. Three different dream narratives of more or less the same string of events all ran simultaneously, or else they went back and forth. In the first one, I left the place where we’d conducted Oneironauticum, a small wooden house at the end of a long rural road. I started to walk home, realizing I was barefoot and this might be problematic (a common experience in my dreams). Eventually the road turned onto a busier, more urban stretch. I passed through a large, rusted, part boat, part old market, with stalls where people sold various things. I edged along a filthy, crumbly bit of sidewalk by the side of an ancient swimming pool.
In the second narrative, several of us got in a truck and drove away from the wooden house, that was also a bar where people asked us questions about how the Oneironauticum had gone. The truck rounded the corner from the rural road to the more urban one. We stopped at a small store, the kind that’s attached to a gas station and only sells nasty food in packages. From the parallel dream, I knew the old market lay further down the road, so I urged the group to drive there to find food.
The third narrative started at the end of the rural road. To get back to the city, I boarded a large boat, like an ocean liner. We traveled up the coast, passing the decrepit old market on the left. I saw San Francisco in the distance. Then a large, dark cloud suddenly appeared from the direction of the city. Everyone else ran for cover but I stood on the deck as the cloud surrounded me.
After waking at 5:00 to take the Galantamine, I dreamed of us, in the space where we slept. We’d all woken up some time around the middle of the night and several dreamers participating in the Oneironauticum (in the dream, many more than actually slept in the space) had decided to go home. Many other people had arrived, however, wanting to participate. A few different crowds of people wanting to join milled around the space; they’d all heard about the Oneironauticum and thought it sounded cool. It seemed to me, however, that they might think it was a kind of hip hop event instead of a phenomenological dream group.