6
Dream Content
The content of a dream includes the environment in which the dream takes place, which I call a dreamscape; the features of a dream in the form of people, places and things; and types of dreams, meaning that which distinguishes one kind of dream from another. Some of these examples cry out for interpretation, but I will cover that in another chapter.
DREAMSCAPES
Although these can vary considerably, over a long time of recording dreams I have found that certain dreamscapes tend to repeat themselves, while the stories in those environments vary a great deal.
Mountains
Very popular in my dreams, and sometimes the same mountains are in different dreams.
I am climbing around the base of a cliff in the mountains.
I go to a party deep in the heart of a Washington resort in the mountains.
My mother is operating a telephone on a mountain top.
I am looking at real estate. The setting is like a mountain town in Colorado.
I am on vacation with my family riding horses in vast, high mountains with deep gorges.
Cities
I seem to spend a lot of time in cities while dreaming. Sometimes it seems like I am revisiting the same cities in different dreams, and sometimes they range from small to vast with wide variation in styles of architecture.
I am downtown in a big city like Los Angeles.
I am driving through the streets of a Hawaiian city.
Down in a valley is a city that looks like Montmartre.
I see a celestial city floating above the cities of the world.
Villages
I also spend a fair amount of time in villages.
I visit a coppersmith in an Irish village.
I am in a mountain village with some friends.
I am in a traditional African or Polynesian village.
Eateries
Restaurants and food play an important role in many of my dreams. I go to dream restaurants so many times that it would be boring to list them, but food is another matter. The funny thing is, I follow a lowcarb diet and I wouldn’t touch a lot of the foods that I dream about in Waking Life.
I am in charge of a Hawaiian food restaurant in a city.
I am serving fruitcake and whipped cream.
A friend has given me an Easter cake.
There are candy treats to sample and a really scrumptious-looking chocolate cake with white icing that I’d love to dig into.
I go to a cafeteria with desserts and pancakes.
Shopping
For some reason my dreaming self loves to go shopping.
I am in a shopping center looking for new space.
I go to a shopping mall and have a sense of having been there before.
I have a store in a giant shopping mall.
In a village in Mauritania I am shopping in a general store with Moors.
Buildings
Many of my dreams take place in and around buildings of some kind, including conference centers, museums, department stores, hotels, university campuses, apartments, motels, residences, and on and on. Sometimes they are very special places with fantastic architecture and displays of artifacts and unusual technology, but most of the time they are just buildings that things happen in. Like locations, certain kinds of buildings are very similar or almost identical in different dreams, sometimes years apart.
Coming out of a building where President Senghor of Senegal is giving a speech on the steps.
I am among a cluster of adobe buildings in a dry area.
Visiting a sort of Western museum. It is a white stucco building with historical interest.
I am in an African town. I keep walking to an intersection that opens up into a really vast and high temple area that is under construction. Something about part of the construction reminds me of another place I’ve been. Hundreds of people are very busily working on the sides of the high buildings, some of them seem to be monks in reddish robes, but I can’t quite see what they are doing.
Restrooms and Bathrooms
Suffice to say that my dreaming self has to use these quite a bit in all the ways they can be used. Sometimes they are related to the immediate physical needs of my body, and at other times, even though my use of them is intensely active, there seems to be no relationship at all to my body’s physical state. I’ll forgo examples on this one.
Historical Settings
These can include places I’ve never been to nor read about, as well as some I have.
In eighteenth century America or England wearing a wig.
I am an alchemist in sixteenth-century Germany.
I am in a fishing village on a cloudy, cold day with a rough sea. We gather all the boats together to prepare for an attack by the British.
I have been traveling on a river or on the coast for quite a while. Feels like the 1940s. We anchor by a city that I think is Atlanta, but a friend says no. Very clear. Blue sky, a large reddish warehouse building out on a point. War is declared and we have to scramble for uniforms to report for duty.
I’m in a place with swords and shields. I take one of each and engage in a primitive sport.
I am living in the Old West. There is a dispute between our family and another that turns into a war and the other family attacks our house. When I take careful aim I am deadly accurate and I kill several from the window, even some heroes who are very surprised to be killed.
In a town in the 1800s I seem to be the leader among black slaves.
Water Environments
These are dreams in which water is the main element, and includes situations involving the ocean, the sea, lakes, and rivers.
When we are about in the middle of the bay really big waves start to form from the shore, which surprises me, and we have to swim up the face and take a deep breath before plunging through the crest of several waves.
We lean on the balcony railing and watch the ocean waves. Surf is pretty rough and every once in a while a large wave breaks and runs up close to our condo. Then the ocean gets rougher and I see a real monster wave in the distance. This ended in a tsunami type experience.
The hotel has huge windows looking out over the ocean and I notice big swells getting bigger and becoming breakers, first splashing against the windows, then crashing against them.
I join a training exercise as crewman of a large open motorboat that leaves the dock and heads to sea. We are warned to grip a bar in front and keep our heads down as we go through rough breakers.
Countries
I have been to a lot of countries in Waking Life, and also in my dreams. In some cases I was in countries that I hadn’t yet visited in Waking Life. The most often visited dream versions of countries have been the USA (mostly in California, Colorado, Hawaii, and Washington); the UK, including England, Wales, and Scotland; Ireland; Germany; Spain; Australia; Mexico; India; China; Russia; and many countries in Africa.
DREAM FEATURES
This category includes people, places, and things that occur frequently in different contexts.
Celebrities
Famous people who I have never met personally, including a few that I had never even seen on the screen or in the news, have often played an important role in my dreams. This was especially true during the first few years after I returned from Africa, possibly because I hardly got to see any celebrities at all during my time there. In the dream stories some were friends, some were enemies, some were lovers. I’ll just name some of the names and dream roles from 1972 and 1973.
Dean Martin, as a friend gone bad.
Leopold Senghor, president of Senegal, giving a speech.
Larry Hagman, as a friend.
Jimmy Stewart, as a publisher I sell a manuscript to.
Alec Guinness, as my brother.
Laurel and Hardy, as ushers.
Dustin Hoffman, passing by.
Jane Fonda, as a girlfriend.
The Carpenters, singing in a recording studio I am at.
Steve McQueen, as a member of a rock group I am interviewing.
Paul Newman, as manager of that rock group, and as an actor playing a witch in another dream.
Lew Ayres, as my high school teacher.
Jack Paar, in an audience as a gag.
Mai Zetterling, as a lover, but I had to look her up after the dream.
Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew, as themselves, when the president called me in for an assignment.
Tony Curtis, as a fellow driver in a race.
Jim Bacchus, as a member of a singing group.
Julie Andrews, singing with me over a bottle of something.
John Wayne, at a dinner party.
Deborah Kerr, at the same party.
Rudy Vallee, as the stuffy host of a party my wife and I attended.
Benny Goodman, as a friend and fellow musician.
Roles and Occupations
I have had a lot of roles in my Waking Life, and have worked at a lot of different occupations, but not as many as in my dreams. Here are some roles and occupations of mine in that world. I have been the following in my dreams:
A fisherman.
A marine non-com and an officer. (I was a marine non-com in Waking Life.)
A navy sailor and captain.
An army noncommissioned officer, captain, and general.
A revolutionary leader.
A cowboy.
A rebel.
A teacher.
An actor in films and plays.
A writer.
A prisoner and a prison guard.
A salesman.
A pilot.
An airman in the air force.
A king.
A community development worker.
A plumber.
A British soldier.
An American soldier in the revolution.
A filmmaker and director.
A roller derby star.
A barbarian.
A spy and a counterspy.
A policeman.
A robber.
A diver.
A Spanish gypsy.
An Argentinian gaucho.
An appliance technician.
An electrician.
A kahuna.
A priest.
A rabbi.
A restaurant owner.
A storekeeper.
A painter.
A miner.
A student.
A diplomat.
An astrologer.
A laboratory assistant.
A musician.
A mechanic, etc.
In addition, in my dreams I have been Jewish, German, East Indian, Amerindian, Hawaiian, French, British, American, Spanish, Argentinian, Mexican, African, Afro-American, Korean, and other ethnicities and nationalities.
Vehicles
These play a very important role in many of my dreams. Most often it’s a car of some kind, either one I’ve had or currently have, or one I’ve never driven before in Waking Life, like an MG or a Cadillac. I’ve also driven tanks and motorboats, sailed many kinds of boats and ships, traveled on cruise ships, and flown lots of different types of planes. Now, I have driven motorboats and sailed sailboats in Waking Life, but no tanks or ships. And apart from seven hours of flight training in 1965, I’ve never actually flown any type of plane. I’m really puzzled as to where my dreaming self got all that experience.
In the dark before dawn three planes are ready and I am supposed to pilot the middle one. It is a secret mission and at first I have to pretend I am not involved. Someone comes with me as I go to the plane and I pretend I am only looking at it until I get inside and then the three of us take off. The roar of the plane is very clear. The crosswinds are strong and the plane is buffeted about, but I am still able to keep it on course.
I am hauling a sailboat that belongs to someone else to a marina by the sea, because I want to go sailing. The sea is rough. The day is cold, windy, and stormy. There are even hailstone squalls. The marina owner asks if I want a Firebird, a fast boat that is used for racing, but I am more interested in cruising without working so hard all the time. I want to be able to lash the main once in a while and cruise safely. So he picks out a safer, more broad-beamed boat called a pangalang.
A Freudian analyst would love this. I had to look up the word pangalang. It’s slang for a penis.
Family, Friends, Strangers, and Mysterious Companions
Friends are a very important feature of many of my dreams, as are strangers. Curiously, though, a whole lot of my dream friends are complete strangers in relation to my Waking Life experiences. And then there are the mysterious companions. Quite a few other people I’ve shared dreams with have had the same experience of a helpful companion that we can’t quite identify. I call him (or her, for all I know) mysterious, because we never really see his (or her) face. Here are a few examples.
I talk with a tall man wearing a plaid shirt. He is an old and treasured friend (not in Waking Life) and he is leaving and I have strong feelings about missing him.
In a strange, dry land. Bumblebees come out and make an attempt to sting, but my companion knocks them away easily (the dream is longer, but there is no other mention of the companion).
I am walking a broad pedestrian way and my companion is vague, but large.
It is worth noting that although my dreams almost always include a lot of people, mostly strangers, but often family members as well, this is not necessarily the norm. One friend of mine reports that he hardly ever has other people in his dreams, and another says that she regularly meets with a special group of dream friends to do healings and other activities together, whereas, except for family, I rarely encounter the same people twice. And in my dreams, even family members can vary widely in their dream ages.
Animals
Animals commonly appear in my dreams, sometimes friendly and sometimes not. Here is a list of dream animals recorded in just one year, 1995.
Kangaroos and dingoes in Australia.
A horse jumps to its death.
Brass-legged camels in Cairo.
Indians selling horses.
Lions in a swamp.
An eel-like creature.
Cats in a cabin.
Cats, a tiger, lions, and sea eagles by a house.
A cockroach.
An alligator in a bar.
A friendly meercat.
A moose.
Danger from cats.
Chimps attack my wife in trees.
Many other kinds of animals have appeared in my dreams. In 2016, for the very first time I can recall, the same unfamiliar animal, a terrier dog, was in separate dreams two days apart. The most unusual animal dream I’ve ever had, though, was in 1973. It was the first and only time that a dream animal has talked to me in a human way.
A sheep named Barbara Ann comes into the room escorted by a white sheep dog and followed by a mouse or rat that we don’t pay any attention to. We are supposed to impress the sheep. She makes the rounds of the group, talking with each man and letting him handle her. She makes comments on each man. She seems to be most impressed by me and likes my hands. She jokes that I will eat her, but I say I am not eating sheep or lamb. I am impressed by her wool, which is green and gray, all ready to be sheared off to make a sweater. She says it will make a good sweater for my sister.
A close second to that highly unusual dream was this one, where I actually was the animal.
I am in a future time and I am an ape like in the movie Planet of the Apes. I am working with other apes on a garden wall gathering clusters of grapes and stuff. A group of tourists comes out of the cafeteria, chatting as they pass. A few women stop by me and wonder among themselves what I am working on. I show them a clump of grass with dirt on the roots and in a deep, clear voice I say, “It is grass.” They think that is amusing and pass on. I cannot stay here, because I have a mission to accomplish. A human friend helps me get into the place where the tourists went. It is a huge auditorium and masses of people are watching a movie screen. It is dark except for the light from the screen, but I find myself further back in the past where apes were not tolerated. My friend helps me hide my face and I carefully make my way through the crowd, nearly being discovered from time to time. I must escape from here, but I don’t know how. Either the same friend or another finally leads me to a box in a booth. If I get in I will wake up in the DA’s office. I get in and wake up in my bed.
And I have to include this one of also being an animal, because it shows how a lack of knowledge can affect a dream.
I am changed into a tiger by two women. There is a bridge over a stream and the whole is enclosed under a glass frame like in a huge greenhouse. The women try to get me to go in the water, but as a cat I am afraid of water, or I dislike getting in it. In order to get me to go in the women jump off the bridge with my two sons so I will jump in and save them. I go to the edge of the bridge and get ready to jump in and save them, but I can’t because they are all in the way. Then my sons really start to drown and I want very badly to jump in and save them, but there is no clear spot to jump into. The women finally grab the kids and swim with them to the shore and I jump in and swim after them.
The very curious point in regard to this dream is that tigers actually love the water and swim in it happily. I suspect that my Waking Life assumption at the time about cats not liking water had a direct influence on this dream.
Clothing
Clothing is important in many of my dreams and, like quite a few other people, I have had my share of dreams in which I found myself naked, in my underwear, or only partially clothed in public. In some I felt embarrassed, in others I simply went and got something to put on, and in still others it just didn’t bother me. I don’t feel it’s worth giving examples. I’ll go into interpretations of it in another chapter.
Money
Scenes involving money, usually coins, come up fairly often in my dreams. Curiously, though, the amounts are often absurd in relation to the dream story, like paying $1.35 rent for an apartment or getting 45¢ for wages. Some people have very creative ways of interpreting numbers in dreams and I’ll comment on that later.
Sports
I am neither an athlete nor a particularly avid sports fan. I played basketball in high school and have played a number of other sports for fun, but sports are not very important to me, and so I don’t often have these kinds of dreams. No doubt a professional player or fan would have an abundance of such dreams. Nevertheless, here are a few.
I am part of a sports team and I work after hours.
A basketball game, and the ball is an iron wheel in resin, and a kid is too short to tip it in.
I am trying to play volleyball, but it won’t bounce, because it has been torn and patched and sand has gotten in.
Aliens
In spite of the fact that I have been a huge science fiction fan since my preteen years, I have had very few dreams involving aliens. Still, here are two significant examples from 2016. Neither one relates to any book I’ve read nor any movie I’ve seen.
I am living in a small house with kids. Everything is normal until alien ships start appearing in the sky. At first, they look like normal airplanes that aren’t moving, but as days go by they become bigger and look more like spaceships. My son has a small portable Stinger missile and sets it up to blow one away, but I see that if he does it will fall on a populated part of the city and I stop him. A spaceship close by is scanning the area and zooms in on me with a bright light, but I don’t react and go on talking and it goes away. I check my arming objects for the Stinger again and get ready to go looking for another spot to shoot from. I find a place in the country and shoot the missile at one of the ships. At the same time lots of other missiles are shot and together we blow all of them out of the sky.
I have been called in by someone to investigate the disappearance of the people of an entire rural community. After an unsuccessful investigation I decide to use my superpowers. I fly up into space like Superman and use my extrasensory perception to search for where they might have gone. It turned out that they had all been kidnapped by aliens from a great distance away. I open a portal to bring space and time together and step through to the world where they are. I had expected to find them as slaves of some kind forced to carry out dangerous work that the aliens didn’t want to do, but that was not the case. All the people were living in a community very much like their own and doing very much what they had done there. Using my extrasensory perception again to find out why they were there, I finally determined that there were tiny alien eggs in the food they ate that could only be fertilized by going through their digestive systems. Then their feces with the eggs were collected by the aliens, who never showed themselves, without any harm to the humans. The humans did not want to return to Earth because they didn’t have to pay taxes where they were, so I reported that they were truly missing.
Magic
I have already mentioned magic as a theme, but it can also be considered as content. Here are a couple dreams that I think are worth sharing.
An extremely vivid dream of separation from myself. It is in bright color. I am in a house with a balcony loft. The separation occurs a couple of times and I think it is a reflection until the other me doesn’t move as I do. I know the other one is part of me, but I do not feel my consciousness in it. It finally teaches me to separate my consciousness as well and again there are two “mes.” But now the conscious one can float and soar through the house. I call to my wife and float overhead for her, saying, “I can do it.” She is glad for me and completely amazed.
I am in Africa, wearing a tan safari suit and dark brown safari hat, confronting a group of natives who have gathered to have a contest of throwing a javelin to kill a man. The javelin is a fine piece of workmanship made of mahogany. I take it and throw it to the side, saying we will have no killing here. While speaking to the natives they get a shocked look on their faces. I turn around and see that the javelin has turned into a thick, old branch with a rough knob at the end, and as I watch it sinks slowly into the ground. I pull it out and it dissipates into dust. I know that sorcery is at work and I challenge the sorcerer to reveal himself. A small wizened old sorcerer appears. I realize that the javelin is still there, only made invisible, and that the branch was just a thoughtform. I chase the sorcerer and he dissipates when I catch him, so I know that he was only a thoughtform, too. Although the sorcerer remains invisible I am able to detect him and take away his power.
Pain
There is some controversy as to whether pain can actually be felt in a dream. Some practitioners of dream yoga claim that it cannot, which is why they say you can prove it by putting out a fire with your hands without pain. In his own dream records, Lecoq notes instances in which he feels pain in his head, but also notes an occasion in a lucid dream where he purposely sticks a metal punch into his hand, seeing the wound, but feeling no pain. Zhuang Zi says that both pain and pleasure can be experienced in dreams. Research on Hindu dreaming indicates that pain is a sensation that can be experienced. At the same time, many modern dream reporters say that there is no pain in dreams, even if you do something like jumping off a building.
From my own experience, I have to say that sometimes I feel pain and sometimes I don’t. Here is a recent dream in which pain was clearly felt.
I go outside barefoot and the broad concrete walkway is so hot and painful I start jumping around.
And here is one from the day before in which I felt no pain at all.
Somehow, I cut myself somewhere on my body and then I realize that I have cut off my left hand, but it is still hanging there a bit away from my wrist. There is no pain or gushing blood and I remark to someone how odd it is that I can still move my fingers and feel my hand even though it is cut off.
Unanswered Questions