The strange and the uncanny
Rooms that are two places, people who are two people, and the traces something has left. Ordinary dream construction, described here rather than mystified.
19 records
- PlaceA place that was two placesThe setting version of the composite person, and just as common. A place that is unmistakably two places at once, with no conflict felt at the time, and the objection arriving only on waking.
- ActionBeing in the wrong bodyBeing somebody else, and knowing it, and continuing. It completes the identity argument: dreams assert who you are with as little regard for the evidence as they assert who anybody else is.
- SymbolA language you do not speakDreamers report understanding and speaking languages they do not know, fluently and without effort. What is happening is not translation: the dream is supplying comprehension the way it supplies every other kind of knowing.
- AnimalAn animal that speaksReported calmly and accepted entirely, which is the finding. A talking animal is a large impossibility and produces almost no objection, where a wrong staircase frequently produces some.
- SymbolA nameNames fail in dreams in every direction: the dreamer cannot recall one, cannot say one, is called by the wrong one, or knows one without ever having heard it. All four are the same mechanism.
- ActionA secretDreamers report holding a secret of enormous importance and being unable to say what it is. The weight is generated and the content is not, which makes this one of the purest examples of the pattern this database keeps finding.
- ActionBeing invisibleDistinct from being ignored, which is painful. Deliberate invisibility is reported as freeing, and the same absence of response produces opposite feelings depending on whether the dreamer chose it.
- ActionChasing somebodyThe active counterpart of the most reported dream there is, and it is reported a fraction as often. When the dreamer is the pursuer they still do not arrive, which shows the failure belongs to the dreaming body rather than to the role.
- ActionFollowing somebodyQuieter than chasing and quite different: the dreamer keeps pace rather than closing, and the person ahead does not know or does not mind. It is one of the few pursuit structures that does not fail.
- ActionJumpingA deliberate leap, which distinguishes it from falling entirely. What dreamers report is a jump that goes further and slower than it should, and that over-performance is the opposite of every other motor report here.
- ActionRefusingDreamers almost never refuse anything, and that is the finding. This database is full of dreamers complying with absurd instructions, accepting impossible situations and answering to wrong names, and an entry for the exception is the right way to end.
- SymbolYour own shadowDistinct from the shadow person in the Bestiary, which is a figure. This is the dreamer's own shadow, and it is one of the most reliable consistency failures a dream produces: wrong direction, wrong shape, delayed, or absent entirely.
- SymbolFootprintsEvidence of a person who is not there, and the reports turn on a single question the dreamer answers without evidence: whose. The certainty arrives complete, as it does throughout this database.
- SymbolDustDust is how a dream says time has passed, and dreamers read it that way immediately. What is worth noticing is the second detail: whether anything has disturbed it, which is the part reports return to.
- SymbolSmokeSmoke is a fire the dreamer cannot find, and the searching is the report. It is also one of the few dream images where smell appears, which is rare enough to be worth noting on its own.
- SymbolGlassGlass does two things in dreams and they are unrelated: it separates without concealing, and it breaks. The separating version is the more distinctive, and dreamers describe being able to see somebody and not reach them.
- SymbolA holeA hole is an absence with edges, and dreams handle it the way they handle every absence: the edges are generated and what is beyond them is not. Dreamers report being unable to see in, and being certain about what is there.
- SymbolA threadThe pulled thread that does not end is a small, common and oddly memorable dream. It is the multiplication finding at the smallest scale: something that should be finite and is not, because nothing is measuring it.
- SymbolA crackCracks are one of the few things dreams reliably show growing, which is unusual: dreams produce states far more readily than transitions, and a spreading crack is a transition being watched.