I'm seek a friend at her home--a big co-op house whose layout is like my childhood home. I don't know her housemates. Walk down a long dark hall to my friend's bedroom, on the left at the end. But I get distracted--straight ahead's an open door into another bedroom that three young women share. One climbs out of the top of a bunk bed while the other two get out of the lower bunk. Lovers? They're all near-naked, but hastily pulling on clothes--business clothes. Late for work!

My friend's door is open too, but the room's mostly dark. Heavy blinds over all but one window. Low sun slants in. Empty? No, a lump in the bed. A slender, curving lump with an unmistakable aura: Dawn! Long to join her, but have no right--had a huge crush on her, but haven't seen her in years, and she's sleeping.

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• House, hall, BR with bunks: when I was 3-9 years old, our house looked like this; my sisters shared a room with a bunk bed, where the dream one was.
• Dawn: Dawn Z, a fellow dream artist who I had huge crush on--but she wasn't single, and moved away. I haven't seen her in decades! Why's she here now?
• "When Pigs Fly": A painting by Dawn was on the wall, but I woke unsure what it was. She once painted a pig rising above its barn, so I put that in.
• Girls, mustn't pry: on my way to the library today, I passed two gorgeous teens talking about books. I longed to join them & couldn't. Walked on.
• Came at the wrong time: is the dream not about sex or work at all, but... time? How?

NEXT DAY

Walk to library. Check out their newest manga:

Witch Life in a Micro Room, by Akitaka. Two beginner witches move to the big city and share a tiny apartment and cheap food; each morning, Madge and Ririka climb out of their bunk bed to go find dull, low-paying witch jobs. Their neighbor Aloelle, a third witch, often comes by... Straight out of my dream!

Also, a new volume (#13) of Chihiro Ishizuka's Flying Witch. Three sisters try to sabotage Akane and Makoto's efforts to host a witch-conference in their rural Japanese town--the three want it in their hometown in Norway. They get Akane really drunk. She sleeps it off... sprawled half-naked. Like Dawn in my dream... again.

Witch Life in a Micro Room (v.3)

Flying Witch (v.13)

But this is the real sequence: dream, then manga! Coincidence? Sure, if it happened now and then. But I've had thousands like this! Nor is it just me; nearly all serious dreamworkers (meaning those logging years of dreams, and willing to look fairly at the sources of their imagery) have at least some they consider predictive or telepathic. And not just in life-and-death crises! Whatever the borrowing of next-day imagery is, it's frequent, ordinary, even ubiquitous--so trivial we mostly overlook it, as JW Dunne's experiments revealed a century ago. The waking mind's "now" spans around half a second, but the dreaming mind's "now" spans more like half a week.

Note how the dream tried to flag its temporal oddity, to get me to pay attention to timing: "I came at the wrong time." This isn't the most explicit, but I think it's still an example of a self-flagging dream--a dream sensing oddness and trying to alert the conscious to the source. (Here it's time, but there's no reason it has to be limited to that.) Quite aside from any arguments about ESP, self-flagging dreams of any kind suggest a lot more self-awareness in the dream-composing mind than most researchers have allowed.

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