I see by the clock that it's time for the famous Hitchcock train scene on TV tonight. I want to avoid it, but I just can't. Try to slip out, but every door opens on that European train compartment, in black and white. Damn. I'm stuck. Bump into to a man... apologize, "I'm trying to avoid that damn train scene."

He nods. "It's good to go through once, but after that..." Exactly. Then he pulls out his gun. "I do regret this, given your feelings about it." From his air, I expected it. Just can't escape the train scene.

I try to talk him out of it--"logically, you have nothing to gain. I'm broke, this isn't a movie, I'm not a spy, and with all these witnesses you'll be caught..." He aims, cocks...

I snatch the gun! Was he really that slow? Or did he LET me take it? Oh. He wants ME to shoot HIM! Wanted to die all along. "Kill me! If you don't, I'll turn into a bird."

So what's so bad about that? I won't shoot him.

Well, he was right. He changes into a pale yellow and blue songbird. Rather pretty. Except for his song--"Just shoot me."

The train becomes a glassy loft. He flutters around, hitting the windows. Trying to escape? I open a window and shoo him out, but he comes back in. Still trying to die, bang his head on a pain pane?

When will he accept that his Hitchcock days are done and his bird life begun?

NEXT DAY

At lunch, on the lawn at Stanford, a songbird comes and sings to me, begging for snacks, but then won't eat. Others come, beg, eat, leave. This one alone stays and stays--while rejecting food. Bizarre.

2020 NOTE

So was the dream predictive? Reverse the time sequence--then the dream looks like a reaction to the waking-world bird. But when the dream comes first, suddenly everyone's terribly skeptical. Trouble is, looking at the thousand OTHER dreams I've had that violate the current scientific paradigm, it's harder for me to dismiss ambiguous ones like this, where the dream, to me, seems to be not literally incorporating a future event but using it to express some idea of its own--just as it would, uncontroversially, if the dream were one night later--after that live bird acted like it was in some early scene of Hitchcock's The Birds.

If I'm right that the dream was simply borrowing that weird bird to say something of its own... WHAT was it saying? All I can see now is: "Your human days are over. Your bird days have begun. But you don't want to face it."

Within months, I had to. In 1983, a flood of more blatant psychic dreams forced me to face that my scientific worldview was inadequate; forced me into shamanism. Whose traditional Siberian symbol is a bird. Soul-flight! Of course I was reluctant to give up my normality--my humanity. For months after this I clung to my old... training.

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