1: MUCHA'S JOKE

There's a fey trolley line whose tracks evaporate, then reappear. No one understands what causes this cycle. When the rails are visible, they're weirdly compelling--luring you elsewhere. You just have to catch the ghost trolley, and find where the silver line takes you. You will--the hollow hills. And then car and track evaporate, stranding you there--beyond the world you know.

Art Nouveau master Alphonse Mucha designed this track in 1910, as a practical joke about gender "training"--taking respectable men and women out of their accustomed roles. He assumed the victims of his prank would hike back out, changed a bit, in a few days. Weeks, at most.

No. No one lured into the other world ever came out. They've been trapped there for 75 years! Built shacks, grew gardens, started families. A whole village of mortals, cut off.

I read Mucha's notes, scrawled in tiny Chinese characters. They say that to break the spell keeping their village on the other side, you need "big female" (maybe short for "adult woman") and "yuan" (garden or meeting or money--unclear) and "tuán", group. I think he means a team of witches or psychics. So Mucha himself thought if anyone got stuck, a lone guide wouldn't be enough to lead them out.

But how to assemble a team? I live in suburbia. Not many shamans in...

2: BLIND HACKER

Put computers on it, searching through databases for psychics. I'm helped by a computer genius who's blind--or may just be pretending. Or is she just great at compensating via telepathy--peering through others' eyes? If so, she'd be a candidate for the team herself. But will she admit to her second sight?

Our maybe-blind maybe-telepathic hacker says she wants a man, but all the singles she's met feel wrong. I say "No wonder, you're gifted, and there aren't many single gifted men available--many have younger women who aren't necessarily gifted--it's more socially accepted! And many of the rest are recluses or driven types who don't date."

Hmm. Off in their heads, in another world? Like those victims of Mucha's joke.

3: ANDROID COLLEAGUES

At a work-party I describe one dull co-worker as "mechanical"--reliable but uninspired. Then realize some of my co-workers ARE androids, and I don't want to insult them! Just as imaginative as humans. Some humans working with androids treat them like slaves, some like servants, some like equals--colleagues.

4: THE THIRD ELEMENT

I attend an android funeral. Two old enemies come together, reconciled by the death, to say the eulogy. They chant the closing benediction together: "Matter and energy end; but the third element lasts."

It's not the place or time to ask them about robot religion. But I want to know: what's the third element?

5: LEMON CRASHES

The blind telepath programs an experimental computer. It's a rainbow tube some 80 cm long and 5-10 wide; touch makes colors flow through it. Blue, wine, black, sober green, brown. I ask "Can you get yellow and chartreuse?" She struggles with yellow. I reprogram it a bit and come closer, but the equation for balancing red-green-blue must hide some ratio of two phosphors; when I demand lemon, blue drops to zero and the program divides by zero--and can't.

Mustard or chartreuse, yes, but pure lemon-yellow? It crashes the system.

6: LOOFAH HELIX

I picture myself in a drowned stone tower flooded with warm water, drifting down a spiral stair. The purpose of my dive is to scrape my skin clean on the stone walls and steps, rough as loofah sponges. Controls and valves are up top, by the Artichoke Fountain, where outsiders to the helix can mess with flow and temperature. So I'm wary, expect whimsical changes. Though... it takes a long time to change a big mass of water. Thermal anchor!

Just picturing this hundred-ton helix, it turns real; I find myself deep underwater (though the stair goes deeper still: spirals on down into blue abyss). I must swim back up the helix to air, on one breath. Green light from the surface grows brighter. I blow bubbles, swim up through warm water toward golden light... but will I make it?

Still rising toward the light, I wake.

41 YEARS LATER

I still find this dream-cluster rich but baffling. I do see all-night themes--the Third Element at the android funeral, then the calculations inside that tubular computer trying to produce lemon yellow out of three phosphors... then I'm apparently inside that tubular structure, in the spiral-stair tower, again seeking luminous yellow-green, as I swim upward through two elements, water and stone, toward a Third Element, air.

But basically, I don't understand it. Still, what if understanding wasn't the point?

Years after this dream image, I designed The Coil--a tubular/helical chromatic piano with rainbow keys (needed to orient you), remarkably like the tubular computer/spiral stair here. By then I'd forgotten these dreams, but when I transcribed my old journals and read this... I wondered if it was an engineering prompt.

If so, pretty long-term. In 1985 I was sick, exhausted and broke, with no resources to design or build anything. It took over ten years of slow swimming upward before I got my head above water, and had the energy to make even mock-ups of the Coil. I never built a working model--fitting the electronics into a small device was far beyond my fabrication skills. Still is.

The Coil wasn't my only "nondream" project that turned out, when I transcribed my journals, to have been prefigured years earlier in dreams. I thought Planetocopia was a purely nondream project till I reread my dream-journals from the 1980s and 90s, and found multiple dreams prompting it too (and in much more detail) up to 13 years before!

With thousands of dreams it's impossible to keep track of all the ideas they propose. Consciously, at least. But the prodding doesn't have to be understood consciously to get you moving, either. Once you reach the surface and can breathe.

World Dream Bank homepage - Art gallery - New stuff - Introductory sampler, best dreams, best art - On dreamwork - Books
Indexes: Subject - Author - Date - Names - Places - Art media/styles
Titles: A - B - C - D - E - F - G - H - IJ - KL - M - NO - PQ - R - Sa-Sk - Sl-Sz - T - UV - WXYZ
Email: wdreamb@yahoo.com - Catalog of art, books, CDs - Behind the Curtain: FAQs, bio, site map - Kindred sites