Dream Interpretation 28

DREAM 28

23 January 2012

Following the WBTB technique, I felt very awake and found it quite difficult to fall back asleep. This was compounded by the fact that once the dog realised I was awake, he wanted to get into bed with me for a cuddle and kept laying on my MP3 player and disturbing my attempts to meditate. When I eventually did drift off to sleep, I had one short, very vivid dream.

Lucid dreaming experiments/techniques 

• Mental/training – MILD technique (no binaural beats before sleep); WBTB (Wake-Back-to-Bed) technique (woke after 5 hours of delta sleep; remained awake for 1 hour, then returned to MILD technique/sleep)
• Binaural beats through headphones following WBTB technique – 20 minutes of alpha (I felt very awake during the WBTB technique in the morning) and 1 hour of theta/gamma mix – specifically a looped track I prepared, using Conscious Release - Solfeggio & binaural beats (theta & gamma), performed by Jandy Rainbow aka Jezebel Decibel
• LDS –high strength cod liver oil enriched with omega 3, 6 & 9 (3,600 mg); multivitamins A – Z with evening meal; sea kelp (90 mg); CoEnzyme Q-10 (150 mg); Gingko Biloba (120 mg); and Vitamin B Complex. No 5-HTP (experimenting without to test improvement in dream recall) 

Potential triggers/’day residue’   

• The evening before this dream, my friends and I were discussing eating pork (I don’t eat it) and the boys began singing a song about ‘swine meat’
• I drink a lot of coffee
• I made contact with an old friend and arranged to meet when I visit my old hometown – he has asthma; additionally I used to use a peak flow meter when as a result of now-outgrown childhood asthma
• I had been thinking recently that there could be a small, yet viable business opportunity in importing fresh seafood daily from my old hometown to London businesses during the summer months
• The night before this dream I was explaining to someone how to avoid paying extortionate rates on loans you can no longer afford and how to protect income from bailiffs/seizure by creditors. I asked a friend (jokingly) if he was secretly working for a particular bank branch (as I was of course, informing him of how to avoid paying a substantial loan back at the agreed rate). When I was a child, I won a competition organised by this bank and won a china piggy bank as part of the prize. Downstairs in the house I currently live in, in London, there is a similar version of the piggy bank, although I do not recall actually ‘seeing’ it just before this dream as I rarely use the lounge
• The night before this dream, I viewed the page on this Blog which is illustrated with two Salvador Dali images (the two linked ‘Persistence of Memory’ paintings) – and thought about Dali (I was trying to decide whether I would rather be responsible for the artistic output of Dali or Picasso – I chose Picasso)

Main dream environment(s) 

• (Scene 1):

A very cluttered, dark room filled with strange ornaments and curiosities on shelves – like the shop Alice enters in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There (1871) - in the chapter entitled Wool and Water.

Illustration of Alice in the curisosity shop in Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There (1871) by John Tenniel

Characters 
(Scene 1):

• Myself (I did not see myself)
• A disconnected voice – I did not see who it belonged to, but it was an adult female voice

Dream narrative

• (Scene 1):

I was in an old curiosity shop (this is the best description I can come up with – see the description above). The first item I saw was a piece of medical equipment – white and pale yellow, consisting of two clear measuring cylinders inscribed with numerical measurement, mounted beside one another – vaguely reminiscent of ‘peak flow metres’ used to test the power of someone’s exhaled breath, for example in asthma sufferers. There were round smiley faces – like those associated with Acid House culture (i.e. similar to pills) falling down the two cylinders – rolling like marbles, but on the exterior - not actually inside -  of the cylinders. I walked to the left and saw a dark wooden table. On it were several objects, which seemed to be made from varnished china. There was a lobster telephone (see picture & caption below), but with an animated face, and a square-shaped pink piggy bank. I thought it odd that every item in the shop – all inanimate objects – had facial features. I then heard a voice say this exact phrase: “We have to go to the contact party soon, there’s a coffee orgy for the children”. I woke up, feeling confused. I had been asleep for less than an hour.

Peak flow meter

Smiley face pills

Salvador Dali, Lobster Telephone or 'Aprodisiac Telephone' (1936)

Square piggy bank

Whilst Googling the phrase 'coffee orgy' I came across some images of vintage collectable coffee mugs, designed by Taylor & Ng (in the 1970s - 80s) which have an animal 'orgy' theme. I had never heard of this range, nor the company, prior to my post-dream research. Some of the images are produced below:

Interpretation/analysis  
This was such a strange dream – especially the phrase which I vividly recalled upon waking.