Atlantis, dreaming

honestly, this is one of the most beautiful dreams I've ever dreamt. I don't think my words will ever match up to it, so here's a clumsy, clumsy attempt to transcribe it (will probably rewrite it later :P):

26/6

before: 
volcano. a thatched wooden hut of two stories perched over grassy mountain-hills. granting favours to people, an assistant to a witch, but with fairy wings, bound by a kind of servitude. people come with their problems, and we help them solve them.
(a waterfall in an earthy landscape. a tourist, somehow, marveling at the way water breaks into the ground in white explosions.
a boy slips (some lawsuit?))
below the witch's hut, a boy tells me he has never seen a shooting star, and hence cannot draw it. I tell him not to be ridiculous- doesn't he have an imagination?  I point to his back- look! a star is erupting already! we turn around, and sure enough, the sky erupts with the flames of stars, lighting the sky in fiery explosions. it turns out, however, that these are the flames of a volcano.
the sky swells with volcanic fire till the coal fiery clouds engulf the roof of the sky, sweeping towards our little thatched hut that lies on stilts over the hill. we grapple the soil with desperate fingers, climbing our way towards the hut. we manage to get away with a few possessions, albeit closely. 

after:
a carnival. park of some kind under the moonlight. the streets are painted a ghostly halo, and all is brushed in shades of silver. there is also a multiple-storied shopping centre with banisters of glass. a luminous halo shrouds everything that strongly reminded me of the short story  "Murder Mysteries" by Neil Gaiman...
an exhibit:
an enormous glass building that is a tank. it looms over the streets with no end, its belly bulging with huge glassy tanks of water.
numerous pale koi fish swim around in these tanks, their bodies shimmering with a ghostly light. under the moonlight, they look eerily like a procession of silvery ghosts. I grapple for my camera, which isn't present.
(I had a kind of detached lucidness throughout this whole dream.)

later that night: in a stadium. it is night, but the sky harbours cracks of silvery light that pierce the clouds, as though hiding slits of the day. it's one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen.
on the stage, a woman rises. she sings a looping opera that seems to have descended from the heavens. we sing with her, our bodies and voices rising in a crescendo with the flow of the music. It felt like we were a painting of shadowy moonlit shrouds rising and falling to an unearthly tune. it was a most heavenly feeling, and I remember thinking it was the most sublime thing I'd ever experienced, molding into this scene...

later: a lawsuit. no one can hear me. I must, must take a picture of this beautiful scene. I rush around Yanny who is suddenly dressed as a pale, unearthly witch clothed in dark purple velvet and scarlet nails. no one hears me because of the noise that dims over everything in a kind of perpetual radio stutter. I pick a stone and throw it at Yanny in frustration. it bounces off her and breaks the thin glass banister. I am startled, and am shipped by her to the police where I patiently explain it wasn't really my fault. I get let off, I think...

~
Lesson? Read Diana Wynne Jones books before you sleep! XD I was reading "Witch's Business" for comfort, really, and it did deliver such phenomenal dreams! (although dissimilar in content, one has to admit there are layers to her books that betray the eye at first glance)

24/6

before: kinokuniya and Singapore. semi-lucid, I smile to myself: I now have access to all the books in this bookstore in my dreams! I make a note that I will constantly return to this place to devour all the books while I am able to lucidly dream this.
also: humidity. I can feel the touch/taste of the air tingling my skin. everything feels more claustrophobic, immediate. the roads converge together, the buildings clasp the horizon, I can feel the rawness of the bursting sun setting, the fleshy concrete beneath my boots. It feels rawly humid, rawly real... I can smell the hawker's food, nearly taste the South East Asian aroma of strong spices and earthy milk tea. I'm slightly disconcerted upon finding myself here again, and trying to wrestle between feelings of comfort and confusion...

after:
traveling from that Singapore-area to another destination. initially, gripping onto iron handles at the edges of a monorail of which cover refuses to shut, grappling for a hold. getting pushed off onto the railway track.
emerging from the broken railway station to a dirty tiled staircase leading from old multi-storied car parks to areas above. circling my arms to fly over the floors till I reach an open-aired temple with a floor tiled with piercing blue lapis lazuli and fractured marble pillars. the temple looks over a deep volcanic lake of the same piercing blue tucked underneath sparkling mineral hills with oyster mushroom-like houses. a queen emerges, her face a porcelain doll's, her lips painted a quizzical pale pink at the edges and on the top like a geisha's neat lips. up close, I can see clearly she is made of porcelain. she has wide, wide eyes that seem to sparkle as she gazes upon the world with a kind of quirky wonder (I thought of helena bonham carter, for some puzzling reason :D).  she approaches me, her eyes pregnant with worry. "I am dying," she tells me. "I don't look it, but I'm deathly sick." She is also amused by my appearance, and laughs, teasing initially me for being such a dwarf next to her (she is a giant in her world). I perch on a broomstick that is like a mushroom cloud, gently breathing in the beautiful landscape, and memorising each and every aspect of it...

~

Mah, it was really, really gorgeous! If I had brilliant coloured paints like
theirea , I would be off painting this right about now :D. Hee...
The fact it was lucid just made it doubly wonderful!!

I also got the distinct impression my dreams were gently admonishing me for being too lazy of late to record them. I distinctively felt a pervading, suspended self in the atmosphere was trying to bring me back to myself (by letting me dream lucid and hence, semi-aware with memory and senses in-tact) so I'd just stop working for a moment and get back to the source of my artistic fertility. it's awesome, yes yes :3

20/5
awakened by a bristly kiss, rough on my neck like a sore. A stranger, but familiar
hands. I tumble out of bed, into a room of red walls and white sheets. Messy brown
hair, languid eyes, arm twined around neck (supposedly divine). Yet cold.
A happenstance body, a stranger's perchance kisses. Squirming out of dream-folds,
tumbling, tumbling onto the hard floor of reality. In the shape of his embrace, a
sleeper suddenly with phantom limbs, sleeping with ghosts, yet never alone.
Even in dreams, I am awake to the bleached light of experience, a heap on the floor
of my sea-bed, skin prickled with the ghost of bitter kisses, like a thread of spider
bites, making me forget- your light, your light- as my body dissolves into the mists
of a memory of you.
I am the eternal sleepwalker. Even in dreams, I cannot sleep, eyes forever turned
inside out, eyeballs gleaming into the inside of my skull, my animal senses forever
on end, wakeful to my world's reality, trapped in my mind-bubble. Awake, yet
dreaming.

( a disclaimer: don't say I didn't warn you! >_> )

...
the first dream is true. the other is only half true.
they're both, in their own way, little prose poems,
products of a burning need to write, write, etch my existence away...

~
Shrouded in thought-clouds, enthroned by shadow-forests,
she stands before me, her tiger eyes burning with an eternal hunger,
like the first hour of darkness before dawn that stretches for an eternity
without hope, she peers at me, all ash hair and eye-pits
shadow of my soul, over the entrance of a cave clothed in the cobwebs
of a spiral thread, knitted through with needles the size of collar-bones.

Here's a secret: Malaysia is Singapore's shadow. That's why I dream of her as a demon,
shrouded, clothed, in the dense forests of her soul.

~
15/5
with Calista. midnight woods. first time dreaming of my (Canadian) house. hiding in
the bushes, fed by forest fears, dragged into the dense undergrowth by phantoms. "The spirits
will see us," she tells me " they're after me here." That is her ghost.As for me,  I'm running away
from a man who lurks in my house. he stalks me with the intensity of a tiger. He is
Malay, I think. a product of the damp, tropical forest. Followed me on a bicycle, extorting
me as I walked up the steps with malicious taunts, then snuck cunningly into my house
when we opened the door. Yanny, selfishly, thought he was after her. But I never doubt
he was my unwanted stalker. He delivers two metal mugs with bleeding hearts to the door.
They pour over with a transparent liquid that sparkles under the moonlight, and gleams
off the metal. It looks strangely like unicorn blood. They're our hearts- I know this with
the certainty of my own heart. My father's, Yanny's and mine. My father grimaces, isn't that
gruesome? I shrug, thinking it a strangely aesthetically pleasing gift, despite the
circumstances. It's good he has a sense of style, I say. At least he didn't destroy my
room. He could have gotten into my books. Perhaps he was intimidated by the messiness,
I laugh to myself, and settled with the hearts instead.
Running away- yes- into the bushes  by the front door on the elevated hill of my
house. Night. Calista and I. At the fork, I see my man staring at me from the huge
windows of my house like a wild animal, eyes gleaming like a wolf's in his native woods.
I see now he has cropped coal hair that falls to his chin, grey skin and the eyes of a Malayan
tiger. I describe him to Calista. We run to the woods, where I roller blade into the sky, flying
effortlessly. The ground falls from me like a glittering dram, the street lamps and silent
houses no longer an immediate reality of mine. If I fly high enough, I think, I am safe. As for
Calista, she cycles, sticking to the shadows. That's her way of keeping out of view. After
awhile, Ms Siti appears with my parents- the search party. She nods, approvingly. That is
smart, she says. Fly high, and you're safe.

~
shadow-swollen eyes dripping with newly grown epiphanies,
fear bleeding from fingers, convulsing her body with
each pulse of a worn heart that beats through its cage with
the inevitability of a time bomb
she shakes, a tremulous quake of a soul, limbs suspended
and shivering from the realisation that life dangles on a thread,
tied from her heart to the demon-world's. Unbreakable, except
in death.

~
16/5
Last night, I dreamt of a man who had the shoulders of Thor: heavy with
the load of the thundering heavens. His soul was knitted with mine through
a spider thread, not by my will. He held me to him like a possession, and I hated
him with the hate one has for a captor who clings onto you with his life- his subsistence;
eagle-claws searing my soul.
We sat in a bathtub dressed in our native skins, me staring at him with cat eyes that
bled with the intensity of my finger-clawed frustration. Then, suddenly, he shrank
before me. This Norse God of a man, shrank into a shadow of his bulk, skin collapsing
into bones that crumpled into a carcass, face suddenly a caricature of a man, shred
like a snakeskin a foot from my feet.  And I realised a truth: that was all he was all
along. Not an ever-present reality that had gaped at me like creation's smiling
monster- the gun that I thought would inevitably shoot through my soul- but a
phantom soul, substanceless without my will.
And I laughed with glee as the ghost strings that had straddled my heart blew away with the
winds of my laughter, out the bathroom and through the windows of the world.

6/4
Over fields lit by an orange tinted glow, mystics perform an ancient ritual. One ends up flying up cross-legged over the fields. I am floating suspended over the fields, and the sight of him makes me very uneasy for some reason. He comes constantly towards me, nonetheless, while I float around by moving the air, trying to get away but always moving closer. I have become part of the ritual. He tells me that in order for me to fly better, I have to spread three fingers out and divide the air like a top. He says this while his eyes and legs are crossed.
Back at his hut (also lit by an orange-reddish glow, and Turkish carpets), he lets me read an ancient book on flying rituals on his bed, aside a book of Mucha art (o_o). The book is huge but thin, with a reddish worn cover. 

...

In an apartment, with the friend who owns it. She talks. The fire on the stove turns on, and dances around in the figures of people. Each flame is a person. One steps gingerly out and rubs his sides, walking towards the table. My friend cries out that he will die outside the stove, and the only way to save him would be to pour water over him. This makes sense to me at the time...

2/4
With Jennifer, who is under my care. Train- massive, steel. Sunlight filters through the windows so beautifully. I wrap an arm around her casually and we sleep an easy sleep under the daylight. We awake in a taxi-driver's cab, unsure as to what is happening. Outside, a street in the heartlands with soaring bridges, and white concrete flats littering the landscape. 
We swerve into a neighbourhood that looks like the sea has overtaken it. White, decaying HDB apartments are encrusted with shells, crustaceans: fragments of the sea. Alleys swarm with homeless men, aside rubbish dumps and other detritus. Everything is decorated like a decrepit, forsaken South-East Asian Atlantis. The characteristics of the heartlands run rampant among the seaweed mildew- its sweaty labourers, the rickshaws... Occasionally, there is a brightly coloured building in pastel shades of rainbow...
Buildings had a peculiar beauty. I remember wishing I had brought my camera. Instead, I recorded names.
Back home (in my old house), I quarrel with the taxi driver, meet laoshi, among other things...

5/4
School. A subversion of space. Reds and wood. Spiral staircases that leap up and out.
tilted boards- you slip down the floor and out the classroom. Tables placed like  pieces on a tilted chessboard. The chance of falling is perpetual. The ceilings follow a kind of strange logic- they aren't there, but they are in certain areas. All is a bit like a surrealist painting, but with a rather modish style...  
Gradually, as I change, the landscape melts into my old school. The inversion becomes of time- William is there, acting as a kind of older guardian.

Recently, old dreams have been resurfacing. Here is one:

?
A swimmning pool that is the sea. Within it, whales and dolphins swim among fishes. It seems a travesty to contain such huge creatures in such a small space.
The swimming pool is on the deck of my uncle's yacht. The interior of the yacht is deep mahogany, with vaulted ceilings and sweeping wooden spiral staircases. Red turkish carpets cover the floor. This massive interior is contained inside the yacht in a strange inversion of space...

16/2
a very tall landscape. a black lake sweeps below where bird?masked strangers row canoes. above, masks and mirrors dangle down, suspended by strings. I am not supposed to look at the masks- which are more kabuki than venetian- directly more than once- they have some kind of enchantment. I memorise the landscape before 'sailing' forth eyes closed. I move by manipulating the air around me.
a 2nd rectangular room, with no floors. the walls sweep high, white, and are adorned on all sides by huge portraits. at the end, there is a portrait of a girl wearing red shoes. I open the secret hatch by the picture and enter. A riddle- how do you fill a basket with holes full of water? I solve it by putting wet shirts inside (the landscape molds itself to fit my needs), and escape to a more industrial, Victorian reality.
A sea portion- I don't really remember what happened...

(the 2 segments are actually the final two segments. The whole dream was a beautiful, intricate puzzle of which I had to solve...)

~
18/2
by night, swimming in a shallow dark pool under moonlight outside my old house. The water only reaches my shoulders. Daylight arrives quickly without a sunrise, and I see a flock of beautiful birds fly over- birds of paradise flying with their crowns in full glory next to dark, sweeping swallows (my Chinese name means "swallow"). I point them out to my older brother. Upon entering my house, I find the grounds are full of orange turkey heads.
Looking for the body of Ida? in a dark swamp. Finally uncovering the bones and fighting with the skeleton...

a harbour by the sea, its piers lit by a faint glow of a dying sun. all is in shades of gold, orange and faded blue. a flock of birds, white doves highlighted with/licked by a white glow, like an oil painting. they emanate auras of rainbows.
(Death Sandman short story? do they foreshadow death?)
all around, everything is bathed in the gold of sunsets. I ask people if they see the rainbows- they can't.
Kittens, and a few cats. They can talk. A baby kitten asks me for its mummy. Its aura, too, is a rainbow glow.  It has a pursed mouth like a bottle.it rolls on its belly. there is something very beautiful about its little haloed body on the sunset-painted pavement. I take out my camera and photograph it.

The glow dims gradually as the shadows pass (into a night?).

a dragon haunts my school/house. a massive chinese dragon that curls its body around the many stories of white,
decrepit flats (again, rounded into a circle and closed in upon itself). it has huge, glaring jade-eyes and a mouth that leers into a twisted grin.
its iridescent colours of red, blue and green make a bold contrast against the pale concrete.
My grandma prays to god, and it disappears to her. it is still there, though. I have to get rid of it. It's a parasite in my world.

A second monster- traveling in a blue car to a second house. this one is frustrating, and may not look human. Can't remember its
name. I'm also supposed to destroy it. (I am some queer kind of exorcist?)

on the way to the third house: riding a motorcycle through damp fields with worn-out fences and washed out skies. some boys are playing football. I ride my machine recklessly, nearly knocking into a couple. 
my destination is a castle-like house overgrown with ivy. a third monster lives there.
I knock on the door, and an old lady with black, curly hair greets me. I remember being very much relieved she is- to all appearances, anyway- human. she ushers me into rooms that are painted an odd white. from the door, a path of wet puddles mark the floor to the bed, where a toy baby cries out its frustration in its crib. it's made of silicone, but nonetheless has all the attributes of a real baby. the strange alien lady sings "oh, lovely, don't cry, little baby" (or something along those lines) to soothe the baby.

I wake up out of the sheer weirdness of it all.

~
Funnily, all the imagery in this specific dream was derived from some point in real life :D. I find it amusing how dreams come up with such queer permutations of reality, making even the mundane exquisitely queer...

Something older...

1/11
Film-like: twisted oak in a classroom. The classroom is old, the desks are in neat rows, the air humid with the grating choir of wooden floorboards. Ivy creeps unrurily all about the floor. Emptied of the laughter of children, the classroom contains a sacred, still kind of silence. The silence of the woods. The oak is beautiful, so beautiful and so old. His arms pierce the rooftops, and below, the rotting wooden floorboards. The tree is in agony, I can feel it. I am doing a documentary about this. The oak's tragedy of getting trapped in a confined space- the whole internal monologue.
-

Strange fact: a few weeks after this dream, I found this. Peculiar?

6/1/09

An assassin dream. Through airports unseen, a chase. I am running away from a country. Someone tells me he/she knows a secret passageway for us to flee. it is behind a stairwell, I run and and run and run. at the end of the staircase, a betrayal. the explanation flashes through my eyes. it hurts in a way I can't understand.

An old bus rattling through humid, rainy landscapes. It is going to my old estate, but steers and passes into an area grey with mildew and damp fields. Somewhere, there is a stable. A dirty animal farm with owls peaking out of barn windows, and huge ugly boars with strange markings. An animal farm like a deep sore; an infection on the hillside...
Steffie, an old old friend. She shows me the deep, long scars on her legs. We talk of things I can't remember.

Under a stand near one of these fields, I can smell the rain. The air is cool on my skin. Everything is real real real. There is a dog beside me. A seeing eye dog. I think I am supposed to be blind, but I can see.

A chase, again. This time I can feel the presence of my pursuers, but I do not remember their faces. I run through moist grass laden with the occasional huge, encompassing tree. They circle around me, and I decide to let my dog go. I fly up the trees. Somehow, the knowledge of flying is something innate. It seems natural, like swimming. You push the air up around you and fly. It's so simple.

Another pursuit. This time I can see them, and the tables have turned- I will trap them myself. 3 cops/criminals. Men. I lure them by their greed with promises to an old house filled with many, many rooms. It smells of old wood and tea bags. One of the rooms is just filled with shelves and shelves of rotting books. I push the books down, and ask them to do so, too. "You try. On the other side is Grandmother's house," I tell them. Everything smells of must and mildew. The comforting sting of old, moist walls...
A room with a slopping roof full of beams the colour of deep wood. I cup the face of one, smiling a cat's grin...
I really wanted to remember the rest of it, because I myself was quite curious as to how I would trap them XD. But some annoying person woke me up...