Into the Sleeping Skull

"Beautiful! Beautiful! Only the marvelous is beautiful!" – André Breton, The Surrealist Manifesto

I saw the fire. I saw it before it happened. The exact scene. It might have been colored by the perceptual lens of my subconscious mind. At any rate, I saw it, amazingly enough, not a few weeks before it occurred. In the cosmic lens, the wireless internet of my sleeping skull.

Most don't know that I do nearly everything based on dreams—at least from a creative aspect. Yesterday, however, when my stove caught fire by accident (don't ask), and my mother, who was over to help me clear some stuff out, was beating it with a towel trying to put it out, I had to stop her from doing it while I called 911. I realized I had previously dreamed the EXACT same images a few days beforehand. Thankfully, my neighbors came to the rescue before the fire department got there, and did what I thought would just make a fire on the stove worse—they poured hot coffee on it and put it out. No damage, thank God, and no one hurt, and the apartment was saved.

Ironically, I was talking with Dan, who no longer works in this building, just recently about how I was afraid to use my ITC "Ghost Box" device because of the poltergeist effects I've experienced—I was terrified the poltergeist, which has operated electrical devices in my home and thrown items from shelves occasionally, would start a fire, as poltergeists are sometimes known to do. (Another reason is the spate of strange and disturbing phone calls that follow in the wake of my attempts to use it. Since I work on the telephone, and they are quite unnerving, I can hardly afford to take the risk of using it again. Thus, it sits in the drawer, unloved, and relatively harmless, I believe.)

Consciousness is a continuum, and it is often that I have seen dream images before seeing the same images in the "real world." (For instance, seeing a celebrity suddenly appear in my dream, and then having the same celebrity be the first face I see when I log on in the morning.) Currently, I'm concerned about a dream of a man in a tipped-over truck, who is trapped inside. An old man with white hair and a beard, who gave his name before the accident, staring directly at me, as "Barnabus Whittington." All very curious.

The dream images seem to emerge from the realm of ever-shifting "possibility," before they concretize in what we perceive as "reality." You could call this the interim plane, or Astral Plane perhaps, and it seems to be the realm between the perceptual, physical world, and the Universal Mind. Again, curiouser and curiouser.

Across the board, I attempt to utilize the information given to me in dreams, in waking life. If I dream the title of a book or movie, I immediately, upon awakening, watch the film or later seek out the book (if I already own it, I read from it, beforehand asking what is pertinent in the book that "It" wants me to read and consider).

Dream dictionaries are of great assistance and importance, and I've republished old dream dictionaries for sale. One passage that has always haunted me is from a random dream dictionary (but it has been repeated in others): "To see the dead in a dream portends misfortune. If they speak with you, however, PREPARE TO DIE." How comforting. The dead frequently appear in my dreams, and they often speak to me. Curiouser still.

I cannot explain the fact of precognitive dreams. I can tell you that, stripped of context, the dream imagery does not "make sense" until one stumbles upon the exact set of circumstances calculated to bring about the particular, peculiar, and seemingly often nonsensical juxtaposition of incongruent images that manifest in the waking state of consciousness (which, I would argue, is simply another permutation of the dream).

André Breton, in The Surrealist Manifesto (another document I peddle), laments the "death of the dream" in the adult stage of life, romanticizing the free interplay of fantasy and "reality" experienced by a child. He states, baldly (he states much inscrutably): "Only the marvelous is beautiful!" Very true. If anything at all can be said to be true in point of fact. (But maybe there are no real facts either, only perceptual observations and self-imposed delusions.) Breton, who self-described how he was, at one point, totally devoted to Freud, thought the dream the gateway to understanding psychoanalytic processes and further proclaimed that Surrealism would "lead you to death, which is a secret society." More curious still.

At any rate, I saw the fire. Or the fire saw me. Or one agreed upon the other, at the behest of The Other, which may simply be the self, the I, or The EYE.

Take your pick.

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