My strange recurring dream element (the cipher note), and helping a friend to move

BLOT: (16 May 2011 - 03:23:49 AM)

My strange recurring dream element (the cipher note), and helping a friend to move

My dreams have picked up a recurring element, which is rare (but not unheard of) for me. A lot of my dreams have motifs, yes, and share broad concepts but only once or twice would I say I've had what others call recurring dreams. I do not even really remember the previous ones, just remember the idea of thinking about them, so they may have only been semi-recurring (close, but not exactly the same) elements.

These past few nights, though, have had definite recurring elements. Well, an element. A note. On a small piece of paper. About a quarter of a standard 8.5"x11" page in size. The entire note is innocuous. Something about people doing this or that and then they want to bring this and be sure to include this or that. The first line is always the weird one, because it starts out with something like, "He would be better known as reminivi." The r-word being bolded and underlined, giving the whole thing a typed element (and while it doesn't strike the memory as being particularly typed, considering the old-school typewriter style of that word, it must have been). I say "r-word", because while "reminivi" was one word that showed up, other versions of the note have had other words. "Reminiscence" was one, others I can't quite recall.

In the dreams, the note shows up and ends up taking over the dream. I become aware that there is some hidden message (for some reason, the word "include" sticks out as being particularly useful for solving it) and start to worry about it. Now, dream-text tends to fall into one of two different sorts. Either it is a big, conceptual word like "EXIT" or "DANGER" that you know as much by the idea of it as by the letters, or they are a jumble of loose, unfulfilled concepts and trying to focus on them causes them to swirl about and change. At least over time. I've had dreams where I can read something once, but rarely more than once. Mix those two elements together, and you get why this note is so annoying. It has roughly the same words (and the first line seems to stay the same with the exception of the one word) but the actual words swirl about over time.

I get quite worked up and eventually it wakes me up. Which is why I remember seeing this note at least a half-dozen times over the past three nights. I took a long nap this afternoon, and there was no note then, so maybe it has stopped? I have no idea.

Enough about dreams, on to the waking world. Saturday Sarah and I helped Mandi and Jon move. At least partially. We showed up about 2pm, helped cart a couple of U-haul loads of heavy-ish stuff and some boxes to their new place, and then left as it came down to more and more small stuff that had to be packed and sorted. Unfortunately, my crap knee (the left one) and Sarah's crap wrist (the right one) meant we had to tip-toe around certain conditions—after about ten trips up and down their stairs, I had to stop and just wait at the bottom to help pack the truck and such—but we were luckily able to do quite a bit unloading at the new place because the lack of stairs meant I could carry heavy stuff and Sarah could focus on getting smaller items moved. Took us something like an hour and a half to pack the second U-Haul and only about fifteen or twenty minutes to unpack it. It was wondrous.

After that, went over to Katie and Jason's and watched a documentary on Tesla (most of the stuff I knew, though there were bits new to me) and some YouTube videos. They had originally planned to go to Brewfest but after we talked and Sarah and I couldn't go (we really couldn't justify spending $80 to mash through crowds for three or four hours only to come away with about half a six pack worth of beer (each five to fifteen minute line nets you 1/6 a beer, meaning you will average about 1 to maybe 2 "beers" per hour, if you are lucky)); Katie called back and said we'd have a mini-Brewfest of our own, which was mostly the bit above. Sarah and I were too tired to do too much and it was nice to go for the more relaxed atmosphere than anything too boisterous.

We did practically nothing all day. Didn't even really get up, much less out, until the afternoon. Going out, we only ran a small bank of errands—including getting another small batch of groceries that the power-outage had caused us to lose—before coming back and then cooking dinner and loafing. Now I'm about to go to bed, and see if I dream of weird notes, again.

Dreams, Me in 2011

OTHER BLOTS THIS MONTH: May 2011