I'm not sure but I think everybody remembers dreams a little differently. I've asked around over the years, you see. But then, it could just be that people dream differently. That might be it too.

I don't expect everybody to dream the same as me, nor do I expect everyone to remember the same as me. Everyone should be grateful most of the time that they don't THINK the same as me.

But what about these dreams of mine, then? Let's just say they've been varied. In dreams I've met the recently deceased in vivid experiential moralistic tapestries, and confronted major issues only my subconsciouswas was willing to admit and awoken disquiet, and met a succubus who flew at a suspended me inside of sacred chains of caves in the mountains in the winter in New Mexico, and I met the devil once and touched his folded cheesey skin but don't tell Cotton Mather. I dreamed I smoked pot and got stoned. I dreamed I dropped acid and got off: and then woke up tripping in the middle of the night. I've dreamed of One in Distress and found the Dream was True. I've dreamed of places that I've never been and then gone there, later; and didn't even have a deja vu.

I've dreamed I could play guitar so well and that I could speak and understand French SO WELL and I really did understand it in that dream because the whole dream was in French. I understood it for a second on awakening too but then it faded.

Sacre bleu!

It's those fading recollections of dreams in the morning or anytime upon awakening that interest me.

Once I asked a friend if they were ever just sitting, thinking and the sharp recollection of a dream returned for one brief second into consciousness like a shadow passing briefly across the mind, but in preternatural clarity. And of, say a dream that one had dreamed a YEAR before and had not remembered but only in that brief second upon awakening was then forgotten lost submerged into the depths of black forgetfulness. And then a year later it just FLASHES across the mind and is remembered and you say "Oh. THAT dream." (To yourself and no one else for who could understand?)

I asked someone if that had ever happened to them once and they said, "No." And so I never really asked again. Except as I am asking now.

These are not recurring dreams as I have had of sand dunes and tsunamis or of flying here and there so proud. These might be considered "resurfacing" dreams, but here's the rub and that's that everytime an image of these dreams comes back it is identical it is like a stamp a key an imprint a slice of the dreamtime. And I can see a signature image in my mind's eye and I can smell smells in my mind's nose It's all there again and then it fades and goes so fast away.

I don't know about this now and I am afraid that perhaps if I mention these resurfacing slices, if I put them down on paper then they'll never again return to me in those aetherial realms within which they make themselves known to me. Signature places and feelings hidden deep within and known only to me. But perhaps not for what if they were also known to others and that these places that fade faster than dew from the mind could borrow some greater affirmation or reality in the having been visited by more than only me?

So perhaps it's worth it to expose one or two, and if it breaks their spells then maybe I will find some new place to revisit in their stead.

I do say place because it seems these fleeting slices that flash bright and clear across the parabolic dish of Mind's camera obscura are more slices of dreamspace than any other thing. Not story lines or faces though I wish they were sometimes but places strange and easily forgotten but so unique most of the time.

I've visted these places in my dreams too, again and again, but as unremebered recurring dreams that I come back to, and then, in the dream I say or think, "Oh, THIS dream."

And I know I've been there before but never yet in waking hours has the image crossed my mind to be remembered and I know it. These then are the unremembered recurring dreams that lodge only in the subconscious and retreat to darkness long before the eyes open and the mind awakes. These remain hidden.

I often dream of architecture: buildings, stairwells, and facades. And streets and other works of man.

Today a slice of dreamspace crossed my mind from a dream dreamed who knows when at first but I think it was long ago. So too I think this slice has flashed my way before.

Do these places exist in real space at all or in another space just as real but someplace else inaccessible to us as Tir nan Og?

If so the closest to it might be New Orleans or perhaps in South America somewhere. It is a place of broad cobblestone avenues with sidewalks and collonnades of trees that overhang shallow channels and reflect in pools defined in concrete old and stained and I would say the trees are kempt but wilding underlain by grasses grown thinly-spaced but tall from lack of cutting. Along these avenues the standing cenotaphs above-ground tombs not round Etruscan-style but blocky square but unadorned at least not garishly like those in Crescent City. But were those tombs just shadows of sagging dingy three-storey white clapboard variety stores like the kind you used to see with metal signs in windows selling Nesbit's Orange or ancient root beer brands? And it was early dusk not twilight yet and a mood of revelry was building in the crowd a loose and dusky lot. And I knew there would be peepers soon from out those shallow man-mades streams.

I can't remember if I wished for fireflies: the image faded far too quickly.

-- Anonymous, September 20, 2002