Dream and Interpretation: Silent Observers and Unseen Spaces
By Reuven Kotleras on November 13, 2024
Reuven Kotleras is a profoundly gifted ex-child and polymath. He has published professionally on European political history, Eurasian economic development, epistemology of science, and mathematical logic, among other topics. His skills include decision analysis, organizational design, and strategic foresight. He also is a poet, pianist, runner, and dog-lover.
Dream and Interpretation: Silent Observers and Unseen Spaces
I was in a living-space apartment that had a ceiling like the ceiling in the living room of the house I lived in with my family of origin when I was attending secondary school. There were wide, hollow rafters, and you could hear squirrels when they galloped up and down on top of them or inside them. I had the impression this living space was in Westwood (or Brentwood) in L.A., although I lived in L.A. only for a year and a half in middle school.
I was staying in this living space, which I apparently didn't own and didn't know how I got there or even think about it, and was not bothered about any of that. Apparently I didn't even control who had access to it or could enter or leave. I have a memory of a trace in the dream where some guy entered and left, almost as if I weren't there or anyway not heeding my presence. I didn't object or try to shoo him away our out, it was as if I had been socialized into not having boundaries (which was in fact pathologically true).
Another guy showed up and went into the kitchen, which was at the far end of the apparently one-room apartment that also had a fireplace that worked but was never used. My back was to him when he spoke sharply to me, I turned around saying, “What?!!"
Pause.
“I thought you were eating..."
Pause.
“I'm not eating..."
Then, like a needle across a phonograph record, the scene skipped to a dinner party around a table set a bit high adjacent to the kitchen, like the sink in the kitchen at the first-referenced secondary-school-era house, that separated the kitchen space from the eating nook, and above which table (which was set around a sink, a large counter-top really, but you could pull up chairs to it) were cabinets like those that existed in the secondary-school-era house.
There were three women and maybe three guys other than myself, but the party was not for or about me. In fact none of them seemed to take notice of me. This did not bother me, and I just observed it. I just sat there while they consecutively entered and socialized and sat down and ate, and I ate with them. There was a caesura as if I fell asleep at the eating-table then woke up later with a start just before they were all or almost all getting ready to say goodbye to one another, not to me, and leave.
At the end I was drawing the conclusion that I was being tested, in the sense of being observed for the purpose of drawing up a report. The last guy said something half-comically, half-nervously, to the effect that he thought that I was doing something like that, i.e. drawing up some report; whereupon I looked at him and said, “Ah! YOU'RE the one!!" (i.e. the one who was doing that). He looked away in some nervous discomfiture and I knew, and he knew that I knew, that I was right, that he was drawing up a “report". This didn't bother me; it was just what happened to be the case.
The three women and the other guys had left without even acknowledging my presence, which was interesting since I felt almost not there myself. After the guys left, I found a weird laptop computer that folded up into a mini-batmobile shape, and maybe a few other electronics. I folded the computer up and put it behind the bamboo-wooden curtain that was at the right margin of the room and of the table, and which set off a passageway that led to a doorway surmounted by a single incandescent bulb, which threshold led, I guessed or half-remembered, to an excavated basement-space that must, I guessed again, be radioactive. I had been down there once in the dream before anything else happened, and I think many times before but suffered no ill effects from any radioactivity.
Still, I took the ticking of the Geiger-counterlike batmobile-shaped computer as an admonition to halt further excavation. Yet, whatever I had found down there, whatever I had excavated and unearthed, had only made me stronger. I had transformed it, reconstructing it for my own purposes, and now... now I had no need to go back. I did not have to return to that narrow passageway, descending staircase, and capacious ill-lit basement, not because I feared it, but because I had other resources. I had excavated enough, at least for now. I didn't need to go down again, I had everything I needed right here.
Komentarze