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I am of the opinion that if one wants to plot trends in the public psyche, the unusual (to me) occurrence of UFO related dreams gives an incomplete picture. It seems better to examine a series of dreams for recurring patterns. One may never have the same dream twice, but upon examination of my dreams for a few months it became quite clear what themes were being represented.
In correspondence with Robert Larson of The Excluded Middle, I expressed this sentiment and related three recurring themes which readily sprang to mind. As I recall, these themes were found during my teen years and persisted well into adulthood. Occasionally they recur even today. They are drained lakebeds, pending tornadoes, and finding rare coins. To my surprise, Robert replied that three of his most common themes were ominously overflowing lakes, pending earthquakes (he lives in California, whereas I grew up in the midwest), and finding precious gems. A direct hit, it would seem. As I examined myself and my dreams further, several other themes were recalled. I’d like to challenge Robert Larson, Greg Bishop, Peter Stenshoel, and Jeffery Lewis, all of whose dreams have appeared in these pages, to do likewise. The results would surely be interesting.
The “finding of rare coins” theme has taken several forms over the years. As a grade-schooler, I would often examine such coins closely, only to find the date on the coin was several years off, making the find invalid. When I did find an old coin, I would grasp it very tightly and wake myself up in an attempt to externalize the coin. Finding such coins became a certain sign of lucidity in a dream, something I‘ve done repeatedly since my first spontaneous lucid dream in the first grade. More on that later.
In Junior High a beer-can collecting craze was sweeping the nation. Since we were almost but not quite old enough to drink (the legal age was 18 then), it was a little daring to ally oneself with beer this way. I was no longer interested in collecting wheat pennies or buffalo nickels, so I began to dream of rare and unusual beer cans found in out of the way places. Here too, I often attempted to bring these cans into the waking world with me.
In high school and college, my tastes became more academic, and I often found myself searching dream libraries and dream book stores for rare titles by Philip K. Dick, J. G. Ballard, H. P. Lovecraft, and Wm. S. Burroughs. Dick once recorded a similar dream, in which he searched for a story in an old issue of Amazing or Astounding called “The Empire Never Ended.” Lovecraft wrote of several dream volumes, and decades later the Esoteric Order of Dagon would refer to such texts as the fragments of Liber XXIII, an as-yet unwritten Necronomicon sequel.
I also developed strange musical tastes around this time. Many such dreams involved searching small record stores for unknown records by groups like the Residents and SPK. Often the liner notes would contain more of value than the actual recording, much as cigarrette warnings directed one to Ubik in Dick’s novel of the same name.
In Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung tells of his recurring dream wherein he searches an old house of his youth for a forgotten text. He discovers it in a secret room of which he previously knew nothing. This he equates with an unknown facet of his own mind, the underutilized part which belongs to the occult or paranormal. Likewise, dreaming of finding rare old coins equates to a search for psychic libido, little treats which energize one’s soul. Recall the Mario Bros. and their curious trek through mushroom land, picking up coins to extend their lives. This dream has nothing to do with the face value of money.
“The winds of change” may sound cliche, but I have no doubt my dreams of approaching tornadoes point to dramatic upheavals, personal or global. Unfortunately, I can’t point to any direct connection between these dreams and external events. Perhaps they express the need for or anticipation of a change.
The tornadoes never were frightening. Instead, they induce feelings of awe and anticipation. The sky turns green, the wind begins to blow, the air crackles with ozone. As a child, I would join my dad outside whenever a tornado watch was announced, rather than cowering in the basement. We wanted to see one, but never did.
I grew up on one of Minnesota’s famed 10,000 lakes. I was dreaming of partially or totally dry lakebeds long before I ever read any J. G. Ballard with his drained swimming pools. It was usually the same-I’d wake up one fine morning, look out the window, and see that most or all of the water had drained out of the lake. The bottom was clearly visible, as was whatever lay on it. Stories of the lakes having dried up during the dustbowl of the 1930’s made a big impression on me. I often wondered what sort of cast-off junk remained on the now submerged bottom, not to mention the accidental or deliberate droppings from boats. Old cars were supposed to be out there, and farm implements and a large rock pile and innumerable other items. It sounded like an antique collector’s paradise out there, under the sea. I always wondered what it was like.
I also saw the fish, still submerged in the few remaining low spots or flopping helplessly on dry land. Occasionally I dreamed of flooded streets full of living fish, but more often it was the lake, with just enough water left in it for the fish. Like the rare coins, the fish are little bundles of psychic libido. They are a symbol of Christ, the renewer of life. They are a secret, a treasure hidden in plain sight that nobody else sees.
The drained water occasionally exposes pathways leading out into the lakebed, sometimes even secret islands. Often with the water gone, these islands may not be visible from the shore. Only when one walks out into the drained lakebed do they become visible. Atlantis rising? Lovecraft’s R’lyeh? “There is another world, and it is in this one.” (Paul Gluard, French Surrealist)
Remembering a ufo sighting, at five years of age, in McKinney, Texas. I was in the empty lot behind my home, about mid-day, and heard the humming sound overhead. I don’t know how long it hovered above me before departing.
Last night I dreamed of UFOs and I was abducted while sleeping in my dad's office within his new home, following Thanksgiving festivities. Sleeping in the bed at my feet was one of four household felines. This one's name... is E. T.
Present also area seven-year-old girl and an authoritative man. We are waiting for the helicopter. Prismatic paranormal lightning tears away the veil of reality, setting the mood on edge as I realize it is connected to this female child. I scale a nearby sloping oak to my left to gain a new perspective on the scene. Once in the tree I consider the danger of such a move but throw aside all fear by rationalizing it as paranormal lightning and thus probably given to different tendencies.
Then I see it. A UFO approaches from across the hills in the distance. Its neon lights shine brilliant pinks and blues, grandly advertising its presence. It is upon us within the wink of a thought. It emerges through the same fog bank which engulfs the drive way, while another identical ship surges quickly up the drive and out of its misty shadows.
The gut feeling that I should NOT stick around overtakes me and I turn to run the short distance to the front door. As I turn, I witness thirty to fifty Japanimated gnomes pouring from around the left side of the house. They are about a foot tall, round-ball-bodied, and helmet garbed. I continue running for the door, thinking I will simply leap over them and through the door and lock it behind me. As I leap over them and toward the door I feel myself begin to soar slowly upward. I suddenly remember flying earlier that evening, but I quickly understand that I am not in control and am being pulled backward and upward. I then know I am about to be abducted. The top of the country home and the hills beyond are all that are within my view. Aliens below and spacecraft behind! Then the sensation of an air elemental's arms coming from behind me, under my arm pits and over my head and face. Then black.
Just black... but then darkness fuzzes into focus, giving the feeling of a fisheye perspective while I sense I am on my back. The only light is from a dim source directly above. Could it be the sun? Could it be a lamp? Yes. Both. Either. The only differentiation between light and dark is the impression of three to four humanoid silhouettes. Obelisks. Standing stones in a ritual/sacred circle. Shadows. Then gone.
A complex laboratory filled with commotion. All is in miniature and, viewed from my perspective, only inches away from my face, yet I am not present in so much as I can FEEL every minute vibration occurring within this room. There are small rubber conveyer-belts winding intricately throughout. They carry laboratory objects, test tubes, vials, rulers, pens, etc.
Close up of an object undergoing scrutiny by a Frankensteinian electricity-focusing contraption beaming its energy-thought not, in this case, visibly. I sense it. I can feel everything within this space. I perceive all tactile sensation as vibration. I am not so much frightened as worried. It doesn't hurt, it kind of tickles, but I am definitely wary of proceeding with these unusual sensations. I awake.
I leave the bed with difficulty because of the cat, E. T. I wander into the alien restroom of my dad's new home. Being at least minimally conscious I distinctly feel I could lie back down and reenter that dream. Or I can shelve it and start a new one.
As my head hits the pillow I think it would be nice to allow for a more pleasant dream. I am rewarded with the companionship of a beautiful acquaintance whom I have not seen in a long while. In RealTime she has, coincidentally, seen a UFO.
What do you think? I told this to one of my roommates and he suggested I could interpret it as an abduction by my Higher Self. It could be viewed that way and still be written off as a dream. Nothing seemed that alien save for the actual flying saucer UFO spacecraft (which looked quite similar to the armada in Coneheads the movie). So even they weren't that alien.
As we were leaving, though, I had second thoughts. We went back down the steps to the house but found the door locked and the lights off-the party was over. Just then, however, a voice called from up on the road, “Flying saucer!”
I dashed up and looked out toward the range of hills in the east. Just above them hovered a cloud, and whatever was in that cloud shot out a ray that hit me right in the belly. I began to speak-roar is more like it-in a tongue so profoundly powerful that I was jolted into lucidity and nearly awoke. I was able to keep ego in the background, though, and it continued to pour through me, rising up from my guts and gushing from my mouth in a torrent of emotion and meaning-not one word of which I consciously understood! Later, after I awoke, it seemed to me the language was a Middle Eastern one, but so ancient and rooted that in it Word was not distinct from Creation.
I was in a state of full-blown ecstasy, and my body rose from the ground about four feet and keeled slightly over to the left as I went on rapping. I floated southward into a broad, sunlit valley full of houses. The people all stood on their porches listening to me, and I began to understand what I was saying: that many of us would lose our bodies in the coming years of upheaval and rebirth, but that we just had to make the best of it and everything would work out. I finished, and woke up.
I lay there sweating profusely and struggling to reorient, and then it occurred to me to see if a flying saucer might really be about. I got to my feet and looked out the large northern window. Up among the bare branches of the tree outside, a light was dancing and flickering; and something about the way it moved was intensley familiar. Suddenly I remembered that I had had another dream just prior to this one. It too had been a long, powerful, challenging dream, though all I could remember of it was that one of the small people I’d been among said, as he escorted me back to my own world, “Humans think we faeries have only two tendrils that we insert into one another’s backs during group intercourse, but in fact we have six such.”
As I mulled this over the light began to drift off to the north. I ran from the house into the street to try and get a better look at it, but then realized I’d left my glasses behind. I stood there, stark naked and feeling quite helpless, as it continued to move away, still dancing in that peculiar, hauntingly familiar way, and then a faint message came through (or was it just wishful thinking?): “We’ll return in a few years.” (And they have.)
Once upon a dream I awoke with the following words on my mind’s tongue: “You can’t have no room in my dream.” Quickly--as to not lose this phrase to the mists of human mind fog that shrouds our waking thoughts--I found as fast as I could a pen and paper to jot it down.
“You can’t have no room in my dream!”
These words I once did scream
Awakening from deep sleep
As my spirit gently creeped.
“The rooms are filled,” said I,
With quite a snide reply
“No vacancies I see
The rooms are filled with me.”
* * * I am reading the morning newspaper. The headlines read, “10,000 Converted Today!” Tens of thousands of people were converting every day to this new religious cult. Fanatic cult members would come to my house in droves, with smiles on their clean-cut faces, gazing at me through glazed, hypnotized eyes, trying to sell me their brainwashed religion lest I burn in the Devil’s embers down below. But I wasn’t buying into their scam, and I knew if I left myself open to them I would become just another of these mindless lambs being led to a slaughter in the sky.
Myself and a buddy, Frank, were among the last few of society’s ‘unconverted outcasts’. We looked hopelessly into each other’s eyes, shrugging our shoulders and shaking our heads, knowing full well that the game was over for all parties concerned, and that the fat lady was singing the blues. Then in the distance we heard the bomb blast and saw the mushroom cloud rising like a gigantic hand of doom to crush us all down with one fatal blow. There was no happy ending to the story (dream)…
In another ominous dream, I found myself in my old neighborhood, walking down the street. I stopped to look into a large stained-glass magnifying lens that had been placed on my neighbor’s lawn in such a manner that it pointed at a ninety degree angle into the sky. When I looked through this magnifying glass, I became instantly hallucinogenically intoxicated, the magnifying lens sucking me into some altered state of consciousness, enabling me to see into another dimension inhabited by an evil being with a long strange face and a tall, purple top hat, dressed in colorful clothing who drove through the sky against a psychedelic swirling backdrop in a surreal space age version of the car Fred McMurray piloted in Chitti-Chitti-Bang-Bang.. No one else--of the nameless, faceless people present--who looked through this stained-glass magnifying lens could see what I saw; that of an evil phantasmagoric menace, invisible to the naked eye, yet nonetheless there, plotting to wreak havoc upon our fragile human race from behind the scenes of an alternate dimension…
Then there were the dreams where I was flying. It came so easily and naturally, I’d soar through the valleys and across the mountains of my mind’s creation, saying to myself, “Good God, this is real, this is really real, I’m actually flying. This is not a dream!” Then I’d wake up and be bummed out because, after all, it had been a dream, and I couldn’t really fly after all. Normally in these dreams I’d fly around my neighborhood, and sometimes--reaching a higher elevation--I’d fly over towns and cities. One time while flying higher, ever higher, I decided to keep on going up through the stratosphere into the farthest reaches of space. Soon I found myself soaring through the heavens surrounded by beautiful stars burning fuchsia bright against a purple and scarlet backdrop wove in Heaven. It’s probably the closest to Heaven I’ll ever get again.
Another truly cosmic dream I had was about this comet I saw fall down from the sky and then--in a colorful trailing downward flight--crash into Earth, exploding triumphantly in a glorious starburst blaze of brilliant, blinding colors. I ran over to the comet, picked it up, and held it in my astounded hands. It miraculously began changing and rearranging, transmuting in psychedelic colors before my eyes into alien faces of multiple races from a thousand dreams and one hundred and one nightmares. I carried this magical metaphor/meteor with me all throughout this very memorable dream…
* * *
I had a dream after she died.
I was at work, (or some odd place)
Going through the various rituals,
That go along with living.
Perhaps eating my lunch,
Or performing some menial chore.
As I was carrying out my duties,
The phone rang.
Someone answered it, and said,
“Hey, Adam, it’s for you.”
“Hello,” I said, and the disembodied
Voice on the other end said,
“Adam, this is your Aunt Daisy.
I’ve just called to say goodbye.”
Before I could answer,
The dial tone came on.
* * *
Then there were a series of dreams I had featuring celebrities. The first of these starred none other than Soupy Sales, that pie-throwing lame brain who used to host a TV kiddy program I watched growing up. He later appeared on “The Gong Show” and other Hollywood has-been-type game shows like ”The Match Game” with Gene Rayburn, and “Hollywood Squares.”Anyway, Soupy and I were in England for some dumb reason, hanging out together. Unfortunately we ended up in a grocery store where the aisles were jam-packed with corpulent older ladies, diabolically surrounding us on either side, leaving us trapped and immobile in the aisles with no way out. Later on in this dim-witted caper, Soupy and I were cruising around the streets of London-town when we experienced automotive difficulties. We took our motorcar to an auto shop where the mechanic used a visual demonstration to explain what’d gone wrong with the car. He had a Styrofoam cup of soda with a straw in it and poked several holes on either side in vertical lines so the liquid came gushing out in symmetrical streams. For some reason, that seemed to make perfect sense. Anyway, I wrote a poem at the time about my road trip with Soupy, though unfortunately I only remember a couple of stanzas.
Gee, Soupy Sales
You’re such a funny guy
You know I tell the truth
How could I tell a lie?
Our merry trip to London
Was such a bloody groove
But the ladies in the grocery store
Just would let us move…
I had Glen Ford in a dream one time, one of my least favorite movie actors. He was having a bad day in the dream, as I recall, though I can’t remember why…But the most limpid clear and lucid dream I had featuring a celebrity type was with John Lennon. We sat in a cabin in the mountains at a table facing one another. He looked a lot like he does in that picture from the White Album. You know, those eight by ten glossies they had inside of each of the Fab Four?
It seemed as if we talked for hours on end in this dream, though I remember not of what, except that it was a very heavy discussion, which of course is to be expected from the dead spirit of such a heavy dude as he. I wonder sometimes if it actually was his departed spirit to whom I was conversing. Wondering, as well, what the words were that he shared with me…D. Scott Apel wrote a book a few years back about one of my favorite authors, Philip K. Dick. It seems that Mr. Apel experienced his own strange series of dreams where Dick visited him, passing on to Apel certain mystical messages much in the same fashion that Dick--in his own lifetime--received: DIVINE REVELATIONS from another dimension in the form of hypnogogic dreams, not to mention the pink laser beam that shot EVERLASTING WISDOM into his brain, transferring gnostic knowledge unto him via VALIS (Vast Active Living Intelligence System).
I don’t discount Apel’s claims. Quite the contrary, in fact. I believe the same thing possibly happened to me re: John Lennon; his departed spirit floating through the astral plane entering into my sleeping brain and there transferring certain perhaps esoteric knowledge which at this juncture in the space time/continuum I can’t remember, though perhaps--just perhaps--hypnotic dream regression could possibly retrieve this stuff from my subconscious shadows.
One hot summer night whilst living with my parents in suburbia, I decided to sleep outside, where it would be cooler and more pleasurable. Big mistake, the aliens were out to get me!Let me set the stage: with my favorite blanket, I lay down to sleep in my backyard on a chaise-lounge, gazing up into the wondrous stars of the night above. Soon I was sound asleep, and shortly had entered into the misty realms of dreamland weirdness. But unlike other dreams, where the world you often enter into is a combo of this or that, a little bit of maybe your friend’s house interspersed with maybe a little bit of your own house inhabited by people you know, or may not know, doing this or that; ah no, this dream was lucid and distinct, as clear as crystal it shaped itself in my dreaming mind. (Or was I dreaming?)
Within the dream everything was exactly as it was before I fell off to sleep. Everything in the backyard was the same as it had always been; not one thing out of place. And I was exactly where I had left my sleeping body; on the chaise-lounge with my favorite blanket covering me, facing in the exact same direction; everything exactly the same, nothing different or out of place. But then things got a little weird…
As I gazed into the stars above me, there suddenly appeared a huge UFO. The UFO, moving at a very low rate of speed, appeared out of east, and seemed to be coming towards me, slowly lowering. It was spectacular, much like the ‘real’ UFOs I had seen with my friend Hoogie-Man as chronicled in my tome, UFO’s, LSD and Me. And though it was a huge wondrous brilliant multicolored creation of some far superior race, I also picked up malevolent vibes off the thing, and I was starting to get scared, when I felt somebody tap me on the shoulder. I jerked to my right side to see who or what was there, and the jerking motion woke me up, as I was facing to my right side to see what the fuck had tapped me on the shoulder. But nothing was there.
And the UFO was gone!
It took me awhile to get back to sleep.
I had a dream last night I was inside the Hollow Earth... There were no televisions there, and the helicopters didn’t have rotor blades.
Such is the stuff of dreams!
The next part of this dream I was shown two places from my childhood. The first, which had a Spielbergesque “secret kid activity” flavor about it, was from a vacant lot in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where a bunch of neighborhood children played “pirate.” It was a dirt hill with a solid sheet of plywood which was a sort of sliding door to the opening inside. On either end of this vertical doorway were sliding paths in the dirt, where we kids enjoyed sliding down on our rear ends. I don’t remember ever playing pirate and I don’t remember this particular fort or kid-made cave, but in the dream it struck a very real memory-response. Perhaps I was a tiny kid at the time, which would place this at 1959 or 1960. Due to my older two brothers, it’s not implausible I would be allowed to tag along by my good parents.
The second vision was from my later youth in Colorado. I was shown a stone-laden mountain side where I had played with a school friend. I was shown my friend and I immediately “knew” we had both been contactees with space folk! This discovery brought me back to my bed and I attempted to scream out of the joy of remembering an important fact. I could only manage a steady whimper, which nevertheless woke Miriam (in my dream at any rate) to whom I explained what I had just remembered, thanks to this induced vision (for it really felt as if I was being “shown” this by something or someone). The remainder of the dream I remained in bed in an altered state listening with fascination to quite loud radio broadcasts going on in my head from a variety of stations, including standard talk radio types and some not-so-standard transcripts of clandestine conversations of (to me) wholly unknown individuals. When I really finally awoke, Miriam had no recollection of having been awakened earlier.
Later I’m riding with “K” around the “spaghetti junction” part of town. I’m giving her directions to get off on a certain ramp. We go up the hill and can see the Mississippi River below. We drive past several shops downtown on the lower level of skyscrapers. I know that we’re going home to do it.
Later I arrive at “K’s” house. It is night. This is an old house that looks a lot like my Grandma Johnson’s house in Minneapolis. “K” greets us at the back door, and explains to a disappointed Judy that she should know that whenever we visit, it’s Paul’s turn to do it with her.
It’s morning now, and I’m walking across the street to my old house in Golden Valley. I lived there from age 3 to 11. As we approach, I see three small UFOs come right over the house from behind us. To my surprise, they hover and perform several other impossilbe maneuvers before landing in the driveway. When they land, they stand on end. The rear part where the engine is looks like a large coffee can. Four supports grip it and attach it to the small pointed cab in front-a one man setup. A passageway or storage bin are built onto one side. They are all three painted tan.
A middle-aged woman steps out of one, or rather, just appears in front of me. She has on an overcoat and a scarf on her head, as did Sandra Bernhardt, but no sunglasses. She begins reciting the tale of her father, a scientist for the government who perfected these rocket ships. She has a strange speech impediment, and when she opens her mouth I can see evidence of surgery, as if a cleft palate were corrected. When I interrupt with a question, she continues as if a recording. Apparently she has memorized her speech and is afraid to deviate from it for fear of forgetting. I let her continue.
Her father is dead from an accident at work, or the side effects of the experiments, and she is taking the three ships to California where she has friends, rather than let the government have them. Her father, I gather, was an alien. Her mother was a human assistant of her father’s, also dead.
She is standing next to a brown AMC Hornet station wagon, which I realize she was driving. The UFOs were simply flying on remote. She is drinking a Pepsi. On the can I see it was bottled in Atlanta, home of Coca-Cola. Next to her car is a white AMC Hornet station wagon. The markings on the side indicate it is a government vehicle from a motorpool in Atlanta. A young man dressed like he was in the Air Force is at the wheel. Her boyfriend? He looks away impatiently, as if not wanting to delay or be recognized.
I open up the back door of her car and remove a large ziploc baggie with many different cigarette packages neatly arranged to fill the bag. Each has different writing on it in different alphabets-Sanskrit, Cyrillic, Hebrew. Even the few with Roman letters spell out nonsense. The Hebrew doesn’t look quite right either. Others seem to have Nordic runes, but in a variation I’m not familiar with.
I interrupt her again to explain that these cigarette packages bear important UBIK messages. She continues, so I explain that UBIK is a Philip K. Dick novel, and these messages are important communications from the Other Side. They point to something being very wrong with the way we are perceiving things. If we can read them, we will then know the true situation concerning our reality. I ask if she can read these other messages. She says no, she cannot read those numbers. I expected her to say “letters.” Is this of Kabbalistic significance, I wonder? I give her directions to California as if she were leaving from Montgomery, Alabama. Take I-65 south for a few hours to Mobile, then west on I-10 all the way to Los Angeles. She should be there in a few days.
When she is gone, I go around back to see several enormous rockets and strange aircraft. One is a standard rocket, but monumental in height-much bigger than a Saturn V, and it’s reusable. It can land and take off. It’s standing on end, and I have to lie down in the grass right next to it and look straight up to see the top. A man is on a gantry near the top. I don’t think he’ll come down. I think I would never go that high, not even to go into space.
Another ship looks like a large version of the alien lady’s
UFO, but it doesn’t have the same range or time-travel features. Other
strange ships are parked in my yard as well, and several Air Force personnel
are running around. One comes over grinning; he begins showing off all
his top-secret equipment like a boy with a new toy. I guess they are chasing
the UFO lady, but he doesn’t say. He doesn’t mind me seeing all this highly
classified government aircraft-huge rockets, weird airships with reverse-
engineered propulsion systems from flying saucers, etc.
I guess he knows I wouldn’t be believed if I reported any of it. He acts
like the pilots of the 1897 Airship Flap-polite and friendly, perhaps even
with a little showmanship.
I look across to where several neighbors houses should be and see only a field. Over the next few roads are gone. This is how it used to be, I thought, even though I was too young to see it. I lived here 1965-1973, and these homes were all built in the 1950’s. I hope the alien lady makes it to California OK.
After reading the above, she said that the saucers were silent only when flying. When they zapped people, there was an electrical buzzing noise. The beam fried people, taking a large “scoop” out of them. Then they dropped dead on the ground.
