John Burridge: labyrinth

Showing posts with label labyrinth. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 12, 2018

Dream: Olaf's Treasure

Dream:

In an earlier dream, I was in Corvallis driving some author friends around, S.D. and C.O. (who is not an author in real life, but a high school friend) or maybe E.P. (who is also not an author in real life, but a friend from St. Olaf College. We may have been driving from Portland, and I seem to recall highway navigation. In any case, I was driving, and I realized that I needed to get S.D. to her house in North Corvallis, which meant I needed to take the Hwy 99 exit to Walnut street--which meant going over a small hill (which in real life was probably the back road to Samaritain Hospital.

Suddenly, S.D. was sitting on my lap, and the car stalled, and I couldn't get my feet on the break or gas petals properly because S's feet were there, too. The car rolled backward, and before we knew it, I was driving the car backward on the highway.

There was something more about being apartment-mates and a meal.

I think the main dream starts here... I was in a house that was my Grandmother Agnes's (only it wasn't). Everything was dark wood, and chrome grates and enamel tubs and vaguely 1950's decor. Some cats and kittens (possibly Cicero) were there, and there was a pile of stuff (like a kitty basket) over an air vent near a cast-iron stove to keep the kittens from getting into it. The room became more cabin-in-the-woods as the dream progressed.

The stuff was cleared away, which revealed a trap door (more like a five-by-five-foot section of the floor flipped up) opening on a kind of vanity counter and bathtub. The room was darker than above, and there was a sense that it was part of the air circulation system. I think we were trying to turn on lights, and after fiddling with an old-style breaker-box, we opened up another part of the room, which was dark and musty like a concrete floored garage or tool shed.

There was still a sense that this space was underneath the wood cabin. This room had a bunch of my Great Great Uncle Olaf's stuff (like a lawnmower) in it. In the dream we called him Uncle Olaf, but it was really my Great Uncle Conrad. There were other rooms beyond, and we found ourselves (by this time my writer friends had turned into non-descriptive, generic family members) in a labyrinthine set of museum wings filled with Fertile Crescent Antiquities that Uncle Olaf had excavated and curated by himself (and everyone was surprised, since he was a potato farmer from Astoria in the early half of the 20th century).

I think the cats followed us around. Room after room was filled with tiles, and carvings, and figurines. There was a room of finials which had a special, crescents-and-feather finial in it... it was some kind of rune, I think.

In a side room, we found a glass-chip vase filled with random rocks and agates. We decided that it would be OK to take a stone each. As we were exiting the museum, I passed through the tool shed garage and noticed a figure standing/sitting in a wheel-chair (he was propped up, he was standing, but there was also a wheelchair). It was Olaf/Conrad; his visage was dark and shadowy (which was kind of odd, since he always had a shock of silver-white hair on the top of his head and I always remember him being pale). Since Olaf/Conrad died in the 1980's, I stepped closer, for a better look and became aware of his dead staring eye blazing blue in the dark. He didn't move; he didn't speak; I don't know if he'd opened his eyes or if they'd already been that way, but his blue eye had a flame in it.

I rushed upstairs. The cabin was still a cabin, but now it was in a city setting. My relatives, a married couple, were standing on a concrete overpass.

"Uh," I said, "I think it wasn't a good idea to take those rocks. We should put them back."

The husband agreed, and gave me his rock.

The wife wanted to keep hers. "They're good luck. Why should we give them back? All those years, Olaf [did something bad/selfish], so I don't see why I shouldn't take some of that luck now."

I walked up to her, "You're using Olaf's bad decisions in the past to justify _your_ bad choice now. Stop it."

There was some frustrated rock-throwing, and I picked up one dark rock from the edge of the overpass before waking up.

Wednesday, March 23, 2016

Writing and Dreams

Writing

Saturday, or at least Saturday morning, was going to be a writing time, but I kept going to the shiny. And I needed to straighten out the house because I had a (very) small gathering for the Spring Equinox.

Sunday was going to be a writing time... and it was a writing flail time (see previous post), with me slowly typing disjointed sentences.

Monday's writing started out on a good foot, and then Life Intervened and I had to deal with other things.

Tuesday morning I managed to get in about 750 words of very rough draft. I know how the story ends, getting to the interesting part leading to that end is proving difficult. It was very helpful to do a parallel play session over the Internet because it got me started at 8 AM. The best moments happened when I was able to turn off my inner editor and simply write; having a "no backspace key" rule is good in this way. Right now the story is very internal to the protagonist's head and she needs to be more active. The problem is a character story, and I need to add some external action that appropriately mirrors the protagonist's inner dissatisfaction.

I got a critique back and it's clear I need to examine my more obscure word choices and do some replacing. In my more cynical moments, I sometimes feel like I should simply replace every fifth word with "awesome." On the plus side, the villain of the piece felt three-dimensional.

Dreams

Wednesday morning I dreamed I was on a train in England. I think this started out as a labyrinth dream, with me walking through neighborhoods, or possibly a train depot, but the dream took on a kind of mystery/puzzle turn. Mark might have been in the dream to begin with, or he might have been on the train that was coming in. Besides myself, there was an English "Sarah Jane Smith" character, who, in more English Domestic Sit-com moments of the dream, may have been my wife.

We lived in a train station. Or else we lived in a train car. The train station was also a kind of shopping mall and amusement park. The interior was like a British sit-com flat designed by Escher: lots of overstuffed furniture, wood panelling, a compact floor design, and stairs going off at unexpected angles. It was also a train car or station.

Previously, someone had died (I don't recall the circumstances, but I think it was an accident). Somehow the trains were going back and forth through time, so when the train was in station A, it was time A, and when it was at station B, it was time B, but it could go back to time A. (It's also entirely possible I dreamed different versions of the same dream story and they've been smooshed together in dream recall.) This gave us a kind of limited time reset, and Sarah Jane and I were trying to come up with a intervention that would save whoever died. We had to do this before a certain train came in. Unfortunately, I moved a newspaper (or something) and while this saved the person, Sarah Jane and I wound up as ghosts.

We then spent the rest of the dream trying to influence another woman to do something to bring us back to life. I think we could move small objects, like keys, or flip pages of books, but that was the extent of our ghostly powers.

Wednesday, March 02, 2016

Strange Dreams

Lately my dreams have been more memorable and vivid, and I should make an attempt to wrtie them down.

In the one Monday morning, I started out as a re-enactor in a Roman campaign or documentary. As the dream progressed it became more like I was flipping back and forth between two alternate realities; one where I was a Roman centurion arrayed for a battle along a river, and another where I was house-sitting for my parents and helping one of their (non-reality-based) older neighbors.

As a Roman, I remember wading through a river and we had a convict or slave or captured soldier tied up in a small boat/canoe that we were going to sacrifice to Mars (or something). There was a scene where we had children in our ranks, and there were three squads of them playing horns: the oldest did a proper "it's time to sleep" horn call, the next, kids around eight, did a simplified version. I forget what the third squad did. I remember being given permission to go on leave, and I did, but somehow I knew that we had our marching orders, so I was dragging out returning as much as I could.

I'm thinking the house-sitting segments of the dream happened when I was "off site" from the Roman campaign. As the dream progressed, the re-enactment parts became more real and less acting. At one point I remember telling her (the neighbor) that I would get back to her (she was moving or packing out of her largish house) but that if I got my marching orders, I'd be unavailable.

Tuesday morning. I remember I was in a medieval setting. I want to say I was a minstrel or a Robin Hood figure. There was a very large castle set on top of a craggy green hill. The recall isn't so good on this dream. There was a Queen in White, who wanted to support her Lord, but he wasn't very nice. There was a Young Princess of the Meadow, who was the love interest in the dream. There was a older Tyranical King, who wanted to lock me (the Minstrel) up but I'm not sure if it was because the Princess was going to marry me or someone else I was helping, or because I was really the ruler of the Land and he only ruled the Castle. There was a lot of musical numbers, with me singing to the Princess in the wooded meadow below the hill... and there was a scene climbing up the outside of the castle in order to hide among the chimneys (?from the King?).

Then it turned into a trying to walk through a labyrinthine neighborhood dream (or possibly a college campus), only I could fly. This did not stop me from accidentally trespassing into somebody's yard while they were trying to trim trees or build a bridge between two stone arch things while they worked from three ladders lashed together.

Wednesday morning. All I remember was that I was at an outdoor craft faire, which may or may not have been renaissance themed. There was an awkward extended family problem, like someone's great-uncle had died, or someone's young little-girl cousin was having Issues, or something (I suspect the soap-opera family relations from Agents of SHIELD affected my dreams.) I was flirting with someone, and what really sticks out from this dream was that he touched the back of my hand (maybe the cat wanted something and was batting my hand?).

Working Out: Tuesday. 200 cal in just under 20 minutes on the rowing machine. 3x8 at 15, 14, 13 on the chin/dip assist. 3x12x50lbs on the pec fly. 3x12x80lbs on the lat pull-down. 3x13 curls. 2x12x12lbs overhead triceps curls

Thursday, October 15, 2015

Angsty Dreams

I guess I'm not as fully recovered from the weekend as I thought I was; I was pretty tired yesterday (Monday) and I had a very slight case of vertigo (my ears must be congested or something). Anyway, I thought I'd be more productive than I was.

Dreams lately have been angsty . In one, I was two twin boys, until I was the twin caught in an evil doctor's office (lots of screaming and yelling in that one). In another, Mark and I were wandering around, lost -- I think we were lost on a hike, or lost in a building, but it was the usual stuck in a labyrinth motif. The latest was discovering that The Child was trying to feed Smokey our cat and another mystery cat, and he'd opened two cans of cat food and plopped them in water bowls and filled the bowls with five cups (at least) of dry kibble, and the both bowls were turning into a soupy mess which the cats were mostly tracking around the kitchen. And then The Child did something like smear the cat food all over the walls and himself... and I'm standing in the kitchen thinking, "Why the hell don't you have any common sense" and trying not to lose it.

Tuesday Night.

I dreamed that I was in a parade or something. It was vaguely Renaissance Faire. Mark was there, and at one point I was reclining in a rectangular fountain basin. The fountain was the backdrop in a circular amphitheater setting (very Soleri-esque) with ramps spiraling around the seating area. At various parts of the dream I would either be in shorts, or naked, or else wearing a kind of merfolk tale (which might have been a artfully twisted green blanket).

A procession of horns ... no that's not right, maybe it was a procession with just one singer singing Greensleeves came down the ramp, and the costumed people standing in front of the fountain couldn't quite hear the words or the tune. I started singing because I could hear what was going on, and some robed people in front of me picked up the tune.

There was a break... and a fine, fit man had joined me in the fountain. He ran a hand over my merguy tail and made a comment about the fabric, and I thanked him for the complement and told him that I was in a monogamous marriage.

There was something more about getting out of the fountain and finding mark in the outside mall surrounding the fountain in order to find some clothing. And someone in a really large plush sun mask.

There was another break, and I was in an audience with Fer Horn. This may have been after the fountain... A bunch of Renaissance performers were up on a stage, but the sound system wasn't working, and we couldn't hear them. I noticed a rack of mics... And then the duct tape in my socks started to crinkle very loudly (I don't know why there was crinkly duct tape wrapped around my feet under my socks), which Fer thought was very funny.

Then there was something involving lots of wandering and swimming through or flying over a river... and something a family finding a lost puppy underneath a terra cotta flower pot during an outdoor garden performance.

So... stages and audiences, sexual tension, quests, and being heard or not. I guess the next step is to ask myself who I'm not hearing, or what it is that I'm trying to tell.

Thursday, February 05, 2015

Dream: Otherworld Reversals

I was in a very large house with relatives. I think they were the cousins on my dad's side. There were a lot of empty rooms, and it was almost as if we were staing in a half-empty hotel. The house had three stories. Some of us were staying on the second story, which was a bunch of rooms connected to a central kitchen or dining room area. I remember the sun was rising (I think) and the ruddy light came through some of the windows.

Then J. N. (not a relative) was there and she was complaining that she was stuck in one of the room on the brick third story. "Oh I know nobody will believe me," she said. "But the stairwell to my room is haunted." She was going on to no one in particular. "One night I got stuck. I was on the stair and I couldn't move."

I'd say half of us believed some supernatural force had rooted her to the stair, half through she'd somehow hypnotized herself or something, and half though she'd dreamed the whole thing.

There was a break. The house was an old monastery. The setting had changed to England. The haunted stair / room was the room that the monks, who had been doing inner-city work, would store confiscated guns from the youth they helped. One night there was a terrible shoot-out in the monastery, and (at least) two monks were killed.

A voice-over narrated while a lone monk, standing by the back-side of the house, pensively looked at black smoke rising from an industrial complex across a dark river. "...After that, the brothers were forced to make a living at the very same nuclear power plant they despised." The monk turned and began climbing either stairs or an embankment. It was dark, and his hands glowed green.

"Oh, come on," I said out loud to myself. "Glowing green hands?" And I was watching the monks on TV.

There was another break. A famous actor, like Hugh Grant or Beckham, was noticing that young girls were in an area where there was a gun deal or a drug deal going on, and he got them away. This might have been a prelude to the monk section.

There was a break. I was standing on the corner of Willamette and Broadway in Eugene. Only it was a junction where gleaming, silver, double-decker trains/subway cars converged. Four story department stores stood on every corner.

I got onto a car, which had a layout like a bus, and had wide benches to accommodate three or four people. The train pulled away and onto a looping turnpike, as if it were travelling on an interstate highway. There were a bunch of other commuters in the car. We went over some marshland, and had somehow gotten to the outskirts of New York City. Suddenly, a policewoman appeared at the head of the car on a big black horse. The horse slowly clomped down the aisle, and stopped at my seat, and began to sniff my up-reached hand. Then it wanted its nose rubbed.

The policewoman got off her horse and sat down with some people behind me. She pulled out a small round flask, the size of a pocket-watch, and took a sip of something alcoholic. The she passed it around to the passengers next to her, explaining that it was an herbal extract (chamomile, I think) and that it helped her condition (or to feel better or her cold or something).

I'm not sure if I got off the car or if there was another transition. I was in a castle or small European village. I think it might have been a documentary, because the narrator would say some short small fact about the season life of a medieval / renaissance village.

The Child and I had gone for a short walk along a path which ran through the woods and by a stream. In waking life it was very much like the Reed College canyon, especially the more wooded east end. I had a slight sense of something malicious in the slow, stagnant stream. I also had a sense that I was lying under the quilts and blankets on my bed, and the carpet of small, red-brown leaves underneath the trees took on a dual, blanket appearance.

"Let's race back home," I said. "I'll give you a 30 second head-start." He ran along the curving, wooded path while I stayed behind at the water. (In waking life, I'm not sure why I thought splitting up would be a good idea... although I wanted to make sure nothing was coming up behind us.) Then I quickly and cautiously followed. I thought I'd catch up to him, but when I got back to the castle, The Child wasn't there. I went back along the path, carefully looking for small arms or legs under the leaves or the water plants, thinking I'd have to save him from a Kelpie at any moment, and kicking myself for letting him get away from me.

A bunch of other folks were also searching, but then the dream shifted again, and the narrator said, "In late October, the villagers set out at night with small lights." I and the other searching villagers were scrambling around a hill with three-inch diameter pumpkins stuck on our index fingers. Insert grinning, finger-sized jack-o-lanterns floating in a dark forest here.

It was dark. I was climbing a hill with a lit finger pumpkin. At the top of the hill, there were a bunch of people standing in a line in front of a bright light. One of them was the policewoman, only now she was a a policeman. I rushed up the hill with a sudden desire to kiss the policeman. Just as I reached the crest of the hill a furry head interposed itself between me and the policeman -- at first I thought it was the horse, but the horse had turned into a kind of black panther. (Possibly the cat, who sleeps with us, was nuzzling me in real life, but I don't know.)

We'd come to a concession stand at a train station or a highway rest stop. It was Halloween night, and the policeman was selling snacks.

I'm not entirely sure what's prompting this dream. I've been having some stomach issues, which typically give me anxiety dreams -- but I've been careful to remind myself as I sleep that I've had an upset stomach and not to respond with a Never Reaching the Airport Anxiety Dream. I'm guessing it was several dreams, and I've scrambled the sequence a bit.

There were lots of reversals in this sequence. Meeting my cousins in a labyrinthine house isn't new, but usually it's my mom's side of the family who meets, not my dad's.

The horse and crossing a river is a typical motif, usually signalling that I'm operating in an otherworld. This is the first time that I've had any interaction with the horse's rider, usually it's a knight, not a New York Horse Policewoman. And usually the horse is white, not black. This is also the first time the horse has transformed into the black panther, which is usually associated with erotic desire and thoughts.

I'm guessing the monks may be related somehow to the techno-monks in Girl Genius, but aside from being monks, the similarity ends, as these weren't train-running techno-monks, but rather, inner-city monks working with troubled youth (and nuclear power plants as construction workers)

The Child in Peril is a typical anxiety dream, although this is the first time The Child has been in supernatural peril from a Kelpie; usually, it's physical danger, like falling out a window or over a railing.

Watching the dream on TV is a typical dream shift motif, but this is one of the few, if not the first, times that watching hasn't been literally "and then I was watching it on TV" instead of a narrator's voice-over providing summary.

Sunday, August 31, 2014

Virtual Stars and Labyrinths

One of the rewards I give myself is working with Blender to create 3D images. Lately, I've managed to use InkScape to create 2D patterns which I then import into Blender extrude into 3D shapes.

Importing from InkScape works fairly well with angular objects, but curved objects tend to generate objects with a broken manifold or with a missing facet that shows the insides of solid objects. When an object isn't manifold, I have to go in and edit objects on a vertex and face levels.

Blender can use Boolean Logic to create complex shapes by combining or subtracting simple objects. My favorite function is the difference function, followed by intersection function.

One of the latest designs I've worked on are a Moroccan tile design created by interweaving five pointed stars. Since the symmetry is pentagonal, the golden mean shows up frequently. Interweave designs require careful focus during the InkScape design process to get the over-under pattern correct.

The other design is a labyrinth. After looking at ancient and classical labyrinth mosaics, I worked on something similar. After following some false trails (heh), I found that creating a roughed-out design on paper was more efficient than trying to make paths work in InkScape.

I managed to create a labyrinth and get it into Blender. Then I extruded it into something a person could walk through. Or possibly a stove element.

Revisiting the labyrinth, I managed -- with a whole lot of difficulty -- to grab just the top vertices of the extruded labyrinth, then scale them down so that instead of a disk shape, I had a cone shape. From there, playing with a sphere gave me... Tron's lightcycle helmet, I think.

Oh well. I'm hoping that I can create some interesting objects by sending the Blender Items to Shapeways, a 3D printing company.

Monday, February 03, 2014

Cat Owl Eye Dream

Saturday morning, I had a dream about labyrinths and woke up with a dream image in my head (see to the left). In the dream, a bunch of us had to traverse a magical labyrinth and the only way to do it was to close our eyes and paint squares above and below our eyes and painted eyes on our lids. Sunday morning, I had a long, involved dream, which featured more eye imagery.

The premise was that there was a Vampire, who worked in a business skyscraper (or possibly a a castle, or maybe a business castle) and had a suburbanite family as a cover. The family knew they were his cover, and the mom appreciated that he kept them in a really nice Mac-mansion. (While he wasn't exactly the "Bad Businessman" I used to dream about in my twenties, he was certainly the bad guy in this dream... although now that I think about it, he didn't do anything particularly vampiric except maybe live in a castle.)

The part I remember the best was that a oracular Cat worked for the Vampire. "Work" is probably too strong a word, as they had a sort of genie and lamp owner relationship. I think the Cat came with the castle. I'm not entirely sure, but I think the Cat was our cat, Smokey.

In order for the Cat to tell the Vampire's fortune, he popped out his left eye and turned into a barn owl (it was a bloodless, goreless procedure). The one-eyed-barn-own-cat then perched on a stand in front of a screen divided into a five-by-five grid with tarot cards on it. I recall that one cell was X'ed out and the Owl was giving a reading to the Vampire.

I think at this point in the dream, the Vampire's castle was under some sort of attack or infiltration. There was an exchange between the Cat-owl and the Vampire, where-in the Vampire complained that the Cat-Owl never did anything for him, and the Cat-Owl replied (in a New York accent) "You've never done anything for me."

Afterward, the owl flew some place where there was an eye (I'm not quite clear on the dream's plot at this point, but there was an eye or an agate or something laying on the ground, possibly in front of the suburbanite cover family's house), pressed his face into it and turned back into a cat.