dreams incubation

I fell asleep on the couch and slipped into a dream unfolding in the same time and space, but in a different layer of reality.

In this dream, I fall asleep on the couch. The owner of the studio I live in, an agile woman in her early 70s, enters without knocking at the door, waking me up. She is looking for something or someone. Her intrusion drives me mad. I can’t hear my voice, but I am yelling at her.

• What are you doing? I don’t pay for this shit. What is this?

I do not hear her words. She is speaking to herself, completely ignoring my anger.

• It happens again.
• What are you saying?
• The […] in the attic.
• I can’t hear you.
• The […] attic.
• What attic? This building has no attic.
• How did she get out? She was locked.
• Who? Who was locked?

She stormes out of my house. I shut the door.

When I return to the living room, four entities are lying on my other couch. They look like materialized faceless shadows. A woman and three men. I can’t tell who’s who, but their energies are clear. They are saying something to me, in German, with the tone of some wise or ancient creatures, as if they are downloading something into my mind.

• If you want me to understand, say what you have to say in my language.

They look at me without stopping their words. It feels like they are on the clock. All that matters is to finish saying what they were coming here for.

The dream suddenly skips to another scene.

The stairs to an attic open in a wall, looking like a projection on a cinema screen. In the beginning, it feels silent, a heavy silence, but gradually deafening music of a little girl playing more and more furious on a piano begins to turn into a storm. I don’t here, but I perceive and feel her.

I have never felt such rage, such fury, such a level of frustration, loneliness, pain, and helplessness. She is so angry and sad at the same time. So unloved. So betrayed. So rejected. Rejected by God, by the devil, by the whole world and universe. I feel she is hoping her fury to kill her. But it doesn’t. Instead, it tears the building down and then the whole town. She is the lost version of the Apocalypse.

What does she want? I wonder. Why now? Who is she?

I run out without taking anything with me to save my life. I didn’t realize I was living so deep in the underground. In reality, my place is at the street level. When I look back, there is only fire and dust while her piano music is still playing. Without her.

I wake up. My heart is beating hard. I stare for minutes at the ceiling. Thoughtless.

What if this little girl is me?

What if this is a real story about annihilation and everything that it dislocates? What if, by my annihilation in childhood, a huge chunk of who I am was cut off way before I could remember? Maybe that is why I cannot recognize it and feels so unfamiliar. What if I forgot who I really am? Who wanted me to forget my identity? Why?

Once I acknowledged this possibility, I felt an indescribable feeling of resonance and pain release. And then, after the dust settled, I felt more clarity. There was no need to understand the mechanics of the process, the why-s, or to wonder if it was real or not. It felt natural, real, and healing, and that was all that mattered.

At the same time something connected with Sunmoon and her reply to Piper when Piper remembers the single thing she knew about love, a poem about which she’s not sure was just a fantasy:

• It’s the other way around. Love remembers you.

But who were the German-speaking shadows? They didn’t seem like wanting something from me, but just for me to know something. What do they represent?

This dream left me with a film idea. A story about disabled and mentally ill children and old humans who are locked away in mountain caves and left to die because society finds them useless and resource-consuming. Prayers of monks from isolated monasteries call the birds to feed them with drops of water and breadcrumbs. Few survive here. The remains of the dead become their sacred weapons, mystical and spiritual guiding tools from the unseen, and slowly, behind their apparent weaknesses unfold their superpowers.

I called this film idea “Palos Verdes Blue”, the name of a tiny endangered butterfly whose distribution is limited to one single site, making it the world’s rarest butterfly.