Impossible Realities and Shooting Stars

Several friends from Prague and I had decided to move to St. Augustine, which is weird enough though not the reason I'm writing this. I'm talking about last night's dream. We'd just arrived in town and were taking our first stroll along the bay-wall.


It was mid-day, sunny and warm. We were wearing shorts & t-shirts and had deep tans in late autumn. I made an appreciative comment. It felt like paradise. Apparently I really miss the sensual kind of sunshine you can feel with your skin.

While we walked, I looked up to the sky. Here comes the crucial weirdness.

* * *

It was noon, but as I looked up to the sky, I saw stars. Even as I remember it now, I can't imagine how this was visually represented. I only know it's what I saw.


Stars are a personal dream sign. In dreams, I have a strong tendency to look at the sky, and since dream images are so unstable, the stars always end up doing some kind of dance. Maybe even in my non-lucid dreams I subconsciously know I'm dreaming and look up because I want to see the stars dance--but that implies a sub-subconscious and infinite regress I'm not willing to wade into right here.

So what happened was I saw one star move. I thought maybe it was a meteor, satellite, or a UFO, but then all of the stars began to dance. Dream sign. Should've went lucid right there, but I'm rusty. Then the dancing stars turned into military transports & jets & helicopters in space--telescopic vision, another dream sign that failed to provoke lucidity--like a swarm of insects, the aircraft moved across the sky. I wondered where they were going and if it meant anything to me. I decided it didn't.

I'm wondering about the weirdness of the stars in the mid-day sky. My rational mind prevents me from recalling this image because it is downright logically impossible. And yet, in my dream, I saw it.

Dream consciousness can not only pull together night & day, dark & light, it can visually represent the fusion in a meaningful way. As a writer & an artist, I am incredibly intrigued by this. Somewhere, my mind is already doing this. It is showing me stars in a mid-day sky--though by "mid-day sky" I only mean that I understood it as such. Like I said, I can't remember what it looked like. The dream part of my mind is showing me darkness in light and light in darkness.

It is showing me a circled square.

I want to get closer to that kind of thinking. I want to make these sorts of things happen in my writing. Because my dreams have dissolved categories of thinking that function as parameters for experience. If I can change those parameters in my waking life by following cues from dreams, I can open up an entirely new dimension of human experience for exploration. And that, to me, is the purpose of fiction.