From the Place between Sleep and Awake

Quite tired after recent travels and exertions, I spent many more hours than usual in bed. The Parade of Faces appeared almost whenever I closed my eyes: face after face of strangers, popping up one by one, or in crowds. I knew that some of these people were “dead”, while others were fellow dream travelers. Some of the street scenes were ones I may encounter in the future. Most of the strangers seemed unaware of my presence, but a few looked at me directly.

    I drifted in and out of dreams, often lucid, in which I found myself in two dozen social situations I remember with people I don't know in ordinary reality, though some of the locales are familiar - the Mermaid Cove, the Winter Cave of the Dreaming Bear, the scholar city of Anamnesis, London in World War II, various lecture halls - are familiar from other dreams and journeys. I tried not to control any of this, just to stay present to scenes that intrigued me. The traveling self may be in many more places in the multiverse than we are aware of in the everyday mind.

Note on Recording Practice

I make a practice of keeping a log of HG (hypnagogic) experiences as well as of dreams and experiences of synchronicity. My feelings will guide me on what details matter, and I certainly do not attempt to record everything I remember from dreams and liminal states, just as I don't write down what I ate for breakfast after waking or how many times my dog relieved himself in the park. A map as big as a country is no longer a map, as in the Borges story.
    In any event, there are obvious limits to how much even the most dedicated dream journal-keeper can bring back from a night in the multiverse. No doubt everything is recorded somewhere - more likely in nonlocal mind than the basement of the personal subconscious - but since we can't yet Google our dreams, it is essential (and can be wonderful creative fun) to develop searchable logs over time. They become the most important scientific data (in the sense of state-specific science, adequate to the field under investigation) in this area that we will ever attain. 

    On some days, my inner guidance is to write down whatever I remember as soon as possible, and let further writing and pattern recognition emerge as I do that. This works really well when I start by drawing something from the dream. On other days, my guidance is to forego journaling altogether in favor of simply writing with the energy and elements my dreams and HG experiences have given me.
    Some of the things that happen in Dreamland and stay in Dreamland have enduring effects even when we are amnesiac about what happened. 

Drawing: "Faces at the Threshold" by Robert Moss