happy Monday dream log

Had this dream last night this morning whatev.

First act started with video-game style running around, maneuvering. There was some kind of barbarian horde out there (not pictured) and I was trying to either avoid them or get my forces in place to defend against them. There was a me-character who looked like Wasp from my current Soulcalibur III campaign, with the samurai sword and the red armor and red cloth over her face.

Second act. Time track is a little messed up, so I'm not sure which thing (typo: wrote thine) here happened first.
There was me-as-Lisa-Simpson explaining how her email program, represented by a cartoon unicorn on a computer screen, was different and cool. But then she was kind of abashedly explaining how it did require a lot more maintenance than a regular email program and you did have to go through and delete your old emails every day. Then for some reason the unicorn had to take a huge piss and she was asking Marge if it couldn't just go in the house, but Marge said no, so she had to unhook all the cords and carry it out into the yard. I didn't actually see the unhooking and carrying, instead moving on to the next part.
There was me standing outside the house and there was something in my eye. Prior to sneaking in, with awareness that the house I was about to be sneaking into was enemy territory. I think there was something stuck in each eye, actually. One of them it was a little hair like a very thin thread from a garment, the other like an eyelash that had got a little dug in so I had to like pinch it out and there was more than one layer. I was using that tiny little hand mirror I keep in my bag. I had sensation and it did hurt to be picking at my eyes like that, but not as much as doing the same things to my eyes in real life would have. (And after I woke up I did not have anything stuck in my eyes, so that was an actual dream-image and not an intrusion from physical reality.)

Third act. I was in a basement, laid out kind of like our old basement at Manton with a main room, a side room off to the right, and a third room your could only reach by going to the side room. Except for the structure the rooms were completely different. The main room I did not notice any features. The first side room was smallish and empty and had very old greyish-tealish kind of paint over bricks or horizontal wood slats, and a single lightbulb hanging in the middle of the room.
Through the door to the other room, no scene shift. The other room was better-lit with the same type of paint, but much much bigger. Got the impression that I was along for the ride, that I was seeing things-that-were. (Much resistance on typing this part up. Phones ringing, people coming into the office asking me for things, etc.) Room empty, no visible light source, no contents, just daylight coming in from somewhere. There was a hole in the floor, rectangular, offset to the right of the entrance in about the middle of the room. I went over there, hunkered down and looked in. Underneath (whoo! phone and fax ring, distracting!) there was a dark space piled and filled with bodies, old charred or decayed bodies that didn't much look like people, except for one little girl near the top. Maybe two. I honestly am not sure. Looking her (them?) in the eye I got a feeling of what had happened, who had done what horrible things to them and how they ended up thrown onto this pile and left to die and become corpses like all the many, many others. I am not to write down specifics, the interruptions tell me that much! The sense of the people who had done the horrible things was like a larger echo of the sense of the unseen barbarian horde I had earlier in the dream.
Then I (we? Jimmy might've been along for the whole ride, like in the shark guy dream) withdrew to the side room. And I felt I wanted to say something, something appropriate, because beings like the girls in there probably don't get a lot of visitors and I'd been in there and known not to say or do anything while I was in there. So I touched the wall and said something like, "I hope your dreams will be more pleasant." Then I 'heard' someone else say "Rest easy, old soldier." But I'm not 100% on who was speaking. My best guess is it was Jimmy saying what I was trying to say in a less awkward way! Then I pulled the lightbulb chain to turn off the light and we went back out of the basement.

I'm not sure how to interpret. I like to think I can tell the difference between when a dream is entirely internal to my psyche and when it has to do with people and things outside myself. And in the mama's house dream I remember there were multiple representations of other children there; the door covered with black & white headshots with the eyes all scribbled out, the long line of kneeling children I slipped in the door to kneel at the end of. The real spot where communication happened in that one was after I looked in the mirror, when I walked down the hallway, felt the spacetime start to shift and slide out from under me, and knew when to turn around and head back. The stuff after that was secondary, making sure I understood what had gone before.

Here I am even more positive that this was something not entirely from my personality. The other dreams where I've come to the conclusion there was communication and not just defragmentation going on have had similar aspects. There was Jimmy being sort of--the hell is the word?--reinforcing my shield, or layering his presence over with mine, which wouldn't be necessary if I was inside myself. There was something about the time, where the shape of the time I was in came up against the edge of a different time (in the specific sense where a time is a spirit of a group or series of events!). That pushing of times against each other would have been really unnerving if I hadn't been used to it, or maybe the James or the people I was visiting took steps to make the time-jostling less rocky.
And hey, in this dream also communication was preceded by looking in a mirror! Picking hairs out of my eyes is a dual reference in that context. In an older version of my images, me messing with demons was represented by having worms under my skin that I had to pick or dig out. Picking things out of my eyes is necessary to be able to see clearly. Me picking stuff out of my eyes in a mirror before going inside was just a little bit of, hehe, occipital hygiene. So that I was not distorting my ability to perceive on the one hand, or on the other hand bringing potentially infectious little ones into someone else's domain, which is just rude.

I have no idea why I went on that visit at this time or whose idea it was. And I won't say I emote about it one way or the other. Communication is cool and I am honored, but I don't want to go around feeling all honored and saying "wow! how awesome!" Because people who live in a time like those girls live in are not people you want to be visiting every day, and who certainly do not enjoy being where they are and do not consider it awesome. I'm not sorry it happened, though, and I hope us being there was in some way helpful or good, because nobody should have to be stuck in a time like that even after leaving their body. That's bullshit.

Also I hope I'm not making it all up and being crazy. Now is not a time for me that I can afford to go any crazier than I usually am!

[edit later in the day]

I wonder if it's possible to loan the cats to people, if the cats are willing and the people are ones to whom I've been properly introduced.

By the cats, I refer to firecat and secretcat, which are my names for two little ones I apparently acquired over the past few months. Firecat is that creature shark guy shot at me, then apologized for shooting at me. But only after I'd had a short series of dreams where I saw it and dug it out of its infection vector, then watched over its transformation from undisciplined angry bitey thing to somewhat unruly but basically friendly creature. I decided to call it firecat, because its last image was a little white cat with big bright eyes and orange flames blooming around its chest. Secretcat is the one I picked up in the psychic-society dream where the chase sequence ended in a graveyard. I was carrying Shashi in my yellow bag at the beginning of the dream, but then at the end there was a Shashi in the bag and behind her was another cat, who when I looked at it more closely I got another image for. He was vaguely catlike, but shaped high and thin and sleek like a greyhound, white with blue tones and blue eyes and long skinny jaws with sharp white teeth.

When I was first putting together my menagerie I thought only in terms of demons, and came up with names and templates based on the four elements. These two fellas are the only little ones that have come to me openly since I shut down the demon factory in me. The other day, when I was conversing with a little one and ended up drawing waay too much "air" energy and freaking out afterwards as a result, that was firecat I was talking to. He is still too undisciplined and turbochargey for casual deployment! I thought I had to be PMSing the reaction was that bad. Not good to be typing hate hate hate hate into a browser window when material circumstances have not much changed. Once I figured out what was happening I took steps to correct it, and lemme tell ya. Earth energy comes in through your root chakra, and extreme fluctuations in the spiritual energy of any center will affect the physical systems around it, so I had a really uncomfortable bus ride home that day. XD Secretcat I can't really say whether I've deployed successfully or not, that being not only the nature of secretcat but the nature of me. It's harder to discern skill area for a creature where it was like "he followed me home, I'm'a keep him!" than one somebody else was already deploying and I could see what it was attempting to do. Firecat works, seems like, as an energy siphon; secretcat I think has to do with deflection, replication, shifting things to one side or another of surfaces. Since that was how he arrived, mimicking my kitty and slipping from the outside to the inside of the bag I was carrying. But he did politely ask my permission to stay, after that, and give me a good image of himself, so to me he's not sneaky in a bad way!

They both seem to be, in elemental terms, primary air-thingies, one with a fire subcomponent and the other with a water subcomponent. Which makes sense given me and how I operate.

So getting back to the beginning. If it's still too iffy to try deploying these cats (one of them, at least) in response to real-world situations, I wonder if it's appropriate to ask them to do stuff for me in dreamscapes. Since that's where I officially met them and all. Like, in future, if I were to go visiting some being who exists out there in mindspace, and I visited them a couple times and got to know them, and valuable knowledge or something were exchanged and there was a basis for trust, and they needed some work done on their "house", would it be a good idea for me to bring my little ones with me and attempt to accomplish something on behalf of an ally?

Maybe this is too much speculative and not a sensible thing to be pondering at this point. But dangit, it occurred to me, and I want to write down stuff in this area when it occurs to me so I can read it later and be like, "Hmmm." Also if I have a dream where I show up someplace and notice one of my cats is with me I want to have already thought it through so I'm not making a decision completely on the spot!