timothy's Journal: Dreams: a lucid one of 20100523

Several dreams last night; the ones fading fastest were about travel, I think all about road trips. Ski trip was part of the plan, and one of the trips I think included the mysterious western stretch that appears in many of my dreams, with glowing sunsets, mesas and plains. In one bit, I remember wearing an all-white snow suit, thin but quite warm.

The craziest one:

Perspective: sometimes 1st, sometimes 3d person.

I'm a detective, played by the heavyset curly-haired Irish guy who's often in the role of maverick detective, whose name I can't recall. [Note: looked it up: his name is Colm Meany.]

Along with some other detectives, at the scene of a death chalked up to suicide. (Actually, I think that the body was missing, so we weren't even certain that there'd been a *death* but that was the presumption.) Something about the scene puzzled me. The killing took place at the kitchen table of a small house or apartment with a very eccentric owner, or at least one with strange decorating taste. Over the table were several (three, I think) hanging ceiling lamps, unevenly spaced. One of them in particular had caught my attention (the other two were identical, and on one side; this one was hanging over the other side of the table). The shade was bulbous, composed of segments of glass or ceramic, in orange-yellow, black, and white, with circular decorations forming a band around the shade about half-way up. These decorations reminded me of eyes, and then it struck me: the lamp, though purely abstract at a quick glance, was actually based on the head / face of the cartoon character Daffy Duck, and the decorations that looked like eyes really did represent eyes. If you looked at any single pair of eyes, you could see Daffy. The yellow-orange parts were his bill, and what had seemed like random variations in the surface color resolved themselves into subtle details of Daffy Duck. (Does Daffy Duck have any actually subtle details? No matter.) The realization might have meant nothing in itself, but I noticed another instance of the eye-decoration pattern, at the same height as the eyes on the lampshade, in a line going around the brightly papered wall. It looked to me like each eye on the lamp had a matching eye on the wall, which I confirmed with a straight-edge. The lamp's off-center position over the table worked to make this straight-line relationship work, but it wouldn't have otherwise.

The other detectives were looking at me oddly now, but they seemed to agree that there was something intriguing about this now, even if they didn't think I was doing anything to understand the crime (if there was one). I noticed that one of the "eyes" on the wall looked slightly different from the others; it was behind the place where a diner might have sat on the narrow end of the table, away from the rest of the kitchen. I tapped the wall there, and found I was able to break into the plaster at that point, and pull from the wall a small glass jar (with a screw-on top), which contained at its bottom two small dark items. I did not open the jar, and handled it carefully, in case there were fingerprints to be found. In the dream, I remember being certain of what the items in the jar were (microfilmed blackmail material? Some secret recording device?), but now I don't remember what the actual conclusion was. However, this discovery immediately changed the tone of the investigation; suddenly, everyone seemed to believe that this was more likely a murder, and that the victim might have been tortured by a killer seeking the location of the hidden jar.