Life After Death

A strange dream. I dreamed that a boy was playing a song very similar to "Nella Fantasia" — but on the clarinet, not the oboe — and that I was playing the piano. That person looked a lot like Rit Parnichkun but I know he doesn't play the clarinet.

After a while, the clarinet vanished and "Rit" (or the person who looked like him) was singing instead of playing, and this was an astonishing voice, a soaring, pure soprano that went up to a sustained high C. As he sang the C, a brilliant, blue-white light washed over us.

A woman, in her 40s or 50s with piled up blond hair was standing behind the piano (it was a brown upright) with perhaps a blackboard behind her, so we might have been in some kind of school room. And she said to me, "What does the song mean?"

And I said, "It's about letting go, detaching from the conscious self."

She said, "So it's a song about death?"

"I guess so."

"So what IS death?" she asks me? (I remember now she has a white blouse with a frilly neck, slightly similar to an Elizabethan ruff.)

"I don't know what happens. I think we just become one with nature and the universe, and later we get reconstituted as something or someone else."

"So you don't believe in life after death?"

"I guess, not as a thread that continues."

"That's what I think, too," says the school teacher. The singing goes on — angelic — and I play chords on the piano, accompanying the boy soprano who looks like Rit Parnichkun.

And I slowly woke up — not all at once. The sound of the song in my mind went on past my waking up for a few moments.

Disintegrating Teeth

I dreamed that my teeth turned to powder and started disintegrating. It was a realistic dream. I remember clearly my left upper incisor going KER-RUNCH and feeling the inside of my mouth, running to the toilet (while still dreaming, but thinking myself awake) to see in the mirror that I could still smile but only in a crooked kind of way ... a panicking morning.

Periscope

I dreamed that we were on a starship and that most of the passengers were being kept in stasis. I, one of the crew, was being woken up. There was a crisis.

Everyone wore bright orange jumpsuits, as though they were prisoners. Indeed, they were, I realized, and we were transporting them to some penal colony. The crisis was that we were being sighted by an alien ship.

The aliens were unseen, speaking to use through what looked like a kind of periscope that could stretch, bend, and peer around corners. The captain was having difficulty communicating and asked me.

The alien said "I yield to the gentleman from Massachusetts" and I wondered if he learned English from watching C Span.

I started to speak the periscope moved up and down, peering quizzically. Then the alien said "Oh, I know you! Your sister has visited us, and she told me you and your husband were coming to our world."

And this is what my dream has tonight (wide awake at 2 am after waking up from a long, drug-induced slumber — the doctor diagnosed acute sinusitis and gave me some high powered medicines._)

Hungary

In my dream, I was in Hungary. I don’t know why.

But I’m driving around in a small domed car kind of like a VW. Apparently I’ve driven all the way from Thailand. I go down a ramp in a place called Rozska Square. That I remember perfectly because are signs everywhere. The name is very similar to the name of one of my favorite Hungarian composers. In the parking lot, I get out of the car and I’m being bullied by a bunch of young thugs. They show me around. One of them is the skinhead. They seem to be adolescents. I’m forced to abandon my car. I remember that this underground parking lot has a cracked and pothole laden floor.

It seems that days later I come back and the car is very much damaged. The locks have been chewed away as though by rodents. The car won’t start. I’m not sure how I will get back to Bangkok.

Somehow I do manage to get there, and I’m trying to get help from my mother to get the car towed. All the way to Thailand.

Martin or Martha?


I dreamed that I was watching my own opera, sitting in the front row. There was no orchestra pit. The scene suddenly changed and it seemed that "Jesus Christ Superstar" was being performed as a entr'acte. However, it was a modern dress production and the set looked like a row of Baltimore townhouses in a lower middle income neighourhood. Except they were all painted a yellowish-green. There were low wooden green fences in front of the houses and a man in bell-bottom green trousers was climbing over one to go up the steps to the front door of a house.

I find myself outside the theater now on a street that actually seems to be a continuation of the theater set. It is a cul-de-sac and I am climbing over a fence to go up the steps into a house. I am looking for something and don't remember what, and can't find it. As I stand on the porch I try reaching into the mailbox and it is huge and cavernous inside, big enough for a whole person to crawl through and crawl out the the other side. There is a woman in the house, an older black lady. She is dressed in black with a white apron. She works in the White House.

Two skinheads, one a fat boy and another an older man, come up to the porch. The look threateningly at the lady. They appear to be the cliché image of white supremacists. "Help me with my homework," the boy says, "I gotta name three Germans."

I don't recall who is named by the lady but then the boy turns to me and I feel really threatened, intimidated, and suddenly, in my dream, I realize that I am black. "Gimme a name!"

The first name I think of in my mind is Hitler, but the name Luther instead appears in my mind on a kind of parchment vision, its letters (in Fraktur script) obliterating Hitler's name. I try to say "Martin", but instead I end up saying "Martha." I wait to be attacked.

Instead, the boy seems satisfied, and writes it down. I realize he is uneducated and doesn't know the names of ANY Germans. He walks away as I wake up.

Tristan in a Strange Town

I dreamed that I arrived in a strange European town to conduct Tristan at the Metropolitan opera. But it is not like any Metropolitan Opera I know. it’s a series of squat low buildings and I am let off far from them and walk there.

Getting closer, I’m picked up by the violinist Daniel Draganov driving a white sedan, which pulls up to a little extra lane next to the grassy area by the opera and I get into his car. I walk into the building when he lets me off with a Dover edition under my arm and a white baton.

Oddly I don’t actually remember conducting the opera itself in the dream. Only the aftermath. I didn’t really perform it, I must’ve done something else instead, something I want to forget.

After the opera, I find myself in a hotel room with a briefcase and some papers and some money. I leave the room after locking the door, and walking around in the city I realize that aliens have invaded. The people are all somehow transformed, and I realize that it was my performance that did it. Somehow I was the unwitting agent of these aliens. I have been sent there to do this.

Uneasy, I return to the hotel and get a different room. In the room there is a briefcase and papers and a wallet just as I had before. Now I have two of each. The room is on a lower floor I believe it to be the second floor.

I have to get away from this country and warn the world. Carefully I put all my correct papers into the other briefcase. I put my money into the other wallet. I sneak out of the room and try to lock it. However, the key doesn’t really fit in the lock. I lift up the door and try to jam it in, but the hardware simply isn’t designed to make the door lockable. Where the old hardware was, it is papered over and painted in white.

I carefully look down the corridor because I want to make sure I can escape. The coast seems clear but after I walk a few yards there’s a right turn into a breakfast room and the hotel lobby and the check-in counter. I realize I wasn’t on the second floor after all. I stand there wondering how I’m going to get through the lobby and warn the world that the aliens have taken over the country.

Morgaine The Cross-Eyed

Oh, what a strange dream!

I dreamed that I was a knight and that I was walking in the narrow gulf between two covered bleacher-pavilions. I had another knight with me. The bleachers had two raked rows of seats and a tilting roof. So, the bleachers were bordered with white fences. A little ass-sized piece of wood stuck out and my friend sat on the fence on the right. But I couldn't get onto the "seat" on the left. I am struggling, cursing my fatness. I make the posts of the pavilion shake and the roof rattle! It's panic and the crowd starts to make fun of me.

Looking around and squatting uncomfortably of that little wooden wedge, I realize that I actually AM in the middle ages. People are walking around in armor and other fantasy costumes — there is a big field, and behind, through the trees, perhaps a town. Where we are appears to actually be a jousting place.

"Look," I say to my friend, "there goes Edmund, the imbecile!" And suddenly, excitedly, I say, "People don't have surnames here. I can just assign epithets to me and in a few centuries, they will BECOME their surnames!" Excitedly, I look at the other people.

A monstrously corpulent, robed man waddles by. "That guy, for instance," I say. "I will call him Morgaine the Cross-Eyed."

Morgaine walks past, unaware that he has been surnamed for the next five centuries ... and then I wake up.

Egyptian Circles

I had two wildly vivid dreams last night. One was very domestic - but overblown. I dreamed that my sister Pinky and I had purchased space in a luxurious condo-like building. It is really vast. Behind the living room are a series of curved corridors, like the insides of a conch shell, leading to bedroom suites. It's all on an open plan and people from other condos are wandering in and out of their own bedrooms without an boundaries. I am fearful of getting to the wrong bedroom if I pick the wrong spiralling corridor.

The living room as at least 30 different furniture suites in all styles and there's a grand piano at the end nearest the bedrooms and a brown upright I start thinking what a great space for a house concert and I start counting seats - over 100 of them - and wondering whether it would be okay to bring in straight back chaires for a concert. The furniture sets are mostly in gold an olive, there's one with benchlike wooden frames and black and white cowskin pillows.

The living room doesn;t have a wall (it's all open plan) and opens out into the vast lobby area with women behind counters and even a box lunch service.

In fact I soon find people sitting in some of the furniture sets and wonder what they are doing in my living room, except I seem to have wandered into the lobby of the building. I look back and my own living room is quite far a way, one step up from the lobby, the bedroom spirals so far away as to be almost invisible. There's all sorts of foot traffic around, people hastening to other condos, but always this spiralling, shell-like interior. In fact the condo is like an infinity loop.

I went back to sleep and had another dream: one where I am directing Aida. A huge chorus in Egyptian dress is walking around in a circle. The triumphal march music is blaring from a curious black circula column like speaker. They march around and around and I realize that the scene needs more happening. High priests, citizens with offerings, need to come out to importune the marchers. But the ENTIRE scene has finished playing back on the speaker and the chorus is still marching round and round and won't stop.

Is it a nightmare? It's certainly a bit Kafkaesque, but I feel no terror or paranoia....

My So-called Vacation

So: I dreamed that I was taking a seven day vacation from all my hard work and that I was sitting in the front row on a plane flying west (across America) toward California. So, high up in the sky the plane takes a sharp right dip and I feel wind.

A small blond boy is sitting in the row across. He is the pilot's son. His dad has opened the window so they can look out at the clouds and the land below. We're flying low and I feel the wind in my face. The landscape through the open window is lush farmland, very American. But looking out front (there doesn't seem to be a pilot's cabin but just a front window) the light is golden, like a Max Parrish painting. And to my left, with the window closed, it is so bright and golden it hurts my eyes.

We are flying low and there is a sheriff's car, bright red, below. "Let's buzz our friend the sheriff" says the boy and the plane swoops down, drops thousands of feet on its side to pratically graze the sheriff's car with one wing.

"No, no, let me off," I say, "this is too nerve-wracking," and I somehow manage to jump out of the plane and I start walking to California.

The landscape changes and I'm walking down a pathway (always westward, to the left) rimmed with hedges. I begin singing "Carry me back to ol' Alabamy" (I know the song is ACTUALLY "Virginny" but I wasn't singing that in my dream). It's quite peculiar as I'm actually walking AWAY from Alabama. But the walk is long. I find myself on a hilly path descending with an industrial city below. At first I think I have already reached California, but I don't think so now. It's a bit discouraging.

A car pulls up. It's the pilot and his son. "Get in," the pilot says, "We have to catch up with the plane." (Defies all logic but it's a dream. I imagine it's on autopilot, circling low.) I get back in the car and I'm suddenly on the plane again.

And I'm thinking, I didn't pack my laptop. I left behind the attaché case with my laptop in it. I was planning to work on a new novel during my holiday, but now I can't. Why am I even on vacation? Should I go back? I start to panic. This is where I woke up.

In the Ice Age

Little remains to me of this dream after being awake unnaturally early for many hours. But basically what I remember is a long journey "home" to a bleak, snowy country - I believe we're in the ice age in this dream, wearing animal skins.

But when we get home it's actually an apartment building with a central atrium and a staircase that winds around and around the sides of the atrium, so it is a long climb. In the building, it is snowing and when I reach the floor that I call home the walls are icy and cavernous so it is both a cave and a concrete building — perhaps like a diorama in a museum.

The carpet is also a snowy forest floor. And then I hear music, very clearly, with each step. The sound is orchestral but my steps are punctuated by chords played on three flutes, each a major ninth apart, thus the passages are spread across the whole range of the instruments....

This was my dream after falling asleep really early last night from sheer exhaustion.

Oktoberfest

What a peculiar dream! I'm with a bunch of friends in what looks like an old wooden hall with two levels … the upper level is accessible by two curving ramps, one on either side, with raked levels. There are small tables for four people and people are eating or drinking. This seems to be somewhere in South Germany — there are people wearing what look like Bavarian folk costumes. The walls are dark wood with ornate baroque carvings.

We can't find anywhere to sit. We start to go up the right ramp where there are some chairs but no tables. On the upper level which is like a balcony, some people in "peasant costume" beckon to us. They have the only long table where we could sit, but they point beyond where they say there is another table.

We bring our own chairs but the "table" is just a square black log set into the wall. I try to pull it out, thinking it can be pulled out, but it really is just a log. We'd all have to sit in a row facing the wall, trying to put our drinks on the bit of wood that pokes out.

The peasant ladies at the next table laugh and so, "No, no, Sie can bei uns sitten" — a weird mixture of English and German. I see they're finishing, downing their drinks and the table is being cleared. As we move toward them, however, they all stand up … and my friends have all vanished. An oom-pah band is playing and only by the second line do I realize it's the Bayernhymne, the national anthem of the former kingdom of Bavaria. (It's not exactly right, though. The first three notes make it sound eerily like the Nazi anthem, which is not how the Bavarian anthem goes at all. In fact now that I am awake I realize the anthem I heard in my dream was actually a hodgepodge of different hymn-like German pieces.)

Well so I can't get to a seat until it ends. And it ends so I go down to the raked area. My friends are gone, but now, where there weren't any before, there are tables. I am about to sit but suddenly the anthem starts up again — there's another verse. Some of the people start singing along. The words are in a kind of dream-German.

After the second verse no one sits down and I think, O God, a THIRD verse. Instead, in the cleared area below, a scene from a play is being enacted. People are wearing 19th century (or earlier) clothes, and declaiming in a crisp kind of Bühnenaussprache (like an exaggerated stage pronunciation) — even so it's still "dream-German" not comprehensible. The play — maybe it's one of those endless Schiller things — drones on and on but instead of lulling me to sleep, i wakes me up. (Maybe because I'm tired of standing.)

8 3/4

So I dreamed I was in a bus with Federico Fellini. Well, that is who it claimed to be in my dream, but it actually LOOKED like Marcello Mastroianni.

The bus is winding through the streets (is it Rome?) and Vanessa Redgrave shows up. We're having an interesting talk but it's clear she's really here to see Federico so when he gets off, she starts to as well.

I said, but there's an interesting play on, it's adapted from the first act of a sex comedy film. We should go. She's all "All right," but the play is in London and for some reason the bus is letting us off in front of another theater, in Cambridge. The play is sold out.

Vanessa gets us in by claiming that ticket have been left for us, and we sneak in while the ticket person is looking. A curly haired blond young man is apparently the author. He greets Vanessa with a hug and I am introduced. Laughing, we stand in the back aisle and watch as the curtain rises.

Homophones

I dreamed I was conducting a rehearsal of HMS Pinafore — I was not the main conductor, just taking a rehearsal. So, the main conductor. a whale of a woman, shows up in a elegant long dress and I believe her to be the late Mary Chafee, conductress of the Bangkok Combined Choir when I was a child.

I'm looking at her across an Olympic sized swimming pool and the male chorus are all standing on another side of the pool, on my right. She begins to conduct the opening chorus: "We sail the ocean blue, and our saucy ship's a beauty."

Outraged, I cry out, "But they're supposed to be swimmimg while they sing this number!" I start demonstrating the crawl, with alternate arm movements every two beats of Sullivan's bum-bum-bum-bum-bum. I'm appalled they didn't realize it's a syncrhonized swimming production of HMS Pinafore....

Something to file away for my future in Regietheater.

Just before I wake up, I find myself explaining in some kind of linguistics lecture: "You see, the reason the French have to prance around and use a lot of sign language is because dents, dans, and dont are near-synonyms." The thiing is, I mean to say homophones, but in my dream I definitely call them synonyms... LOL.

Oingo Boingo

Last night I dreamed that I and a woman (I don't remember who now) were searching for the Buddha. We found him meditating in a forest.

The woman called him by a nickname, which was "Oing". In the dream I kept thinking - in Thai, ng can't come after oi. (There's not even a credible way to spell "Oing" in Thai.)

The Buddha was serene. I knew it was really him because he had a halo. The trees, the forest, everything was pitch-black except for the Buddha's face.

I looked up the word "oing" in the universal dictionary. It has two meanings: in French, "oing" means unction and is a very archaic word from the Latin "unctum". In Irish, it can be either the vocative or genitive of "ong", meaning sorrow.

Two oings, therefore, bilingually, would mean "unction of sorrow" — or "O unction sorrow".

The dream is telling me that my sorrow is also that which anoints me. And in my dream it is a secret name of the Buddha. Meaning that I must accept this sorrow as a sacrament to attain serenity. The unction of sorrow is the pathway to light.

A simple dream leading me to find answers in a dictionary, but I suspect that really is what it means.

Dreams reach out

18 months ago, I had this dream.

Since that dream, my personal and business and generally everything to do with my external life has got steadily worse, Not my interior life, though — my composing and my writing. There have been quite few breakthroughs there. Indeed the more I suffered, the more my creative work seemed to benefit.

This weekend I was so depressed because it seemed that my many problems had no possible solution at all.

I happened to post on facebook a photograph of my Ganesha, the 15th century statue from India. I made a flippant remark about whether I believe or am I just hedging my bets.

Ten minutes later, an anonymous donor contacted me with an offer to give money to the DasJati project. Just enough to make the difference between annihilation and survival.

Now, when I had this dream, I believed I had to recreate the scene in my dream — that this was a demand from Ganesha in some way (or from the collective unconscious or from whatever system of symbols you care to use.) But I have not yet done so.

Maybe, just maybe, today's events are a kind of trickster-god type teaser. So I better do that ceremony.

Just to be on the safe side. Not that I'm superstitious. But I AM a Thai. Superstition is kind of in the DNA....

A Faustian Bargain

My dream. I've been entrusted to do an English version of an opera about Faust. I am in Bayreuth, but this is not an opera by Wagner, only someone very much like him.

In the night, I sort the papers, the ms. pages, and one of the scenes is missing, The scene is set in a church or a chapel and has Margaret in it, in a white dress with a cap looking very much like someone in the period of the Salem witch trials.

I'm sitting in a large office with a rickety wood-plank floor — an old building — with a computer.I search the files over and over. They are in glossy black folders with the scene numbers written in white ink, the numbers in a continental handwriting, i.e. the one has a big upstroke.

Now I am in the street outside the opera house. I meet a large, fat German who is NOT Wolfgang Wagner (but reminds me of him.) I explain my problem and ask for a printed copy to help me find the scene. He is annoyed and I say "No, no, I just need to know where the scene falls in the context because the files are all out of order."

He enters a doorway into a brick townhouse that is to the right of the opera and I think, "Just like Wolfgang ... he has a secret way into his own private apartments just by the opera" … and he emerges with what I DON'T need, a printed edition of FAUST. I easily find the scene leafing through the paperback but that's not what I really need.

I find myself on an upper balcony talking to a young singer with red curly hair and freckles. He looks say, half Irish, half African. It's a very exotic look and the odd thing is that this guy, a tenor, is Thai. He is speaking to me in Thai. He's performing in this production.

"I'm nervous about it," he says, and seems to need a hug. Then he says, "I'm not nervous anymore. Usually I only get performance anxiety when I'm away from Thailand, but luckily I am home now."

But I am thinking … wait a minute. We're in Germany. Just then, I wake up.

Guys and Dolls

I had a dream last night. I don't appear to have been a character in the dream, I seem to just have been watching.

First I see a doll, a girl doll. made with the special ability of being able to locate objects by echo. This doll utters strange sequences of syllables, trying to find a mate by listening to the echo. She is pursuing a boy doll. They are in a house. She beams her echo and walks around the empty corridors. The boy doll disappears behind a bead curtain. The girl doll follows the echo. Behind the bead curtain there's emptiness and darkness and the dolls fall, fall, fall.

They find themselves in a children's room. The girl doll follows the boy doll. There is a bed in the room but they lie down on the floor next to a wooden dresser. The girl doll pours gasoline on them both and set themselves on fire. (They're toys, not humans, so they don't appear to be in pain.)

My omniscient vision pulls back and there's a teenage couple on the bed. The room belongs to one of them, but they are too old for toys. They have each other now. But as the toys are burning, the boy teenager looks at the burning girl doll and says, "When did you learn to play with gasoline?"

That's when I woke up. I don't know how to explain this rather disturbing dream.

Trafficked to Turkey

I had remarkable bad dream in which I was in my mid to late teens and I had been captured and I was in a group of five people being trafficked to a strange country which seemed to be part European, part Asian - perhaps Turkey.

They keep us chained up and we have to sleep outside and one day they sit us around a table and explain to us the things we are going to have to do now as their slaves. The boy seated to my right has long black hair and he says no, no, that doesn't apply to me, right, I am only here to observe. They beat him up.

Later I manage to lead the group out of the house where we are locked up. There is a back alley that runs alongside a hilly in a park and suddenly we are in a large room where Queen Elizabeth, in a state visit, is sitting no an open air throne with hundreds of uniformed people, high society people or diplomats, seated facing her.

In out rags and chains we run up the aisle and kneel to the queen and I say "Help us, we've been brought here from overseas and kept in chains and made to perform unspeakable things."

"Eaugh! How very interesting," the queen says. Suddenly I wake up and I'm still in a dream. I'm at a science fiction convention. And I'm talking about the dream I just had....