The Cliff
This dream was recorded from very scant notes set down on the night of the dream. Actual recording was done about a month later. I considered this to be a very important dream, because it is the first in which I turned the tables on an attacker by fading enough out of the dream world to become invulnerable. It set me to thinking to what extent this could work in the awake world. The dream from which this one opened was not remembered at all, but I was aware of a previous dream or forgotten sequence.
I was looking at several paintings which included horses. One of these showed horses at the edge of a cliff, either jumping or falling into the canyon below. As I examined the painting closely, it opened into a real scene with me standing on a ledge about 30 feet below the canyon lip. The cliff was very high, maybe 1000 feet. In my imagination I experimented with the feeling of falling from the cliff and wondered what would be the best way to slow my fall and what attitude I should hit in to make the least mess of myself at the bottom.
While I was involved in my thoughts, one or more persons tossed a young man, who looked like a dangerous juvenile delinquent, over the edge. He somehow stopped his fall and climbed back up uninjured.
The two of us walked away from the cliff through a tunnel that opened onto the ledge where I had been standing. Sometime after this, someone, I do not know if it was this same person or not, threatened me with a knife. Rather than fight or run, I deliberately faded partially from the dream reality so I became uninjurable, though still perfectly visible. When stabbed, the knife just passed through me with little resistance and no damage.
End.
While recording the above dream, an image came to me which has appeared several times over the last week or so while recording dreams. It is inside a (New England) hardware store, modern, not old fashioned. There were counters along the end walls, and on top of the cabinets behind the counter at one end were ranged bicycles. I do not remember the action or plot, although the scene appears from several positions inside the store. It is my impression this was a fairly recent dream.
Another scene just appeared to me as I was about to exit to the formatter. It opened on a street with a row of turn of the century (19th to 20th) wooden houses before me. I walked up the short wide walk to one and climbed the cement steps to the entrance. Opening the door, I entered to find myself in a two story entrance hall with a spiral staircase before me to the right, which had been expressed as a large round tower from the outside. A door to the first floor rooms was before me to the left.
The hall was dusty, but well lit, through high windows and possibly holes in the roof. The condition of the entrance hall was very poor, with treacherous holes in the floor. Inside the room behind the doorway, the floor was mostly gone, leaving the beams to walk on and the cellar below. I found some small object of interest there, but do not remember what it was. I feel this to have been a vivid dream, but one which was probably not remembered upon waking. This dream leaves the impression of being older than the hardware store dream above, but only a year or so, and not in the time of the dream recorded at the top of this page.
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