Ribbon dream

I had a dream several years, or perhaps decades ago that keeps popping in to my head. I think I was ill at the time, or at least sleeping in bed that was too hot.

It was a frantic scene. A large, dark room, which in retrospect is perhaps the ‘Tron’ play space, is over what feels like a running track mixed with a flat Rainbow Road track from Super Mario – there was specifically some endless void below. These game related parallels are things I have drawn in my later life, it did not feel like I was experiencing a ‘game in real life’, this was just the scene.

There was some sort of running, or at least movement or motion progress happening on tracks. The curious thing was the dynamics. Up ahead the track was flat and divided into lanes, perhaps a dozen or so. The track was curving left and right, slightly undulating. But were I was, the ‘here’ in the track, was split into ribbons, which were flowing up and down the further from the splitting point I was. And the splitting point was alwasy ‘just up ahead’. The harder I tried to get to the unsplit and sort of safer looking or feeling part of the track, the faster the splitting would happen, so I was always on what felt like a bucking or at least undulating and swaying ribbon of track. Some ribbons would simply drop down into darkness, and the strange thing was, when this happened, I was standing on the ribbon.

I would try to jump from one ribbon to another, other that would somehow outlive the current ribbon, and this would work for a while, but it would always drape down and I would fall.

The weird thing (as if none of this was already weird) is that I was on all of the ribbons. It was my perspective that was shifting. I was on every ribbon, and every ribbon was heading toward the track, but I, the I having the dream, could only experience one perspective, and then only temporarily.

I have since thought that this is my brain trying to lace together my gut feeling of the relationship between the concious and unconcious mind. There’s a roiling mass of perspectives, nearly all of which are snuffed out before only a fraction or the survivors are incorporated (literally) into your concious perspective timeline. Sometimes the welds show. Sometimes there are conflicts between ribbons and your brain stutters and the ideas ‘fight for supremacy’. We you are in an altered state you can sometime feel or see this process happening, or your mind weaves into and attempts to maintain the ‘wrong’ ribbon far too long. You be trippin.

In any case. The image of this dream, of jumping between, falling from, but always only being on ONE ribbon, oftem resurfaces in my mind.

Zinner