Dream shared, discussed and painted in a session as part of the multidisciplinary Dream Science Symposium,
10th - 11th October 2018, at University of California Los Angeles.

It was night-time and I was in London. I was with my old high school friends, four, all girls, my closest friends, plus me. The city was really beautiful, really bright, in contrast to the blue, very dark sky. The bright lights were almost a little bit overwhelming. We were close to the Big Ben tower. We were talking about coffee, mainly the taste of it, which I don’t like as it is bitter.
Suddenly, it was like falling in a roller coaster, anti-gravity, where you feel your body lift up and feel strange. I looked around me and everyone started floating, their feet slowly coming off the ground. I then felt sort of lucid, where you can sort of control your body in your dream, and the first thing you want to do when you feel lucid is you want to fly around. I could control my movements. My friends could do the same. So everyone in the entire city, it was pretty crowded, started floating, slowly up, along with my friends. Some people were really scared and stopped, but I was thrilled with the fact that I could control everything now.
We were flying and spinning around Big Ben, like in the movie Peter Pan, the famous scene where they are flying around. It was like a picturesque version of that, swirling and doing loops with all my friends. I could look down at the whole world and city, the contrast of bright lights with the dark night sky. My vision was blurred black and yellow, with lots of noise. It was freezing cold, the wind was going really fast. I could feel how cold it was, but it was like an adrenaline rush. We kept going further out into the ocean, I could control everything.
I woke up but I didn’t want the dream to end, I liked the dream so much I tried to go back to sleep and continue it. Miraculously the dream continued and I was flying again for a long time. My friends were no longer with me. I thought I have had my fun, so I flew straight down and dove into the ocean. It was completely black, and then I woke up.

“I’m in a building that’s big, made with blocks of stone. It feels like it’s hundreds of years old, I’m not sure how many stories it is but it’s feels like it’s almost a square. It’s like a museum, kind of dark and in shadow. There are windows on the far wall. It’s just a really thick stone wall, kind of grey.  It’s open in the interior, like the Guggenheim in New York, but with square corners instead of round. The landings are all on the outside and it’s open down the middle so you could potentially see all the way to the bottom. I can’t see to the bottom as it’s murky down there. I’m walking down the corridor along the outside edge of the top floor, heading toward the staircase, I’m going to turn right and start heading down. But on my left is this tapestry that I would have just walked by except that, as I’m walking by it, it moves, or it’s folded or there’s some way that it gets my attention. From first glance it’s sort of nondescript, it’s faded, it doesn’t really stand out. But then it gets my attention, and I turn and look at it. The tapestry is quite big, maybe 15 feet high, bigger than me and 6-8 feet wide. It’s really, really old. Like one of those carpets that was bright red when it was made but has now faded to a pale orangey colour.  And when I look at it, I don’t really see any detail, I can’t really tell what’s on it. But I think I see a tree, and in the dream I think, the tree of life. It might be like an oak tree, that kind of shape, it’s deciduous, fully leafed. And I get the sense there’s a river. And I also get a sense that it’s one of those tapestries where there’s a story or a myth being depicted. It was very detailed and densely woven. There’s so much in it, it feels like all of life is represented in it. The tapestry feels richly filled with people and animals and all kinds of symbols, it’s crowded with stuff.
“There is a small group of people starting in the same place I did. They want to see this tapestry so I have to move along because there isn’t enough space for us all. You can’t stand back and get a good perspective because the railing is there, and the dropoff. They are big wooden railings. They’re oak, carved, thick, old, somewhat ornate. The top has this wide curved, carved surface, and there are spindles underneath. At the corner of the stairs is a feature, a curved piece of wood to mark the corner. The corners of the building are square, but the railing is curved. They are beautiful even though I don’t like them. I have an adverse reaction to this railing. I don’t like oak.
“So I stand and look at the tapestry for a little while, and then I have to move reluctantly out of the way to let these people see it. I realize I have to share. I go further down. When I moved away from it and looked at it from a different angle, there was a whole different scene – like those scarves from India that are different colors depending on the angle of light, but the tapestry was much more complex than that, a thousand times more intricate. It felt like if you shifted your angle even just a little bit, it shifted the picture. It felt like it could change anyway, with time as well. It felt very magical.”