This entry and all others from 1996-97 are part of my dream project which extended from August 1996-97. I kept track of my dreams for an entire year by recording them to audiocassette and illustrating what parts I could in composition books. I ended up with over 70 ninety-minute cassettes and four composition books detailing my dreams.
The written transcription is from a much later date than 1996-97 but is almost word-for-word, with some slight corrections and omissions. This typed transcription is not 100% faithful to the original verbal account, as it allows for slight modifications, additions, omissions, and corrections. There are new separations between paragraphs and dreams are separated into different entries at approximately the right places. In addition, segments of dreams MAY be transposed/moved/added to other sections as I see fit. Aside from these modifications, these dreams are detailed exactly as I had them over six years ago.
This dream is kind of confusing. There was some stuff going on with my family--I can't remember all that it was, but I went into the bathroom to take a bath at night. I sat in the bath and picked up the soap and tried to lather my arms, but I was having trouble doing it for some reason. My brother, Eric, was sitting next to the tub with his arms on the edge as if he were in a trance. He had a camera in his hands while I was sitting here trying to wash! It's like we were BOTH kind of in a trance because I would never have allowed anybody in the bathroom while I'm taking a bath! He had this camera and said he was going to try to take some pictures of me for the family or something. All of a sudden I said, "Eric, you can't take pictures now because I'm trying to take a bath!"--meaning, of course, "Get out!!"
So I think he just got up and left. I didn't have soap on me but I was washing dirt off; there were little grains of something coming off me and I rubbed my arms to get it off. After I came out of the bath it's like I went into a combination of the dining room and my bedroom, and where the closet or the phone would be there was a big box, only it was also sitting on the edge of the dining room table. I started digging around for stuff in it and removing things and I found my faux leather portfolio. It was all dusty so I took it out and rubbed it against the floor to get the dust off. (I hate rubbing dust off with my hands as I have an aversion to dirt.) I put it aside and kept digging and pulling out things. I kept finding magazines similar to--but that weren't--National Geographic. All of them had to do with history. As I dug down into the box they kept getting older and older, it seemed; the ones on top had something to do with like the French Revolution or something, and the ones in the middle had to do with another subject, and the one on the very bottom had to do with Senmut, who was Queen Hatshepsut's grand vizier in ancient Egypt. I think I was going to take these out and read them.
Then it's kind of like I was in my room near my offwhite dresser at the foot of my bed, digging there instead. I found my blue folder with the different entries I've written on the Egyptian gods; this was a project I engaged in for the fun of it long ago in real life, and was more about the gods as my own characters than as mythological entities. In the dream one of them had a drawing; it was about some kind of monkey god--I think it was Hanuman from Indian myth--only here he was a sort of bad guy. He was standing to the left and in his hand he held a statue of a baboon which represented Thoth, the Egyptian god. The thing is, Hanuman--or whoever this was--was a monkey, but wasn't a monkey, because I remember that both of these things weren't monkeys. So I'm not sure how to explain that, but it WAS a dream...
Standing between and behind these two characters was the goddess Sakhmet, and she was looking at them with some surprise, like, "Oh, my gosh!" This illustrated some kind of story. The monkey god (or whatever!) held his hand out like he was holding the statue on the flat of his palm, but then he seemed to be holding it up by its neck. I thought, "The drawing's rather good, except for the bodies." This was because the faces were pretty good compared to the bodies; I thought I would fix how he was holding the statue, because it looked kind of weird with him holding it up by the neck.
