Monday, October 24, 2011

Nightscape - Bird of Pray (5-13-07) 54 Reads

Current mood:productive
I have shared with you some of my more vivid dreams before.  I've been holding on to a couple of them for a while now.  I wanted to do something more with them but I just don't have the time.  I'll just state them as they were.

Picture a slideshow, my old childhood photographs from the 70's.  Old, yellowed and cracked.

The imagery was the same as the actual photos but twisted in some way.

Then the stationary pictures came alive.  Silently and in extreme slow motion.  They didn't turn into video but instead into distinct memories.  My perspective angle stayed the same but it would pan and zoom giving the two dimensional subjects a pseudo third dimension, much like a popup book.

In the background Gnarls Barkley's song "Crazy" was playing.  But while the song kept the same tempo, the voice became morbid and twisted.  A sandpapery rocky voice sung the song in what could have been a demonic Marilyn Manson rendition of the hit.

So the dream would pan through these old photographs and zoom into them.  The subjects were moving ever so slowly.  Laughing, crying, talking, jumping and dancing.

They were all pictures from my youth.

But then there was another change.  In these pictures and in every single shot, I realized that I had done a bad thing.  I had committed some type of sin in every picture.  I had stolen the candy I was eating happily.  I had yelled at someone outside of the photo frame.  I had lied about something insignificant.

In my dream I realized as I was floating through this half stationary photographs that there was a tiny little black bird in each one.

In every picture, somewhere there was this crow-like bird.  No detailed features on this bird.  In passing you might even mistake it for a black blob.  The more I noticed it though, the more I noticed that it was very, very small when I was a child.  Far away, in the distance this bird glared on.  A dark blob with a sharp beak pointed down and its two beady yellow eyes focused both on me in the photograph and on me as the intruder in this slow motion picture book.

The song continues becoming raspier as the dream moves forward.  As I grow older in the photographs the creature also grows.  The detail on this "bird" becomes more noticeable, but still, strangely out of focus other than the beak and the eyes.

It almost looks as if the black blob portion of this bird was absorbing the light around it.  It was so dark and cloudy I couldn't stare at it for too long out of fear that I would too be drawn into it.

Pictures move from my toddler years, to my young teenage life.  My sins continue, the bird keeps growing. 

My young adult life and my current life.  Then my future.

Before long the photographs are showing me what I look like when I am old and decrepit.  Just before the slideshow comes to an end and as I lay on my deathbed, the creature moves.

I'm still smiling through my dentures at the camera with my cane in hand as the creature grows behind me.  It doesn't grow horizontally as much as it grows vertically.  The beak and eyes stay the same but the ghastly wings that sprout forth and vertically send shivers down my spine.

These wings were far from heavenly or soft and feathery.  Fleshy, black burnt and smoky, these enormous wings stand as symbols of my forthcoming pain and suffering.

I wake up in shock, sweating and my heart pounding in my chest painfully.

I wanted to create this dream using Macromedia flash, animation and all, but it would just take too much of the little time I already had.  I hope I was able to do the dream justice painting the picture with my words instead.

Comments:

Wife: I like the way you wrote this to be so short yet so descriptive. Not that I don't like it when you write long blogs, but in this case, you used few words and created a lot of images. Great job. About the dream, it is pretty freaky. I wonder if you have these dreams because you don't sleep enough, you eat late at night, you like scary movies and images or if they mean anything? What is your opinion on the meaning of this dream?
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Bring me water: scary dream... i know the crow isnt a good sign.. i think i've had it in one of my dreams.
let me go find it.
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