Capturing the Lightnings Shadow: Dreams 1986-2000

I find myself in a large open field in the company of another person. I cannot recall who it is but as we peer over a rise we see a dark plane coming in to land that looks like a giant flying wing with a tripod undercarriage (See illustration).

It is an amazing sight this flying wing. As it turns away from us there is a huge section of windows in the rear running in between the top and bottom of the wing. Inside it is brightly illuminated; lots of people are rushing back and forth from desks and computer terminals. Banks of computers line the back wall. (Commentary here)

I am in New Zealand even though I have never been there. I am driving around in a car with Tania H, down wide streets and around corners. All of a sudden I am back in Australia in the driveway of my old family home in Ringwood.

There is a line of people passing wooden boxes from the boot of a car to one another, I recognise one of them. There is a figure wrapped heavily from head to toe in dark dirty wool clothes. I can’t see his face but I know he is my brother. He asks, “did you go to the mountains.” I reply, “no I only stayed in the city”.

I am on an ocean with an unknown woman. We are on small surfboards powered by tiny engines. Rising out of the water in the distance is a place like Disneyland? I know that it’s too far to paddle too.

Now I am in a railway yard. I have returned because I know that I must. Spreads out across the tracks in the distance from left to right in a line are Asian soldiers in full khaki dress and helmets. They are waiting for me but I keep going, on the left hand side of the line I recognise a girl from the newsagents near work.

She points me out to the soldiers. I’ve been betrayed, now I know that I will be caught. They come at me from all sides and I scream. The sound of the scream endures and changes to a sound that is not human. I wake up 6.25am.

Buying my old car back, I drive off, seeing a Chinese man. It is good to sit in and be driving my old car again, though the interior is now a blue green color. Driving up the hills around the Croydon Markets I make regular stops on the road and check under the bonnet. The engine has always given me trouble.

I am with my brother at a house that I do not recognise. Something tells me that it is my uncle’s home. I walk down hallways not knowing really which way to turn. A woman I know from my workplace appears. She beckons me to her and says, “Your fathers penis is the size of a wiggly mouse!”[1]

I go with her behind a long blue curtain where I descend down a wood and brick staircase. At the bottom a large group of people are boarding an open Hydrofoil. My brother is with them, I tell him I'll go on my own. The boat leaves and as the front rises out of the water I find myself skimming over the top of the water past the boat. At the other end my brother asks me how I beat him, I am really not too sure myself, no boat or engine and I didn’t swim.

Walking up stairs with my brother on my left we talk of what we have been getting up to. Listening behind the wall to the left at the top of the stairs is my brother’s girlfriend. On the right is the fourteen-year-old sister of the girl in the 07/09/86 dream. I am aware that she has been seducing me. She flees on hearing that I have been unfaithful. I chase after but lose her.

Now I am in a cinema. My girlfriend is to my left and a ‘dark’ unknown person on my right. We are sitting in orange seats and the group ‘Genesis’ come up singing a horrible live version of their song Abacab. It finishes with ‘Virgil’ from the television show Thunderbirds sitting in a lounge chair narrating a documentary.

I am in a shop and see something and ask the lady what it is, she says, “come back tomorrow”. I ask her why and she replies. “The story goes right back in history”. I wake up 6.30am. (Commentary here)

All I remember is an open car, flat on the top and bottom with rounded ends that I have borrowed from a guy by the name of Jeff W and that I just drive from place to place.

In a corner I see window with toy cars in it, one is a red and white Porsche. I decide to steal them. Opening up the glass door to the left I can see on my right through another window the old shopkeeper watching me take the cars. Knowing that I have been seen I casually take the cars into the shop under the premise of paying for them. We chat and he puts them into a Boan’s bag and without paying I leave thinking that I have outsmarted him.

My brother is riding away down the street on a horse, I yell to wait and run after him and jump on the back of the horse. As I do I drop the cars, the fronts of which are now smashed and I feel dejected that they are now of no use to me.

Riding down Burwood Highway I stop at a group of shops and notice the back wheel of my bike is buckled. I am now in the kitchen of the Burvale Hotel or so it seems. I think that I cannot be seen, for now I am a spirit. I am seen though by Mary Tyler Moore? With whom I relate to quiet well.

Sitting in the corner in a chair next to a table is a rough old man with long dirty wavy blonde hair. He starts to verbally abuse me and has a swing at me but his arm passes straight through me. Laughing, I retaliate by throwing chalk and spraying ink from a well on the table over him. Behind is another spirit with a beard and long wavy black hair seated at a piano.

Reluctantly I am about to go back to school. I walk into my childhood bedroom and sitting on the bed or rather hanging in the air is my doona like it is draped over some invisible shoulders. I scream and the ghost stands on the bed and tries to escape with the doona climbing the corner wall. It then drops loosely onto the bed. I then run out to tell my father.

Looking up into the sky at night I watch the saucepan and the stars move west across the sky. I am now on a tropical island with Sue off the West Australian coast. We are down at the docks. There are tin sheds, a wharf and behind a huge old nineteenth century building. It is two storeys, built of orange sandstone with a tin roof.

There are local markets, palm trees and bamboo piers. Sitting in a shed near the pier I give a local man five dollars and tell him to go buy us some drinks. Looking out past the docks along the beach and out over the ocean our isolation makes me think, “how far it is to anywhere”.

I get a letter from Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi[2], then a phone call from Carl Jung. My father congratulates me on the call and I later find myself Jung’s pupil. I go by bus but finding the right one is difficult and I end up on the highway between Coldsteam and Lilydale.

I'm on my way to work, on the nature strip in King Street I stop to jump over the cyclone fence into my old Primary School. The ground gives way, it is like quicksand and I sink rapidly up to my chest. As fear sets in, my feet come to rest on a pipe in the ground and an unknown friend hauls me out with a rope. On examining the ground I notice unusual round and square shapes[3] in a broken group in some lumpy earth. There is also a tiny ceramic water jug with a handle.

At my parents old house in Mooroolbark I walk up onto a non-existent arm on the backyard and I see my old bungalow from the house I grew up in. This is where I work and I have forgotten the front door keys. A broken window that actually exists in the shop where I presently work is in the back of the bungalow. I could break in but decide to fetch the keys instead.

Now I am down at the docks with David L, there along the wharf is a large cargo ship. We board it and find there are food and drinks being served to a group of people. Exploring over the ship up and down the decks we see in a corner some pinball machines. Looking out over the bow of the ship I see the most amazing and brilliant sight.

In the distance out across the water is a long white building with arches all along the front and in the centre is a large central block with a larger arch (See illustration). Fire and lightning streams in and out of the building with a conscious motivation and life.

From the building it reaches out across the water to the ships bow. David is unaware of any of this and I call on him to look at this astonishing sight. The light and heat is so intense that in the daylight it reflect off the cream paintwork of the ship structure and we need to seek shelter from the heat. (Commentary here)

I have borrowed an open aluminium boat to go fishing around the docks. But are having trouble keeping water out of the boat as the front keeps dipping in the water. It is a while now since I have left the boat and are now walking past a row of shops trying to get to where I have left the boat. Walking into two toyshops (one is full of Lego), I try to find a way out the back. Finding a hallway I walk down to the end. To the left is a door and at the end is another door with windows. An old man goes into the door on the left.

Looking out now from cliff tops into the distance over a deep blue sea. I watch brightly colored windsurfers shooting back and forth across the whitecaps under a clear blue sky

I am with some friends and we get busted by the cops. In the boot of the car they find three large square bags of marijuana. They do not belong to me and I did not know they were there. No one will admit owning them, but I do find out whose they are. I ask why he lied and I am told it is because they are worth only thirty dollars each. We are then we taken off to prison. I cannot call a solicitor and there is a huge guard who has an ‘attitude’ and is really brutal. He is swinging punches at me trying to provoke a fight. I back off.

Next I learn that I am off to the kitchen where I am deep frying potato chips. Hot fat is spluttering against my bare skin. The brutal guard comes back and all of a sudden he is lying on the ground screaming. He’s burning and people are rushing to his aid. I or someone else has thrown hot oil over him. I awaken 3.05am.

A girl comes to pay a lay-by and her order number is something like 163 or 164. Looking through the book at first I cannot find it, and I am in a hurry to get it done. Finding it, she pays her money and the thought comes into my head that as a give away incentive I could give her one of the aircraft carriers that I am in a hurry to see. I am about to open my mouth but shut up instead.

Now I look over a fence and see four strange looking ships. I think they are aircraft carriers steaming into what looks like Fremantle Port. The first is like an America’s Cup yacht, grey in color, but it is sitting right out of the water. Running down where the stabiliser fin is, a drive shaft is turning a series of cogs.

The next is a mass of rusted steel girders higher at one end than at the other. The following two are grey, smooth and shaped like capsules with windows all over them. I have to catch a train but see in the distance that it has left the station, so I jump on my bike to intercept it at the next station. I wake up.

Sue and I move into a high rise apartment. It is modern and we are on the top floor, which I tell Sue is the best one. There is a set of stairs going up to the roof where there is a ‘jungle garden’. I know there is a baby crocodile up there also and I tell Sue to be careful when she goes up.

Once there though I see that it is a giant crocodile furiously slashing its tail from one side to another knocking down trees and plants. It runs towards us and opens its mouth wide to eat Sue whole, but a cyclone fence stops it. Down stairs again I tell Sue that sleeping so high in the air that if I was to roll out of bed its a long way to the ground, as if I now sleep outside.

With some friends, we are going out to a park with something to do with history. Arriving at the entrance located between two giant boulders we find that the ‘gatekeeper’ will not let us in. He lets us in after a bit of haggling on the condition that we keep out of the way of the cameras. He lifts the boom gate and we go in. It is dark inside, a dim orange light illuminates the place. To my left I see two Viking longships perched above the ground. Also someone is trying to make a movie but it is not going right.

We are now in a house where a friend of mine Phillip S, whom I shared a house with. Then all of a sudden I realise that it an illusion, the house disappears and we are back in the illuminated cave. Urged on by a friend named Graeme saying, “you can do it, you can do it”, I realise that I have some sort of severe mental (psychic) power.

Concentrating hard I throw up a projection of the lounge room I lived in when I was young. Sue, Graeme and I stand in the room, everything in it created by my mind. We have left now and are racing along in an old Mercedes. Graeme is driving too fast and as we take a corner I think that we are going to roll, the car bouncing over the cement curbing. Now at the top of some steep sand dunes, we all go surfing down them but I fall over. (Commentary here)

In the arcade where I work in Fremantle I smash all the windows with an unknown male person of a handcraft shop. The police come and arrest us, we must be travellers because they throw our bags into their car as well. I think that they are going to give us a beating but we are dumped off outside of town.

Now with Sue, I discover a cycle shop in a shopping centre where one hadn't been before. Inside on the wall is my bike on a rack with numerous other bikes. The price is now $524.00 and I am glad that I did buy it when I did and the salesman says I have a top bike as well.

Though we cannot afford anything at the moment the salesman, a man with short wavy blonde hair and a beard writes up a docket to lay-by some bike shoes and riding gloves. Until I can pick them up he gives me an old blue pair to use but they are too small. On a shelf I pick up an unusual L shaped pink bracket and then I notice that my bike on the wall has a strange aerodynamic type cover over the handlebars.

We are now on an elephant train somewhere in India and are walking along a great wall.

I am jogging in a marathon around the Australian coast. I stop to rest but am enthusiastic to complete the final leg even though my girlfriend wants me to rest. In Cottesloe we have an upstairs flat and my girlfriends brother has returned. I lock him out, so he breaks into the flat next door and comes downstairs and opens the door inside. This activates a fire alarm with a red flashing light. Sue then informs me that my Aunty Belle has loaned her sister $22,000 to buy a new Holden Commodore. “She must be crazy because she will never be able to pay it back”. I reply.

I dreamt that I took a plane to London to go for a job as a teacher. In London I go by subway to find out where the school is but cannot locate it. In a coffee shop I find a cockney girl who says that she knows were it is. Somehow she talks me into taking off my clothes, she and a friend are now going into a Club. I am apprehensive about entering with no clothes on. Through a swinging door I do notice that no one inside is wearing anything. I do enter and find I am the only naked person in the place and quiet embarrassed.

I visit my parents and present them with a gold statue of Shiva that is holding a sword in his left hand and something else I cannot recall in his right. There is a green LED readout on the bottom of the statue. All of this was all like a video of sorts. All these brightly colored visions pass before my eyes. The only one I can really remember an oak tree on a hill with a bright blue sky.

My parents tell me where the school I am looking for is. By subway again I find that it is located on a hill and looks just like the Potala Palace in Lhasa (See illustration). It seems like a waste of time going back to work in Fremantle after flying to London. I phone my girlfriend Sue asking her to make an excuse to my boss that I am sick or something and wont be able to work this afternoon. She won’t or cannot so I take a ‘what the hell attitude’, and don't really care that I won’t have a job if I do not return now. I would rather spend a day in England instead.

I am in a house with a long grassy front yard and a dirt driveway and a friend of mine. A and his brother T arrive. There is another person, a middle age man with wavy blonde hair who knows them as well. It is then that I realise A and T are going to kill us. I think that too many drugs have made them crazy.

They grab the middle-aged man, lie him down and put his head in a box. The side of his head is sawn through peeling it open and exposing his brain. I must escape and get some help but it is difficult because they have taken the pedals off my bicycle, however I still take it.

Running up to the front door of a house in Cottesloe I knock and a woman answers the door but will not help me. I then run upstairs to another house, a type of surf shop where a young boy is willing to listen and help me.

This dream seemed so pleasant and real that it felt like I was really back there. I was again in Nepal. This time with Sue, trekking around Pokhara with a couple of other people. From a rise I can see the Himalaya’s in the distance. Now I travel back into India where I go and meet the Dalai Lama in a Hindu ashram. There are a number of his followers present as well as an old sadhu who is standing behind him, I feel honoured to meet him. (Commentary here)

My friend Graeme and I join the navy. We arrive in Penang, which I am glad of as I have been there before. Graeme going to get some sex from somewhere but I decline going with him saying, “there is no way that I could go back to Sue if I caught something off some girl”. He gives me a pack of roll your own cigarettes, I tell him that I am looking forward to getting to Bombay, to which I am told that we never go anywhere near India or Bombay. I say to myself, “Fuck this, I am not signing up for six years if I don’t get to go to India. “I will drop out while I can”.

Back on the ship/aircraft carrier an inexperienced pilot crash-lands a large white jet upside down on the deck. From below the top deck I am looking at this upturned jet and out of the three wheel wells appear these women singing '4801234, 4801234' and then they sink back down into them. Out of the front wheel well comes the main woman weaving like a snake saying, “Come on you can call me now”. I recognise her as the young woman off a television commercial for newspaper classifieds.

In the barracks there are two sets of bunks, I have the top bunk near the door. There is a large set of louvre windows to my left and a small window in front of me. I want to roll a cigarette but a sign on the wall says ‘no poking’ and I wonder what it means or if the sign has just been defaced.

A rough looking stocky man comes in and blurts out, “No smoking in the rooms”. I say to him, “Sir I want out” and he asked me outside for a talk. I begin with, “Look Sarge” and once again he begins yelling, “Don’t call me Sarge. On duty call me sir, off duty you call me...............”.

I don't hear or understand the rest of what he was saying but I go on to explain that I don’t want to sign my life away for six years. Then he tries to explain to me why I should remain in the Navy. Telling me how he borrowed one thousand dollars from the Bank of Israel and had put it into Greenwich Mean Insurance Bonds.

I must pick up some guns to be delivered to Iran and in a church I discuss the plan with a man who informs me that I must leave at 4am. Looking at a fob watch that I have I see that it is time to leave. I have to go by jeep and drive off into the desert of Saudi Arabia to pick up the guns.

There are now two men in the clearing of a thickly wooded forest. Their bodies are wrapped in sticks of wood. They light a large fire but make it very smoky so that no one can see the flames. These men are looking for me.

In what seems to be the arcade where I work, I see a man that I know in real life and who I do not particularly like. He tells the most outrageous lies and seems to believe them himself. I see him leave a nearby shop with two rolls of material under his arms, one is purple the other green. Realising that he has stolen them I yell that I am calling the police.

He turns on me and chases me down a white walled lane with vines growing along the top, the lane narrows and curves into a spiral until I have no room to move. At the end I cannot even jump over the wall. He's just about on me when two policemen grab him and take him away.

I’m on a bus travelling down a long straight road somewhere in North Perth on my way to India. At the airport I find out that I cannot just jump on a plane and go, but have to wait three weeks. I start complaining to an airport official who informs me that I can fly to Bangladesh straight away if I like.

It is night and I am parked up against a wall in a car park. A leprechaun comes up to me and gives me a bag to look after for him. I know that he is a leprechaun because he is a short little green man with a pointy nose and chin. Robin Hood cap and clothes that are of a red-brown color.

There is another person there now and I tell him what happened and we look in the bag. Inside it are gold bars that look a little like hot chips. The leprechaun does not return. Now we are on a train and start eating the chips because we are hungry.

Looking up I see the leprechaun is slipping into the train between the window and frame. Standing on the shelf solid like a statue he begins to shake and his arms and legs separate from his body. There is a tear in his face and a mouth is formed as he screams. I notice that he has big white teeth.

Jumping down in front of us he ask why we ran off with his bag and I explain that we did not think he would come back. Giving it back to him he begins to mould the contents into a shape like it is now a type of putty, he seems quite upset and ask, “where is the rest”? I indicate that we have eaten it and I offer what I am still chewing to him. He takes it but it is now no longer gold or chips but a kind of chewy boiled lolly. Trying to mould it into a shape, he is sad for he cannot now complete it. This was his friend.

I now drive into the Malvern workshop in Melbourne where I used to work. My parking spot is missing so I take someone else’s and I tell the guys that work there about the leprechaun.

In a Bookshop there are two books that I want to buy. One I purchase for ten dollars and ninety five cents. With the change that is left I also buy the other which is a hardcover with brightly colored pictures on the front. The saleslady tells me that it is forty dollars and fifty cents and I am surprised at the price but it is the last one there and I want it. She too is surprised at the price and putting my money down I have to dip into my left pocket which has the only other money I have. On the shelf is a worn out book similar to what I have just bought but for ten dollars and eighteen cents.

I drive along a causeway in a 4WD to a white block building at the end. I would like to go for a swim in the sea but the tide is out and there are only mud flats beyond the beach palms. There is also a Chinese man.

I am in a house with a woman. There is a wall unit to go against a wall but it is too large. We go into another house where I have a dispute with a man while his wife stands idly by. Now a yellow Ford Falcon driven by this same man crashes into a small cement pond in a Zoo that is full of Hippopotamus. This scene is replayed over and over again from all sides of the pond. This is somehow connected with the dispute. I am now pulling to pieces a white modular wall unit while Sue stand behind me.

In a caravan in South Croydon there is a girl I do not know. She is chubby and round faced, with straight blonde hair down to her shoulders. She informs me that I am the father of a child that she has just given birth to. I think ‘oh well’ and are about to succumb to the idea of parenthood when another girl that I know who has been overseas returns. She burst into tears when she finds out. Now composed she says that I might be able to get out of it, have I had a blood test? I have not so there is a chance that I am not the father.

Down at Fremantle port a sailing ship is berthing and I have got the anchorage rope by the look of it. The ship looms right over me and it reaches the front easily. A stern, authoritative German woman runs the ship. She is her forties with blonde hair and has it tied in a ponytail.

My friend James H and I are now on the ship as crew. In a cabin we are unpacking, I have a rucksack and James a trunk. There is a knock at the window and the woman wants to line the crew up for a talk out on deck. James leaves but I am messing about, “will I wear the black T-shirt with the white rimmed red circle on it that reminds me of a Japanese flag or....”

Another knock at the window. “Come on, you have ten seconds to get out here”, the woman yells. In the line up with James and I are the woman’s two daughters and as a punishment for being late she states, “right now I want to see the two of you wrestling”. “Wrestling? I don't even like fighting”, I say to myself.

Back in the cabin something terrible happens to James, his head becomes a television! I call for help out in the hallway and the two daughters come, I open a cupboard door and in it a television sits flickering on the ground. “Look what has happened to him”, I say and they begin to tell me what happened to him and it relates to this story:

I am on my bike in Dandenong. I come to a road and to the right it goes into a fork. On the other side beyond a gravel field a multitude of people move en mass from a settlement of flat roof houses. Riding over the road into the gravel field I ask what’s happening? A voice answers[4], “they know that the ghost is coming, but it is alright because we have called the police”.

Back in Pokhara, Nepal I return to see Bednath and Gory the two young men I met in 1984. But it is not the lovely little lakeside village any more instead more of an urban jungle. Bednath is of the Brahman caste and Gory of a lower one. Instead of being close friends any more Bednath is at the top of a staircase exerting his authority over Gory while he obeys. “Ah-ha”, I say to myself, “So this is the way it is”.

I am now in what seems to be shop where I work, against the sidewall is a target. A man appears and says that it is for my pistol practice. Though I am in the front of the target I think that I will be able to hit it better by standing in the arcade and firing through the plate glass window. A robbery occurs in the shop, from behind a high bank of lockers I see a man with an accomplice that looks like an old woman. They throw a stick of dynamite at me and I pick it up and throw it back behind the lockers where it explodes.

A well-dressed Negro with a shaved head runs out from behind the lockers holding a gun. We fight and scuffle out down the arcade where the fight goes my way. I see part of the skin on his head rip open when he falls on some brickwork. He wants to give up but I continue to make sure that he does not escape. When I have finished, skin is hanging everywhere off his battered head.

[1] This message from my anima has always puzzled me. The father – penis - mouse relationship to myself here I see as indicative my relationship to my father ie: authority - power – procreation. The mouse being an ineffectual representation of my father’s inability to have children (I am adopted). The ‘wiggly mouse’ cannot be understood literally. Its form I see as a metaphoric symbol of the sperm. Penis as a representation of power here is dysfunctional given its association with the authority figure of my father. Overall it points the way to an underlying inferior function. To grow and mature independently and not to be a vessel for the perpetuation of my fathers own inferior functions.

[2] I had received a correspondence from Rajiv Gandhi, the then Primeminister of India on September 10, 1986, regarding my recent visit to India.

[3] Undeveloped symbols of individualisation (expand to include the earth motif)

[4] “Dr. Jung (has) identified the appearance of a voice in dreams with an intervention of the Self. It stands for a knowledge that has its roots in the collective fundamentals of the psyche. What the voice says cannot be disputed”. p.338. Jung, Carl G and von Franz. ed., Man and his Symbols. London. 1964.