I wake up. I’m laying in bed. I’m arising from a dream, but I fully reach consciousness and it’s as though I’m reviewing the dream, in remembering it. The dream, what I remember of it, is as follows.

I am at a potluck-style buffet, made out of several neighbors within a neighborhood. It has echoes of being a church-style buffet, an after-church event, where everyone is bringing food on offer. I feel very isolated from the individuals who have brought food, as I haven’t brought food. I remember vaguely that my mother has brought food, and perhaps I am allowed attendance by proxy of her fulfilling our obligatory duties. Maybe it is some kind of baked good, but I don’t know. I’m starving. I’m in awe at the odd, carnival-esque style of the buffet, the block-party style of it, and how elaborate it is, and the sheer amount of food present. I walk through various different rooms, and take a look in advance at some of the food. I find the surroundings and presentation odd, and notice we’re in an enclosed, simplified kind of area, with a central hallway opening into different rooms which belong to different families, but a faint dark pinkish sort of hue, but the walls are different colors, and there is an intuitive sense of the layout, but it seems almost stylized, like a video game. Some of the rooms open into balconies or backyards, it resembles an apartment complex. There are machines present to help prepare the food, and long tables that hold all of the dishes. There is a machine in one room that seems to be for warming up or sanitizing bread/buns before you serve yourself hot dogs and hamburgers, which someone points out to me (perhaps my mother?) are being served on one of the balconies. I can’t figure out how to make the machine work. I put two hotdog buns and one hamburger bun in the machine, it’s lined with parchment paper and works by blowing air through it, but I can’t figure it out and at some point I awkwardly abandon them and move to the central table, grabbing a plate. Again, I am starving, but as I move past all of the food, each one seems unappealing and difficult and I don’t want to take any, while others in line are taking food ahead and behind me. I pass some dishes and then come to an aluminum tray where on the left side there are triangular slices of grilled pineapple, and on the right side there are slices of a grilled fruit I have never seen before. It’s shaped in a symmetric embellished swooping pattern, like a type of bulb perhaps with small spirals and gaps between the internals (like a fence or lattice) and near where the stem would have been it was brownish green, but the rest of the fruit was a vibrant iridescent blue, like a shining butterfly’s wings, and a deep oil slick magenta at the same time. It was blue on top, but the magenta was held within it. I picked up a slice with metal tongs and tilted it back and forth in wonder, asking the person behind me what it was. They gave me an answer, something that mentioned how it was a type of exotic fruit, but in a commonplace tone, and I don’t remember what it was called. I continue down the buffet and am not able to find anything that I want to eat.

I wake up, remember the dream, and continue lying in bed. A very loud, harsh ringing noise starts, located on the left side of my brain, almost to the left and towards the back of my brain, spatially, and “takes over” becoming located in the very middle and center of where I am experiencing. The ringing is similar to the tone of tinnitus but different, and carries with it a harshness, and a type of buzzing, or perhaps an essence of friction and sandpaper-ness, perhaps it could be called grating, but only in the sense that it feels like being pushed through a grate from the abrasion. It isn’t entirely unpleasant, but is very clearly so at the same time. It is not suffering, but rather feels like you are pushing yourself through a very small opening in a cave, and the claustrophobia of it causes a type of inability to breathe. This is perhaps the fifth or sixth time I have experienced this ringing, always upon waking up from (or from within) a dream. In this case, it feels as though I have been shrunken down very small, and I am placed near a large ringing object, which is attempting to broadcast a message. I also get a sense that it is a type of lifeline, that it is there to watch while I attempt things that may not be wise, but are certainly not unwise, as long as I am not, myself, unwise.

I experience a recognition at the ringing, a flash of fear and trepidation, and a clarity at the presences that I am in the presence of. I move my body, trying to get a sense of whether or not I can, and I can’t remember if this resulted in genuinely moving my body or only feeling as though I have. I feel a large wall, one that seems to be made out of a type of permeable thing, a film over a large fluid membrane, and it feels as though the fear that I experience, and have experienced in much larger degrees of terror in previous encounters, is a fear of the wall being punctured. I remember the wall from previous experiences, it has been here and it is important that I don’t puncture it. But the importance of this seems less prominent than previously. I attend to the fear itself, turning to face the wall, and the wall is a person, but the wall is a feeling, and the feeling is guarding the wall, and I calm it, by moving into it and feeling calm. This is accomplished by sending a question, a “why are you scared?” And moving myself into the place where the fear is and understanding it. Then something feels to “click” or “change” and I feel that I am in a different realm, as if I was on the threshold before, figuring out how to enter, and that now I have entered. I experience myself as opening my eyes, and I am in my apartment, though I also know that I am motionless “in the real world”. I hear whispering, as though the people whispering are impressed that I made it here, and I feel as though this must be what people experiencing drugs feel. I can see very clear and exaggerated after-burn effects visually, and I wave my hand, covered by my blanket, in front of my face and marvel at the trail of images that hover in the air. I am looking around and I glance upwards at the ceiling. There are waves of patterns and movements dancing across the ceiling, and moving back and forth. I see faces in diagonal patterns in the movements, and the one that catches my eye is a woman with her light brown wispy hair in a bun, regency-style aesthetically, with a pink dress collar and the essence of pearls, in profile, looking to the right. I’m interested in her, and I experience a desire to find more people, to hear more things, to stay in this space for longer. Suddenly my attention is drawn back to the ringing, and I am exhausted, and I think to myself “I’ve got to get out of here” and it feels as though my time in this place is up, but that I’ve succeeded in accomplishing something important in being able to make my way here. I wake up truly, and sit up, looking around me, and experience a distinct physical exhaustion in my brain. It is accompanied by some pain, though not a significant amount, perhaps the pain of overexertion, but not cramping or misuse, after a day of hiking.