#these half-pages are glued into the book w/ **repositionable** glue so they won't damage the original pages

[daytura]

Dream #3

Transcript below.

"For the more troubling and by far most terrifying Dream #3, Mia Haven and Lance Slocum team up together to ply the curvatures of that strange stretch of imaginings. Unlike #1 and #2, this dream is particularly difficult to recount even in 400 pages and requires that careful attention be paid to the various temporal and even tonal shifts. An outline of key "shifts" shall have to suffice.

Navidson wakes up in a dark hull of a ship. He can just make out that it is raining outside. His head is pounding. He is suffering from a hangover and his body is covered in mysterious welts.

A few moments later he is standing on the deck of the ship, which he now understands is called the The Burrow. It is still raining outside and Navidson is still incapacitated, his normal gait cast down into a stagger. The ship is absolutely deserted. As Navidson calls out for help or answer into the sky, great echoes return. One echo of note is the following, in response to "What is going on?!": "Going on!"

In the next few moments Navidson discovers that the rain is only on the port side of the ship, while the starboard side of the ship is bathed in blazing sunlight. Given the crippling darkness of the rainy half and the blown out highlight of the sunlit half, he is unable to determine which side of the ship he is on. He has the sense that the ship is balanced between the two extremes, though he realizes that if he could just find a way to move from the port side to the starboard side he would surely find rescue. He attempts to cross, but he finds the soles of his shoes somehow nailed to the deck. A great wave hurtles over the deck, crashing onto Navidson.

When Navidson comes to awareness again, he is in the hold of the ship. He is in a tub of water, which is the same temperature as his body. He is surrounded by seven or eight extremely thin old men, who are in turn surrounded by a multitude of empty bottles. One of them speaks to Navidson, “You're a long way from home, young man."

Navidson finds himself on the deck of the ship again. This time he is standing on the starboard side. He can see a lifeboat off in the distance. “It’s okay,” he hears someone say. “It’s okay.” This same person pushes him from the deck, and he falls headfirst into the warm ocean. Bubbles flutter up to the surface of the water as he screams.

Navidson wakes up on the tongue of a great animal. He is far from the teeth and only a stone's away from the dark throat of the animal. Navidson tries to strike the inside of the animal's mouth, but it does not budge. Now quicker to resign, Navidson takes a deep breath, exhales, and begins to crawl on all fours down the length of the tongue.

Navidson wakes up in a large living room, curled up in a fetal position on the floor. Navidson cries out again, but it is a low noise more befitting an animal than a man. The room is dark. Moments later, an indistinct figure opens the door and steps in. They light a small lamp, which illuminates the doorframe and a portion of the doorknob. Before Navidson can see who the person with the light is, he wakes up in real life.

Haven takes the first stand and explains the ship, of course, is the house. Haven even goes so far as to suggest that the name The Burrow has no other etymology than the house itself, though she is unsure whether or not the name is to be interpreted as a verb or a noun. [389—-Translator’s note: Haven’s original German text employs the word “denke,” which means “to think,” though “to burrow” is also a legitimate translation. — Ed.] As Haven points out, the rainstorm on one half of the ship mirrors the darkness that continues to grow within the house, and the unbearable sunlight on the other half mirrors the summer heat that has followed Navidson, his family, and even the house well into the autumn months.

Slocum takes over and builds on his colleague's realistic analysis. He explains that the ship’s duality is more than just a mere reflection of the house's duality, but a two-toned "amplification" of the house. Slocum is particularly taken with the idea that the ship is balanced between night and day, where Navidson's frantic attempts to escape only bring about a further deterioration. Slocum pushes forward the idea of a double abstraction, such that if the Great Hall of the house was indeed an extraordinary hull, then this ship in Navidson's dream is the house enlarged to a massive scale. Innate dualities of civilization and tribalism, light and darkness, the individual and the collective, are now magnified. Slocum conjectures that Navidson's attempt to cross from the shadow to the light was doomed to fail, because it "rests on the assumption light is always good when this could be no further than the truth. For creatures of the night or the deep sea, light blinds; and sunlight eats whole swathes of newspaper and books when outside a home".[200—Haven and Slocum, Oceans of the Mind, 199X, p. 251]

Haven returns to address the old men in the hold who surround Navidson. She notes the possible biblical reference to the seven or eight prophets of the Old and New Testaments. But Haven remarks that the old men could also be interpreted as "the people of the house", or even "the ancestors of the house", and she speculates that the fact Navidson is sitting in a tub of water means he is at peace with the house for the first time, and that the men are even encouraging him to remain there. With this in mind, the lifeboat becomes a more sinister symbol. It is visually the last chance for Navidson to be saved, but Haven suggests that in reality the lifeboat is the last chance for the house to hold on to Navidson, and that being tossed overboard means the house has finally lost him.[201—Oceans of the Mind, p. 254-5]

Slocum proceeds to the sixth shift, where Navidson is on the tongue of a great animal. Surprisingly, Slocum rejects the notion that the animal is the house, and instead claims the animal is what the house has become after the Navidson family and their contacts have explored it. Therefore, just as the mouth of the animal is a derivative of the house, Slocum proposes that the dark throat of the animal leading into its stomach is an additional but necessary derivative that allows Navidson to come back to the reality of everyday life. "Abstractions upon abstractions seem to expand, but more often than not they simply pop," he says.

Finally, Haven and Slocum converge on a final interpretation for the seventh shift of the dream. They both agree that this darkroom [202—Typo. Should be "dark room", with a space. —JT] exists outside of the ship and beyond the labyrinth of the house; however, they disagree on how to interpret the significance of the dream. Haven regards the dream as an obscure warning to Navidson, where the dimness of the lamp reflects Navidson's waning spirit as he is separated from Karen and his children. "The door is shut and will remain shut", she says. Meanwhile, Slocum considers it a more positive sign for Navidson and reifies the implied movement of the figure. While it is true that the light of the lamp is a "small but essential sign of the future" the true significance of this dream is that this figure is opening the door to check on Navidson and see that he is alright. Navidson waking up before seeing the face of his sentinel is a consequence of his sleep cycle, not of thematic finality. "The dream," Slocum concludes, "ends in the very same way it began. Navidson waking up in the dark, but this time with hope."

Just before it seems like Haven and Slocum will burn the page with their competing interpretations, they have the mind to admit to each other that they still a hard time understanding what this section of the dream means, if it means anything at all. "We could put our glasses down and just accept it as it is," Haven begins. "Navidson on the floor could just be Navidson on the floor. The lamp could just be a lamp. The figure could be any one of Navidson's family or friends. The problem with this part of the dream is that it 'feels' so real, which means it has much more in common with the mundanity of our daily lives than spirits, monsters, and gods of literature." Slocum returns the sentiment. "It's nihilistic without even trying. It's so real it seems to have no meaning at all — only one we can make of it, though I suppose that's what we've been doing all this time." [203—Oceans of the Mind, p. 398] Ultimately, they agree that it is, at the very least, a curious and almost peaceful way to end the dream; and that Navidson has much work to quell his own waves and traumas."