Process technology at the Dream Factory: The embrace.  [nederlands]

I don't know where i was. It seemed a pretty neutral environment, which is actually a nonsensical statement because every environment is basically neutral; the events ín that environment give it a certain colour, and the living things that are in that environment. But isn't that nonsensical too? For example, is an environment with many large deciduous trees more neutral than one with only low fruit trees? Or are we humans always the polarisers of the environment?

Let me rephrase: where i found myself reminded me of a Sketchup environment, afterwards when i was awake. Different shades of stone: off-white, light grey, a somewhat veined darker grey, black lines, and the light seemed to be equally strong everywhere. Were there trees? I don't remember. Was it inside, outside? No idea. Maybe there was an office plant. It's probably unimportant, and yet i want to know. Because how did Sepp suddenly enter the story?
I was in an environment, a rather indeterminate, light-grey three-dimensional environment and why i was there is also unknown to me, and suddenly Sepp walked into the story and we embraced each other intimately and i felt an intense warmth and i thought: he has come here especially to comfort me and i felt comforted.

When i woke up, the comfort was immediately gone and i felt mostly confused. For a moment i wondered, i still wonder - but of course nobody knows this, nobody can know this - if dead people can visit you in your dreams. So not that the image of that person in your dreams comes through your own brain, but that some kind of spirit of the dead person can actually come to visit you most personally, and that the only gateway is through the dream.
Because how else could it be that he was there so suddenly. And though i don't remember where i was, and with whom, but his appearance was so incredibly unexpected, completely out of the blue he was there, and that embrace....

As i thought more about this dream, there were some things that might explain the sudden appearance after all.
1. Maybe i had been thinking about him in the days prior.
2. During the embrace, i briefly doubted the sincerity of his comfort gesture.
3. I had been thinking for days what i would write about first, he has been a candidate for three years already.
4. When he was alive, he would also pop up from time to time without appointment.

Point 2 i must explain:
About six years ago, i was with Fabiënne, a friend of mine, at the movie in Eye. It was a long, old, somewhat drawn-out film, but that was probably mostly because we’d had a few glasses of wine with dinner, which caused us some trouble keeping our eyes open.
Just before the film was due to start, we were sitting quite high up in the auditorium, we saw Sepp and his good friend Clara enter.
Afterwards, we walked down the grand staircase towards the foyer, and there they were already having a beer. It was late, and even though Klotestad is a metropolis, many things close at old-fashioned peasant times, and so we stayed only briefly. Meeting Sepp was unexpected, and we both really enjoyed seeing each other again, so our embrace was genuine and firm (and in pre-pandemic time, mind you).

As we walked together through the station, all three of them had to go back to D4-701, me living a bit closer in the R-neighbourhood, Sepp had the highest word, complimenting me once again on how good i looked. And right after that, he asked me, if i didn't want to go home with him... I felt a bit uncomfortable with that, i felt he was asking this with a sexual intention. I didn't have that interest towards him, plus from Clara i thought that she wanted more with him, than he wanted with her. And although he is not responsible for that, i felt it a bit inappropriate to make such a proposal then, in her presence. I also found it awkward that i was suddenly placed in a competitive position with her in that way. That happened before with others, and it never ended well. For me.

I reacted evasively, saying i had to go to work early the next day. Sepp sputtered a bit, i ignored it, and they hurried to the last train.

[text goes on beneath the picture, which is a digital edited version of one of the Free Drawings]


This event seems a very fitting dream model to me: the true story of the close embrace, the really sincere friendship and the later somewhat horny Sepp, and the fact that he died by suicide almost three years ago now, during the beginning of the pandemic, that is now sort of remembered everywhere.
Because what exactly happened during that dream?
I was in that environment, and suddenly Sepp was there. We embraced each other intimately. The moment our bodies touched, i thought in a split second: does he have a boner now, do i feel that right? And in that same second, i felt guilty about being so suspicious. And the boner, if it had been one, was gone. And then followed the intense comfort.

That during the dream i had felt very briefly guilty about my possible mistrustfulness, i found annoying but enlightening. Although i was never angry about his somewhat awkward attempt at seduction in the tunnel, it was yet another moment when a man i was friends with wanted to turn this into sex. And while there is nothing wrong with that, because why not if you both want it, for me it was more than a remark. Just because i had experienced it so many times, in all sorts of ways, through family even, men are quickly unsafe for me.
And it's ridiculous that i feel guilty about that. I shouldn't feel guilty about that at all.
No one should feel guilty, if you are hesitant about someone's motives, especially if your past experiences suggest it.

-

So all this in at most half a minute's dream.

Now i just wonder where i was in that dream. Was it perhaps a kind of DallE mix, of the moment in Eye, somewhere between the stairs and tables, a plant here and there, with the moment in the dull, brightly and shadowless lit station tunnel? Had my brain attempted to find the reasonable middle of the environments? Had it perhaps, like a ChatGPTish dream version, been pondering the countless times i've been in similar environments, or circumstances? And can that still be called neutral?
For years, i've found it a real shame that you can't record your dreams, because i want to know things.

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