Wow, it's been almost 2 yrs since I last bothered to describe (a) dream(s).  Last night was fitful as usual, maybe a little more so.  I started a 1 wk juice fast yesterday, I'm only at the end of the 1st day.  There was a period in my life when my dreams mainly consisted of fighting off thousands of people trying to destroy me, maybe hundreds of thousands, maybe millions - that was easy enuf to recognize as an exaggeration of my waking life.  I didn't succumb, I always FOUGHT, & got more & more impossibly tired.  Last night I was fighting again.  Sortof.

I was in a big spacious rm.  Nothing as simple as a rm such as one might ordinarily encounter in a house - more like a warehouse space w/ multiple vertical layers not necessarily organized around any readily apparent purpose.  It seems that I was fighting w/ at least 2 males, maybe 4.  I might've also had some friends, who weren't fighting, maybe 2 or 3 or 4.  Anyway, I apparently killed 2 of them by throwing objects that hit them on the temples.  It was all very amorphous, or, at least, my waking memory of it is.  Did these enemies exist?  I remember a high platform?  One of the enemies might've been there.

I was trying to leave, trying to clean away the evidence before investigators came to discover the murders.  But I was doing so in a chaotic, dysfunctional manner.  I wasn't doing things like wiping away fingerprints.  & where were the corpses anyway?  Maybe friends were helping me, maybe we were all dispirited, it was a horrible enervating situation.  I was half-heartedly hiding some small things, like C batteries, in something like a partially busted cabinet, in one of its broken interstices - knowing it wdn't really work..  &, yet, there weren't any investigators, they were just a possibility.

I awoke & eventually went back asleep again.

I was in another, more claustrophobic, mostly empty rm, hypothetically an interrogation rm..  but there weren't any interrogators..  just the feared threat of them.  I was thinking about what I'd say about the murders.  Did the victims actually exist?  Wd I just be trying to fool the investigators if I sd that I didn't remember?  If I sd I didn't actually know whether I'd committed the murders or not?  Wd pleading amnesia be accurate?  Or was this something other than amnesia?  An actual amorphousness of 'reality'?

Segue.

My environment was taking shape around me according to some sort of sub- or un- conscious force, perhaps wishes.  The rm, not the same rm, not the interrogation rm, became a store for used odds & ends, something like an antique shop.  I was w/ friends, fellow musicians, maybe Kenny Haney, maybe Neil Feather, maybe, later, Brian Wolle.  The shopkeeper was showing me a Bb clarinet, an unusually LARGE one but still straight, not like a contrabass one, eg.  I explained that I'm not a clarinetist & that I might not be able to get much out of it but that I wanted to try it.  I arranged the reed so that it was on top & sat down to play.  Even tho it was an 'ordinary' Bb clarinet it was so long that its bell reached to between my feet while I was sitting.  I was trying to stabilize the clarinet so that I cd get my fingers on the keys but the clarinet kept turning.  The bell wasn't completely circular, it was about 2/3rds circular w/ a flattened side.  I thought the flattened side wd go on the floor but in that position the keys were torqued wrong.  Of course, if it were an actual clarinet in waking life, I cd've spun the bell to whatever position I wanted it in - but in the dream that didn't occur to me.  The shape of the bell changed as I tried to look at it to see what the problem was.  Now, instead of a circle w/ a flattened side, it was a circle w/ 2 flattened sides forming a "V" w/o the dramatic angles of the letter "V".  I tried to play the clarinet but only got a squeak.  In waking life, I wd've been more proficient.

None of my friends were in the rm so I went in search of them in an adjacent rm, perhaps like an arm of an "L" in relation to the rm I was in w/ the clarinet.  I like being in rms w/ instruments & when I'm somewhere where there're none I often feel like the rm is missing something important.  In this new rm there were a plethora of instruments & I was excited.  & many other objects to.  I gravitated toward what initially appeared to be an oversized upright piano, perhaps one w/ more than 88 keys.  It was partially obscured by other miscellania.

As I got close, I was excited to see written on it that it was a "Mirliton".  "Mirliton" had another word before it, like a brand name, but I don't remember that now.  In waking life, a mirliton is a membranophone activated by blowing, like a kazoo.  But in my dream I was thinking of it as an automatic instrument, like a calliope or some such, the type of thing that the Bayernhof displays in Pittsburgh or that House of the Rock displays in Spring Green, WI.  Excited, I called to my friends to point this out & confirmed that it had doors on its front that cd be opened to display its inner workings.  Then I noticed that the doors were unusually small, that they'd apparently been glued shut, & that there were little screw holes that showed where small knows for opening the doors had originally been, now removed.

The proprietor came over to examine it, he didn't realize what he had.  But as we examined it, it became increasingly flat, rather than free-standing in the rm, as it had originally been, it became more & more reduced until it was just a canvas, perhaps 3/4" deep, hanging on the wall.  There was no keyboard, no lower body, even the appearance of small doors had become sketchy.  The proprietor & I awkwardly removed the canvas from the wall & put it on the floor & then he walked away.  Surprisingly large creatures started to scurry off from their nests in the canvas's stretcher frame.  At 1st, a very large centipede, then a very large spider, then a mouse, then an 'impossibly' increasing number of mice.  When I called the proprietor's attn to this one of the mice seemed to be a baby rat instead.

I wrote earlier that "My environment was taking shape around me according to some sort of sub- or un- conscious force, perhaps wishes."  But it wasn't quite a lucid dream.  It was more like me discovering the nature of the way dreams ordinarily form.  It's not like they're just 'there', they BECOME THERE as I create them w/ whatever drives are bubbling to the surface at the time.

In the midst of all this, I awoke at one point & wrote down this phrase: "Damnable boys on innuendo state, she said".  I've been keeping a list of such phrases thought of while half-asleep since the mid 1970s.  I call it "Telepathy Research Training".  But I don't recall having added any new phrases for at least a decade, maybe for 15 yrs.  Was last night's sleep a time when some sort of unconscious dam broke?  Did accumulated cholesterol work its way out of my (he)arteries?