Weird Dreams That Make You Question Reality

[Redd Panderson]

Always interesting reading about others' dreams. I relate with those of you who mentioned dreaming about familiar places but with extra rooms or such that shouldn't be there. Dreams like that have been some of my most unsettling. A lot of my family claims my grandparents' house was haunted and have had dreams of weird extra rooms in that house--myself included. Some of those dream rooms had sinister vibes, like a glowing red copy of my grandparents' bedroom with an altar-like vanity, or a green-tinged subterranean copy of the living room with ghosts in it watching TV, very weird. I myself, though, am more of a skeptic with these things and I don't really believe in ghosts.

So 2026 has been interesting for me for a lot of reasons I won't go into here, but:

I had a lucid dream in March where I was standing in the bathroom of the house I grew up in. I became intensely aware I was dreaming while staring at the woodgrain of the wooden door before leaving the room, and chose to stay inside because I could hear people on the other side of the door and I didn't want to lose control of the dream. I tested how lucid I was by trying to open my real eyes. I couldn't. I was IN the dream. Some other stuff happened, but I found myself staring at the metal light switch cover by the door. It was very vividly colorful; the top was bright yellow, the bottom was deep blue, and the middle a gradient of green between the two. It also had a bas-relief of diagonally grid-patterned fleur de lis. When I moved to look at another part of the wall, a copy of the same light switch cover grew out of it again.

The next morning I googled the significance of the fleur de lis and learned that, among other things, it's a symbol for the holy trinity. I'm not Christian, but I thought it was interesting to read about for a bit. It seemed to me to have some parallels with some Buddhist stuff, which I do practice.

Then April happened, Boards of Canada sent out that tape, and they later announced that the new album is called Inferno. So I decided to finally get around to reading Dante's Divine Comedy (I'd been waffling on reading it for over a year). I picked up a copy of it, start reading the intro, and found that the three parts--Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso--are modeled after the holy trinity.

It was one of those weird, proverbially look-behind-me-to-see-who's-watching full-circle moments. Just lots of synchronicity this year. For one small example, at the end of Purgatorio a griffin with six wings is pulling a chariot with a rainbow on the sky, and the middle pair of wings is centered perfectly on the green part (center) of the rainbow. I just started Paradiso, so we will see how that pans out!

I hold this stuff with an open hand. I see some people seem to go off the deep end obsessing over strings of coincidences and I don't want to be that person. But I do note these things when they happen because it does feel like my intuition working on and telling me things. We notice what's important to us, sometimes, without even knowing what's important to us consciously. It doesn't need a supernatural explanation, but it's mysterious how these things work.

Anyway, so tl;dr, if you've been holding back on opening that door, maybe 2026 is the year to open it.

[Cupz]

I hold this stuff with an open hand.

I also believe the human brain is capable of some pretty inexplicable stuff (though I'm not sure I'd call it anything spiritual). Visiting a place in real life for the first time realizing you've been there in a dream. It might be because you are misremembering the dream. The image was incomplete when it was part of a dream and now your real eyes can fill in the rest. Or did you subconsciously "see it coming", extrapolated from innumerable variables colliding into possibilities while your brain is defragmenting all the information? Or do we possess some intuitive mental capabilities to calculate likely events into the future, like how quake 3 pros calculate the trajectory of the grenade launcher vs the enemy's movement in a split second. Same with following the "zeitgeist" like I feel very strongly about subjects before they become a more common thought in the people around me (I was into that -before- it was cool hmkey?).



Anyway, to keep on track. I remember one dream, long time ago, where I was walking around Lelystad as I often do, strolling around and I noticed it was a dream. I think it was the casio watch I wore at the time was going haywire (I then tend to try to hover above the ground to make sure I am dreaming before I do anything too crazy). I got really excited and over-confident and got rowdy, picking up heavy stuff and throwing it into windows, I had super strength. Kind of like playing GTA with cheatcodes but better. I got into a fistfight with someone, I don't even remember who, and I kung-fu'd them. Like I really popped them hard. I think I "killed" them, a dream NPC. And I looked up and I saw other dream characters looking at me like all scared and worried. Even though I knew I was dreaming, it made me feel bad. Like kicking a Roomba, you know it doesn't feel anything and its just a few motors on wheels, but it's still shitty behavior.

So I got a bit sad and I woke up. It was still kind of early in the morning, I remember the sky being that dull dark blue of early summer morning and I didn't turn on the lights. I got out of bed and did morning stuff until suddenly there was a knock on the door. I opened it and there in the hallway were like a whole bunch of people looking at me with disdain, and they started making a lot of noise (like loud party noise), entering my house and touching my shit. I got like an anxious panic attack. I remember they even ripped down parts of the wall before I woke up for real.

And I was like holy shit, karma. Don't disrespect your dream or it disrespects you.

[Redd Panderson]

And I was like holy shit, karma. Don't disrespect your dream or it disrespects you.

Lol! It's amazing how dreams can enact the relationships between different parts of your psyche in such elaborate ways. It is pretty amazing how much our brain is doing "under the hood" and truly mysterious how it manifests in how we dream and in how we perceive things in the waking world.

In the BOC thread on Inferno's album cover when I compared its art direction to behavioral feedback loops, this was during a time when the Backrooms movie wasn't out yet. They were two totally separate pieces of media at that time in my head. Then I saw the movie on May 30 and not only does it very explicitly open with a monologue about getting stuck in behavioral loops, it ended with a new BOC track from Inferno. Same exact moment of proverbially looking-behind-to-see-who's-watching, lol. I couldn't believe it! So I feel what you're saying about being keyed into the zeitgeist.

I think most people are a lot more intuitive than they realize, it's just a matter of practicing being in tune with that in a way that works for you and following the signals where they lead (while also not getting too pulled down rabbit holes of "false positives"). A regular meditation practice has been great for me personally on this front, and I think that has also increased my capacity to lucid dream.

[Redd Panderson]

Last night I dreamt that the V/Vm Test Records website was relaunched as an ever-metamorphosing storefront/selection of bizarre new Boards of Canada merch--strange artifacts whose identities were difficult to place in turquoise and other colors, and all came with previously unreleased music possibly unavailable in any other format. There was also a sixth album, but it and the merch was all under the "Orphel Binuswade" name. The banner at the top of the page looked really glitchy and read "Binuswade."

It had the vibe of a weird curiosity shop.

The new album came in a 1-vinyl, 4-vinyl, and max 7-vinyl format (which was $2000!) and it wasn't clear if it was all cuts of the same material or different parts of one piece or 3 different things, it was very...weirdly maximalist and opaque. But the music was definitely more on the ambient side than Inferno. I don't remember the sound of it much, but there was a hard to placeness to it, abstract but earnest vignettes or something. That might just be the aspect of it being something I caught only a glimpse of in a dream. There was also a video of Mike Sandison sitting on a random porch playing a casio in his lap on a rainy day, and he said some stuff to the camera.

During the dream it felt really real, but when I woke up I had the reaction of "why did I think that was real??" I was even genuinely tempted to find any way possible to drop $2000 on a bizarro new 7-LP BOC album...

....is it's possible I've been listening to too much Boards of Canada lately? Lol!