I’ve always meant to post this, even before I decided to do the Dream Journal series on my blog. It just felt very odd and unusual, and I’ve always held back on it since the artwork did leave a few people speechless or unsettled. Considering what I’ve dreamt in the past few years and recent events, I believe I’m comfortable to share this after sitting in my Drafts for almost 5 years.
This is one of the longest dream journals and breakdowns I’ve ever done so far, so please bear with me. I didn’t want to leave any stone unturned, and I call upon a lot of past experiences and memories. So maybe grab a coffee for this one.
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Original Dream Date: November 27, 2012
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I was in Randolph, living in apartment which had been renovated like Mass Effect. I somehow meet Yorina, and end up going to a hospital. I don’t know if this was because someone was hurt, but it could’ve been that she’d been called there.
Upon arriving, the hospital’s interior resembled a family member’s home office. My partner and I then find an alien resembling a cross between a Rigilian and a Grey, but taller and with translucent cell skin like underwater creatures (a jellyfish is what immediately came to mind). The eyes were completely black, and the left eye had tissue covering up one side of its face. I got the distinct impression that it was scar tissue, and this individual was deformed. There was a gold or silver chain around its head, and the extra bit draped over the scarred eye. A green gem dotted in the center of the chain at the forehead.
As I start to exit said home office/hospital through another door, I now realize this is likely an aquatic alien and I’m walking into some sort of Atlantis-themed ruins underground; running water included.
The scene then changes without warning. I found myself on the top of a pinnacle with no way to get down except to jump. I did indeed jump, and didn’t get seriously injured like I should have. A comm device I had answered to Yorina’s voice, asking if I was okay.
The scene started to fade as I felt that I was traveling somewhere in New Jersey. I believe I was on my way to meet her mother (who had met up with her), but then woke up.
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Interestingly enough, this is one of the few times I’ve actually drawn what I dreamt; that’s how vivid it was in my head. I outlined this in my travel sketchbook a day or so later:
What does it mean?
Looking back at this with a better view, I actually think I can take a stab at translating this dream. I know for a fact it just would’ve been an oddity if I had posted it back when.
First, this was at the near beginning of my dream journaling experience. I had a series of bad nightmares the previous month, which I can’t recall at this point in time. I also was starting to dream a past location of my childhood; an apartment complex that my Mom’s siblings grew up in over the years. We’d frequently travel to New Jersey to visit them at this location, up until they moved in 2001. This specific dream would be repeated weekly, leaving me with no closure and utter sadness every time I woke up. (I currently don’t have this dream posted, but it deserves an article on it’s own. I’ll edit this appropriately when that gets finished).
After trying to get some answers about the apartment, a family member had introduced me to dream journaling at the time. I’d heard the term in passing, but never quite paid attention to it. After all, I rarely had dreams, or I had them then didn’t remember anything important. I was also recommended the Dreamkeeper app to go along with it, and had opted to this over writing it down (which I found a hassle since I typed really quickly).
However, instead of encountering that repeating dream or those nightmares, I had this unexplainable bit of a dream. Sure it had to do with a “version” of the apartment complex and New Jersey, but it had gone completely off the rails.
This was also the very first dream I had recorded in the app. To make it even weirder, the drawing I made to go along with the dream. That’s how vivid the scene had stuck out to me. I’ve drawn some of my dreams out before, but they’ve been spaced out by years apart. Before this incident, the last time I drew a dream was in 2009, then 2008, then 2004.
While this is backstory, I think this is relevant to interpreting this dream. I believe this was an exercise to see what I retained from dreaming, and how serious I was about the matter. Would I ignore it because it wasn’t the nightmare or apartment dream? How good was my memory at retaining dreams for long periods of time?
I know for a fact as I type this in 2025, that I would not have remembered those details so vividly years later. I’m still a little fuzzy on the exact jewelry decorations it had, but the scene was so stark and vivid. If I start thinking about the “jellyfish alien”, this is immediately what comes to mind.
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There was a previous dream that I had posted to get my Dream Journal series on track. One thing I learned from a number of my dreams, is to let me experience things that I wouldn’t otherwise experience in real life. From friendly faces to walk it to people holding my hand, it’s been a pillar that if someone shows up in my dream as a sidekick, it’s almost always because I never faced something by myself, or am scared of doing so.
With this dream, my mind had picked Yorina as my sidekick for this venture. She would’ve been more on my mind at the time, having coming up with her design during my color theory class in the first part of 2011 while watching Exit Through the Gift Shop.
With a snarky half-Atlantean woman sporting a shotgun and a New Jersey accent, who wouldn’t want her as a sidekick?
With the Mass Effect motifs, I was playing that game quite a bit the months before. My brother and I spent lots of time in multiplayer, and I know I had revisited the game a number of times up to 2013 when the Citadel DLC came out. As I was drawing on this for Dawnstar’s inspiration at the time, I also think this was my mind making up a situation of me and Yorina checking out something in a pseudo Mass Effect setting. Maybe some NCIS mixed up in there, along with a splash of X-Files.
For the alien, a number of things come to mind. Not only was it the prop or center of this adventure, but the fact that it had such an unusual design is what caught me off-guard.
First, I do believe this was a little bit of a metaphor of who I was. At the time, I definitely viewed myself as “alien” to the people around me, and it was a lot more obvious as you got further up into Johnson City and beyond in those neck of the woods. It didn’t matter that 56,000 people lived there at the time, or that the ETSU campus was there. If you weren’t white and didn’t speak their dialect/accent, you “ain’t local”.
I can confidently say “Oh, I’m this weird thing”, but like a Dune figure going “Look at me and be revealed as a reflection.”
Specifically, the scarred eye. While I see about the same in both eyes, my left eye has a stigmatism due to the way the lens is shaped. This always bothered me, and it seemed that its as something previous eye doctors glossed over till my last set of glasses then.
There was also an unexplainable, high strangeness even that occurred with that left eye, which will have to be linked to another blog post down the line. I developed a sty in my eyelid around that time, which wasn’t comfortable and I couldn’t get rid of. The odd part of this was, it showed up when someone in the family went sick, and disappeared within days of that family member dying.
I also think it was a metaphor that despite being so unusual, strange beings can have flaws and such.
Per the alien’s overall design, that baffles me still to this day. The body being this translucent jelly material didn’t make sense at all. I don’t think my mind went as far as organs or what it had in it’s cavity, but as you can see in the drawing, I had drawn a jellyfish which I thought had the closest complexion of what the flesh would be. Squishy, rigid but flexible. I’ve seen non-lethal jellies on beaches over the years, and I did touch one which was a Cannonball Jellyfish. That would’ve felt about the same rigidity and structure.
With that being its flesh, I always felt that it breathed with osmosis in water. Why it had a “nose” I’ll never know, but it never felt like a real nose. Rather, more of a face ridge in place of the feature.
I also have been generally terrified of the Gray alien archetype. Aside from the abduction stories, I’ll give you a fun fact that most Christians (especially Adventists) believe! They’re not extraterrestrials or inter-dimensional beings, they’re evil angels or demons masquerading in the form. With my growth over the years I do still hold this viewpoint to a degree, which may actually require an explanation one day. But point in short, it’s spooky. It’s not something I like or dwell on, so meeting that in my subconscious dream world was pretty terrifying.
Aliens to me have always been stuff out of Star Trek or things like Freespace, Halo, etc. My famed IGA universe took this wholesale inspiration for the aliens in the setting, and that’s what usually came to mind when I used the word.
So except for the eyes and some features, this was mashed with something I called a Rigilian. This is something from aforementioned IGA universe, a lesser-known humanoid alien with a massive body and stood 7 feet high if not more. They were reclusive, had no visible eyes and I likened them to humanoid rhinos (in self-defense, I was not aware of Dr. Who’s rhinos, much less of the show at the time). But they were a baddie, something you didn’t want to encounter at your isolated frontier mining outpost.
The good part of waiting so long to post this? Scans of art! So I didn’t have to do a big hunting session to find it. Here’s a spread of some denizens from that part of the galaxy alongside with the subject in question.
Spread of alien races from my IGA Universe, circa 2005.
As you can see, big bulky body that stands tall. In relation to the other two aliens, the Tooi would be about human sized, so that’s teenager me not sizing it right. For the Tooi and Otrad, you’ll just have to stay tuned till I do a write-up on them one day.
With that info, I think my mind mashed that up to drive home that this alien was unsettling, but in a way that there was some familiarity with it. My sketch does indeed have a more “humanoid” body plan like a person, but my dream self with the journal saw Rigilian traits in there somewhere.
I do have one other aspect to touch on before I get to a summary; the jewelry around the head. That I can distinctly point where that came from; a game called Solar Winds.
This was one of my first computer games I was allowed to play in it’s entirety, and one of the first times I paid full-price for a mail-order game. It has a long history and fascination with me, although I last touched it while I was at ETSU. I’m certain I played this sometime during my first apartment, which is why this would be more vivid.
In the 2nd game there was an alien who aren’t referred to by name, but had bulbous heads but humanoid faces. One specifically called himself an “Overlord” to a system that he took over, and had sort of a similar jewelry on his head. This was more of a cord in the game, but I believe this is where the concept came from.
By then I also was aware of the “fey” type of cosplays going around, often reverting to druid or fairy like sort of styles. A ton of those had gold-chain circlets with decorations, too. So the “chains” might’ve been inspired by those.
Lastly, the ruins and water outside the hospital? I believe that’s where it came from. I’m pretty sure it was some sort of aquatic alien, died somehow and was recovered then brought there. Yorina and I get called to investigate, dream plays out. Why I was shown where it came from instead of getting a blurb about it’s origin is beyond me, but that’s more visual storytelling I guess.
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The rest of the dream isn’t that dramatic beyond that point, but no less important I think.
Me on top of the tower? More Mass Effect drama, but it was important for me facing a fear and moving forward. I believe this was not only hinting at me trying to make my way forward in life in general, but that if I wanted to escape what I left behind, this was the way to move forward.
I rarely jump in a dream, much less survive impact. I almost always wake up when I realize I’m falling a great distance. The fact that this didn’t happen was unusual. Again with the theme of things, Commander Shepard does a lot of falling, and plot armor allowing him to walk it off most of the time.
And when I hit the ground, being asked if I was okay by someone I liked was back in line with the ‘experiencing something I didn’t’. People didn’t ask me that question back then, and were more of the “Well, you’re negative so leave me alone,” or “You’re walking and talking, you’re fine.” It’s part of the reason why I kept apart from people, as much as I wanted a romantic partner or close friends. So I was always left to “walk it off”, per se.
Despite me waking up at that last point, I believe the dream wouldn’t developed more if I did sleep in. The dream was already starting to fall apart meeting Yorina and her mom, and I was getting into unknown territory.
Which makes sense looking back at it. At this point in time, I was stood up twice for a date with someone, and been immediately blocked on another blind meet-up for my physical appearance. If I’ve never been in a relationship with someone, how was I supposed to imagine something more intimate with an individual, to the point of willingly going to meet their friendly parent?
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I look at this dream with something of a neutral view, more of a curiosity and a landmark to go in the collection. While I’m bad at letting content sit then tackling it 5+ years later, in this instance it was a good thing. I don’t think I would’ve had the insights that I did this much later.
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On an interesting note, I became aware of an image that started floating around the Internet in 2014. I’m not going to stick it here, as it does genuinely unsettle me all that time later; but I will link it here if you want to follow to see what I mean. (Sue me for playing Warhammer 40K, but being spooked by an “ayylmao” per what a certain online friend calls it). I didn’t give it much thought and let it go in passing.
I’ve been told by two people since 2022, that this alien reminds them of the entity on the book cover. I’m not sure what to make of it, it very well could be they knew of this stuff and simply are associating my art with this image now that the book has become popular. I’ll leave that up for you to decide.