> > Curiously, the board was entirely in black basalt stone...
> > The 4" figurines in my left hand were light grey, and shaped like the ancient terracotta warriors of Xian. . . . In my right hand were 3 pieces the size of walnuts. One was a white soapstone turtle, one was a white carved solid snail shell, and the last piece was a dark grey, wavy, 3D double-asymptotic 'trumpet'.
>
> By the way, how on earth do you get such details out of dreams? I don't recall ever having dreamt of anything at all that I noted was made of "white soapstone turtle."

It was white, and I knew it was soapstone simply *because* of the style of carving: a somewhat crude, flattened representation of a turtle as done by a traditional Inuit artisan. Soapstone as used by the Eskimos in real life is generally grey or black or olive green, however. So it's not supposed to be white. Unless I was making some sort of connection with LifeBuoy or Ivory soap, heh. :-)

Btw I don't know where you could buy such a chessboard set, Sam. You'd have to carve your own, like Andy Dufresne does in The Shawshank Redemption.


> Actually I think I'm even more curious about how you knew the figures where four inches high. Was that a figure you noted in the dream, or afterwards, in your estimation?

Afterwards. I know what the width of my palm is (3 inches), and when I clasped my hand around the warrior figures, their heads projected about 1 in. from my fist. By deduction, 4" total.

My "real-time" sense of great lengths and distance generally is skewed in dreams, though.


> If the former, that is truly remarkable. One dreams with one's right brain hemisphere, which doesn't deal with measurements and like analysis. (That's why you generally can't read books or signs, discerning letters and words, in your dreams, though you may have the knowledge of what books and signs say anyway.)

Yes. It is not possible to read books or manuscripts consistently in dreams. You may read a rather lengthy message and understand it, turn away briefly, and when you read it again the entire text has *changed*. In fact, that's the main indicator that tips me off to the fact that I'm dreaming.