SCPantera's Dream Journal

I had a very bizarre dream that I'm compelled to document. It wasn't quite lucid, but...well, read on.

Early as I can remember, I was in heaven in what looked like a cross between a mall and a cathedral. It was very crowded. By chance I found the man who had murdered me in heaven also. I declared that I was going to kill him (smite his soul or whatever) and that the Angel of Vengeance was on my side. After this short monologue I was about to attack the guy, but before I could do anything he stabbed me, killing me. After a short delay I was reborn as an angel of vengeance, called a One (Something--I can't quite recall what, it wasn't "Winged", I think it started with an M) Angel, and not just one--it seems as I had spawned as a squad of armed angels. It seems that this rebirth had taken some time, since after returning the man had been long gone. I searched heaven looking for the man but could not find him. Instead I returned to Earth and, running out of patience, I began to kill anyone who looked like the guy (from the start of the fight to here, the dream passed as some sort of weird top-down camera strategy RPG). It seems that to end my rampage I was returned to Earth with no memory except the name "One (Whatever) Angel". The dream then seemed to follow me on a search to find out what this name meant. I began by asking clergy or people who seemed religious; they all either straight-faced denied that they exist or looked at me in shock and horror and told me to get away from them. As my search went on with no answers I began just asking random strangers (my search took me to a drink stand just as it was closing in what was some in-dream deja vu, as I'd recognized this even from a deep early part of the dream that I don't now remember). Early on in my search I'd come across a girl who had overheard me asking questions at some point and had taken an interest in me. She eventually explained to me that she could help me remember everything through a process that involved dreams (vaguely Inception-style); I seemed to have a vague understanding of this process already and was firmly against it for a while. As time went on and my search for answers grew more desperate I eventually agreed to try it. It was to take place in what looked like some sort of park. As I entered, I came in behind an old, black lady accompanied by a young child. I recognized the old lady as someone I had previously asked about the angel who was disturbed by my question. The child stopped ahead of her and turned around, he asked, "Are you sure you want to do this? It could be the last time..." to which the old lady responded with something about helping these troubled young folk. I followed them to where the girl was waiting for us (I'm going to give her the name Ashley, it seems to fit my memory). In addition to the old, black woman (let's call her Oracle, since she looked like the latter version from the Matrix), Jon Voight was (apparently) helping us. They explained that Ashley would have to sit/lay on top of me in order to merge our dreams and gave me a large bag to put over my butt since apparently the process had several unpleasant side effects (supposedly most people shat themselves upon coming out of it). I sat down on a bench and they gave me some sort of injection and then immediately I was in the back (left) seat of a car, with Ashley sitting to my left, the others in the front (Jon Voight driving). I explained to them that I was once an oneironaught myself and briefly described my first lucid dream. As if to reply and boast of his own lucid dreaming skill, Jon Voight turned his head into an inflated version of Ashley's head. We all laughed, but I noticed that the situation was rather strange so I did a reality check that failed. I quickly exclaimed, "Holy shit, we're dreaming already! That's amazing." Then I looked over at Ashley, who was looking at me also, however she appeared out of it or drunk. I noted here that despite the reality check failing I didn't seem to be able to exert any lucid control; at the time I attributed this to the process occurring in the overarching dream storyline but now that I think about it after the fact it seemed kind of weird. At this point I had a very brief false awakening (I only remember because I awoke to a lit room before actually awakening) which was followed quickly by an actual awakening.

I'm not going to count this among my lucid dreams being as it fit into the context of the dream that my reality check would fail (maybe this also explains my apparent lack of dream control). It was a curious experience. I'm a little disappointed I didn't get to see the end to my search for answers.

Two sequences of note tonight.

I was in a large metropolitan city. I was driving (with some other people?) to some shop that sells herbal products. I/we went inside to check things out; I walked around checking out products, being my normal smug, condescending self when confronted with herbal products. For whatever reason, I stay inside wandering around after they close, I end up staying there overnight. During the night and as morning approached I argued with the owner, some hipster chick, over why the vast majority of her products were utter bullshit. I stick around for a little while after they open then eventually leave.

I either am or am playing my paragon adept femshep in some ME2-like game. Our ship is under attack by some unknown force, so I'm scrambling about the ship doing damage control. We take a big hit and something notifies me that I need to go check it out immediately or the crew will die, so I quickly head there. There's a big hole in the ship, but it's blocked off automatically by a glass door or a forcefield or something, but I can see that two crew members had gotten sucked out through the damaged hull. I grab three oxygen masks and then jump out after them. I'm able to get to them and get them set up with oxygen in time, but we're now out in space and drifting away from the ship. I turn to look back and observe that it doesn't look like the Normandy, but it looked reminiscent of one of the airships from Final Fantasy 6 (only more obligatorily high tech). It's facing away from us, and it jumps out to light speed but then immediately jumps back so that it's coming towards us again to pick us up.

Short fragment and a slightly longer fragment tonight. The short fragment was that I was walking down a long isle in a grocery store, shopping with my wife. She was asking me if we should get some juice, but I was like, "Eh, nah." This, of course, would never happen in real life; my wife absolutely refuses to take me grocery shopping.

In the second sequence I was walking down the street with a black woman. We were about to get on a subway. She was telling me about how she was looking forward to riding the IM subway for the first time, only she pronounced it like the "im" in "him". A white woman near us who overheard was annoyed and corrected her that it was pronounced like initials. As we walked down the stairs into the subway, the black woman had her subway pass on some kind of wood or plastic board; she didn't know she was supposed to hold it at a certain angle as she passed through the scanner, but it was hanging at the right angle anyways. As we proceeded she asked me why I didn't need a pass, I told her it was because I had already picked up a special permit which required two forms of ID and that when you show them they only give back one (which I then thought was kind of counterintuitive). As I was telling her this, we were passing by the special permit area where I could remember earlier (possibly even in the same dream here) standing in line to get the permit. The subway looked more like an airport terminal.

I had an interesting set of dreams last night, but my memory of them is rather disjointed. It was heavily inspired by Myst and Riven, which I have been replaying and playing through respectively after having picked up the Cyan pack on Steam (a nice, reasonable $20 for some hardcore classic PC games). The dreams take the form of that sort of exploration through surreal-yet-logical realms. I seemed to have a sense of dread most of the time; I imagine this mimics the emotions one trapped in a Myst-like experience might have. The first area I can remember was sort of a Myst-island style hub area, but looked a lot different. I was in a grassy plains area; there was a path heading through, several large rocks or canyon walls, one path led off to a lagoon area, another path led off to a large, imposing purple-black castle in the distance. Every so often along the path some animals would try to attack me: a swarm of insects near the lagoon, a snake in the grass a ways in front of the castle. I stopped playing this game and decided to try the older original version. I remember seeing an intro sequence and the Myst intro theme music playing, and thinking that this intro sequence was absent in the remake. It was mostly the same as the 3D one, but presented in still images like the original Myst; the creatures attacking me looked like they were relatively poorly rendered. I moved on to an apparent sequel, this one also in 3D. I have a small memory of something in a village that was on stilts above a lake or ocean; the water and sky were both black or dark gray. There was also a forest, with different patches of green, blue and purple, and red and orange forest. I remember having that same sense of confused frustration as to what to do next that I had yesterday when playing Riven. I found a pair of ropes hanging in the orange forest, whenever I pulled one a basket on the end of a rope would come down from the treetops and there would be some unusual objects that were meant to be hints inside.

Thinking about that last bit reminds me of a different sequence, though again I only seem to remember a few details. I was in some sort of RPG. We were in a city mostly. I knew there was a hard boss fight we had to go to at the top of a several-story-high building, so I was spending a lot of time doing various tasks to prepare for it.

Tonight's dreams came in kind of random fragments, which I suspect might possibly be due to waking up several times over the course of the night and not even realizing I'd dreamed before dozing off again. Here's what I can remember:

I was with my family, we were in a car (it seems it must have been either an SUV or our old Isuzu Trooper, judging from how relatively high I was seated) and one of my parents was driving, I was in one of the back seats. We were on our way to the lakes, which I was somewhat excited for; I had been vaguely wanting to spend a weekend at some lakes place all summer (also, I had read a classified ad for a luxurious-sounding lake cabin yesterday, which probably contributed to the dream's inspiration). The lake area we were going to was in a sparsely wooded area, but for some reason we were going to stay in a hotel at the edge of the woods. As we turned into the hotel, we were stopped by a woman and a young girl. The young girl walked up to the window and was telling my parents something; apparently they were from another family that we were traveling with. Apparently, the hotel we were going to go stay at was either closed or full, so we'd have to go stay in our proper lake cabin. I noticed the hotel was in a fenced off lot, and was several feet deep in water as though it was flooded. We went back onto the road to go into the woods, but a short ways in we came to a line of traffic that was backed up behind the main road, which was closed for some reason. My family used this as an excuse to turn around and go home. I was pissed because there was a clearly visible side road nearby that we could have used.

I was playing Metal Gear Solid 5 (!), and was increasingly concerned that Hideo Kojima has gotten a bit too avant-garde, because it included several highly unusual elements, such as Pokémon. There was one part where I was trying to figure out how this summon thing worked; it would summon a ghost night who would get more powerful with time but the summon didn't last very long. I eventually figured out that you have to restart channeling the spell to continue and doing so wouldn't resummon the ghost knight. Later, I tried to get my brother to try playing the game, but he wasn't interested.

At some point, I decided that if my family wasn't going to the lakes, I'd go by myself. So I took a car and drove there. At the woods there was a large grouping of camp sites and paved areas for RVs. It looked like a fun place to be, but was disappointingly empty, which I attributed to it being early in the season. I found a quaint-looking cabin that I parked at (though curiously I note that it wasn't near any lake).

I'm not sure if there is some chronological shuffling that's going on with my memory, but this is all I recall for now.

Got quite a good haul tonight; 3 decent-sized sequences that I'm going to split between two posts to denote a break where I woke up and wrote down some notes.

This first one may have been longer on the front end, but this is where my memory picks up: I'm living in a house with just my dad. I'm in the back yard enjoying the beautiful weather. I'm sitting at the top of a hill, looking at the sky. As I look back down, I notice the back yard is a mess, stuff is scattered everywhere and there is dog poop and urine stains all over, on the ground, and on the walls. I notice my neighbors' back yards are nice and neat, they're all separated into distinct sections by a short chain-link fence. I go inside and it's a mess inside as well. Pissed, I call for my dad, who shows up quickly. I yell at him for letting the dog shit everywhere. I tell him I'm going to go to the store and that everything better be cleaned up by the time I get back. I get into my car, but I decide instead of going to the store I'm just going to run away and live somewhere else. I try to plan where I want to go, I decide I'll fly to Alberta, Canada, then from there to Vancouver. I figure my dad might still be able to find me there and he'll be mad, so I decide I should keep going to Europe. I pick an arbitrary spot to land in Europe, so I pick Budapest (I had to check Wikipedia to verify Budapest is even in Europe and apparently my subconscious knows exactly where Budapest, Hungary is on a map; I should also note that my starting location was in southern California and as I was planning it I was seeing the path I was planning to take on a map with a line for the air route Indiana Jones style). So I go to the grocery store, which had an airport on its roof. I go up to the roof to get on a plane.

This dream may have transitioned into the following one; my memory of it starts (as I'll describe shortly) with flying as the previous one ends with it, and the sky in both situations was yellow as though it was dusk.

It's the future, but it's a zombie apocalypse. But not quite an apocalypse; there's pockets of humans living comfortably and there are quarantine zones. I'm at an airfield near a forest, learning how to fly (the airplanes are these tiny hover airplanes). I watch another student (who is Jesse Eisenberg of Zombieland fame) successfully take off and then do a couple loops in the air to show off. I do my own take-off and continue flying to explore. I wander into a massive city, only I notice that it's conspicuously abandoned (also note, the sky is now blue). As I continue, I suddenly realize I've accidentally flown into the quarantine zone, just in time to just barely miss getting hit by a raising camera bot with a zombie hanging off of it. Since it's the future, and there's some advanced technology, they use automated hovering camera bots to watch over the quarantine zone. However, sometimes one of the zombies would grab it, causing the hover blades or the bot itself to be destroyed, so to solve this problem they programmed the bots to fly up and continue flying up if they get grabbed until the zombie falls off. Looking forward, I see several more upward flying camera bots with random zombies hanging off them, some occasionally falling off. Though I'm filled with some dread, I figure I'm fairly safe up in the sky so I continue exploring. Some ways in I find a series of very large buildings that are completely intact. One of them has a large airport on top of it (what's with the airports on top of buildings in these dreams) and as I continue I can see into some of the buildings. I come to realize that this is some evil corporation who's trying to exploit the zombies. In some places there are crowds of people moving around normally as though they are busy at work and aren't in the middle of a zombie infested quarantine zone, but in other places I can where swarms of zombies are attacking people who are desperately trying to escape. There's places where it looks like there's a special forces team fighting zombies. Another place looks like a grade school; a nervous student answers a teacher's question but is wrong so she is taken to a closet and left outside, zombies burst through the door and attack the girl. At another classroom area, a student lures the teacher closer but then attacks them in rebellion so they can escape. The other students attack him too and knock him out, so they all flee. I find what looks like some kind of vent that's large enough for me to fly down into. I come out in a busy office hallway; the ceiling there is high, so I can hover above everyone's heads so most of them don't notice me. There an intersection, and nearby is a black guy in a suit who is apparently the boss of the whole operation. He's giving some sort of evil monologue. I continue to look around while listening; there's windows into labs where technicians in sterile suits are working on something. The boss guy's assistant has noticed me and is trying to get the boss guy's attention but the boss is too into his monologue to be interrupted. I start to head back the way I came to leave, but as I get back to the vent I notice it's been covered over. While I'm trying to figure out what to do, the boss notices me and approaches me enthusiastically, he shakes my hand and asks me how I've been and other small talk; apparently we've met before. Another guy comes up the stairs nearby, I recognize him as a supervisor that I had for a previous job and I'm worried because I know he'll recognize me and know I'm not supposed to be there. The boss waves him over and "introduces" me to him, then tells him to find me a room. After boss guy leaves, I tell supervisor guy that if he lets me in on whatever the evil corporation is doing I'll keep quiet and won't try to escape or anything. He agrees and we get on an elevator. Inside there is what looks like some sort of special forces team. One of them looks half-zombified and is wearing some kind of special suit. We get off on an abandoned floor, the team goes first and readies assault rifles so I assume it's an unsafe floor. I wake up hereabouts.

I was in some sort of human immune system MMO (I'm describing it as an MMO for the sake of description; the dream seemed to actually take place in vivo). I was a young lymphoblast fresh out of hematopoesis with everything to prove, wandering about trying to decide on a specialty. Did I want to live the short violent life of a natural killer, play it safe and be a long range nuking B cell, or perhaps settle on the utility of a T cell. As I was wandering there was a mission alert, and we were being sent to the stomach. When I arrived I could see what looked like a weird biological space battle; B cells were firing antibodies like machine guns at some pathogen I couldn't see because it was blocked by macrophages engaging it in melee range. Afterwards I was looking at the internet for more information on specialties and I recall being frustrated at the trouble I was having finding information that wasn't written by internet retards.

Edit: This is a partial entry with one dream sequence omitted. See file 0813-0814; recall note: fast food restaurant, black coat.

Just laid down to get a little more sleep when I remembered some more details of what was either a separate dream or a long segment before the previous one (if so, I was myself at this point and not Bruce Willis).

-

And even just now I recall another separate sequence. At this point I'm not sure where in tonight's overall sequence it belongs.

I was riding a bike (with a helmet even, I remember checking--successfully within the dream--a few times to be sure I was wearing one) up 10th street, I think I was on my way to work (noting of course I don't work anywhere going that direction). I turned left onto 19th avenue and decided I move to the sidewalk and stop taking up space on the street, only before I was able to do so I fell into a small crowd (maybe 6-7) of people walking (apparently I was biking really slow?) west down 19th avenue. They were talking to each other about something I wasn't paying attention to. I decided to go along with them as they moved onto the sidewalk and started moving behind some beige-colored buildings where the strip mall would be on the 10th street/19th avenue corner. We kept going and the crowd sorta slowly grew larger; I was still on my bike (I checked for a helmet here for sure at one point). As we reached the end of the buildings heading west still, someone pointed out that there was a large wooden fence blocking further passage west as well as one to our left blocking passage south. The north-south fence was slanted slightly diagonally southwest to northeast, so we turned the corner of the building to the north and kept going. The fence and the building reached a point where the formed a small passage at the building's northwest corner.

I volunteered to go in first and check it out (at some point after turning the corner I'd gotten off my bike). Inside the passage it was very narrow, made out of wood planks like the fence outside, and the passage was uneven (ie not straight, the walls zig-zagged slightly at random intervals, mostly small but with interesting patterns, for instance there were small alcoves where people would be sitting). It seemed like it was not longer outdoors somehow, but there was a really high ceiling. It sounded crowded, like there were a lot of people outside the wooden-fence-passage area that I couldn't see, and even the passage was fairly crowded with random people just loitering of passing through in the opposite direction. It was slanted slightly downhill, so I remember thinking it felt like I was moving out of a mountain passage amusement-park-log-chute-style. My memory of this sequence ended at some point as I was navigating this passage.