Nazrax

I go to bed at 10:50, intending to get up with my wife's 6:30 alarm. A few hours later I wake for some reason (no recall) and return to sleep. At 3:10 a kid makes noise and wakes me. I jot down a fragment then return to sleep. At 5:50 a kid wakes me as she uses the bathroom. She's coughing once she returns to bed, so I take her some water. I can't seem to get back to sleep, and I hear my wife's restlessness and know she can't either. At 6:15 she gets up and showers, and I fall asleep while she's in the shower.


Beer in space
I'm on a very traditional star ship (or maybe a space station?), walking through the corridors. It's a very traditional design, with identical gray corridors meeting frequently. I'm totally lost, but that's OK: I'm wandering around the place trying to get a feel for it.

Now I see the officers in the conference room, where everyone is looking out the windows. Captain Picard looks out last and gets a disgusted look on his face when he sees what the rest do: a giant brown beer bottle floating in space, spinning slowly. As the label rotates into view, everyone can see it has a goofy picture of the captain, and the name of the beer and its catch phrase are poking fun at the captain. Everyone immediately knows this was done by Q.


Scanning stations
I'm watching as defense stations around the world are doing some kind of scan. As I'm initially watching, there are 5 stations, but the number keeps growing as the dream continues. At first, I'm watching from inside some kind of control room. I'll see a quick clip from one control room, then I'll see a clip from a different control room in a different station. I can tell I'm seeing different stations because the people in the room change, but the room itself stays exactly the same. I'm surprised they'd use such an obvious trick to try to save on production costs; even the camera angle stays exactly the same! The last room I see is being run by a stocky Russian woman, and everyone is speaking in (what I identify as) Russian (though I can't understand a word of it).

Now I'm looking at a map of the earth that has all the stations marked out on it. I see red arcs appear from every station to every other station, then start to shrink. I assume that whatever is still under the arcs still needs to be scanned, and the places the arcs have shrunk away from are already scanned and determined not to have anything interesting.


At the hotel
I'm in a nicely appointed bathroom. It's long and thin; one wall has a long row of sinks followed by a long row of urinals, while the other wall has only stalls. I'm walking back from the urinals towards the sinks. Initially I think I'm alone, but then I realize there's a woman at one of the sinks closest to me. I'm very surprised to see a woman in here, but I just walk around her and go on my way. She's doing something at her sink (washing her teeth, maybe?), and there's stuff on the floor around her (towels?).

Now I'm in the (impossibly huge) foyer of a hotel, standing in the middle at what I first assume to be a concierge desk. I'm with other people I know, and someone is talking about coffee. I realize that this isn't a concierge desk but is rather a tiny Starbucks. While he's getting his coffee, a woman in my group who's standing near me tells her friend that she's never had Starbucks and wonders what it's like. I tell her that Starbucks coffee is too heavily roasted, almost burnt, for my tastes.

Now I see a couple of people with small plates of food. I look around to see where it may have come from and realize that on the other side of the Starbucks is a small table with lots of fruit on it - I specifically see strawberries and chunks of pineapple. Despite being right next to the Starbucks, I think it's actually provided by the hotel, so it's probably complementary. I think about going and getting some.


Unclear traffic signal + Flying and pumpkin hunt
I'm driving a car of some kind, maybe an SUV (I've never driven an SUV IRL). I'm stopped at the top of a hill, waiting on a ramp to join with a larger road that's down and to my left. Between the large road and my ramp is a HUGE board that reminds me of a scoreboard at an athletic event. Most of the middle of the board is taken up with rows that look like they should be holding team names and scores; around the edge of the board I see more than one set of red/yellow/green traffic lights. Initially, the board is completely blank. Nothing is on the rows, and all the lights are off. Eventually one of the greens on the left-front of the board turns on, but since it's away from me I assume it's for the other road. Other lights start cycling, though none on the right. Up to this point I've been alone at the top of the ramp, but I still start to get concerned that maybe one of those lights was supposed to be for me, and I'd hate to hold up traffic. As I'm thinking about this, I realize that a motorcyclist is going around me, tired of waiting for me to go. I check my mirror and am horrified to see a long line of cars waiting behind me. I decide to ignore whatever the strange sign is trying to tell me and just go.

Now I'm on a three-lane, one-way street. Somehow I'm aware of the driver behind me not liking the left-hand merges he has to do on this road. I think nothing of the strangeness of knowing what another driver is thinking/talking about, but I do try to figure out what he means. If you're switching left, you merge left; if you're switching right, you merge right; so what's the big deal? I can't see how this road changes anything.

I start to get a vague sense of "wrongness" and decide to do a nose-pinch RC. Initially, it only seems to deepen the sense of wrongness; something's not right, but I can't quite put my finger on it. I keep doing it, eventually realizing that, yes, I'm still breathing through my nose (left nostril only), even though it's pinched. I do it a couple more times to confirm that, yes, I'm really dreaming.

Now I'm standing in front of a house on a kind of rock path made of very coarse white gravel and small rocks. The scene is very fuzzy, and I know I need to ground myself in the dream. I start by looking at my hand, but it's badly out of proportion, and I really want something to keep me here and not convince me I shouldn't be here. I kneel down and pick up one of the larger chunks of white rock. As I feel its solidness and hard edges, look at its shape, and study the sparkly flecks in it, the dream becomes crisp. I stand up and recall my goals for this dream: the basic challenge to cut open a pumpkin and see what's inside, and my personal goal of better flight.

Nearby, I see an open door into what looks like a small shed. I look inside to see if there any pumpkins here. As it turns out, there are two: a medium-sized one on a table to my left, and a small one on a counter near the back. I don't like the look of either of them and continue on my way. I remember reading about someone finding a pumpkin patch and decide to check if there's one behind the house, but there isn't. I change my mind about the pumpkins in the shed, figuring that any pumpkin will do, even if it's sickly looking. I return to the shed and take the larger of the pumpkins, but in my hand it changes into a collection of small orangish guards connected by strings. It's useless to me now, so I leave it.

During this first part of the dream, I frequently stopped to re-ground myself. Sometimes I studied my hand (slightly different each time), and sometimes I picked some part of the scenery to look at. From this point onward, I forget all about doing any further groundings.

Somehow I end up back in the house. I'm in what's probably a living room, though since the house is completely empty it's hard to tell. I'm standing on hardwood floors, and in front of me is a wall that's mostly window. Even the doors are mostly glass. I'm getting a bit frustrated with not finding my pumpkin, so I decide to move onto flying. After all, there's no reason I can't fly and look for pumpkins at the same time. I decide to start out by jumping. Last time I tried jumping in a dream, something really strange happened, and I want to see if I can do better. I manage to jump all the way to the (fairly high) ceiling, then gently float down, That was fun, so I do it again. But, jumping isn't flying, and it's time to fly!

Now I'm outside (not sure how I got here), flying about head-level off the ground. I know I'm flying, not just gliding like I have in previous dreams, so I know I can go as high as I want. I head up to about roof height, then come back down to head-height. Now I'm flying along above a field. To my right is a high school athletic field of some kind (baseball, maybe?) with a high chain-link fence around it. I see a few small groups of people talking near the fence. I know some of the people in the groups, and in one group I see Amy. I feel sad, thinking on how we used to be good friends but that she left all her old friends (including me) behind. I decide to give her a scare, so I fly by her and somehow pick her up in my wake so that she's flying behind me. Her additional mass slows us down, but I don't mind too much. We fly down the street into another neighborhood. I see Sarah H. standing by the street, and she sees me and gets an amazed, incredulous look on her face.

Now I'm in another house, in a small hallway. The outside door (some kind of side door) is behind me, and a set of bi-fold doors is in front of me. The doors remind me of the bifold doors in my wife's parents' old house that hid the washer and drier. I decide I'm done trying to "find" a pumpkin, and I'm going to add one into the dream. I know that asking DCs for something tends to work well, so I decide that I'm going to find a DC behind these doors, and that that DC will help me get a pumpkin. I open the doors and walk through to find a mother and daughter working on laundry. The mother looks like an old-fashioned washer woman: she's wearing an off-white blouse with a darker off-white skirt and has her hair pulled back and up in a floral handkerchief. I think the daughter is wearing something similar. I see that the mother has a rather tired, hard-bitten expression on her face, but I go ahead and ask her for a pumpkin. She gives me a look that says "I don't know why you're in my house, and I don't know why I'm talking to you at all" and eventually drawls that there aren't any pumpkins around here. Behind her, I notice a small table designed like a pillar, and I see that it has a small misshapen pumpkin sitting on it.

I consider calling her on her lie but decide not to. I look over to her daughter to see if she'd be any more help, but then poof I wake up.