lucid

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was with a couple of "friends." One of the friends looked like a person who has attended a lot of the anime events I've gone to IWL. He's white, kind of pale, tall, with jaw-length, brown hair and eyeglasses. This friend was organizing some kind of theatre event. He had gotten me and my other friend to volunteer.

We had first been discussing the details of this event in some bar. The bar hadn't seemed very well-lit, and it also seemed a bit empty. Then we were discussing the details out on some hilltop, out on the driveway of a house in a residential part of town, probably in the kind of early morning.

The theatre friend said, "We'll have a lot to do. We'll barely have time to go home and go to bed at 11 AM, before we have to wake up at 1 PM and do the second show."

As I realized how much work my other friend and I had volunteered for, I saw, probably in my mind's eye, dark grey clouds rolling overhead. I told the theatre friend, "I don't think we can do both shifts. At least my friend can't. We didn't realized we'd be going all the way through 11 AM. And we already signed up to volunteer at another event. Your second show will overlap with that event. At least my friend has to go to this event."

At this point the friend I was defending may have been my brother.

I was now in a small theatre. It was either before or after a show. The theatre was only half lit. The stage didn't have any light on it at all. The area felt like a cafeteria in an elementary school's basement. The walls may have been sea green. The seating area was made up of folding chairs. There were a good amount of people sitting in the chairs. Some people were also milling around in the empty space behind the seating area.

I sat near the back row of seats and near the aisle. So I turned myself around to look at the people milling around in the back area. Most of the people looked pretty normal. But there were a couple of older black women wearing very flashy, dressy outfits. They stood out from everybody else and seemed to demand being treated in a very special way. They each sat in chairs against the very back wall, at some distance from each other.

One of the women wore a turquoise dress and hat. The dress seemed almost to have been made out of a crepe material. The hat had a big, round, kind of floppy brim. My theatre friend immediately came up to the woman and started saying all kinds of nice things to her. But I could tell he was trying to get something out of her. So I telepathically told her to watch out for the man.

We were now watching a movie which was supposed to be Back to the Future. There were a few scenes, kind of randomly put together, which gave the feel that the movie was more about a group of kids working together to create a time machine than anything having to do with Doc Brown or Marty McFly.

One of the scenes showed Amy Irving, like she looked in the Brian DePalma version of Carrie. The view was of the girl's face, framed in a misty circle, looking up toward some kind of blue, moonlight, garden light and singing some kind of rock song. The girl's eyes glowed bright blue or green. I liked the girl's glowing eyes and the rock song a lot.

There were also a couple of scenes, apparently from the future, showing some kind of time travel bridge being built. The scenes were all in some kind of way overexposed, really pixellated video. The coloring was almost black and white. But it was more like the sky was all colored brownish-grey, while all the solid bodies were pure black silhouettes.

The bridge was somehow being built backwards. I watched (maybe through time lapse?), the "tracks" (?) of the bridge being built backwards through a frame of standing columns. It seemed to be in a mountain setting. I then watched a similar process near an ocean shore. This bridge had a sign over it, kind of in an old, Coca-Cola-esque style. It said something like "B-Way Bridge" or "B'Way Bridge."

I then woke up in my room. I stood up and looked down at the floor. Something seemed not quite right about my room. I walked really slow. I could hear my breathing rushing though my head, like I was wearing a space helmet.

Something seemed really weird about my floor, like it was made out of grey-painted concrete, especially where the floor met the wall. I then saw that my table was pushed away, at least 33cm away, from my wall. I thought it was possible that I could have pushed my table away from the wall. But not that far away.

I looked up and noticed that the walls in my room were now painted green. Some of the walls were a dark, pine green, while at least one of the walls was a slightly lighter shade.

I told myself, "Well, obviously I'm dreaming. My walls aren't green in waking life."

I figured since I was dreaming I would try to fly out of my house and out and around my neighborhood, to see what kind of views I could gather. But I must not have been totally lucid. I went flying toward my bedroom "window," which was actually a thick, ornate, wooden wall. This didn't seem to register with my "lucid" mind at all.

I was about to penetrate through the wall when something stopped me. A very polite woman's voice spoke to me through telepathy. It said, "We're sorry, but at this moment we cannot access the outdoor scene you would like to experience. Would you like to have a Gothic lucid dream instead?"

I said, "Oh, well, yeah, okay. That sounds nice." But I didn't want to have a Gothic lucid dream. I just wanted to go outside, into my neighborhood and gather data on the environment. I think I was thinking that I was having an out of body experience as well as a lucid dream, and I really wanted to gather some hard evidence of it. So I was disappointed that I couldn't get out there.

Dream #2

I stood inside a room, looking out to some area like a dock on a river. It was a nice, sunny day. The dock area was all a kind of beige-white concrete. A man was out working in front of two cars. The two cars themselves seemed to be junked. They also seemed to be wrapped up in coppery brown garbage bags, or in adhesive tape with the coppery brown color of VCR cassette tape.

The cars were parked one in front of the other. Either the hood of the front car was open, or else the windshield of the front car was completely missing. A huge object like a leather suitcase, possibly also all wrapped up in tape, was jutting out.

The suitcase-like object was open, revealing the snout and tip of the jaw of what appeared to be a gigantic lizard. Just given the size of the snout and jaw, the head of this creature must have been taking up the entire interior of this car! The jaw had leathery-looking, brown scales all over it.

I was now outside, near the cars, even though I could no longer see the dragon's head. I was with another man, but not the man who had been working outside while I had been inside. That man had been like a dock worker. This man was a wealthy business man. He was really tall and strong. He carried himself well. He wore a nice suit and a clean, beige overcoat.

I came to understand that the dragon had been killed. The cars were used as containers for transporting the dragon's body. Nobody had thought dragons existed. But this dragon had been discovered by accident. Possibly it had emerged from the sea.

Luckily the dragon had been killed before it could kill anybody. But people were (or I was?) worried that there were a lot more of these dragons, and that it wouldn't be so easy to kill them every time they posed a threat.

I told the man that this whole thing seemed to have been foreseen in a science fiction book written by a Russian man. I tried to tell the man the author's name. It was something like Gogol or Sergei. Finally I settled on one of the author's names, possibly his first name, being Selkei.

I saw a view of the book I'd bought (which seemed to have the name Selkei as the second name). The book was paperback. The cover was kind of glossy. There were a lot of swirly, black and white stripes all over the front cover and on the first few pages of the book.

The author was apparently either from the early twentieth century, like from the 1920s, or else his life was so impoverished in the late twentieth century that it was like he lived during the 1920s. But his sci-fi writings had a lot of subversive political content, and a lot of it seeemed to have been really prescient.

The man with me may now have been closer to me. We were still out on the dock -- or out on some shore cliff -- but we stood behind some kind of screen-like display, like a big text display at a museum. The man told me, "You just go into places, like bookstores and libraries, and you seek out these guys, don't you? You don't know who they are. But you know what you're looking for. And you find them.

"But people think, when they see you with all this stuff, that you've stolen it somehow. They don't understand the work you've made to discover it. They just think you've stolen it all.

"This book, for instance --" The man and I turned toward some kind of black, basalt cliffside as the man opened up a wide, short book full of pages that looked like coloring book bages. The pages were all colored in. They had drawings on them reminiscent of Henry Darger. But they were apparently supposed to have been by William Blake.

One drawing showed a little girl, colored pale peach and in a pale yellow dress, against a maroon-colored hillside. The drawing looked kind of crude, and the girl seemed very lonely, especially in the context of a Darger-like drawing such as this.

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was at "my office," which was basically two cubicles set in one of the product islands at a discounter store like a Kmart or a Wal-Mart. I sat in the left cubicle. My co-worker S sat in the right cubicle. There was an aisle for a walkway between us.

I had been doing some kind of work, but now I stood up from my cubicle and walked into the main part of the store. I had probably been thinking about my bad handwriting.

I looked in the distance. Hanging on the wall or hanging from the ceiling were two signs, as big as the signs that might usually advertise products, like in a Target. The signs may just have materialized as I watched them. They mimicked my handwriting, making two whole pages out of little scrawls. The two pages seemed to be slightly curled and almost touching each other back-to-back.

I thought that described my handwriting really well. I was now walking back toward the cubicles. I walked past some sort of exchange counter, which was just a smallish, fake wood counter which may possibly have stood before a dressing room. A kind of big-framed, kind of muscly woman with very short hair stood before the counter. She wore a white tank top and blue jeans.

The woman was trying to exchange something that looked like a classical statue of a chest and head of a man. The sculpture was in some kind of grey, slatey material. The back of the sculpture was completely flat. It hadn't had any features carved into it, but there were all kinds of apparently accidental scratches made in it.

As I headed back to my desk, my co-worker CB, a peer to my boss, walked up behind me. He had completely shaved his head, and he looked a little more tan than before. He wore a green shirt with white woven in, so that it looked like it was inside-out, and some blue jeans.

I was afraid that CB hated me. I also knew that my boss wasn't around, so I figured CB would try to make trouble. So I tried to hurry and sit down at my desk. But, for some reason, CB kissed me on the head. He said something nice to me. He may have asked me to help him with some issue he was having with a project. I was relieved that he didn't hate me.

(Although in waking life I don't think I'd appreciate it if he kissed me on the head.)

Dream #2

I was in a dark hallway that was made of big, stone blocks. The hallway was tall, somewhat wide, and almost completely dark. I was apparently taking a break from studying.

Just for fun, apparently, I decided to bounce upwards off the walls. I bounced from wall to wall, bringing myself higher and higher. I was finally almost to the ceiling. At this point my body was horizontal, as if I were floating and laying on my left side.

I thought I should probably get back to studying. But I figured that what I was doing now was also educational, as well as fun. So why not keep doing it? I decided that since I was basically floating, I might as well fly through the hallway.

I flew through the hallway and into some dark room that was kind of like some classical study in a mansion and a messy, suburban living room. My mom may have been sleeping on the couch.

There was a sliding glass door at the back of the room. It had a thin, light brown curtain on it. As I flew toward the door, I thought, I can only fly in my dreams. I thought, Well, I don't think I'm dreaming, even though I'm flying. But I thought, Well, if I'm dreaming, I should be able to go straight through the closed glass door. I should try.

So I flew at the door. I may have felt myself pushing through the curtain and the glass. I may have thought, Well, I guess I am dreaming.

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was in a huge grocery store. At some point I was in the produce section. A boy and girl and possibly one more child, all siblings, stood at some stand displaying apples or some other kind of fruit. One of the children may have been writing on a piece of paper that was resting on the apples.

Dream #2

I was in a dim room that was full of people. The place was like a club mixed with a museum. I sat on a really low chair or sofa made of red leather.

A bunch of little kids would come up and sit with me. They didn't know me. They just thought I was interesting. I was kind of flattered. A few of the kids were Asian. Their dad was nearby, looking at paintings and talking to people. One of the Asian kids looked like an old person. He had longish hair, but he was balding on top.

I and one little boy were now watching what was supposed to be Gentlemen Prefer Blondes on a video screen in the floor. The screen was about the size of a small TV screen.

In one scene, Marilyn Monroe walks into a fountain at night. She was apparently naked, and she apparently said "bon appetit," though I did't hear or see any of this. The boy asked me what bon appetit means.

I tried to explain to the boy that it didn't mean anything bad. The scene now replayed itself. I thought, there's no way Marilyn Monroe was naked in this movie. They wouldn't have allowed it!

Marilyn now walked into the fountain, which was an enormous pool of water at the foot of a staircase before a huge building. She was wearing a thin, body-length dress. The soaked dress became kind of, but not extremely, see-through.

Marilyn now swam up to the camera, which was positioned at the side of the huge fountain, and said "bon appetit."

Now all kinds of weird blue and green digital drawings blotted onto the screen like crude versions of fireworks.

Dream #3

I was walking home at night. But somehow I had lost my way. I was walking through some kind of suburban neighborhood. I would turn down streets and think I was finally in the right place. But then I'd see I was still in the wrong place.

At one point I got to a streetcorner which looked exactly like a streetcorner near my house. But it was completely empty, and the buildings were all shut down and featureless, maybe even windowless. I wondered what had happened to my neighborhood. But I suddenly realized this wasn't my neighborhood. The buildings I was looking at were part of some huge hospital.

I turned around and walked another way. I was now in the parking lot of some area like a church. I felt like I might not even have been in the right borough. I turned to walk out of the parking lot. I grabbed my phone, which was my old phone, to try to get an idea of where I was.

I wondered how I'd gotten so lost. It didn't seem possible. I thought, Maybe I'm dreaming. I didn't think it was possible, but I tested myself anyway. I jumped up into the air to see if I could fly. I began floating a little bit. So I was dreaming.

I couldn't control my flight. I was floating backwards. I managed to get floating forward, about 3m off the ground. I was coasting through some suburban neighborhood. I still didn't know where I was. I told myself, You can't see where you are because it's dark. If this is your dream, then make it light.

So I made it light outside. But the world suddenly got very blurry.

I was now floating down toward something. I thought I had woken from my dream. I floated past one of my co-workers, C, who was giving some self-important lecture about something.

I was down in the frozen food section of some grocery store. I was looking at some children's picture book or some piece of paper on which I'd scrawled some stuff. I was still thinking to myself what a disappointment it was that I'd woken from my lucid dream.

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was in a new deli, which may have been downstairs from my apartment. The deli was still under construction. There were all kinds of things being unpacked.

The place had a blue-green kind of feel, as if the walls had been painted a pale blue-green. There were rolls of paper unrolled on the floor. Counters were set out in random fashion, as if they hadn't been fastened to their permanent positions yet.

There were a couple soda refrigerators with their doors open. One was on the back wall, in front of me. The other was on the wall to my left. They were both tall and narrow. The refrigerators were so cold that I could feel the cold coming from them.

The coolers were so cold that the sodas (or bottled waters?) inside the coolers had been frozen. I figured this level of coldness was natural, since the store wasn't opened yet, so that the coolers weren't tuned to a normal level.

There were a few people running around in the store, getting things ready. I saw at least one woman and one man. They were both Mexican. They were talking back and forth and joking with each other in English or in Spanish and English.

I knew that the place wasn't open yet, and I felt like I shouldn't be here. But, for some reason, I felt really comfortable here. I figured I'd grab some stuff and then head back up to my apartment.

It suddenly struck me that, now that there was a new deli below my house, it would be a lot easier for me to come downstairs and grab some frozen pizza. I thought I would suddenly be eating a lot more frozen pizza than I'd been eating in a long time.

Dream #2

There was some kind of television show or some kind of stage performance about adult women who had romantic relationships with young girls.

The stage and background were white. The stage may have been clean and polished, so that it was slightly reflective.

The women and the girls wore spandex suits with blue, pink and purple flower designs on them. They also wore something like flowing, white blouses that went up over their heads to become something like hoods, leaving a circle open for their faces. The hoods may have been topped with flat circles, which were slightly tilted.

The women and young girls were doing a slow dance, in groups but kind of solo, where they would elevate and point forward their legs and arms slightly.

Dream #3

There was some kind of narration about my mother's life. There was talk about how my mother had had such a tough time because she had been a single mother. There may also have been talk about how my mother had been really upset when my father had left her.

There was now a view of a car like a station wagon driving up a steep, mountain road. The road didn't criss-cross or spiral up the mountain: it just went straight up the steep slope. As the car drove, the narrator spoke about how my mother worked through a lot of emotional difficulties and survived to this point in life.

Listening to this narration made me really sad for my mom. But it also made me kind of proud of her. I felt I had seen this road somewhere. It occurred to me that I might have seen the road in a dream. The surreal steepness of the road and the way the car seemed to be reaching extreme heights on this mountain all reminded me of some tall mountain dream I'd had in the past.

I was now in the backseat of the car. My mom was driving. We had approached some place halfway up the mountain. We pulled into an asphalt parking area.

My mom, and possibly one of my family members, maybe my sister, was talking about how lucky we were. Some of our more removed family members, my mom said, had died in pretty terrible situations. They had died all alone, sometimes in shameful ways. The closer family members of those people had had to deal with the ghastly emotional impact of those situations.

But, my mom said, the closer members of our family who had died had died rather peacefully, with loving families around them. And, right now, all our family members were in situations where, even were they to die suddenly and unexpectedly, they would at least die in a position where they were somewhat comfortable and they knew their family loved them.

I either thought to myself or said out loud that that wasn't true. I thought about two of my cousins, P and B. P is a man and B is a woman.

I thought that both P and B were in situations where, if they died, they'd be all alone. At least one of them was actually in an extremely dangerous situation, though in my dream I couldn't remember where either cousin was.

I was now out on a river bank with my family. I suddenly realized that my cousin B wasn't far away at all. She was actually in this forest. She was kayaking through this river.

In my mind's eye I saw further down river, to a wide stretch that was shaded pleasantly by tall pine trees. Where we were, the banks were open and lawny, with jagged rocks for the river's banks.

Maybe all my immediate family members were out on this bank. We had a couple of kayaks nearby. We must have been getting ready to go kayaking, although for some reason, I seemed to feel like I was thinking of suggesting the idea of kayaking to my family, as if it hadn't yet occurred to anybody to go kayaking yet.

I thought of dipping one of the kayaks into the water, but the water (which was actually only moderately fast) seemed way to rough and the rocks way too jagged for the kayak to handle.

I turned around and saw at least one of my nephews, the oldest nephew, getting dressed in an orange life jacket. I felt like everybody was getting dressed in life jackets, as if they were all getting ready to go kayaking. I thought this was great, and I offered my own life jacket to one of my nephews, since I knew they liked wearing my stuff (???).

One of my nephews, maybe the oldest, said he'd take my life jacket. But suddenly I realized I'd left it somewhere else. It was like I'd left it in the car. But it was also like I'd left it somewhere very far away. I said I'd have to go get it. I hoped I could get it fast enough so that it wouldn't cause a delay.

I suddenly realized that I had also left the life jacket in water somewhere. The life jacket had been in the water so long that it was now beginning to dissolve. I hoped I could pull the jacket out of the water before it dissolved entirely.

In my mind's eye I saw the life jacket. It was white, instead of orange, but it had orange flower designs on it.

Dream #4

I was walking through a park. It was a clear day, pretty warm. The sun seemed to be going down. The sky was dim, and the light was partly golden and partly cool and dim.

I walked along a concrete path in a somewhat narrow curve of the park. There was deep, green lawn on either side of the path. There were a few people in the park, just relaxing. I think everybody in the park was black.

The sound of my breathing slowly became more and more audible. Suddenly it seemed to me like my breath was like the breathing sound of somebody in a space suit, like in the movie 2001. I wondered why my breathing would sound like this.

It suddenly occurred to me that the reason my breathing sounded like this was because I wasn't exactly in a park. I was in a different kind of place altogether. The only time I could think of when I was in a place like this was in my dreams.

I realized I was dreaming. There wasn't a tremendous improvement to the clarity or sensation of the dream, like there usually is when I become lucid. But I was suddenly a lot more aware of the environment.

I smiled at a few people. I was happy to be aware, and I wanted to share my happiness somehow.

I walked into a wider area of the park. Since there were a decent number of people around, and they all seemed to be peaceful and happy, I figured I'd try to talk with some of them, just to see what things were all about here.

There were a couple of boys playing (with a set of blocks or other toys set up to look like a castle?) half on the concrete path and half on the grass. The boy on the path had his back turned to me.

I smiled and addressed the boy in some way to get his attention. The boy turned his face toward me. He looked a lot older than he actually was. Something about this threw me off balance. I looked quickly at the boy and walked on down the path.

I tried not to let the boy's surprising appearance throw me off balance. I tried to continue acting cheerful. I figured if I could keep the cheerful attitude I'd had as I'd become I could stay lucid. But I could already feel that I was dropping out of lucidity.

I could see that I was approaching something like a brick-and-concrete, arched gate that served as an entrance to the park.

Good morning, everybody. I'm pretty sure I was only semi-lucid in the first dream, even though I was aware that I was dreaming.

The second dream took place between 5 AM and 5:30 AM, I'm pretty sure.

Dream #1

I was in a house with some female "family members." They appeared to be about my age, white, very pretty. I saw them as if we were all close together. The women were having some kind of serious conversation.

I suddenly floated up and out of the house. I assumed I was in the neighborhood my family had lived in before I went to college. (Though it now seems to me that all the houses were much bigger that in that neighborhood, and that they all had flat roofs.)

At some point during all of this, I told myself I was dreaming. I think that I was thinking this was something more like an out-of-body experience than a dream. I told myself to focus on the rooftops and try to "bring something back" to waking life that would prove I'd had an OBE.

But I was only floating around between a small number of houses. I think I was having some kind of trouble with my vertical control, like I kept on going up way high and having to pull myself back down.

At some point in time I saw a house with its roof caved in. I recognized this house as being a couple houses down from my family's old house. I thought for sure that this would be something I could "bring back."

I thought I'd focus in on this house, land on the roof. But instead of landing on the roof, I ended up going way down to the ground or a much lower roof (as if all these houses were like multi-story buildings -- which is obviously not true in that neighborhood). I flew back up and landed on the top of the roof.

But the roof wasn't collapsed. Instead, I found, the whole thing had been an optical illusion. The object which had given an impression of a depression in the roof was actually the basin of a gigantic hot tub.

Somehow, again without any criticism, I found myself in the empty basin of this gigantic hot tub, indoors. The hot tub was actually on the roof of the back end of a big RV. The room I was in was like a gigantic garage for the RV (even though, again, it was on the top floor of this "house").

I called out to my brother. He'd been friends with the son of this family. I figured he'd know more about this than I did. My brother "appeared," though I don't think I ever saw him directly.

After I'd "asked" (mentally?) my brother about the gigantic RV and hot tub, he responded, "Yeah, I was surprised, too, the first time I came to their house. I thought it was a broken roof, too. Because they always looked and acted so poor.

"But then I realized that they really did have all this rich stuff, too. Then I started getting jealous, because we don't have anything like this! But then they started letting me use it, too."

Dream #2

I was watching some kind of live-action drama that had elements in common with an anime drama.

The view eventually changed to some kind of drama of which I was a part, even though I was still only an observer.

There were a bunch of beautiful, rich, college-aged people walking from the right to the left of my view, before some stone castle which was part of some college campus. The sky overhead was dark and roiling with clouds. The students (mostly or all women?) were wearing colorful, silk dresses and plastic masks to make them look like anime characters.

Eventually I was in a room, at a party. The room felt like a study in a big, nice house. The room was dim, full of people, probably rich adults.

I had been talking at first with a young woman. At some point I was listening to the speech of a man who had a face like Rodin's sculptures of Balzac. The man was speaking with great pride about how he had cheated some business associate, then killed and eaten him.

Now I saw a group of partiers, all turned toward me, motionless, silent. They were mostly women. The women wore masks like female anime characters. The men wore masks like the mustache mask from V for Vendetta (?).

My view now shifted to a number of fragmented scenes showing old, great manga and anime artists at their work. One scene had a man sitting back in his swivel chair before his desk. The man was tallish, wearing a sweater and a beret (but he wasn't Tezuka).

The wall of the man's room was turquoise blue, and was decorated with some of the classic anime and manga he'd created. One drawing was a figure of a plain, young man with black hair wearing a yellow sweater and khaki slacks. Another anime of his had to do with the adventures of some little girl in a forest. I heard the anime theme song.

(As I woke, I could hear the theme song of this anime. I even hummed it to keep it in my mind. But I forgot it now. Ugh.)

Good morning, everybody.

The endings of the first and third dreams were lucid. The first three dreams happened between 1:30 AM and 3:30 AM. The fourth dream happened between 5 AM and 5:45 AM.

Dream #1

I was with a couple of my nephews in a car that was driven by my grandmother. I may have been getting a ride back to the airport after my visit back home. It was a nice, sunny day.

My grandma asked me where I'd like to eat. I may have felt like a little kid at this point. I didn't want my grandma to have to pay for a big meal, so I said, "Oh, just Burger King will be fine."

We began driving up a winding hill, the face of which was brownish rock. My grandma said, "No. We're going to go to a sit down place to have some food. Let's go to Denny's."

We were at the top of the hill, in some kind of parking lot. Behind my grandma, from a view out her window, down the slope of parking lot and across some street, I could see a Denny's. Out my window and slightly up the parking lot's slope, I could see the car my mom was driving.

My grandma said, "You go tell your mom we are going to Denny's, and that she is coming, too. Don't let her make any excuses. Tell her I'm paying for all of you."

I was at my mom's vehicle, looking in from the passenger-side window. The vehicle was tall, like a tall van or SUV or pick-up truck. My mom sat at the wheel, giving me an almost dead look. I understood she was almost scorning me for thinking she'd go to Denny's with my grandma.

Somehow I was in my mom's car, riding down the hill, possibly to Denny's. I was trying to keep my mom's emotions under control.

We were now at my family's house. My mom and sister and I were playing with a little boy and a little girl, "my niece and nephew." We were all sitting on the floor, which was kind of cluttered with toys and clothes.

The little boy was doing something cute, but the little girl got really jealous. She did something mean to the little boy, hurting the little boy, and then started crying herself. Either my mom or my sister started comforting the little girl. They fed her a bottle which had a fleshy look to it, like a bottle-shaped breast.

The girl seemed to have a weird-shaped head and weird shaped eyes. The head and eyes got weirder and weirder as I looked at the girl eating. I stood up and walked toward the kitchen.

There were a mattress, some blankets, and some other stuff strewn on the floor right before the doorway to the kitchen. I stepped over all that stuff to get into the kitchen. But among that stuff, I saw that there was a little baby boy who had been forgotten under a bunch of blankets.

I knelt down and uncovered the little baby boy. It looked like a white-furred monkey with black eyes. It was swaddled in a blanket. I picked it up. I felt there was something meaningful, almost psychological, about my having found this baby boy and having started to care for it.

My sister and mom knelt near me. My sister took the baby. As I handed it to her, I felt like I needed to see it again, as if I couldn't believe I'd seen it at all. But now it was a "cell phone," which looked more like a blue, plastic alarm clock with green-lit punch keys on the underside.

My sister handed me the phone. I started talking with my sister on the phone. It was like she was no longer in front of me..

My sister said, "Yeah, it's probably not a good idea to tell F (my oldest nephew) about some of the things you did. It makes him think it's okay for him to do them. I mean, you think it's funny, and I think it's funny. But mom thinks it's just destructive in her house."

I replied, "Yeah, that's cool. We just come from different generations, I guess."

As I was saying this stuff, I found myself in another room, "my bedroom," which was more like a big room in a museum. The room was gently lit with warm, white-gold light. I wasn't on the phone. I was laying on something like a bed, on my left side.

I was looking at a huge painting, maybe 5 meters long and 3 meters tall. It was of Jesus, just his head, before a blue sky. His hair flowed as if blown by the wind, like you sometimes see happening for female anime characters.

Jesus had blood on his head and face, from the crown of thorns. The blood was also blowing in the wind. The blood then turned into red and orange leafs blowing in the wind. There might have been canopies of red and orange leafed trees in the background.

For some reason, this fall-themed crown of thorns painting made a lot of sense to me. I began to wonder why there wasn't a fall-related holiday relating to the life of Christ.

I rolled onto my back and then onto my right side. The room was dark. I was looking at another huge painting, this time winter-related. It had something to do with Jesus' footprints in the snow.

But there was something weird about the snow. It actually looked like boot-tracks on the moon. I realized Jesus wasn't in this painting at all. It was just a painting of boot-tracks on the moon. Yet it seemed so mystical to me that I reached up my arm (a child's arm?) parallel to the tracks.

Suddenly I realized I was dreaming.

I sat up. I was on the floor. I stood slowly. The room was dim, almost completely dark. The painting which stood before me was now even larger. The only detail I could see on this painting was near the lower left (my left) corner of the painting. It was the back of an almost naked person. The back was huge, muscular. But I couldn't tell iif it was male or female.

Next to the painting was an enormous (maybe 1.5-2 meters tall), metallic vessel, probably silver, on a stout, white pedestal and under a plexiglass display cube. The "bowl" of the vessel had a weird, nest-like tangling of metal, as tangled and fine as moss, which was incredible, considering how big this vessel was. The "neck" was smooth and polished.

Walking around, I kept feeling myself fade out of the dream. I tried to keep calm and hold onto the dream as long as I could. But eventually everything went black and I woke up.

Dream #2

I was in some big room like a school cafeteria on the second floor of a building. There were a lot of long tables with bench seats. The light was nice, incandescent. I sat at a smaller table with my friend T and a friend of hers, who I at first thought was Japanese.

T's friend and T were here to study. I had helped T with some kind of study project. I was apparently here to hand off a paper with my revisions. But now T took out a copy of a screenplay I'd written, with a lot of revisions on it.

The screenplay seemed to have been printed on 11x17 paper, so that two pages showed on each side. The first page was covered with pencil-revisions, in a really nice, narrow cursive hand. I understood that the rest of the screenplay was just as full of revisions.

At some point, T's friend reached over and scribbled something in the margins between the two pages. It said something about how T was my girlfriend. The T's friend said something out loud, and I realized T's friend was actually Chinese.

I felt odd about the implication that T was my girlfriend. But right after that T may have called me her boyfriend. I may have been happy about that.

Dream #3

It was night. I was walking down a sidewalk in front of some apartment buildings. A young, black man in a bright red hooded sweatshirt, black bubble-jacket vest, and jeans ran into an apartment building. Seeing me, the guy slowed down and gave me a kind of suspicious glance. He then ran the rest of the way into the building.

I knew somehow that the guy had been planning to kill me for a while. Now that I had just gone past his building, he figured he might as well shoot me now.

I saw him, through some windows, run up a stairwell, then run back down it. I knew he had just gone into his apartment to pick up his gone, and that he was now coming back for me.

I didn't walk any faster or try to get away. I figured if it was going to happen, I couldn't avoid it, even though I'd probably be really afraid once things really started happening.

I was now walking through a long hallway in a dorm building or apartment complex. The hallway was kind of dumpy, with white walls and stark, fluorescent lighting. There was somebody following me. But it now felt like an older, white man rather than a young, black man.

I came to a door, which I knew was for the apartment of the man who lived in the apartment directly above my apartment. I knocked on the door, thinking I'd finally take him up on his invitation to come up and hang out some time. I figured this way, I could throw the stalker off my trail.

The door was a really weak wood. I knocked. The door was now a heavy door with a thin window on the left side. Through the window, I saw a small hallway and the another door. A college-aged girl opened the far door. She waved me in.

I thought the door was locked. But as soon as I pushed on the door, there was a buzzing, and the door opened. I walked into the smaller hallway. The woman was gone, which struck me as strange. I realized I was all alone. This struck me as odd.

Suddenly I realized I was dreaming. I almost lost the dream right there. But I calmed down.

I told myself to keep walking, and just to explore the space. I walked past the small hallway. There was another small hallway. The walls here had wooden drawers set into them, like old library card catalog drawers, except that they looked really light and cheap. I thought this was an interesting place, full of files or something. But I kept going.

I walked through another door. I was now in a very small room with a small, grey-painted metal stairway and second level and a bunch of grey-painted, metal lockers. Below the balcony of the second level, the room seemed to twist off into a much smaller corridor. The staircase also had a metal-railed gate in front of it. The place kind of reminded me of small rooms in the Intrepid aircraft carrier.

I was surprised that I was all alone, and I kept on gurad for a person, who I assumed would probably not be very kind. I remembered that in my last long lucid I had met a really crazy person.

I had two options for exploring. I chose to go up the staircase instead of around the curve on the first level.

I floated over the gate. I almost floated up the staircase. But I felt like the floating was actually causing me to lose my dream-control. So I grabbed the railings of the staircase and forced myself to walk up.

I had a weird feeling through the rest of this dream. I felt very closed in. I could hear my breath, like I was wearing a space suit.

I felt very warm. Walking up the steps, to my left, I saw a clothing rack full of old, pale blue and white button-up shirts. It looked like they were for a somewhat old man. Above that, there was a shelf piled with upside-down, round-brimmed, straw hats. I picked one up and fiddled with it a little. It looked like it was in bad shape.

I got up to the balcony. There were more lockers. It looked at first like I couldn't go anywhere else from here. But then I realized that there was a hallway or something off to the right.

In waking life, my computer made a loud noise. I woke up.

Dream #4

I had been in space, flying some kind of space vehice. I barely remember anything. I remember being high up in the sky, coming back down, around sunset, when the sky was a vivid purple.

I was now taxiing an airplane (?) into an airport with my mother. We were "parked." My mom went into the airport to take care of something before we went home.

I sat in the backseat of a car, outside a metal-walled building like some staff building at an airport. I was still waiting for my mom. The sky still had a deep-blue-purple post-sunset look. It was kind of cold.

I could imagine what was going on between my mom and the people she was talking to. The people were something like military people. I could see, in particular, one tall, older, white man who kind of looked like a very thin Stan Lee, wearing a green military uniform for formal occasions.

My mom was asking the military man what he would do now that she'd told him about the weird adventures I'd been through, which were undeniable fact.

The military man said, "I'll do the same thing I do to every mother and son who comes in here telling me stuff like this. I'll tell them to get out. I had money to pay attention to this kind of stuff the first few times it happened. But now it's happening all over the place and -- you mothers and kids are bleeding me dry!"

I was sitting in the trunk of the car, with the trunk opened just a crack. I thought of getting out of the trunk and telling the military man something about my experience that was so unique that he wouldn't want me to go away. Plus. I would tell him, I didn't want his money. I just wanted to tell my story.

I thought to myself (why?) that this was a lot like a Joyce Carol Oates story (which it wasn't).

I opened the trunk all the way and sat out of it to see one of my female cousins, A, walking down the tall stairway of another metal-walled building. She came my way. I could tell she would be mad at me for not having spoken with her for a long time.

By the time she got to me, my mom was there, too. I was standing by the car. There seemed to be a miniature living room surrounding the car as well.

I was trying to explain something to my cousin about how I couldn't include her on something my mom and I were doing. As I did so, I was kneeling by a small bookshelf and going through some items.

I stood up to see my cousin kneeling on the opposite side of the bookshelf. My cousin now had weird, plasticky, shiny, black hair, like an anime character. She was also wearing some kind of red and yellow uniform that reminded me of an anime character.

My cousin gave me a half-mad, half-disappointed look. I tried to make her less mad by saying something half-heartedly interesting about anime.

(Note, evening, Dec. 17: I think the "crown of thorns" image in my third dream is influenced by a set of images from a photo slideshow I saw yesterday on the US version of Reuters.com. The slideshow was just the normal "editor's choice" picks of global photos, I think.

But it showed a lot of images of people in England, Greece, Turkey, and other countries, involved in some form of protest. A lot of the photos showed people who had sustained head injuries during the protests. What really struck me was that these people were still protesting, even after having been hurt.

So I don't think the "crown of thorns" image is entirely about Christ.

Also I thought at first that the metal vessel in the first dream was just a really big symbol for the male, uh... parts. I still think that's the case. The painting of the man's or woman's backside and the giant... parts right next to each other seems like an image readily supplied by the unconscious.

However, I also think the image stands for a couple other things. First, I think it's an upside-down version of a brain and neck. In my fourth dream I also have an upside-down head (the hats) near a torso (the shirts). I don't know why the head and neck have been important in my dreams lately. But they have.

Second, I think the vessel is like a jet or rocket engine: a bunch of fine, intricate pipes and valves, ending in a big propulsion valve. Anyway, I guess jet engines can be phallic or intestinal, depending on how you look at them.

None of this is a big deal. I just write it down to help me focus.)

Good morning, everybody. I think these dreams are both influenced by other dreams I've read on this site.

Dream #1

I was in a department store. The light was somewhat grey and dim. I walked to my right, into an area with a lot of dresses for little girls.

I walked past one long rack of dresses. The dresses were all shimmery. Most of them had one single color, like purple or pink. Some may even have had pointy, brimless "princess" hats (which now remind me more of the I Dream of Genie headdress).

All these dresses were supposed to be long on little girls. I assumed they'd hardly even fit onto my body. But for some reason I was still thinking of trying these things on.

I walked between two long racks of dresses. Some of these dresses seemed to have black velvet tops and gold skirts.

As I walked along, two or three tall, young, black men came walking from the other direction. The men were all dressed in shiny, satiny outfits that looked like jester outfits. The front guy may have been wearing sunglasses.

I scooted out of the way a little bit. When I did so, so did the guys. I excused myself and said sorry. The front guy said, "No problem, no problem."

I now found myself out in a wider area of the store. I was trying to figure out whether I wanted to go back to the dresses or go somewhere else.

Dream #2

I was possibly somewhere like a room in a library. I was probably with a group of peers, which was probably led by an older, tall, balding "teacher" figure with grey hair, glasses, jeans, and a denim shirt.

At some point I realized I wasn't wearing any pants or underwear. I was just wearing a big button-up shirt. I knew I needed to get fully dressed.

I walked out into a large stairwell like a big, open stairwell at a museum. I knew I was on the third floor and I needed to get down to the first floor. There were people on the stairs and on the floors between the stairs, walking in and out from exhibits. I had told myself I would run down the back stairwell. But I now realized I was going down the main stairway.

I thought for a moment I could keep going. I thought the shirt was long enough that nobody would see I was wearing no underwear. But then I saw that people had noticed I was wearing no pants and underwear. I was embarrassed. I hurried at the next landing to a doorway to the back stairwell.

I ran past a couple people and into the smaller stairwell, which was more like a fire escape stairwell. I was all alone. I started speeding down the stairs, almost flying down them, taking a lot of steps at once.

I went too fast and found that I had gone too far down. I was in an area full of white-painted pipes. The area was huge and well lit, and the pipes were all so neatly arranged, like bookshelves in a library.

I felt way out of place down here (although my state of undress didn't seem to bother me anymore). I knew I needed to get up to the correct floor. I imagined workers finding me and trying to do something bad to me.

I now imagined (???) a tall, black man in a beige denim jacket and black sunglasses standing before me at the bottom of the staircase. My view panned through the aisles of white pipes which also seemed to be decorated with white Christmas lights.

I imagined myself asking the imaginary man a weird question, like which way was the way out. I imagined the man first telling me something weird, like telling me how to get to the position in the basement where the exit would actually be on the first floor. I even imagined a huge painting, like a huge equestrian painting that might be seen in the lobby of an art museum.

I then imagined, as my view panned through an area of white pipes lit almost entirely by tons and tons of white Christmas lights, that the man asked me something, like he was asking me on a date (???). I imagined that just around the corner from this area there was something like a themed food court, all done up in a confectionery style, like old merry-go-rounds.

I thought that if this guy wanted to go have all this fun at "the festival," I'd have to get money from an ATM. I could hear Mexican music, like Mariachi music, playing somewhere.

I found myself in a place like the parking lot of a shopping plaza from when I was a kid. The shopping plaza had a number of large stores, like a big clothing store, a big grocery store, and a big bookstore. It was night, and the light was deep blue, with all the lights in the shopping plaza turned off. But I still saw the lights, felt the warmth, and heard the music of the festival somewhere.

I walked around trying to figure out where the festival was. I felt like I had woken from a dream. I may have been trying to convince myself that the music and light had only been in my dream, and that I was now just having trace memories of that stuff.

But, I told myself, I'm still dreaming! There's no way I could be just walking around here right now. This is a dream, too.

Realizing this was a dream, I felt a lot more clarity. The sky may have even gotten a bit lighter.

I decided to turn around and look for the festival. But as soon as I turned around, everything went black, like I had closed my eyes. I tried to "open my eyes" and see again. But I couldn't. I walked around. I felt and heard myself walking. I even continued hearing the music. I even had some idea of where I was in the parking lot. But I couldn't see anything.

Dream #3

I was in "my office," which was larger than my office, much more like an office floor for a larger company.

I got up from a cubicle when I heard that a couple of women were getting ready to interview a man for a position. I felt like they were interviewing a replacement for my position.

I walked a little ways, then looked through what seems to have been the underside of a large semi-truck's trailer, to the elevator bank at the front of the office floor.

I could see the interviewee in my mind's eye. He was a little kid, maybe 10 or 11 years old, dressed in a nice suit. One of the women interviewing him was a stout, Hispanic woman with short, black hair.

I heard from somebody nearby that my boss was getting fired, and that the person was interviewing to become my boss' replacement. That was a relief for me, considering I had been thinking all this time that I was going to get fired. I only hoped that management would decide to keep me after firing my boss.

I may have thought about the complications for this actually being possible. Maybe the man already had somebody like me on his team. So maybe he'd just bring that other person over from whatever company he was coming from. I also thought that it might not be worth it to work for this guy, anyway. Maybe he would just turn out to be a jerk.

Good morning everybody. I remember three really short dreams from last night. They were all from after 2 AM. I had coffee last night and couldn't fall asleep until 2 AM.

The third dream was pretty much all lucid, even though it was short.

Dream #1

I walked through some room toward a staircase. The staircase was just past a doorway and was part of some slightly larger hallway, like for a small apartment building.

The room I was in was something like a mix between a living room and a small apartment lobby.

I had to maneuver a little bit past some kids who were rough housing with each other right in front of the doorway to the hallway. There were boys and girls, probably in their early teens or just a little younger. Their parents stood nearby. I thought the kids were funny, and they looked like they were having fun.

I wallked into the hallway and turned toward the staircase. A group of kids ran just in front of me, blocking me from the staircase. The began wrestling and rough housing with each other. I thought they were pretty funny. I just waited for their rough housing to pass.

But then I remembered that the parents were in the doorway, watching the kids. I thought that the parents would think I was weird for hanging around and watching the kids. I decided to get moving. I tried to edge past the kids. It was really difficult, because there were so many kids, and the hallway was so small.

Dream #2

I was in "my bed," in "my bedroom," which was a lot like my bedroom in waking life, except messy. My lights were on.

I was laying face-down on my bed. I was thinking bad thoughts about God. For some reason, I was really angry at God. The more I cursed him, the more amusing I found the activity.

Eventually my legs began levitating off the bed. I wasn't controlling it, but I thought I might be able to. My legs lifted higher and higher until my body was almost perpendicular to the bed, with my head on the bed.

At some point, I noticed little specks of dirt or something black all over my bed. There were also hairs or cotton fibers, also colored black, all over my bed.

I started trying to blow all the dust and dirt and hair off my bed. Some of it would blow away. But there was so much. I wondered how I could have let my bed get so dirty.

Dream #3

I was in "my bedroom" at night. I was crouched down on the floor, possibly naked, with my knees to my chest. The bedroom lights were off, but I could see by the purplish evening light.

I told myself that this wasn't actually my bedroom. That seemed pretty obvious. I told myself I was dreaming.

As soon as I told myself this, I had a false awakening and sat up on "my bed." But I was still lucid.

I stood out of the bed and told myself to remain calm. I figured I would walk out of the house and see what was around. The house seemed like a suburban house.

I was heading for the front door. But suddenly I thought, Why should I exit through the door? If I'm in a dream, I should be able to leave the house any way I want.

So I decided to walk through a wall. I turned right, into another room, possibly another bedroom. I walked straight up to the wall, which had a window on it that started at about my chest.

I thought I might climb up onto the windowsill and walk through the window. But I figured I didn't need to go throgh the trouble. Walking through a wall and walking through a window were basically the same thing.

I began to walk through the wall. It seemed pretty easy. But suddenly I saw a bright light. I felt like something was resisting. I got kind of mad, and I pushed really hard through the resistance.

I'm pretty sure I lost lucidity at this point. I fell past the wall and fell a couple stories down to the ground. I think that as I fell, I was telling myself, Oh well, I guess I woke up from that dream.

I sat up. It was daytime. I "had awoken from my dream." To my right was a red brick wall. To my left was a beach, possibly like Coney Island. The sky was deep blue and the light was dim, almost as if I were looking at an old film.

(Good morning, everybody. This is a really long entry. Sorry.

I remember three dreams from last night. The first two dreams happened sometime between midnight and 5 AM. The third dream was between about 5:30 AM and 7 AM.

I became lucid in the third dream, and sustained my lucidity for quite a while. But I think it was mainly because I “conserved my energy” and didn’t really try anything out of my normal range of dream-activity.)

Dream #1

I was coming back to “my apartment.” I was walking through a building that itself was as big as a small neighborhood. I walked through one area, a huge room with tall ceilings and wood walls.

As I walked through the area, I went past a young man and woman who were possibly standing outside the door to the woman’s apartment. The door may have been pale blue.

The woman was very pretty, with copper-colored skin and long, straight, black hair. The man was handsome, white, tall, with blonde hair about down to his shoulders. He wore a grey, wool cap and some winter clothes.

The man was telling the woman that he would make sure her move went smoothly. She was apparently moving to another place, and she was nervous about it. I gathered, from the man’s speech to the woman, that the man would make sure she didn’t experience the same harassment she’d experienced at her present apartment.

But as I was walking past the couple (I didn’t actually get very close to them, and I had to exit via another door into another room in order to get to “my building”), the man and woman expressed some kind of concern that I was going to get them in trouble. It was as if, as well as the woman experiencing harassment from some group of people, the man and the woman had themselves been accused of causing trouble in their neighborhood. They thought I was the kind of person who would get them in trouble again.

I walked softly and quickly through the door, trying my best to give an impression to the man and woman that I was nice, that I wouldn’t harass the woman, and that I wouldn’t get the man and woman in trouble – in other words, that I would just mind my own business.

I walked into the next area, which was like a mix between some completely forgotten room or corridor in an enormous mansion and a back alley. A light shone from high above, and at the heights of the room, it was dark as night, though it was light enough near the floor. The walls were wood, and the floor had a pale, blue-grey carpeting. But there was junk everywhere, like tattered cardboard boxes, wadded up pieces of wrapping plastic, and other garbage. There seemed to be turns and staircases here and there, leading up to other “apartment buildings.”

I walked toward my building, which didn’t even have a front door, just a staircase leading up to a winding ramp into darkness. My landlord, an older, black man or woman, stood at the top of or on one of the curves in the ramp. He/she apparently knew I was coming home, so he/she was waiting to welcome me back. I may have been away for a few days, doing something like visiting my family.

I didn’t realize, but the young man had followed me all the way here. My “building,” it turned out, was the building that the young woman would be staying in. I thought that for sure the man would now be panicked. He and the woman had been so afraid to begin with that I would get them in trouble. And now it looked like I had “reverse followed” him all the way to the woman’s new residence.

I tried to act natural and cool, to make the man understand I wasn’t going to do anything mean to him or the woman. I spoke a little bit with the landlord, in a kind of easy, happy tone. I then said I was going to head on in to my room and get a little rest.

As I headed toward my room, through a door along a dim balcony facing at an odd angle to the ramps and the long alley-corridor, I heard the landlord now speaking with the young man. I thought, Why not prove that I’m a good guy, and let the young man see inside my room? Once he sees how lived-in my place is, he’ll know I’ve been here a few years, I’m a decent guy, and that I won’t do anything rude or mean to the woman or him?

So I called attention to the landlord and the young man. I had them come over to my room. I opened the door to my room. The room was humongous and dim. But I could tell, just by glancing inside, that the room was a complete mess – a disaster! Plus, the place just let out a horrendous smell, like tons and tons of socks that hadn’t been washed for months!

I quickly closed the door and told the landlord and young man nevermind, that I must have forgotten what I wanted to tell them. They walked away, kind of disappeared.

I suddenly felt suspicious of the young man. I felt that, now that he’d seen even just a little into my room, and he’d seen where I live, that he’d try to break into my room. I closed my door. I walked slowly away, as if I was trying to put on some kind of show that I didn’t really live in this apartment.

I suddenly recognized that, just beyond my door, the wall to my room only went up to about the middle of my chest. You could see inside the room just by standing out on the balcony. I looked inside, hoping that nothing of value would be easily spotted, prompting the young man to break into my house and steal things.

All I could see, though, anywhere, was a bunch of clutter and garbage. I felt like there was no way I could have left my place this way when I’d left. Had I been that neglectful of things? Or had I been gone so long that my place just kind of dissolved into these shambles of itself?

I walked around the corner of the balcony, now facing some dim corner of the alley-corridor directly, but still having a good view into my room.

Down below, in my room, I saw a huge, pale-blue, L-shaped couch. It was completely torn up. The stuffing of the couch was bloating out of the cushions, and a black, metal frame jutted out the edges.

Suddenly, my mother burst out from the inside of the couch. She scrambled out of the couch cushions. She then rabidly twitched and scratched against the couch, tearing it even more to pieces. She looked terrible, like she’d become some kind of wild animal.

I was terrified by this. But I quickly became indignant. Who had allowed my mother into my apartment? I ran down the balcony to find someone to complain to.

I ended up on some dark hilltop, under a small tree. It was pitch black night, but I could see, as if a car from somewhere were shining its lights on the scene. There were a few people wandering around, possibly Hispanic.

I found my father, who was almost cartoonishly wide. He was also dressed somewhat like a clown, in red clothes with pink and orange polka-dots. He may even have worn a clown-nose.

I yelled at my dad, “Why did you let my mom into my apartment?”

My dad gave me some kind of excuse that sounded half-hearted but official, so that I couldn’t really argue against it.

Dream #2

I was in a subway station, waiting for the train to come. I was in a far-off, unfamiliar neighborhood, and I had been doing some kind of activity that made me tired and ready to go back somewhere familiar.

The subway station was more like the lobby for a building like a hospital. I sat at a table in an area that looked like a makeshift café. The serving counter may have been in a small room, off to my right. Behind me, there may have been the main lobby area, large and bright, with a lot of sunlight flowing through the window-walls.

To my left was a wide doorway, through which I could see one subway platform. Through a kind of dim, plasticky window at the opposite end of the room and in front of me, I could see another subway platform.

I pulled out a book, crossed my legs, slumped in my chair, and started reading. A couple of teenage boys sat down a couple of tables away from me. They were making jokes with each other, pretty relaxed. They seemed cool. But for some reason, I didn’t want them to notice me. I thought they might start trouble.

Suddenly I could see, from some kind of reflection, that the train on the platform to my left was coming. It seemed to be coming without warning and very quickly. In a rush, the boys and I stood up from our tables and ran to the platform.

But I didn’t want the boys to know I got on this train. I felt that if they knew this about me they could hurt me somehow. So I tried to act like I wasn’t getting onto this train.

But when I got out to the platform (which was huge, wide, with tall ceilings, nothing like in NYC), the train wasn’t there. I heard the rushing of a train to my left. I looked and saw, down the platform, and up at the top of a tall staircase, a different train arriving at another platform. Was it just that train I’d heard? But I could have sworn I’d seen the train arrive on this platform, as well as heard it.

I looked down into the well for the train and tracks for my platform – and was terribly shocked! Instead of tracks, the floor was completely empty, trackless, and painted a bright yellow. There were no tracks! No train could ever have arrived here! But I was sure this was where the train was supposed to be – where I had actually seen it arrive!

I felt terribly foggy all of the sudden, as if I had fallen into a different world.

I heard the train on the second platform, off to my right, arriving. I thought I’d take that train. But I knew it wouldn’t get me anywhere close to where I wanted to go. I knew I’d just have to take this train, at this platform, whenever it came, no matter how long it took.

So I went back into the café area to go back to reading my book.

Dream #3

I was in my great-grandmother’s house. I had apparently been there for a long time. The place looked nothing like it had looked while my great-grandmother was alive: it was dim, grey-blue, and strewn garbage, household items, and even streams of toilet paper.

I walked around in the kitchen and dining room, possibly picking up and eating and drinking pieces of food and drink that had been left out for a long time on dirty plates and in dirty, grimy cups. There may also have been dirty, rusty knives, or something like that, somewhere.

I walked back into the living room. I felt like I had isolated myself in my great-grandmother’s house for so long. It had been days. Here I’d been, back home all this time, and I hadn’t visited my mother once!

I thought I’d give her a call and let her know I was at my great-grandma’s house, and that she could come visit me or maybe even pick me up so we could go somewhere to visit with each other. But I hesitated – I now felt so guilty having neglected my mother for all these days, that I knew just calling her would cause me a lot of heart-breaking pain.

I was suddenly in “my bedroom” at “my house.” The room was clean, a little barren. Nice sunlight flowed in through the window. It was cheerful enough. But it felt somehow lonely – not just lonely, but sterile, padded.

Something about this feeling made me realize I was dreaming. I realized I was now lucid. I told myself to keep calm and just go exploring this place as if it were a real environment.

(Oddly enough, when I became lucid, I may have “transformed” into a tallish, white, young man with tanned skin, blue eyes, and short-shaved, blonde hair. I have no idea why.)

I walked out of the bedroom and into “my living room.” I was in a suburban house. The house looked small and nice. But it was completely empty. It had thick, brown carpet.

I walked very slowly, to keep my emotions calm. I was heading for the front door. This was a kind of challenge for me, and I knew (even in my dream-state), that I had to keep calm in order to do this. I knew, I remembered (the truth, not a false memory – I mean, insofar as etc., etc.) that when I’d become lucid indoors in the past, my lucidity would end as soon as I walked outside, as if I hadn’t believed my imagination could “create” an outdoor space.

I got to the door. It had a strange bolt-lock on it, which I thought was kind of over-doing things. I worked the lock out and pulled open the door.

It was a bright, sunshiny day in a suburban neighborhood. I told myself to remain calm, remember this was all a dream, and just explore the place like it was a real environment.

My front yard was a tangle of flowery vegetation and rough, dark shrubs. There was a driveway off to my right, with a big, brown, 1970s-style car.

A blonde man, very tan, with a long tangle of hair and beard, was messing around near “my car.” He looked crazy, and I was afraid of him. But I was also pissed that he was messing around my car. So I yelled at him, “Hey! Hey! What are you doing?”

The crazy man hunched up (he never really stood) and turned toward me. He shouted and growled and barked all kinds of weird things at me and started rambling toward me violently. For some reason, he was holding a Panini and a paper plate in his hands, as if he had been eating a Panini when he’d seen my car and decided to vandalize it or rip it off.

It seemed as if the crazy man were going to try to invade my home. So I yelled at him, “Don’t you come near!”

The neighbor from the house to my left, an Asian man, in his late 30s or early 40s, wearing glasses, a pink-red polo shirt, and khaki shorts, walked out of his house and into my yard. He’d heard the commotion and was coming to help me.

I yelled again at the crazy man to back off and not to come anywhere near my home. But I also tried to make it seem to my neighbor like I had the situation under control. I felt like this crazy man was somehow important to whatever I was supposed to learn from this lucid dream. So I had to keep him at a distance without scaring him away entirely. I also wanted to make sure my neighbor didn’t scare away the crazy man.

Off to my right, in my garden, I saw a strange plant that looked like a Cleome topped with a cabbage. The cabbage was pink and white, like Cleome flowers.

Somehow, either my yelling my neighbor’s yelling had finally scared away the crazy man. He ran off. I, and possibly my neighbor, ran after him.

He ran down toward a chain link fence that ran along the crest of a kind of tall, kind of steep, cliff-like hill. I was calling to the crazy man to stop. I wasn’t trying to do him harm. But my neighbor was running faster than me, and he was chasing the crazy man quite violently.

The crazy man found a bent-up part of chain-link fence and crawled under it. I followed. I saw the crazy man run down the steep, brown hill-face, jumping into a shallow, muddy river or creek at the bottom.

My neighbor was still ahead of me, intent on capturing the crazy man. But once the crazy man was in the water, he did something to himself so that my neighbor could no longer see him. He had changed his wild, blonde hair into a weird, pink, green, and white, spiky flower style, looking like a hairdo-mix of a Cleome and a lotus. He ducked down low in the creek so that only his head was above water.

But I could still see that it was the crazy man. I wondered why my neighbor couldn’t. Nothing was different about the crazy man’s face: it was just his hair that looked like a lotus floating on the water.

I could see that the crazy man was drifting toward a group of copper-skinned, black haired children who were playing and splashing about near the creek’s banks. I thought that it might be a good idea to get the crazy man away from the children. He had gone over to them to blend in with them until we left. But I had a feeling that if he suddenly went crazy again, he could hurt the kids.

But now the crazy man and my neighbor were gone. I stood in some rocky area, looking down to the kids playing in the creek. At some point I looked over to my right and saw that there was a subway station, just jutting in a platform out of the hill, as if it were half-finished, forgotten. But it also looked new, clean, modern, even futuristic. And it was functional.

I saw some kids, maybe pre-teen or teenage, playing around near the platform, waiting for the train. I was up near the top of the hill now (which, instead of being muddy or earthy, was now rocky). I was at a pretty level view with the platform and with the kids. I hoped they wouldn’t notice me, because I didn’t want them to start trouble with me.

My emotions got so unstable that I felt my lucidity fading away.

But instead of the dream continuing, not lucid, everything blacked out. I told myself, you’re losing your lucidity. You’re waking up altogether. Go back to being in the dream, and being lucid.

So now I was back in the dream, lucid. I lay, stomach down, over some ledge of rock, looking down to some of the kids playing in the creek. They may have been a boy and a girl. They noticed me and started handing me toys to play with with them. One of the toys was a plastic horse.

I played around with the horse a little bit, then handed it back to the kids, who went back into the water.

I walked into the subway station. Inside, it seemed like it had become night. The station was lit gently with a kind of street-quality, greenish, fluorescent flood-lamp. The walls were a brownish stone, and the floors were some kind of granite-like grey. There was a downward staircase in the center of the lobby-area, and there were a few different corridors leading off from the main lobby-area.

I walked down one of the corridors off to my right. I heard a bunch of teenage kids who sounded like they were joking and having a good time. I decided that I should probably talk with the kids instead of being nervous and shy around them. This was a dream, and I was here to explore whatever I ran into.

So I saw the kids. They were a group of white boys and girls, dressed in kind of loose baggy sweaters and wool caps. They were making a bunch of jokes which struck me as intelligent and funny. I thought I’d talk to them. But they really didn’t pay any attention to me. So, rather than trying to hard to get their attention and getting hostile attention, I walked down another corridor.

But now I heard somebody calling for me. I wound around through the corridors, back to the area where the kids had been. It had definitely sounded like one of the boys, calling me back to be part of the group.

But when I got back to the area – something like a lobby, with a long, wooden counter at the front of the room, and a tall, nice painting on the cinder-block wall to my left – there were no kids, only two women. The women were both naked. They walked toward me, side by side.

The woman on the right was very tall, maybe a foot taller than I (or “I” in the dream). She was naked, but she wore a dark-blue plume of feathers as a headdress and a spray of dark blue feathers around her waist and back. She looked like a burlesque performer.

The woman on the left was still taller than I, maybe by an inch or two. She was pale, with long, curly, light-red hair. The women were both offering themselves to me for sex. I chose the shorter woman.

The woman stood right in front of me, almost to the point of pressing up to me. I asked her a question, and she replied. Satisfied, I began kissing her body.

We had sex in two or three different positions. But in one position I realized I was just doing a terrible job, and that I must just be making a weird situation for the woman, even though she did at least appear to be having fun. Regardless, I got so ashamed of what I perceived as being my stupid clumsiness that I woke up.