Morning of August 21, 1965. Saturday. In early morning, I am walking through an outdoor maze-like area in an undetermined location with about six other children of whom are unfamiliar. On each side of the old and broken sidewalk are various unusual plants in flower boxes of about two feet high of which are adjacent to the sidewalk. Some of the plants are as high as about three feet, but many seem to be drying out, some stems almost straw-like. Some of the plants seem like oversized sandspurs (Cenchrus), though a few have attractive flowers. The area is possibly an abandoned plant nursery or the forgotten large garden of someone who had moved. There is conversation, but I mostly had only recalled a girl saying something about “the garden bed”. Someone’s forgotten private garden may more likely be the case, as we eventually seem to be in the unmaintained backyard of a suburban residence. There seems to be the presence of an unusual odor, firstly thought to be coming from some pale flowers. We all walk closer to the back of the house. A girl in our small group opens the back door of this house. There appears to be something moving in the darkness in the center of the room. It is seemingly a skunk, but we can only see the white part of it very clearly. I suddenly become aware that it is startled and puzzled by our presence, and curiously, and very interestingly, the white part (body and tail) quickly form a question mark. The formation of the question mark, which seems to hover in the air (though I am still aware that a skunk is there) creates an intriguing sense of awe and surprise upon waking, as if the skunk’s surprise and puzzlement are my own; as if I am the skunk being awakened by the girl in the doorway. At this last point, I am seemingly also immediately (without implied to have walked here) near the center of the dark room, looking at the white vertical question mark while seeing the girl’s silhouette in the doorway. I eventually consider that it is my mother coming in to look in on me as I am sleeping (a puzzling transformation of the girl around my age suddenly becoming an adult as well as briefly perceiving myself as a skunk). This is one of many childhood dreams that taught me that dreams were based on the autosymbolic nature of the dream state and waking transition rather than having a waking life “interpretation”. The phrase “garden bed” in this case is an indicator that I am asleep and dreaming, though I do not become lucid here other than in the final moments. The transition of the preconscious shifts from my dream self’s perspective to seeing the skunk as my emergent consciousness. As with many other dreams, the autosymbolism is directly based on the puzzlement of becoming aware that I am dreaming. (This is inherent to the foundational meaning of all waking process autosymbolism.) The unknown girl in the doorway establishes this as doorway waking autosymbolism (a very common waking process). The door is autosymbolism for the impending exit from my dream in the final scene as well as the door to my real-life bedroom (and in fact, I have often used this knowledge for both liminal dream control and deliberately vivifying the dream state). It is a girl around my age due to the downscaling of my mother (who is usually the one to wake me while standing in my doorway). The skunk and its intriguing transformation into a question mark represents my puzzlement in liminal space (dark featureless room in this case rather than a more defined autosymbolic liminal space construct such as a porch or parking lot), as well as a form of defense against the preconscious factor in my liminal focus of not wanting to get out of bed just yet even though my dream self’s vague intent is to find my way back to my conscious self identity (which is basically what a dream is). I believe that this dream also had a precognitive thread, first validated in 1978 when my parents and I moved back to Wisconsin. The backyard and the back of the house in my dream seemed to match, in appearance, color, and orientation and distance (relative to the 901 Rose Street building we lived in on the second floor years previously), to the house my sister Marilyn (who had lived in the apartment across from my parents and I on Rose Street) was living in years later. (This is curious, as the majority of my dreams otherwise have unique fictitious composites as a setting.) Additionally, my father built cinder block flower boxes (similar to those of my dream) onto the front of our house after we had moved to Florida in 1967.
Fell asleep meditating on the idea of lucidity, and a particular location ("Home Base"). I don't generally expect to attain lucidity during my first few periods of REM, nor do I really want to. Zoning out and just letting sleep happen is nice, in and of itself. I had some new forms of success and ran into some familiar problems... Had dreams. Don't recall them. I need to get better about writing stuff down, but don't want to disturb my boyfriend, either. I still don't feel like they were particularly vivid, coherent, or noteworthy... dreams from the first few hours of the night generally aren't. Settled back to sleep meditating on home base. Slipped into gray fog. At some point, attained lucidity... had the sense that it was near the very beginning of a dream because I have no recollection of a dream up until that point, but suddenly I was sitting at a table with a pile of colorful alphabet-letter magnets on it. I touched and examined them, and then the grey fog reclaimed the dream. I slowly woke up. Settled back down and began meditating again. Body slowly settled back into sleep; my limbs became numb and I felt like I was drifting. This is normally the point I'd have trouble with a WILD. At this point, I would normally try to start moving, sit up out of my body, and feel a way that I can only really describe as feeling "tangled in a blanket" - mentally flailing around but unable to really get anywhere or do anything, still stuck in the fog. Sometimes, it's instinctive, so it's been hard to shake the habit, but last night I was actually able to remain mindful and stay still. I felt as if I was drifting in a river. My body was numb and the idea of being attached to or "in" it was going away. I tried to sink into the river even more... I felt my head sink through the pillow and my body sink through the bed, and sank down into the gray fog. Drifted for a while. I watched the fog so that I didn't end up drifting out of lucidity. I waited for shapes to appear in the fog. Sometimes shadowy shapes would appear. This is normally where I might have trouble again - trying to will them to BE something, without anything really coalescing... wanting them to BE something... getting frustrated and exerting myself too much mentally and waking up as a result. This time, I just let them fade in and out. I still paid attention to them and tried to examine them, but I tried to remain as objective as possible - trying to see patterns and shapes in them without trying to force them to "be" anything. I knew that if I kept doing this, eventually I could coax one of them into reality. Eventually a shadowy room came into being, and became reality. I was standing in the living-room of my mother's old apartment in Florida. It didn't have any furniture and was fairly empty. The alphabet magnets from before were scattered on an end table in the center of the room. It felt pretty "solid". I examined the brown carpet and patted the wall. I walked through the room, toward the hallway, running my hand along the wall so that I didn't lose lucidity. I wanted to do a scene change - this place wasn't where I wanted to be, and it was boring. I walked up to the door and willed it to open to a location I actually wanted to be in (again, home base). I opened the door, and there was... another door? I opened that door, and behind it was another door. I felt irritated and opened that door, willing it to be the location that I wanted, but it opened into the apartment atrium. I walked across the atrium and opened one of the doors to another apartment. That door led back into the atrium. I got an idea - something told me to try to dive through a door and use it like a portal. I dove through a door and opened my eyes to my actual bedroom. I should have known that this was potentially a false awakening, but instead I just went back to sleep. I dreamed I was hanging out with a few of my friends. We were going to Full Throttle Bottles, but in the dream, Full Throttle was not the store I was familiar with, and it was not in the location where it would have normally been. Instead, we were all walking down a street full of nothing but liquor stores. We went into one of them and a friend bought a bottle of vodka that was in a bottle like a soda bottle and tasted like orange-flavored cream soda. I liked it, so I bought one myself. I kept thinking that it was odd that the store clerk hadn't carded any of us, but didn't manage to figure out that it was because this was a dream. We walked up to a place that looked kind of like a castle. It had brown, smooth bricks. I jumped down a wall and my friend grabbed my arm and jumped down with me. I remember thinking it was a very long way to jump and was surprised I hadn't hurt myself a lot, but reasoned that it was because my friend was taller and had held me up kind of like a balloon. I then dreamed about a flying cartoon skunk whose super power was smelling so bad that the odor killed evil things.
Major rise in confidence during this dream! Got an animal transformation, Advanced TotM, and was getting there on a Task of the Year, too. Thanks to NewArtemis for the dream control suggestions! Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid Lucid #171: I Am the Wolf I have a false awakening that places me in my bed at home next to Wife. All of the lights are on and she's fiddling around with some papers in bed, something to do with my new business. "Oh good, you're awake," she says. I grumble about how unhappy I am that this is the case. "Sorry," she responds, "but we really need to work on this." I whine that it should be able to wait until the morning and that I was trying to have a lucid dream. She turns back to the papers, not bothering me any further. I'm a little worried that I was rude and have maybe pissed her off, but I decide to just take my chance while I can. I roll onto my side and begin my mantra of "The world is yours". I'm shocked to find that almost immediately I start a WILD transition. (Obviously just an in-dream WILD, but I didn't realize it at the time.) In the transition state, my dream hands are grasping at something rough that's rolling by beneath me. I grasp at it and start clawing my way along. A gravel surface comes into view. It seems like I'm floating while climbing a ladder made out of gravel that's been crudely mortared together. After a bit, the scene solidifies and the gravel becomes a path. There's one more odd little jump as gravity takes hold and now I'm walking along the path in a full-formed scene. It's dawn and I'm on a path that cuts through a park, not far from a street. Most of the DCs are dressed like it's chilly but it feels mild to me. I remember my intention to be extra confident in this dream and I start shouting my intentions at the passerby. "I can do anything I want! This is all mine!" I shout, interspersing lots of profanity and generally sounding like a total nutjob. I remember Task of the Month to turn into a white wolf, hide in the snow, and hunt down a meal. I still feel all crazy from my mantra and the insane confidence I had at the start of this dream. I shout in a booming voice that's not my own that "I AM THE WOLF!" Immediately my hands curl into white paws. I practice running a bit on all fours and it's not bad! I kind of get the sense that I'm sort of bent over like a loping hunchback / werewolf thing but hey, close enough! I go on a brief, profanity-laced tirade about how there's a bunch of snow to my right, and yep there it is. I hop my little wolf-feet into it and crouch down, looking to my left for some prey. Immediately I spy two potential targets: the closest is a large skunk and the other is an orange, semi-spherical alien thing with tentacles. The skunk's closer and the alien makes me a bit nervous, so I pounce on the skunk. My teeth rip into him and I tear a big chunk away. Fortunately none of this is bloody but the skunk stares at me in shock. The skunk meat tastes atrocious. It's like chewing on a fart. I can't remember whether I'm supposed to eat the whole animal so I take another bite. This time it's more gummy and tasteless at first but after a bit of chewing, nope, this bite's all farty-tasting too. I hope this is good enough because I've had enough of being a carnivore. I allow myself to change back into a human and walk further into the park. I come to three identical stone buildings with opaque green windows, standing side by side. I think of the Colosseum Task of the Year and shout that the building which leads to the Colosseum needs to light up. No immediate result, so another attempt, more yelly and with more profanity does the trick and the middle building's door lights up. I move through a series of three automatic glass doors where a steady stream of children is walking in the opposite direction. I say that the kids need to get out of the way and DC parents appear from out of nowhere to pull them to the side as I pass. I emerge in a restaurant area filled with DCs enjoying a meal. An Indian man in his early 40s is playing on a slot machine against the left wall and he turns to look at me with an expression of surprise. I push through the back door out into the early morning next to a crumbling sports arena. It's huge and looks a lot like the Colosseum apart from some weird details like the rebar that's sticking out of the top of it. I fly up toward the top and as a gust of wind carries me sideways away from where I want to be, I shout and mutter that "this is my world", and things get back on track. I come over the top of the stadium to see that inside it looks like a grassy version of the Circus Maximus! There's even a little chariot racing by itself around the track. I know I can make this work, so I fly down toward the field, shouting that down there will be someone for me to fight. Before I'm even halfway down, though, the dream ends.
I was walking around in my backyard, when i came across a raccoon being attacked by a baby skunk......i shooed the skunk away and picked upthe raccoon and allof a suden i was walking down a street, a street ive seen in my dreams before many times..dont know where it is though...i examine the raccoon briefly, there are no wounds, i turn left and walkdown a short alley, then turn right into an open area between buildings, ive been here before as well, theres a vets office at the far end of this plaza type place, i examine the raccoon again and now it has a gash on one side of its body, theres a napkin dispenser hanging onthe wall next to me so i graba couple and apply pressure to the wound, i start walking towards the door in the back wall, which leads to a hallway, strange thing is i had a key to this door for some reason, i walk to the end of this hallway and take a left, the vets office is at the end of this hallway, but as it is in every other dream ive seenit in, its closed....theres a square of light on the floor under the onyl window there, even though its nighttime, so i lay the raccoon down in the square of light, andit curls up liekits going to go to sleep, i say to myself, the vet will be here soon and will find him..i start walking out and fins theres a door in the middle of the hallway between the outside door and where i left the raccoon, its always there on the way out, but never there on the way in......i oen the door and go through and i realize the baby skunk was following me.....i go through the outside door and trap the baby skunk in the hallway, after the door closes, i panick a bit thinking i left my keys inside, they wer in my back pocket thankfully, i walk out of the alley and its now early morning, sun just coming up....i walk past a circle K, in reality a convenience store, in this dream, a tire store..i dont think its at all strange...as i head down the street i'm getting in a better and better mood, huge smile on my face, strutting down the street etc...i see a covered bus stop in the distance and i start dancing to and singing "du hast" by Rammstein....i havent thought about that song in years, nor wa i ever a fan of that song, but it popped in my head for some reason....then i woke up......
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