ZAD's DJ

Sep 29 2018

Background - i didn't get nearly enough sleep during the week (b/t 5 and 6.5 hours a night) so i haven't had lucids since last sunday and have only been remembering 1-2 dreams a night on avg. so maybe this was sort of an extended REM rebound effect? i didn't sit down to meditate (although at many points i made myself hyper-aware) or visit the bathhouse, but anyway i remembered to do math in most of my lucids, got to talk to my dream guide (or it felt like it), and got my subconscious to play music. p. cool night!

3 NLs - before waking at 5:30 (went to sleep 11:45) (fortunately i wrote all of these down)
* in 9, my parents are talking to "Mr Jeff" in the front porch, talking about walking sticks as "staves", they examine one i found in the forest when we went to the cabin at the beginning of august
* in 8, seeing an older woman out of the apartment who had just helped F and I with something or was maybe just visiting. she has the body of a younger person but has surface-level wrinkles, almost like they're a painted-on texture with no depth (they're white) and I think she even had black hair. but her skin also looks quite dry. she reminded me of one of my neighbors who walks two dogs
* in 512 (grandpa's house) with F and my dad. F and I are sitting at the dining table across from each other, dad is to the right. i have tea and she has water, my dad asks for some of my soft drink because there's some rule that anytime i have soft drinks he gets a portion (he used to do this IRL too ;_ but i tell him i'm drinking tea and that i don't (or barely) drink soft drinks anymore, he points out a detailed list of times i've had soft drinks over the last year. i'm eating a wrap and unexpectedly i see a splotch of guacamole getting pushed out of the top like a tube of toothpaste, i lick it so it doesn't fall and i can vividly remember the taste - it was spot-on. really good guac!

LD 1 - WILD after WBTB - after lots of HI coming close to successful WILD, finally it's sort of like an FA, in bed, can see light coming through curtain, sit up and move curtain (feel body shift into dream body). It's light out, I look around, look at body and try to transform, wake up. go back to sleep pretty quickly after that

LD chain 2 - WILD, DEILDs, and DILDs - too many so I'll only write summaries - didn't write all of these down because after finally waking from the chain I just dove right in to the second chain
* walking outside in area between 9 and neighbor's house, asked subconscious for music to play, got some symphonic. it came and went, but as it faded I would conduct it with my hands and it would get louder. after a bit the music changed to a medium tempo pop instrumental and I conducted it as well. I was focusing on the sight/sound/touch sensations involving the wood fence, white lattice, the foliage, grass, swingset, etc. very vivid
* converted FA in 8 bedroom, summoning big cuddly dogs (F's grandma has a big dog so whenever we go over there like we did yesterday, I cuddle with it); in the dream they're very warm, i'm starting to feel temperature more in dreams whereas before with touch i would only feel pressure; one of my goals is to actually feel the bones inside my hands and the muscle contractions
* something with F in 9, can't remember details now...
* morning daylight scene, approach white service van and enter, there's a moldy (not really decomposed but with a green patina almost?) girl in the back sort of under the carpet (skin sort of the texture of the under-carpet material in floor boards) I try to move her head and her fully black eyes open, I kiss her (or do CPR?) and every time I do she blows air at me, weird weird weird wtf
* there were a lot more (i'm getting vague impressions of more FAs and maybe one more outdoor one), they're just lost on me -- i'm giving it time and hopefully i'll catch a few more during the day

LD chain 3 - WILD, DEILDs, and DILDs - too many so I'll only write summaries - had these after a brief wakeup and pee
* met dream guide as pudgy girl (reminds me of an outgoing version of F's little cousin), talked to her about my thoughts and whether she was real. I didn't ask my subconscious for the dream guide, I just saw her and knew -- i asked "are you my DG?" and she said yes, we held hands and walked through a crowded mall and talked for a bit.
* fight/murder in crack, blame - there are two men and a woman, the man and woman are fighting (they're married?) on a second-story floor with long cracks perpindicular to the hallway, so that you can see through to the first story (long fall); the second man walks up and says something to the first man that makes him jump through the crack. the woman is distraught but turns to the second man (her lover?) for comfort. at first i'm a semi-lucid observer but after this i summon my dream guide and he shows up in a doorway behind me as a tall built older man, feel his sides (like obliques) through shirt and they're warm. he says it's the only way he could get to me (like KPAX sort of - why is a soap bubble round) (when I first see him I saw other girls who looked similar but definitely different to the girl DG from before, their eyes were different)
* red curtain in parent's bedroom and transition scene - cool technique where I was looking in a mirror and I summoned a huge red curtain and threw it sort of over and around me and wrapped myself in its suspended self to transition to the next dream, however the next dream was somehow "too small" and so it faded quickly as I couldn't get a grasp on it
* lost a lot of these too... will keep trying to recall

as i lay in bed trying to recall and recount these dreams, i'm perfectly still, when i finally do try to move there's heavy resistence and then a snap! and i awaken, it turns out i had been in a detailed FA the whole time, as a result I lost some of the lucids. before waking I could recall 13 lucids total. not too bummed though as I'm sure I'll have a lot tomorrow night too!

Sep 25 2018

[D] In house with D and F's Grandma's dog (GD). GD is running around in the back yard and living room with a carrot, balanced precariously on a fence or string or hammock. D is avoiding her. GD is simultaneously a dog and a full-grown savage (think raised by wolves) naked man with long black matted hair. We (F and I?) have a conversation about taking a picture of him to share so he can be returned to his proper owner (this makes my dream self ponder what should fall under the responsibility of pet adopters).

[F] Long house, dark outside, I'm putting something up on my walls. Papers, plans, something? There's discussion/controversy over it.

[D] I'm with rory from gilmore girls, I'm her mom (or the other way around)? We're looking at boarding schools, transition to scene with all blond girls changing, one blond girl turns around and looks at us with a scowl, distinct image of this. Maybe I had changed back into a guy. I think rory's mom was now separate from me as an entity. With F now in a room full of monogrammed purses, like a giant walk in closet. I find several wthat are close to her initials or almost have all of them, there were a few humorous ones I found myself starting to question. If I had stayed in the dream longer I would have become lucid, at this point my awareness was spiking.



I believe I had 2 or 3 more but I can't find any trace of them in my memory palace. Will visit it during the day, and I think I'll sweep it out and start over clean with today's dreams. I think each time I wake up, I need to somehow activate my memory with an exercise so that placing my dreams in the memory palace will be more effective.

Sep 14 2018

On couch - cousin & wife are facing away from TV while fiancee & I are facing towards it. I wanted them to flip around like we were but they were going to sleep or something (she had some kind of problem). Some discussion between my fiancee and I about how flat the layers of the 36-layer cake (cookies and cream, but it had a special name like "seminole" - not that but close) had gotten (I tasted one of the thin layers, it was good). This layer cake desert was from a previous dream fragment. In this dream I'm trying to accomplish something and it becomes a big deal. C&W are stretching out on couch in front of us w/ our dog and their dog, W is trying to take pictures of ours but they're coming out blurry. Posts on facebook with a picture that missed him, people posted sympathetic comments below about how hard it is to take a picture of a dog these days and she liked the comments and posted a better gif that captured him yawning.

Walking through town at night - look through window and see lights inside, people. Go in, brightly lit, fancy upper class dinner party. There are white tablecloths and food trays and servers. One of us says "These are not our people". Lots of middle-aged women in bright, colorful, but elagant dresses (all one color, some blue, yellow, maybe one peach). Vivid dream, walked through main room and some hallways.

Vivid and long dream about my fiancee and I (we were at this point in the dream teens who didn't know each other). We were attending some kind of religious boarding school. We were assigned to make love to each other in a small room with a glass door (reminded me of group study rooms at the campus library). I think we got to pick, so as lots of students were walking down the hallway, we reached out to each other and held hands and picked each other as partners. After that we entered the glass room. I'll spare the details here. The dream has several smaller scenes spliced together to make it feel like years passed; we grow up together (in the dream we were allowed to find other partners instead but we both stuck with each other). There's a third friend or one of our siblings, a midget with an adult face who is someohw our age. My fiancee and I are in a side hallway by a door or a water fountain, and we look up as a crowd of students and faculty in sort of acolyte robes with red chef hats are passing through, some of them crying. The midget brother I described breaks off from them and comes over to tell us the news; I assume someone has died and say "who is it?" and he says something snobbish.

It's years later in a separate dream from the previous dream and I'm watching in third person now. My fiancee is still with "me", but the version of me I'm looking at doesn't resemble me at all (kind of look like a pudgy Elvis impersonator). I'm under a bridge, trying out my new unicycle/stilt that has a "Cuddler" attached to the top where I am -- a Cuddler is one of those chairs that's a cross between a recliner and a loveseat, big enough for two people. Anyway I think the chair is white or black. "I" am standing on the chair's seat cuhion, rocking it back and forth to increase the height of the stilt/unicycle. If I rock back and forth in the opposite direction it will go back down. Fiancee is sitting on the curb watching irritatedly, we both have to go somewhere and I'm holding us up (I say something like "go without me"). The dream self is clearly more focused on reaching the top of the bridge before coming back down. He seems like a bit of a deadbeat (is wearing all white and has a pompadour). I think he's a struggling performer.

Sep 8

Long NL. I'm in my apartment complex's front yard and office area. My manager from work is there, along with some coworkers and random DCs. We are in school sdesks arranged in the parking lot, doing work on laptops. I see an email in red letters that says "failed", although I know the test was successful. The email gets sent out again with SUCCESS, and mentions something like "good job everyone", but I notice that it's not just an email, it's a meeting invite. My boss comes around and pats people on the back, telling us to "enjoy the long weekend" and mentioning that we can work from our beds. My fiancee is there as well (either as a worker or just as my fiancee) and calls this out as bullshit as we were already working overtime. Before or during there is also the understanding that I have to assassinate someone.

Dream scene changes and I'm in a room walking towards a door. My dog is there and so is my fiancee. I am holding my dog as I pass through a door. I become lucid! I keep telling myself "I'm lucid" and "I'm dreaming" but don't do any RCs. I see a small door (like a dumbwaiter) and consider using it to teleport to my dream world I've been incubating, but for some reason I hesitate and don't (don't know if this was a conscious decision). Instead I go with the flow of the dream.

The scene shifts. I'm still holding my dog, and I think "he's the best". I'm in a somewhat cluttered room now, and I understand that I need to kill all of the DCs here. I do some jedi mind tricks to make sure they don't resist, and they work. I tell them I'm dreaming and they all react in a friendly way. Each time I go to kill one of them, it seems like they go through the 5 stages of grief for themselves in front of my eyes, always ending up at "acceptance" before dying. I kill 2 of them, and then decide to use ice powers*. At first I was intending for Skyrim ice shards, but it came out as more of a stream of icy powder/wind from my fingertips. My thumb and forefinger are pressed together and the way the stream of ice comes out is something like when you put your thumb over a garden hose to spray pressured water at someone. As I'm pondering this I go into intense visualizations of the streams, and there are 3D mesh outlines of the stream and its "weather patterns" overlain on my vision, like a series of oblong lines. The visualization shifts to a long sawblade with teeth marked with numbers. As I mentally change the number from 8 to 2 and adjust it by notches, I see the angle and strength of the stream change.

The scene shifts to a security cam view, and as I press my left thumb and forefinger together, I can send ice shards from the camera, although they're not reliable. The camera reminds me of the show Person of Interest. After this I'm transmitted into the room. There is a blue tint to the room, and I look around and see some DCs. I walk out of a door behind me and peer into the hallway (very bright incandescent light and white walls and floors), then I go back into the blue room. I tell the DCs "I'm dreaming" and again as I approach them they go through stages of grief. I do this to a couple of DCs then walk through a doorway/archway. Above the archway are two drill bits. I jump up and grab them. I test one on a wall and it drills right through, despite having barely any threads (it was basically an ice pick). I go up to an old lady DC and say "I'm dreaming". She looks at me with sadness and says "We'll take care of each other/ourselves", then I wake up.

The dream lasted around 2-3 minutes and was very vivid. I was lucid and aware the whole time, but it still felt like a guided/directed dream.

Longer NL -- I'm a young boy who is somehow a vertical venetian blind(???). I am on a quest with a young girl, we're descending into a deep level of some underground building, with a furnace and monsters. Her face doesn't seem real, more like a porcelain doll or something. We arrive and there's a giant hydra in a brightly lit room. It has a "cement burning rocket" that's burning me and melting my armor. The girl is wrapped up in one of the hydra's necks or tentacles. I back away and reach a closet with the venetian blinds. They tell me or some other voice tells me that I am one with the blinds.

I had a few other NLs and fragments. In one, I'm in my grandpa's house and there's a weird square baby with thin, posable arms. It reminds me of BMO from Adventure Time. It was a premature. The parents are proud. There's an old lady to my left who looks like my aunt, who's wearing a white shirt with gold lettering. I note it, it's in different languages (Chines, Latin, Greek) together. At some point I had my midget intruder FA again, but it was very hazy and I yelled "Fuck you!" or "I'll kill you!" loudly and it fades quickly. In another fragment, I'm Dexter and Rita is dropping in the pool next to me. I'm supposed to be enjoying it, but I'm Dexter so I hate it. I say something like "Rita, the water is going like 20 mph". Scene shift to Deb and Quin, Deb's in a room playing with a reclining bicycle for toddlers and Quin comes in and says something while smiling and laughing. Next scene, Deb is driving a bus, Rita and I and the kids are in there. She's taking a risky corner under an interstate high rise. I don't see the bus flip, but I understand it does. Rita scolds Deb in that annoying way she does. Finally, I have the transparent eyelids effect, I can see my room clearly and thought I heard my fiancee calling me, when I move my waking body my head is under the blanket and I go downstairs to find my fiancee watching TV, turns out she didn't call me.



*I don't know if this counts as the "Breathe an element" goal

Sep 3 2018

Woke 3:35. In a fight with parents and grandpa about cooking or setting up something (possibly speed-reading). Daylight outside, long tables (possibly crawfish boil).

Woke 5:05. Long fragment in a stadium, receiving some sort of business presentation from coworker. After it's over, I'm picking up my laptop bag and I stand out of the way for a coworker and an unnamed DC, who say that they have a "merge request in the morning". The presenter (another coworker) is kicking us out.

Awoke directly from FA nightmare. My dog barked and I could tell instantly that it was serious, not just him barking at another dog. The door to the bedroom is thrown open and the midget from Twin Peaks season 3 entered with a small gun. He approached the bed, not looking directly at me or anyone, just at the wall behind us. He said something vague and I tried to lean up in bed asking something to the extent of "What do you want?". As I tried to move, and in some sense solve the problem, my vision blurred and the dream started to fade. He was wearing a blue shirt with the pattern of "I (heart) N Y" but the letters were "? (eye symbol) T Y" in white. The room's layout was completely realistic and accurate unlike other false awakenings. I woke up and said "holy shit" aloud. Very scary experience, but very vivid -- would have been invaluable if I could have gotten lucid and converted it.

Before that, I was in my childhood home, on the phone with my manager about something that needed to get done. The screen was black with red nubmbers and dial-screen graphics, and an orbiting globe outline. The call got dropped. I was worrying about this with my parents but they seemed to think it would all work out (it was nighttime). My sister was in my room on my computer, looking for the first book in a series my fiance is currently reading. I suggested that she can just read my fiance's copy rather than buy it herself. I end up also giving her a japanese manga volume and another poorly translated japanese book, I remember the engrish being hilarious in-dream. After this, I went to the kitchen (all of the lights were out). I was trying to write down my dreams in ink on the wood floors. In the back of my mind I knew this was a terrible idea and that my dad would be furious, but in the moment I wasn't worried about it. There were some drops of water on the floor and it was smearing the ink, so I started wiping it up, making the smearing even worse. I was also worried about cockroaches.

After the ink, I found myself in a distinct dream scene. I was on the ground looking up at the side of a cliff maybe 4 or 5 stories high. There was a good bit of dirt caked on and I thought to myself how nice it would look if I could get the dirt off. I grabbed a wedge-shaped piece of reddish slate and scraped as much dirt as I could off and stepped back, and noticed how nice the geometric patterns were. I remember the thought-phrase "cliff face". When I looked again, one of the rock formations sort of looked like a nose, and the one below looked like a mouth! When I started examining the rest of the cliff, the whole thing was taken up by face structures (abstract and Easter Islandish). The ground went from being solid dirt and rock, to having some cracks in which curved red boards were shoved and prying the cracks apart. In the cracks were green cylindrical vegetables (I thought of okra or fat asparagus stalks). As I moved forward towards the cliff, I noticed a mesh oyster bag of sea urchins, which were moving around each other in the bag, sort of like you expect spike balls to in a metroidvania or platformer. This was a really vivid and overall nice and creative dream that's simple but feels profoundly peaceful, the kind of nonlucid you generally want to have. So of course this scene transitioned directly to the nightmare FA.

I woke again at 8:59. My fiance was in trouble. We were in some sort of college sign-up, car buying, or other related scenario. There were DCs everywhere, and specifically several DCs with deep blue eyes and short hair meant her harm in an insidious way (they were outwardly friendly). I became more and more adversarial over the course of the dream, eventually hitting them and throwing things at them. We moved from the student union/indoor car lot into a side hallway which transitions to a long house with lots of corridors and small rooms arranged in pretty much a straight-shot, but almost labyrinthine at the same time. I was thinking somehow they were hypnotizing her, and she was getting more and more bruises on her arms and abdomen. Eventually I get in exaggerated physical fights with them and I somehow manage to get 2-4 of them to defect to my side as allies and stow her away under a sliding hole in the kitchen (sort of a drain hole in the floor, like you see in restaurant kitchens). She escaped succesfully.

I'm unknowingly in an FA but think I'm fully awake. I am having the "transparent eyelids" effect, and I'm looking around my bedroom at the closet door, but it's the wooden closet door from my childhood home. I'm etching a human face in it with my mind.

After this, I'm in my childhood home and members of my family as well as random DCs are dressed in "starship troopers armor" -- white and blue, and white and red. It was a long and in-depth dream, but I don't remember much of it. I finally escaped the fray and sat back on my bed, but then my father entered my room with his gun held high, and I remember thinking "oh good, you'll just be my bodyguard". When I thought this (non-lucidly), he changed his course of action from running forward to attack me to climbing in bed next to me with his rifle held out (think Fullmetal Jacket "This is my rifle"). I got up from bed* and started walking towards the hallway. Almost instantly I became lucid! I didn't say "I'm dreaming!" or do any RCs or stabilization unfortunately. I walked down the hallway towards the bathroom, and it was daylight outside, maybe early morning. I walked into the bathroom and looked at the mirror, seeing a girl in a dress instead of myself. In this moment, I started to think of the "bad guys" in the starship troopers armor and then banished the thought from my mind, knowing that if I thought of them I would encounter or summon them. So instead I took advantage of the situation -- although I was seeing the girl in the mirror, I felt my dream body as my own physical body. So I turned away from the mirror and decided that I would become the girl in the mirror. I turned back around and I was!

Spoiler for nudity:

My body had changed competely and I was naked. Naturally, I touched my arms and chest to test sensation (it was dull, sort of semi-numb as my dream body sensation usually is). I did a little twirl and

inspected my face further in the mirror -- my face was sort of ugly and homely**, and as mirrors in dreams usually do, my face shifted quite a bit. I leaned in further to inspect myself and kissed the mirror (it was cold). I then leaned back out and decided to try my "Clear sight. Clear sound. Clear touch. Grounded. Calm, confident. I can stay here as long as I want." stabilization phrase. However, as soon as touched my thumb and forefinger, I accidentally said "Clear mind" first! It rejected me from the dream instantly. As I began to feel my waking body, I realized my thumb and forefinger were touching here too; maybe this triggered the waking?

I laid awake for quite a while after that, as I had already slept more than usual for the night, and for the whole weekend basically. I was also still excited about the lucid and hoping to drop back into it. Eventually I went back to sleep and had some more non lucids. In the first, I was with my fiance in a rest area/cabin in the woods. In the next, I felt as though I dropped into the dream as a visualization from waking, but it's possible I was only visualizing from an FA. I was imagining tall waves, and how my body bobbed up and down in them. It felt incredibly nice and peaceful. I was at a beach, and my sister was standing on a board of some kind zipping up a life jacket. I think my fiance was bobbing up and down in the water too. When I looked at the shore, I couldn't quite see the sand but I could see tall buildings above the waves, which I identified to be my apartment buildings from WL. A distinct black shape was swimming towards me, and I thought it might be a shoe or a fish (I thought it could be a dangerous fish but dismissed the thought instantly). After another waking, I had a final dream of being in a wood panneled shop with an old woman who was offering the shop to me (inheritance?). Her wares were laid out on a long wooden table, which after looking away and looking back turned out to be a giant Knorr pasta packet. I believe this all happened in 3rd person.



*I think getting out of beds in nonlucids is a lucidity/awareness trigger -- will have to investigate how to encourage this).
**This is actually the second time I've transformed my body into a woman's in a mirror while lucid, but for some reason I always turn into butterfaces. Also not sure why I keep doing this. Why, lucid mind, why?

Sep 2 2018

I went to bed with strong intentions to become lucid, as well as a solid plan for what to do once I became lucid. I was trying the anchoring method I mentioned in another thread, anchoring positive and confident memories with the sensation of touching my thumb and forefinger together. I had a phrase burnt into memory to repeat nonverbally once I became lucid (to replace "Clarity now!"): "Clear sight, clear sound, clear touch. Grounded. Calm, confident. I can stay in this dream as long as I want" (in retrospect this is extremely long, but I think I'll try it out for a few new nights anyway). I also used my standard mantra "I will become lucid in my next dream"/"In every dream tonight" in combination with "In my next dream, I look at my hands and realize that I'm dreaming". In the future I will stick with only "IWBLIMND" since it's more succint and sets a clear intention for the immediate future, rather than a broad concept of "every dream".

I awoke at 1:18 am in a somewhat strong paralysis with extremely vivid imagery (not dreamlike, more like imagination). There was a man, possibly me, conjuring lightning circularly all around him. The lightning was blue, white, and green. I awoke again at 2:47 am. I remembered several dreams involving my fiance and my dog. In the first, I was at the elementary portion of my high school (it's K-12) and I swerved my car to narrowly miss my dog, who spontaneously started running out at me in the street. I got out of the car and was rubbing his front leg and paw. I noticed that his paw had too many joints and was curled in too much. Somehow this felt connected to a drive through.

In the next dream, I'm in a living room with a wrap-around bar counter. I think I've been here in a dream before. I'm watching Bob Ross on TV painting thick brushstrokes -- X's, C's, and U's -- over an already finished landscape. My dog jumps off the counter. I'm trying to remember what to do tomorrow, two important things in the morning and night.

My next set of dreams came after WBTB. In the first, one of my cousins was referred to as "3". There was an interesting story about diving, and D&D. I vividly remember descending in a well, looking up as the light was blocked out by the silhouette of a monster (Demogorgon?), although I didn't feel fear. Next, I was in an arcade or bowling alley, some sort of indoor entertainment place. I left my fiance to go to an adjoining room from the lobby and get ice cream. There was a girl there who was going in the same direction as me, and called me a "creeper" jokingly. She was trying to be funny or cute in the way she was getting her ice cream. I was friendly but not overly so. I got maybe 4 flavors of ice cream, in sort of a flight. In the next dream, I'm an intruder in a man's house. He has a lot of weapons strewn about, some intricate compound and traditional bows, swords, guns, blowdarts, etc. I go through room after room and find the man, he's in his mid 50s or 60s. He threatens me with a long, thin, metal pole, and I think he threatned to castrate me with it. He transports me back to some memory of 1950's New Orleans with a McDonalds, and a small building with an advertisement to "teleport you to the Science Museum". The visuals are faded, blackish, and all the buildings look like plywood.

In the next dream, I'm at Sonic at night/early morning with my fiance. She's handed me a cup, but I threw it away; there are two crumpled cups beside it. I understand it to be sonic, but it's more like someone's backyard, there aren't any lights or servers or menus, just the standard sonic table and trash can, as well as an overhead cover. A group of foreign men walk by, talking about wanting some cervezas. In the next dream, I'm going over some train tracks covered in water, in a swamp (I've been here before as well). The waves are rounded like tiled hills -- at certain points they are covered in grass, at other times they're just water/waves. I see the sasquatch.

My old boss is giving me cryptic hints about something, laughing about it. We're in the woods, sort of. Something about eating a spider/the dust that comes out when you crush the spider. Possibly my fiance was warning me not to eat it. I eat the dust, and then eat the crumpled spider husk too.

Next I had a dream about DreamViews! It was something about inline comments/spoilers; I remember red and purple text. There were other sites too -- DreamBattles and DreamWars (reenactments, maybe I read about this before).



*Slept for a really long time hoping to get lucid, and kept trying to go back to sleep. After this frustration, I decided to not get bummed out when I don't get lucid. It doesn't help. And there's always tomorrow night

Aug 28 2018

I'm in my childhood church. On the altar there's some kind of human sacrifice of women going on. I remember also being around the sound booth (I was here a lot as a teenager). There are scenes in the youth room and parking lot as well, and they're all very dark, but I can't remember what was happening.

I'm in college again, but my curriculum is changing. I'll have to take a lot of advanced math classes I didn't have to take before. I'm really concerned but my fiance is trying to convince me it'll be easy, she starts drawing squiggles with her pencil on some paper in some sort of parallelogram (squiggles all going out from one point or line). I consider changing my major to Psychology, but I'll have to start with Psych 113 (whatever that is).

Aug 29 2018

As I was falling asleep, I did progressive relaxation, thought about a couple of new mantras* to see which felt right, and then started meditating on my breath, focusing on the tip of my nose. After a while I realized my body was mostly paralyzed. I decided to make the most of it and try to WILD. When I first thought of this, I got some pretty in-depth HI and imagined visuals, very vivid. But after that I spooked myself or something, and I couldn't get it to the same level of vividness for the next thirty or so minutes. So I MILDed on one of my new mantras and eventually moved and broke the paralysis.

In the first dream I remember, I was driving around my WL car. It was hard to handle (like trying to legally drive a car in video games) and I kept bobbing and weaving and turning around. My viewpoint was shifting between first and third person. I was driving around a warped version of the city I live in, and ended up running some stops signs or red lights. At some point some cops pulled out of a parking lot and started following me, but didn't turn their lights on. I lost them and went to an interstate ramp, but I didn't want to get on the interstate for some reason, so I was stuck between the ramp and the exit (it was on the left, whereas they're usually on the right). I had to wait for the lanes to clear out so I could back up and get off the ramp -- quite stressful. I think this happened twice.

In the next dream, it felt like an FA although I don't think it was. My dog was in it, which is odd because although I see him all day (probably more than my fiance) I've only ever seen him in my dreams once. We're in a darkened bedroom/living room combination. I walk downstairs and we're talking about somewhere we need to go. I'm possibly worried about an intruder? Slight shift and I'm going outside, I open the door and my dog almost makes it out but I grab his hind leg and put him back inside. Before or after that I caught him eating some crumbs off the ground.

Scene shift again and I'm sitting on something or laying on the grass on the side of the house, looking up at the sky. I notice some lights in the sky, like heat lightning. Then (separately) I notice I can see lights on the clouds, and realize they're coming from my phone! Even with dream logic I'm amazed that my light can travel so far to the clouds from my phone (I recall a similar experience from my childhood with a high-powered search flashlight). I try to shine the phone's light on a tree that's hangning overhead, and I see the patterns of the leaves on the clouds above! I also notice 2 moons, then 3, some redder or foggier than others, but mostly the same size. I wouldn't call it semi-lucid, but I was seriously questioning the world. I think I should try to add looking at the sky to my dream routine, since most of the time I'm looking at the ground or my immediate surroundings, and seeing these inconsistencies may help with getting lucid.

In the next dream I'm in a fitness center or some similar place. I'm sitting or laying down in these lanes, aiming my feet to sort of louge through the lanes. This is coupled with a video game-like view with arrows showing which direction I should go. At some point I turn around and lie prone, trying to go backwards, but my feet are dragging so I have to manually push myself. I'm sort of in a cobra pose with my back underneath this large pullup bar type thing (black metal wrapped in foam). Eventually I reach the end with a lobby or something similar (carpeted, reminds me of a Chuck E Cheese). I see someone I went to school with who I didn't really know, and I'm sort of embarassed. I say something stupid like "I'm having a Shiatsu massage**". She responds with something nice but is clearly weirded out.

The dream shifts again and I'm in some kind of locker room. Another less-than-acquaintance from HS is there and is trying to convince the coach that he should recognize/remember him. He kept saying "I'm Double-D! Don't you remember me?" and the coach humiliated him. I think my dog may have been eating crumbs off the floor here too.



*"I am a master/natural at lucid dreaming" - meh; "I look at my hands and realize I am dreaming" - solid; "I calmly take control of the world I've created" - good for focusing on stabilization, but it's a mouthful.

**Of course I pronounced "massage" the british way, probably because I just watched S1E3 of Black Books, "Grapes of Wrath", which is arguably the best episode of anything ever.