Bubble

Jan. 21, 2003:
I've been studying that so much I dream about studying for it. I had a nightmare the other night that I was taking the Art History exam and they'd invented a brand new type of architecture that was on the test.

Feb. 15, 2003:
I had this dream about a farm, only the farm was failing and everything... it was like everything was going to hell, and nothing was working out... all the the buildings around it, etc., were failing... and it worked like a sort of medieval manor and everything, well, we were under attack by enemies, to boot, and had to keep retreating, losing more and more land, and then there was a flood the destroyed all of the crops.

As for the family... there was the dad, who in the dream was 'my' father, and he was a real jackass, and he ran the farm/manor like a dictator, and then there was his younger brother, aka 'my' uncle, who was this little bald man with a deformed back, but he was very crafty, very shrewd, and knew a LOT more about what was going on than the guy supposedly in charge... and then there was 'my' sister, who was like drop-dead gorgeous and was marrying some nobleman... and then there was me. Boo, me. I found out that not only was I not getting ANY inheritance, 'my' dad was paying for her education but not for mine, and it made me insanely pissed off. That and I had fallen in love with some guy who was supposedly of a "lower" class than me and therefore 'my' dad was incredibly disappointed in me and thought I was a failure or something.
And, of course, there was a flood. And we got attacked, and buildings were abandoned, and the peasants starved and whatnot.
I guess this wasn't a very cheerful dream...

Original journal entry dated Sept. 10, 2002:

First part is unrelated to the second, they just kinda faded into each other - I was with my family, only it was with my uncle I's extended family. My brother was there, but in the dream he was a little sister instead of a little brother. I dreamt we needed gas, but first we stopped at this one restaurant, and there were lots of badgers inside, and I talked to a waitress who was a friend of my mom's, she was complaining about her hours. Then I went with my family, we needed to get gas, for some reason they were filling up cereal boxes with it and carting them around, I told them this was really really stupid and they told me to either shut up or walk, so I got out of the car and started screaming at them and threw my box away, and made my brother/sister get out too. Then their car blew up. And Melissa Etheridge, in the guise of Alice from The Brady Bunch, came and saved everybody and gave my brother and I a ride home in her truck.

Ok, it's funny when I write it down, but in the dream I was very, very angry and upset and screaming at the top of my lungs. I hope I wasn't yelling in my sleep again.

There was a vaguer dream slightly beforehand but I don't know if it belongs with the one I'm about to describe. It was... sky-rides. You know, like the buckets that go along those lines, between the poles, and people sit in them... sort of... yeah, me and mom and my aunt and uncle were riding those, I think it was on the way to the tour... they were almost like a monorail but hung upside down on the line and they were open to the air.

Then the nightmare, less angry and family-oriented and far more creepy. I had a dream that mom and her friend, for whatever stupid reason they had, decided to go on this one tour with my uncle K and aunt L. It was through something called "The Basement", a really big haunted region, and it was supposed to be this awesome, scary tour, with the catch that all of the haunted stuff was real. Actually, "The Basement" was only a section of the total area, there were other places with names like "The Attic" and stuff, but I forgot the names, and they were pretty minor areas compared to The Basement anyway (it was the biggie). So we got split up from aunt and uncle and lost our tour group, and it was all grey and misty and totally deserted, and I was scared shitless. Mom told me that she went on the tour a long, long time ago with my dad and she didn't see any ghosts, really, except for one that bit her on the top of the head, except that was at the Carnival, which was a ways off. Lori Beth only seemed mildly disappointed that we hadn't seen anything so far. I was wishing that I could magically and instantly teleport right out of the place, since I was terrified and I hadn't even actually SEEN anything. Mom told me that if I got really scared I could go and find my uncle, since he was some sort of weird anti-ghost void type person (i.e. could repel ghosts). We were getting closer to this one old house type place and my mother's friend was debating whether or not we should go inside. I personally didn't want to go anywhere, much less any place that looked that ominous. It wasn't the usual Victorian mansion, more like an old farmhouse but a very large one that a richer family would own (like a plantation house only not so, you know, Southern or elaborate).

Then I woke up absolutely terrified

Original journal entry dated July 14, 2002:

I dreamed I was on a road-trip with my aunt and uncle, except that it was like a video-game in that I could save at certain points and then "play" from my last save-point. My cat, Abby, was with us, and she fell out the window, but they refused to stop the car so I could go and get her, even though she was in the middle of traffic. So I screamed at the top of my lungs until they stopped the car. Miraculously, my cat had not been flattened and seemed perfectly fine, though I wondered if maybe she actually HAD gotten hit and seemed ok but was bleeding internally. Then I vaguely remember what was possibly a different dream, there was a lot of art involved, paint and colors and rainbows and stuff, and something about silk.

Original journal entry dated July 15, 2002:

It was sort of a waking-dream, a daydream, as I unsuccessfully tried to fall asleep. All I could manage was a light snooze. All the same, I imagined that I was leafing through my old Bible.
I don't consider myself a religious person; all the same, it had significance for me. I hated that old Bible because it was such an ugly teal color, and because the vinyl was cracked, and because it was dog-leafed from being studied and being in my backpack. I flipped through the pages and saw where they had been highlighted. There were a lot of highlighted passages, stuff that I was supposed to study for class. My old Bible was heavily highlighted, mostly in yellow, and I always hated how the pages were so thin that the yellow marker leaked through them and then you could see the black on the other side, and it made them so hard to read. In any case, I really hated that Bible.
I had to buy it for class - the King James version. And I hated it because my mother had had to buy the cheapest one in the store. I think I was looking for one verse - one particular verse - that would answer everything, every question I had ever had, and it wasn't there. All of the passages in smudgy black ink on cheap paper, highlighted in yellow, that I had had to study for so many hours for my classes, didn't hold the answers. The verse that I was looking for just didn't exist.

I took 3 mg melatonin before bed. I don't know if it did my dreams any good, but I slept pretty well.

I dreamed that I was staying at somebody's house... a couple, who were maybe in their 60s. I don't remember the man very well, but the woman had shoulder-length dyed brown hair and wore sort of flowy pastel blue clothing with lots of jewelry. Their house was on the edge of the water. It was mostly open to the air, with pastel curtains hung between pillars. It reminded me a lot of some of the houses in Florida. When I asked about hurricanes, they said they'd rather live on the edge of the water than relocate to a hotel on slightly higher ground where they would just drown anyway.

Then, there was some sort of hurricane/typhoon. The house was blown to pieces. Somehow, the couple was unaffected by the craziness going on around them, but extremely concerned about me. Even though I hung on, I ended getting blown away.

The dream shifted. I was entering a city that was built on the water. I descended on the city from the air, somehow. The houses' walls were made of white plaster, and the rooftops were glittering ceramic tiles in all sorts of jewel tones. The architecture reminded me a lot of the American Southwest. There were canals between all of the houses. Somehow, all of this was on top of a mesa that rose out of the sea. I recall that I was able to get into the city because my cousin J helped me get a passport.

The environment around the mesa reminded me a lot of coastal South Africa. There was a cave system inside of the mesa, with different levels to it, all of them filled with enough water to pilot a boat around. The poorest people lived in boats in the lowest levels of the cave system (which also opened to the sea, through a tunnel that looked very mouth-like). The richest people lived in the houses on top of the mesa. The lowest level was very dimly lit, and the cave walls were made of sort of a brown clay.

I was at the lowest level, and suddenly had a boat. My boat was a little house-boat, about as small as a house-boat can get. The lowest level of the mesa, where I was, had terraces, with waterfalls. I thought the sound of one particular waterfall was very annoying, so I tried to pilot my boat to a higher level. One of the other residents was an extremely skinny man with tan skin and a shaved head. He stopped me and said they wouldn't allow boats at the higher levels, because the water was too shallow. I thought that sounded like bullshit, but turned around anyway.

The dream shifted. I was somehow involved in a plot to detonate a bomb somewhere in Sweden. I don't remember why. I remember moving there because my friend had moved there to teach English (which she does in real life) even though I really wanted to move to Norway instead.

My great grandfather lived in a run down little shack there, and wore a ratty red robe. I remember thinking that he looked very thin and frail. He was trying to tell me in broken English that what I was doing was evil, and begging me not to do it. I was doing it for his good as well as my own, although I don't remember how. After I had completed the task, I was able to move my great grandfather to a much better apartment. He still wore the same ratty red robe, and he refused to talk to me.

I woke up, rolled over.

Dreamed my roommate was talking about getting married to one of our other friends, but I don't recall anything else.

I don't recall my dreams from last night, beyond that my mother was in them. At one point, I woke up because I felt cold. I know I had dreams... I just can't recall them. This has happened a few nights this week. It's weird for me, because my dream recall is usually pretty good.

Maybe as I go through the day, I'll remember and then edit this post.

Edit: I recalled the dream as I was eating dinner.

I dreamed I went to eat at an old buffet restaurant with my brother and mother. It was ugly, with lots of cheap wood paneling and muddy-looking murals of pine trees. The carpet was a sort of ugly beige pattern. The interesting thing about the chain was that it was a combo buffet/ "real" restaurant, so there was also a regular menu in addition to the buffet, but nobody ever really went there for anything but the buffet. So, they had regular servers, but very rarely did anybody order off of the dinner menu.

My mother was commenting on how they couldn't keep servers there because they only paid the server minimum wage (servers make an average of $3 per hour in many states in the US because it's expected that their tips will make up the rest) and most people didn't tip their servers at buffets/tip enough, because they didn't feel like their server "did enough".

I don't remember if the food was any good. If I don't remember... I guess not.

I had a LOT of trouble falling asleep, possibly due to weaning myself off of decaf (which still has a very small amount of caffeine in it).

I dreamed I was roaming around Seattle, only Seattle had grown to the size of New York and a lot of the buildings were in ruins. I was on my way somewhere with my brother and mother and traffic was so heavy that we couldn't get onto the main road at all... it just didn't let up. We were in a parking lot and mom announced we were leaving, but she and my brother left without me.

I had a black pickup truck, though, and I tried to drive that out of the parking lot. I ended up driving into an area that was nothing but steep inclines and loose gravel, and I couldn't keep my truck from sliding all over the place, so I got out of it and slung it over my shoulder so I could try to climb up the hill.

The whole place (which was inside of an alleyway) was full of archaeological digs, but they were all digging up stuff like old dog tags and license plates. I accidentally blundered through one of the digs and then found my way in through some tunnels to a hidden homeless shelter. I asked a woman there how to find my way back onto the street and she told me I had to navigate back through the dig site, or through the building we were in, which was full of labyrinthine hallways.

I decided this sucked and did a non-lucid rewind back to the parking lot. This time, I got into the truck with mom and my brother BEFORE mom pulled out of the parking lot.

Things got blurry. I was no longer in a truck, I was in a white car with a broken window. My friend A__ was driving. It was difficult for him to drive and steer because one of the wheels was missing a tire. I had a large kitchen knife with me, and I had it in my hand and was dangling it out the window. Part of the road was made of paper, so I was running the edge of it along the road.

I thought maybe that wasn't a good idea, though, so I hid it under the car seat as we passed a group of squad cars. Suddenly, everything was dark, like it was nighttime, and we were explaining to the cops what we were doing in the parking lot.

I was no longer with A__. I was with the Doctor from Dr. Who and we were running through the city on some sort of mission... I don't remember. I woke up.

Last night, when I lay down to sleep, I resolved not to attempt to induce a WILD. The reason is that I have been tired the past 2 days, possibly due to waking up between REM cycles for my attempts.


#1 - I dreamed, but don't remember it. I woke up, because I was hot, but immediately went back to sleep.

#2 - I was in class, in a first grade class, but I was my real age (nearly 30). I don't recall the reason for being in the class, there was some reason that I understood in the dream but that was never made entirely clear. I was not an intern or TA, I was definitely a student, and all the other students seemed aware that I didn't "belong". My teacher was a big woman. At one point, she was asking me questions in class out of a work book. I was answering correctly, but she was behaving as if I was not and "Correcting" me. Finally, it got to be too much and I stood up and yelled at her. She started to cry. Later, I told another student, "You know I'm actually 23 years old, right?" (note: I'm not 23). The student acted shocked.

#3 - This dream phased into another one where I was in a romantic relationship with a guy. I was staying with his family. He was kind of a blond "jock" type... not really my type. We had sex in the shower...his family knew we were very good friends, but I don't think that they thought we were involved in that way.

Then, the family attempted to buy a nicer house, but it turned out that there was a bankruptcy that the wife had forgotten to mention on the paperwork. Her husband began to yell at her, and she began crying. The real estate agent told them that they wouldn't be able to get another loan for something like 1500 years.

#4 - My aunt has agreed to give a family friend's friend a ride in their old red Dodge Caravan. We have to make special accommodations for her in the van because she's disabled. For some reason, this involves my uncle trying to fit a shopping cart into the van (he claimed it was her wheelchair). We finally manage to fit it in the back and go to pick her up. She's inside of my aunt's house. Their driveway is very steep in real life. My aunt pulls most of the way up the driveway, but not all the way up, and the poor woman has to walk the rest of the way to the van. She is very overweight, but it's not due to her overeating, she has some kind of hormonal disorder that causes this and makes her bones very soft. She has many small braids in her hair and is wearing a purple dress. Walking the 10 feet to the van is painful for her, but my aunt doesn't seem to care and won't pull up farther. I get out of the van and help the woman walk the rest of the way to the van, and help her climb inside. She thanks me, then sits down on the seat looking very relieved.

I wake up. In real life, I have gathered my sheet up somehow and am clutching it like it's a teddy bear.

I haven't documented my dreams for a while, so I lost a few. Here are the ones I remember (from while on vacation and afterward):

Dreamed that I had to go get my grandfather (grandpa M) and bring him somewhere - a party, or something. It was sort of important. Along the way, we got dumped into a (freezing) river. He sank to the bottom, and I had to dive down and search around for him and drag him back up, worried it was too late. Every time we got to the surface, he got dragged back down again and I had to fetch him. Amazingly, none of this killed him, and we got to the other side.

Dreamed that I lived in a house - sort of decrepit, or maybe more like a trailer, or cobbled together, but anyway, it didn't have enough walls, some parts were just... open. I knew that there were dangerous things and people living in the hills and was constantly worried, especially since the house was so exposed in the parts that didn't have walls.

Dreamed that I had a little brother/cousin/kid/whatever, a toddler, only I was unable to take care of him, so a former classmate of mine took custody of him. I felt like shit since the main reason I couldn't take care of him was that I didn't have a good enough job. Even so, the place they lived in was very bare, almost no furniture, and not very safe. There was a part on an upstairs landing with no rail at all, period (for some reason, I knew a giant planter was supposed to go there, but there wasn't there and that's why there was just a drop with no railing).

Original dream dated 07/20/2008:

Dreamed that we (my family) were in a house packing. I was being followed around by a very annoying blonde-haired little girl who had several dolls. She wanted some ceramic stuff packed (dolls and tea pots) and I was trying to pack them carefully so they didn't break, but she was being very careless with them. In addition, the house we were in spooked me very badly. It always felt like something was there watching you, and some rooms were so bad, nobody would turn their back on them. It was bitterly cold in the dream, even though when I woke up the apartment was actually quite warm.

Had a second dream:
Dreamed that I was helping liquidate another store that was going out of business, only this one was full of odds and ends and books, and I had to sleep there overnight, which was very uncomfortable. I was very tired and everything, but the boss kept coming in and asking if we'd gotten everything sold yet, packed up and sent out yet, etc.
Then, my family was looking at different houses to rent (in the dream), one house had sort of like a river with a bridge across it, it was really cool but expensive (and the room they were renting was not large enough). The houses were within walking distance to a cool thrift shop.
Anyway, it was the 4th of July and my family wanted to go see fireworks. We wound up climbing up on this embankment with a bunch of other people. I dreamed that my aunt was driving the car to the bridge where we eventually climbed the embankment, only the car was being pulled along by cables and beads of light, and I kept wondering how we didn't fall off the bridge.
After the fireworks show, there was a woman putting on a juggling performance, only it was almost more like belly dancing. There was a story and a theme, with music. I somehow managed to get digital recordings of the music, and the performer said it was o.k. to share them with other people who'd seen the show and wanted the music.

07/07/08

Another nightmare.

Dreamt that I was on a trip with my cousins on my dad's side of the family, we drove up to an old decrepit building that looked like a warehouse, it was some religious thing and we had to go inside.

It was sort of like a conveyor belt/rollercoaster ride, and very dark inside, with all sorts of terrifying machinery. Halfway through I was invited to pick something up by a kind of monster/beast, but I declined, and said that I didn't want to take anything out with me. IT looked angry, but it let me go.

I wanted to tell the other people waiting in line the trick about not taking/keeping anything, but was worried the trick would not work for them. I also wanted to accompany my cousins back in even though I was terrified, but was worried that the thing would not let me go free a second time.

07/09/08

Dreamed about college again. Yeah, still having college nightmares.

Dreamed that I was taking an English course with Prof. Dimino, but hadn't been going to classes/hadn't kept up on my homework, and now I was terrified that I was going to fail and there was nothing I could do about it.

Sept. 5, 2003:
I dreamed that there was this blonde disabled woman, who somehow despite her disabilities and her family (her mom and sister were both real bitches) had overcome all of these hurdles, risen to the top of her class... her one dream was to go to Belgium, and she got the chance, but then her sister screwed it up for her...

Then for some reason, both of her family members were witches and made people hallucinate and act crazy. And they killed a lot of people. The end.

Sept. 2, 2003:
I had this dream that my uncle had a fish-tank, only instead of fish there were hamsters swimming around in it. When I asked, "Aren't you worried they're gonna drown?" and he was like "No, they've lived in water all their life, they fell in there when they were babies". Then I dreamed I was in an office doing secretary work. There was some other stuff, but I've forgotten it already.

Sept. 4, 2003:
I had a dream, but I don't remember very much. My alarm clock went off and I hit the snooze button. Then I had a very realistic dream that mom called me on my cell phone, and the reception was really really bad, but I woke up halfway through the dream (so I know it was a dream).

I've had weird dreams, and I haven't been sleeping well... I don't know why I feel so ill but I just can't sleep. I reached that state of overtiredness that isn't caused by a lack of sleep, so much as too much stress. I mean that state where you're actually almost hallucinating, and you're paranoid because you're jumping at stuff that you see out of the corner of your eye, but isn't actually there. And all of the freaky dreams don't help either.

I mean, aside from the hamster-fishtank dream, I had a dream I was talking with Mom on the cell phone, but I had a nightmare too. I had a dream that I woke up and somebody was standing in my bedroom, but then I dreamed that I fell asleep again, or something. I know there wasn't anybody in my room, for several reasons. The first: my door was locked. I always lock and close my door when I go to sleep. Second, none of my roommates are like 6'3 or 6'4" tall and male. Third, it had that nice, surreal quality that makes you think "Hmm, I'm dreaming."

April 22, 2003:
I know I've been studying too much when I have a dream that I live in a library!

April 27, 2003:
Every time I close my eyes, I dream that I'm studying - or I'm in a library, or something. The insomnia's worse than the dreams.

April 28, 2003:
All night I had dreams about exams - that as I was going to take my exam, a huge tornado hit, and I had to go and hide in one of the offices. For some reason, my old Geography professor was doing paperwork there. I was supposed to fill out this form explaining that I couldn't take my exam because of a tornado. Then my brother got hit by a car with these 2 annoying prissy girls in it. They broke his leg and they kept trying to compensate us for it by giving us makeup... my mom was really pissed off, so was I, he didn't seem to give a damn, and Mom told them she'd see them in court. Then I found out that I'd been exempt from the exam to begin with - EXCEPT that I was supposed to have turned in ANOTHER form verifying that I was, indeed, exempt...

April 29, 2003:
I had a dream that there was some sort of alternate dimension, and we were on a film project to film it, or something. And it was just a huge movie, and all of the people in there were actors - they knew they were actors, and would go to other dimensions to "star" in them (like movies). So there was this one, and he had really long black hair, and he was supposed to be like the antihero/supervillain type, and he starred in this one dimension as a swordsman (a la Highlander) and then hopped to the next to become an evil sorcerer. But he didn't start out as one - just as a sort of twisted, misguided sorcerer. Then he got into a fight with this humongous hairy beast, and it killed his son, and he got all angsty/dangerously insane, and created a dimensional bubble where he screwed with reality. Then he turned into a woman.