Bubble

Dreamed I was in grade school, but I was in school in Japan.They had started painting murals all over lunch rooms "to encourage kids to eat all of their food." The administrator in charge of planning this said not everybody would like all of the murals because "some are very soft".

The administrator is standing in front of one of the murals, speaking about it. The light is bright, artificial indoor lighting. The mural is a goofy cartoon version of a kid running - but more like an American Peanuts-style cartoon than a Japanese one. The colors are bright; the kid's skin is a peach color. When he talks about the "softer" murals, I can't see them, but I imagine what one might look like, and it is a pink fuzzy blob.

The lunch room has tables like a standard American lunch room (the long brown tables with benches) and the kids are sitting down and eating at them.

They also implemented a new program where they would give kids "tickets" for lunch item menus like meat, salad, dessert, etc. They warned kids not to use up all of their meat tickets at the beginning of the week, or they'd end up eating salad the rest of the week. One particularly enterprising kid bought tickets off of the other kids and "sold" them in exchange for doing his homework, etc. The teacher found a hoard of salad tickets in his desk because nobody wanted them.

I see his desk full of salad tickets. I imagine the child as a husky little boy with short, messy brown hair. Perspective shift - I see a child in line, handing a lunch server a meat ticket, while there is a voice-over of the teacher explaining about the tickets.

The dream shifts a little. I'm still in Japan, but now I am an exchange student with the ability to alter reality to suit my whims - just a little bit. While walking up the steps to a one-story brown brick building (the school), I change the color of another kid's shoes. I walk through the door after him.

---

Then I dreamed about eating at a restaurant that included a shower with the meal. I ate a seafood meal that is basically calamari, mussels, and clams mixed together and sauteed. The inside of the restaurant was a bit dark, and the seafood was just sort of plunked down on the plate (and a little tasteless).

Then I took a long shower, but it became so long that I worried that the restaurant's owners would be pissed. The shower was a stand-up shower with no tub and a sliding door. I had a blue-green loofah.

---

I dreamed I bought a house right off of the highway. It was supposed to be very close to where I currently live, just a little bit further out and with a much nicer yard. It cost me about $500,000. When I showed it to my mother, she liked the yard. I decided that we needed more space, and there were 3 empty undeveloped lots behind and off to the side of it, so I bought those as well - my reasoning being that we could plant a garden there. They made kind of a "U" shape around my neighbor's house, and I got nervous that there would be some conflict over who owns the land since up until now, the neighbor had just sort of used it by default because nobody owned it/was using it. I was also unsure if it was too much space, and if my mother's garden would really extend beyond the original house's garden.

Anyway, the house was up on top of a steep hill, with steps up to it. It was a little one-story house with light blue siding, plenty of windows for natural lighting, and lots of foliage around it. In the dream, it was summer and the sunlight was bright. The whole thing seemed very cheery. There was a patio in back with a few patio chairs and a table, and the yard behind it was lush and full of trees and flowers. The predominating color of the foliage was a light spring green, and you could hear birds in the garden. I told my mother that if you went down the steps to the sidewalk, you could walk into downtown. I apologized about the noise from traffic but explained that it was a great house and the traffic noise had brought the price down to make it more affordable.

Original entry dated July 10, 2002:

First I was sort of at school. Only it was like band-camp, and all of my friends played the trombone.

I was in the cafeteria getting food with two of my friends, whom I don't have in real life, they weren't real people... one of them was sort of pudgy with sandy hair and whined a lot, the other one was a goth chick with long black hair.

Anyway, in the cafeteria there were actually 2 food counters, and I was thinking that this was good because the lines used to be terribly long, and about how this was my last day there, and I never had to play guitar again (yes I was the only person there who played guitar). So we got in the car to leave and I was going with my friends, I was gonna stay with the goth chick over the summer, she hadn't been to her childhood home in years. It was an old victorian house. She was talking about how her parents were really restrictive and never let her do anything, and when she was in the yard she was never allowed to look around the left side of the house.

So we went into the house and it turned out to be haunted. There was this one demon/ghost who... well... had a really big rack. And green hair. She was chasing us around. And this one ninja dude who kept sneaking up on us and trying to catch/kill us. She was dressed kind of like Lum, only... wearing less.

For some reason I was wearing a full Victorian gown, and I kept falling over and getting tangled up in it.

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.

Nothing interesting. Dreamed I was working at a restaurant/pizza place waiting tables... or I was supposed to be, anyway. Instead, I was messing around with my laptop and webcam and trying not to get caught goofing off. I came up with a recipe for Spaghetti Carbonera which became the house special, and I had very specific instructions for cooking it that I passed on to the rest of the cooks.

Prior to bed, I had 2 margaritas and a daiquiri... I'm not shocked that my attempts last night were unsuccessful and my dream recall was terrible.

I went to bed focusing on the idea of awareness and lucidity. I focused specifically on the goal of meeting some friends for lunch at an inn in a fairly stable setting I visit (it is often where I wind up when I succeed at a WILD attempt). One of my other lucid goals was to go to a concert with a different friend of mine.

I did not go lucid, but focusing on my goals was not entirely fruitless.

In the non-lucid dream that followed, I DID meet up with some family friends for lunch. Lunch was in some sort of fast-food restaurant. For some reason, I couldn't stand the idea of ordering food; normally, I love french fries but for some reason in this dream, the thought of eating one made my stomach turn! I think that while I was asleep, I may have actually felt ill from the alcohol I ingested and reacted to the in-dream (very vivid) smell of french fries with actual nausea. Instead, I went and got a slushie from the slushie machine... a blue raspberry slushie. The whole restaurant had kind of an "outer space" theme to it.

I woke up briefly. I had set my intention to not move between dreams but EVERY TIME I woke up last night, I moved and then thought "d'oh!". I attempted a WILD but without success and lapsed into non-lucidity.

I was in a car with a friend and her teenaged daughter. We were driving down a highway in Nebraska, trying to find a restaurant... so we could go to lunch. Haha. The dream got a little blurry. We stopped at a truck stop that turned out to be kind of like a... club? My friend and the daughter disappeared once I went into the club. Instead, they were replaced by my friends A_ and two other "friends" I have never met in real life. All of us were wearing baggy, colorful animal-themed footie pajamas that looked kind of like animal costumes. The darker-skinned guy was wearing a costume that looked like a blue alligator... I don't remember what A_ was wearing... and I was wearing a big fuzzy rabbit costume or something. The whole environment felt like a combination of a comic book convention and a rave.

We went to the roof of the club, which had become kind of a skyscraper thing. To get up there you rode an escalator but it had been designed by a crazy artist so that it became so steep that everybody going up to the top had to support each other so they could even stay on the thing. Then you were supposed to get back to the ground floor on a giant slide. At the top there were several bands playing in kind of a "battle of the bands", including 3 identical-looking guys with acoustic guitars and huge puffy hairdos who were playing some stuff that sounded kind of like... I dunno... acoustic Linkin Park? Anyway, they lost the battle and their reaction was to start sobbing and then jump over the railing of the roof and fall to their deaths (they were 5 stories up). I saw this in slow motion from outside of the club. For some reason, at the time I thought the whole thing was hilarious.

Again, another night where I didn't remember much. Frustrating. My sleep schedule has been irregular, which doesn't help.

In the last dream of the night, I walked a few miles down the road from my aunt's house to a convenience store that doesn't actually exist. I wanted to buy 2 gallons of milk, some food, and some candy bars. I didn't have enough money for the entire purchase on one card, so I had to do 3 separate transactions for less than $4 each. The clerk put each transaction in its own plastic bag.

I began to walk home. The milk was heavy and somehow both my hands and arms were full, and the bags were unwieldy. I stopped at another store to meet up with my mother. For some reason I set the bags down momentarily and went into the store. When I returned, my bags were gone. I didn't have any more money left to buy any more milk or food, so I curled up in a ball on the ground and began to sob.

I haven't actively been trying to induce lucid dreams, and I've been too distracted to really focus on my lucid activities, so my recall this week is pretty terrible. It'll improve once I'm less tired and distracted.

I recall one dream from last night.

I was with my mom, aunt, and brother. We were looking for a restaurant to eat at. We found one past a mall (in real life, the mall was long ago turned into a mega-church), and it was a donut shop. It was always late night in this dream.

The donuts were the best donuts. The. Best. Donuts. I have ever had, either asleep or awake. They were Krispy Kreme style donuts and they were so super amazing that my aunt, mother, and I kept going back to the little donut shop. Their special was something called a "Southern Treat" which is a thing that exists in real life. It's a hamburger put between two donuts and fried. In real life, I think that's disgusting. In the dream, it was the most appetizing looking thing in the world, but I kept forgetting to buy one every time we went to the shop.

It wasn't a lucid dream, but I never eat in my dreams - ever - and one of my goals has been to eat something in a dream. I guess it doesn't 100% count since I wasn't lucid but at least my brain's on-task even when I'm not.

(this dream is current, as of last night)

Side notes:
WILD attempt unsuccessful. I felt the onset of paralysis, but the sound of the heater distracted me, so I was unable to "dive". Ugh. I need to not let those things distract me! I may have to turn the heat down, although then I'll have issues with being too cold. I can't wait for summer.

The second time I woke up, I just couldn't tolerate remaining on my back. It's hard to describe the sensation, beyond discomfort coupled with a compulsion to roll over onto my side.


The dreams:
1. I was wandering through a hospital, which was also a university somehow. The elevators didn't work properly. The math professor accidentally locked me in the classroom; I don't remember how I got out. I remember that there were a lot of ledges and narrow bridges you had to climb in order to navigate even the most basic parts of the building, such as the library, and thinking to myself that it was unsafe.

2. I dreamed that M--- and I were driving through a city. It was an unfamiliar city, but it was on a bay or sound of some sort. I wasn't paying attention, and M--- was driving. He drove up the metal framework of an unfinished bridge, and over the edge, into the water. I bitched at him and told him that he needed to pay attention to where bridges end. Rather than letting the car sink, I dragged it along behind me in the bay so that it floated and started the engine, using the car's engine to push us through the water faster.

3. I dreamed I was lying on a mattress with Mom and G---, and G--- was trying to tell me that if you add red paint to yellow paint, it makes green paint. I was arguing with him that it did not, although at the time I couldn't articulate why. Mom began playing with actual paint, like finger paints, and made a mess.

(Woke up, used bathroom)

4. I dreamed I was in a city with high rise buildings. The light was shining off of them.

5. I dreamed I was talking to a rheumatic old man. He had oddly-colored eyes, one was a deep blue hazel with brown in it and the other one had a brown iris shaped like a flower, where each petal had 2 dark brown dots in it, and no pupil. He had a cloth that was soaked in bleach that he would sniff, and told me about how comforting it was to him to smell it, then pressed it in my face - I wasn't too thrilled with it, although I do like the smell of bleach sometimes. He then told me about how the gene for his weird eye was recessive, and asked if any of my relatives had the recessive gene. I told him no, because he was creeping me out. His eye reminded me of a weird cat I remembered seeing (dream memory, not real), a black cat that also had oddly-colored and oddly-slanted eyes.

(woke up and went back to sleep)

6. I dreamed I was grocery shopping, and trying to select food that I thought both my brother and I would enjoy. The grocery store was dark and dingy, and the freezer cases had cloudy glass and didn't seem to close correctly or be working properly. I was loading up on junk food, thinking that we hadn't been able to afford it lately and he would be pleased. I also bought Fresca. I wanted to buy a small sample pack of different sodas, but someone had stolen 2 out of one of the sample packs and another one was nothing but grape (I hate grape). I was disappointed.

Woke up. I need to remember to perform Reality Checks more often upon waking, though.

This dream occurred in May 2008:

I had a dream about a woman with bright red hair and very, very pale skin. She was some sort of movie star, who was in love with an Austin Powers-esque adventurer/detective. She was a dancer, performing a dance on stage, it was beautiful and the costume she was wearing was made of mica or black glass. It didn't harm her, but it was sharp. When her boyfriend went to embrace her after the performance, it cut him to pieces. She had an elixir that was like the elixir of life, which was carried in a vase. She had used it once before to bring him back to life, but barely had a second dose left. She sprinkled it all over the chunks of him that were left, but barely had a drop for the last piece. She cried and tried to coax it out of the vase, but finally succeeded.

This was followed by a dream about my German professor taking my classmates and I on a trip through Germany. He was lecturing us on our grammar, and me in particular on a mistake I constantly made while conjugating certain verbs. We were traveling in trams that hung from a wire, they were open to the air and had red roofs. All of my classmates were in one, while I was in the other. Their tram stopped, but mine continued going - I was worried that I would get separated from them, but not terribly worried about being alone. I arrived at the next station, which was a building on top of a very tall pillar, and my classmates soon arrived as well. I stood in line, trying to figure out what I could eat off the menu in the station's cafeteria that wouldn't make me sick, and figured out that I could create a makeshift hot-fudge sundae from various menu items. Then, the dream ended.

01/04/2006:
"I had a very odd dream. Odd for me, in that it was a dream and not a nightmare, and had people I know in it.

I dreamed, first, that my roommate and I had gotten our other roommate a gift. The gift was a very small dog dish, with dog biscuits. He was very happy about the dog biscuits because they were from Germany. I sampled a dog biscuit and agreed that they were very good.

He was masterminding this television program where people wrestled each other live in their livingrooms, him and y were taping it, what ensued was a rampage through our livingroom where we all tried to best each other using a combination of sleeper holds, water, and dog biscuits... then everybody (K, C, me, P, M, Ky, and a whole slew of other people) decided to drive to campus, because it was the first day of classes. On the way there was this radio show where they only played the main riffs from all of the hit songs. We got stuck in traffic but nobody minded. When we got there, we continued taping the show, and small groups of people chose slightly different routes to the main part of campus. Somebody had brought a radio with and had it tuned to the same station we were listening to in the car. For some reason, everybody had been rained on, even though it had never rained, and we were wringing out each others' hair and clothes. We merged into one large group and started picking up other people along the way, acquaintances of people in the group. I think when the dream ended, we were heading toward S Hall dorms."