Exploring My Mind

Back on a steadier pace, and I think it helps that things haven't been so busy. Today's dream brought about, yet again, another recurring person.
I was in a huge hotel of sorts, that had all sorts of lavish rooms, hallways, and lobbies to explore. Present in the dream with me were my family, the girl who I've been referring to as K in a lot of my previous entries, her boyfriend, and her family. We were all there on vacation, and more than ready to relax and have a good time. Said good time is hazy, but two key moments I remembered happened in chronlogical order. First, that night, we all set up on this very cozy balcony and watched a movie that was projected onto the wall in front of us. Despite being a projection, the movie looked to be in full HD. Can't quite remember what the movie was, but it was in black and white, oddly enough.
K, sitting next to me, glanced over at me and laughed. I did the same. Everyone else with us was a little more quiet than usual, but I think they just seemed like they were absorbed into the movie. Just behind the projection, you could see the sky outside through a large opening in the hotel building, the setting sun burning up everything it could touch.
Later on the next day, we all decided to go swimming. K and I were the first ones to arrive at the pool, which as it so happened was inlaid right next to a beach. It struck me then that the whole place looked similar to a place my family and I go on vacation every year for Thanksgiving. Shaking the thought, K and I had fun swimming. However, at one point when I went under to see how long I could hold my breath, I discovered upon emerging from the water that K was no where in sight! She was just next to me a second ago, but she seemingly vanished out of thin air. I was frantic. What could have happened to her? I sprinted out of the pool, and noticed her boyfriend running down the stairs by the pool. He looked equally as frantic. I explained to him what happened, and the search began. Man, why does the plot always ramp up when the recall drops off? One thing I can say for sure: Once I get much better at having lucids, I'd love to visit this place again.
There was another smaller dream recalled when I went back to sleep. Seems my current no-alarm, wake-up-twice schedule is producing similar amounts of dreams.
I was in a virtual space. Best way I can describe it is it looked like a dream scene straight out of TRON. By my side was a cute little fluffy dog. Apparently he and I were tasked with taking down this deadly, gigantic machine that was in the middle of the area. The machine was shooting off blasts of electricity all over the place. Along the ground, however, were glowing arrows that flashed red and green corresponding to when we had to move or stop. Using these, we quickly dashed our way to the machine.
So there's the daily couple. What's interesting to me is the prevalence of K in my dreams lately. I said in my last entry that she may be a dream sign, but now I'm starting to believe it fully. As to why she's been so prevalent...well, that's a whole different thing. Her and I don't speak much IRL except for a few comments here and there on social media. Thing is, K is from a time in my life, in my past, where things were really nice. She's from one of the happier periods in my life, a period full of day-long stretches spent with friends doing fun things like we did in this dream. Lately, I've been longing for these things, and to get back to something akin to that. Therefore, I think her appearing so much in my dreams is a reflection of that. Maybe it's something else. Maybe a mix. Who can say? Ramble done.

Lately I've been changing up my sleeping routine and just not setting my alarm. It seems to be helping with recall...so far.
I was in a little house that rested on top of the clouds. The house wasn't any that I recognized, but the sight outside was beautiful. Strangely, our house was the only one like this; no others were in sight, just an endless sea of clouds.
In the house with me were my dad and my aunt. We were all gearing up to ride on some airships to this festival that would be taking place down on the surface, beneath the clouds. While we were preparing, multiple people I knew IRL also came to visit, popping up through the clouds on their own airships. The airships themselves looked like motorcycles without wheels. One guy who I didn't recognize popped up and laughed loudly, cupping his hands around his mouth and shouting towards us, "ARE YOU GUYS READY YET??"
Eventually my grandpa appeared on his own airship, parking it on the house's balcony and coming in to chat with the lot of us. Unfortunately, if we did go to that festival, I certainly don't remember it.
The next dream recalled was much smaller, and I think I had it after going back to sleep when I woke up to write the previous one.
Me and my friend AJ were in this strange place that looked like a combination between my high school and a shopping mall. /for some reason, quite a few of my dreams feature warped or weird versions of shopping centers or my high school. I don't recall much from this dream, just that AJ was trying to lead me to some place, but I ignored him, as I had a bad feeling about it. Instead, I went upstairs to check the lockers, for some reason expecting to find something in them that was apparently very important.

More radio silence for an entirely different reason this time around. These past handful of days, I've been recalling little fragments. Although they were little, however, they held important significance. Each one dealt with a pretty symbolic subject matter corresponding to stuff that's been going on in my life lately. A shame more detail for them wasn't recalled.
Which leads me to how things have been IRL these past few days. Lately, I've been undergoing a change in attitude. It was a busy week for me and my family, as we had my aunt and cousin over and we never see them since we moved, so we did a lot of stuff. One thing of note we did was go to the beach.
The beach holds a lot of meaning to me, when it comes to lucid dreaming anyways. First and foremost, it's a relaxing place. Everything about it; the sounds, the breeze, the vastness of it all. It helps that we went at dusk. It also holds meaning due to my use of it in my lucid dreaming story Dream Gazers, as a meet-up place for the protagonists' shared lucid dreams. I find myself thinking about lucid dreaming a lot whenever I go to the beach anymore, and sometimes it can bring on strong, vivid dreams. In this case, it didn't, but that's okay.
Since that night at the beach, I've sort of been re-analyzing my path in life and what I'm doing, where I'm going, what I want to do now. My life got turned upside down last year, and I've been scrambling to piece it together since then, barely able to grasp hold of something concrete. It's just difficult, sometimes, figuring yourself out, y'know? I've had to re-adjust all my expectations, all my feelings, all my views after losing someone special, and now, I think I'm starting to gain a foothold.
Multiple plans of action have been laid out before me, and in thinking hard about these things, I've felt a lot more happy and clear headed these past few days than I have in a while. I've been doing my standard LDing practices in the course of that time, but I haven't been 100% going at it, as I've busied my mind so much with the future. In any case, that's done nothing to throw me off the track, and I'm thankful for it. To cap all of these thoughts up, I remembered (and wrote down) a non-lucid this morning, with moderate detail. ^^
I was visiting my friend's house (call him A) and hanging out with the girl (K) from my prior dream (I'm starting to think she may be a dream sign) where she asked me to that dance. IRL this girl is A's niece, and I'm good friends with both of them. Strangely, A appeared to be absent. K said he was upstairs, but while we hung out down in the kitchen eating breakfast, he was no where to be seen, and we certainly couldn't hear him upstairs. What was strange about the setting of this dream was that it was shot like a movie. I could see myself in third person, and multiple dramatic effects and music scores would play when certain things happened. At one point later in the dream, I rushed back into the house, my mom and aunt following closely behind me. We were running from something outside, but I don't recall what it was, or if we even knew what it was.
Also later on in the dream, K appeared on the news. Nothing bad had happened, thankfully, but I don't remember why she was on the news or what they were talking about, yet she was sitting right across from me still. She looked at the TV with an amused expression, and we resumed our daily activities.
So that's been me these past few days. Life's just being life.

Haven't posted any entries in 4 days, but rest assured, I'm ALIVE. Rather than not posting due to no recall, however, I didn't post the entries for the 1st and 2nd of September simply because they were extremely mundane dreams.
Literally all they consisted of was me hanging out with my family and going about day to day business. Nothing really to write in depth about.
The dream I had for the morning of the 3rd (or, yesterday, as of this time of writing) was an interesting one involving the concept of inception.
My cousin was going to get married to this jerk of a guy, and I wasn't okay with it, so I decided to pull a Leonardo DiCaprio and delve into her dreams to perform inception. A dream about dreams, as it were. Deep.
And then, this morning's. All of these dreams don't have a whole lot of detail recalled, but rather, specific plot points. One thing that has been improving though is my ability to recollect these things even after falling back asleep, as usually that's enough to simply wipe my memory of it if I didn't write it down.
I was hanging out with this girl I used to know really well IRL (we haven't hung out in literal ages), and we were sitting on this outdoor park bench. Yet, half of the area was covered in what appeared to be a house. So it was like half outdoors, half house. I can't even find a good way to describe that, it was a sort of reality warp-ish type of dream scene, the kind your dream self can understand just fine, but in real life you're like 'wtf'
Anyways, strange dream scene aside, we were sitting on this bench, a nice breeze blowing through, and just sort of happily people-watching. All of a sudden, she turns to me and nervously asks if I'd like to accompany her to her school's Snowball dance. Shocked, but pleasantly surprised, I happily accept. Almost immediately, in comes a lot of people I know and associate with this girl. They just begin walking by, mumbling their thoughts about that turn of events. Sorry if this one sounded bizarrely described, but that's cuz it really was sort of bizarre. It had a nice peaceful atmosphere, but a lot of weird stuff that you'd usually only notice upon waking (or maybe not, in the event of a successful DILD, which has yet to come. But that's okay!)
Anyways, sorry for the radio silence, and happy dreaming.

This morning's recollections come to you in two flavors: Creepy and sweet.
I was in a haunted house of some sort. It looked kind of like my old house a few years back, with certain rooms being pretty much picture-perfect recreations. Most of this dream is a blurry haze to me, but what I do recall is going into the bathroom. All seemed to be normal in there, but the light switch wasn't working. I shrugged and started to head out of the bathroom, but heard a sort of sinister laugh behind me. I turned, and the entire bathtub was filled with this huge pile of towels. The pile was so huge that they were spilling out onto the floor. While this may sound really random and silly (and it is), my dream self was deeply unnerved and bothered by it. I slowly stepped towards the towels, but as I did, I heard a small hissing noise around me, as if the room was filling with some sort of gas. Before I knew it, I passed out and all went dark. The spooks are real. Piles of towels. Everybody's worst nightmare, really.
Now for sweet.
I was in a large school building that was eerily similar to my elementary school, but 5x larger and it housed college kids instead of being an elementary school. It was here that I met two Japanese friends. Sadly, I can't recall their names (it's pretty hard for me to remember DC names for some reason), but there was one boy and one girl. The boy, strangely, looked similar to Watari from Your Lie in April if you've ever seen that anime. Meanwhile, the girl didn't really look like anyone in particular. She had long, jet black hair, and a fiery air about her. Both of them hit it off with me right away, and a lot of the dream was spent hanging out with them in various parts of the school, just talking or doing random, fun things. Later on in the dream, when we were sitting by the big wall beside the stairs, I began to grow sour, as I realized I would have to go home soon. I explained it to them, and they both acted very understanding, trying to console me and saying that I'll see them again. When it came time for me to go, I headed out into the parking lot, found a bus (which had a lot of my old high school classmates on it), and rode homewards, the environments and dream scenes all looking exactly like real life, but with an ever present gray sky and a lot less busses. Glumly, I put my head against the window in my seat on the bus and thought about when I'd see those two again. I'll throw a new lucid goal on the list for future reference: Either summon or find these two DCs again. They were very pleasant people, and I was able to converse in some Japanese with them as well, since I have a basic grasp of the language. It would be fun hanging out with them while lucid.

I'm starting to notice a recurring theme in some of my dreams lately, involving me going somewhere with my girlfriend and her mom. Happened in two different dreams this morning.
My girlfriend, her mom, and I all went to a fancy cabin/store/hotel place...apparently to kill ghosts.
For some reason I had made myself a car out of minecraft textures and brought it with me. I was exploring the lodge place later on with both of them, when a green light appeared behind me. I spun around, only to find a ghost who looked like an old lady. She had an eerie, green light shining around her. She shrieked at me, her face starting to come up close to mine. Amazingly enough, I forgot if we killed the ghost or just ran away from it, but then we were back out at the parking lot, and my girlfriend's mom sped off in her car with my girlfriend, leaving me behind with my minecraft car. I decided to take it for a spin. It was glorious.
This next dream was recalled after falling back asleep and waking up my normal time.
Guess where I was at this time? A con! Guess with who? My girlfriend and her mom! Some con-goer walked up to me and sold me a pretty looking GTO book that looked thin but apparently had every chapter of GTO in it. GTO is an anime I really like, GO WATCH IT. My girlfriend was talking to this guy at the front of our booth for a while, making me a bit jealous. I ignored the feelings and went to talk with her. We talked for a while, and while we were doing so, the guy kept trying to quietly steal my GTO book, leading to me scolding him to get his own.
Multiple random people I know were at the con, hanging out at our booth. I recall a random part on one of the con days where we were all staring at a fish bowl for some reason. The con felt like a sped up version of three whole days.
That's it. I'm happy I recalled more than one! I need to start reality checking and paying closer attention to situations where my girlfriend is around or her mom.

I was in a long line that stretched from my house to (you guessed it) a warped version of my school. This is another thing I should keep an eye out for in my dreams..
I was waiting in the line with my girlfriend. Apparently there was a play going on at the school. When we got close to it, my girlfriend mysteriously disappeared and I was left wondering where I should be going. I entered the building and discovered my girlfriend's mom, who got angry at me and told me to put my two packs of luggage (which I was magically now holding) under the stage. I tried to do so, but she shouted.
"You need help with those!"
"But..not real-"
"Go get help."
I walked towards the stairs and found a manager there who told me to go put the two packs under the stage. I got annoyed, telling them that that's what I was trying to do in the first place.
I put my luggage under the stage, and headed back to the stairs, this time going down them. As I did, a large group of people headed up. They were who I assumed to be the actors for the play. I saw multiple people I knew, and a lot of them gave me dirty looks, even though some of them are friends in real life. I got to the last step and entered a large, warehouse looking place. The line was stretching all around the edges of the walls here, from left to right, filled with people. I tried to figure out where my girlfriend or my friends were, and found one of my friends who told me how stupid this was.

Remembered three different dreams last night.
I went to a party at a house I didn't recognize. A guy I know took my hat and started tossing it back and forth with another girl. I snatched the hat out of the air and they gave me disappointed looks.
This next one I recalled in a lot more detail.
I went to an old friend's apartment for a reason I can't remember. Upon arriving, I discovered none other than the plant dad from Goosebumps. I suppose we got in a fight, because soon after I was running down the stairs trying to get away, but I realized I forgot my phone, which I desperately needed. I ran back up and suddenly had a small brown block in my hand, which I used to tackle the plant dad to the ground and beat his head in, hoping he would stay down. He did not, much to my horror. And turns out my phone was in my pocket the whole time.
I ran down the stairs as quick as I could, the plant dad following close behind me. When I reached the bottom, I sadly discovered that the door had an electronic code lock. The plant dad was behind me, but instead of attacking me, he pushed me aside, opened the door, ran out into the garage of my own house, and stole our car. He drove away smiling and waving at me.
I then re-visited the same apartment during the daytime, and decided to watch TV with a group of people. Suddenly, we discovered one of them was a zombie. We freaked out and rushed to the car outside, but when we got in it, we discovered a zombie inside! I grabbed a pencil that happened to be in my jacket pocket and stabbed the zombie in the face, but it bit me before I could get my hand away. I started feeling a stinging sensation in my hand, and felt funny. All the zombies began looking like normal people. My dad was suddenly next to me, so I told him what I was seeing. I woke up. I presume I died and turned into a zombie. May that version of dream-me rest in peace.
I was at a baseball game. For some reason, I was selling these multi-colored masks that just covered the nose and eyes of a person's face. I handed them out, and apparently the masks were turning people into zombies!
I finally woke up a second time, and wondered why all my dreams were involving zombies.

I recalled a handful of dreams last night, but upon being awake for too long, could only remember this one. Anyways.
Me, my friends Pasqual and Brent, and my Aunt Mindy were all headed to this strange place a place that I can't remember the name of to go get something that was very similar to gasoline.
I hopped in the backseat of the car with my aunt while my two friends took the front seats. As we were riding, I started to have this really odd, strange sensation. Suddenly, it felt like I was spinning in circles in the back seat of the car. Not like, spinning in place. Like, I was basically floating up and down and around the back seat. I tried to push a hand or a foot out to touch something, anything, to stop the odd sensation. It worked, and everything returned to normal. My aunt was staring at me like I was a lunatic. I explained,
"I think I just had sleep paralysis!" Okay, that's just silly. SP in a dream? I think I know why dream-me came to this conclusion. Before I went to bed IRL that night, I felt a really odd tingly sensation in my hands and feet, and after a few minutes of this, my foot jerked and slammed down on the bed, and I heard loud breathing and footsteps. This made me think of SP, which probably carried over to the dream.
"Yeah, that must be it," Aunt Mindy said. I couldn't tell if she was being sarcastic or not.
We arrived at this odd place to get that gasoline-like thing. As we walked in, an old man hobbled over to me carrying a large, spiky chunk of wood, and something that looked like a deformed chisel. He handed me both, laughed, and said, "Alright, sonny, now make a perfect cube out of that." I looked up in disbelief, thinking, I can't do this! I looked around and noticed his old friends were watching me, expecting me to do it. I sort of forget what I did here, but, After working with the odd chisel device, a severely scarred and deformed cube was the result of my hard work. I showed it to the old ladies watching, and laughed, saying, "It's something, right?" They laughed with me. The old guy turned me around and berated me for not being able to make the perfect cube, and he then snatched away the two items. From that point, I was extremely sad till I woke up.

I was at a very plain looking house with a group of people I didn't know. Some giant, armadillo-looking Pokemon was stalking us outside the house, trying to get in so it could kill us. It eventually did get in, but I got an idea.
"HEY! UGLY!"
It turned towards me, and surprisingly, started speaking. "What do you want, human?"
"Just come here," I said.
"I'll come over alright..." and with that, the Pokemon rolled into a ball and sped straight towards me, planning to crush me underneath it. I jumped out of the way and it went flying off a cliff.
This next part was an entirely different dream. A very hazy one too, as the Pokemon one was easier to remember.
I was walking to my schoolbus and heard someone yelling my name. I turned and saw Nate, an old friend of mine who I haven't talked to in years IRL. He kept saying, "HEY!" "HI!" "HELLO!", so I responded in kind, then went on my bus.
The scenery changed, and I was in a room with my friend Seth. We were eating cookies, and noticed some lady from the game No More Heroes 2 behind us, trying to zipline out of the building, only to get stuck. This caused Seth to say,
"I enjoy playing games straight through so I can beat them."
"PFF!" I scoffed, "That's no fun! You gotta play it slowly so you can enjoy the experience more!"
And that's all I remember.

Not one of my more interesting dreams, but I'll log it in here anyways.
Me and and large group of friends I know from school headed to this big event that was comparable to real life Olympics. The prize for winning it was being granted immortality. We had to go and practice that day, in order to prepare. Our group leader was some bald man who looked very familar to me, but I can't quite place who he was. I think he's this guy from church I met, like, 6 years ago. Haven't seen the guy since, so that's probably why I had trouble figuring out who he was at first.
The man (although I recognized him now, didn't know his name) ordered us to get dressed and ready. We all bought out this large hotel where we each got our own room, and I went in mine, the silence becoming almost creepy. I changed my clothes which were actually the same clothes I was wearing the previous day IRL and went outside to look at the city, feeling anxious about all these upcoming events. The city was large, and somewhat blurry in the distance. The sun wasn't out that day, it instead being very cloudy, so a gloomy hue colored the atmosphere, fitting my anxious emotions.
We practiced that day though I can't recall what we actually did and we got to go home to our families. I went to my grandma's, and my friend Aaron came over so we could play a videogame together. As we were playing, I told him about the upcoming 'Olympics', and told him I had to run for a very long time, and that I was extremely nervous.
That's all I remember. I do recall the dream continuing for a bit after I talked to Aaron, but I don't remember what happened.

I had various dreams last night, but I forgot all of them except for this one, which I think I had right before I finally woke up.
I was in my friend's house for some reason. I didn't know which friend it was, however. Apparently I was staying at this house for a sleepover. Suddenly, I wanted to go to my friend, Aaron's house instead. I looked up at my friend's parents, and asked, "Can I go to Aaron's house?"
"But why?" they asked.
"I figured I'd spend an equal amount of time here and there as well. We haven't visited each other in a while, so..."
"What about Logan?" they asked.
Ah. Okay. So this was Logan's house.
"What about him?" I inquired.
Logan's mom frowned. "Tell us about him." It's too bad my dream self didn't notice how odd this statement was.
"Well, he's a great guy, I mean, he's pretty religious too. Does all this stuff for his church, the youth group, things like that."
All of a sudden, Logan's sister walked in, hands on her hips. She looked angry. Something weird about this whole thing was that I've never actually met Logan's family up close in real life, I've only heard about them. So I'm assuming how they looked in the dream wasn't true.
She glared. For the next 5 or so minutes, she lectured me on how people should act in the world, and how they could make their lives better. I took it all in, and it was actually quite useful advice. Afterwards, time seemed to fly, and Logan's sister and I were watching some anime. I then decided to finally go to Aaron's house, and got a glass of water before I did.
Then the dream ended. I'm pretty dismayed I didn't remember the whole talk Logan's sister had with me, because I vaguely remember that what she said was actually pretty true and useful advice.