Exploring My Mind

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.

Didn't sleep too well last night. As it would turn out, I had a pretty good 2 hour nap late into the evening, so come bed time later that night, I really wasn't all that tired. Therefore, the night was spent sort of sleeping but frequently waking up, much to my dismay. Luckily enough, I was able to recall multiple dreams, but on the downside, they're all basically fragments. Here they are anyways:
I was eating at Olive Garden, when all around me the customers and waiters and waitresses all started going crazy, dancing around like lunatics, throwing things at each other. I huddled up further into my booth and continued to enjoy my breadsticks. Clearly my dream self has important priorities!
I was in this huge house with a lot of my family as well as complete and total strangers. The front side of the house was open to the outside street, where multiple houses alongside it were selling goods. Not much of note here.
I was in a small room that looked like something out of Homestuck, and on the wall, projected, was a cool looking animation of David Strider and Jade Harley. This fragment may have been a part of the same house dream just before it. Funny I had Homestuck appear here, as I've not been into it in a couple of years now.
I was on an alien world, and everything was blowing up. ......
My ex and I entered into a contract of sorts, and we were living together and going about our day-to-day pretty happily. Still learning to get into the habit of reality checking when she's involved, as she's basically the biggest dream sign I have.

Another particularly vivid dream, this time with a good number more details recalled than that pizza dream.

I was at a house that looked like a much more modified version of my current home, complete with a second floor, big TV, and a pool in the middle of the living room, about the size of a ping pong table. Lots of different people were there, including my boss from work, my dad, my grandpa, and some random people.
This dream was sort of a hodge-podge of everything going on in my life recently. It was all topped off when...
One of my old best friends from, like, 7 years ago appeared (I'll refer to her as K). This coincides with real life, since K texted me out of the blue just the other day. Just as in real life, it had been a while since we had seen each other in the dream's story, so K expressed her surprise at seeing me. Curiously enough, she was closer to the age she was when I last saw her, rather than how old she is now. She immediately wanted to go swimming (since that's what we used to always do), so we decided to do just that.
While we were swimming, my boss called me over and asked me about Luigi's Mansion (for whatever reason, great game though). And then the random events just kept happening when my dad announced he had to go. He slipped on old-time Japanese wooden sandals (I'm starting to not understand the connections here ) and slipped out the front door.
"Dad! Where are you going?!" I asked him, upset he was leaving.
"I've got work to do!" he yelled back.

And that's where it ended. I felt sad waking from this dream, it was fun seeing all these people I don't usually get to see anymore.

Haven't remembered anything since Monday, in which I had a lucid. It seems like my recall tends to take a nosedive the days following my lucid dreams. In any case, I finally remembered a dream this morning after having an absolutely terrible day on Thursday. Nothing was going right, and I was in a terrible mood for the entire day up till I went to bed. Seems to have given me a sad dream.

I was at my house, except it was very warped and different from my normal house. Part of it was modified so that an entire wall looked like it was the night sky, and it opened outward into an expanse of sea, where many people (whom my dreamself considered friends) were swimming and having a good time.
I decided to join in, and went for a relaxing swim for a while. The water was nice and warm.
After finishing up my swim, it was time for me to go to work (in the dream). I headed to work with my girlfriend, with me behind the wheel and her sticking her head out the passenger side window enjoying the breeze. Things took a sudden turn for the worse when, out of no where, a huge chunk of metal came flying off of a nearby vehicle, slamming into my girlfriend and knocking her out of the car. She was killed.
Afterwards, a medical team recovered her body, and I made funeral arrangements with one of my coworkers, who just so happened to be nearby. Once things were squared off, I headed back home, uncertain of my future now that my girlfriend was gone.

-takes a deep breath- A not so great day and a not so great dream (aside from the swimming part). I am glad I remembered one though, so

Been a little bit since I recalled anything. Glad to see it back!
I was with both my family and some strangers. The strangers consisted of a woman, two children, and Woody Harrelson (I believe he was in here because of my latest obsession with the show True Detective). We hung out at this warped version of my house for a while, but soon, people started dying! We weren't sure why, but it seemed to be something paranormal. That was our guess anyway.
At one point I pretended to be a ghost, to the amusement of everyone else. In the midst of investigating, my aunt brought her dogs to the house, and I played with both them and the stranger kids.
Suddenly, the truth was starting to reveal itself. The woman I mentioned as one of the strangers ended up dying in Woody's room by unknown causes. When we all gathered in his room later on, Woody revealed that he had cameras throughout the house to record and capture paranormal activity due to his suspicions. Even so, for some reason, we didn't think to check the footage to see how the woman died. Eerily enough, when we looked at Woody's desk, his keys were gone. Everyone insisted that they didn't take them, and we even checked. It must have been the woman.
After all these crazy events, I was left feeling inspired, and felt like saying one thing to Woody and the gang.
"I wish I had a PS4..."
Cue fade to black. Many years pass (instantaneously of course, like a time skip in a movie or book), and the two kids are sitting around a dinner table, a lot older now (teenagers at least).

I've had work for the past two days at my new job, which required me getting up super early. That threw off my recall a bit, but it's back now, with a vengeance!

So apparently I was in Australia (I don't find this out till later in the dream). Of course, I've never been there, so the environment I was seeing wasn't based off of it or anything. Me and my ever-present girlfriend were hanging out like we usually do in my dreams, except we were in a house I didn't really recognize. It looked large and well decorated, almost as if the owner had a lot of money.
There's a gap in my memory to what happened here, but I eventually found myself exploring a weird house that was different from the one I was in before. For some reason, the house reminded me of the house from Gone Home, except stranger. I kept looking through it, bumping into two drunk old men on my way through, and eventually found my way down into a large chasm where a flowing river was going. The chasm opened out to an ocean, and it was night time. I wanted to get on the other side, but going in the water made me wary. I didn't know what might be in there.
So! Somehow, my dream self thought I could get across by using a super power: sending jets from my feet to collide myself off the surface of the water so I could bounce across. "Genius..." I thought to myself.
I jumped towards the water and tried using the power, but it failed miserably and I started sinking. It quickly activated as I was sinking, and I could feel SOMETHING slither by my legs. I quickly jetted out of the water and back to the beginning of the chasm.
As I made my way back upstairs, I was confronted by my girlfriend's grandma, who started scolding me about a lot of things.
At first I thought this next dream was a separate one, but my dream self literally referenced the previous dream to a friend, so it seems they were connected.
Suddenly I was in school. My Japanese classroom. However, all the students around me seemed unfamiliar, yet I accepted the fact that I knew them. I talked to one of them about my encounter with my girlfriend's grandma previously. We then were tasked with playing some kind of word game, but sadly I don't remember how that went.

This dream was pretty close to real life, aside from some minor discrepancies. Not much out of the ordinary here.
I went to a new house to babysit my little cousin for the day. My grandpa gave me the tour of the house, which was still being worked on. This relates to my aunt's new house in real life, but the house in the dream did not look the same (one of the discrepancies I mentioned). Throughout the day, it was mainly just me following and playing with my cousin, or watching those educational cartoons with her. At one point, I ended up spending the night there, though my memory as to why is pretty hazy. I also walked in on my girlfriend watching a strange TV program based on Bioshock Infinite??!
There WAS a moment where I thought 'am I dreaming?' and performed a reality check, BUT...I'm pretty sure I was too close to being awake for this to work, so it didn't count. Still, that's progress if it was my dream self thinking that and not my waking self.

Two dreams remembered last night, the first being pretty hazy. The second, however, was both more vivid and more funny in terms of what it meant.
I was at a house I didn't recognize with a bunch of friends I didn't recognize. Apparently we were trying to hide from some creature that was hunting us down. I hid between a small spot next to the wall behind a table. Sadly, that's about all I remember from this one.

This second dream was rather interesting. I wasn't in the dream at all, I was more like an observer to what was happening. In a way, it was like watching a movie. It seemed to be about a blonde-haired girl who was working for the police. However, as the movie progressed, weird things started happening, and the girl slowly came closer to becoming lucid, as it turned out everything going on around her was a dream. However, there were multiple things in her dream to try to keep her from getting lucid, including a sinister woman in a business suit. In the end, I don't remember if she ever got lucid or not. This dream was pretty funny though in that way, because it's like I was trying to convince myself that this was a dream, but the fact that I was watching it like a movie made it less obvious to me. Still, I take that as a good sign. Like, scratching the surface of awareness in a way.

I believe these dreams were two separate ones!

I was at a ceremony for my school (well, old school now), where I was having dinner with my parents and various classmates. We then went into this big hall where all the students and their parents were, and names were being called off in groups of two or three. If you were called, you had to rush down there and try to beat the other kid in a race to the bottom. If you won, you got a prize. I got called twice and managed to win both times without even knowing the rules. And my reward...was a pokemon game.

This dream had me in my house. It started off as me not even being there, just watching as two famous actors (Rob Schneider and someone else) were discussing something. Eventually they disappeared and I got to walk around my house. I decided to call up PeanutButterGamer (FOR SOME REASON) and had a nice chat with him about mario. After this is when things started getting a bit weirder. I heard noises outside and got a bad feeling, so I instinctively went to the kitchen to grab a knife or something for protection. "Y'never know," I told myself.
As I got to the kitchen, I looked outside. Cats were everywhere in my neighbor's back yard. Weird, cuz he normally has a bunch of dogs. They were going up to this pool of liquid (it looked kind of like apple cider), and lapping it up. I turned my eyes back to the kitchen, and there were suddenly a bunch of cats in it! Cue me going
I opened the knife drawer, cuz I was still feeling paranoid about the noise I heard. The knife drawer was filled with the same cider looking liquid I saw before. I sighed and tried to get a towel to clean it up while all the cats mewed at me.

What an odd dream.
I was at either Arkansas or Alabama (can't remember which). It was no village I had ever heard of, but many nuns resided in this village. It wasn't especially big, but it did have a little center area for restaurants. Lots of trees were scattered around this village, making it hard to see far in any direction. For some reason I was living with a kind young woman, probably 19 or 20 years old, who was helping me get my bearings in this new town. She had mid-length brown hair, and I can't recall her speaking much.
While I was out exploring the town, walking by the local Arby's, there was a shooting. More precisely, a man in a blue shirt on a nearby cliff held up a gun, aimed, and started firing at the crowd of civilians around me. Somehow, I knew that he was looking for a specific girl. I hid away in the nearby back parking lot and ran off, trying to find somewhere where I would be concealed. I eventually found a dirt path under some bushes, which led to a random house. I apologized to the people for barging into their yard and ran as fast as I could, hearing the gunshots and screams behind me.
I hid away in the young woman's house once more, this time locking myself in my room there. She wasn't there at the time. I peeked out the windows. Multiple nuns were walking hurriedly out of a nearby house and making their way to what I assumed was church. As I was watching them from my window, I suddenly realized they might see me, so I backed up. Too late. The head nun saw me, and her face contorted into sheer anger. She ran up to the window, pointing at me and shouting something. Judging by reading her lips, she shouted, "What are you doing in there?!" She moved away from the window, running, so I could only assume she was going to come into the house to try to get me.
Call me crazy, but something wasn't right about these nuns. They gave me an uneasy feeling. I knew my door was locked, but I put some things in front of it just to be safe. I I heard multiple shouts and banging against it. The obstacles started sliding away.
That's all I could remember after waking up. Also, my previous dream had a shooting in it too. If this keeps up, it could be a potential dream sign.

My parents and I were sitting in the room of a house that wasn't ours, or as far as I knew. I forget what mom did, but she hit something to make the house flip upside down. We were then dunked into the ocean, and the ocean water splashed about the room of the house, bringing a lot of fish in as well.
a fragment. oh well.

Couldn't remember much. But here's what I got from last night.
I was in my house, lying on the couch where I fell asleep the night before (though of course, I didn't realize I was asleep). I sat up and looked around. Everything looked the same, except for a random dresser sitting over by the couch. I crawled over and peered over the side of the couch to the floor, only to see my friend Haley laying down there, mumbling something about her cousin knowing French. I said hello, and she murmured a hello back, only to continue rambling on about her cousin knowing French. I heard a noise and looked over towards the living room to see my uncle, aunt, and cousins all walk in. I didn't question why they were there. I just said, "Oh. Okay."
I got up and went to talk to them.
And sadly, I don't remember the rest, but I woke up shortly after. I'm really happy Spring Break will be here soon, as it'll give me plenty of days to improve my dream recall and lucidity.