Good morning, everybody. Dream #1 I was in a museum with enormous rooms. The paintings were also enormous. The walls of the rooms may have been twenty or so meters tall. The paintings were just as tall. I may have been with a group of people, possibly a school group. But I had broken off from them for some reason or another, and I was now walking around by myself. But I was afraid to go into any of the rooms very far. The paintings on the walls were so gigantic. I was afraid they'd fall on me and smash me. So I could barely go beyond the threshold into rooms. One room was kind of dimly lit, like from a dirty set of windows in the ceiling. I saw a pair of paintings in the room. The paintings were, I told myself, either by Goya or El Greco. The paintings had the same subject: a young man in rich attire, something like pink, satin pants and a white shirt. The paintings stood opposite each other in a kind of side niche in the room. I wanted to examine the paintings closer, but I was too afraid of them falling on me. I left this room -- I think -- and went into another room. The paintings were also huge in this room. But I may have been getting braver about being around the paintings, and I may have stepped quite a few meters into the room. But now I looked up and saw that there were also paintings in the ceiling, the rest of the ceiling being made out of thick, ornate wood, like in the Rose Reading Room of the New York Public Library. I was now afraid of the ceiling paintings falling on me. They seemed like they'd be heavier than the wall paintings. Dream #2 It was a greyish day. I was either treading water in a river, moving backwards slowly in a small boat, like a rowboat, in a river, or standing on a walkway through or at the edge of a river. I may at first have been with a group of older, well-off people, like a tour group. But I'd broken away from the group a bit. The group were all walking along the walkway. The river was wide, and at the other end of it was a big, kind of square, building. The building faced the river directly, starkly: it may even have been a bit cantilevered over the river. The building was made of some kind of white stone, but the front of it, or the side facing the river, was of slightly tinted glass. This windowed section curved around the sides of the building as well, giving the white stone of the building a kind of backwards "C" shape. I knew that the building was an art museum. It was the Art Museum of Mexico or the Mexico Museum of Art. It was a very good and nice museum. But it was also used -- especially the enormous room overlooking the river -- by drug cartels for arranging certain deals. People liked to visit the museum. But people who went there were always afraid. You always had to be careful not to hear things, or at least not to act like you heard things. And you couldn't offend any person in any way. If you offended someone or acted like you'd overheard some drug deal being arranged, you could be killed. But for some reason I was feeling defiant. I was going to go into the museum and I wasn't going to act afraid at all. Besides, it was the Mexico Museum of Art. It was full of great works of art. I'd be really disappointed in myself if I didn't see the art works there. Dream #3 I was in some building. I was near a staircase. Apparently I'd always come here to this place to read. Other people did, too. But I'd come to have a favorite spot for reading on the staircase. And I'd read there all the time. There were some guys who'd decided to follow me around. They thought I was really smart. They were jealous of me. They wanted to figure out everything I was doing and studying. They thought if they read everything I read, they could get smarter than they thought I was. One of these guys was an old, kind of tall, white man with a big belly. He wore nice slacks and a nice button-up shirt. He saw I was heading toward the staircase to read. So he either took the place I always took or took a place a few steps higher than my place. Wherever he sat, his plan was to look down at what I was doing, so he could do it, too, and hopefully beat me at it. I tried to figure out what to do. I didn't really care if people knew what I was doing. I tried to be open about that. But I felt annoyed. I may have thought I'd hide whatever I was doing, just to annoy the man back a little. Or I may have thought I'd just act unperturbed, like the man didn't bother me, or didn't exist at all.
Good morning, everybody. Dream #1 I was in a big, empty room. The room had a grey, concrete floor. There was natural light coming in through a window somewhere. A brown blanket lay in the center of the room, on the floor. The blanket was made up of small squares. For some reason, I was now cutting the lower squares off the blanket. But I was leaving a couple of the central squares in one of the lower rows attached to the upper rows. So now the blanket looked like a square with a bit of a lip at the bottom. As this was going on, a movie was playing against the back wall. It was black and white. The film was old and scratchy. There were also four or five straight lines that ran vertically, up through the center of the frame. The movie looked like an Abbott and Costello movie. But Costello was a kind of serious character, and the other guy was a young, kind of bright, but shy guy. The Costello character was telling the man something like, "I don't think your idea for using the edges of the film-frame and putting sound on them is such a great idea. I don't think people will like it. It's too bothersome." I now realized that the lines running up the center of the frame were the soundtrack lines that Costello was referring too. I thought that they were bothersome -- if they had to be right in the center of the frame like that! But then I realized that those were the lines for this film. The film the man had made had the lines on the outside of the frame, where they weren't visible. I understood that Costello's criticism of the man's use of a soundtrack in his films wasn't valid. But I somehow knew that Costello knew this as well. In fact, I knew, Costello even thought the use of soundtracks in film was a good idea. But Costello didn't want to let the young man know he thought it was a good idea. He didn't want to support the young man's development. Costello felt that the young man was smart enough as it was, and that the young man would be so successful eventually, that he shouldn't have to support him in his efforts. I thought that this was a terrible sentiment on Costello's part, and that the young man was probably in dire need of help. Dream #2 I lay in bed, on my back, in an otherwise almost empty room. It was almost completely dark in the room. The bed was set next to a wall, which was to my right. The bed itself was rather narrow. I looked out to my left, across the room. On the wall at the head of my bed was a window. It was pretty heavily curtained, but it let in, at the far end, a tiny corner of orange streetlamp light. I noticed, in the corner of the room that was dimly lit by the streetlamp light, three statues. The statues were all Egyptian busts. They were all set on square pedestals, but they were arranged in a really haphazard way. I knew somehow -- maybe from some narration in my head? -- that the busts were all supposed to be of the boy Pharaoh Tutankhamen. But all the busts were wearing the ubiquitous headdress of Nefertiti. And one of the busts, the lowest one, facing me most directly, was of a really chubby boy or man! Dream #3 I was out on a beach. It was a nice, sunny day. There were a decent amount of people out on the beach, but not too many. For some reason, I suddenly felt like I had to leave. I turned to my right and began heading away. But as I left the beach, people began giving me troubles. I'm not sure what these troubles were now. But I think people just constantly kept getting in my way, even though there weren't a whole lot of people on the beach. I may finally have thought I'd counter the problem by flying. I may have started flying a couple meters above the ground. Now I was moving through an area of the beach with orange sand. Two enormous, black guys now came charging down the beach. It looked like they were just trying to start trouble. They had huge, long dredds and black, Oakley-style sunglasses, with silver rims on the tops. I may possibly have stopped flying. I may possibly have thought if these guys saw me flying, they'd just pull me down and pummel me. But once these guys passed me, I knew that I had to get out of here once and for all. Soon there wouldn't be anything here but trouble. I may possibly have gotten onto a bike like the bike I rode in junior high school. Or I may still just have been walking. I ended up on a concrete path in a park. I took this park to be a park from my high school years IWL. It was kind of like a trail on a small greenbelt running through a suburban residential area. It seemed like the path descended from here and went under a bridge. Either on foot or on bike, I descended under the bridge. Once I got beyond the bridge, I was in a much more forest-like, tree covered area. The path may now have been dirt, rather than concrete. There was a river on my right side. Trees also seemed to be growing up out of the river. I suddenly noticed a gigantic bullfrog sitting on the stump of one of the river trees. The bullfrog must have been 60cm tall! It looked pretty intelligent, too. It seemed to register my presence and be a bit worried about whether I wanted to hurt it. I acted calm and walked forward, trying not to regard the frog at all, so it would feel less worried. But now, up the way only twenty or thirty more meters, I saw another one of these huge frogs! I decided to get off this trail. I think I was afraid of the frogs. But I also think that I thought that if I kept having to act like I didn't see or care about every frog that worried as I passed it, I'd get bored as hell pretty quick. But also -- the trail itself may also simply have just ended: being cut off by the merging of a small creek on my left with the river on my right. I saw that if I jumped across the small creek on my left, I could land on the opposite bank. The bank was steep, but short, dry, and grassy. I could easily climb up it and out of this park altogether. But as I turned left to face the opposite bank, I noticed another huge frog! This one was also kind of worried about me. I was now in between two huge frogs that were all shifty and nervous. And I was afraid that if I jumped, my motions would be so fast and scary to them that they'd have heart attacks! I wondered how I could jump without scaring the frogs. The only thing I could think to do was close my eyes and jump. This way, the frogs would see that I wasn't looking at anything at all, and so I couldn't be jumping because I was trying to attack them. I closed my eyes. But I couldn't remember what the bank looked like. I didn't want to hit something bad. I tried to open my eyes again to get a good memory of the bank. But when I opened them, they were all groggy and grainy. It was really hard for me to focus on anything. Finally, the frog off to my right said, in something like a female voice, "There's actually a good patch right up around here." I looked up to the frog. I went to where the frog directed me. I jumped across the little creek and landed on the bank. I started climbing up the bank. All this time, the frog was still talking to me, in that kind of female voice. She was kind of friendly, like a really smart scientist, or a librarian. But I had the idea that the frogs really weren't comfortable with my presence here. At the top of the bank, I turned around to look back down at the river. The river wasn't there anymore. I was just facing a red brick building, which seemed to be set a meter or so down into a sandy trench. I was out on a road, it seemed, on the outskirts of a very small town in the desert. But this didn't even register with me. Down at the base of the building I saw a rectangular slat of an opening in the wall. Two sets of female eyes looked back out at me. I knew these two women were the frogs I had just jumped past on the river. I felt bad for not having spoken to them. So I did want to say something to them. But I also felt a little shy, like somehow these frogs were of a higher station than I was, and would thus be put off by my acting too familiar with them. So I wanted to keep whatever I said short. I said, "Yeah, I'm sure I'll come back here. So if I do, I'll talk to you guys again. I used to ride my bike up through this park all the time when I was a kid."
Good morning, everybody. Dream #1 There were a woman and man in some dark area at night. The area seemed to be inside, like in some dark, abandoned factory. The woman and man were both strong and sexy in a comic book sort of way. They were both very pale. The woman had red hair and wore some kind of small outfit. The man may have had pale blonde hair and probably wasn't wearing a shirt. The woman was the leader of a gang of killers. Most of the members of the group were women. And, mostly, the aim of the gang was to kill men. The man may have led a group of men. The man had done something wrong, possibly to betray the woman in some slimy, underhanded way. The woman was very poweful. She had the man in her grip. She was strangling him and drowning him in some pool of water. Eventually the man went limp. The woman may actually even have cut off the man's head by the force of her grip. But I now saw that the man had just feigned death so the woman would let him go. He fedll deeper and deeper into the water, as if this were a big river in some city. He had his head. He had been falling with his back down. Now he twisted around so his stomach faced down. He swam away. I knew he was going to gather people to fight against the woman. There were two women in a car in a dark, deserted, alley-like street in the city. Both women were part of the gang of killers. One woman had gotten out of the car. She had been in the driver's seat. She walked around to the passenger side and got the other woman's attention somehow, letting her know she should get out of the car. The first woman knew that the woman in the car was young and naive. The first woman was taking the second woman to the leader. Apparently the second woman had done something wrong and was now going to be punished, probably killed.,
Good morning, everybody. Dream #1 I was in a new deli, which may have been downstairs from my apartment. The deli was still under construction. There were all kinds of things being unpacked. The place had a blue-green kind of feel, as if the walls had been painted a pale blue-green. There were rolls of paper unrolled on the floor. Counters were set out in random fashion, as if they hadn't been fastened to their permanent positions yet. There were a couple soda refrigerators with their doors open. One was on the back wall, in front of me. The other was on the wall to my left. They were both tall and narrow. The refrigerators were so cold that I could feel the cold coming from them. The coolers were so cold that the sodas (or bottled waters?) inside the coolers had been frozen. I figured this level of coldness was natural, since the store wasn't opened yet, so that the coolers weren't tuned to a normal level. There were a few people running around in the store, getting things ready. I saw at least one woman and one man. They were both Mexican. They were talking back and forth and joking with each other in English or in Spanish and English. I knew that the place wasn't open yet, and I felt like I shouldn't be here. But, for some reason, I felt really comfortable here. I figured I'd grab some stuff and then head back up to my apartment. It suddenly struck me that, now that there was a new deli below my house, it would be a lot easier for me to come downstairs and grab some frozen pizza. I thought I would suddenly be eating a lot more frozen pizza than I'd been eating in a long time. Dream #2 There was some kind of television show or some kind of stage performance about adult women who had romantic relationships with young girls. The stage and background were white. The stage may have been clean and polished, so that it was slightly reflective. The women and the girls wore spandex suits with blue, pink and purple flower designs on them. They also wore something like flowing, white blouses that went up over their heads to become something like hoods, leaving a circle open for their faces. The hoods may have been topped with flat circles, which were slightly tilted. The women and young girls were doing a slow dance, in groups but kind of solo, where they would elevate and point forward their legs and arms slightly. Dream #3 There was some kind of narration about my mother's life. There was talk about how my mother had had such a tough time because she had been a single mother. There may also have been talk about how my mother had been really upset when my father had left her. There was now a view of a car like a station wagon driving up a steep, mountain road. The road didn't criss-cross or spiral up the mountain: it just went straight up the steep slope. As the car drove, the narrator spoke about how my mother worked through a lot of emotional difficulties and survived to this point in life. Listening to this narration made me really sad for my mom. But it also made me kind of proud of her. I felt I had seen this road somewhere. It occurred to me that I might have seen the road in a dream. The surreal steepness of the road and the way the car seemed to be reaching extreme heights on this mountain all reminded me of some tall mountain dream I'd had in the past. I was now in the backseat of the car. My mom was driving. We had approached some place halfway up the mountain. We pulled into an asphalt parking area. My mom, and possibly one of my family members, maybe my sister, was talking about how lucky we were. Some of our more removed family members, my mom said, had died in pretty terrible situations. They had died all alone, sometimes in shameful ways. The closer family members of those people had had to deal with the ghastly emotional impact of those situations. But, my mom said, the closer members of our family who had died had died rather peacefully, with loving families around them. And, right now, all our family members were in situations where, even were they to die suddenly and unexpectedly, they would at least die in a position where they were somewhat comfortable and they knew their family loved them. I either thought to myself or said out loud that that wasn't true. I thought about two of my cousins, P and B. P is a man and B is a woman. I thought that both P and B were in situations where, if they died, they'd be all alone. At least one of them was actually in an extremely dangerous situation, though in my dream I couldn't remember where either cousin was. I was now out on a river bank with my family. I suddenly realized that my cousin B wasn't far away at all. She was actually in this forest. She was kayaking through this river. In my mind's eye I saw further down river, to a wide stretch that was shaded pleasantly by tall pine trees. Where we were, the banks were open and lawny, with jagged rocks for the river's banks. Maybe all my immediate family members were out on this bank. We had a couple of kayaks nearby. We must have been getting ready to go kayaking, although for some reason, I seemed to feel like I was thinking of suggesting the idea of kayaking to my family, as if it hadn't yet occurred to anybody to go kayaking yet. I thought of dipping one of the kayaks into the water, but the water (which was actually only moderately fast) seemed way to rough and the rocks way too jagged for the kayak to handle. I turned around and saw at least one of my nephews, the oldest nephew, getting dressed in an orange life jacket. I felt like everybody was getting dressed in life jackets, as if they were all getting ready to go kayaking. I thought this was great, and I offered my own life jacket to one of my nephews, since I knew they liked wearing my stuff (???). One of my nephews, maybe the oldest, said he'd take my life jacket. But suddenly I realized I'd left it somewhere else. It was like I'd left it in the car. But it was also like I'd left it somewhere very far away. I said I'd have to go get it. I hoped I could get it fast enough so that it wouldn't cause a delay. I suddenly realized that I had also left the life jacket in water somewhere. The life jacket had been in the water so long that it was now beginning to dissolve. I hoped I could pull the jacket out of the water before it dissolved entirely. In my mind's eye I saw the life jacket. It was white, instead of orange, but it had orange flower designs on it. Dream #4 I was walking through a park. It was a clear day, pretty warm. The sun seemed to be going down. The sky was dim, and the light was partly golden and partly cool and dim. I walked along a concrete path in a somewhat narrow curve of the park. There was deep, green lawn on either side of the path. There were a few people in the park, just relaxing. I think everybody in the park was black. The sound of my breathing slowly became more and more audible. Suddenly it seemed to me like my breath was like the breathing sound of somebody in a space suit, like in the movie 2001. I wondered why my breathing would sound like this. It suddenly occurred to me that the reason my breathing sounded like this was because I wasn't exactly in a park. I was in a different kind of place altogether. The only time I could think of when I was in a place like this was in my dreams. I realized I was dreaming. There wasn't a tremendous improvement to the clarity or sensation of the dream, like there usually is when I become lucid. But I was suddenly a lot more aware of the environment. I smiled at a few people. I was happy to be aware, and I wanted to share my happiness somehow. I walked into a wider area of the park. Since there were a decent number of people around, and they all seemed to be peaceful and happy, I figured I'd try to talk with some of them, just to see what things were all about here. There were a couple of boys playing (with a set of blocks or other toys set up to look like a castle?) half on the concrete path and half on the grass. The boy on the path had his back turned to me. I smiled and addressed the boy in some way to get his attention. The boy turned his face toward me. He looked a lot older than he actually was. Something about this threw me off balance. I looked quickly at the boy and walked on down the path. I tried not to let the boy's surprising appearance throw me off balance. I tried to continue acting cheerful. I figured if I could keep the cheerful attitude I'd had as I'd become I could stay lucid. But I could already feel that I was dropping out of lucidity. I could see that I was approaching something like a brick-and-concrete, arched gate that served as an entrance to the park.
Updated 02-26-2011 at 03:42 PM by 37466
(Good morning, everybody. This is a really long entry. Sorry. I remember three dreams from last night. The first two dreams happened sometime between midnight and 5 AM. The third dream was between about 5:30 AM and 7 AM. I became lucid in the third dream, and sustained my lucidity for quite a while. But I think it was mainly because I “conserved my energy” and didn’t really try anything out of my normal range of dream-activity.) Dream #1 I was coming back to “my apartment.” I was walking through a building that itself was as big as a small neighborhood. I walked through one area, a huge room with tall ceilings and wood walls. As I walked through the area, I went past a young man and woman who were possibly standing outside the door to the woman’s apartment. The door may have been pale blue. The woman was very pretty, with copper-colored skin and long, straight, black hair. The man was handsome, white, tall, with blonde hair about down to his shoulders. He wore a grey, wool cap and some winter clothes. The man was telling the woman that he would make sure her move went smoothly. She was apparently moving to another place, and she was nervous about it. I gathered, from the man’s speech to the woman, that the man would make sure she didn’t experience the same harassment she’d experienced at her present apartment. But as I was walking past the couple (I didn’t actually get very close to them, and I had to exit via another door into another room in order to get to “my building”), the man and woman expressed some kind of concern that I was going to get them in trouble. It was as if, as well as the woman experiencing harassment from some group of people, the man and the woman had themselves been accused of causing trouble in their neighborhood. They thought I was the kind of person who would get them in trouble again. I walked softly and quickly through the door, trying my best to give an impression to the man and woman that I was nice, that I wouldn’t harass the woman, and that I wouldn’t get the man and woman in trouble – in other words, that I would just mind my own business. I walked into the next area, which was like a mix between some completely forgotten room or corridor in an enormous mansion and a back alley. A light shone from high above, and at the heights of the room, it was dark as night, though it was light enough near the floor. The walls were wood, and the floor had a pale, blue-grey carpeting. But there was junk everywhere, like tattered cardboard boxes, wadded up pieces of wrapping plastic, and other garbage. There seemed to be turns and staircases here and there, leading up to other “apartment buildings.” I walked toward my building, which didn’t even have a front door, just a staircase leading up to a winding ramp into darkness. My landlord, an older, black man or woman, stood at the top of or on one of the curves in the ramp. He/she apparently knew I was coming home, so he/she was waiting to welcome me back. I may have been away for a few days, doing something like visiting my family. I didn’t realize, but the young man had followed me all the way here. My “building,” it turned out, was the building that the young woman would be staying in. I thought that for sure the man would now be panicked. He and the woman had been so afraid to begin with that I would get them in trouble. And now it looked like I had “reverse followed” him all the way to the woman’s new residence. I tried to act natural and cool, to make the man understand I wasn’t going to do anything mean to him or the woman. I spoke a little bit with the landlord, in a kind of easy, happy tone. I then said I was going to head on in to my room and get a little rest. As I headed toward my room, through a door along a dim balcony facing at an odd angle to the ramps and the long alley-corridor, I heard the landlord now speaking with the young man. I thought, Why not prove that I’m a good guy, and let the young man see inside my room? Once he sees how lived-in my place is, he’ll know I’ve been here a few years, I’m a decent guy, and that I won’t do anything rude or mean to the woman or him? So I called attention to the landlord and the young man. I had them come over to my room. I opened the door to my room. The room was humongous and dim. But I could tell, just by glancing inside, that the room was a complete mess – a disaster! Plus, the place just let out a horrendous smell, like tons and tons of socks that hadn’t been washed for months! I quickly closed the door and told the landlord and young man nevermind, that I must have forgotten what I wanted to tell them. They walked away, kind of disappeared. I suddenly felt suspicious of the young man. I felt that, now that he’d seen even just a little into my room, and he’d seen where I live, that he’d try to break into my room. I closed my door. I walked slowly away, as if I was trying to put on some kind of show that I didn’t really live in this apartment. I suddenly recognized that, just beyond my door, the wall to my room only went up to about the middle of my chest. You could see inside the room just by standing out on the balcony. I looked inside, hoping that nothing of value would be easily spotted, prompting the young man to break into my house and steal things. All I could see, though, anywhere, was a bunch of clutter and garbage. I felt like there was no way I could have left my place this way when I’d left. Had I been that neglectful of things? Or had I been gone so long that my place just kind of dissolved into these shambles of itself? I walked around the corner of the balcony, now facing some dim corner of the alley-corridor directly, but still having a good view into my room. Down below, in my room, I saw a huge, pale-blue, L-shaped couch. It was completely torn up. The stuffing of the couch was bloating out of the cushions, and a black, metal frame jutted out the edges. Suddenly, my mother burst out from the inside of the couch. She scrambled out of the couch cushions. She then rabidly twitched and scratched against the couch, tearing it even more to pieces. She looked terrible, like she’d become some kind of wild animal. I was terrified by this. But I quickly became indignant. Who had allowed my mother into my apartment? I ran down the balcony to find someone to complain to. I ended up on some dark hilltop, under a small tree. It was pitch black night, but I could see, as if a car from somewhere were shining its lights on the scene. There were a few people wandering around, possibly Hispanic. I found my father, who was almost cartoonishly wide. He was also dressed somewhat like a clown, in red clothes with pink and orange polka-dots. He may even have worn a clown-nose. I yelled at my dad, “Why did you let my mom into my apartment?” My dad gave me some kind of excuse that sounded half-hearted but official, so that I couldn’t really argue against it. Dream #2 I was in a subway station, waiting for the train to come. I was in a far-off, unfamiliar neighborhood, and I had been doing some kind of activity that made me tired and ready to go back somewhere familiar. The subway station was more like the lobby for a building like a hospital. I sat at a table in an area that looked like a makeshift café. The serving counter may have been in a small room, off to my right. Behind me, there may have been the main lobby area, large and bright, with a lot of sunlight flowing through the window-walls. To my left was a wide doorway, through which I could see one subway platform. Through a kind of dim, plasticky window at the opposite end of the room and in front of me, I could see another subway platform. I pulled out a book, crossed my legs, slumped in my chair, and started reading. A couple of teenage boys sat down a couple of tables away from me. They were making jokes with each other, pretty relaxed. They seemed cool. But for some reason, I didn’t want them to notice me. I thought they might start trouble. Suddenly I could see, from some kind of reflection, that the train on the platform to my left was coming. It seemed to be coming without warning and very quickly. In a rush, the boys and I stood up from our tables and ran to the platform. But I didn’t want the boys to know I got on this train. I felt that if they knew this about me they could hurt me somehow. So I tried to act like I wasn’t getting onto this train. But when I got out to the platform (which was huge, wide, with tall ceilings, nothing like in NYC), the train wasn’t there. I heard the rushing of a train to my left. I looked and saw, down the platform, and up at the top of a tall staircase, a different train arriving at another platform. Was it just that train I’d heard? But I could have sworn I’d seen the train arrive on this platform, as well as heard it. I looked down into the well for the train and tracks for my platform – and was terribly shocked! Instead of tracks, the floor was completely empty, trackless, and painted a bright yellow. There were no tracks! No train could ever have arrived here! But I was sure this was where the train was supposed to be – where I had actually seen it arrive! I felt terribly foggy all of the sudden, as if I had fallen into a different world. I heard the train on the second platform, off to my right, arriving. I thought I’d take that train. But I knew it wouldn’t get me anywhere close to where I wanted to go. I knew I’d just have to take this train, at this platform, whenever it came, no matter how long it took. So I went back into the café area to go back to reading my book. Dream #3 I was in my great-grandmother’s house. I had apparently been there for a long time. The place looked nothing like it had looked while my great-grandmother was alive: it was dim, grey-blue, and strewn garbage, household items, and even streams of toilet paper. I walked around in the kitchen and dining room, possibly picking up and eating and drinking pieces of food and drink that had been left out for a long time on dirty plates and in dirty, grimy cups. There may also have been dirty, rusty knives, or something like that, somewhere. I walked back into the living room. I felt like I had isolated myself in my great-grandmother’s house for so long. It had been days. Here I’d been, back home all this time, and I hadn’t visited my mother once! I thought I’d give her a call and let her know I was at my great-grandma’s house, and that she could come visit me or maybe even pick me up so we could go somewhere to visit with each other. But I hesitated – I now felt so guilty having neglected my mother for all these days, that I knew just calling her would cause me a lot of heart-breaking pain. I was suddenly in “my bedroom” at “my house.” The room was clean, a little barren. Nice sunlight flowed in through the window. It was cheerful enough. But it felt somehow lonely – not just lonely, but sterile, padded. Something about this feeling made me realize I was dreaming. I realized I was now lucid. I told myself to keep calm and just go exploring this place as if it were a real environment. (Oddly enough, when I became lucid, I may have “transformed” into a tallish, white, young man with tanned skin, blue eyes, and short-shaved, blonde hair. I have no idea why.) I walked out of the bedroom and into “my living room.” I was in a suburban house. The house looked small and nice. But it was completely empty. It had thick, brown carpet. I walked very slowly, to keep my emotions calm. I was heading for the front door. This was a kind of challenge for me, and I knew (even in my dream-state), that I had to keep calm in order to do this. I knew, I remembered (the truth, not a false memory – I mean, insofar as etc., etc.) that when I’d become lucid indoors in the past, my lucidity would end as soon as I walked outside, as if I hadn’t believed my imagination could “create” an outdoor space. I got to the door. It had a strange bolt-lock on it, which I thought was kind of over-doing things. I worked the lock out and pulled open the door. It was a bright, sunshiny day in a suburban neighborhood. I told myself to remain calm, remember this was all a dream, and just explore the place like it was a real environment. My front yard was a tangle of flowery vegetation and rough, dark shrubs. There was a driveway off to my right, with a big, brown, 1970s-style car. A blonde man, very tan, with a long tangle of hair and beard, was messing around near “my car.” He looked crazy, and I was afraid of him. But I was also pissed that he was messing around my car. So I yelled at him, “Hey! Hey! What are you doing?” The crazy man hunched up (he never really stood) and turned toward me. He shouted and growled and barked all kinds of weird things at me and started rambling toward me violently. For some reason, he was holding a Panini and a paper plate in his hands, as if he had been eating a Panini when he’d seen my car and decided to vandalize it or rip it off. It seemed as if the crazy man were going to try to invade my home. So I yelled at him, “Don’t you come near!” The neighbor from the house to my left, an Asian man, in his late 30s or early 40s, wearing glasses, a pink-red polo shirt, and khaki shorts, walked out of his house and into my yard. He’d heard the commotion and was coming to help me. I yelled again at the crazy man to back off and not to come anywhere near my home. But I also tried to make it seem to my neighbor like I had the situation under control. I felt like this crazy man was somehow important to whatever I was supposed to learn from this lucid dream. So I had to keep him at a distance without scaring him away entirely. I also wanted to make sure my neighbor didn’t scare away the crazy man. Off to my right, in my garden, I saw a strange plant that looked like a Cleome topped with a cabbage. The cabbage was pink and white, like Cleome flowers. Somehow, either my yelling my neighbor’s yelling had finally scared away the crazy man. He ran off. I, and possibly my neighbor, ran after him. He ran down toward a chain link fence that ran along the crest of a kind of tall, kind of steep, cliff-like hill. I was calling to the crazy man to stop. I wasn’t trying to do him harm. But my neighbor was running faster than me, and he was chasing the crazy man quite violently. The crazy man found a bent-up part of chain-link fence and crawled under it. I followed. I saw the crazy man run down the steep, brown hill-face, jumping into a shallow, muddy river or creek at the bottom. My neighbor was still ahead of me, intent on capturing the crazy man. But once the crazy man was in the water, he did something to himself so that my neighbor could no longer see him. He had changed his wild, blonde hair into a weird, pink, green, and white, spiky flower style, looking like a hairdo-mix of a Cleome and a lotus. He ducked down low in the creek so that only his head was above water. But I could still see that it was the crazy man. I wondered why my neighbor couldn’t. Nothing was different about the crazy man’s face: it was just his hair that looked like a lotus floating on the water. I could see that the crazy man was drifting toward a group of copper-skinned, black haired children who were playing and splashing about near the creek’s banks. I thought that it might be a good idea to get the crazy man away from the children. He had gone over to them to blend in with them until we left. But I had a feeling that if he suddenly went crazy again, he could hurt the kids. But now the crazy man and my neighbor were gone. I stood in some rocky area, looking down to the kids playing in the creek. At some point I looked over to my right and saw that there was a subway station, just jutting in a platform out of the hill, as if it were half-finished, forgotten. But it also looked new, clean, modern, even futuristic. And it was functional. I saw some kids, maybe pre-teen or teenage, playing around near the platform, waiting for the train. I was up near the top of the hill now (which, instead of being muddy or earthy, was now rocky). I was at a pretty level view with the platform and with the kids. I hoped they wouldn’t notice me, because I didn’t want them to start trouble with me. My emotions got so unstable that I felt my lucidity fading away. But instead of the dream continuing, not lucid, everything blacked out. I told myself, you’re losing your lucidity. You’re waking up altogether. Go back to being in the dream, and being lucid. So now I was back in the dream, lucid. I lay, stomach down, over some ledge of rock, looking down to some of the kids playing in the creek. They may have been a boy and a girl. They noticed me and started handing me toys to play with with them. One of the toys was a plastic horse. I played around with the horse a little bit, then handed it back to the kids, who went back into the water. I walked into the subway station. Inside, it seemed like it had become night. The station was lit gently with a kind of street-quality, greenish, fluorescent flood-lamp. The walls were a brownish stone, and the floors were some kind of granite-like grey. There was a downward staircase in the center of the lobby-area, and there were a few different corridors leading off from the main lobby-area. I walked down one of the corridors off to my right. I heard a bunch of teenage kids who sounded like they were joking and having a good time. I decided that I should probably talk with the kids instead of being nervous and shy around them. This was a dream, and I was here to explore whatever I ran into. So I saw the kids. They were a group of white boys and girls, dressed in kind of loose baggy sweaters and wool caps. They were making a bunch of jokes which struck me as intelligent and funny. I thought I’d talk to them. But they really didn’t pay any attention to me. So, rather than trying to hard to get their attention and getting hostile attention, I walked down another corridor. But now I heard somebody calling for me. I wound around through the corridors, back to the area where the kids had been. It had definitely sounded like one of the boys, calling me back to be part of the group. But when I got back to the area – something like a lobby, with a long, wooden counter at the front of the room, and a tall, nice painting on the cinder-block wall to my left – there were no kids, only two women. The women were both naked. They walked toward me, side by side. The woman on the right was very tall, maybe a foot taller than I (or “I” in the dream). She was naked, but she wore a dark-blue plume of feathers as a headdress and a spray of dark blue feathers around her waist and back. She looked like a burlesque performer. The woman on the left was still taller than I, maybe by an inch or two. She was pale, with long, curly, light-red hair. The women were both offering themselves to me for sex. I chose the shorter woman. The woman stood right in front of me, almost to the point of pressing up to me. I asked her a question, and she replied. Satisfied, I began kissing her body. We had sex in two or three different positions. But in one position I realized I was just doing a terrible job, and that I must just be making a weird situation for the woman, even though she did at least appear to be having fun. Regardless, I got so ashamed of what I perceived as being my stupid clumsiness that I woke up.