Bubble

Had a dream that Marge Simpson ran off and joined an Oceans Eleven style heist team. One member of the team was a dashing pirate, and she started a fling with him. Homer tracked her down, kids in tow, and she wanted nothing to do with him.

I only remember my last 2 dreams besides waking up briefly and trying to remind myself to remember the prior dream (I forgot it).

Dreamed I was back in high school. I got on the bus and got off at the wrong stop. The bus I'd been on is the bus that I take to work now, but the layout of the city itself had changed quite a bit, and there was a suburb where downtown should have been. I freaked out, because it meant that I was going to be 15 minutes late, and I was already in huge trouble academically. I'd been warned that I couldn't be late even one more time, or I wouldn't pass the grade I was in.

I also realized I wasn't on the street I thought I was on, which would have been a straight shot to the school. I was on a side street I didn't recognize. In fact, it was even a dead end.

Some other students had gotten off the bus at the same time I had, for some reason. They were older kids. So the older kids seemed kind of confused and annoyed by how panicky I was. But they allowed me to follow them. Once we reached a street I recognized, I was able to find my way to the school.

The school was my old middle school. I did get in exactly 15 mins late. I ran into my "brother" - not anything like my real life brother, really just a dream character - as he went down the stairs as everybody went between classes (despite it only being 20 mins into the school day) and explained my problem. He told me "Well, go to your first class, then!"

Then I realized that I had forgotten which class my first class was. I thought maybe it was English, but I wasn't sure. I also didn't know exactly where it was located.

Then two school administrators came up and started yelling at me, demanding to know why I was late and why I wasn't in class. They were wearing brown leather dusters.

My perspective shifted to just outside my body. At that point, I realized that I was a giant floating pink cartoon brain, and so was my brother. He had thick boxy glasses on and a dorky shirt collar and was generally a nerd. He looked down on me for being "stupid".

Then for some reason our roles switched - I watched an outside comparison of my bubbly-squishy-"stupid" state and my much more streamlined-looking "intelligent" state, and my "brother" became the "stupid" one.

He'd always looked down on me for eating lots of junk food and gross/fried foods, one of them being something the school cafeteria served that in the dream was called "cop-burgers" but once he'd switched places with me, he suddenly realized how delicious everything was.

At some point he locked himself in the bathroom with a bunch of junk food and once he'd finished it, demanded to know (through the door) if I had any more burgers. I said, no. But I was also kind of him at the same time, staring into a sink full of fast food wrappers, and yelling, "Do you have any pork drippins'?"

And that dream ended.

I woke up, was a little weirded out by that one, and went back to sleep.

I dreamed that I was looking through what I think was a Walmart for a present for my uncle. I wanted to get him a grill. I was crouched down on the floor looking through the bottom shelves for cooking grills, and there was a tiny propane grill you were supposed to be able to use on your counter top, but it really just looked like a weird tiny charcoal grill. It had little canisters it came with. You were supposed to buy more to refill it, but they were expensive, so my mother (who was suddenly there) argued with me about that. Eventually, I put it back on the shelf.

Then I was in a cartoon and there was a puppy and I ran inside after it. So it turned out to belong to a girl who was trying to give it away. She was a complete stranger, but I just crawled right into her bed with the puppy and went to sleep.

I sort of recall maybe having a conversation with her, but I was mostly interested in paying attention to the puppy.

Fell asleep meditating on the idea of lucidity, and a particular location ("Home Base"). I don't generally expect to attain lucidity during my first few periods of REM, nor do I really want to. Zoning out and just letting sleep happen is nice, in and of itself.

I had some new forms of success and ran into some familiar problems...

Had dreams. Don't recall them. I need to get better about writing stuff down, but don't want to disturb my boyfriend, either. I still don't feel like they were particularly vivid, coherent, or noteworthy... dreams from the first few hours of the night generally aren't.

Settled back to sleep meditating on home base. Slipped into gray fog. At some point, attained lucidity... had the sense that it was near the very beginning of a dream because I have no recollection of a dream up until that point, but suddenly I was sitting at a table with a pile of colorful alphabet-letter magnets on it. I touched and examined them, and then the grey fog reclaimed the dream. I slowly woke up.

Settled back down and began meditating again. Body slowly settled back into sleep; my limbs became numb and I felt like I was drifting.

This is normally the point I'd have trouble with a WILD. At this point, I would normally try to start moving, sit up out of my body, and feel a way that I can only really describe as feeling "tangled in a blanket" - mentally flailing around but unable to really get anywhere or do anything, still stuck in the fog. Sometimes, it's instinctive, so it's been hard to shake the habit, but last night I was actually able to remain mindful and stay still.

I felt as if I was drifting in a river. My body was numb and the idea of being attached to or "in" it was going away. I tried to sink into the river even more... I felt my head sink through the pillow and my body sink through the bed, and sank down into the gray fog.

Drifted for a while. I watched the fog so that I didn't end up drifting out of lucidity. I waited for shapes to appear in the fog. Sometimes shadowy shapes would appear. This is normally where I might have trouble again - trying to will them to BE something, without anything really coalescing... wanting them to BE something... getting frustrated and exerting myself too much mentally and waking up as a result. This time, I just let them fade in and out. I still paid attention to them and tried to examine them, but I tried to remain as objective as possible - trying to see patterns and shapes in them without trying to force them to "be" anything. I knew that if I kept doing this, eventually I could coax one of them into reality.

Eventually a shadowy room came into being, and became reality. I was standing in the living-room of my mother's old apartment in Florida. It didn't have any furniture and was fairly empty. The alphabet magnets from before were scattered on an end table in the center of the room. It felt pretty "solid". I examined the brown carpet and patted the wall. I walked through the room, toward the hallway, running my hand along the wall so that I didn't lose lucidity. I wanted to do a scene change - this place wasn't where I wanted to be, and it was boring. I walked up to the door and willed it to open to a location I actually wanted to be in (again, home base).

I opened the door, and there was... another door? I opened that door, and behind it was another door. I felt irritated and opened that door, willing it to be the location that I wanted, but it opened into the apartment atrium.

I walked across the atrium and opened one of the doors to another apartment. That door led back into the atrium. I got an idea - something told me to try to dive through a door and use it like a portal. I dove through a door and opened my eyes to my actual bedroom. I should have known that this was potentially a false awakening, but instead I just went back to sleep.

I dreamed I was hanging out with a few of my friends. We were going to Full Throttle Bottles, but in the dream, Full Throttle was not the store I was familiar with, and it was not in the location where it would have normally been. Instead, we were all walking down a street full of nothing but liquor stores. We went into one of them and a friend bought a bottle of vodka that was in a bottle like a soda bottle and tasted like orange-flavored cream soda. I liked it, so I bought one myself. I kept thinking that it was odd that the store clerk hadn't carded any of us, but didn't manage to figure out that it was because this was a dream.

We walked up to a place that looked kind of like a castle. It had brown, smooth bricks. I jumped down a wall and my friend grabbed my arm and jumped down with me. I remember thinking it was a very long way to jump and was surprised I hadn't hurt myself a lot, but reasoned that it was because my friend was taller and had held me up kind of like a balloon.

I then dreamed about a flying cartoon skunk whose super power was smelling so bad that the odor killed evil things.

Last night's dreams weren't very remarkable. I have a cold or some sort of sinus infection, and kept waking up with a fever.

I dreamed that my back molar was completely rotten, and every time I closed my mouth, it shoved the tooth out of place. The tooth was extremely loose - I was able to pull it up and see a pool of brown gunk beneath it. It didn't hurt, but it felt extremely uncomfortable and weird.

I really don't remember much else, beyond a vague dream involving the characters of Avatar: The Last Airbender - a show I haven't watched in year. My brother and a friend were discussing it earlier in the evening, though, and I think that may have influenced my dream.

Original dream dated around late January:

I had a dream about a tiny girl the size of a thumb, a la Thumbelina, but the whole thing was done in the vein of a 1940s or 50s/60s cartoon. She had curly blonde hair, and all of the mice and other small animals helped her out. At one point, they set up a go-kart rink type thing with a soapy floor, and they drove around it on match-boxes tied to sponges. It looked really fun.

Original dream dated early February:
I had a dream that I was helping a biologist film a documentary on birds who could bend space. He was studying how the insides of their nests were much larger than the outsides (which were woven from grass and not much larger than a makeup case), and theorized that the inside existed, just somewhere else in space/time. It was really interesting watching the birds build.

Jan. 31, 2004:

I had this dream that George Bush got turned into a kitten, and that while he was trying to give the State of the Union address, all of these cartoon characters kept trying to kidnap him. A 2 lb. George Bush swore in a squeaky voice while getting chased by a chihuahua, and seeing a tabby kitten go ballistic was well worth my time spent asleep.

Then I had some weird dream about how all of the cartoons were getting uber-stylized, a la Samurai Jack, with nothing but straight lines and squares and angles.

Feb. 9, 2004:
I miss Abby a lot. I dozed off in my chair a little bit while M__ and T__ crashed here this morning and I dreamt she was in my dorm room.

March 1, 2004:
I had one of the freakiest dreams in a while. I dreamed there was this big war, and I fought in it, and I did something really important but I got injured. And something about me being topless because of the injury. And I dreamed that I sort of turned into a skeleton quasi-death thing, but only if you looked at me the right way. So my uncle drove me to this place... only he wasn't my actual uncle and had long hair, and he sang really well... he stood outside singing until a woman inside noticed, so she treated my injuries and baptised him.