Bubble

I dreamed about a cop who looked a little like one of the people I work with (but not really), and he was harassing a woman about her ID card. She'd had her ID stolen, and it was a tribal ID, and the cop was giving her trouble over it not being a valid ID while both of us argued with him that it was. I was particularly irritated since the person that the cop reminded me with would never be such a jerk. Eventually, we convinced him, and he recovered the ID, which had been discarded in a parking lot.

I kept waking up and dozing because I was cold. I finally woke up completely and put a warmer shirt on and turned the thermostat up. I tried some visualization exercises, but fell back asleep.

I don't remember much about my dream, but someone was throwing a party, and there were 3 rooms, and each had a different activity in it. One of them was scrabble, but they were using 5 scrabble boards all at once, and people would keep letters they "won" by spelling words with them. One guy had won a lot of letter tiles and had built a tiny tile city out of them. I recall there being furniture in the room in the most awkward places, like a desk that was just sitting in the middle of the room.

I wake up, back to sleep, again visualizations. I'm frustrated because they haven't been working well the past 2 nights.

I dream that I am eating an apple, and it is delicious. It's huge, the size of a grapefruit. It's soft and juicy, and it's purple inside. I somehow know I am in an alternate dimension on an alien planet, and wonder if the seeds will grow new apple trees if I discard or plant them here. I try to convince another dream character (a recurring character, sort of a witch or sorceress) that she ought to eat some of the apple.

Wake up. Lie on my back and try to relax. I'm making some progress with visualizations and then I snore and startle myself. Ooops. Back to square one. Ok, time to turn on my side so I don't snore again.

I'm visualizing and dozing off and bitching to the wizard-cat (another recurring DC) that I'm frustrated with how things are going this morning. We are both drinking coffee out of mugs. I figure that maybe if I hold a conversation, it'll help draw me in. It's actually starting to work, detail is starting to creep into things (but it's still all very hazy and not at all real or anywhere near a dream). I sniff my coffee but instead of smelling like coffee, it smells spicy-sweet. Suddenly, out of nowhere, instead of the dream gently forming around me I'm fully lucid and the mug is completely real. It startles me so badly that I drop the mug and wake up.

There's a weird interlude before I fully wake up where I'm trying to find my arms and they're invisible. I know I'm dreaming, but at the same time I'm not sure, and I'm also half awake, so it's more like a weird semi-OBE than a lucid dream. I finally manage to actually move my arm and wake myself up.

Naturally, I'm irritated. I sigh and work on visualizations again. I explore an imaginary room. I'm in the great room of the cottage near the fireplace when I start to slowly ease into sleep. I'm sitting in front of the fireplace, wondering why there's a fire going and logs in the fireplace, but there's no pile of wood. I reach behind myself, produce some logs, and set them in the bin next to the fireplace. There's suddenly a desk in the middle of the room, the one from the scrabble dream, for pretty much no reason at all. Unfortunately, I lapse into unawareess.

After a gap in time I'm on a bus. I realize that it's almost a completely fully formed dream, but it's so thin and I'm so close to being awake that if I make the "push" that I need to make it super-real (i.e. feel like reality rather than a super vivid visualization) I will probably wake myself up. It's all very flat, like watching a scene rather than being in it. There is another DC there, a sorceress, but she flickers and turns into the warlock character (recurring DC). He is a smart-ass but generally helpful when it comes to gaining lucidity. The bus flickers and fades. I wake up and doze. I am now in some sort of weird geometric environment. Everything is made of white square tiles but it's also like something out of Escher. Warlock DC is there with me, silently walking with me through the scenery. Again, it is close to clarity but not really "there". Instead of trying to brute-force it and try to push through the membrane of the dream all at once to bring it into full focus, I dive to the ground and start running my hands and face on the carpet (that wasn't there a moment ago). I can't make anything focus or make it clear, the sensation is a lot like being really drunk. I go through a door and try to will a scene change even if the dream's not fully formed, hoping it will be easier that way. The room only half-changes, and everything is still white. I rub my hands together, hoping to make things more vivid, but it doesn't really do anything. I get frustrated and wake up.