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AAAAAAAA I lost my entire journal entry. I hit the back button somehow and I don't even know how!!!! It blanked everything out!

I don't know why it claims it auto-saves when I can never find my drafts. Ever. They never appear, even when I save things as drafts. Not once have they ever.

I'm REALLY upset and frustrated.

Ok, fine, here I go AGAIN.

First dream: Fragmentary. May have been lucid. All I remember is a very interesting looking brown and cream diamond tiled floor. I almost always forget any lucids from my first dream, and everything in them is fragmentary and fuzzy. They're also always only barely lucid, not even worth considering one if I really wanted to be strict about it.

Second dream: Dreamed about a farm. Fragmentary, weird, and complicated. Hard for me to make sense of. I'll write more later. Some bullet points:
- kind of video game farm but also not
- piles of laundry/hay
- helping my aunt
- weird cat thing in a sack
- apple trees
- HUGE tree with a city in it

Woke up, tried an induction. I was trying to end up in Rome, but my attempt failed.

Third dream:
There was a street festival in a more run-down area of my old home town. It was in front of a two-story white house. There were a lot of food vendors, and there was also a stretch of street full of people doing face-painting for children. I was trying to meet up with my boyfriend on the other side, so I picked my way through them, trying not to knock over any paint or step on any children. After I got through, I realized that I could have simply walked along side the whole thing instead of through it.

Before the festival, my boyfriend and I had buried our more valuable belongings along the side of the house and marked it with a long, stiff, silver blade of grass. After the festival was over, we went to go dig it up. But there was a guy who considered it to be his territory, and he seemed aggressive and we thought he might attack us. He was flying around in a tiny plane thing he sat on top of.

So we abandoned our stash, and I couldn't remember if I'd buried my wallet with it, but I hoped I hadn't. We got in my car and started driving away from there, and drove through some thick woods. He disappeared into the trees. We turned around, hoping he was lost or thought we were still in there, and went back to try to dig up our stash before he showed up again.

Woke up. Tried an induction into Rome again... attempt failed.

Then I dreamed about a "cone" on Mars that may have been a tower from an advanced alien civilization. For some reason, though, NASA didn't seem interested in investigating it, which was frustrating. There wouldn't have been a way to analyze the technology anyway without humans there in person, if we could even get ahold of any (which was unlikely) and there wasn't much to gain by sending humans there to do it, either. I doubted the rover would be able to get there and get anything without them destroying it. They didn't even know about the little rover driving around out there, anyway.

Then I dreamed that there was suddenly a new Democratic candidate, a young Latino guy. All of the candidates' faces were up on huge banners, but Hillary's was the only one that had a name on it.

I believe my inductions had such a high failure rate because the environment I was trying to send myself to was very unfamiliar. My inductions into familiar places are much more successful.

I've gotten better at WILD, although it took... what... 4 years?

I've found I have much more control over the dream and don't run into the "stuck in the dark" issue that plagues my lucid dreams when I gain awareness during a dream.

I've been horrible about keeping a dream journal, and today I only remember my 2 WILD lucid dreams and not much else. Very lazy of me.

My favorite method for WILD is to explore a specific environment. I have two main fallbacks, two different "home bases". I know a lot of people really want to create a home base. It has been very difficult for me - I had no luck even managing to arrive in my home base for 2 solid years. I think part of it was that my "home" really wasn't a good one and didn't reflect my true personality or needs, and I had to spend a lot of time rearranging and rebuilding it in my head. I have two different ones right now, depending on what I want to accomplish. One is a whimsical home in what looks like the rainforest of the Pacific Northwest, perched on a cliff over the ocean. The other one is a fortress in a rugged landscape that looks a lot like the Grand Canyon, although much more mountainous.


LD #1: Woke up. Had to use the bathroom. Went back to bed.
Began my visualization of home #1... I was on the sandy beach below the cliff. I walked up and down the beach in my mind, focusing on all of the sensations that would go with it - the sound of the waves, the sound of the wind, the feel of the sand beneath my feet and even the slight whisper it made when I walked. How my footprints looked. The sky and horizon over the ocean, and the smell of salt on the breeze. Eventually, the sound of gulls over the water.

I looked back toward my house. There are steep stairs that lead up from the beach to the top of the cliff - they're made from the stones themselves. I walk across the beach to the steps and start climbing upward toward the house. The stones feel solid beneath my feet.

By the time I reach the top of the cliff, the dream has solidified into a lucid dream, although it still feels very fragile. I spend some time on the terrace at the top of the cliff looking out across the beach and ocean, and marvel at how beautiful it is.

I have a feeling that there are some friends nearby heading toward my house, so I move through the bedroom (which has a door leading to the terrace) and then the kitchen area. Things are fuzzy and I've made the mistake of not stabilizing very well because I'm anxious to greet my friends.

I open the front door. The rainforest outside is cool and misty. Wooden steps create a trail upward through the foliage. I can hear their voices in the distance, it sounds like two of them are arguing with each other.

Two of my friends appear at the top of the steps and start heading downward... I can still hear the others arguing with each other, although they're still out of sight somewhere further up the trail.

All of this is very distracting. The dream is too thin at this point, and it fades. I wake up.

LD #2:
I wake up naturally. It's early morning... light outside, but earlier than I'd like to get out of bed. I don't really remember the dreams I just had.

I lie back and begin another visualization; this time, I'm exploring the fortress. The fortress is a very new idea, interesting and a bit more grim. I wander around through some nondescript rooms... I haven't really developed the place much... and eventually become lucid in an area with ugly lemon yellow walls that really don't look very fortressy. I'm sort of irritated since I'd rather be somewhere more fitting for what I'd like, and more interesting. The hall I'm going down twists and turns but doesn't lead anywhere, and I'm becoming more irritated.

I run across a woman wearing a very old-fashioned maid outfit (not like a sexy French maid, think a traditional English maid) but she's very... zombielike. I think I said something to her, and she replied in a monotone. Her eyes were white and milky-looking. I don't like her and don't want to deal with zombies, so I destroy her (with a thought, she basically becomes a blood spatter across the walls and floor).

I run across one of the dream characters who'd normally inhabit this fort (he's a general) but everything is foggy so I don't recall any specifics about him... I need to work on him a little more... and complain about the zombie. He tells me that he and another dream character zombified all of the inhabitants and servants in the fortress when they took it over, so they wouldn't have to deal with any opposition by them but the fortress was kept running and in pretty decent repair. He doesn't care much about convenience and upkeep for himself - he doesn't need that stuff - but the way he sees it, it's more convenient for me. It's sort of evil and disturbing, but it IS something I'd expect that character to do, and he does have a good point.

This wasn't something I came up with myself... I was a little surprised by it, actually. I still don't really like the zombies, but I don't want to argue with that particular dream character very much - he's very stubborn - so I let the zombie thing slide.

As I head toward the main door that leads outside of the fortress, the dream falls apart and I wake up.

Feb. 16, 2003:
I had some dreams I really don't remember,except that they weren't nightmares. Then I had dreams about woods, but they were nice dreams. Then I had a dream about a puppy. It was sort of scary but the end was happy, so it doesn't qualify a nightmare.
Then I had a sort of semi, psuedo-nightmare, but the puppy was still involved... hmm... oh well.

In my dream I was walking through the woods. They were more like deciduous woods, though. Not sure if they were Florida woods at all. I embraced a tall man with light brown hair. I can't remember what color his eyes were, or if they had a color. All I remember is saying "I remember you" and asking him his name. He wouldn't tell me his name

Then there was the dream about the puppy, I don't remember much except that the puppy was going through a temple to save some people, and in the end the puppy managed to save them. It was smallish, sort of like a terrier, with silvery black fur, only it had floppy ears. It was a VERY cute puppy, though.

Then I had a dream I was in a car with J following another car through some sort of theme park, and his brakes gave out. Somehow, though, we made it through that alive, mostly because the guy in front of us used the back end of his own car to slow us down (everything was mostly downhill so we would have kept gaining speed). The guy was NOT pleased that he had to total his car, but... hey... we didn't die.

Original entry dated May 10, 2002:

I dreamt I was paddling a rowboat through a sea of kittens.

Original journal entry dated May 19th, 2002:

I had a dream that I was a skater-type person, in a forest with REALLY huge trees, and there was one tree that had an incredible long ramp up into its boughs... the ramp was extremely steep, to the point that one could not walk up it.

I was skating around on the ground, and then these gangster type people drove up in a low-rider and started to threaten me because it was very dark and I was alone... in this one, though, I was male, looked blonde and surfer-dude-ish, and VERY 80s in a bad teenie flick sort of way. So I got scared and pulled a rolled-up rainbow out of my pocket (it was a very narrow rainbow, maybe a foot across) and threw it toward the ramp. It unrolled and created a glowy rainbowy escalator thing, and I jumped on it and started riding up the ramp into the tree. I was holding little metal bars in my hand that made ringing noises, and the pitch of the ringing changed as I got higher, so I would know how safe it was. But I had to hold them very straight and level and parallel, or else they wouldn't ring correctly. It was very dark and humid and exotic up in the treetop, and the sky was a pretty color of deep blue, lapis blue. The foliage was all dewy, and there was a tribal type of llady up in the treetops, and she made sure that I got up and down correctly. So I rode up and down the rainbow...

Somehow, my ex-boyfriend was in on the whole "rainbow" thing and had been watching... so after all was said and done, I wound up hanging out with him at night, God only knows why, and it was around Christmas. He and his mom were looking at various miniature Christmas trees and trying to decide which one to put in the kitchen (which is even more unusual because they're Jewish), they all looked pretty beaten up, one of them spun around and lit up, but they couldn't agree and were arguing with each other, then his mother asked me what my opinion was and I just shrugged and tentatively suggested the spinny one. I thought his mother was being unusually nice to me, considering, but didn't overly dwell on it. For a split second I turn around and he is several inches taller than me, I'm astonished and do a double-take and he's back to his regular (diminutive) height.

He seemed to know more about my life than he should, as usual criticizes me on a number of points and is somewhat caustic. I take it too hard because, well, I always take things too personally. Turns out Joe's been rooming with a female friend of his, I felt a tinge of jealousy but it turns out that they're just roomies in a conversation I have with him, we talk about "old times", then the conversation and dream cut off indefinitely.

Then it changes to a movie set. My friends and I, as our Independent Study Project, are making a movie, but our budget sucks because it doesn't exist, and somehow the rainbow is still here. So we all wind up riding around on it and it tends to defy the laws of physics, and somehow we get stuck in an alternate dimension, where we turn into different sorts of RPG characters, and all still VERY 80s, and one of our characters is a prissy bitch but she's the mage so we've got to put up with her. Even though she sucks at being a mage. But she winds up being REALLY badass later on. Then, I'm swimming down the river because we lost track of the rainbow, and get attacked by these little pygmy people who are shooting arrows - ineffectively - at me. So I laugh at them until the tribal African lady, who has somehow become my guide, informs me that the poison on the arrows was so potent that had one just barely nicked my skin I would have died instantly. So then I got all upset and scared and nauseous...

Anyway, it ended with us successfully completing the ISP with the footage from our adventure, everybody thought that a "documentary" approach to fantasy was really neat-o. We held a screening of it in a tiny theatre-type room that doesn't exist at New College - but in the dream, we went to a big university, not New College - and the professor who evaluated it was very old and sort of doddering.

I split this into a separate entry because it is long.

I woke up last night at ~10:30 pm. I had gone to bed at ~9pm. Fell asleep again at ~11:00pm.

Woke up again around 1:30-2:00am. I did not recall any dreams, except for dim impressions. Attempted WILD but was too tired.

I set my intentions to wake up at some point in the early daylight hours before work. At this point, I'd had the dreams about snowy car crashes, unicorns, etc. Woke up again at approximately 5:00am. Felt grumpy about lying in a supine position. It feels like it's going to take forever, too. I maintain the supine position until it's incredibly uncomfortable, then sloooowly roll over onto my side while trying to maintain as much of my trance as I can. Because I have work, I'm not going to fight falling into "regular" sleep too hard but I keep a halfhearted watch for any dreamlets I might be able to latch onto.

Eventually, a "proto-dreamlet" pops up. I'm not asleep enough for it to actually really be a dreamlet... it's still a visualization, just not one of my choosing. Even though it sounds like one, I really want to drive home that it's not an actual fully formed dream... it's like the difference between watching a movie and being the movie. It's an intense visualization - one I don't even fully control - but it is not a dream.

My attention wanes. My mind wanders, eventually producing a ghost of a memory. I am in a convenience store. It's the beginnings of a dream, but too "thin", like a flat image. It is an incredibly detailed visualization, but I'm not "there" yet. Again - tough to explain.

I am in a convenience store. It's old and run down. The walls are yellowing, even though they were once white. I recognize this faint memory - I am in Nebraska. I know that some of the cans and boxes on the shelves expired long ago. I move through the store. I look down... I am wearing sneakers. The floor is beige speckled linoleum, and it's dirty.

I go through a door, into a laundromat. It's full of ancient, coin-operated washers and dryers. They're dented and noisy. There's an old fat man, who looks like Archie Bunker. He's wearing a dingy wife-beater and sitting on a plastic chair. I recognize the laundromat as another dim memory.

The visualization gains vividness as I move through the exit. I am on the outside, on the second floor, on a fire escape. I go down rusty steps. My sneakers make metallic thumping sounds. I am on the ground now. I look around. The ground is flat, flat, flat, covered in brown and yellowing grass, and it is mid-afternoon. I feel very, very close... I move forward, trying to break the "surface tension" of the visualization and turn it into a true dream. It's right there...

But I am in Nebraska, and the landscape is SO BORING. I think that I don't want to have a lucid dream where I'm stuck in Nebraska, since scene changes can be a pain for me, so I try to shift it to the dreamscape from a prior dream. Kind of like a "bait and switch", to see if I can trick my brain into putting me somewhere I want to go.

It's a mistake. The vividness fades to a ghost of what it was. I cannot conjure up the evergreens that I wanted. I try hard to push more detail into the visualization, to no avail. I cannot become lucid in this state - the trance is too light, and the visualization is too dim. I don't give up, though.

I stick with trying to visualize the snowy forest, the towering evergreens... I imagine my "house" is there (my dream cottage). I approach it... shift... I am now in it. I am holding a baby, although I'm not sure why. I set the baby aside, and it disappears. I am sitting on a couch. The cottage only has one large room. I am looking out a large window at the ocean, which I can see through the snowy evergreen branches. There are hazy mountains in the distance.

The DC I have been looking for walks through the door. The visualization is still not a dream - his features are foggy. I decide to explore the cottage, but the visualization is disjointed. I discover that my bed is on a loft under the eaves. The eaves are made of natural, untreated wood. There is another window that lets me look out over the forest. The bed is soft, and covered in quilts. One quilt is a red and white patchwork quilt that I recognize from a memory.

The DC climbs up into the loft and stretches out on the bed. We watch the snow fall. The visualization is slowly regaining intensity and clarity, although nowhere near a full blown dream. My alarm goes off.

Original dream dated May 7, 2008:

I had a dream about a skinny boy who was tormented by a hag, she sat on his chest and licked his face - eventually, he was able to shake her off and take off on his bicycle, where he raced a train that longer and longer, but not like trains are usually long - like silly putty. It also had the front end of a truck. Eventually, he reached a castle full of the ghosts of old soldiers who had to act out their final battle again and again, and was recruited into their ranks.


I also had a weird vague dream that was sort of like I was at work, and there was another person, a young blond French man, who was sort of my friend. My boss was being a jerk about stuff not getting done, even though it was impossible to do so much. Then I dreamed something about owls, only the owls were not owls, they were big beautiful black and white birds that looked more like hawks, and they had chicks. Then, something about photographing another type of bird with chicks, using my cell camera. The dream ended with an earthquake and firefighters rescuing two little girls from their house, which was falling down the side of a cliff.


Then, for some reason, I was a large, muscular man. I had just gotten out of my jeep and waded across a river, I think I was trying to keep someone from tracking me. The landscape was like woods in perhaps Colorado or Northern CA.