Bubble

So last night, I had a lot of trouble with inductions... again... I'm just out of practice. Frustrating, but I'll get back in the swing of things. I tried to go directly to Rome, but I'm just not familiar enough with the location, so I'll try my house next time.

During my second attempt, I ended up with an Out of Body Experience instead of a lucid dream... yes, I know they're technically the same thing, but the OBEs always unsettle me. And I'm always blind during them, since they tend to send me straight into the Void, which I hate. So I got irritated when it happened and just reclined back into my body and went to regular sleep.

I dreamed that my boyfriend and I lived in a different part of town than we do right now... in the dream, we lived really close to my brother. We were moving. My mom, my brother, and one of my boyfriend's friends was helping us. This particular friend is extremely chill, never gets upset over anything, is even more patient than my boyfriend is (patience of a saint), etc. I was in the car with him, and my boyfriend was in my car with my mom and brother.

We were moving to a different section of the city... maybe even a different city further south... in any case, I lost the address of the house we were moving to, which was sort of like a ranch style duplex thing, and I don't have the directions either. The siding of the house was white. Houses in my dreams always tend to be white, for some reason.

Anyway, so we get onto the wrong on-ramp, and we pass my boyfriend and my car and aren't able to turn around to join/follow them, so we're on the freeway straight to a different city (and no off-ramps along the way). His friend is getting progressively more irritated and pissed off. I've never seen this guy get pissed over anything, ever, and he kind of reminds me of one of my cousins as well, so I think this is hilarious and start laughing. Which makes him angrier, which makes me laugh harder.

I was such a dick in that dream.

Dreamed I was in grade school, but I was in school in Japan.They had started painting murals all over lunch rooms "to encourage kids to eat all of their food." The administrator in charge of planning this said not everybody would like all of the murals because "some are very soft".

The administrator is standing in front of one of the murals, speaking about it. The light is bright, artificial indoor lighting. The mural is a goofy cartoon version of a kid running - but more like an American Peanuts-style cartoon than a Japanese one. The colors are bright; the kid's skin is a peach color. When he talks about the "softer" murals, I can't see them, but I imagine what one might look like, and it is a pink fuzzy blob.

The lunch room has tables like a standard American lunch room (the long brown tables with benches) and the kids are sitting down and eating at them.

They also implemented a new program where they would give kids "tickets" for lunch item menus like meat, salad, dessert, etc. They warned kids not to use up all of their meat tickets at the beginning of the week, or they'd end up eating salad the rest of the week. One particularly enterprising kid bought tickets off of the other kids and "sold" them in exchange for doing his homework, etc. The teacher found a hoard of salad tickets in his desk because nobody wanted them.

I see his desk full of salad tickets. I imagine the child as a husky little boy with short, messy brown hair. Perspective shift - I see a child in line, handing a lunch server a meat ticket, while there is a voice-over of the teacher explaining about the tickets.

The dream shifts a little. I'm still in Japan, but now I am an exchange student with the ability to alter reality to suit my whims - just a little bit. While walking up the steps to a one-story brown brick building (the school), I change the color of another kid's shoes. I walk through the door after him.

---

Then I dreamed about eating at a restaurant that included a shower with the meal. I ate a seafood meal that is basically calamari, mussels, and clams mixed together and sauteed. The inside of the restaurant was a bit dark, and the seafood was just sort of plunked down on the plate (and a little tasteless).

Then I took a long shower, but it became so long that I worried that the restaurant's owners would be pissed. The shower was a stand-up shower with no tub and a sliding door. I had a blue-green loofah.

---

I dreamed I bought a house right off of the highway. It was supposed to be very close to where I currently live, just a little bit further out and with a much nicer yard. It cost me about $500,000. When I showed it to my mother, she liked the yard. I decided that we needed more space, and there were 3 empty undeveloped lots behind and off to the side of it, so I bought those as well - my reasoning being that we could plant a garden there. They made kind of a "U" shape around my neighbor's house, and I got nervous that there would be some conflict over who owns the land since up until now, the neighbor had just sort of used it by default because nobody owned it/was using it. I was also unsure if it was too much space, and if my mother's garden would really extend beyond the original house's garden.

Anyway, the house was up on top of a steep hill, with steps up to it. It was a little one-story house with light blue siding, plenty of windows for natural lighting, and lots of foliage around it. In the dream, it was summer and the sunlight was bright. The whole thing seemed very cheery. There was a patio in back with a few patio chairs and a table, and the yard behind it was lush and full of trees and flowers. The predominating color of the foliage was a light spring green, and you could hear birds in the garden. I told my mother that if you went down the steps to the sidewalk, you could walk into downtown. I apologized about the noise from traffic but explained that it was a great house and the traffic noise had brought the price down to make it more affordable.

1. I dream that I am in a grocery store, and that part of the grocery store is a bar. There's a girl in a cutoff shirt, or something. I pay for my groceries and park my cart outside the bar. The bar's very dark - the walls and floor have been painted black. I have a beer and buy a 6 pack of cider. When I return to the cart, someone has stolen half of my loaf of bread, and 6 eggs out of my egg carton. I complain to management and show them, and ask if they will reimburse me for the bread and eggs.

2. I dream I am in the attic of an old house. I've broken in. There's a lot of old stuff stored in here, some of it mine... how my stuff ended up in here, I don't know. Some friends and I have packed it into boxes. The attic is filling with water, and I'm moving through thigh deep water trying to sort through these boxes.

We hear people in the house below. I get worried that they will discover us, so I start trying to put the boxes away neatly so they don't realize that their attic is full of someone else's things. I'm also worried they'll notice the water pouring down from their ceiling, since it's draining but I don't know where it went. Another friend gets on a cot that's built against the wall and starts talking about how in his college dorm, it was so tiny that he had to pull his knees up any time someone opened the closet.

We decide the coast is clear and start handing boxes to someone on a ladder outside the door. From there, it's easy to go down the ladder and through a hole in the fence into my own yard. The boxes have some of the homeowners' stuff as well... I plan on selling it at a yard sale.

My house is an old white two story. It's about a hundred years old, and there's nothing particularly special about the house itself. The yard is full of trees; one is much older than the house, and towers above it. It is an old oak tree. My grandpa is there now, and he is talking about how everyone cuts down their trees, and everyone's yard looks the same, and it's bland and sterile. I look at the yards of the other houses on the street (somehow they are bland-looking mansions) and see that they are all treeless and perfectly manicured. I flop down on my side and roll down the hill, and my brother (who is suddenly there) does the same thing, while our mother walks behind us. When I look up the hill, the contrast between my yard and the rest of the yards is striking. The trees rise above my house, and their branches weave in and out of each other. My grandfather comments that having so many trees in the yard is pleasant and adds character to the house. I pat the perfectly mowed, perfectly green grass at the bottom of the hill and tell him that the rest of the neighborhood seems very sterile in comparison.

I wake up briefly and then go back to sleep, and the dream resumes, although it has lost some vividness.

I continue from the bottom of the hill into a neighborhood beyond the bottom of the hill. I walk along a sidewalk. It is bright and sunny outside, and probably June or July. There are some preteen girls standing in a yard, chatting, and a little boy in a red striped shirt on a big wheel. This neighborhood is also quite uniform - suburban America, at its most mediocre. The vividness is returning. I realize I am dreaming and try to push through into full lucidity, but the dream is still too thin and everything goes black, and I wake up.

Original journal entry dated Dec. 15th, 2002:

First I had a dream that I lived in this weird old house and there were two trees in the back yard - a pine and a birch. I decided they weren't enough because we needed a good shade-tree and planned on planting on oak or an ash, but the hole I dug was way too big. I also ran a boating company with my uncle, but in my dream my uncle was some big fat redneck (none of my uncles are fat). this one guy wanted to rent a boat but he was half-blind and stupid and drove his car into the hole I dug for the tree. Then I went to get him a boat. But the boats weren't in a real river, they were in a fake one where we could control the currents with switches and stuff, but I messed up and hit the wrong switches. I could also, incidentally, breathe underwater, so I did a lot of lever pulling and such in these complex underwater tunnels beneath the river. Then I went inside to watch TV, creating a nice seque between dreams...

... in this dream I was watching the news when all of the sudden the picture started to change. The guys from "Megatokyo" had decided to interrupt the feed from the news network and take over the TV channel. They managed to keep it up for about 3 hours before the channel wrested control of the channel back. In the meantime I was very entertained by their antics.

Original entry on March 18, 2008:

So first I dreamed about this one river, and it was very very polluted, and these guys decided to go fishing. Only they found this one invisible island. At first it seemed like a really wonderful, idyllic place, and this nice old lady invited them inside.

Note: if a "nice old lady" invites you ANYWHERE, it's a good idea not to go. In fact, run really fast in the opposite direction.

Anyway, so of course they listened to her, and they went into this house and down these stairs into this, like, underground mansion thing. Which seemed really great and everything at first, but then they started to notice discrepencies in stuff that they didn't notice at first. The woman had a pet dog, like a big mastiff, only it seemed a little strange sometimes, like it couldn't quite fit entirely inside of its form. Like sometimes the walls would flicker, or there'd be stains where there shouldn't be, or the furniture or the stuff hanging in the closet would seem really weird for a second, that sort of thing. Then one of them made the mistake of looking behind the shower curtain and there were a bunch of skinned bodies hanging there. So all of the sudden the illusion fell away and they realized that they were in a structure made entirely of bones and decomposing bodies and other stuff like that, the remains of people and animals and stuff. She'd fed some of them to her "dog", which was actually this huge demonlike thing. So anyway, she turned out to be a pretty ooglay monster thing herself, and chased them. They jumped into the river and managed to get to their village. The mayor, who was a woman, and looked strangely... well, familiar... led an expedition to the island with a bunch of big tough guys, only when they got there the place was deserted and all of the bones and stuff were dried up.

Ok, dream number two, there's this really busy police office and they're trying to catch this one serial killer dude who's responsible for a bunch of really gruesome murders. But well the police office is really busy, and they're very overworked and everything. They get this call from this one woman who seems to sort of be freaking out, there's a bunch of growling and snarling in the background that sounds like really pissed off dogs, and she's asking them to send people over. The cops are like, "We're really busy and we'll send animal control, ok?" and then they hang up before she can say anything. So the woman's stranded on the bed with her two kids, and she DOES own a doberman, only it's sort of dead right now because she's being attacked by evil vicious snarling demon-babies. And one of them goes after her kid so she winds up wrestling with it and it sinks its teeth into her arm.
So the cops are looking at this newspaper clipping later on, and the headline is "Woman And Children Found Dead In Bedroom, Eaten". And they chalk it up to this serial-killer who's been going around. They just can't seem to catch the guy.

Original journal entry dated May 22, 2002:

It didn't really start out as a nightmare, it started out as a dream that I was playing Dungeons and Dragons like my friends, and it was a normal session except for the fact that we would literally become our characters. And the fact that the campaign took place on the actual campus, not in a far off fantasy world. This was a whole dream in and of itself.

It then phased into the next dream in this manner:
When we were done playing, we cleaned our stuff up, packed it away, etc. I asked for a ride home but nobody wanted to give me one, although M offered to drop me off at the closest bus-stop. Unfortunately, it wasn't the bus-stop that I needed to be at, which was a mile down and across the freeway. So I started walking down the side of the freeway, which wasn't there at first, but then there were walls along the edge of the road and I had to walk IN the road, inching along with my back pressed to the wall, while tons of cars barreled by. I managed to get across the freeway when I realized that I had miscalculated and overshot the place where the bus-stop was, so I had to go back. As I was going back, I found myself stumbling along a gravel embankment at the edge of the road, and the way that the wall and embankment were arranged, I had to walk away from the actual road and into a sort of hollow near the freeway pillars and supporting structures... all of the sudden, it got way too foggy for me to see, and I wandered blindly until I suddenly felt incredibly cold, clammy hands all over me, and then I passed out...

...when I woke up, I was blind, but I was in a warm bed and a house, and people were talking to me. There were 3 voices - one was a fatherly voice, conjuring up in my head the image of a man smoking a pipe. The second was a daughter-ish voice, that of a young girl. She spent a lot of time talking to me and stuff. The last one scared me, it was a mother-ish voice, but instead of conjuring up a motherly image in my head it conjured up the image of something rather like a medusa (I'm talking mythology, not squid, here). They took care of me and talked to me, but they never touched me. In my dream I think I was an orphan so I guess I finally had a family. I always refered to the fatherly figure as "father", the sisterly one as "sister", but didn't refer to the motherly figure as anything at all. I kept asking them when I would be well, when any important events would happen, when I would be able to go back... they told me, one day, that in a day they were going to go somewhere, and asked me whether or not I wanted to go with - I could go tomorrow, or in a week. I told them tomorrow, and asked them where we were going to go and what we were going to do. They responded, "Tomorrow they will uncover us." As I vaguely began to wonder if my caretakers were something other than... well, alive or human... back in real life, D knocked on my door, and the dream abruptly ended.

So then I managed to get back to sleep, but this time my dream was different, it was about the dorms only the design had changed (for one, they were nicer and the foliage was more lush, the landscape was prettier). There were some design flaws in the dorms, one of them was that in order to reach their own patio the next-door dorm had to cross ours. So there was a debate as to whether or not they also got to use and put their stuff on the half of our patio that they had to cross to get to their own. Then there was some stuff about mom and screen-names, and a bunch of random stuff, one thing of which included a mural with different descriptive name-bubbles that you could choose to put next to the objects depicted in the mural. The Mural of the Week was one with dinosaurs, and for some reason they didn't look sad but they were crying, and some of the word bubbles were pretty silly.

Sept. 18, 2003:
I had this dream that I was back in my aunt's old house, and there were all of these zombies everywhere. And they weren't stupid, shuffling zombies, even though they were all nasty looking, they were cunning and intelligent zombies. They'd plan traps and pull all kinds of tricks and stuff, and this made them far more dangerous than your average zombie. And of course, the old standby - get bitten by a zombie, and you turn into a zombie.

So I'm holed up in this house, and there are zombies everywhere, and of course houses are not terribly secure, especially old ones. And this person busts in, and I think he's a zombie so I try to kill him, but it turns out he's one of the few people left who's still human... his name is, of all things, Sniper, and he's a sharpshooter. He's also a total asshole, but that's beside the point.
The problem - we have several guns (Sniper's are very nice and very deadly, mine's a worn out rifle and a pistol) but very little ammunition. The odds that this house has ammunition are slim to none. If we go outside to get it, we're toast. I have a feeling that Sniper sees me as a minor annoyance/possible human shield, at best. Especially since I have a habit of forgetting to reload the shotgun and running out of ammunition at the worst possible time.
Anyway, we secure the house as much as possible, you know the drill - board up the windows, etc. Except we're gonna run out of stuff to board windows up with, so we decide to secure a smaller but tactically crucial section of the house. By this point we're running pretty low on ammunition, although I've gotten a few chances to prove that I'm not completely worthless. Just mostly.
So once everything's secured, someone knocks on the front door. Sniper opts to open it since he has much better aim than I do. So he cracks the door open, and there's a woman standing out there, and she's obviously a zombie. But she pleads with him a little bit, says she only wants some money, that she needs to feed her kids (who are little zombie-lings by this point). So Sniper, in an odd fit of human compassion, opens the door to pass some money through, and the two evil children attack him. He shoots them before they can bite him or anything and the mother runs away, dropping a pistol that happened to be fully loaded. So we're like “cool, ammo”.
So then I had to go down into the basement, I don't remember why, I think it was to look for food and see if there was any ammunition down there (even though odds are, there was not), and I get freaked out when I see this zombie (the one from earlier) trying to get in through the basement windows... she can't, though, because there's a metal grating over them. So I grab what I need (no ammo down there) and run upstairs again. And that's when the dream sort of faded out.

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 entry dated Feb. 16, 2002:


Nightmare #1:
I had a nightmare that I was in this deserted ruined city-place, and there was nuclear ash everywhere. The city was quasi-inhabited by the ghosts of children, who told me that I couldn't leave because nobody leaves. I tried to leave anyway, by climbing over a crumbled wall and biking down a deserted and shattered highway. I could bike a LOT faster in my dream than in reality - in fact, I was amazed by the speed at which I was going. There was something nameless and terrifying behind me, and I didn't want to look back because I knew that if I did I'd see nothing there but a tremendous wall of brute evil force... like a visual shock-wave from a bomb blast... and then I opened up my eyes, I was lying in bed in the pitch-black and felt something sitting at the edge of my bed. Something like a man but not a man. It terrified the hell out of me. I could feel it there like... a dead weight... solid as a rock. I was paralyzed with fear, but finally gathered the courage to lunge for the light. When I turned it on - of course nothing was there. Perhaps that was when I really woke up and the nightmare ended, or at least I hope so.

Nightmare #2:
There was a house that was - how can I put it? - unfolded. It existed in more than three dimensions, so to speak, and was very frightening to experience. There were ghosts living in it. There seem to be a lot of ghosts in my dreams. One of them was a sort of... respectable old gentleman, who would be kindly if he weren't so sinister in a way. The house was a labyrinth, and I kept getting lost and becoming very afraid.

Nightmare #3:
I had a nightmare that I had died. In it, my mother and brother and I lived in an old Victorian mansion. I couldn't move on, and wanted very badly to communicate with them, but the only time I could was that split second when they hovered between sleep and waking. At night I was chased by hell-hounds, and was sort of held back by things that I thought of in my dream as "death-bones".

I dreamed about abandoned, crumbling, overgrown overpasses and train tracks through the wilderness. I clung to the bottom of one, like monkey bars. Some friends and I went into the wilderness to explore, but we were afraid of getting lost. We ran across another group of people. In our explorations, we cut through a lot of grass and underbrush, and I was worried about the impact we were having on the landscape.

I then dreamed that I got a job at a shop in a historic section of a city. It was a job at a candy shop, and it was partly commission-based. My mother didn't want me to take it. She said the area was "too dangerous".
I was at the outside cafe section of a nearby restaurant when I went lucid. The restaurant was inside of a converted Victorian style house. When I realized I was dreaming, I immediately went inside to look for a specific DC I really wanted to see. I didn't see him. Instead, there was a waiter who was in his late 30s but mostly bald. I covered my eyes and tried to imagine that he was the DC. When I uncovered them, he had changed a little bit; his face had morphed, and was a little blurry, and tufts of hair were coming out of the side of his head, and he looked a little... melted. I got very frustrated.
I recall that my surroundings were hazy. I recall the restaurant having a lot of dark wood in its decor, and being a fine dining/upscale sort of place.

Review:
I think I went lucid because I realized the area I was in was unfamiliar and I did not recall how I got there, and this was a cue that I was dreaming. I have also just randomly gone lucid a lot out of "habit" - I am used to habitually questioning reality, now, so I also do it while I am dreaming as well, which I suppose is the whole point of ADA. This has led to a gradual but measurable increase in lucid dreams. Three years of practice are finally paying off.

For anybody who is just getting started, remember this: it took a year and a half of trying before I had my first lucid dream.

I need to work on remembering to stabilize and observe before trying to do anything. I've been frustrated at the haziness of my lucids lately, but I also have not been observing and stabilizing as I ought to. I need to work on vividness and stabilization. I miss the beautiful landscapes of my first few lucids... I've stopped observing and gotten too impatient, and it's backfiring.

I try too often to exert direct control. I think my attempt to change the waiter may have been a tad too direct. I still wouldn't call it a complete failure - I did succeed at partially changing his features.

Things I could have done:
- Asked the waiter to seat me, sat down at the table, and waited for the DC I was trying to find to show up at the time we'd agreed on.
- Continued to look for the DC in the crowd.
- Looked for the table that I knew the DC was waiting at.
- Used the restaurant doorway to go somewhere that I knew the DC was at (scene change).
- Reached behind myself and felt for the DC's hand.

So, tonight will be another night - and hopefully, another lucid. I need to remember to use my environment to my advantage.

Alright...

Another stupid "haunted house" dream. How boring. I mean, it was terrifying at the time, and I knew something was in the house (the attic, I guess) and I had stuff written in Satanic script on my forehead (much to my horror) and I was terrified during the dream, but haunted house dreams seem to be pretty common for me, so... boring.

Other dream:
I was half-asleep and heard little running foot-steps, like those of a child, and then a child's voice whispered loudly in my ear, "Hey!" I woke up and looked around, but didn't see anything. I then went back to sleep.

I had another dream last night that I know was very vivid, unfortunately I can't remember any of it beyond the fact that there was some sort of house, and my mother and brother were involved. It's noteworthy that although I think the house may have been run-down, it wasn't haunted or scary. I also have fragmented impressions of lots of greenery (lots of plants and trees, perhaps in a greenhouse) and maybe a short man in a suit. I know that I didn't want to wake up this morning because there was something in the dream I needed to resolve. Also, something about traveling along a highway in a car, and the highway may have been near the sea.

More fragments may come back, sometimes fragments of dreams I've 'forgotten' have resurfaced after a while.

I haven't documented my dreams for a while, so I lost a few. Here are the ones I remember (from while on vacation and afterward):

Dreamed that I had to go get my grandfather (grandpa M) and bring him somewhere - a party, or something. It was sort of important. Along the way, we got dumped into a (freezing) river. He sank to the bottom, and I had to dive down and search around for him and drag him back up, worried it was too late. Every time we got to the surface, he got dragged back down again and I had to fetch him. Amazingly, none of this killed him, and we got to the other side.

Dreamed that I lived in a house - sort of decrepit, or maybe more like a trailer, or cobbled together, but anyway, it didn't have enough walls, some parts were just... open. I knew that there were dangerous things and people living in the hills and was constantly worried, especially since the house was so exposed in the parts that didn't have walls.

Dreamed that I had a little brother/cousin/kid/whatever, a toddler, only I was unable to take care of him, so a former classmate of mine took custody of him. I felt like shit since the main reason I couldn't take care of him was that I didn't have a good enough job. Even so, the place they lived in was very bare, almost no furniture, and not very safe. There was a part on an upstairs landing with no rail at all, period (for some reason, I knew a giant planter was supposed to go there, but there wasn't there and that's why there was just a drop with no railing).

Original dream dated July 04, 2008:
Dreamed that Reese and I were trying to get home from an airport called Mariana airport, and we couldn't. Mom was supposed to pick us up, but never showed up, so we took the bus instead. Somewhere along the line, it turned into Reese driving her jeep, and we got stuck in traffic on the Interstate. It turned out that Mom had never planned on picking us up and there had been a miscommunication. For some reason, we lived in a 2-story white house.

I had a dream that my pet rabbit had a heart attack and was dying, so I wrapped her up in a purple towel and cried while she groomed my head.

Original dream dated July 05, 2008:
I had a dream that I was working on rules for a D20 game, and they turned into rules for the world...

Somewhere along the way, we got invaded by alien wasps that climbed up your nose and replaced your brain, stealing your soul. It happened to me, and I wasn't technically supposed to get another 'chance' at working things out in the world, but for some reason, I was given one. I had to abide by the rules I'd written, though, which stated that if you lost then it would rain forever and everything would be covered by 500 feet of soil over the next few thousand years. I escaped from the original area (which was quite dangerous) with some friends of mine, including a tall brown-haired man. We got to a coffee shop and tried to figure out what to do. We were sort of stuck in there, at least one of us was covered in blood, and I realized that we were all doomed unless I recovered the book I'd been working on and revised the rule set. The brown haired guy offered to run through the rain for several miles to get it, but it was very dangerous out there and there were zombies, and I argued that if he died it was permanent but I could revive myself... the dream left off there.

(original post dated 06/11/2008):

Dreamed that my aunt S was using my sewing machine to knit with, somehow. I wanted to remove the yarn in order to do some sewing, but didn't know if she was done with it yet, and my cousin Jenny wasn't much help because she didn't know. I had gotten a new pair of pants that, at first, looked really cool, but they were falling apart and had holes in them, which I had not realized when I bought them - hence the need to sew them up. Once I put them on, I was chagrined to discover that they were actually tacky snow-pants with a bright orange camouflage pattern on them.

Then, I was an imp cleaning up someone's house. And then, for some reason, we were also putting on this show, where we jumped from a platform into a lake below us, and I was an imp but also myself. Something about my swimsuit, I don't remember. I was debating a graceful dive vs. a back-flop (more in character for an imp) when the platform abruptly descended. The guy working it was asian and looked familiar but I couldn't make out who he was, and suddenly I was underwater and swimming back up to the platform before it ascended again.

Then I was playing a text-based MUD, and was debating whether to be a Paladin or a Monk, and decided to be a Paladin but specialize in unarmed combat and fist-weapons.