Bubble

I dreamed that my old pet rabbit was alive. I was in a room that was sort of a cross between an old apartment I lived in when I was 12, and my current apartment. The floors were the old ragged brown carpet from the old apartment... the layout was like the bedroom of my current one, except instead of a regular closet, there was a walk-in closet. I was keeping my bunny in there. I didn't want to keep her in her cage. IRL, her "cage" was really just her potty, and she was able to come and go as she pleased... it was basically just the crate I used to transport her to and from her vet, combined with being a litter pan. She didn't spend much time in there. She actually liked to just lie there in it with the door open, for some weird reason. I guess because it was "hers".

Anyway, in the dream, though, somebody wanted me to keep her in there. It was way too small and dirty, so instead I kept her in the closet. In the dream, I remember sitting down in the closet and petting her, and playing with the fuzz on top of her head. I miss her.

Then, I started wandering around the apartment naked. I recall lying on the carpet on my stomach (still naked) using a laptop. The carpet was the same sort of dull brown that the old apartment had, but sometimes it was also a wooden floor like my current apartment. It was late morning or early afternoon and there was a lot of sunlight... it may have been summer. The bed I was next to was a mess, unmade and covered in clothes. The mattress may have been lying directly on the floor.

Then realized maybe i should wear some clothing, and put my fleece leopard-print onesie on.

I woke up and I was cold, so that explains at least some of that dream. It was about 4 a.m. Tried to do visualizations, but too tired and needed all the sleep I could get, so I let it go.

Then I dreamed I had a roommate who was a huge asshole and then suddenly stopped being one and I was suspicious of it. Tall dude with long blond hair who fancied himself a "metal head".

Them I dreamed mom and I were driving around the city I currently live in with my brother, and she kept stopping and giving me painkiller injections to numb my mouth. Except they didn't numb my whole mouth. Specifically the left bottom side of my front teeth. My gums were all torn up and bloody there. So eventually she just gave me a syringe full of clear fluid and told me to use it. i asked what the dosage was, and she just shrugged.

Then... We were on the upstairs part of a store... it had a similar layout and looked a lot like the grocery store down the street from us but also sold clothing etc... I wanted cupcakes. The ones on the upstairs clearance rack near the checkout lanes were gross looking and overpriced. Like $3.99 for 2 cupcakes with the frosting all messed up. The rest of the baked goods weren't what I wanted. I really wanted cupcakes.

At some point, mom handed me 3 candy bar things. They were really thin fragile sheets of milk and white chocolate split diagonally along the length of the bar. They were in packaging that was simultaneously gold and shiny but also completely transparent. Unfortunately, they were so fragile that I accidentally broke 2 of them, one quite badly. I was worried they were ruined, that nobody would enjoy them that way, and apologized profusely to my mother. She didn't seem to care very much.

After picking through the shelves of baked goods upstairs (it was really just one display), I went downstairs (the layout of the store was the same as IRL in a lot of ways, but had escalators instead of stairs) to the bakery section, where they weren't much better. I picked through what was there... A helpful employee tried to help me find something, but all of my options sucked, and the store wanted like $18 for a pack of 4 cupcakes. The cupcakes were all in terrible shape - chocolate cupcakes with the blue and green frosting sliding off or mostly stuck to the plastic package.

Then at some point in between, we were driving around my old hometown, around one of the more run down areas... Brown figured heavily in the color palette... Lots of crumbling parking lots and dried out grass... it was midday, warm and very sunny, maybe it was late summer or early autumn. Mom was driving, I was in the front passenger seat, and my brother was in the back seat. I don't remember much about the car. It may have been my car, but I don't think it was. It wasn't a nice new car, in any case.

Anyway, I had decided not to use the mystery syringe because I didn't know the dosing. So I had put the syringe in the glove box and was worried the cops would pull us over, find it, and think it was illegal drugs. But I didn't want to just throw it in the trash because I didn't want anybody to get a needle-stick. For some reason I had a cap, like a pen cap, that could go over the needle... I put it on and put the needle back in the glove box. I decided I'd find a sharps container in a bathroom somewhere and throw it out there.

Then, I was back in the bakery section of the store, still trying to find cupcakes.

There were big security monitors above the cashiers lanes, and writing would randomly appear transposed over the images and then disappear. At first it looked like it was that the monitor was scuffed up. I reasoned it was actually Security doing it from their office. Like they were "writing" on the images in real-time, although I couldn't figure out why.

Woke up and thought about the fact that my dream recall hasn't been great and I hoped I wouldn't forget everything in the morning again. Fell asleep and dreamed about writing in my dream journal... In the dream, I had a notebook and pen on the nightstand. And my boyfriend wasn't there for me to wake up, I was alone in the bedroom. I had the light on and wrote in the notebook while sitting in bed. The walls were a sort of warm creamy yellow color, which they are not IRL.

Then my alarm clock rang.

The false-awakening dream journaling did actually help my dream recall. I really did basically write down everything from the past two dreams I'd had, which helped me remember them when I woke up for real!

As I went to sleep tonight, I recited a mantra, "I will stabilize". I also firmly fixed in my mind that as soon as I began dreaming, I would know that I was dreaming.

This worked. I spent some time drifting, and then a dream began. I was lying in bed, and the lights were on. I looked to my left. There were 3 tiny, glowing playing cards floating in the space above my head. I thought, "Yes, I'm dreaming," and snatched the playing cards from where they were floating. It's hard to explain, but the cards were a cue for me - it was specifically seeing the cards that made me lucid. I don't remember what suites the cards were, only that they were 1/4 the size of normal playing cards, they were glowing, and they immediately induced lucidity.

I got out of bed, and my bedroom was very different and not at all like my real bedroom. The carpet was worn out, and an ugly shade of tannish orangy brown. My "dream room" carpet is always this ugly color, for some reason. The door was in the wrong place, and led to a hallway that doesn't exist, and there was no furniture besides my bed. The bed was a twin, but in real life, I have a full. I said, "Stabilize!". I went to the door and tried to visualize that as soon as I went through it, I would be in a rainforest. I tried very hard to convince myself of this.

When I went through the door, everything was dark. I saw shadowy forms that hinted that I was in another room. I got frustrated and lost lucidity.

I woke up, grumbled, and tried WILD. I got past the initial wave and felt as if I was sinking into my bed. I sat up out of my body. I tried to open my eyes, but it was very hard, and I felt like I was opening my physical eyes. I was really tired and had work in the morning, so I gave up on it and lapsed back into unawareness. I dreamed that my head had made a huge dent in my pillow, so now my pillow had 2 lumps of stuffing on either side and nothing in the middle. I tossed and turned (in the dream) and tried to make it comfortable somehow.

I dreamed I was shopping at a store. I've never been there in my waking life. There was a desk on a top shelf that I was interested in - it was $50, and I thought it would make a good room divider. But my cell phone was malfunctioning badly. The screen came off (how?) and then it got hot to touch and melted. I got some of the melted screen on my finger, and it burned me. I kept thinking about how frustrated I was that all of my money now had to go toward buying a new phone. I needed a smartphone, too, so it was going to be expensive.

I woke up. I tried some visualizations. I visualized a room full of dolls, where each doll represented a DC I knew. I visualized putting a doll on the floor and making it grow to full size. (I was not asleep at this time). I began drifting off, but the visualization didn't completely take hold, and I didn't become lucid. Instead, the room became the room of a woman with a group of really odd friends. My dream followed their antics, but I don't recall any specifics on what they were.

Review:
Dream clues:
- Playing cards (instant lucidity)
- My pillow doesn't have stuffing. It's a memory foam pillow.
- Unfamiliar store, without recalling how I got there
- Malfunctioning phone (malfunctioning electronics)
- Spectator perspective

Edit: Believe it or not... I actually figured out the playing cards while I was riding the train home. In my dream, they were glowing like they were lit up LEDs. On the train ride home, there's an installation where LED playing cards flash by the train windows. I tend to stare out the window at them because I'm bored and they're something to look at... which means I'm also staring at my reflection. So, since mirrors instantly make me lucid (for some reason), apparently my brain linked the playing cards with my reflection strongly enough that just looking at a card makes me lucid.

Original dreams date to Jan. 27th and Jan. 28th, 2008:

I had a dream that I bought some shelf space in a department store - the way things worked in the dream, you pretty much rented shelf space like property and oversaw the placing of products there. I decided that I needed to fill it, so I bought a baby bottle and formula factory, but for some reason I couldn't manage to get past the legal hurdles and difficulties involved in getting the factory up and running and placing the products on the shelves. I was very confused by the whole process, and it frustrated me, and I was worried about it causing some serious problems with my taxes.

Some real world information on the next dream: my friend, Mrs. Y____, passed away the day before. It was some very sad news, but she was a very old lady, and I was glad that she had at least simply passed in her sleep rather than suffering through a long illness. She was a very sweet old woman, so I will miss her. I didn't get a chance to call her before she died (I had moved to another city), which means this dream makes slightly more sense.

I dreamed that I went to visit Mrs. Y___, but she had moved somewhere else, which required me riding on a boat across a sea. The boat was sort of like a cross between a cruise ship and a Navy ship. I spent some time talking to the second in command, who was a very nice young man with brown hair and appeared to be in his late twenties, but the Captain was nowhere to be seen. Once I reached my destination, I had a little bit of trouble finding Mrs. Y___ because I wasn't quite sure where she lived. The place actually looked almost like a tourist town - sort of like International Drive in Orlando.

When I finally found her, she was living in a sort of out of the way place, it looked like an old white house surrounded by thick forest - more like swampy forest, though, mangroves and such - down a dirt road. As I walked down the dirt road through the forest to Mrs. Y___'s mansion, I was surprised to see several black futon bed frames fly by, although they had no obvious method of locomotion. It later turned out that one of my friends had rigged a tiny motor to them so that they could roll on their wheels to their destination, which made moving them around easier. I was worried that it would wear the wheels down too fast, since they weren't designed for such heavy or high-speed usage, but he assured me that futon wheels were cheap and it didn't do them any real harm.

The house looked slightly run-down, but in a welcoming way - if it had been more polished-up, it wouldn't have seemed very homey, and this way it seemed more comfortable and lived-in - and Mrs. Y___ actually seemed to prefer this.

We chatted for a bit, although I don't remember most of it. It was the usual "how are you" and then one of her favorite subjects, which was her home country, and her usual argument that I really ought to visit there because she thought that I would like it and want to stay and live there. I fell back on my usual argument (that I wouldn't fit in very well), which she dismissed like she usually did. I promised her that I would visit it at some point in the future, when my finances allowed, and this seemed to make her happy.

Back in the main city, there were quite a few theme parks, which Mrs. Y___ and I explored. One of them was autumn-themed and had a lot of very cool areas filled with colorful buildings and lights, there were mostly children there since it was aimed at children but neat enough for more than a few adults to check it out. We went up into one building which was a staircase that rose into the air, covered in orange balls of light, and the building was shaped like a giant pumpkin sitting in a tree. I don't remember, but it may have been a restaurant.

In any case, after visiting for a while, I had to leave. After returning back home, I found out that my mother had had to move, and had given my cat - whom I had left with her - up for adoption. It was implied that he had been adopted by another family. I don't own a cat in real life. The cat in question was a very friendly fat orange tabby tom-cat named Halloween, and I was heartbroken. My friend M___ and I went searching for Halloween - it was autumn in my dream now, and went driving down a dirt road on an ATV. We wound up at a place that looked a lot like the theme park that Mrs. Y___ and I visited while I was visiting her, only it was decrepit and abandoned. I never found my cat.

The dream then changed. I was upset, so I went to visit my aunt L___, who had moved into a very large and old Victorian-style house. I began planting plants all over the house, in pots, in the yard, even inside between the floorboards, and the plants began to grow. My aunt was very pleased, although a little bit worried that the roots might do damage to the floorboards, so I pulled some of the larger ones. The plants began flowering, and the flowers were all very exotic looking, so that there were sprays of tiny blue flowers coming up from the floorboards and all sorts of gigantic tropical orange and purple and green flowers covering the building. When I stamped on the floorboards, they had turned hollow and become filled with plant roots rather than wood.

I woke up for a while, and then as I was falling asleep again, I began to dream about voices (only voices). I was still half-awake so it might have freaked me out if I weren't used to this happening. There were two male voices, one older and one younger, they sounded prophetic (which, again, is fairly normal in some of my stranger dreams). They were talking about history or something, although I forgot what they were saying, except for a line or two here or there, something about beasts. I then fell asleep.