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So, I haven't been keeping very good track of dreams.

Helicopter:
About a week ago - had a dream I was in a helicopter with someone. I looked down and there was fog rolling across a field, rolling in waves like an ocean. There was a storm in the distance, I could see it across several farm fields, but it was beautiful. On the edge of the fields there was a forest. The helicopter flew down until it was only a few feet above the ground, and we flew through a forest. I had a vague idea I was dreaming, and I wanted to share this with one of my friends, so I tried to turn the helicopter pilot into one of my friends. I looked away and looked back. When I looked back, her face was blurred out, but she hadn't fully changed. When this stuff happens, you'd think it would be super creepy in a Silent Hill sort of way, but when I am dreaming it's just a "this didn't completely work" sort of thing and doesn't bother me. I woke up.

I've had a few lucid dreams over the past 2 weeks but I've also been bad about recording those, so I'll just record last night:


Lucid:
Woke up ~8 am. Got up to use the bathroom. Went back to bed with the idea that it would probably be easy to transition to a lucid dream at this point.

Fell asleep, as normal. At some point, I became semi-aware while I was in the grey fog. I am familiar with the fog, by now. I knew that because I didn't "have a body" at the moment, I wouldn't be able to enter a dream (this is something it took a while to figure out, and it's just the way it works for me). I decided to do my technique of "walking" forward until my feet took form I could see my feet. I looked down at where my feet would be and began "walking". After spending a while doing it, suddenly my feet came into being. Once they came into being, I decided to try to bring an environment into being. Suddenly, the world popped into place. It startled me so much that I fell on my butt.

I was now sitting in a yard in front of a house. It was very clear. There was a house behind me that I didn't notice very much, and trees all around me. The grass I was sitting on was vibrantly green and soft. I saw some little flowers growing in it (like little daisies) and thought about picking one. Before I did that, though, I decided to look around. Everything was crystal clear, no "dream fuzziness" at all.

I heard a car in the distance. It stopped at the curb next to me. Curious, I stood up to take a look. I could see the driver inside, his features were quite clear without the "dream fuzzies" that sometimes happen when I see a dream character. He opened the door and stepped out and suddenly everything became fuzzy and gray again.

My body had disappeared again. I began to rub my hands together. After a while of rubbing, they suddenly appeared in front of me. I was pleased and tried to cause the landscape to reappear. Unfortunately, I guess I hadn't stabilized enough because my hands disappeared again and I woke up a little bit.

I settled back down and tried to imagine walking while looking at my feet again, and holding the hand of a friend to try to make them appear with me once I "existed" again, as sort of an anchor (I am holding onto them and they are in the environment that we are both in, so they stabilize me and vice versa). It doesn't really work and I feel like I can feel my feet shuffling in my bed (I'm never completely sure if they actually are or it is an illusion that they are).

It doesn't really work. I give up and drift into deeper sleep.

Kitten:
I dream I am robbing banks as an accomplice with a dream character (Caucasian guy with dark shaggy hair, thin and generally unhealthy and unreliable looking). At one point we end up in a production room where people are packing up cocaine for distribution. I have a tiny orange tabby kitten and I am worried about its welfare. I carry it with me at all times. We are going to go rob a bank and crash at a motel and my fellow bank-robber tells me to just leave the kitten outside and it will be fine. I start to leave it there but panic and come back and bring it with me. It's a huge inconvenience, but I cannot bring myself to leave my kitten alone outside where something may happen to it.

I see on the news that I am being listed as an accomplice for murders, but I haven't murdered anybody, and I didn't know that my bank-robbing buddy has been killing people. I decide I need to get away now, that even if I'm on the hook for robberies I'm definitely innocent of killing people. I can't leave my kitten behind, though, I am too worried about it. I'm also worried something will happen to it if my bank-robbing accomplice or the police catch up to me. I run through the woods (I don't have the van/car) and come upon a house there. I know that one of my IRL friends, James, lives in it, and that it would be safe to leave the kitten with him because I trust him. He opens the door and is friendly, as if he doesn't know I've been robbing banks (or doesn't care), and happily agrees to take care of my kitten.

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 dated July 12, 2002:

I was on a campus and it had really big buildings, only they were built in trees. And there were obviously lots of stairs involved. I had a chemistry lab class in one of these buildings, but just outside the door to my classroom was an arcade, and I wanted very badly to buy some nachos because I was hungry, only I was afraid the teacher would return while I was waiting in line and then I'd get in trouble. And then I went home, and for some reason Lucy and Ricky Ricardo were our next door neighbors, and there was a convention going on where they were showing all sorts of different movies, because it was the big debut of some much-anticipated anime, only I missed almost all of them because I was asleep or in class. Then something kept biting me while I was in bed (in my dream) and leaving huge welts and nasty scars, so my aunt and I searched my bedding and found a fuzzy grey worm that she said was a "ragamuffin" and was responsible for my wounds. It was about an inch long and grey with darker grey stripes, and it had a face like a raccoon.

Original journal entry dated July 13, 2002:

I had a dream that kittens were hanging from little cocoons on the wall, staring at me and buzzing.

Kittens were on the wall, all across the wall, like spiders, with sticky feet, in little cocoons, just staring at me. Just STARING. They wouldn't stop.

It made me so nervous, being watched like this. Watched like a bug, and I just KNOW they're planning something, because they're actually devious little spawns of Satan, and that their heads would explode.

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.

Original dream dated June 18, 2008):

Had a dream I was in middle school again (and therefore, generally terrified). I stopped in a classroom to have a conversation with Bruce Campbell, who rather than simply being in Spiderman WAS Spiderman.
I discovered, to my chagrin, that the lock combination on my locker was the same as the lock on another locker, and that this was a prevalent problem. I went to go and point it out to someone.

A group of little assholes had hurt a friend of mine, and they had decided to start messing with me, too, so I actually decided to get even with them. I got into a fight with them and managed to beat the shit out of at least one of them. One of the others was this big, fat girl with a snout like a mole or a shrew that was constantly oozing mucous. She expressed her displeasure at the fact that I'd harmed a friend of hers, and we got into a yelling match about who had started it. Ultimately, it didn't matter, because the gang of kids wouldn't leave me alone, so I got them isolated in a park and took them down one by one.

The next dream was also pretty jumbled. I was riding with Mom and my brother to class, and class started at 11:40 (in the dream, I was back in middleschool, again) and I was late, again, but Mom wanted to stop by the beach first. On the way, we discovered that an orange tabby cat had accidentally hitched a ride on the outside of our car. We opened the window and grabbed him and pulled him in. He was very soft and friendly, and I liked him a lot. He behaved as if he were somebody's pet.

When we got to the beach, Mom wanted to leave him there because she didn't want a cat in the car, and I said that was cruel because he'd obviously come from somewhere else and was clearly somebody's pet. She said we'd come back for him, but I said he didn't know the area and was bound to wander off (and I didn't believe her, anyway). She left, but for some reason the beach area had been transformed into a jungle kingdom. In any case, I decided to stay with the cat until Mom came back because my reasoning was that the cat's life was more important than one missed day of class.

As I wandered through this area, I found a huge tree that also had a throne, and a pelt nailed to it. I took the pelt down and kept wandering. There were wood-and-vine tunnels, like tunnels through a massive tree, and apparently I'd stumbled into the kingdom of some sort of nasty dictator. In any case, I found a snake - a large ball-python - and played with him for a bit. Then I heard a legend about a snake that came out of the throne from a hole in the back of the tree that it was carved out of, so I went to investigate. I found the hole and knocked on the trunk next to it, and the snake slithered out. He was a very pretty snake, very glossy and red and black, and very docile, so I picked him up and draped him over my shoulders and walked along with two snakes and the cat. People were scared of the snake, for some reason.

I came to a beach, where three men were planning on crossing, one of them called himself Columbus and they were determined to cross the sea, only all that they had was a lttle dinghy. But some sort of reward was being offered for getting to the other side. I decided to accompany them on their adventure, for some reason, but once we got the boat launched from the beach, the dream sort of faded out.

In the next dream I was at an old apartment (from when I was.... in middleschool) and getting ready to go to class. Thankfully, I wasn't actually in middleschool any more - this was like a special event where college grads went and talked to the kids. I was still late, though.

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.