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Original journal entry dated Sept. 10, 2002:

First part is unrelated to the second, they just kinda faded into each other - I was with my family, only it was with my uncle I's extended family. My brother was there, but in the dream he was a little sister instead of a little brother. I dreamt we needed gas, but first we stopped at this one restaurant, and there were lots of badgers inside, and I talked to a waitress who was a friend of my mom's, she was complaining about her hours. Then I went with my family, we needed to get gas, for some reason they were filling up cereal boxes with it and carting them around, I told them this was really really stupid and they told me to either shut up or walk, so I got out of the car and started screaming at them and threw my box away, and made my brother/sister get out too. Then their car blew up. And Melissa Etheridge, in the guise of Alice from The Brady Bunch, came and saved everybody and gave my brother and I a ride home in her truck.

Ok, it's funny when I write it down, but in the dream I was very, very angry and upset and screaming at the top of my lungs. I hope I wasn't yelling in my sleep again.

There was a vaguer dream slightly beforehand but I don't know if it belongs with the one I'm about to describe. It was... sky-rides. You know, like the buckets that go along those lines, between the poles, and people sit in them... sort of... yeah, me and mom and my aunt and uncle were riding those, I think it was on the way to the tour... they were almost like a monorail but hung upside down on the line and they were open to the air.

Then the nightmare, less angry and family-oriented and far more creepy. I had a dream that mom and her friend, for whatever stupid reason they had, decided to go on this one tour with my uncle K and aunt L. It was through something called "The Basement", a really big haunted region, and it was supposed to be this awesome, scary tour, with the catch that all of the haunted stuff was real. Actually, "The Basement" was only a section of the total area, there were other places with names like "The Attic" and stuff, but I forgot the names, and they were pretty minor areas compared to The Basement anyway (it was the biggie). So we got split up from aunt and uncle and lost our tour group, and it was all grey and misty and totally deserted, and I was scared shitless. Mom told me that she went on the tour a long, long time ago with my dad and she didn't see any ghosts, really, except for one that bit her on the top of the head, except that was at the Carnival, which was a ways off. Lori Beth only seemed mildly disappointed that we hadn't seen anything so far. I was wishing that I could magically and instantly teleport right out of the place, since I was terrified and I hadn't even actually SEEN anything. Mom told me that if I got really scared I could go and find my uncle, since he was some sort of weird anti-ghost void type person (i.e. could repel ghosts). We were getting closer to this one old house type place and my mother's friend was debating whether or not we should go inside. I personally didn't want to go anywhere, much less any place that looked that ominous. It wasn't the usual Victorian mansion, more like an old farmhouse but a very large one that a richer family would own (like a plantation house only not so, you know, Southern or elaborate).

Then I woke up absolutely terrified

Original entry dated July 10, 2002:

First I was sort of at school. Only it was like band-camp, and all of my friends played the trombone.

I was in the cafeteria getting food with two of my friends, whom I don't have in real life, they weren't real people... one of them was sort of pudgy with sandy hair and whined a lot, the other one was a goth chick with long black hair.

Anyway, in the cafeteria there were actually 2 food counters, and I was thinking that this was good because the lines used to be terribly long, and about how this was my last day there, and I never had to play guitar again (yes I was the only person there who played guitar). So we got in the car to leave and I was going with my friends, I was gonna stay with the goth chick over the summer, she hadn't been to her childhood home in years. It was an old victorian house. She was talking about how her parents were really restrictive and never let her do anything, and when she was in the yard she was never allowed to look around the left side of the house.

So we went into the house and it turned out to be haunted. There was this one demon/ghost who... well... had a really big rack. And green hair. She was chasing us around. And this one ninja dude who kept sneaking up on us and trying to catch/kill us. She was dressed kind of like Lum, only... wearing less.

For some reason I was wearing a full Victorian gown, and I kept falling over and getting tangled up in it.

Original entry dated Feb. 16, 2002:

I had a dream that D and I went to buy a new bike. I was gonna trade in my old one. I wound up with a pink one with this weird little engine-thing attached. Anyway, where we lived was this scary supernatural world. Like, the laundry room - nobody went in after dark. If you opened up three of the washers, you'd find creepy, on the verge of horrifying, things. But if you opened the fourth washer, you saw something so incredibly and awesomely terrible that NOBODY was willing to go anywhere NEAR that washer (much less open it). There was a little girl ghost in a bonnet who would wander around collecting change for my laundry for me, and I always warned her not to go into the laundry room at night, and to go nowhere near the fourth washer. Anyway, back to me. There was this weird... like... demon overlord dude who masqueraded as an eight year old child with ice-blue eyes and white hair. When the kid died through some freak accident, he decided that he was gonna make the world a really shitty place. He specifically tried to hurt my friends and me. There was also a house called "Harriet's House", which was a museum of sorts. It was now a Londonesque sort of home, but used to be an asylum type place with torture chambers. People would go on tours through there, but were warned before they did. The proprietor was a tall black lady with her hair drawn back in a bun. She wore a brown sort of pilgrim-looking dress. The rest of the dream was pretty blurry.

I also had a dream that I worked for a company that produced video-games. We were in direct competition with another company that an ex-friend of mine worked for. It all sort of sucked. It wasn't so much scary as really depressing, and I can't remember most of it, except that the rival company stole our hit title idea.

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.