One Must Imagine Sisyphus Happy

Chess, Leaf Blower
0647: Cleaning up after a chess tournament. In a backyard, me and another guy are folding up patio tables and umbrellas and picking up chess pieces off the ground. I use leaf blower to collect the stray pieces (but in the dream, I call it a wood chipper). Need to drive the tables to a new venue. A group of four girls is leaving and the other guy wants to follow them and try to pick them up. I have trouble starting the leaf blower. I say my father game it to me, like an heirloom. There is a swimming pool and a pickup truck.

fragment
I recalled this at the very end of the night. I think it fits in here. Sara holding the front door open for me at work.

Baseball Stands
0911: At a baseball game with my father. It's a huge stadium. I think it's the Dodgers vs the Tigers in Detroit. We sit way up in the nosebleed section. Then two guys I knew in high school sit near us. My father points them out: "Hey look who it is." I ignore them and don't want to talk to them: "They aren't my friends anymore." Then the scene is a much smaller baseball field like at a high school. One of the high school classmates is at bat. He bats left-handed. He hits a foul ball that bounces around our seats and I grab it. Father suggests I give it to the other guy. But I refuse and keep it.

Another foul ball comes to me and I catch it. Then a guy in the stands who is dressed like an umpire step out to the edge of the field. He looks at me as says "Hey, we need that ball back." I think about it and then throw one of the balls to him. Then the chuckles and walks back to the stands. He tricked me! I want to say "Nice lesson in honestly for your kid" but I don't have the chance.

Short WBTB in which I use the bathroom and recall my goals and intention

Doors
Method WILD
Lucidity C
Vividness B
Control C
Begin lucid in an unfamiliar house. My plan and visualization was a Christmas party from a few weeks ago. But this house is totally different. I walk through the house, opening doors, trying to teleport to the party. One set of doors is three sets of doors, like connected hotel rooms, but three doors instead of two. I open one set of doors and see a man who looks like Wolverine from X-Men, but shorter and less threatening.

I open another door and see a woman who looks like the girl from Boy Meets World. I kiss her and then walk past. Now I am outside. It seems like a remote mountain road and the house I was in was a luxurious winter cabin. I walk out to the road. It's daylight. I'm in the middle of an evergreen forest. Dream fades.

Shutter Island and Nice Car
Method DILD
Lucidity C
Vividness B
Control C
1114: Not sure how, but I become lucid. I am in the Daisetta house. Once again I recall my goal to relive the Christmas party. I imagine a girl there whose name is Rachel. Instead I am with a woman in the family room. She leads me into the bathroom. I kiss her (I tend to do that a lot) and look at our reflection as we kill. Then she tells me that Rachel was missing but they found her (this is from the plot of Shutter Island). She pulls back the bathtub curtain. There is another woman in wet clothes who seems frightened. The bathtub is divided into two sections, like a food lunch tray.

I lose interest in that and move on. I walk back to the family room and phase through the sliding glass door (with some difficulty). Now I am outside and walk to the front yard. It's night and the streets is lined with cars. Across the street, I see a nice car with the door empty and lights on. It's white sports car, looks like a Tesla Roaster. I walk up to it and climb into the driver seat. On the passenger seat, there is a lit candle. I blow it out. Then I shift the car into drive and peel out. I drive up the residential street as fast as I can. It's fun to drive so recklessly. I turn out on to one of the main streets of town and weave through traffic. Other cars honk and swerve. I try to go even faster but I can't seem to.

Record my 50th LD this night. I think my actual count is off by a few but it's close enough. So yay me!

Playing Cards
In the desert, maybe in the wild west like Red Dead Redemption. I am with a friend around a campfire and there's also another DC. He's a middle-aged man. In the dream I recall thinking he looked like a well-known actor but I can't recall who. We start playing cards. My friend and I play a few rounds of Texas Hold 'Em. Then the third man is dealer and he deals out a hand of 7-Card Stud, which my friend and I don't really like. Then we play a different game where we are dealt out a lot of cards, like a whole deck. I ask it he dealt too many. Recall fades.

Sex DEILD Chain
Method DEILD
Lucidity C
Vividness B
Control C
Recall is a bit hazy. DEILD from a previous dream that I don't recall. I enter the dream in an FA, looking through my sleep mask at my bedside clock. I try to move my limbs but it either wakes me up or triggers an FA. So I lay patiently without moving, just waiting and staring at the clock. I begin to become sleepy and close my eyes which triggers yet another FA.

Now I'm in a different bed and the stability of the dream is better. It's a very large bed and there is a huge pile of laundry on it, almost up to the ceiling. I'm laying on one corner of the bed. I roll out of bed and put on my glasses. The dream becomes clearer and more vivid. I walk out of the bedroom. Outside, the hallway is an open balcony overlooking the entryway and living room of the house below. I don't recognize this house at all.

Confused and disoriented, I encounter an attractive girl who I don't recognize. I grab her and we do the business. The dream destabilizes and I wake. I DEILD back into a similar scene with a different attractive and anonymous girl. I lead her back to the bedroom with the bed covered with laundry and proceed. This cycle repeats 3-4 times, connected by a mix of FAs and DEILDs. Mostly I just recall that the sex was great.

Work and Pizza
I'm at work, which is surprisingly rare in my dreams. I sitting in one of the pens instead of my real office. I recognize many real coworkers sitting near me. CG is walking back and forth between me and LM, because LM and I don't get along. CG is calling him "Steel" for some reason. Anyway, I'm begin especially sarcastic and disruptive.

I walk to the kitchen where I see one box of pizza so I take a slice and return to my desk. Moments later, I return to the kitchen just as a pizza delivery man is dropping off another pizza box. This happens a few times, with a delivery man dropping off a single pizza just as I am there to take a slice.

Elusive First Cycle Dream
0430: D. First cycle. Once again that strange feeling in the first cycle of having slept for a long time. When I woke up, I was a bit upset that maybe I had slept through the whole night without any recall. But when I looked at the clock I realized I'd only been asleep for about 75 minutes. By this time, the vague recollection of my dream had mostly faded. This is what I wrote: No plot recall. Just feeling of missing something. Feeling of change. Chasing to recover something lost. In retrospect, maybe the feeling was about the dream recall itself, not within the dream. Or maybe the feelings from the dream spilled over into waking. Anyway, moving on.

Girlfriend in India
0630: B. This is likely some residue of a conversation I had with a friend about his Pakistani girlfriend. I'm in India living in a cheap apartment. I'm dating an Indian girl. She looks like the contestant from MasterChef. We're fooling around in the bed and she wants to go further. I don't want to or maybe I'm just teasing her. Suddenly I'm wearing my sleep mask. She pulls it off and tells me to stop acting silly. We end up just cuddling and seem to drift off to sleep.

I wake up in the hallway outside the apartment. The girl is gone. Hugh lives next door. He's exiting his apartment and locking his door. He notices me and stops to talk. He's heading off to work and he's wonder why I'm sleeping in the hallway. He leaves.

I stumble into the apartment but now it's where the girl and her parents live. I'm trying to figure out how to turn on the A/C and hang a "do not disturb" sign for the maid. The girl and her parents are talking around a small kitchen table. The mother is concerned that her daughter is dating a boy. The father is proud of the job he has done raising her. Then an air raid siren goes off. The mother tells the girl to go tie up the reindeer.

Just Weird
0755: C. I live in a house is feels familiar but isn't recognizable. It's really hot and humid. At school, there's a contest to do something with two sheets of fabric. I guess I won and I bring home two blankets. I talk with my mother and sister about where to put them. Suddenly, instead of two blankets, it's a colorful table placemat and a frozen packaged crab. The placemat is white with blue and orange stripes. The crap is bright orange and the package says it's from Mexico. I decide to put the two items in the dining room where there is a very long large dining table. But I guess we barely use this room. There's a spider web above the table and a live crab walking across the table. My sister breaks the spider web and the spider falls near her. She and I are both freaked out and run out.

Practicing Dream Control
0905: B. A short WBTB where I used the bathroom and had a few slips of water. Practiced MILD suggestion going back to sleep. I sense there was more plot earlier in the dream but don't recall, so I pick it up as I'm in a nice quiet residential neighborhood cul-de-sac. It's a sunny autumn afternoon. All the houses are two-story with nice lawns, trees, and Halloween decorations. I enter one house in the middle of the block. Inside it's a crowded house party. I walk up the stairs to the second floor, stepping sideways through the crowd. I see a guy who I recognize as Nick, a friend from high school. I'm confident I'm dreaming and I'm ready to execute my plan. I continue walking through the upstairs of the house, walking with purpose and determination. I'm looking at my hands and rubbing them.

My first task is to touch and pick up a few objects, which I do as I'm walking through a bedroom and then a hallway. I think I picked up an empty can of peas. I'm looking for a window that overlooks the front of the house. I find one and run and jump through. It's a small window so I hit the wall as well but I go right through and hover gently down to the street. I don't recall hearing a crash so I don't know if I smashed through or if I passed through, but it's satisfying enough to count as my task.

So I'm back out in the middle of the cul-de-sac street. I'm feeling pretty confident and ready to try my next task. I want to summon a girl from work named S and then teach her to fly. So I'm looking for a door. The house on the corner catches my eye. I walk up to the front door of the house and I think, yup, this is S's house. I picture her opening the door and then I knock. A woman opens the door but she's not right. She has many of S's features and her voice is similar, but she looks about 50 years old. I roll with it. "Hi, you must be S's mother. Is she home?" She replies: "Yes, come on it!"

The house is a bit dark inside and decorated with oriental rugs which kinda makes sense. I ask, "Is she upstairs?" I look at the stairs, expecting her to be coming down. Again, there is a woman there but she still isn't S. Again she has similar features, tan and pretty with long black hair. She looks about 35. The girl I'm looking for is supposed to be about 25. The mother says exactly what I'm thinking: "Oh, that's her older sister." I try one more time. "Could you call S down?" Once more, another S impostor comes walking down the stairs. This one was pretty close. Her age and height are right and her voice is right on. S's Turkish accent is probably the most distinctive thing about her IWL. But this girl isn't as tan and she has freckles on her face. Hmm, my confidence is a bit shaken. I talk to this girl a little, I forget about what. I give her a hug and a couple of friendly kisses. I decided to leave and move on.

I walk outside. I'm a bit discouraged. That didn't go as planned. I recall the earlier part of the dream and, come to think of it, my lucidity is probably only average. I'm thinking of what to do next. Meet Dream Guide? Hmm. I look at the house at the far corner of the street. It has the most Halloween decorations on the block. I try to imagine opening the door to see my Dream Guide, who I imagine is Yoda. But on the heels of the less than perfect summoning, I decide to do something else. I resolve to spin to a new scene. I picture my office and start spinning. As I'm spinning for about 10 seconds I still see the neighbor scene around me. Hmm. I slow down. Should I close my eyes? What if that makes me wake up. I tell myself, don't think about closing your eyes! Of course, I close my eyes and wake up. Ah! Rookie mistake. Oh well. Lesson learned.

Missed Lucid, Facepalm Worthy
1125: C. I had trouble falling asleep after the last dream so I got up and read DV for a while and then got back to bed about an hour later. This dream might as well have been a giant light in my eyes screaming "Dreamsigns!" Yet I blew it. I'm walking in a bright outdoor school yard. The buildings are familiar to my high school. It's lunch time and it's crowded with students. Everyone is wearing the navy blue uniforms from my junior high. I think, hmm, if this were a dream this would totally be a dreamsign. I look around to see if a recognize anyone. I see a group of people that I didn't like in high school that often recur in my dreams. Yup, that would be another dreamsign. I walk near them through the crowd, hoping to overhear their conversation without them noticing me.

I continue through the crowd and see a white soccer ball bouncing toward me. I think, now see if I were lucid, I'd probably kick this soccer ball. I kick it but I still don't clue in that I'm aware that I'm dreaming. I actually feel disappointed that I'm not lucid and any amount of lucidity or dream control that I might have had fades away. I decide to leave. I walk to the parking lot but I don't find my car where I expect it. I get a little worried. I wander around pressing the lock button to trigger the car horn. I finally hear the horn on the far side of the school, which now is only one building that looks like a hamburger stand with some covered benches near it. I walk to my car and recognize it. End.

Experimenting with some dream titles to break up the wall of text a bit.

0230: F. Two sentences of illegible notes.

Birthday Girl, Bro Code
0337: C. Even in a dream, I obey the bro code. I'm at a girl's birthday party. I came with Lance. It's indoors at a house. There are about a dozen people there. It's dark outside and mostly dark inside. Lance and I pull the birthday girl aside to give her the gifts, so the three of us are alone in a dark room. Lance forgot to bring a gift, but luckily I brought two. I say they are from both of us.

The birthday girl has short black hair. She's tall and pretty. She's wearing a dress. She opens the presents. One is wrapped in purple, the other in yellow. Yellow is her favorite color? I don't remember what the gifts are but she really likes them and is very happy. She starts making out with both of us. (Not the arrangement I had planned for my first threesome, but whatever) As things get heated, it's clear the girl is more interested in me. She pulls off my pants and ignores Lance. Lance gets up and paces around the room upset. He keeps saying "That's not cool." I stop her and get up. She wants me to come back. I leave with Lance.

Hell Is An Amusement Park Line
0510: C. I need to raise half a million dollars, fast. Maybe I'm in debt to a loan shark.

Scene change. I'm in purgatory. I guess I'm dead. I'm waiting in line to be judged to go to heaven or hell. The focus changes to someone else, like I'm watching the movie of some else's life. The main character is a man who died while trying to solve a crime. He's destined to go to heaven, but he chooses the go to hell instead. He hopes he can find more information in hell to solve the crime. I think that's heroic. His partner tries to stop him and says he's crazy. Our hero says he's from San Francisco. Somehow that makes sense to the partner and lets him go.

Scene change. Now it's hell. People come sliding down a big ramp into a large red cavern crowded with people. It's lit by flames and it's fairly bright. Our hero comes sliding down. The focus switches back to me in first-person. I'm already in hell when the hero arrives. In hell, everyone is standing in tight groups in little pens formed by metal railings. It's just like waiting in line for an amusement park ride. I'm standing near some elementary school classmates and they are talking on and on about boring stuff. I think, this IS torture. I think that's funny.

I yell to someone who just arrives down the slide. "Hey, I hope you can come up with the money, by the way. Just because I'm dead doesn't mean I don't have bills to pay. But it's not like I can do anything about it from down here."

Birthday Gifts, Annoying Ice Cream Girl
0716: C. I'm indoors in an unfamiliar place but I get the impression that it's my own bedroom in a house. Apparently, it's my birthday. I'm unwrapping presents. Most of the presents are children's toys like dolls and figurines. My sister gives me a new Blackberry. I walk across the room to plug it in to charge. Another gift is D&D-like role playing game. Hugh wants to play so I unfold the map across the floor. I remark how big the map is. It's about 6 feet by 3 feet.

Scene change. I'm in a outdoor mall in a food court. I'm wearing a blue shirt with faded white lettering that says "BIRTHDAY TODDLER." Everyone is gone except Hugh, but he starts walking away leaving me alone. There are other random people in the food court though. A girl from the crowd walks up to me. I'm not attracted to her. She says she want to satisfy some urges and then walks away somewhere, as if to go fetch something that she will bring back to me. I feel awkward. Another girl walks up to me. This one is attractive and I want to talk to her. She wishes me happy birthday. I ask how she knew it was my birthday. She says it's written on my shirt.

The first girl comes back and hijacks the conversation. The second girl walks away. I'm annoyed about that but I try to be polite. The girl has a variety of ice cream and she starts feeding it to me. She want me to guess the flavors and pick my favorite. I play along to be polite. The first one is dark cherry. The second is strawberry. There are two more that I haven't tasted yet. The next one is green so I'm thinking it will either be mint or pistachio. Dream fades.

0740: False awakening. I don't RC. I roll over to write in my dream journal about my last dream. I write something but I don't note the time. Then I wake up for real. I RC. I roll over to write in my dream journal. I think, wait! Didn't I just do this? Damn it! I write: "False awakening. I dream of writing in my journal."

Unstable DEILD
0811: D. Again, I'm in the food court of an indoor mall but this one is different. I'm with two friends but I don't recall who. We sit at a bench near the actor who played George's father in Seinfeld. But he doesn't say anything. A young blond girl walk up to us nervously. She says "Did you guys know there's a dance coming up?" We say nothing and she walks away.

Another group of girls comes and sits near us in the same set of benches. One attractive blond looks at me and says "Hi I don't know if you remember me." I don't but I guess just to keep the conversation going: "Did we meet last night?" She says no. "I'm on of the 'Real Players.'" I have no idea what that means. Then she starts talking about a family and farm animals. Scene fades.

I wake up and DEILD into a lucid. My view is totally distorted. It's like I'm looking at a blurry TV, off center and from an angle. On the TV it looks like Street Fighter and I struggle to recognize one of the characters is Guile. I turn my head to try to center the view. Instead, I enter a rocky tunnel. I'm floating through, like I'm being carried underwater. It's like in medical films when they stick a camera down a person's esophagus. I look at my hands and rub them. The view still sucks. Dream ends. I think, damn, another difficult scene. I guess I need to be more prepared to face anything that comes at me. Or maybe I just need to be patient and let the dream solidify before trying any control.