maboroshi

Good morning, everybody.

The second dream is another silly instance of dream control. I told myself to dream of myself out in a wide, open space, all by myself. I told myself that if I found myself there, I'd become lucid.

Well, I found myself in a wide, open space alright. But I was in a painting. And I was looking at the painting of myself. So... my dream subject was kind of controlled again. But not exactly in the way I'd expected. Lucid fail!

Dream #1

I was in some place like a hospital or a retirement home. But it may also have been a school. I feel like I may have been on the first floor at some point, heading in to some class I was taking. The class may have been for high schoolers, even though I was my current age. But I think I was still doing horribly in the class.

I went down into the basement. I was in a hallway area. The hallway was low, wide, and kind of featureless. There were doorways that went to rooms, each room like a whole department of this hospital. But when the doors were closed, the hallway felt empty and small.

Off to my right was a little alcove with a few doorways. One may have been open, revealing a larger room. But the alcove was filled with shelf-carts for books and stationary bookshelves. The shelves were all filled with books. I knew this was a used book sale.

There were a few people rushing around, getting the shelves all prepared for the sale. The people were mostly men and women in their fifties or sixties. But there were also some younger people, mostly women, probably in their late teens or early twenties. They were all volunteers.

I was interested in seeing what books were on sale. I was mostly interested in science fiction books. So I looked for that area. I think an older woman pushed out a cart full of sci-fi books right as I thought that.

But right as I went to look at the books, a tall, kind of fat, older, white man saw that I was heading there, and he jumped in front of me. He bent over so that he was blocking all the shelves.

Instead of getting mad, I just figured I'd go look at some other books. I walked over to a tall bookshelf, which may have been for paranormal studies.

Dream #2

I was looking at a painting. The painting wasn't realistic: it was a bit blocky and thick, with the sense of three-dimensional perspective a bit flattened, and the color scheme kind of simplified for intensity.

The painting had a red cliff, like one wall of a canyon, taking up the left side. Then there was a bit of grass, then a path. There may have been a boy, his back to the viewer, walking down the path. To the right of the boy, the landscape extended flatly, maybe with a river.

I told myself that I'd definitely become lucid if I was in a landscape like that in a dream. I probably told myself to remember this painting, and to try and make myself go there when I went to sleep tonight.

Dream #3

I was walking around outside somewhere during the day. But I was also talking on the phone with my dad. My dad was telling me about floods occurring in St. Louis, Missouri, which was apparently where my dad lived.

As my dad spoke, I had very strong visions, which were like still photographs, except that I was in them. I stood out in what I guess were aqueducts: they looked like the concrete-walled channels used to catch and drain waters from heavy rains and flash floods.

But the aqueducts I stood in were like highways. I often even stood in the shade of highway overpasses. All around the aqueducts were hills of lawns and trees, so that the aqueducts all felt so quiet and secluded. But I knew they'd be raging with waters pretty soon. It was a bright, sunny, warm day -- hard to believe that it could flood anytime soon.

I may have seen a couple copper-skinned children: a boy and a girl. I thought that they weren't safe out here in the aqueduct. I needed to grab them and get them out of here. But it may also have occurred to me that these children were actually phantoms.

I came back to my senses and found myself walking along some stone-floored promenade in a big park. I was walking up a slope and looking out over an iron railing to my left. Down from the railing was a slope of brambly, leafless trees.

There were some women walking behind me at one point. They said that the flood in St. Louis was going to be 72 inches, once the rain really got going. I couldn't believe it! I didn't want to believe it. I told myself that the weather was too nice here for a flood to happen, even somewhere as far from here as St. Louis.

My dad said, "They're still saying that we're going to have 72 inches of precipitation. It's going to start out looking mild, with only ----- inches. But then it's going to go up really fast and hit 72 inches."

I said, "72 inches! Sheez! That's crazy!"

May dad said, "Well, that's not so bad. We've seen floods like this in St. Louis before. But what's really strange about this one is that it's happening at Christmas -- in December. We aren't even supposed to have rain in December!"

Now I realized that the women I'd heard speaking before were right. As unbelievable (and for some reason inconvenient) as it had sounded to me, it really was going to flood in St. Louis.

As I approached the top of the slope, I could see that, as the promenade plateaued, it also widened out a lot. Over to the right was an overlook, giving a good view over the town we were in (probably somewhere in New England).

But as I got to the wider area, there were a whole lot more people walking around. There were tons of people heading down the slope I'd just come up from. I could tell -- somehow -- that these people were preparing for the flood, even though we were nowhere near it.

One woman, short, skinnyish, and white, maybe in her sixties, with blonde-grey hair and eyeglasses, was walking among the crowd, heading down the slope. The woman was trying to spread some kind of wisdom. She wore a Hindu-esque robe, though I think she thought of herself as a Buddhist.

The woman was saying, "Global warming. Global warming. The flood in December is from global warming." I knew the woman was trying to get somebody interested in her idea so that she could preach to them about being an environmentalist. She may even have had pamphlets about it.

Some younger women nearby may have been agreeing with the older woman. I kind of agreed as well. But I didn't feel like I needed to listen to environmentalist preaching. Hell, I thought. I hardly use any electricity, anyway. All I do is read books.

There was a book sale going on just off to my right as I hit the flat area of the promenade. I got really interested. The books were used, and they all looked really old. I thought I might make some good finds.

But some tall, white man with a bit of a pot belly saw I was interested in the book sale. He tried to get in my way, so that he could get to whatever books I was interested in first. The man looked pretty well-off. He wore a plaid, button-up shirt, tucked into some nice jeans.

I may have tried to avoid the man altogether. But he may have seen that. So he just walked right in front of me, standing broad-chested, his hands on his hips, as if he were trying to block me from getting near any of the books at all.

I must have done something, because I got past the man, anyway. But I was pissed that the man would try to stop me like that! I started cussing the man out, not loud, but in a regular voice, so he could hear me, but I wouldn't be making a scene.

The man reacted by coming to the bookshelf I was at and bending right over in front of all the books, basically edging me out of the way. He started saying stuff about how he didn't know why I was so upset about what he'd done. But if I was so upset, he'd do it some more. And then, he said, we'd see how upset I got.

I told the man to fuck off, and I walked away from him. He seemed to want to start a fight, because now he was calling kind of loudly after me, "Why'd you have to say that? What'd I do to you?"

But I just decided to walk away from the man and ignore him. I walked around to the other side of the bookshelves and found myself in an area full of shelves and bins packed with vinyl records and comic books. This area almost felt like it was indoors.

I looked around here for a while. I may have found some kind of comic book that I was interested in. It may have seemed a little bit like porn. But I may have decided I really didn't have enough money to waste on something like this, after all.

I was walking out of this section and back out to the promenade. But the exit was a bit narrower now. And another older man was walking up toward the aisle I was trying to get out of.

This guy was kind of fat. He saw me and seemed to want to block my way. He stood and looked at the left shelf of items, blocking up almost the whole aisle. There was also a life-size carboard cut-out of either Superman or Iron Man, which blocked most of the right side of the aisle.

I had to squeeze through the fat man and the cut-out. I'm pretty sure I didn't even touch the man. But he may have turned back to look at me, as if I'd threatened him somehow.

I gave the man a complaisant, friendly smile. But the man just looked at me like he hated my guts. I walked away. I wanted to confront the guy. But I knew that that would only make things worse.