Dream Dream Dream Dream Dream Dream

So interestingly enough my renewed efforts are already paying off! Better awareness, more vivid/consistent dreams, and something odd happened where I almost spotted a dreamsign but my dream was like OH, NO THAT ISN'T WHAT YOU THINK IT IS, HAHA and changed it. You can't fool me forever, dreams.

Dream: Being a Good Person
So first of all, this dream seemed to be set in the past when I was still attending church (good dreamsign, I've dreamed about that church a few times now). I was friends with a girl who was disabled in some way and needed to drink lots of sugarwater, and she'd been assigned to read three verses in front of the whole church, but didn't think she'd be able to do it. So I figured the right thing to do was to offer to read two of the verses for her so she only had to do one. But truthfully I was quite anxious about reading in front of the whole church, and the majority of the dream consisted of me worrying about it. Then my sister pitched in and offered to read one of the verses for me, which I gratefully accepted.

There were other, more confusing and less straightforward parts of the dream, but I'm not going to write down things that don't translate into real life because it always ends up not being true to the nature of the dream. And maybe if I only write down the parts that make sense, my dreams will start to make more sense?

Dream: Family Reunion
So this was a long, fairly consistent and realistic dream with a theme of something like, "traveling." There was a lot of time spent on canoes, in cars, and on metro trains (which children kept falling out of), and my mother, sister, and extended family on my mother's side all made an appearance, as well as my boyfriend. That said, I don't really consider any of them to be a dreamsign even though seeing them in person is abnormal, and this might be because I want to see them.

I think there's a part of me that is motivated to become lucid by the wish to change the dream and avoid unpleasant things. For instance, seeing my dead grandmother alive again is actually rather unpleasant because I don't know why it keeps happening, and there might be something I'm trying to avoid (thoughts like, could I have saved her from her dementia, or what does it really mean that she's dead ... maybe I blame myself for something, or maybe I miss her, I don't know what it is). So, for that reason it makes perfect sense to make her a dreamsign, because it serves the dual purpose of getting me lucid and allowing me to recognize what's happening and escape it. In the same way, seeing my father in the dream is a dreamsign because I try to avoid him in real life as much as possible, and naturally I would prefer to avoid him in dreams as well.

At any rate, after a somewhat unrealistic visit from my boyfriend (I left without saying goodbye to him, probably represents my anxiety over doing something similar in real life and being thoughtless in some way) and a half-remembered canoe outing with my mother, I was in a car in Virginia on my way to a famous vacation spot to meet up with my mother's side of the family. On the way there, we passed something I'd never seen before: a theme park or museum or attraction of some kind that featured massive inflatable ships and things floating on the water outside, and enormous recreations of Lego figures. They may even have been moving. I noticed one of the huge inflatable ships looked a little deflated, as though it were a natural result of the thing being on display for so long with no means of refilling it. I thought about how nice it would be to go there with Alex, and figured he'd probably be able to afford whatever the (probably crazy) entry price was, and together we could have the time of our lives in ... whatever this place was.

Then I was on a train, and children kept getting confused because the train would stop and the doors would open, but sometimes it wasn't the right place to get off and the platform would actually be dangerously receded. So throughout the train ride, children kept falling onto the tracks and their family would have to fish them out. A couple times I thought a kid was going to get crushed, but the dream never acted like one was (there were no freaked-out reactions from the family, for instance), so it seemed like things were... "okay" for whatever reason.

Adam Sandler (or so my brain called him) and his son were also on the train, going to the same vacation spot as I was. I seriously don't know much about him, but my brain was like "white comedian man" and I figured "yeah he's probably one of the ones that says fuck a lot." I was thinking about how well-behaved his child was in that he wasn't trying to throw himself onto the train tracks like the other kids had been, and then I might've accidentally taught the kid the f-word. I said to Sandler that the kid had probably already learned that word from him anyway, and Sandler just sort of smiled like that was the kind of thing he would expect someone like me to say. He really had a reserved feel about him in that moment, as though he'd completely removed his comedian persona and was just trying to relax and be himself with his son. This got me thinking that I'd made a mistake in assuming that real-life Sandler and comedian Sandler were the same person, and I was chastising myself a little bit because I don't like to make mistakes like that.

At any rate, the vacation spot was some set of cabins and things next to a bay, and there were a bunch of friendly squirrels running around in one area because there were so many oversized acorns on the ground. You could pick the acorns up and hold them over the squirrels, and the squirrels would beg for them as though the acorns weren't right there on the ground to begin with. And I distinctly remember eating two of these acorns for... for some reason. Both times the outer shell was a bit pliable and tasted awful, while the inside was perfectly nice, and both times I failed to even try to shell the acorn and suffered the consequences. So... not really the high point of my intellect, there.

Then, the most interesting moment. I heard and saw my grandmother nearby, and as I observed I realized that her dementia was entirely gone. Somehow she had made a full recovery. And then, the first inkling came that this was important and odd, and perhaps... and the dream reacted. In an instant, Granny had vanished, and one of my older aunt-in-laws was in her place, sounding (though not looking), quite a lot like her. It really had the same feel as thinking you see something, and then looking closer and realizing it's actually something else entirely. Then I overheard someone say (or perhaps it was simply the dream straight-up narrating), that there was an older man who constantly got this aunt-in-law confused with Granny, and it was so sad because he'd been so close to Granny before and missed her quite a lot. Hm. Not much else interesting happened after that.

I guess I need to figure out why I want to be lucid. I think there's a huge part of my motivation that simply wants to escape bad dreams and images, because this was what originally got me into lucid dreaming in the first place. I used to have nightmares as a kid, and realized pretty quickly that these were dreams and that killing myself would wake me up. For some reason I'm now remembering one particularly memorable time this happened when I was quite young: I dreamed that I was being forced into a marriage with an alligator by my foreign royal family, and that soon I would have to climb into bed with this literal animal and be eaten and torn apart by it. Instead, I locked myself in the bathroom and stabbed myself in the stomach with a fancy pair of scissors. This didn't hurt or feel like anything, but it was apparent that I would soon die from this... when my family broke down the door, all of them crying as they realized what I'd done. They pointed to the alligator in the bed, now slain, and said that they'd killed it, and I didn't have to get married to it and there was no need for me to die. I was crying a little too at this point, if only because they were so sad, because I was quite ready to leave the dream at this point and didn't really want to stay with this odd, sacrificing-people-to-alligators family. Regardless, it was too late. I died and woke up soon after.

One way to interpret this would be to say that my dream somehow regretted my leaving. But that might be me personifying the dream when I shouldn't be, again. Perhaps I was trying to teach myself that dying to wake up wasn't necessary, and that there were other solutions? Man I'm really not sure what it all means, I need to think about this more.