Coinception

This dream once again occurred this morning, 23 August 2012. It contained some brief moments of lucidity, and was interruped when I woke up around 6 am.

We begin in a university classroom, which for some reason looks very much like a classroom in a high school or elementary school. I'm sitting in for a social studies class, on the political history of the United States or something, and in contrast to my regular courses I don't find this interesting - I find it VERY interesting. Most of my friends in my program have already left. The teacher continues an explanation. By 11 am (or is it 1 pm?), I'll be beginning my first day in Physics class. My phone rings.

The person hanging out outside appears to be me, but I can't really identify with this person, so maybe it's my alter-ego. For sanity purposes, I'll refer to this individual in the first person.

I'm doing an extreme sports stunt on a bike, not a skateboard. The scene shifts toward somewhere else. Suddenly, the police catch us, and we're denied permission to enter my next class.

I don't want to go with the cops, I think. Yet my phone prompts me to, and I enter the principal's office.

Somewhere along the line, I'm walking in a hallway on campus in what seems to be a big environment building. I suddenly realize that I'm dreaming, and begin to look around at the walls, the windows, and the students.

I drift in and out of consciousness, of sleep. The waking-life version of myself seems to be paralyzed, so I drift back into sleep, with much effort. The scene changes.

I'm in the principal's office, and a thought drifts into my mind. I think of writing these things down, to publish certain things on Twitter when I wake up, with codes B, C, and D. The D code refers to detention, while the B code is something later on in the alphabet. The D code says to the teacher:

"Am I in detention, or am I free to go?"

This is something that I picked up from a video showing how to deal with the police. Rule number one is be calm and don't be crass.

I'm given a list of options, from life in prison to one day free to whatever else. The best option, they say, is Baptism.

The official looks rather puzzled and pauses for a moment, but after a while says that I'm free to go. I remember the buildings on campus, but I never make it to my physics class.

At home, it seems that my dad has lesions on his neck, which look like cancerous lips protrouding from the base of the chin. We go to the doctor, and then suddenly I'm in this waiting room.

I remember a TV commercial about healthcare options. Even though I know trhat I'm lucid, I think it would be wrong to change the scenery while I'm walking through that hallway again. So I walk up to the reporter at the receptionist desk:

"Hi, I'm looking for healthcare options for my dad".

The reporter, who seems to be African-Canadian, shakes his head.

Flashback - in a dark cave dismantling something to the next level.

The doctor finds that the lesions are cancerous, but traditional chemotherapy would have done more harm than good. A new emerging field in medicine, nutshot oncology, has proven that these lesions are treatable by other methods.

Have a nice glass of glastnost!

Jail or Baptism?

On YouTube, the number of likes are hidden, but it's wavering around 50%. A certain scene is depicted, and the likes rise above the half-point mark when we win, and fall below when we lose. It shifts in a gyroscopic circular manner, like the Moon around the Earth around the Sun, and then the Moon will be flung away, pulling Earth-Moon out of its orbit.

"But the Moon has been around for four billion years!"

In high school, I send some people an email with facial icons for each of their respective profiles. For some reason, the guys' images are larger. I tell him not to skip class.

In social studies class we talk about "nutshot porn". That's gross.

As I walk outside my residence room in the morning, it's chilly. Yet, for whatever reason, my sweater is wet and damp.

I wake up early to go swimming.

This dream occurred to me this morning. As you can tell, my mind is consumed with university-related themes right now. I will post the remaining journals from February to June sometime later.

Here I was, at the University of Waterloo's Student Life 101. In a group of a few students, many of whom I didn't know, we walked inside this building and took some pamphlets.

The room was somewhat cozy and old-fashioned - perhaps it was the residence building on campus? We packed our stuff and headed down the hallways, me remembering my toiletries. By the Sun angle and time of day, I was walking east.

As I entered the bathroom, I was reading the pamphlet, describing a student's experience at the university.

A female student wrote inside: "I enjoy fam sessions and walkout sessions".

Instantly, I was taken in my mind to a scene where the pine trees stand tall in Saskatchewan, yet the grassy fields were all over. A thought popped into my head: "the difference between boys and men when they have a problem, is that boys ignore it, and men ask what they can do to fix it".

Perhaps it wasn't that concise. Either way, I thought: Replace the F with a J and then we're talking. *Revolution!*

There was much anticipation on either end, and some towels were possibly in the room. I woke up to the sound of my alarm, and went to check the website to find info on an English Proficiency Exam, including bloopers.

It's been four months since I last posted. Everything's been busy lately but this morning's dream (June 9) was vivid enough that it pushed me to post now.

Usually when I have a dream, I'd write it down and hopefully remember enough details to post when the time comes. Much has changed over the last few months. Often the dream would reflect something that goes on in real life, either before or after the dream takes place.

I still have recollections of 1/3 of my dreams, but about 2/3 are just paper notes now and I have no recall of them. Yet I'll be posting as much as I can, and hopefully in a few weeks the flashbacks to past dreams will join up with current dreams again.

Before we continue, I should explain what I mean in my use of the word "facade": basically, it's a word, another memory or previous dream, or a false recollection that triggers faint memories of the actual dream as they slip away. Sometimes the memories fade within 10 seconds of waking up.

You have to be careful sometimes - often the blog will log you out while you're trying to do a journal, and even today I had to change my password, after a Russian hacking incident months ago here.

It's a real challenge to get this thing started. Let's begin at this morning's dream, when I fell asleep on my sofa around 12:30 am.


I'm in a room somewhere. There are these orange vitamin B-12 pills in my hand, and it looks like there are several dozen of them. Should I put these in my mouth, or moreover report just what happened?

A tropical weather website comes up, dicussing a low pressure system that was bound to give us a big heat wave in the early part. Not much else was going on, except for that jet stream.

I'm sitting somewhere with an old student-teacher friend of mine, who talked about her memory of living in northeastern Ontario, where there are now some wildfires. Not sure if I ever join in on this conversation.

Hearing some words being said now, remembering a few.

"So when I was up at Algoma University, the weather would really stay pretty much the same. One day, it would be 7C. The next day, 7C and the same the day after that."

"It would take 35 minutes to drive up to Timmins, and 65 minutes when there was a big snowstorm and the traffic got heavy".

Wait a minute, I thought, looking over at a map. Wouldn't that mean North Bay takes only 25 or 30 minutes? I live in the Greater Toronto Area at this time.

Funny thing is, my friend never even went to Algoma. She went to U of T.

Now, I'm remembering something about a conversation I had with the principal, or maybe I was having one. I wasn't in trouble or anything; in fact my principal thinks of me as someone who is more mature and responsible than most.

There's a lot I didn't get to say to her, though.

I wake up with this strange pain in my left leg. Had I been bitten by a spider while I took my midnight nap? It seemed like I'd been asleep for maybe one or two hours, but as I look at my radio clock, it's 3:50 a.m. Without even going to brush my teeth, I return to my room, turn off my computer, and go to sleep. I consider taking my chemical experiment into my room before it gets stolen, but leave it there and doze off anyway.

There were these "fake vegetable" pills in a jar, that had both the shape and the taste of real vegetables: carrots, peppers and broccoli, at least two of the above three. Should I eat them?

I was asked whether I wanted an ionizing treatment, producing an isotope on my body that might have been radioactive. The isotope had an atomic mass of 188.

Of course that's going to be radioactive, I thought, when I woke up much later. Yet doing a bit of research, it turns out the element is probably non-radioactive osmium-188, which is naturally more dense than lead, and maybe a few traces of radioactive iridium-188.

Sitting there, I'm looking at a screen off the wall of my classroom, where my geography teacher was giving a lesson using a weather website that I routinely used. Next, we pointed out a small earthquake that had occurred a few days before off the northwestern coast of Ireland.

"Belfast!", I exclaimed, literally shouting it out loud. Yet Belfast was in North(east)ern Ireland, and whether I knew this at the time, I'm not sure.

The alarm woke me up again. It was just after 6 a.m., but I'd forgotten to turn off the alarm the previous night. I might wake up once more during the next bit, but whether this is recorded is unclear. Still have some assignments overdue for my geography teacher. The next part becomes rather academic.

I'm swimming in a lake somewhere, and the water is very tolerable. Whether it's more like a pond or there's a castle in the distance, I do not know, but I keep thinking it's Elsinore, the Danish city on the extreme eastern big island where the Shakespearean play Hamlet is set.

Some time is needed to practice my recipe. I had made bread before, but this was something quite different.

I have to finish another assignment, I think for the same geography teacher, involving a sled or a toboggan, that would be tested on the snow. Yet the snow had all but melted, and the assignment was overdue. How was I to finish it, then?

It's morning, and I'm on a trail with some of my friends. We'd all be university-bound next year, and to my left we see this grassy knoll that has a barn-like house positioned on top. A horse-drawn carriage was nearby, and I get the feeling that I'd seen this place before, but cannot remember where. Maybe I had been there. From where the Sun was positioned, we were walking southwest. There were some people on or near the carriage in costumes, the woman wearing some kind of shroud over her head, the whole family looking agrarian and traditional.

"Mennonites", I said.

"Yes", one of my friends continued, but...

But what? We continued walking. Over to our right, we come across this forested ravine, that has a steep drop-off soil cliff face with some tree roots. One of us, I or a friend, tries to climb down, but seeing it was so steep and there were granitic rocks underneath, we give up. We continue walking.

We were on a university campus now. I didn't know they had these types of trails here; maybe we don't.

I had debated whether or not to include the names of specific towns or universities I dreamt about. After much thought, I'm deciding to mention these places by name, and will do so in most cases for journals of past dreams.

On our right, it was the University of Guelph campus. There were still some tree branches as we approached the clearning. But I knew that none of us would be going here this year in September.

Johnston Hall.

Some say it's the most well-known landmark. Yet the rock climb had been difficult, and sometime later or earlier, I'm doing an exam for one of my classes.

It's my philosophy teacher, and this time I'm struggling to do well in this second-semester class I'm taking. I had gotten 95% in the first class, but was struggling to maintain 83% in this one. Whatever it was, I knew I needed to do well on the exam.

The room was beige, the desks far apart, the lighting dim yet incandescent. It somehow reminded me of my old elementary school. What in the world was I doing here?

I wake up this time, and it's past 10 am. Time to get up; it was a weekend morning.

OK, I know I haven't posted in ages. Yet some powerful recollections have been contained in the past dreams, and many of them go back to February. When I only have figments of dreams, then maybe I'll post as many as five in one entry, which gives overall a clearer picture of whatever that may be.

The memories may be hazy, but the dreams provide a glimpse.