Carabas

I'm someone who's investigating a woman, and my partner and I are searching her apartment. I'm going through old chat logs on her computer. As we leave, walking down the stairwell, we talk about something I found in those logs. I'm saying to her something about "the desire to feel someone else can understand your experience, your point of view. The internet can be great for that." I'm thinking that I'm starting to understand this woman we're investigating, to know how she thinks; I can relate to her. I'm also thinking that the internet's never worked out that way for me - but then I think, feeling alone in something is a universal human experience in itself.

Connecting directly to that feeling-alone-in-something thought - we get to the bottom of the stairwell and walk out the door, and outside, we're in the ruins of an apartment building where I used to live. Everything I can see is covered in debris. We're standing in front of what used to be the indoor pool on the first floor - there's no water, there's a layer of debris at the bottom, and there's no wall or ceiling, the pool is the only recognizable part of the building left. This is a memory of where I was when my wife and daughter died. I climb down to the pool ladder, trying to recreate the moment. But I'm shorter now than I was then, the perspective's wrong. Getting the right eye level means putting my feet on a different rung of the ladder than before. It's not quite right.

Looking around, I find something in the debris. It looks like a cartridge for an old video game console; from the pictures and words on it, I get the impression it's not a game itself, but a soundtrack. My partner takes it from me and looks it over and says, yeah, if you don't know what you're doing it'll just be a soundtrack - but this contains a hidden emulator.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Fantasy setting loosely based on ancient China. As a disembodied observer, I'm watching a man teleport into a large tunnel or cave, only to immediately crumble into dust. I'm thinking, whoops. Let's retry that.

Earlier, a woman showed that man a dark green and glittering substance kept in a small, rectangular, light green bottle, and explained that to use it you simply rub it over the palms of your hands and clap them together. Having seen him crumble into dust, I can tell she was tricking him, deliberately leading him to his death, but I'm also aware that this substance really is something of value - this man only asked her about it because he's seen her use it before. There's an old man listening to their conversation, and when she's left that old man catches the younger man's eye and takes the bottle himself, tucking it into his sleeve. The scene skips ahead to a moment when those two men are surrounded and need to escape in a hurry; the old man produces that bottle, rubs the contents over his hands - which causes them to look claw-like - and claps his hands together. Both men are teleported to that tunnel - this time around, the original teleporter lives, and the old man crumbles into dust.

(Side note: It occurred to me yesterday, lucidity works best for me when I'm focused on a specific task, as with defusing nightmares, and that's probably something I could put to work for me more. So before going to bed today, I tried typing out one of my dream goals with the heading Task of the Day.)

I was flipping through the just-released final book in a series, the Wheel of Time, when it occurred to me that this series already ended. I get online to explain the discrepancy, and there's some explanation that this new book is an optional epilogue with bonus materials and illustrations and so on. I realize this is a dream. My first instinct is to just continue with what I was doing anyway, but right afterward I think, no, what I was doing was boring. There is no way I am going to waste a dream sitting around my IRL home on the computer. (Although come to think of it, a dream computer could probably do some interesting things too.) That decided, I immediately set out to perform the task I set for myself. (Successfully remembered!) The first step is finding a doorway or other way of changing scenes, so I head for the door.

Before I get there, however, I get distracted: I realize I'm holding the t-shirt I'd taken off earlier in the non-lucid part of the dream. But although I hadn't put on another shirt afterward, I'm fully clothed now, which I think of as a convenient bit of dream logic. I remember a previous lucid dream where I'd tried to transform a shirt into something else, not very successfully, so the presence of a spare now makes me want to try again. I decide to just transform it into a robe, that should be easy, I'll just lengthen it and create an opening in the front. I see there's an opening at the front of the collar now, so I take hold of either side and pull as if tearing it, extending that opening to the bottom, seeing that it's grown longer as I go. I hold it up to look at it - it's got the shape I pictured, but it looks like a poorly-sewn costume, like something a child would make. It's got a piece of plastic sticking out of it, as if a price tag's been torn off, and there's a tangle of loose threads and frayed edges across the opening in the front. I tear that tangle off, then realize I'm waking up. (It occurred to me afterward that both shirts had been specific shirts I actually own IRL. Makes me wonder if I'd have an easier time if, rather than just the general idea of a robe, I'd aimed for something more specific. Still, though: a more successful transformation of an object than the last attempt.)

My IRL father and I are having a conversation. We're both aware this is a dream. (But I'm not really lucid, or at least not very - 'this is a dream' is just part of the plot.) We're talking about recurring dreams I've been having of falling. (IRL, I can't remember ever having dreamed of falling.) He's concerned about it, doesn't like the idea of me repeatedly splattering myself on the ground. I assure him that I hardly ever splatter on the ground.

As we're talking, the scene shifts, and now I'm falling from a great height - but I land lightly on my feet on the ground, demonstrating my point. I've landed somewhere near an airport. Near where I've landed, there's what I think of as another version of myself from another fall - but rather than being me, it's a woman with long red hair, lying on the ground, bending backwards at an awkward but not fatal angle, and motionless, because she's not really here, she's just an image, like a three-dimensional photograph. Looking at her, I remember various dreams where I watched other characters fall and was unable to stop them, and I acknowledge my father's point, that sometimes the falls don't go so well.

A woman I seem to know very well is waiting for me when I walk away from the airport, and we go to meet back up with my father and his girlfriend. (No resemblance to his IRL one.) We come to a street where we'd meant to meet with them, but we don't see them. I call out "Dad! Ada!" but there's no response. There's a bit of a crowd, people talking to each other, one guy handing out flyers, I get the impression there's a festival going on somewhere nearby. The end of this street is a dream boundary; if we cross it, the dream will change. But the festival is on the other side, and we're wondering if my father went on ahead, through the boundary. The character version of me starts to head for the boundary, but the part of me that's a disembodied observer zooms out and takes a look around, and spots my father and his girlfriend sitting on a bench under an overhang. They'd been blocked from my view by the crowd around the guy handing out flyers. So I cause the character version of me to have doubts about crossing the boundary, reminding him that it'll be hard to get back to this same scene if I'm wrong about my father going on ahead. Character!me turns around.

I tell the woman I'm with that I want to take one last look around, and I go and find a bench to sit down on. I hold my palm up in front of me, and speak to it as if to a computer, "Run search." Two glowing screens appear above my palm, one vertical, one horizontal - I think of it as a way I've created to execute dream programs. I give it more commands to run a scan of the area and locate my father and his girlfriend. Meanwhile, as a disembodied observer, I find this a neat trick, and make a note to try it sometime when I'm actually lucid; I'm wondering if it would still work. The dream scan finishes and has successfully located them, very close to the bench where I'm sitting.

I walk over to them. They seem a little out of it, as if they're high. Apparently they'd heard me calling, but it didn't occur to him that by 'Dad', I meant him. I say to him, "What did you expect me to call you? Paul?" (His name isn't Paul.) Some passerby who's clearly enjoying the festival overhears this and sticks out his hand to my father to introduce himself, saying "Hi, Paul!" My father and I tell him to buzz off, which his girlfriend objects to, as the random passerby seemed nice. By nice, she means good-looking.