• Lucid Dreaming - Dream Views




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    1. Mirrors in an opera house

      by , 12-07-2014 at 07:48 PM
      I've been following something in the form of a child through a place that reminds me of the Flavian Amphitheatre, though I'm aware this isn't Rome or any other physical place; I'm climbing a spiraling staircase along the outer wall, with the arena far below to my left, and arches to my right looking out onto water, and I've just gone lucid in order to focus on remembering what I'm seeing through those arches. The sky is dazzlingly bright.

      As I climb higher, the water is replaced by images of another place. I'm seeing an opera house sometime in the early 20th century, but at impossible angles - I see the audience in their boxes, a row of tables outside the theatre proper, a strip of grass and hedges from the little garden outside the building, all at the same time. The effect is something like looking through a faceted gem or a kaleidoscope, with images from different angles jammed right next to each other. Instead of seeing the walls, I see mirrors reflecting nothing, just bright, shining glass. I spot a man I think of as me, though he looks nothing like me - a young man with white hair, sitting at one of the tables outside the theatre proper and smoking. And as I continue climbing, my perspective moving along the audience, there's a woman in one of the boxes who catches my attention - a young black woman with her hair pulled back tight into a bun, in a pale purple gown. It strikes me as very important that I'm seeing her here in the audience, not on the stage.

      I looked around for text in order to get some context, but while I found plenty of writing, it refused to cooperate, even swirling into spiraling shapes before my eyes. I don't normally have trouble reading while dreaming, lucid or not, so I thought of this as being deliberately evasive.

      Updated 12-07-2014 at 08:01 PM by 64691

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      lucid
    2. Breath and healing

      by , 03-25-2014 at 10:40 PM
      After few non-lucid fragments (one interesting one involving a woman and a mythical being something like a bird and something like a qilin, and his 'missing part', which is in the form of another person this woman knows; otherwise dull), my memory picks up in a scene where I'm already semi-lucid (I'm controlling my surroundings and aware that this control is due to it being a dream, but otherwise have fairly low awareness and mostly go along with the dream storyline). I'm walking through a park with another man, while watching someone I think of as a killer, and I mentally push him toward his next target. However, at the moment I expect him to take out a knife, instead he puts his arm around his target's shoulders and hands him a cigarette.

      The killer, the target, and the man I'm walking with are all smoking. I take the cigarette from the man I'm walking with, intending to smoke it myself, but I find the dream won't allow it: first I'm holding nothing, it's back in that man's hand; then when I focus I find I can put it to my mouth and feel the physical pressure of it, but it doesn't resemble smoking. I've had similar problems before, when I deliberately focus on improving the realism of some complex physical sensation, and instead only wind up feeling the sense of pressure accurately, nothing else. I then focus on breath instead of on the cigarette itself, and something interesting happens. I have the impression I can control my surroundings far more easily by working in rhythm with my breathing.

      My memory's vague for the next two scenes, while I was focusing on breath - I saw this as a great development. (Dream logic inspired by meditation, maybe. There's no reason I should be breathing in a dream at all. I wonder whether I was actually in the same rhythm as my sleeping body's breath or not.) First I saw something like a shadow play, where the figures moved in rhythm with my breathing, under my control. Then I was walking through halls and passing people who appear to be from America of about 200 years ago, all of whom I find vaguely unpleasant; I still had the impression that I was successfully controlling something through breath in this scene.

      I wound up in a room where several people are sitting around a round table, and they call me and someone with me to join them. I start to sit down and an old woman stops me, points me to a different chair. To my left is a man holding what I think at first is a young boy. When I get another look at it, it has the face of an old man, and one of his eyes is that of a cat. This is all very unpleasant. I recognize him as my own cat, S., and I believe he's somehow sick. (S. died a long time ago, but I didn't remember this at the time.) We put him on the table, now in the form of a human-sized cat, and I chant a healing spell over him, mentioning a goddess, exerting dream control. Objects rise off the table and hover in the air, and the other people around the table join in, though by just chanting 'heal!' over and over again. I woke up while listening to them chant.
    3. Painting visions

      by , 09-11-2013 at 06:10 PM
      A voice saying "The demonic lovers, burnt out in the darkness," and an image of same: a beautiful woman, a witch, in profile, breathing out smoke, cigarette holder in her right hand, and as implied by the voice, she looks burnt out. Her left arm is cradling the severed head of a blond man, her husband. It's still alive, and in pain, and can't die. The things they did out of love led to this.

      A man I know has come to my apartment to ask for my help. He looks like he needs it - pale, strung out, in a stained and rumpled suit. He wants me to draw or paint my visions, specifically the one I just saw, the witch with the severed head. He's still in the hall, I'm leaning against the door frame with my arms folded, I'm not letting him in because while I'd like to help, I don't believe I can do anything for him. I'm sure I can't paint/draw well enough to capture that image, not the way he needs.

      Wrote a fragment down earlier tonight as "Talent, innate vs. developed" - no memory of that dream anymore but seems like a related theme. Other fragments were all very dull - a woman with tiger-striped hair, a game that summons pieces of different cities, walking in the rain and thinking about someone, the word 'mirror' in my notes with no memory of what that was about.