• Lucid Dreaming - Dream Views




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    1. Library

      by , 05-17-2014 at 07:23 PM
      I'm standing outside my IRL local library with two women. One of them needs to get something from inside the building, without getting caught. There's only one person inside to avoid being seen by, that and hiding her face from the cameras, so it seems fairly simple, but she's still worried, and she's standing around working out various plans. This seems to be something she intends to do on her own, she's not asking either of us for help, and the other woman with us is just waiting impatiently off to the side, but it seems to me this would go a lot easier and faster if I just went ahead and took care of it myself. After all, unlike her, I don't show up on video, and it'll be much easier for me to avoid that person inside - they're mostly walking around the main area near the door, so I'll just go around to the side of the building instead and walk through the wall.

      The section of wall I phased through comes out in the fantasy section, off in the corner of the library and out of sight. I'm looking around at the fantasy books, and thinking about how I used to eat this stuff up, and about how much more difficult it is for me to get lost in a book now. I'm aware that the quality of the books hasn't changed, it's my own mindset - but I somehow feel sure that if I look at one of these books, now I'll find one I can get absorbed in. I pick one up and flip through. The paragraph I'm looking at now involves characters named Maedhros and Fingon - I recognize the names from Tolkien, and I note this as odd, since this isn't a Tolkien book. These aren't meant to be the same characters either; the author seems to have just stolen the names for his own characters.

      The dream scene changes to a scene from that book. One character is explaining three weapons to another, and he's making a big deal out of a knife that secretly contains some kind of poison. He says there are two options with this - a whole dose inside will kill instantly, but "a thousand light touches... well, depends on how you define death." The scene changes; he's meeting a small group of people in a forest, one of them a queen, and they're coming to some agreement. He secretly places small doses from that poison in each of their drinks, which will give him some power over them - to his mind, this is simply making sure that they don't back out of the deal they've made. After they drink, they instantly realize what's happened and regret making this deal, but it's too late now.
    2. A window over water

      by , 04-08-2014 at 06:03 PM
      I went semi-lucid during a nightmare - a scene involving IRL characters - and wanted to change the scene in order to get away from the nightmare. I had a false awakening - possibly two, memory's vague on this point - either way, I eventually wound up in my IRL bedroom, lucid (now unsure on whether or not I lost lucidity in between).

      The room's dark, and I'm frustrated, feeling trapped. I've got the impression I'm stuck in some in-between state, not dreaming properly (whatever that means) and not able to wake myself up, and I'm trying to escape this state. I'm thinking about lack of control, and I look at an object in my hand and turn it into a sword, thinking of this as somewhat pointless, and thinking something about the way the dim light affects this. I find myself moving along the ceiling, as if I'm held up there against my will. There are two windows, and I manage to claw my way over to one while avoiding being pulled toward the other. I slide it open and tear out the screen (I was thinking something I can't recall in detail, something about the way the window responds to my actions by opening or not opening due to it being a part of a dream rather than a physical window), and with great effort manage to crawl through the window.

      On the other side, I'm floating over water, surrounded by cliffs and hills covered in snow. It's night. There are wooden buildings and people outside, dressed in clothes from at least a few centuries ago. My perspective is moving, but I'm still partway in the window; when I look behind me, I can see the window hovering in midair. I'm moving toward the town center, and I can hear people talking - not a language I understand, but from some of the words I catch I believe it to be German, or some variant of it. There's some event about to take place, I believe it's something religious, some ritual.

      I enter a building. Memory goes spotty here again, but eventually I wound up speaking with an old woman who gave an impression of beauty and power. To her left was a woman sitting asleep in a throne, dressed in a costume that could have been straight from the LotR movie elves - I specifically compared it to a costume while I was looking at her. I wondered if she was Julia. (It's unusual that it's something I wondered about, as opposed to just knowing.) The old woman was telling me about her plans, including something she was going to discard, and I requested that she give me that thing. She was surprised but amused and granted my request, but afterward I thought of this as a missed opportunity - I became distracted by the thing she gave me, I should have just listened and followed along with her.
    3. A dead girl and a dog

      by , 03-04-2014 at 12:02 AM
      My IRL sisters are visiting me and we've been bickering as we walk to the door of my IRL house. There's a dead girl standing in the driveway, staring at the door, and - sarcastically, it's related to what we were bickering about - I say to her something along the lines of "Well? Are you coming in, too?" This is said more for my sisters' benefit than for the dead girl; she doesn't seem to react.

      Inside, I get online and read a news article. The powerful old guard of some country have been giving themselves promotions. One man is referred to by the titles Ulmo (name taken from Tolkien, but at the time I believed it was a reference to some eastern European mythology) and Eleusis, and a rank which translates to Old Knight. The Ulmo of myth is (in this dream) associated with beginnings and the dawn, and that was symbolic for this man's political duties, but as these people have given themselves promotions those myth-derived titles have become more literal - he can now literally control dawn, and other forms of time related to the beginnings of things.

      (Woke up. Back to sleep.)

      There's a caterpillar in my IRL house. I pick it up, and although it keeps wriggling away, I eventually manage to take it outside. When I put it down in the grass, it immediately tries to get back inside, and I realize there's a beetle out there it's trying to get away from. The beetle tells me that this is the spirit of a dead girl. It tells me a story about this girl and a hockey player who's also now dead, and about two guys who took a deal not to talk about something that happened between two hockey players and two girls. I see the hockey player and the dead girl on a train, and she's staring blankly into space with these wide, round eyes.

      (Woke up. Back to sleep.)

      I'm watching an extended version of Near Dark with various extras. The one I'm watching seems to be an interview, but with the characters themselves, not the cast/crew. The family's standing around a Cadillac convertible, and Caleb's talking to someone about how he first joined the family, a long time ago. He'd been driving with a woman, she'd been drunk, when the family found them she hadn't realized the danger they were in. He talks about Mae, and then he holds up her hand and says "and lucky me - no ring." He laughs. Jesse looks a little disgusted by the way Caleb talks about Mae, but he laughs too. Caleb's wearing a belt buckle shaped like the head of a snake with fangs bared.

      I decide to go back to the main menu. This isn't just for Near Dark, but for a wide variety of movies, and one displays a picture of John Constantine with a title that references immortality and love and/or betrayal. The menu images are constantly shifting, and he slips off the screen. There are at least two layers of the image, and I think of those layers as somehow acting as mirrors, both of the viewer and of each other. By changing the angle I'm standing at, I get Constantine back in view.

      (Woke up. Back to sleep.)

      Someone's telling a story. The listener asks, "Was it the wrath of heaven?" The storyteller shakes her head. "It was the wrath of the humans." Following someone's advice led to some captured human surviving and leaving the fortress where the storyteller lived, an isolated building in the center of a vast field stretching to the horizon, the only landmark I can see. He returned with many soldiers. As a disembodied observer standing on the top of that fortress, I can hear the soldiers shouting to each other. They're speaking Korean, I don't understand them.

      (Woke up. Back to sleep.)

      A setting based on a fantasy version of ancient China. An elegantly dressed woman is telling a terrified human man to "call me elder sister." He frantically agrees, although he nearly calls her something more along the lines of 'mistress' as he does so; he's thinking about her connection to his master. She releases him and walks off, through a fence, passing through the solid object like it's not there. Looking at this, the man says or thinks "What a way for owls to fly around at night."

      A similar fantasy China setting. There's a man leading a human woman around a palace, talking about truth and the inability to lie. "Like this," the woman says, holding up the candle she was given by the woman who rules this place. It has words carved into it, which she believes promises her safe passage in some fashion. He laughs, and says that's a careful bit of phrasing, which causes her to look concerned. He reads it out, and it says something along the lines of "The human will want/feel no hunger." He points out that this statement will be true even if she stays here forever - she won't want food, she won't feel hunger. But actually eating solid food that will sustain her life, or returning to her own world to do so - that's a different subject entirely, and it's not covered by the carefully-phrased promise on the candle.

      In a modern setting, I'm staying somewhere for the night with a small group of other people. Other groups are here as well, and there's concerns about space, so when I finally see the room we've been given I'm surprised by how big it is. There aren't many beds, but there's a lot of floor space, there should be no problem. We all sort out spaces for our bedrolls, and some of us go over the movies we have between us. I wonder if I can convince the others to put on Near Dark. The floor's becoming crowded, and I just manage to find a space for my backpack; on top of the backpack I place a stuffed animal shaped like a dog, which I'm aware contains a guardian dog spirit who protected me from the ghost of a dead girl earlier tonight.

      Updated 03-04-2014 at 01:01 AM by 64691

      Categories
      non-lucid
    4. Wings and clockwork

      by , 01-27-2014 at 11:44 PM
      There's a girl walking up a narrow attic staircase that she very much doesn't want to go up. There's something that looks like a child at the base of the stairs, forcing her to go up and see 'mother.' 'Mother' is something that this girl has fed people to before, but she's never gone up the stairs herself. Now she's failed the pair somehow. Whatever's at the top of the stairs feels nightmarish enough that I decide I don't want to see this, and take just enough control to back out of the scene. There was some resistance, and it felt like a race against time, whether I could get out before the girl got to the top of the stairs.

      I'm standing somewhere airy, white walkways, a few white walls, mostly open space. There are a few pages on the ground, a story I was reading, but I feel too on edge to focus on it. I put my back to a wall, that helps.

      The Magician on a city street with a little girl. He's saying, "Countless thousands of worlds, or (something, along the lines of 'a few') worlds and those you know." She asks what he means, and he says nevermind, but he's talking about the price for what he's about to do for her; something's going to be lost. He doesn't want her to feel guilty over it, so he doesn't explain the details. He raises his staff and these gold shapes form in the air around them - flat, curved, with sharp points, something like a tribal tattoo come to life, I have vague associations with wings and clockwork (they do resemble stylized wings, but no clue what the clockwork association's from) - and then their surroundings seem to shatter, taking them somewhere 'between worlds.'

      Memory gaps and vague fragments after that: those same two characters standing in front of images like holograms, representing people that little girl knew, but the images are fragmentary, like they've had pieces digitally erased, leaving a bit of hair or a corner of a dress hanging in midair, but never any faces. Something to do with the importance of the little girl remembering "Rose," but there's a trick to it - she knew someone who was called Rose, but who also used another name, and it's that other name she really has to remember. Four knights, two in red and two in blue, male and female, and the man in blue has some message to do with the kid's father and something about a doll.

      (Woke up. Back to sleep.)

      I'm playing some kind of game based on Middle-earth - there's no sense of me physically playing a video game or the like, I seem to physically be there and it seems to be a real place, but I think of it as a game. At the moment I'm trading in some weapon and given a new selection to choose from. It's mostly swords and daggers. I choose a staff. This alters the way the game is played, although I hadn't realized it when I made that choice; it removes me from the fighting and instead allows me to travel freely, flying over the countryside, exploring the world, unlocking all the elven settlements that were otherwise hidden. I won't be able to continue the storyline this way, but it has its appeal.

      (Woke up. Back to sleep.)

      A movie about robots, filmed in first person POV, full of scenes designed to make you feel sympathy for the robots, even while the robots themselves remind you that they're just tools and there's no need to feel concerned.

      Belle and a newly-human, rather fragile-looking Rumpelstiltskin have been traveling somewhere and are now in some dimly-lit house where they're finally meeting with Rumpelstiltskin's son. (His personality's so different from Bae's that I hesitate to use the same name for this dream version.) Belle and the son talk while Rumpelstiltskin's sort of collapsed in a chair, Belle's next to him, the son's on the second floor and looking down at them over a railing; she seems suspicious of him. It seems they've met before, in a shared dream, and something that she saw in that dream is making her suspicious of him now. He warns her not to take shared dreams too literally, as other associations tend to leak in.

      Updated 01-27-2014 at 11:50 PM by 64691

      Categories
      lucid , non-lucid , nightmare
    5. Mostly fragments, mostly fiction-based

      by , 01-22-2014 at 11:32 PM
      Several fragments based on Tolkien, involving hooded figures, the statement that "No (name of hooded figures) will survive Aragorn" which has some vague association with atheism, and a few scenes in which Aragorn is either fighting the hooded figures alongside one or two other humans, or calmly talking to them, and either way shown to be in complete control.

      As Rumpelstiltskin, I'm stopping by the door of one of the storerooms. Belle's inside, talking. The room's mostly filled with straw, but it also holds a mirror, and she's using it to speak with the image of an old woman sitting in a chair and knitting, a woman I know. The woman's giving her advice. I'm pleased - partially at seeing the two of them get along well, but mostly at seeing Belle making use of my magic. They stop talking and Belle turns around and sees me watching them, and I feign disinterest.

      As FK's Nick, I'm stretched out on the floor of my apartment, talking to someone and using a laptop on a low table to search for something; the side of me that's a disembodied observer associates this with the semi-lucid search techniques used in other recent dreams.

      (Woke up. Back to sleep.)

      A vampire watching a woman turn, which at this stage mostly consists of becoming more physical, much like the old movies - not sexual specifically, just more aware of the senses. He's saying something about how there's no need to believe in a divine plan to explain the way they find each other again and again.

      Mina and Grayson are talking in a train car; she says she loves him, and the moment she does, he's flung by some invisible force out of the car, into the next, which is filling rapidly with water, up to the ceiling. He's thinking something regretful about Lucy.
    6. The sky barrier, monitoring an android, trains and ships and gods

      by , 01-21-2014 at 10:16 PM
      I'm looking at some kind of travel ad with a picture of a bridge and a quote calling it magical. A woman's complaining about the misuse of the quote - apparently it's a line from the end of a long poem about a more literal variety of magic, and the way the ad is using it is going completely against the spirit of the poem. She summarizes the poem, saying something along the lines of 'magic's one and only purpose: getting us outta here.'

      As I think about what that means, I become lucid. I'm floating above the bridge from the image in that ad, high over a river, surrounded by trees; I fly along the road, over the trees, flying higher until I can see that this is an island, and I fly out over the water. It's all very beautiful, but I'm still thinking about what that woman had said, and I associate it with a quote from Tolkien in defense of escapism. (The quote: Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home?) Thinking about Tolkien, I think that while I'm lucid, I'll go find some elves. But suddenly I feel a desperate need to, as the woman said, get outta here - rather than flying peacefully over the water, now I'm thinking of the sky as a barrier I have to break through; I'm very worked up about it. I fail completely.

      When I stop trying to break through the sky, I find I'm now flying outside my IRL home.
      I land in a tree. My IRL neighbor's on the steps outside with some people I think of as her cousins, and she sees me. I feel embarrassed, a grown man climbing trees. The branch I'm sitting on breaks with a very loud crack, and although I don't fall very far at all, they run over to me. She scolds me for climbing trees when people are trying to sleep. We go inside. I'm still vaguely aware that I'm dreaming, but I'm thinking that I'll have to wait for these people to leave before I can do anything very interesting.

      I 'wake up' on a bus. I think about the lucid dream I just had, but am distracted when Danica Patrick starts making out with the woman sitting next to me. (And yet it doesn't occur to me that I might still be dreaming...)

      I'm in an office, talking to someone about the android I've been monitoring. The guy I'm talking to is the same model, and I'm asking him about some of the skills he was programmed with; I think there might be something wrong with the one I've been observing, she seems to have let some of her skills decay. He hints that maybe I've got an ulterior motive here, and he's right, but I insist I'm only concerned about my employer (their manufacturer)'s reputation. I'm thinking I'm going to have to download a training program so I can pose as a servant and infiltrate her owner's household.

      (Woke up. Had an unusually difficult time getting back to sleep, I was up for at least an hour.)

      There's two men sitting in front of a fireplace, a young man and an old one. The young man's saying, "Don't you want to help me?" There's a long pause. The young man isn't aware of it, but the person he's speaking to is his father-in-law; his wife, the old man's daughter, has recently passed away, and for some reason the old man thinks it's to his benefit to keep that connection secret. Now the old man says, "Your wife... Very sweet creature."

      (Woke up. Back to sleep without difficulty this time.)

      I'm on a train named after a greek goddess; I've just changed from a train called Autehna (which is meant to be Athena - my dreams have mixed up that name in a similar way before, again pronouncing it with a 't' instead of 'th'), and I'm thinking of the naming of the two trains as pleasantly symbolically appropriate. I'm writing in a journal. As I write, I see an image of what I'm writing about: a very powerful and morally dubious man offered me a position, and I turned him down, and I can't for the life of me figure out why. In the journal, I write that I must have learned in another life to refuse to get tangled up with the wicked and powerful.

      Continuing as the same character from the train, I find my wife and children asleep around/under the Christmas tree.

      Still the same character, I'm standing on a dock next to a rowboat full of men in red uniforms, casting off. I'm in the same uniform, as is the man beside me, but the two of us aren't going back to the ship with the rest. I'm thinking about that position I'd turned down, and the possible ill will resulting from that refusal, and I start to feel suspicious about the guy next to me. When I look at him, he takes off running down the dock, reaching for a rope. I reach for the weapon I've concealed in my false leg, and as I remove it I hear someone say "mon dieu!" I'm thinking about the various bits and pieces of myself that I've left behind.

      (Woke up, once again couldn't get back to sleep and eventually gave up on it, even though I'd gotten only about 5 hours of sleep. Unusual.)

      Updated 01-22-2014 at 03:04 AM by 64691

      Categories
      lucid , non-lucid , false awakening
    7. Demonic visions and possession, vampires and sirens and gods

      by , 09-09-2013 at 09:04 PM
      A teenage girl who's recently begun to see strange things, people who look different to her than they do to everybody else, demonic, eyes in the wrong places or no mouths, and so on - she's thinking about one man in particular, a mentor or father figure, who now looks inhuman to her. She believes this is a delusion. But she's run across a woman who obliquely refers to herself as inhuman, clearly believing that they're both the same; and the woman goes on to talk about various creatures like them gathering, organized by that particular father figure, and about a 'sister' who that father figure favors, and weighing the pros and cons of killing that 'sister.' It's clear this girl is the 'sister' being talked about, though neither of them realize it.

      This conversation had been happening at a food court in an airport while they were both waiting to meet other people, and eventually the girl put her head down on the table, folded her arms for a pillow and took a nap; when she woke up, another person was sitting next to her, a black-haired woman, talking to the first one, and when she sees the girl's waking up she tries to startle her. The girl doesn't get startled. The black-haired woman then says hello in a very odd, drawn-out tone.

      (Woke up. That odd, drawn-out tone was the sound of a chainsaw next door. Back to sleep.)

      Walking through mountains at night, talking about chocolate, and being followed by Gollum.

      Going along with Buffy's friends on some scheme they've come up with, now that she's dead.

      A small model of an obelisk, made out of salt.

      I'm possessing a young man in college, and I'm doing a terrible job of mimicking his normal behavior, all his housemates suspect something's up with him.

      Still in that college setting, a horror movie called 'Mandeathering' is recommended to me - I see a scene involving several creatures in a graveyard, one of them looking like Nosferatu and holding a child in his arms, described as a family that 'feeds on death,' and 'the weak ones' giving in to sadness or despair (though now I can't remember if 'the weak ones' were among the family or the ones they were feeding on). I google the movie, but think the guy recommending it must have gotten the title wrong, because none of the results I'm getting are for a horror movie; the first result is for a dream journal.

      (Woke up. Back to sleep.)

      On a ship, looking down at a human-shaped siren standing on an island and the man from my crew who's standing there with her. I'm thinking about going down there myself, but I'm also thinking about past experiences with things that call to you from the water, asking you to leave your ship. Never goes well.

      Fragment of one person chasing another on horseback on that same island, something to do with a god.
    8. Including gods, shapeshifters, and captivity

      by , 08-28-2013 at 07:46 PM
      A fragment of dialogue: "And you will be trusted with it. Again."

      (Woke up at 7:50 am, after getting to bed at 4:30 am. Back to sleep.)

      I'm reading a multi-volume autobiography. This particular chapter is describing a vision the author had at a young age, and what he thought about that - not about the content of the vision, but the act of having one.

      A man is being held captive by a coyote god, or rather a coyote spirit which has temporarily become a god, taking on a human but coyote-headed physical form. They're surrounded by baby spiders acting as helpful servants. This man had been searching for his wife, refusing to believe the reports of her death, and his search led him here.

      As Haruka/Onikui, I'm chained in a cell, with Minamoto Raikou standing over me with the keys.

      (Woke at 9:04. Back to sleep.)

      "They had more passion, ordinary things; and it didn't do to tempt the passions of ordinary things in passing." The thoughts of a woman who had a man over to eat together with her mother and her daughter, flirting and enjoying it, but with this thought in her head.

      (Woke at 10:28. Back to sleep - but I woke up roughly every half hour after that, and I kept running into that problem where, half-awake, I think about writing a dream down and mistake that thought for having actually done it, and so forget the dream. Nonetheless I wound up with two more pages of notes, mostly too dull to bother writing out in detail.)

      Very dull dreams from the rest of the night included discussions of my control issues, a man taking the shape of a three-eyed bat with a green-and-gold mask, watching the sunset, farm work, bear hunting, anatomy studies, a vampire movie starring Nicolas Cage and Meg Ryan, the death of Mickey Mouse while he was nobly saving Donald Duck, my IRL civilian sister as a military police officer in training, a werewolf-hunting father and daughter giving a werewolf shelter in their home, and a sitcom about hobbits with fangs.

      Updated 08-28-2013 at 11:26 PM by 64691

      Categories
      non-lucid , dream fragment
    9. Tolkien and handcuffs

      by , 08-09-2013 at 07:43 PM
      I'm traveling, spending the night in an old stone tower. Thranduil's standing watch out in the woods, I can see him through the window. The rain's coming down pretty hard, much harder than it was during my watch and I'm still trying to warm up, sitting up brewing something hot to drink. I'd like to call him back inside, let him stand watch from the window instead, but I know he wouldn't. Everyone's still on edge about that Balrog. I hear voices at the bottom of the tower, one of the Men with us calling to Thranduil, telling him to quit haring off on his own like that. I can't see where Thranduil's gone, but the two Men who'd been guarding the door are looking around the edge of the woods. Then a leather wing covers the window for a moment and blocks my view, something flapping around the tower carrying a rider, and I shout to the others to wake up.

      (Woke up. Back to sleep.)

      I'm sitting at a bar drinking something green in a shot glass, when iron handcuffs are snapped around my wrists. Some crime has been committed, something which I'd planned to do. I didn't go through with it, though. I'm innocent. But it's still my fault that someone else carried out my plan, and I'm willing to take the punishment.