DarkestDarkness

One fairly long dream at least, though I had others this was the most prominent on my mind after waking up and even so I didn't make note of all of it.

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Dream:

A sequence about Diablo 3. There was a new expansion for the game or something and they were finally continuing the prime evil storyline but the plot was still kind of convoluted and somehow involved time travel to go back to the time of creation of the evils. But then this angel said (to me and other characters?) that we'd have to go even further back than that. Passing thoughts about the creation of time.

I remember having an interface like in the game and quickly found out that something that had been changed was that you could now make any ability/rune combination use any element, as well as some other bonus I don't remember. Just shortly after changing some abilities, while I was looking through these things I think, a treasure goblin appeared and I chased after him. I was going to try using cleave and rend again (I typically always use weapon throw especially because of enemies like the goblins) but the goblin run just fast enough that small mistakes made me not able to catch up to him. At that moment I was immediately regretting having cleave as my primary ability instead of weapon throw.

Eventually he stopped to do one of his little scripted "look-around" animations and I caught up, quickly getting his health down to 1. This annoyed me because he was technically dead but the animation had to finish for him to properly die.

Then I swapped my abilities back and this time I was going to have weapon throw again but with a bleeding effect (literal in the dream but just general DoT) and with poison elemental damage. But I realised I wasn't sure what my most boosted element was so I tried to find the interface bit where it showed these values but somehow I'd completely forgotten where that was. I looked physically for it? And ended up finding it displayed somehow but also some electrolytic capacitors. I saw the poison was 400 and something % and decided that it was the strongest I had.

Some time later (transition?) I got on some sort of magical stone lift. Yellow beams of light were coming from underneath it, just where there were gaps between the lift and the surround it fit into. It was on a cliffside. I remember fog and a generally nightly and blueish atmosphere. Across from me was a portal, with purple fog coming out of it and I thought that should be the time portal. The lift started descending and I felt like it took me to the past somehow, or perhaps I was already in the past and I'd already come through the portal (portal potentially being the dream "explanation" of being here with no transition).

Down at the bottom was a cave of some sort, as I remember. Fairly light coloured stone, but dark in there.

---

Notes:
- The bit with the goblin was a mix of places, like from Mephisto's lair in D2 and the invaded angelic towers from D3.
- In this bit I remember the camera/view angle was like in D3.
- The dream went on even after the cave at the bottom of the lift and while I did initially have recall of those parts of the dream, because I didn't make note of them in the morning, the recall beyond that point is completely gone now.
- This is the first D3 dream I remember having, but I'll have to go back through my previous notes and DJ entries to be sure.

A few fragments but I remembered some more detail as I read and rewrote my notes from the morning.

---

Dream:

In the old version of the square in my home town. It’s altered compared to my actual memory of it however. It was a bigger area somehow; this may relate to the fact that my memories of this version only exist from my childhood as it changed pretty early on in my life. But the dream takes place in a present time.

I have abilities from Diablo 2, more specifically Sorceress and Amazon abilities. I remember an interface overlay like in the game where I could pick the spells from.

Noteably I remember the explosive arrow and glacial spike abilities, but on closer inspection the glacial spike was actually called frostga.

I was shooting a bow with explosive arrows at these two guys that were just running around a bit aimlessly I think. They just wouldn’t die though and I kept running out of mana, for some reason glacial spike used a lot but explosive arrows didn’t (some uniques in the game granted it as a passive modifier, derived from that?).

Dream Fragment:

I remember there were transitions but the main place in the dream was this Egypt themed zone like a level from Unreal Tournament. It was night time and the zone in itself was more like a floating platform high up I. The sky. It had the shape of a circle but extended out of itself into “knots” on four corners?

Despite being night time it was fairly bright, moonlit mostly. But there were glitches with the lighting, like the level wasn’t finished properly, so some objects and areas were just far too bright like the gamma was wrong just for those bits but I accepted this as something that does happen.

Dream:

Was with mom and dad in the car, we were downtown but everything looked so different, more like a post modern and brand new style than what I think I would have expected, which would be old buildings.

Dad was commenting on how empty the entire area was. I don’t remember commenting myself. Nothing felt surprising or unusual in the dream. We went past some museums, one had written in big block capitals at its entrance: PAPU or something of the sort. As we went past it, I saw an ascending escalator inside the museum through some large and curved glass panes. I had a deja vu in the dream when I saw this.

We went a bit further along and I remember having thoughts about how this area was supposed to be for modern cars only or that it had been pedestrianised. We arrived near the square next to the river but it all seemed pedestrianised and like we weren’t supposed to be in the car here but dad didn’t realise.

A blonde or fake blonde and sort of nearly pale white lady walked up to us and then we weren’t in the car anymore but I thought nothing of it. She told dad that he couldn’t drive here, only “on the basement level” (to park?). There was a platform with road on it that was a lift that went underground just a bit ahead; I think I saw this before the lady was there, but I remember interacting with some console which had a blue GUI with options displayed. The last and only option I remember said something like “1950s (1980)”.

Non-dream stuff - Woke up at 8:30 and then again around 9:10 and had some long non-lucids, but forgot most of the details. Really tired too so not particularly motivated.

---

Fragment:
Something about Dark Souls (3), I remember the feeling of keypresses for attacking but remember being "in" the game.

Remember some other scene where I interacted with dream characters.

---

Scoring thus far:
+ Previous score: 50.5

+ This DJ entry score (breakdown below): 0.5
++ Recall a non-lucid fragment: 0.5

= Total score thus far: 51.0

Non-dream stuff - woke up a bit before 9 but didn't recall any dreams. Woke up again around 10 recalling some non-lucid stuff.

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Fragment 1:
I was playing the game Freelancer, it felt as though I was "in" it; I was in a system that doesn't exist in the game, though I've dreamed similar systems before. It was like the Omicron Alpha system and some of the Sigma systems.

It was a high level area but for some reason I was in the starter ship, and all the NPC ships were showing up red (hostile); despite this, they weren't actually attacking, more like they disliked me rather than hated me (which wouldn't show up as red in the real game).

I don't think there were any planets in this system and there was one star and I could see some asteroid belts in the distance. The "sky" had some blue nebulas and bright stars but was mostly dark.

Dream 2:
I remember being in a small and cramped kitchen, the ceiling was kind of low, especially for a kitchen. There was a fluorescent light that lit up the entire room. In the kitchen were myself, my partner (H) and our friend (M).

Can't remember what we were initially talking about, but while we all talked I crouched next to the fridge and opened it to have a look inside; the fridge didn't seem to have a light inside, and as I opened the door I hit M with it by accident. I said sorry and he said it was ok. I hadn't realised he was standing just there, somehow. I couldn't find anything I wanted really but I can't actually remember what was inside the fridge.

I got up and closed the door and saw the time on some red 7-segment display: 17:09. M mentioned he was going to go to bed in a few seconds, I showed some surprise and asked "shouldn't we be having dinner then?" and we apparently hadn't had lunch yet, as H said "well, make it be our lunch too then".

I think M was considering whether to eat before bed or not, and I think I asked what time he was getting up at, which he said would be 7AM or something. I walked in the opposite direction from M, past H, who was sat on a chair, and on a counter there was a pile of stuff under a tea towel. I took it off and underneath were some ready-made food packs, like chicken with noodles and vegetables. I grabbed one that was open, implied to be leftovers, and grabbed a nearby fork and ate some of the chicken. It tasted a bit... bland. I was disappointed and the rest didn't look that appetising; in fact, the rest of the chicken in this pack looked a bit pink and like it had a few white spots. But I knew it was cooked properly because these packs come pre-cooked and when I tasted some, it didn't taste raw. I nearly questioned all of this but the dream ended.

---

Some notes:

• When I used to play Freelancer, going to higher end systems in a low-level ship wasn't too uncommon for me; the dream hostility implication being that most of the factions I'd want to ally with are ones that you start off as being hostile towards, and the other thing is that if I was starting a new game, because I was good at avoiding shots, there were good wreckage and freight piracy spots in some of these areas, giving a quick boost to being able to get to a higher-end ship sooner.
• I mostly remember seeing Outcast and Lane Hacker factions in the dream. The appearance of Lane Hackers in the dream is strange because they are allies of the Outcasts but I almost never interacted with them.
• In the second dream, M seemed a bit sad or upset and not really up to talking. This is probably residual from his current real-life situation.
• The pink bits on the chicken looked odd because they were on the outside, where the chicken did look cooked; because of the small white spots, I think I probably would have concluded it to be some sort of bacterial or fungal growth, had the dream carried on. I should remember to do a RC when food tastes funny or bland in general.
• Although I remember arriving at the kitchen from outside, I don't remember an outside or a previous dream.

---

Scoring thus far:
+ Previous score: 34.0

+ This DJ entry score (breakdown below): 8.5
++ Recall a non-lucid fragment: 0.5
++ Recall a non-lucid dream: 1.0
++ Recall any non-lucid dream over 7 consecutive nights: 7.0
Though I could probably consider that "fly" happened in the first dream, I don't remember enough sensations to consider it valid.

= Total score thus far: 42.5

Non-dream stuff. Woke up at about 9, only vaguely recalling a non-lucid dream fragment and a nl short dream.

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Fragment:
I was playing some sort of strategy game, possibly a space strategy game, and I was in a lobby menu and my partner was going to play with me; then one of my siblings (T) joined the game lobby too. I remember discussing the game with T too.

Dream Sequence:
It was night time, I was in some sort of rural backroad and there was a little girl, blonde I think. Some snakes started coming out of the hedges and going toward the girl, but very very slowly. There was a car some 100/150ft away with headlights on; the dream implied it was mine, and I went to get inside the car to drive over to the little girl and grab her to take her in the car (why didn't I just do it in the reverse order?). The whole scene happened in third person view. I entered the car and drove up to the girl and got out again; the girl got confused because of the strong headlights on the car and squinted and covered her face and was confused; and I was about to grab her to get her into the car but dream ended.

---

Some notes:

• The game in the first dream fragment will again be a waking life echo of playing something like Homeworld again.
• In the dream, I don't remember feeling threatened by the snakes, nor do I remember thinking they were a threat to myself; but they were clearly distressing for the girl.
• Only when writing the journal entry now did I realise it was an odd order to go about things, when I could have just grabbed her before getting to the car, especially given how slow the snakes were.
• For some reason, as I recalling the short dream, the snakes made me think of hares, and then the October competition. (Do snakes hunt hares/rabbits?)

---

Scoring thus far:
+ Previous score: 10.0

+ This DJ entry score (breakdown below): 2.5
++ Recall a non-lucid fragment: 0.5
++ Recall a non-lucid dream: 1.0
++ Help someone in need: 1.0

= Total score thus far: 12.5

Note: Technically, this wasn't a dream. Not entirely sure why I felt like putting on the DJ. Last night I was listening to the OST from STRAFE through some old headphones (80s I think) I have which make me almost unable to hear/feel the room if no music is playing, and I just had my eyes closed while listening.

The soundtrack feels a bit "melancholic" to me in general, but others might not think of it that way. I wasn't trying to think of anything in particular and some imagery formed, though with little vividness, hardly any more vivid than regular imagination. Forgot some of the details, since this was last night before going to sleep.

I couldn't recall any actual dreams today, my focus on waking up wasn't in the right place and ironically I'd forgotten about intents last night.

---

As I was listening to second half of the OST, I had thoughts come and go of "darkness". Not vivid but dream-like imagery of being pulled down by my "dream" arm into pits - swarms of spiders and insects would appear and I wondered why it was that I could never have visualised a scene like this without feeling fear or horror in the past. Though the imagery wasn't strong, I still felt some disgust at some of the insects, particularly big ones.

This repeated itself in different ways a few times mixed with other passing thoughts I can't remember, related to the imagery. I remember thinking that this probably wasn't what I was "looking for" and thinking that it was interesting that a dream-like setting had formed.

Then as the soundtrack got into the last quarter the thoughts went sort of into the actual in-game area that the track would play in, though the imagery was still relatively weak vs an actual dream, I could sort of feel a dream-body and started remembering the black lizard from another of my DJ entries.
I started wanting to spot him but instead I realised that I was that lizard this time, seeing from first-person, but wearing a labcoat (which is one of my artificial dream-signs) and though I couldn't visualise clearly, I tried to do hand/finger reality checks; counting wasn't possible due to the low duration of physical memory and lack of "vision" - but passing my clawed fingers through my other hand's palm worked.

Though I was fully aware of the music being outside this and the fact that I was sitting on a chair, I felt it was important to try and do a RC to see if my mind would agree with what I was wanting to do. The place the "dream" body was in, was indeed dream-like, despite being awake.

As the music progressed I remember running through the halls of Athena (the in-game area) as if it were in the actual game, getting "deeper" into the area, "looking" down at my "dream" legs, noticing that they were scaly and black and that the feet were dinosaur-like, with 3 front claws and 1 rear claw or something like that; the in-game enemies were appearing and I attacked them with the claws I had and my large reptilian mouth, eating some of the smaller enemies and making particular note of all the blood that was showering from the enemies, just like it would in the game. I wondered, was this the darkness I was looking for? I concluded it wasn't. I tried to taste the blood but the sense wasn't strong enough since I could still feel my actual mouth too. I tried using the channeling effect from Warframe with my attacks but while this did disintegrate the enemies into energy, more seemed to appear from the dispersed energy.

As the music got to the last track I had on the list, which is the music for the final room in Athena, I realised I was standing where the boss would be. There was the player character down below in the chamber; he was autonomous and attacked the boss control room tower and shot towards me too, not penetrating the glass with the bullets. For some reason I taunted him by licking the glass, noticing the tongue to not be reptilian-like but being long, with somewhat better visuals than before. Then I remember breaking the glass and crawling down the wall as a lizard would and going for the player character and killing him; the hordes of enemies that were attacking him turned to me instead and I remember fighting them and soon after the music ended and the imagery ended, as if I'd" woken" up, despite having been "awake" the whole time.

Edit: Forgot to remove private entry checkbox, so changed that. (I sometimes check it so I don't post by accident when I'm sleepy and everything is half-typed ).

Edit2: Added a name to the title of the DJ entry so I can find it more easily when I'm looking for it.

Non-dream stuff - had a couple of non-lucid dreams I remember in some detail. Chronological order slightly forgotten.

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Dream fragment:
I was playing some sort of space game, I could see in third-person view the ship I was controlling. Though I distinctly remember being "in" the game, I know my partner was watching me play, and I was in a system that had 3 jump gates to other stars; the jumpgates looked a bit Stargate-like, but two were coloured red and one was green. I wanted to go in one of the red ones. The system was very dark, there was a red giant star at its centre and when I arrived at the gates (that for some reason were clustered together) there were 2 ships, which were part of local military.

I remember using the jumpgate, though I don't remember the transition special effects, and when I got to the next system, it felt like it was a bit more dangerous. Visually it was confusing, I was struggling with the controls all of a sudden and the field of view adjustment kept changing for no reason. There was a blue giant star, and a regular yellow star; I remember some nebulae, blue, too, but there was something odd about the "skybox"* for the system.

In my controls struggle I accidentally started warping, backwards, somehow. The warp got faster and faster and I could see a "ul" units measurement at the bottom of the interface, going up quickly from 0.x to ~700. I managed to stop it and was now in a different system. I remember commenting to myself "oh, I forgot that worked that way", regarding the system travelling feature of the warp. It reminds me now of the warp mechanic in Eliteangerous.

Then I used it again and went forwards this time but steering at the same time, but when I warped out, I was in a planet with my ship, in the middle of a mega city, so I had to quickly try and maneuver up through openings I could see.

I remember getting past the atmosphere though I don't remember what happened next.

Dream sequence:
On a plane, with my partner. I don't think I was too happy about it; but we were landing, and we were landing in a street somewhere in France. This was the planned destination and the landing worked and stopped more than few hundred feet away from the nearest building.

We got out and I think we went to a flat somewhere, I think it was my aunt's and I remember some sort of interaction with my aunt before the dream started. But all I remember from the flat was that it was like our real kitchen and there was a bathroom. The bathroom was filthy, there was trimmed hair everywhere; there was a slight yellow tinge on things, not from urine or anything, as far as I can gather. There were no strong smells. But it felt filthy. I was trying to clean the toilet's rim with some paper, for some reason, and it was taking very long.

There was a transition and the next thing I remember is being at a supermarket in the same city, and I'm picking up what looks like a sweetener capsule dispenser thing, but instead, they have pictures of great monuments on them. I pick one that has a Great Pyramid, and I remember thinking or commenting to someone near me, "with this we can build our own pyramid... seems it takes about 3.8 acres of land, so we just need to get some 4 acres of land somewhere".

I walk to one of those self-checkout things, only carrying this little thing, and I scan it but I'm a little confused as to how things work and take a little while to understand where to place it; then I do, and I'm about to pay, but this other French guy about my age or younger starts using the same machine as I'm using, and I speak to him in English saying "excuse me, could you help me pay?" and he doesn't even look at me, which I feel to be rude. In the dream I have the distinct feeling they ignored English on purpose. I somehow manage to pay with my card, which I took out of my wallet blindly, but confirmed to be the card I wanted by the 4 last numbers, which were accurate to waking life as I remember.

I leave the shop and go down some street. Of note, I go past a man painting some sort of tall vertical canvases, in his own shop, but do not talk or engage with him. Down this street I am looking for a suitable land for this pyramid I want to build. I find some plaza and some ruins, and in the dream I think that because there are some Aztec-looking ruins I could just use them as a base for the pyramid... It's a micro steppe pyramid in its own right, this ruin, and I remember a hole that would be the stairwell. It is exceedingly dark in here, but I can see somehow. There is a different hole next to a wall, big enough for any grown man to slide in, but I do not satisfy my curiosity and walk away instead. Something felt odd but that wall opening, like it would go down forever.

I remember going up some street and then seeing some big building with a hand-painted sign that said:

"2 any artist;
60(something) (something);
214 accomplished artist"

or something to this effect. I got annoyed reading the sign. The numbers were value/money, and I felt that it was unfair to unknown artists. I commented something out aloud and realise that I'm standing next to the shop with that man from before, with the tall cyllinders that he painted. He said to me "unfortunately that's how it works; you can see how much work I have here - because it is exotic and unusual, I am not considered to be good or accomplished" or something like this. His shop was literally cluttered with all of his artistic work, some of it looked quite nice, some of it was indeed a bit unusual.

There was another dream after this but I've forgotten most of the details, apart from a teen boy being naked and antagonising me, who I punched in the face, though he didn't back down and just kept being annoying. There was a little girl but she seemed sad, she had a little pink dress.

---

Notes:

• *The skybox is traditionally a scaled up 3D element that keeps the exact same position as the player and makes up the far-distance objects that can be represented either with 2D sprites or low resolution 3D models.
• The comments of the other artist reflect partly the basic feel I have about art's value in general.
• My partner was present at some points in the second dream but I don't remember the interactions between us.
• I have been to France only once, when I was a kid, and had the possibility of going again when I was around 16, but didn't.
• In the dream I just couldn't understand why at the supermarket the guy was rude to me. I was being polite and asking for help to get out of his way. But it later occurred to me in the dream that if I'd used my native language instead he wouldn't have been so rude, so it felt like it was a French/English animosity thing.
• I don't know where the 3.8 acres figure came from (it seems very specific but for no reason) in the dream for the Great Pyramid's base area; but checking quickly has revealed to me that the Pyramid's base is about 13 acres, about 3.25 times my 4 acres land estimate in the dream. I do not have any intuitive understanding of the actual area taken by an acre in waking life, so if there was any accuracy at all, it would have been a surprise.

Non-dream stuff - Had a few non-lucids, mostly only remember the details for one sequence, since I didn't come to write on the journal straight away.

---

Fragment:
I was in a game and I fought two girls that were teamed up, over a wooden planks bridge or something like that; the landscape was pretty blocky in general as I remember it, and these girls had picked/were characters that were really strong together, due to the way their abilities synergised with each other. I mostly struggled to deal significant damage to them, as they recovered or blocked it and eventually I remember falling in a low pit and getting cornered and killed. I don't remember what kind of abilities or weapons I was using.

Dream:
I was in the same game, and with this dream I remember the format more clearly: it was a player-versus-player online game. It was night but very clear as there was a bright moon light, and many of us, the players, were on a rocky slope upward toward a castle. The castle had a gate, and it was going to open when the game began.

This time I had a power armour (Enclave-type) like from the Fallout series, and I remember I "pressed" esc and was looking at the armour's details on a menu. The menu was very plain, and was mostly just drop-down menus. The dominant colour was a cyan-ish blue, not unlike a fluoroscan.

I remember my eldest sibling being out of scene in the dream but commenting about the game and asking me what it was like. At this point, I do remember seeing the "screen" as I was pointing at something, but other than that, the entirety of the dream takes place "inside" the game. I replied something in conversation while still looking at the armour details, when I found some sliders and options I could adjust for abilities.

I noticed there was a little face icon with a number in front of it, 4300, my interpretation of which was that this was how many points I had left to spend (and some abilities took 100,1000,2000, etc). I noticed a regeneration ability that I really wanted to pick (tends to be a personal favourite in games) but then when I was looking for it again, I couldn't find it. I tweaked some other settings I don't recall, such as my max health ability but then the match was starting while I was still looking at the menu, and very quickly, someone else killed me.

Later I respawned or something, somewhere in the map, and I was trying to be sneaky through some dark areas, which remind me now of the Kuva Fortress in Warframe, and ended up running into a few different people; they didn't attack me immediately so I didn't attack them either, and one of them also had a power armour and she (a pretty faced black woman, I saw, as she didn't have the power helmet on) was asking me how I'd managed to configure certain abilities for the armour. She commented on the fact that I was killed at the start while looking at the menu and that whoever had done it was distasteful for doing so. I appreciated her comment.

I remember giving her some advice on the armour abilities, though I don't remember the details. She and a few others, a mix of young (teens?) boys and girls, were at the top landing of a small staircase, to which I walked up to as well; there was a doorway to the right, though I have a vague memory of what was through it; I can't remember it other than being a room with wooden floorboards.

---

• There was some other dream fragment I initially remembered, but ended up forgetting while remembering the big dream sequence.
• The two girls that killed me in the game in the first fragment had a cheeky playful attitude and sort of taunted me as they fought.
• The castle doesn't remind me of any particular place, but it had an Unreal Tournament feel to it.
• The transition from being inside the game, to being outside but playing and then back into being inside again was something rare, as that's not really happened before very much.
• The death while in the menu felt a bit too sudden/random; I don't remember hearing a projectile or a weapon firing, but it seemed like I got hit by a one-hit-kill explosion. And I thought the starting area would be safe until left.
• The black woman in power armour seemed to have some sort of strong motivation for being there that wasn't directly related to the game itself, she just had a sort of serious look on her face like she was looking for something in particular.
• I'm making note that while maybe it's not directly related, she was black and had a very meaningful interaction via conversation with me in the dream, and recently in my last DJ entry I've had a lot of black (but the actual colour) dream signs. Oddly enough, it is of some contrast to the last entry that the bit where we stood and talked was brightly lit by a single light from above, and I think the walls were a bright yellow, but it was otherwise dark. But generally speaking, this dream was not even half as dark as the one in my last entry anyway.

Non-dream stuff - a couple of non-lucid fragments and small DILD lucid.

---

Dream fragment 1:
I was at a garden centre place and there was an old man that (in the dream) was a regular I came to talk to. Come to think of it he looked a bit like the kind of old man like the guy who delivers certain parcels to us. He was on a small step-ladder tending to some sort of plant colony on a pot. He was flipping a "plate" of dirt around, because of seeds or something. There were many terracotta plant pots displayed around this outside part of the garden centre, in a somewhat hectic manner, but that seems to be how it tends to be in waking life too.

Dream fragment 2:

I remember playing a game, like Path of Exile, and I remember seeing the screen. Some monsters from another game such as Monster Hunter appeared and I didn't make note of that fact. But then I got a lot of oddly lucky item drops, and the character (or my dream self?) said something odd and I remembered to do a RC as I've been getting used to doing every so often while I'm on the computer too.

I held up my hands with my palms facing me, partially blocking the screen and I realised I was dreaming because my right hand's fingers were missing segments. It felt like I became too excited, as with other times, and the dream quickly destabilised, but I also made particular note of being too aware of the waking world environment at the same time that the dream visual detail was getting lost. I tried spinning, and doing something with my hands, and also produced a chocolate bar (that I could no longer see) and tried eating that; it did taste somewhat of chocolate, though I'm not certain if it was dark or not, but the dream faded anyway.

---

Notes:

• Before I went to sleep the last night, I remembered I haven't been setting an intention properly for dreaming lately.
• I initially set an intention that I might lucid dream and reminded myself that I could do it; then I realised that there was something wrong about the way I set my intention but did it again and it felt different.
• Despite not being able to see the chocolate bar, I know it was a Cadbury's chocolate bar, because I could still "see" the purple wrapper, even though I couldn't see.
• After waking up I did a RC and when I came to write this DJ entry I did a few more too. I tend to always RC in the morning.
• I may have lost some detail on the memory of the dreams overall because between looking after my partner's dad's yowly cat and needing to use the bathroom desperately, it was being a bit difficult to hang on to the memories.

Non-dream stuff; I woke up at 5:59 initially, then being up for a few minutes and then going back to bed and waking up again later around 7 and later at 10:30 when I got up. I haven't numbered the following sequences because the order in which they happened is really messed up in my memory.

---

Fragment and intermission:
This was when I first woke up at 5:59; I simply remember music playing softly. The next paragraph is from waking life:

I woke up from the sound of torrential rain, as did my partner, and we both got up from bed to look. I realised I was still hearing the vague memory of this music very faintly, at which point it stopped completely as I also realised the rain was the likely cause for it in the dream world. After a few minutes we went back to bed, but I did reality checks because it felt like an odd situation, to find that this was indeed reality. I realised that perhaps the fact that I was lucid already by being awoken by something odd was what made me think to do a few RCs. I seem to remember going back to bed with the intention of confronting the man from the next dream written...

Dream sequence:
I was in the car with my partner and we arrived at a parking lot. It was day but it looked dark grey and cloudy. The parking lot was in front of a few shops, and my partner wanted to go to one of the shops for groceries, but closest to us as we got out of the car was a little shop, and I went in and my partner followed. It was a vintage toy shop. There were metallic scale models of WWI and WWII tanks and artillery cannons, and the shop's owner was a man. He had two children, who were also at the shop.

I remember having a look around and taking a liking to a cargo wagon model and a WWII Panzer-like tank model. I always liked the shapes on some of the German tanks. The models were all on display on some glass shelves of some kind, I think. There was a strange red mood lighting and no other lights seemed to be present, actually. This has happened in other dreams though it is uncommon.

Then I was going to buy the model of the tank and my partner was sitting on a sofa thing in the reception area, bored, getting worried the other shop was going to close (which in the dream I felt like he was right about) and then we heard some noise from the other display room and the shop man just said it was his kids.

Then we went out and my partner walked into the other shop, and I was about to too, and I dropped something and I stopped and looked to my left as I was going to pick it up and there was now a small wall close to me but a gap between the wall and the shop. There was a man, crawling forward on his stomach and making raving noises like "oooaaa oooaaa" repeatedly. He looked right out of his mind, and he took what I dropped. I got a bit angry and stepped forward menacingly, remembering now that I was scowling too.

He got up and stood tall; he was a fair bit taller than me and still had an odd expression on his face, and initally just walked forward a bit toward me at which point I threatened him in my native language saying something to the effect of "you wanna get some?!", he stepped forward again and I stepped back because he had long arms and I was wary of him being able to strike me from further than I'd be able to hit him back. Another man stood up from a seat to the left (that I had previously not noticed, in fact there was a whole row of seats and people like at a clinic) and that second man grabbed the first one and directed him toward a bathroom in the wall of the big shop building and bashed the first man's head on the toilet lid.

Dream fragment:
I remember being in some sort of game, with a lot of water. There were big naval vessels and I remember an interface with a map showing lots of dots and dots with circles around them. All of them were coloured, and I remember most of them were yellow or white, and there were some red ones too. They seemed to represent other ships and naval bases. I remember later being on land and something about a military base and my siblings being there.

Dream fragment:
I remember being in a room with a round table. The table was modern and large, but not actually very high. Around the table were myself, some random people and of particular note an old school friend of mine, which I'll call C. I didn't speak to C directly in the dream, she looked moody and was turned away from the table and she looked as I remembered her. Another girl was talking to me and explaining that C and her girlfriend broke up and that C was upset because of it and that they'd been trying to have kids. I initially thought that was a bit odd.

This other girl started having a discussion with me about a random method I'd never heard of for a woman to get pregnant, and I said something like "well, why didn't they just try insemination?" and the girl looked at me with a funny face and said "insemination?" like she'd never even heard the word. She scrawled some crude diagrams of the female reproductive system and of how this other method was going to work.

C left at some point, and that's all I remember.

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Finally, some notes:

• The raving mad man was someone I perceived in the dream to be like a beggar or vagabond. Not the kind of person I would have felt like I'd be threatening with violence, but I was angry for having something taken from me.
• It was odd that in the dream my partner didn't come looking for me but I didn't think of it in the dream either.
• The lighting in the toy model shop could have been a good cue to RC. I need to add it to my list of Uncommon dream-signs, as I've had it before.
• My old friend C was someone I had a crush on during school time. This should was a dream-sign and good cue for RC. For context, a couple of years later I did talk to her about it and she said that it wouldn't have mattered because at the time I was interested in her, she wasn't intersted in going out with anyone because she was fed up, but we were still friends.
• The fact that C and whoever her girlfriend was were breaking up seemed sudden to me in the dream. In waking life I do know that she has a girlfriend now but I so rarely speak with C that I don't really know anything about her life.
• The other very explanatory girl, felt like one of those irritating people who you can't really have a discussion with. Ironically I'm fairly certain she was dream-generated.
• It is somewhat curious to me that the dream-generated woman I recently had appear in some dreams, the receptionist, was a woman that represents the black hair archetype of woman I've found in waking life, such as C and some other friends. The Anima I've previously had appear in dreams was blonde, quiet, and of somewhat firm attitude. This second dream-generated archetype seems to be a different kind of Anima, more likely to respond and talk but also being firm in attitude.

I should make note that this DJ entry marks a bit of a milestone since starting this dream journal, that my dream recall has generally improved a lot solely by having the intention of writing down the dreams and having a routine to do so. I am no longer forgetting fragments easily between sleeping and waking, though it still happens.

Non-dream stuff: Woke up and got up at about 9:20. Remembered a few segments from the last dream I was having.

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Sequence 1:

I was looking at an interface for picking a map in a real-time strategy game, for some sort of Command&Conquer game. I remember my partner being next to me and as I generated a random map with a "continental" style, I thought it looked a bit different and too small compared to most, but my partner said "no, have a look at the preview, it will be fine", so I clicked on preview and then my vision went into the screen and the map thumbnail image; as it zoomed in, the map became detailed and I viewed it from above but my vision kept zooming in closer and then there were 3 player factions, one being mine, another being my partner's, and the last one being someone else or an AI. We all started with some vehicles specific to our factions and the cars were racing through beaches and roads, with my vision still zooming now on a car I had, which looked a bit like something out of 1940s Germany, with white/grey colours and chrome accents. The AI had some military trucks, including one with a mounted gun, and they were chasing me and gaining speed, but I overtook my partner's cars and they blocked the chasing trucks a bit.

I remember now seeing in first person, and the car was stopped near a road tunnel that oddly enough was just after an intersection with a main road and a road that went around a bend behind a hill. I remember it was a clear sunny day and there were tropical forests.

Sequence 2:

Then I was at an area with pavement in a town, this was an open area on or near a quay and was reminiscent of my native country; there were subway entrances and this was all still part of the game somehow, I felt. In one of the subway entrances some gangsters were running up the stairs with sub-machine guns and I threw grenades and rockets at them, watching them not blow into pieces but fly around with wonky physics, just as one would expect with most games. Their "AI" was also poor; they ran against walls and corners sometimes and just idled even though I was being aggressive. Then I noticed I had a toolbar thing on my interface and picked a massive plywood plank item, and placed it over the entrance; for some reason it was steady standing on its own and was large enough that nobody could pass; I read a little tooltip on the interface saying I'd recently placed a blocking barrier and could not do so again for 15 minutes, but that I could upgrade any existing ones to increase their duration; this barrier I placed was going to last for 1 hour, apparently. The people that showed up the steps from behind the barrier, that I could still see just over the top, looked a lot less threatening, and in fact some were complaining like "hey I gotta get to work, come on!". I pretended to not care.

The dream ended at some point soon.

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Some notes:

• Although I separated both sequences into their own parts, they were part of the same dream, I just can't remember what went between them exactly; I don't remember a sudden transition from one to the other.
• The RTS map interface looked a bit like C&C:Generals and Warcraft 3; I remember the players had assigned colours and numbers, like for teams.
• The other generated maps were more representative of real Earth continents, picked at random, but the one I thought was odd just looked like a coastal section of a place.
• The fact that the whole of the sequences took place in a game context makes it very difficult for me to remember to question reality. Even when I am playing games in waking life and remember to do reality checks, it is difficult for me to pick good moments, i.e. weird ones, because games are generally very predictable and the only "weird" things that ever happen are bugs, the frequency of which depend solely on the specific game.
• The vehicles in the RTS were supposed to be base-starting vehicles, so in a way I should have remembered to do a RC over this, because in the dream context, the dream-awareness indicated something different from what actually happened.