DarkestDarkness

23rd August 2021

Fragment:

Meeting L, mom's old friend from teaching. We're in the ramped bit going out of the cul-de-sac just in front of home. She comments that she taking some interest in me. I comment that it's nice for someone to take interest in you and she agrees. T is with us and it feels more cramped than it should feel, even considering this bit of pavement isn't that wide; it seems smaller than it should actually be and I think there's some clutter nearby too.

(gap)

Seeing T's room, it's a bit Japanese in style and actually quite big. Apparently it's his own flat.

---

Notes:

- Rest of recall was gone as I woke up to the sound of the doorbell being rung many times within a second or two. I got up from bed and went to check, nothing. I ended up concluding that it must have only been some kind of hypnogogic hallucination from still being sleepy, it wasn't a false awakening and there are no pranksters in the street, plus it would be way too early for it.

- I'm not entirely sure what could have brought on L as a dream character, I'm also not sure whether she's ever appeared before or not.

Non-dream stuff - Woke up about 3 times through the morning, between 8:20, the time for my alarm, then at 9 something then at 10:20. Some long-ish dreams but think they've fragmented.

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Fragment 1:
At a square or cathedral. There with partner (H), something to do with pipe organs.

Then outside, at the square. Nice cobbles and layout. Remember meeting up with my parents and having them ask why I didn't have a stand here selling old coins; I remember explaining that I'd worked out that the cost to make them look new, plus the cost to rent the space, plus other things I don't remember now, meant that it was far too expensive and not worth it at all. I also remember explaining that I didn't have nearly enough coins to make it worthwhile.

Then at some version of my childhood home with my parents. At the rear balcony of the flat. Things look blocky like a voxel game. I remember blue leaves and yellow logs. We were on the 6th or 7th floor, judging by the height.

Fragment 2:
A friend of ours, M, was buying crap again.

Fragment 3:
At some sort of flat. Don't remember what lead up to this scene anymore.

There was a tongue and lips art sculpture thing on a wall. Then it became a bit more real and I then remember a giant furry outside the flat, peeking in. I remember the fur was white and the eyes were blue. I think it was a girl and she said something.

---

Some notes:

• The appearance of my parents and the questions about the "coin stand", has to do with how they often want me to try and do something else, since they are concerned I won't be able to support myself. This type of appearance in a dream is perhaps validating their concerns in part. When I was awake in bed I remember thinking about carpentry again.
• Being at the cathedral with H seems to be merely a reflection of recent events, as I help H with pipe organ work.
• Both the first and the third dreams were a lot longer, and I woke up sweating with the third dream; this has been happening a few times recently where I wake up sweating at about 10:20 with vivid-ish dreams. Generally being too hot is what makes the dreams vivid, as far as I can tell. Unfortunately it also means my mind is a bit more active when I'm actually awake, making it easier to forget details.

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.

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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.