DarkestDarkness

21st January 2021

Dream:

(not the earliest point I can recall in the dream)

I'm in a dark and sooty room at the apex of a pyramid. I don't remember seeing the outside, I just have this knowledge intuitively. There's also a bottomless square pit. The soot is dark brown and seems to have an increased build up the further up it is on the inner apex. I don't know how I'm able to see, there's no light source but things look just bright enough.

There's some kind of machine near the middle of the room. By the looks of it, it should be fixed down to the ground but it isn't. It has a main moving part, a piston or pushrod of some kind. It jerks around out of control indefinitely. I think something but the recall is gone.

The scene changes a bit and a white lady with light curly hair appears? She starts speaking like she's in a documentary, she mentions the machine but then there is a focus on a puppy that appears in the room. The puppy is an integral part of the room, I feel or she explains, and an integral part of whatever purpose the machine is supposed to serve.

She explains that someone has to come and feed the puppy every day, but that otherwise it must always remain her. I touch the dog, it's a gold labrador at first? I say something aloud about it being unfair for the dog, or something.

(recall gap)

In a Japanese town, but it just looks like any town in Britain or the USA, it has more "room" like the latter. I think to myself it's odd that it's a Japanese town. All the people I see around are distant from me and I can't tell what their ethnicity actually is, making me suspect it's not really a Japanese town. But I don't investigate my suspicions further, some kind of dream plot drags me around the town; I'm being chased, or someone else is, and I'm following.

A man, he was being chased. We arrive at a house that's also a restaurant or inn. A pub, effectively? There's a flagpole outside on the garden, I notice the ground is covered in snow. For some reason I fear this man is going to defecate on his own snowy lawn. He doesn't. The flag flying on that pole is one like that for India, I notice. Three horizontal stripes, top to bottom; green, white, red or orange. With a stylised black sun in the middle.

The man invites me inside. Seemingly the chase is up.

(recall gap)

I'm shown some kind of machine. H is with me. The man leaves for a while; he said he'd like us to fix this machine for him. It looks like it's bare, i.e. no aesthetic coverings, etc.

It has some kind of plastic platters. Looks like many random bits off CD players, tape machines, etc. But the size of the parts is different from what it would be in those machines. H tries to adjust something and the large top platters ping off towards the back left side. We are annoyed, but conclude it probably helps us anyway.

(rest of recall is too vague)

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Notes:

- The machine at the pyramid's apex looked like it was some random thing cobbled together from different bits of wood and maybe some metal. It looked very crude and it was equally crude in behaviour.

- This pyramid's apex felt almost like the mix between a loft and the inside of a regularly used chimney.
-- The room and its contents felt like they had some strong symbolic associations. Could be an interesting place to try doing some dreamwork.

- When I questioned the town's Japanese-ness, my awareness of the dream overall increased but I was instinctively taken by the dream plot before I could really think about it further. I realise now I could have thought about it further while running but I didn't.

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.