AcidicBeing

Partway through a dream I entered a sort of virtual world, green like a woodland or jungle that someone had modelled (possibly as an academic project) and added lots of billboards all along it with floral and artistic designs and possibly some jokey / advert ones. It turned out my school friend J [DREAM SIGN: school / school colleagues] was walking along in the environment with me and he told me there was a hidden model of a military leader in an area of dense trees between two paths. I looked there and it was like a really giant statue.

Around this point he told me he was having a lucid dream. I fairly matter-of-factly told him that I must be having one too then. (SEMI-LUCID / PSEUDO LUCID or LUCID DREAM?)
We started climbing up something pretty close to where the statue had been but it was almost like a giant beanstalk though I wasn't paying a lot of attention to it. Instead I was asking him about how he kept from waking up or maybe was asking whether what we were doing would help to keep us from waking up.

I think at that point the dream abruptly changed scene into us climbing up some kind of slightly cramped, gloomy, industrial or urban looking staircase (spiral or rotating flights of stairs) in ISTR either concrete or maybe red painted metal. I think in the back of my mind the idea of pronlonging the dream or avoiding waking up was still there and the dream seemed to literally fragment like these little rounded bits of glass or bits of an image with ISTR blackness maybe between. I possibly have a very vague memory of an outdoor concrete scene with white metal railings on a fence (like a school car park or something, maybe with a school or library building to the left) [though this could be a fragment from another dream].

Then it faded to nothing and I tried to see if I could get back into another dream but I just woke up after a few moments.

I'm going to call this one a PSEUDO-LUCID simply because I didn't get to exercise any interesting conscious control, act on or think of any dream goals (other than an attempt at dream prolonging / dream duration control), or do any reality checks.

In the car with my mother, suddenly and unexpectedly we were on a strange but beautiful road through an arid landscape with large, low, bulbous overhead lights, so I said to her this is an unfamiliar location and she said yes; then I realized one or both of us might be dreaming it in the car and she might be asleep at the wheel so I warned her! Remained non-lucid.

Night before Monday 2nd January

The second of these two dreams I had great progress, as even though I woke up in that one just before becoming lucid, this marked the most times I've managed to do reality checks in dreams in 12 months. The scene, which involved a recurring theme about school, was unusually vivid this time.

* I was about to kiss a woman I knew from long ago, at my Mum's dining table, and weirdly we both put on these very small imitation glasses cut out of white paper. Mine had spirals cut into them over the eyes. I paused just before the kiss and realised that I wasn't attracted to that person. The dream scene [and perhaps the dream] ended there.

* I was on holiday with my Dad and he had been driving us down south but we suddenly arrived in a northern, beautiful mountainous part of the world. It was a green natural space with mountains in the distance. I think they were green too, the bits I remember noticing. The sun seemd to be out [mainly going by level of daylight I remember] but it seemed like very late afternoon, early evening (though not a noticeable sunset). I had in my mind that it was Canada.

I asked Dad as we had been heading south why had he diverted [or turned around?] and come so far north? He told me he had cows up here and needed to give them water. I think I asked how we got here so quickly and he said he made great time and did it in two hours. He mentioned how economical it was pointing out that it was costing him less than a flight up there. At this point I remembered it was in his old car and given how worn out the car was, I wondered if the wear and tear on the car would end up costing him more [Interesting I was asking QUESTIONS a lot / good CRITICAL THINKING].

We started walking through a grassy area with a worn public dirt path. It was obviously a natural space popular with lots of tourists. Dad's cows seemed to be roaming free here. At this point I wondered why he would need to drive all this way to give them water and wouldn't all the people around give them drinks [Not the best dream logic, but neither is looking after cows hundreds of miles away and driving there unplanned to provide water].

After that I thought about how long we were staying in that part of the country before we had to move on and decided I had enough time to drive somewhere [for the evening? Also where did I suddenly get my own car from up here? I thought I came in Dad's?].

The dream seemed to cut to me having arrived in the road by my old school. [SCHOOL: Huge DREAM SIGN]. I seemed to know that I wasn't a pupil at this school anymore [I didn't really reflect on this, I just knew like I would when I'm awake, like I knew that I'm older now and don't go to school anymore, without actually thinking those thoughts specifically. This is a big step from my usual dreams about school where I almost invariably don't know that].

I saw the pupils walking around. For some reason I had to attend lessons at the school today, even though I was now a guest. I started to think about which lesson I needed to go to first (as I had no timetable) [SCHOOL: Not knowing where to be next / missing / incomplete timetable, one of my biggest DREAM SIGNS]. I immediately thought to myself that this is what normally happens in my dreams - I think I thought it a couple of times - but I didn't immediately become lucid because this dream was one of the most vivid I can remember and I can still remember how strikingly it felt 100% real. The visuals were very vivid and clear. [I don't remember noticing temperature, any breeze, really noticing any noise but that's because I wasn't paying attention to any of them, just where I was and where I needed to be next].

I remembered what I needed to do to find out what lesson I needed to go to next, as I dream about the problem so often, that I needed to go to the classroom where my tutor was who was responsible for dictating my timetable at the start of the year. The very next thing I knew was I was pinching my nose to do a REALITY CHECK - but I have no memory of deciding to do so. I couldn't breathe when I held my nose and I remember instantly trying to make sense of this [I guess thinking it's not a dream or it's not a lucid dream or similar] whilst at the same time noticing that the dream had just disappeared and I saw the blackness of my closed eyes and realised I was awake.


Night before Tuesday 3rd January

* I was sitting on the right hand side (maybe 3/4 of the way towards the back) of what could have been a coach but later turned out to be an aircraft. I had a number of belongings that I was trying to gather up on my lap - I think articles of clothing, a rucksack and maybe some other bags. I think it was almost time to leave. I seemed to be worried that a guy to my left would try to mess with or steal some of my stuff, so I was trying to pack it all away in a way he wouldn't be able to get at it. I think I decided I was going to have to clip or tie something - maybe another bag - onto the back of the rucksack and I was worried he might try to steal from it when I wore it on my back.

* I was in some big canteen or cafe with some young guys. We had to wash the food off the dirty plates but we weren't doing all of the washing up work, we just seemed to be doing one step to make other people's jobs easier. I think we were supposed to take them and put them somewhere or do some other extra step and I think I was trying to skip that step (to save time and effort) and the other guys were telling me not to.

* In some very incoherent scene someone was wearing an LCD display. I think it was on their lower chest. It showed something to do with a salt level I think - but in this dream I'm pretty sure it wasn't anything as meaningful as the salt level in their blood (electrolyte balance). I had a task I had to keep repeating [which I can only remember very faintly and was probably very vaguely defined in the dream. It could have changed from moment to moment] which might have been getting table salt, presumably to influence this reading on his screen.

I think I remember scenes from one continuous dream but they could've been separate dreams. Either way, I think the scenes I can remember were all on ground level. Most of them seemed to be inside various rooms of a hotel and bar (though in some scenes it might have been a different building in another place - it had a similar feel at the very least though) and in the car park outside it. As it was all ground level it must have been a single storey building like a bungalow.

* I was working with some other guys who were very faintly defined. I barely noticed they were there and at times I suppose they weren't. I vaguely remember we might have been moving around the building looking for various (mechanical?) parts. I remember a brightly lit white or lightly painted room with a row of large, tallish white framed windows with daylight coming into the room. Later we, or at least I, were outside in the car park and I had to fit lots of strange parts onto what seemed to be a motorcycle (as parts had obviously been removed). I had a sense we needed to get this ready for some kind of a job (maybe something a bit dodgy). One part I remember was smallish and made of grey metal. Part of it was sort of tubular like it was an exhaust tip or exhaust baffle and at the back it had a very rough shape like it had been melted or very poorly cast. I had to fit that near the back of the bike. It would make sense that it was going on the exhaust but my dream brain wasn't clear if this thing even had an exhaust. It quickly morphed into me working on what looked like the area where a back wheel would go, the hub or axle components maybe.

* In another large hotel (reception or lounge) room maybe facing a car park, again with quite a few largeish windows I think, I was complaining to someone about how my relationship was going badly. I think it was about a girlfriend losing interest or possibly showing signs of leaving. I think I was asking if I should take her on more dates (to rekindle interest) or the DC suggested it to me/agreed. But then I was saying something like there are only so many times I can take her to the cinema or [some other date ideas]. I get a sense I was frustrated about a number of relationships not really working out, rather than necessarily just this one.

* I was moving around a crowded bar area which might well have been part of the same hotel. In the middle of the wall opposite the bar was the front door with a large enclosed porch. I don't remember seeing tables in the bar. I think there were just lots of people standing all around the room. I got a sense that I had some sort of task or mission to complete which was why I had to keep walking back and forth through the crowd of people [This having some fuzzily defined mission / quest / assignment seems to be a recurring theme in my dreams lately. New DREAM SIGN: fuzzy or strange mission].

* I think I remember choosing food in a large canteen. It could've even been school [hazy about this - it might not have even been in this morning's dreams].

Very little dream recall. Just a couple of vague memories of dream fragments:

* A vague impression of maybe searching for a DC (some kind of mission?), possibly seeing boxy almost cubic houses. I think there were quite bright colours, red.

* I remember being in some kind of a street. I think I saw a large view of a traffic light. I don't think it looked real.

As I lay down to sleep last night my thoughts very quickly degenerated into nonsense sentences which is often my experience of hypnagogia.

In the morning I had a LUCID DREAM!

I was upstairs in the physics classroom and I was trying to make my way out of it. Trying to leave the room went on for quite some time [from what I can remember]. There were lots of male pupils I didn't recognise, so I was probably in the wrong class. They looked a year or so younger than me. I feel like they may have looked a bit similar to one another although not quite clones. I was more concerned with getting out of the room, presumably to my next lesson.

The classroom seemed to have lots of exits all around and the other pupils were moving backwards and forwards around the classroom in lots of lines in different directions, around the desks and to the various exits. It was a slightly unnatural pattern of movement. I remember this had the result of delaying my access to the exits. At one point I think I saw out of a window or doorway from the physics classroom and could see that it was high up overlooking a large hall with a light wooden floor which might have been a large sports hall or assembly hall.

As I slowly made my way out of the classroom around the other pupils, for some bizarre reason I kept repeating a phrase out loud in French, "Je suis [...something I can't remember]" [It would be nice if I was saying that I am dreaming, but that wasn't it.] I have a feeling I might've been trying to weird out the other pupils or somehow assert myself to help me get out of the room. That's the only thing I can remember about the end of the phrase, a vague impression that I was saying something a little odd about myself.

The next thing I remember is that I was coming out of the classroom or had just stepped out of it and I was either trying to think of the way out of the building or possibly an indistinct DC might have been asking me about it - if they were there at all, they were very faintly defined so maybe I was just talking to myself [in my head?]. I saw steps that seemed to go out onto a small felt covered roof and I think there was a bright light greyish sky. I don't think I actually went out there. I may have been looking through a glass door - those details weren't clear.

At this point I remember confidently thinking to myself that I DO know the way out of this building, that it's down these (wide, darkly coloured) steps. I don't remember the exact thought process that I had now - I may not have thought many or any words to myself at all but I very quickly seemed to attain LUCIDITY [I expect I just subconsciously remembered that this building recurs in a lot of dreams about school and moving down steps to the front of a building at the school seems to be a big DREAM SIGN in itself - it happens a lot. School itself is one of my biggest DREAM SIGNS, so is losing my school timetable, my timetable being incomplete or confusing, not having the right books, and not being able to find my way around, or classrooms and other parts of buildings moving around. In this case I'd certainly been struggling to find my way around but it seemed to be the moment that I did find the way onto those steps that brought on the possibility of lucidity].

I decided to do a REALITY CHECK as I was walking down the stairs. I held my nose and tried to breathe through it, a little unsure how well that might work I think, but it worked instantly. I must've held it for less than a second and just the momentary feeling of being able to breathe was enough for me. I was LUCID! I felt pretty happy. I probably smiled though I wasn't aware of it, just aware of the burst of happiness for a moment. At this point I thought to myself that this was the second time I had become lucid in this dream - that I had been lucid quite a bit earlier in the dream, so I reflected to myself that I must've lost lucidity earlier on [The thing is I don't recall the earlier parts of this dream at all and when I woke up I had severe doubts that I actually had been lucid an extra time earlier on - it's just as likely or more likely that it was a false memory, maybe created by the dream].

I instinctively knew at this point that I needed to focus on keeping the dream going. This time I didn't try and do my usual effort of trying to focus on the details or spin around. I just said to myself that I would stay in the dream because I hadn't got a lot of time [as in, I needed to continue it now as there were things to be done and maybe wouldn't be time later, or something a bit like that - as I reflect on it now it wasn't the most logical thought process but it did calm down the initial joy and excitement I had felt, though I was probably still a bit excited at this point] and I began rushing down the stairs more quickly towards the glassy doorway and windows that led out of the front of the building.

The dream then kind of blurred out I think. I think I remained calm [which is a big improvement on my usual self-defeating disappointment and apprehension of thinking "I'm going to wake up"
- it will be great to move past that and not do that in future] but as I tried to observe the dream scenery now there was absolutely nothing there. It was just black and empty. I remembered a suggestion I read on dreamviews and shouted "MORE VIVID" and something else which might've been "MORE LUCIDITY" [technically probably not what I wanted to have given I was waking up, but hey, I was trying]. I can't remember if any more imagery came into my head at all at this point. If it did it would likely have been a consciously induced daydream image in my mind's eye rather than any continuation of the dream. I was awake now. I did try and remain still and try to go back to sleep for a short while but it didn't work.

I was quite happy to just wake up and work on my dream recall of my first LUCID DREAM in about five months or more! It's also the first time I've done the nose-holding RC in a dream and quite possibly the first time I've done a confirmatory REALITY CHECK rather than my more usual detective work to gain initial lucidity.

Almost no dream recall today. The only bit I remember is I was holding a computer mouse this morning. I started to wake up and while I was waking up I realised it was a dream. This could've been a chance to get fully lucid but it was over within seconds so I was probably too close to fully awake.

Instead of thinking about lucid dreaming, my immediate response was that as I'm holding a computer mouse (or dreaming about holding one) I should see if I can use it and I tried to press the buttons. At this point I became fully awake, feeling that there was nothing in my hand as I moved my fingers.

I quickly remembered the advice for a DEILD and kept very still and tried to re-enter the dream but I was immediately disturbed by a family member - a very common occurence when trying for DEILDs lately - I obviously need to start waking up earlier!

About time I caught up with this dream journal. I've been too busy with other stuff. All the following dreams were non-lucid.


Night Before Monday 21st November

I dreamt a racing driver who had been about to retire had returned for another race, but only to run tests which meant that his car was set up to remain stationary on the track. He could rev the engine and run through the gears but there was apparently no drive to the wheels. At least one other driver was doing the same thing.


Night Before Tuesday 22nd November

I had a fairly vivid and exciting, non-lucid dream. The first part I remember was one of my recurring DREAM SIGNS of being in an unfamiliar part of the world or the country, having some kinds of obstructions trying to find my way home. We were riding in a taxi with a foreign driver. My mother was talking to me about something about not wanting to offend the driver and I was telling her to be quiet (as he could hear).

We came to a deeply flooded section of a widish road through countryside, with trees either side. The driver hesitated and asked us which way we came through here before. I think my mother answered that we came by boat / ferry. I think he might have said "Oh." as he realised he was faced with a problem.

The road was so flooded it just looked like a deep river. Without saying anything he confidently drove into the water, maintaining a surprisingly high speed [which in reality would've made a wave of water flow into the air intake of the engine] much to my excitement, probably slight apprehension and, as I could see the driver was succeeding, admiration at his skills. We reached a part where the water seemed to get even deeper and he instinctively moved over to a slightly shallower area to the left hand side.

I remember feeling jubilantly excited after we made it through the water, loudly telling him he is awesome and [this bit is fading] I feel like this blended into an experience of sharing this story with other friends or colleagues who weren't in the car when it happened.


23rd - 26th November

I had an unremarkable dream about carrier bags on the kitchen floor and a couple of unpleasant dreams showing apparently deceased animals.


Night before Sunday 27th November

I dreamt there were lots of animals in the kitchen. The kitchen looked different [DREAM SIGN: Room changed]. They seemed to be loads of large birds initially, like crows possibly. I was conscious that I needed to keep the door shut to prevent them spreading into the rest of the house. As I kept looking at them I saw a strange animal that I couldn't immediately identify as a bird or mammal, that seemed to be on all fours, quite stocky, about the size of a medium to large dog, with a broad, rounded head. It looked purple. I called it a griffin. Shortly after this I saw a bird of prey in the kitchen as well and a smallish chimpanzee that approached the doorway. I was a bit nervous that the chimpanzee might be aggressive but someone reassured me they lived in this home, so presumably domesticated. The doorway now seemed to be open and I was standing in a long narrow hallway running from left to right behind the kitchen door [DREAM SIGN: Unfamiliar room]. The chimpanzee started to look a little more human as it got to the doorway. It may have been wearing glasses or human clothes.


Night before Monday 28th November

I dreamt I was standing in my grandparents' front garden, looking at their quite large house. I noticed short rounded towers sticking out on the front left corner of the house. Possibly later in the dream I noticed there was a separate one on each storey. I think they each had a window of some kind. I did start to question this because I was starting to wonder whether you could enter them from the downstairs dining room and upstairs master bedroom. This is where my subconscious started to change things to explain it. At first I thought there was a bay window on the tower in the bedroom, then I realised I was actually seeing towers on the house opposite my grandparents' house, which looked quite similar. When I turned back and looked at my grandparents' house again, the towers had shrunken a lot in diameter so they barely looked like towers anymore and obviously couldn't be entered from inside the house. Still didn't get lucid or question this further. [Seeing my Grandparents' house and seeing unusual adornments on a building are DREAM SIGNS as are the changes of perspective and the objects when I tried to question things].


Night before Tuesday 29th November

No dream recall. I have the vaguest notion it might have been another dream about travelling away from home but I really don't know.

* The night before last I dreamt I was at school [one of my biggest DREAM SIGNS but still didn't get lucid]. I had a toy gun. It had an unusual extra cylinder underneath the barrel. This made me question whether it was the accurate replica it was supposed to be but a colleague just told me I was wrong and I accepted it [need to keep questioning more]. I tried to hide the toy in a bag, then things got really weird because I decided I needed to move over all the furniture in the room to make more space, to the point where it would start passing over the edge of the room into the next one!

* Last night was quite an odd dream scene as well. I was in some kind of bar area or lounge with quite a lot of people around. I think I was sitting at a table. A young woman was asking me to list hairstyles that I disliked. I really have no idea what was going on but I sensed that the people around me did. Perhaps it was some kind of wind-up.

This morning after being woken up and going back to sleep I dreamt I was driving a silver Japanese looking saloon/sedan car, and I stopped outside a doctor's to drop off my girlfriend. It didn't look like a doctor's as it was a huge boxy building a bit like a large warehouse or sports centre. While I was waiting for her to come back from the appointment someone was telling vehicle owners to drive round the back of the building. Then I got told to move my car too and I didn't want to, so I asked if I couldn't wait there and he said no not if I wasn't booked in [for that time]. I started to quickly drive the car away along a road extending at 90 degrees away from the wall of the building. I was hurrying but I was unfamiliar with this car's controls. At this point I noticed that it was dark [I can't honestly remember it being dark when I was first outside the doctor's but I am unsure] and hadn't turned on my headlights but didn't know where the switch was on this car. I guessed that it was a small sliding switch on the left stalk and this could've been a DREAM SIGN because the dream seemed to sort of falter for an instant and update itself with the switch apparently being just as I imagined yet the sense of uncertainty still remained so I still felt a little uncertain -- or maybe the part of my subconscious constructing the dream felt uncertain -- whether the headlights had really come on or not.

As I approached a T-junction the car kept slowly rolling forward even though I was trying to hold the brake.

I don't remember many other dream scenes. I think there was something about a camper van.

* I was in front of a vehicle by the side of what may have been quite a straight road in a natural setting, probably surrounded by forest. My father had written a messsage on the hood/bonnet of the car talking about the reason why he had been "HIDING" [from me]. In response I started to draw two yellow birthday balloons on there for him. I vividly remember concentrating on forming the shapes, or rather I had the impression that I was doing so, as now I think about it, I had suddenly noticed a mistake in the picture, a bulge at the bottom of the ballon below the neck that I then erased, but I am pretty sure that just appeared in the dream and I didn't draw it. The last thing I remember on the balloons is adding a very cliched stylised reflection of a window on the top left of one of them.

* There was an illustration of the pitfalls of naive unregulated libertarianism¹. A libertarian had a large sack of oats (also looked a bit like flour) and was somehow toasting them inside the paper sack. They only seemed to be cooking near the bottom of the sack but more to the point they got pretty burnt. This was how the libertarian liked their oats. The downside and moral of this story though was that this sack was a communal supply of food and in thoughtlessly exercising their liberty, they had ruined the food for everyone else.

* I was in a large spare bedroom in my mother's house. One of my friends from school was there looking the same as he did as a young teenager. He was writing on some sheets of paper which turned out to be roleplaying as a secret agent but I highly concerned because the adversaries he was engaging with were real. Although it wasn't directly referenced I got a sense he was only doing it for fun. I worridly asked him why he was doing it, telling him that those people were psychopaths who would never stop endangering his life. He is a smoker and his answer was to ask whether I had smoked. I said yes. He asked whether that had given me lung cancer. I said I hoped not. His point was obviously that we take risks in life and he obviously believed he would get away with it.

* Again in the same spare bedroom, I was writing a long, multipage letter to someone who I get the sense lived far away. At the end of the letter I had stapled details of a (non-serious) hospital appointment I had, then I realised (perhaps someone told me) that I would need to present that paperwork at the appointment so I couldn't send it to my friend. I removed it and put it to one side. Later I was writing a love letter and there was a row of about five small red hearts at the bottom.

1.Without wanting to bring too much politics into this, I think civil liberties for individuals should be defended but that it shouldn't be an excuse to let big business trash the planet, violate human rights etc.

The night before last's dreams included a strange box of chocolates with a hole in the bottom that had an ingredient that hadn't been approved for human consumption and there were health concerns. I had a beer and a second unidentified alcoholic drink beside it in another restaurant and was presented with a strange sort of poster, perhaps instead of a menu, with stylised artwork a bit like a tarot card of one figure harming another.

Last night I saw a historic town on a coastal cliff edge subject to erosion. When I looked down over the edge of the cliff, there were many more buildings at the bottom, as if they had fallen down there but they looked strangely undamaged. They were old buildings, in about the same age and style as those at the top of the cliff. I got a sense that those at the bottom were probably mostly abandoned. I saw a town hall at the bottom of the cliff and another one looking more or less identical at the top--possibly the replacement?

Later I was walking along the beach. I think it was sandy. There were other people accompanying me but they were quite some distance away. Either family members or friends of family. There were ancient buildings on top of high rocks sticking up from the sand. I saw a large square or rectangular temple. It may have had an open roof or courtyard; I don't have a clear memory of the detail now. My companions seemed to want to walk away somewhere possibly to where they could get to some of the buildings and I think I told them, or at least thought to myself, that I could climb up the rock to the temple.

I wanted to try for a DEILD after waking up from this dream but there were too many distractions and I was too aware of the need to get up today.

Yesterday evening I had a go at some much more involved RCs, questioning lots of things in my surroundings like a detective as was suggested on this site, which is something different to the shorter, simpler almost rote RCs I had usually done previously.

This morning when I first woke up I couldn't remember any dreams at all but after about 30 minutes all the dream scenes started flooding into my head. No lucidity, but the following scenes were of interest:

I was an undergrad at a university (Educational institutions are a big dream sign) and was having to move all my stuff out which included clearing a room in a science department that they had strangely let me fill up with cheap paperback books unrelated to the subject (I questioned this but my brain explained it away as them having plenty of empty space in the building--for whatever reason I didn't dig further).

I was in an urban backstreet and a street vendor was offering to sell some kind of coffee flavoured snacks, but for him to make the snack I was required to carry an enormous cup of coffee across the road to him, which must have been about 4 feet tall and didn't look like a real cup of coffee at all--more like a giant plastic model of a latte you might see on the outside of a coffee shop (Bizarrely I did not question this in any way, so the logical parts of my brain must've been quite switched off at this point--surreal or what?), and ISTR I had to repeat this ritual twice, once on each side of the road!

Later I was sitting at a table, apparently in a restaurant, aware of lots of space around the table, quite a high ceiling, with another family eating at the right hand end of the table who had left a plate of fish shaped biscuits by an empty chair so I ate some but then the man who may have had a shaved head came back to the chair and wanted to fight me for taking them so I explained that I had washed my hands many times very thoroughly with soap before touching them, because of the pandemic!

Here's my first post in this dream journal. I don't know how consistent I'll be posting on here as I'm always so busy or low on energy. I do keep my own notes of dreams. But I'll try and write something for the most interesting ones.

At the end of a long dream that involved my mother driving around with me and at one point my grandmother ISTR, I ended up apparently waking up in a bedroom which actually looked like the room of one of my school friends from my childhood. I was looking at my watch as I knew I needed to get up early for an appointment today (as I did in my waking life) but it turned out to be a false awakening. When I looked at the analogue watch it was hard to make out the time, as I couldn't make out what numbers the hands were pointing to, and when I looked harder I noticed a second smaller clock face in the middle of the watch but it didn't have its own hands so the little hand was pointing to numbers on that smaller face. A bit like a chronograph watch but making much less sense.

I probably missed another chance to get lucid here as looking at your watch a couple of times and looking for changes or oddities is a classic reality check!

The stuff about my mother I think is to do with my brain processing a desire to help her, to see her again (it's been a bit too long), and I get the sense that all this driving around might be stressful or tiring for her and I wanted to drive the car for her but wasn't insured to do it and wished I was. She never let me drive her car so I guess my subconscious wanted me to feel more respected and empowered, even a control thing. Wow. Freud would have a field day.