non-lucid

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.

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.