My brain and I

dream : comments : lucid

5th of May, 2011

This is one of the more memorable dreams I've ever had, and is a pretty intimate one for me.


I flew into New York with Jono, Colin and Nooks. We dropped from the sky into the ocean and swam ashore- it was raining and a guy in a car sped past us on the road as we emerged.
Our hotel was a strange, small building across and in the water and you had to wade to it- the ocean was apparently only shin deep. When we arrived we walked up the stairs that lead out of the water and into our separate rooms. The guys wanted to do something but I took ages to get changed into board shorts.
When I finally changed, I asked where Jono was and Colin said that he was at work as a DJ and had been living in New York for several months. Fair enough.
We strolled into the city and came into a kind of piazza area surrounded by small stalls and bordered on all sides by large, red brick buildings. I set fire to some paper and blew up a stall. People thought it was awesome. I looked up the cobbled road where a bunch of 70’s styled women crashed their giant limo- front and back. I came across Jono and wanted him to come with us to party but he said he hadn’t been for a run yet. At that point I saw some shady looking characters lurking around and Jono put on a police hat and ran after them. I told Nooks and Colin and they freaked out. As we chased Jono more gangsters came so I ducked into a little trinket store but the gangsters followed me in and ordered everyone onto the ground.

They shot me in the head as well as everyone else.
I survived and pretended to be dead. They shot me several times more and then spoke about their plans while I was trying to be as still as possible and not breathe.
After a while they left but I continued pretending.

I kept that up for hours or days as people passed by. Even in my dream it felt like a really, really long time. Eventually some guys put me on a cart and took me into a house. Two of them went upstairs so I decided to scare the other guy by ‘coming back to life’. When the other two came down, I told them what had happened and concluded that I must be immortal.
As we talked, the gangsters ran past and the guys shut the door as quickly as they could, but that drew the baddies’ attention. They stormed in and I pretended to be dead again.
Head gangster Andy Garcia (what?) sat down and checked me. I tried and tried to hold my breath but eventually exhaled.
As I did I woke up...

...in the same room?
Huh?
The guys, minus the gangsters were there and told me I was safer in this existence and “what’s awake really mean, anyway?” They said I should just make the most of my day, even if it was a dream. Okay!
I went upstairs and was back in our hotel room from before.
I remembered that I wanted to find out what music was like in dreams, so after checking myself out in the mirror, I found a toilet/glowing stereo thing. It was actually really awesome looking and totally feasible.
The sound was dodgy when I tried to get it to work and wouldn’t play clearly. After fiddling with it for ages I finally got it to play:
“Never gonna give you up, never gonna let you dooooown...”

(o_O)

Damn you subconscious! Rickrolled by my own mind.
Touché sir.

I went back to the mirror and decided to jump through it, which I did. I became the reflection. I jumped off the balcony and onto the back of one of those canvas covered trucks. It was a weird brick city and the brick road was watery and cracked. I checked my hands and everything was stable so I hopped off the truck, looked around, then did a flip and flew into the air. I wanted to fly to the planets, but it was like the never-ending staircase from Mario 64; every time I looked back, I hadn’t gone any higher.
Eventually I gave up and dived headfirst like a bullet into the ground, crashing through into an underground chasm. It was really pretty and glowy- fluorescing rocks and water. I walked through the shaft and came across a face on a rock made of mossy orange fungus stuff.
It spoke in a scary, profound tone.
I took it to be my true subconscious and he asked me what kind of person avoids their dreams- that I should be doing what I’ve wanted to do since I was three and was mad for not doing more acting. It gave me some deep insights and words of wisdom before I lost lucidity and woke up.

This dream was truly immense in both scale and content. It provided me with insight, joy, laughs and full-on action. It let me do some dream experiments and put me in touch with myself more than any other dream I can recall having. I woke up deeply moved and immediately wrote down as much as I could remember.

29th of April, 2011

On a road trip with Nooks somewhere in the US.
Stopped and got out into a curious little plaza* adjacent to a road. It was a wonderful, sunny day.
We went for a stroll around the neighbourhood and noticed that all the houses were really odd. All totally unique and situated among each other unlike anything I’ve ever encountered in the dream or waking life. Some had ramparts, others were really thin and windy, lots were colourful. It was kind of Suess-ish in a more ‘normal’ way. I mentioned that it would be a really awesome place to go trick-or-treating.
Anyway, we found ourselves walking in a roughly hewn underground tunnel with dingy electric lights hanging from the roof. At some point during our walk I realised it was a dream and we exited the tunnel into a lovely green, bright forest. We went jumping around. Nooks was sitting in the grass playing an instrument– guitar or violin. I lay down in the grass and tried to shrink myself just for fun. It kind of worked but was a bit of a struggle so instead I climbed a tree to see the cool houses again but woke up.

Lay still in bed trying to get back to sleep.

Found myself climbing (literally, up the cabinets and stuff) in a kitchen and was still lucid. I ran down the hallway at speed and vaulted without a second thought over the balcony, falling at speed and crushing my car all awesome superhero style. I jogged down the street and decided to see my special door** again.
As I approached it, I woke up.


*Why am I always dreaming of plazas?
**See the DJ Entry "The First Recorded Lucid"

21st of April, 2011

Standing in a kitchen with Daniel. I began discussing with him about what we’d do if it was a dream. Eventually he just said “it is!”, so I did a hand check and even though they looked reasonably normal, concluded that it was a dream.
Without really doing much else, I remembered I wanted to do the Breath test.*
I took a big breath (slightly larger than usual) and began to realise I could feel my true self breathing.
I woke up after feeling my hands in my bed.

*This is an idea I had regarding whether or not your breathing correlates between the sleeping and waking self. After doing it I discovered it’s actually a pretty well known experiment, similar to how the eyes of a dreamer in the real world mimic the movements of the sleeping self.
Even though I didn’t break any new ground, I’m pretty stoked I can be coming up with experiments that professionals think of!

20th of April, 2011

I'm in a house. Something was goig on when suddenly I jumped out the window and began flying through the night sky and back yard. I swam around in the air for a while before discovering that sucking some gas helps make you fly better. Helium, maybe? I was tearing around the trees and did a Tom Cruise style flyby of people having a conversation while I sang the Top Gun theme song.

-----

In Hong Kong looking at the Bank of China building. I went inside and asked if I could see "The Agency". Toddled up the escalator and came to an awesome TimeZone like place, filled with zany games. After going downstairs and checking out all the machines, I went through a door into the Agency. Some dude I'd met before complained that his sandwich was cold. The Agency was this really bohemian building with wooden floors and a skateboard ramp. Introduced myself at the table and then casually strolled outside and began planting veggies.

24th of January, 2011

I had a nap in the study at Nooks' house and could hear her typing in the background the entire time I was asleep.

Began in a hilly township. I was walking down a red brick paved path but it was far too steep and slippery so I slid down it on my butt and got worried my pants would be ruined.
The dream was already unstable at this point and I was questioning things.

At the bottom of the hill there was a quaint little red brick plaza and I was wearing rollerblades- doing jumps down stairs and stuff. Some pros bumped into me and got annoyed.
At some point my brother, Nooks and some others were around – out the front of a shop or something- and we were talking. Some other adventures happened and we ended up outside/inside a shop with these weird Emu-puppet costumes and Warhammer type toys.
While I was browsing my tooth started to hurt so I touched it and noticed it was wobbly.
Awwww Hell No it ain’t! Did a hand dream check and all my fingers were bent backwards. I did a little dance and asked to increase lucidity.*
In my excitement I discovered I was in my house, so I took a stroll around admiring the accuracy of the recreation then climbed out the window and flew around, which I found much easier than usual and did a sort of breast stroke.
I flew around for a while looking at houses and taking in the dreamscape then landed and did some looking around. I had to keep spinning and rubbing my hands to keep the dream stable. It was a street at night time. The grass was damp on the front lawns. I turned around in hopes of a scenery change but it stayed the same. I looked up at a streetlight and noticed it was more an unfocussed orb of light.
At that point, I woke up in the study. As a precaution, I checked my hands and noticed they were still funny. YEAH!
Had some sexy times (a bit un-lucid) then went outside.
I was in another plaza, kind of like one where I used to live. I ran madly along a ledge and noticed a door- wooden with dirty glass panelling and a numbered plaque. “That’ll do” I thought.
I jumped down off the ledge and over to the door, took a breath and thought “my perfect place is behind this door”.
I pulled it open and was engulfed in a white light.

Then I woke up for real.

I really want to return to that door one day.

*In my experience I find that works best when you just yell it to high heaven, but often when I do that I worry that I'll yell out in real life so when I go lucid I always have this little battle with myself!

21st of January, 2011

We're in Mario64- both playing and observing as often is the case in my dream games. I decide that as she hasn't played it before, I want to show Nooks the coolest level I can. We run into the castle and look in the basement but don't find anything particularly memorable, so we go back outside to this big mushroom that's floating over a void where the moat normally is. When we get closer, we notice that it's not a mushroom with a pipe on it at all, it's a trampoline with a toilet on it. We stood in the toilet and tried to flush ourselves into the level.

It didn't work.

It was just a toilet.

19th of January, 2011

There's a black hole in our solar system slowly sucking everything in. Jupiter and Saturn are huge in our sky as we get pulled together.
The change in rotation causes gravity to lessen, so we're all kinda jumping about weirdly as the Earth gets sucked in.

30th of October, 2010

Humans had settled on Titan and turned it into a holiday destination. I'm not sure it was actually Titan, but that's what we called it and it was some distant moon, so we'll pretend.
We travelled there on this humungous mother ship and when we got off I just lay down and looked at the sky and yelled in utter joy.

This place was spectacular. Amazing. Totally alien yet utterly beautiful.
There were enormous super-highways high in the sky, which in itself was breathtaking; a hazy yellowish green with a constant red tinge. The selling point was the fact that this was a moon, and as such an enormous potion of the sky was filled with a planet that looked a lot like Earth.
I played around on Titan for a while, running through the beautifully architectured streets and incorporated rivers of shimmering liquid. All around people were driving strange automobiles and most tourists were walking around in just as much awe as myself. I played hide and seek with some locals.

-----

I sold my car and while on a train saw a huge (I’m noticing while writing this that a lot of things in my dreams are described as “huge”- I need a new adjective) alien ship in the sky and started shouting about it in panic. We turned a corner and saw a while city was under attack. In the city, police were trying to keep order but people were mutating into these fierce alien monsters. I got chased by mutants who were tearing people apart left right and centre before running back to the place where I sold my car- a strange workshop with a big lift in the centre. I went down the lift into a bunker that was built into the side of a mountain, kind of like those pillboxes that machine gunners sat in during WWI, except several hundred meters off the ground. There I listened to the radio and heard about a resistance group.
While keeping guard with a bunch of new additions to the group, a helicopter came. We weren’t sure what it was so we hid. My friend threw a grenade at them before we realised they were the good guys. I got in this giant plasma gun and started firing into the valley. The alien ships came and caused the cliff to collapse so we jumped into these mech things and strode around tearing shit up.

It gets a bit hazy after that, except for the final revelation: The aliens turned out to be black people.

4th of September, 2010

At Sally's house. She had a pet seal on the roof but it fell off and got chased away by cats. I ran after it and followed it through streets until it caused a huge car crash. I came to a building and broke off the door on the way in. It was a really Eastern European/rundown, depressing sort of place where the girls that lived there were all eating this strange black and white, checkerboard cereal.

I went upstairs and all at once found myself in an Indiana Jones style crypt where what I can only describe as 4th Dimensional lights were flickering in and out of existence while this awesome professor guy was talking about them. I watched them happily be for a while while this guy narrated what was going on in a voiceover.

It doesn't sound cool when written, but I woke up really moved by what I'd been privelleged to see and for the rest of the day felt like I had some kind of tiny new insight into the Universe.

1st of June, 2010

I was in the living room with my family at night time. Cups that were lying around started standing themselves up and flicking up into the air. Started getting a really strange vibe and eventually discovered it was a ghost from 100AD trying to communicate with us.

-----

Went flying in a helicopter over a sparsely treed mountain but one of the landing struts hit a tree and ripped a giant hole in the bottom. We rolled out and down the hill.

-----

On a drive with Nooks. We went through this strange suburb and I authoritatively turned to her and declared that "I've just seen the future of houses."
In hindsight they were pretty ordinary.

We stopped the car and walked into one of the houses and into the bathroom where we fooled around for a bit. Nooks noticed some guys through the window loitering outside and said that they were wrapping our car in barbed wire. I ran outside and started yelling at them then got a pitchfork (!) from the boot of the car.
A massive fight broke out.
Eventually one of the guys ran to some house to get backup so I took off.
Sprinted through gardens and over fences and up hills for what seemed like an eternity and ended up near a backyard pool. This Maori guy came up with a giant dog but we talked it out and everything was okay.
He said he dealt MDMA and the dream ended with an awkward "oh... ...can I have some?"

24th of May, 2010

Started of riding my bike at night time looking for a carpark. Eventually I noticed some seedy guy and, naturally, decided to get off and follow him down some stairs. We found ourselves at this indoor McDonalds and I was looking for some hot-cakes but they were all out. Wandered around for a bit nd noticed a cafe of sorts which had this amazing looking fruit salad iced crush drink...thing. I still want to eat it to this day; it looked so damn groovy.

Somehow I ended up in this rich guy's house with a whole bunch of others. He had this amazing home theatre system and bar set up. At this point we were all employees working on some kind of event.
We walked into the freezer and opened up a panel that lead us into this HUGE hanger filled with weapons and missiles and storage crates on conveyer belts. Jeremy, my current boss, was suddenly the owner and was running around like a mad man trying to sort out the fact that the ice in the freezer was thawing because we were in there. He started crying.

Then I woke up and had a laugh to myself.

Howdy!

Okay, so as I haven't kept an online dream journal and I'm new here, I figure I may as well archive my most memorable dreams, as a way of settling in and letting you guys get to know me a bit. Here I'll post some of the more standout dreams from my book over the past few years until now; I have a terrible habit of writing them down for a couple of weeks and then stopping for months.

I've vowed this year to write down as many as I can, so with any luck this will be an almost daily updated little space.

I hope you enjoy this insight into the weird workings of my mind and possibly even gain a little bit of understanding of your own! I'd love to hear from you.

So.
Without further ado;


6th April, 2010

We were playing the weirdest 'game' ever - it basically involved standing on this abusive, glowing red square and sliding around on it while it made you feel uncomfortable. After we succeeded we asked an elderly woman if it was, in fact, possible to get to Hong Kong. She said yes.

Attempting to get there (I imagine, as I have no sense as to how we ended up where we did) we found ourselves on a small island. It was extremely polluted and you couldn't see anything beyond the waves. About eight others were there and we were all looking at the stars and searching for magic mushrooms.*
We went up and down hills picking shrooms, but only ate these little orange squishy things.

After that we tried to sleep on the beach and wait for the sunrise. Which never came.

Once the tide rose, hundreds of people were suddenly there also mushroom hunting. The Dude, from The Big Lebowski, led us around for a while under these awesome old piers and caves and through water and stuff.



*I don't do, nor have I ever done magic mushrooms but they often feature in my dreams and are always extremely "magical" in their appearance (flourescing, swirly etc.)
I love dreaming about them!