Dream Dream Dream Dream Dream Dream

Dec 22

I dreamed I was at some sort of beach area (maybe with tide pools?). Just before that, I’d been having some weird bdsm dreams that I ain’t sharing online (basically I was borrowing some kinda book or dvd from the college library and it was full of wild stuff); this one was much more family-friendly.
It started off sunny and warm, and one of the first things that happened was that I found a baby sea turtle. I scooped it out of the water (not really feeling the water but seeing and feeling the turtle very vividly) and excitedly showed it to the rest of my family.
Soon enough it turned that there were loads of types of turtles around, including something called a “castle turtle” that was huge (maybe like three feet across) and had its head coming up through the middle of its shell, perched on a long neck. Its name was basically a reference to its defensive mannerisms and centrally situated head: it peered out over its shell as though looking out over its castle, and was constantly prepared to swim away from danger coming at any angle.
There was also some sort of kitten/turtle hybrid, which, in adult form, didn’t have many kitten characteristics, but which gave birth to straight-up kittens. The kittens couldn’t breathe underwater and had to learn to swim at least a little (they were bad at it no matter what). I was quite worried when I watched from underwater as a kitten, trying to swim, got close to the floor of the shallow water and seemed at risk of getting its flailing front paws tangled in a seaweed plant. Ultimately, I rationalized it as “a way for kitten genes to spread out into the ocean.”
After that, we moved a short distance down the shore, and everything grew much colder. It’s hard to remember, but I think the family was getting in a van when I noticed a huge turtle’s neck sticking out of the water, completely covered in a thick layer of ice.
I got excited and yelled for my family to see this and help me, while I started removing pieces of ice. Soon enough the turtle was free, and retracted its head underwater… only to come back up a moment later. It seemed that it was quite attached to hanging out in that position, even if it meant becoming frozen. Underneath the ice, its coloring had some brilliant oranges and greens (which clashed a bit, but was quite striking all the same).
There were a lot of details in the dream that I left out because they were confusing, vague, or nonsensical compared to the rest of the dream. I hope that by only remembering the clear parts, it’ll help my dreams become more clear and stable as well.

Dec 23
This was about reuniting with a girl from my old youth group (NG) and her developing an eating disorder. I wasn’t hugely on-board with that as a dream topic so I didn’t write it down.

Dec 24
I dreamed I was in the middle of nowhere, at night, in an area where peeps were all about adopting dogs. Not the first time I’ve dreamed about nighttime countryside things so it all felt a little bit familiar.
Somehow I arrived at the house of the Main Family that’d led everyone else in adopting dogs (specifically, the mother of the family was the Dog Adoption Guru of sorts). They had a big golden retriever on their porch (I think?). I wanted to talk to them so I literally just… walked in the front door and then called out to let them know I was in their living room. It felt like the wrong approach even in the dream, but somehow it didn't occur to me to knock on the door... or else it seemed like they weren't home and I decided to straight-up walk in to check.
Surprisingly they didn’t mind the intrusion. The lady and her husband showed up from a back room (the kitchen), like they'd just been hanging out back there, and I’m not sure what we talked about but eventually they tried to sell me some cereal. They had big boxes of cereal arranged along the walls of their dining room (the layout was living room, dining room, kitchen, from front to back). They tried to sell me a Fairly Large box of Lucky Charms for $130, which was ridiculous even in the dream.
I ended up settling for smaller boxes of cereal, running around $30 or so, and figured I was getting a good price.

Dec 27 (gore warning)
Dreamed I was trapped on a space station in a horror scenario. I was with a colleague, whose name and face I don't remember and probably wasn't aware of. Our other four colleagues were already dead by the time the dream started, their bodies drifting very gradually within the station. I was watching the vacant face of one of these bodies; her eyes were open and staring, and as I watched, they slid over to look directly at me.
This was reason enough for my colleague and I to barricade ourselves in one room. I can clearly remember there being a sort of shaft going down through the floor of this room, with one of those "staring corpses" floating inside. I shoved something down there to block its way in case it got any ideas, and then put the shaft's flimsy plastic covering on top.
After that, my colleague and I had some sort of terrible idea; we had three or so bodies (either human or some form of robotic doll) that we were going to mutilate and then arrange around the room as part of a ritual. Even in the dream, I had no idea what we were specifically accomplishing by doing this. Regardless, we set to work, cutting out the body's tongue and placing it in its lap, and then slicing open its cheeks so that its mouth fell open. At this point there was blood all over it, and more pouring from the gashes in its face, and we were just about to put some finishing touches on all this and move on to the next body when some rather-more-sane survivors burst through our barricaded door and saw what we were doing.
The second they broke in, my colleague and I panicked, realizing that they were about to get the wrong idea. We tried to call out to them that it was okay, hoping that we could placate them before they decided we were insane, but since I had no clue what we were even doing or why, there wasn't much I could say other than "NO! It's okay!" or something similar. Obviously they paid more attention to the bloody spectacle than to my unconvincing words, running into the room and then coming to a halt with expressions of shock and anger.
In retrospect, I'm pretty sure my colleague and I were the craziest peeps on the station.

Another dream was that I was a TA back at UVA, running a math class that my brother happened to be taking. He was, as usual, struggling in his classes, and I was tasked with putting together the exam he was about to take. The temptation to make it easier for his sake, or even to make it easier for him specifically, was almost overwhelming; however, I never actually reached the point of the dream where I chose how to structure the test.

Dec ?
I don't know when I dreamed this one, but I dreamed the family was visiting our grandparents (father's side) for the holidays. Somehow it was pretty unpleasant and I think I ended up making microwaved meals for myself to get by. There was something else about a game but for a long time now, the concepts I've encountered in dreams are terribly difficult to translate into real-life terms or even remember correctly... and this dream was no exception.
That said, I've been reading about kaizen, and I might be able to apply mind sculpturing to lucid dreaming in a way that makes my dreams clearer and less abstract (the book in question is One Small Step Can Change Your Life by Robert Maurer).

I've been thinking about lucid dreaming for months now, feeling the vague urge to get back into it. Still, I've never had the proper motivation until now. I'm currently at home with my narc-dad and experiencing severe anxiety as a result, and since lucid dreaming was how I coped with all of this growing up, it seems suitable to rely on it now.

All recent dreams:

Pet Store
I had a rather long dream that was focused around the concept of pets and pet stores—actually it's more accurate to say that they were unsuitable pets, such as a straight-up crocodile, and one of those frilled-neck lizards (which I identified in the dream as a basilisk).
The pet store owner insisted that the basilisk would make a good pet and was very lonely besides. I looked down at the basilisk (contained in a glass aquarium that doubled as the pay counter) to see it scrabbling against the glass in a corner, in a way that I read as "being lonely and needing comfort." I made up my mind at that point to come back for it later, because adopting it was the only way to make absolutely sure it would be okay, even though I didn't feel fully qualified to take care of it and I needed more money.

I believe there was also something less related to pets, that had more to do with kids reading a book together. There was also something about going to a zoo.

Packing
I'm in the NH house with A, trying to pack for my upcoming flight. Unfortunately, I see that my pill bottle and the desk are absolutely covered in ants. In addition to regular ants, there are unrealistically tiny ants in a shifting mass.

Being Hacked
I dreamed that a server I was in charge of had been hacked, and the server files deleted. I didn't have a way to fix this, and I was trying to make the best of the few options I had.

Had some dumb dreams I didn't enjoy. First the family was in the car looking for my sister. We found her next to a creek, and I jumped in and tried to make my way to her without crushing the local wildlife or getting my shoes wet. There were toads everywhere. At one point I was astonished to see a small one get caught by a thin piece of spider web and lifted away. I didn't see the spider responsible for this action; it looked more like some sort of automatic trap.

Then we retrieved Jess, and the next bit had to do with Dad and some stupid design he'd done to a car that involved a lot of french fry decals and design choices. Like, there was a big plastic french fry he'd put overtop the antenna. I ended up removing absolutely everything I could to make the car seem normal again.

Then there was an odd segment where Dad was reclaming the car and putting the french fry crap back despite my protests. Oh well.

Last night had some weird military focus. It's hard to remember exactly what happened, but I was a soldier, and some other soldier managed to fuck up something important while I was near it. I was in disbelief at this dude's idiocy (he blew SOMETHING up, I can't remember what it was), and then the nearest commanding officer spotted me near the thing and thought it was my fault.

So then she chewed me out for a bit or hurt me or something. I didn't really care that I was getting the heat for it because the dude who'd actually done it had ran off and I didn't know his name or face, so it's not like I could've pointed them in the right direction. She got most of the rage out of her system and I rolled my shoulders and carried on. Easy.

Wrote out a looong dream for the dream contest even though, it being nonlucid, I would've only gotten a single point for posting it.

Then Dreamviews glitched out and was like "haha, it didn't post. why don't you hit back and then reload? "

I hit back. The dream was still there. I reloaded.

Poof.

I was having some kind of confusing dream about being at a luxurious opera house with my dad and singing. I was up on the balcony, obscured by an odd, curving screen so that the audience couldn't see me and realize that I was the one singing (in the dream I was already a famous singer, and we wanted them to think the person singing was someone else).

Dad was being irritating and peeking around the screen corner trying to "encourage" me. As he kept doing this, I got more and more annoyed and started to miss whole lines of lyrics, until suddenly I grabbed the flimsy screen and threw it at him, completely giving up on my singing responsibilities. As his insincere smile became replaced by a more genuine mix of anger and his trademark disgust, I climbed onto the balcony railing and prepared to throw myself off it. My reasoning was, somehow, that falling to my death was the only way to cap off the entire experience.

That said, although I made an attempt to tip and fall onto my head, I couldn't overcome my instincts to fall feetfirst. I somehow landed safely on the seats below as though they were a flat surface, and began to walk away from the whole thing, when I was struck by the incredibly obvious thought that "This whole thing is a dream!"

For the first time in months, I was actually, truly lucid.

I quickly remembered what I'd need to do for spellbee's dreaming contest. First, a reality check: Still walking away from the site of my failed suicide, I pinched my nose and breathed regardless, enjoying the sensation, the confirmation that I was really dreaming. Next... stabilization. The dream wasn't really unstable, but I said "Stabilize!" out loud anyway, accompanying the words with a sort of calming gesture.

I found myself looking at a wall, unsure of what unrealistic things I ought to do next but certain that I could do anything. Still, I didn't really have ideas for what to do next.

I was still striding swiftly away from the theater as I remembered my three-step task. First: basic summoning. I reached into my pocket and pulled out a pear, mindful of step two: eat the thing I summoned. I bit into it, somewhat surprised that the summoning had worked so easily. It really did seem to be a pear, and appropriately juicy. After eating it down to the core, I tossed it aside. Step three was to ask advice from dream characters, and there were a few of them passing me in a group. It would've been easy, but... somehow the idea of asking advice from strangers didn't sit well with me. Because that's what I saw them as: strangers, not inventions of my own head. I think I was beginning to lose my lucidity a little here.

The dream began to take back over, but I had enough clarity of mind to attempt one last dreaming competition-related task. I wanted to go big: perhaps mass TK, something I'd done in a dream before. I wanted to pick up a house, but the dream and my lucidity were beginning to become a bit flimsy. Rather than pick up the house, I believe I picked up a toilet inside it and caused it to rattle around within.

After that I lost my lucidity. When I woke up, I almost forgot that I'd even had a lucid dream. Managed to commit 20 minutes to writing all this out and now I'm going Back To Bed.

I would've written down this dream but it was just this long, horrible disjointed dream about my brother and sister dying and I don't want to remember it even if doing so would score me a single point in Spellbee's LD Competition asldfkjaseifojlkdf.

Just here to throw down some fragments I suppose.

First (two fragments?)
A brief dream that I was a swordswoman with an amazing glowing orange firesword, dressed in vibrant red. I was protecting another swordswoman in some sort of castle level in a video game. Specifically, there was a moment where she would be attacked by some warrior, and I would block the heavy blow with my sword. It was super amazing and epic and my character was rad as hell.

Later, I was playing this game with either my boyfriend or my brother, using xbox controllers. At this point, it shifted into a Lego version of the game. The other player was being the main character/swordswoman, and I was now a gunman.

And then (a dream)
Dreamed I was at some sort of restaurant with my father and sister. The place consisted of many buffet areas in a ring, with the floor sloping up and down as it went.

At first, I was just trying to grab food like they were, but I kept losing my plate somehow. There was also a moment where the little girl behind me, part of a large family, kept physically pressing up against me as she waited in line; even when I moved forward she would move with me, until I whipped around and practically snarled at her and her family to back off. (Part of me was thinking that this was sort of odd.)

After giving up on the actual buffet function of the restaurant, I started skating around the place. I was wearing clunky shoes that could slip along the hardwood floors as though I were skating, and I started using that to get around the place, effectively turning it into a racetrack. First, I was simply trying to keep up with my family as they navigated to various buffet areas, but soon I was simply racing around the place because it was fun.

And then the place turned into a sort of gaming level, where people could race around the ring with fake guns trying to hit as many targets as they could. My boyfriend was there suddenly, absolutely acing the level and having a great time, when suddenly the police burst in with a freaking SWAT squad, ostensibly because there'd been a shooting. I couldn't stop my momentum and ran right into a policewoman with my gun, and they were all saying to drop any weapons, but I sort of figured that since my gun was fake that couldn't be what they meant. At any rate, I ended up in handcuffs laying on the floor, and so did a ton of the other people at the restaurant-turned-gaming-spot-turned-site-of-a-possible-shooting. Even kids, as it turned out, were not exempt from being handcuffed and forced to wait.

They also put some sort of retainer in my mouth, which hurt my teeth (and felt just like my old orthodontic retainer), and then put some kind of rubber retainer in on top of THAT one, and added a rubber noseplug thing besides. I just let them do all this, trying to be the most peaceful, nonviolent person they had ever handled (and somewhat masochistic besides, but they didn't have to know that). They hadn't done a great job with the handcuffs, so I tightened them a bit myself so they would have absolutely nothing to complain about, and waited. And then they also blindfolded me, but since it was a dream it didn't really work.

After a while my boyfriend showed up, miraculously unhandcuffed considering his previous status as Champion of the Shoot-Things Contest. I managed to crawl towards him and get his attention, and once he was kneeling next to me holding my hand I felt nice and peaceful. And eventually the police were like YUP EVERYTHING'S COOL NOW and I was able to get rid of all the weird shit they'd put on me, feeling rather sore. I woke up with my teeth still hurting.

And also I just remembered (another dream)
An odd dream that I was some old man's hostage in his car. He was railing about things he was paranoid about, and I was figuring that I should play along until it was over, when I suddenly realized that he was driving us directly towards the ocean. I panicked slightly, but figured that once the car was underwater I would just leave by going through the window, and then we were rollling into the waves and the car went underwater and tipped over off a 10 foot drop in the sand. I panicked a bit more but figured once the car had landed I would still have time to swim to the surface.

Then this odd thing happened, where I was holding my breath but knowing that I didn't really have to hold my breath. It were as though I were watching a movie, and holding my breath along with the main character as they swam, despite knowing it was fake (and I even remembered during the dream that some people do this). I think I/the main character may have made it to the surface, but by that point it felt like I was imagining the whole thing, trying to hold it together—and still not knowing it was a dream for some reason.

Wow okay I remembered way more than I thought I would nice.

I dreamed I was an android in a world where androids were being purged, for whatever reason. I was still the me from real life, still had the same family... but they'd adopted me when I was a small android, and I'd grown from there.

I was such a well-made android that, for all intents and purposes, I was the only one who knew I wasn't human. This was quite a privilege considering the circumstances, and I was trying to use my ostensibly human status to assist my fellow androids in their attempts to escape eradication.

One rather shocking moment sticks out in my memory: a group of androids were hiding in a secret room behind a wall, with two of them unfortunately still out in the open, when an extermination squad of robots rounded the corner and absolutely annihilated them with flamethrowers and gunfire. The flamethrowers were apparently a new thing, firing gouts of plasma so powerful that they could simply melt an android into nothing. The robots, apparently feeling no need to save ammunition, kept firing on the already-dead androids until there was hardly anything left, and also fired some shots at random, with some going into the secret room where the hidden androids were watching in horror and fear.

I was watching all of this as though incorporeal, positioned outside the secret room and in the direct path of the flamethrowers, but simply observing. I couldn't see the androids inside the secret room, and feared that they'd been hit by the gunfire. And I remember being afraid of the pain the flamethrowers would cause if they were used on me, wondering what it would be like to feel myself melting and burning the way the androids were right in front of me.

The robot troop marched away without discovering the androids behind the wall. We carried on without the two androids we'd lost, despite the primary character status they'd had (I think they'd actually had names, and one of them had been a source of good humor for the rest of the group).

The dream restarted a bit, but this time it was Christians that were being eradicated rather than androids. I was still helping them, though I remember wondering why I was putting myself in danger of death when I wasn't a Christian myself. Or maybe it was something like, I'd been raised Christian without it ever quite rubbing off on me, and now, although privately I didn't share the belief, publicly I was going to be killed for it.

At any rate, the things hunting us were now single androids who would look human right up until the moment they had decided to kill you. When that happened, their face would warp like a Picasso painting, one eye vanishing and being replaced by a migrating, malformed nose, while the other eye shrank to a dot.

There was also a variety of prisons and exterminators, one of which was called The Dove (I think?). The Dove was really only a prison in the sense that you'd be imprisoned in it for the 60 seconds it took for you to move along a hanging conveyor belt into a furnace, whose fires could not actually be seen until you were inside them. This was where I was certain to head if I were captured: knowing this I let myself be captured anyway.

There were two forbidden books we had on hand: Mere Christianity by C S Lewis, and another one that my brain invented and whose name I can't quite remember... Door, perhaps? These were the books I had on hand when an android spotted me, and I didn't really feel like trying to survive anymore. I let it spot me, let it recognize me and watched its face mutate. It hit me with some sort of poison attack that left me propped against the wall, dying. Or at least, I thought I was dying, thought I was going to die soon (and the dream end? there was no sense that dying might have Real Consequences... more that the story would be over), but the dream continued for long enough that perhaps I began to think I would still be headed to The Dove after all.

The dream stopped making sense after that. Phooey.

So last night I had a dream that I was lucid. Which really isn't the same thing as being lucid, and I refuse to be satisfied with this...

The Sad Stone Harbor Dream
So Stone Harbor is basically my favorite place in the world to be, and for whatever reason it's pretty common for me to dream that it's the last day of Stone Harbor and I'm wondering where all the time went and trying to figure out how I could've used it better.

This time, I dreamed that mom was making me go to a soccer game on the last day of Stone Harbor, when what I really wanted was to be at the beach, in the sun. This made me so upset that I started crying, and ran upstairs... now I was in the 1319 house, heading for the balcony. I brushed past dad in the hallway, got to the balcony, and jumped off so that I could fly.

This is where my thought process was a bit weird. Apparently, I believed that I was awake, but that by the time I got to the balcony, I would be dreaming, without having to fall asleep. At the same time, half of me was considering the possibility that I would simply plunge to my death off the balcony in my mistaken belief that I was dreaming. I was actually pretty surprised when I practically lifted off the balcony as soon as I stepped off it, and though I was happy to be flying rather than, y'know, dead, I was a bit confused as I tried to figure out when exactly reality had become a dream. Frustratingly enough, I completely discarded the possibility that the entire thing was a dream: I firmly believed that the frustrating soccer situation constituted "reality," but that I had somehow transitioned to dreaming at some point.

So, I won't call it lucidity. Although I believed I was "dreaming," it didn't make any conscious sense. If I had been conscious, I would've realized that the entire thing was a dream, and that it's impossible to transition from awake to dreaming without falling asleep. It was like a nonsensical dream version of lucidity...

Farther along in the dream, while I was trying to survive the local serial killer and his sadistic games, I straight-up thought to myself, "I'm dreaming," while flying. I even repeated it a few more times for good measure, trying to make it sink in... but c'mon. If I'd been actually lucid, I would've realized that I could've blown up the serial killer with a thought, instead of my only ability being flying.

I want to be awake in a dream. I'm barely even awake in real life...

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhh hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh lava hurts

Alright so this was one of the few times I actually felt pain in a dream (with another time being when I was trying to get myself to lucidly touch fire and I couldn't manage it because it was too uncomfortable). A lot of the dream was pretty much gibberish (which has unfortunately been the norm lately), but a small piece of it made sense.

Basically I had to handle lava for some reason, and I managed to splash some on the black tights of my right knee (p sure I was only wearing tights on that leg). It didn't feel hot at all, so I was sort of thinking that it was alright, or that the lava wasn't actually a danger. Later, however, when I saw my knee without tights, there was a spot a bit larger than a quarter where my skin was peeling off in layers. This was my idea of a third degree burn: the more layers of skin detach, the worse it is.

The pain came when I pulled at this piece of skin, which was still attached at one edge: sharp and nauseating, unpleasantly realistic, so that I decided instead to tape it down with a bandaid and allow it to heal. It's unusual for my dreams to pay so much attention to my body's well-being, featuring pain as a preventive measure from me damaging myself further, and even the beginning of a gradual healing process.

So after a few days of failing to pay attention to my dream journal due to finals stress + traveling stress + attempting to recover from this stress, I unexpectedly had a lucid nightmare last night. Good times!

Dream
The basic premise was that I was watching a scary R-rated movie. Or maybe I was just hearing about it from friends who actually were into that kinda thing. I knew for sure that this wasn't something I wanted to watch.

The movie's plot went something like: a random doe in the forest was given a choice of two plants by a forest god, one of which would unleash a disease that would kill all but one creature, and the other that would... maybe not do that? Maybe kill everyone and leave not even a single survivor?

The doe, being a doe of average deer intelligence, happened to eat the first one, and thereby unleashed the plague upon herself, her nearby deer husband, and the world!!! Smashcut to the plague infecting college kids.

The plague was pretty much tailored to be horror movie material, killing indiscriminately and in various horrible ways (like one dude's eyes fell out of his face cuz of his eye sockets warping and that was pretty average), and it was basically just a bunch of friends watching each other die. So it was a lot like the typical horror/serial killer story, where characters are killed off one by one and the focus is on whoever is currently dying or whoever is in danger of dying next.

True to the forest god's promise, there was one girl who, though she was infected, wasn't torn apart from the inside by the disease the way the others were. And the dream/movie got increasingly ridiculous with its plot until the last girl was flying a small biplane for some reason under the direction of her professor and with the oversight of one of her few surviving friends, and I have zero idea how this could possibly have helped anything but maybe my brain was just out of ideas at that point.

Next, the dream/movie started over, except now I was very much in it or watching it or basically put in a position where I couldn't avoid it. It felt like I was right in there with everyone else, but there was no danger of me being infected, so it didn't exactly feel like I was part of their world. I was just trying not to watch people die despite it happening right in front of me.

I think what triggered my lucidity was the whole "being in a horrible situation and wanting to escape" thing, because next I knew I was lucid and trying to figure out what I could do about this awful dream. I was already on a rooftop by that point, now recognizing my surroundings as the 1319 area, and everything was creepy and dark and people were still dying below me (sidenote: lately I don't even remember physically flying up to rooftops when I'm lucid? it's like my brain takes that bit for granted and it just kinda gets cut out, which sucks. I used to struggle with flying and not know whether or not I could make it, but lately I don't even remember it...). Trying to fix the darkness, I said something like, "It's bright out! It's daytime!" not expecting this to work. To my surprise, light appeared instantly, followed by a glorious sunrise that bathed the street in orange. Soon it really was daytime. I was quite surprised that this had worked instantly and effortlessly, but though it made things a tiny bit cheerier the horror story was still going on in the streets below.

I think the movie played out the same way as before, and I hadn't become lucid enough to try to find a way to wake up, so pretty much the main cool thing that happened was me magically making daytime happen. Nice!

Today's dreamsign is: wanting to escape the situation being stuck in a time loop.

IM STRUGGLIN. I should not have tried to set lucid dreaming goals during finals week...

Missed yesterday but now I'm back.

Dream
Shoot man I don't even know what was going on in this dream. Alright, so I'm in this odd underground area that sort of feels like a gaming map, and a long distance away I can see this teenage boy on the enemy team with a gun, aiming at something else. I'm behind cover (kinda looking through a window at him below), and I've got a gun too (some kind of modern, silver handgun) but I'm not completely sure I know how to use it.

Still, I decide to do my best: I leave cover and stand, holding the gun carefully with both hands at arm's length, aim down the sight, and start popping off shots at the teenage kid. The first few miss, but each time I'm correcting my aim a little, and the two-hand grip is helping me not get thrown off too badly by the recoil. The kid is starting to scramble as he realizes he's being shot at, when one of my shots hits him dead in the forehead and he goes down (with some gore, icky). I don't feel too bad about "killing" a teenager... it feels like a multiplayer shooter, except that I'm seeing the person and their character rolled into one.

I'm just proud of that moment, because I was being so careful and methodical rather than autopiloting. Progress!

Other parts of the dream (or a different dream) featured me inducing multiple pregnancies (and, a few days later, abortions) in myself because my sister wanted me to (and was doing the same thing, I think). Somehow it helped her out. I kept doing this until the more rational part of my brain caught up and I became legitimately concerned that the abortion pill wouldn't "work" somehow, and I'd be stuck with a pregnancy... and besides that, I wasn't sure how I felt about ending a potential human life, even if it was still only at the "potential" stage. Some part of me was wondering what color eyes and what kind of personality would've been represented by the exact combination of genes that I kept discarding (and combining more, and discarding).

Today's dreamsign is: knowing that I can shoot a kid without consequences (but I thought it was because I was in a game rather than a dream hmmmmmmmm ... I should do reality checks while gaming I think, maybe every time I do something that would normally have a consequence if it were real life).

My dreams last night didn't make a ton of sense, and then I woke up early because I'm stressed about exams starting tomorrow, and now I'm eating mac and cheese for breakfast and there's not a damn thing anybody can do to stop me.

Dream:
OK I got nothin'. Hopefully I'll remember something later but it kinda feels like my brain's already thrown out what little I had.

That said, interesting notion that I need to figure out. I woke up at 7AM because finals are scary, but I didn't start studying, which is the only thing that would make "waking up early" make sense as a decision (right?). It's like there're two parts of my mind: the "oh heck I'd better wake up early" part and the "oh heck I'd better study for exams" part, and they aren't quite on the same page.

In the same way, there seems to be an "oh heck time to dream" part of my mind and an "oh heck I sure would like to have a lucid dream" part that aren't quite on the same page either. And I gotta wonder what the deal is with that.

--

Fell asleep and had some weird dreams.

Dreammmmmm
OK so one was that this professor I liked was being a little too friendly and it was weird and I don't remember that much FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF.

There was also something about me fighting a dragon and everyone being like YEAH GOOD JOB

and then something else about women and men turning into giants... but women in giant form were stronger than men in giant form.

Today's dreamsign is: people acting out of character hurghh

Y'know I'm starting to think my DJ titling could use some work.

Anyway I had a dream that I really liked last night aaaAAAA

Dream: The End of the World
So my real world family was there (though not my dad, I don't think), and some serious shit had gone down that had swamped most of the world in water. I think it had been some sort of massive hurricane ... let's say twice the size of a normal one.

In the dream, the family had a different home which was now half-flooded.

I can remember a few things that happened (though I'm writing this up a bit late). First of all, there was a segment involving my brother and I swimming deep in the water amid the submerged buildings, and only being able to breathe because there were friendly whales that would exhale hovering bubbles of air that we could sort of "sip" from. It seemed that when the world flooded, the whales had swum into human territory specifically in order to help people like this.

Then there was a sort of... more personal segment. I'm just gonna put it into spoiler tags to give myself the illusion of privacy.

Spoiler for kinky torture things:

So, I ... flew? up to the roof of the house, which was surrounded by water that came a bit past the first floor. (If I did fly, I didn't notice enough to make any sort of connection between this and dreaming.) The roof was perfectly flat and wood, sort of like a Terraria house.

There was some sort of witch woman up there. The thing is, I don't know what to call her other than a witch. She was an "evil", self-sufficient and independent magic user who'd apparently taken an interest in me. I think I went up to the roof knowing she'd be there waiting for me. I don't like the word "witch" though, because it summons this idea of some woman in black with a pointy hat and broomstick, and this was more of a... enchantress? But not seductive.

I don't know if any words were exchanged. I just know that soon enough, I was on my back with my wrists and ankles tied down by her magic (sort of hard to see, but I think it was pink and glowing/sparkling). She started to torture me somehow, keeping up the pain until she started to get a reaction out of me. It didn't really hurt (or I don't remember any pain or unpleasant sensations), but as the pain got "worse" I began to struggle and cry out—which was just what she wanted to see. Though I don't remember the pain, I do remember the feeling of my wrists being restrained by the odd, somewhat formless magic (my ankles kicked free at some point, but she didn't care).

This went on for a while, I suppose until the dream "got bored" and moved on to something else. (I think in general my brain isn't great at concentrating on and extending a single moment. I think that's something I'd like to work on, because I was enjoying the whole thing about as much as she was.)

I think she represented me: the sadistic, always-frustrated part of me that is never allowed to really hurt anything. The part of me that wants to be powerful, self-sufficient, magical, in control. But I think it's easier for me to hurt myself than to hurt someone else.

After that, the dream introduced me to a whole group of very small mice ... fish things, of various colors. And my job was to sort of lead/control them in order to accomplish some sort of task. Man, the stuff I'm writing down doesn't really capture the actual feel of it. But as usual, I think there was some odd, unrealistic twist on it that doesn't relate well to real concepts. Hmph.

The Dream Sign of the Day Is: being tortured! woo