Dream Dream Dream Dream Dream Dream

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

Kinda hard to tell if this was one dream or two, but they were so different that I might as well call 'em two dreams.

Dream: Racetimes with Dadboy
UUGHHH so I dreamed about dad again, he'd bought some kinda NASCAR-esque racing computer game and we were all competing, not racing each other directly but just playing the single player and seeing who could do the best job. There was also an odd twist: rather than having one car, you had a whole team of cars, all with the same paintjob as yours, that would follow you around the track as you drove. At one point the game glitched out badly on me... a race had already started, but when I tried to join there were various errors and difficulties. This didn't trigger lucidity for me, I just kept impatiently trying to fix it until I'd managed to get into the game. I started trying to catch up (with my trail of allied cars), but I couldn't seem to play the game right, and the whole thing was frustrating.

Then I got into an argument with dad. He was upset (with mom?) because apparently having a whole team of cars meant that they had to be parked in the house, and there was barely room for them. And I got mad at him and called him a dumbass etc etc who cares.

Dream: A Tiger Ate My Face
So... next I was at some kind of gathering of people (including dad) who were all sitting in a circle in a ... room in a church? I'm not sure what the point was, but I remember walking in and sitting among them, and then entering a different world or story or something, featuring a bunch of anthropomorphic animals... sort of a Redwall feel to it.

Ugh. I thought this dream made sense but now that I'm trying to put what happened into words...

OK so basically, the mice were being forced to migrate by the more villainous animals, and a lot of the younger mice were upset about having to leave their homes. And my objective was to comfort them somehow, but it was hard to tell what I was supposed to do exactly. I talked to a couple young mice but I wasn't sure what they wanted. Then I ended up a bit separated from the main migrating group and ended up alone somewhere I wasn't supposed to be, and this weird somewhat-human-faced tiger jumped down and told me to stop trying to help them or stop doing what I was doing or whatever. I noticed that his face proportions were kinda weird, like his eyes were too far up on his face and his mouth was too wide and he didn't have a nose. And also he was a tiger with a human face. So that was kinda weird.

At any rate, I knew this tiger could eat my face in one bite, but still, when he threatened me and told me to stop I was just like "Make me," knowing full well that he would kill me but thinking of it as a shortcut to the start of the level. He looked incredulous for about a fraction of a second before he lunged and killed me. I didn't feel it.

So I restarted, and this time I found two tiny things: a tiny golden screw, and something else. And I was actually able to find the toy that the screw went into, and screw it in (the screw's proportions weirdly changing the whole time), and get the toy working again. It was some sort of stuffed animal where when you slid the bit I'd fixed, its arms closed in a hug. I knew I should give it to one of the mice children, and I was setting off to find him when I woke up? At any rate, that's all I remember.

Today's dreamsign is: the screw weirdly changing proportions in a very obvious and unreal way.

So interestingly enough my renewed efforts are already paying off! Better awareness, more vivid/consistent dreams, and something odd happened where I almost spotted a dreamsign but my dream was like OH, NO THAT ISN'T WHAT YOU THINK IT IS, HAHA and changed it. You can't fool me forever, dreams.

Dream: Being a Good Person
So first of all, this dream seemed to be set in the past when I was still attending church (good dreamsign, I've dreamed about that church a few times now). I was friends with a girl who was disabled in some way and needed to drink lots of sugarwater, and she'd been assigned to read three verses in front of the whole church, but didn't think she'd be able to do it. So I figured the right thing to do was to offer to read two of the verses for her so she only had to do one. But truthfully I was quite anxious about reading in front of the whole church, and the majority of the dream consisted of me worrying about it. Then my sister pitched in and offered to read one of the verses for me, which I gratefully accepted.

There were other, more confusing and less straightforward parts of the dream, but I'm not going to write down things that don't translate into real life because it always ends up not being true to the nature of the dream. And maybe if I only write down the parts that make sense, my dreams will start to make more sense?

Dream: Family Reunion
So this was a long, fairly consistent and realistic dream with a theme of something like, "traveling." There was a lot of time spent on canoes, in cars, and on metro trains (which children kept falling out of), and my mother, sister, and extended family on my mother's side all made an appearance, as well as my boyfriend. That said, I don't really consider any of them to be a dreamsign even though seeing them in person is abnormal, and this might be because I want to see them.

I think there's a part of me that is motivated to become lucid by the wish to change the dream and avoid unpleasant things. For instance, seeing my dead grandmother alive again is actually rather unpleasant because I don't know why it keeps happening, and there might be something I'm trying to avoid (thoughts like, could I have saved her from her dementia, or what does it really mean that she's dead ... maybe I blame myself for something, or maybe I miss her, I don't know what it is). So, for that reason it makes perfect sense to make her a dreamsign, because it serves the dual purpose of getting me lucid and allowing me to recognize what's happening and escape it. In the same way, seeing my father in the dream is a dreamsign because I try to avoid him in real life as much as possible, and naturally I would prefer to avoid him in dreams as well.

At any rate, after a somewhat unrealistic visit from my boyfriend (I left without saying goodbye to him, probably represents my anxiety over doing something similar in real life and being thoughtless in some way) and a half-remembered canoe outing with my mother, I was in a car in Virginia on my way to a famous vacation spot to meet up with my mother's side of the family. On the way there, we passed something I'd never seen before: a theme park or museum or attraction of some kind that featured massive inflatable ships and things floating on the water outside, and enormous recreations of Lego figures. They may even have been moving. I noticed one of the huge inflatable ships looked a little deflated, as though it were a natural result of the thing being on display for so long with no means of refilling it. I thought about how nice it would be to go there with Alex, and figured he'd probably be able to afford whatever the (probably crazy) entry price was, and together we could have the time of our lives in ... whatever this place was.

Then I was on a train, and children kept getting confused because the train would stop and the doors would open, but sometimes it wasn't the right place to get off and the platform would actually be dangerously receded. So throughout the train ride, children kept falling onto the tracks and their family would have to fish them out. A couple times I thought a kid was going to get crushed, but the dream never acted like one was (there were no freaked-out reactions from the family, for instance), so it seemed like things were... "okay" for whatever reason.

Adam Sandler (or so my brain called him) and his son were also on the train, going to the same vacation spot as I was. I seriously don't know much about him, but my brain was like "white comedian man" and I figured "yeah he's probably one of the ones that says fuck a lot." I was thinking about how well-behaved his child was in that he wasn't trying to throw himself onto the train tracks like the other kids had been, and then I might've accidentally taught the kid the f-word. I said to Sandler that the kid had probably already learned that word from him anyway, and Sandler just sort of smiled like that was the kind of thing he would expect someone like me to say. He really had a reserved feel about him in that moment, as though he'd completely removed his comedian persona and was just trying to relax and be himself with his son. This got me thinking that I'd made a mistake in assuming that real-life Sandler and comedian Sandler were the same person, and I was chastising myself a little bit because I don't like to make mistakes like that.

At any rate, the vacation spot was some set of cabins and things next to a bay, and there were a bunch of friendly squirrels running around in one area because there were so many oversized acorns on the ground. You could pick the acorns up and hold them over the squirrels, and the squirrels would beg for them as though the acorns weren't right there on the ground to begin with. And I distinctly remember eating two of these acorns for... for some reason. Both times the outer shell was a bit pliable and tasted awful, while the inside was perfectly nice, and both times I failed to even try to shell the acorn and suffered the consequences. So... not really the high point of my intellect, there.

Then, the most interesting moment. I heard and saw my grandmother nearby, and as I observed I realized that her dementia was entirely gone. Somehow she had made a full recovery. And then, the first inkling came that this was important and odd, and perhaps... and the dream reacted. In an instant, Granny had vanished, and one of my older aunt-in-laws was in her place, sounding (though not looking), quite a lot like her. It really had the same feel as thinking you see something, and then looking closer and realizing it's actually something else entirely. Then I overheard someone say (or perhaps it was simply the dream straight-up narrating), that there was an older man who constantly got this aunt-in-law confused with Granny, and it was so sad because he'd been so close to Granny before and missed her quite a lot. Hm. Not much else interesting happened after that.

I guess I need to figure out why I want to be lucid. I think there's a huge part of my motivation that simply wants to escape bad dreams and images, because this was what originally got me into lucid dreaming in the first place. I used to have nightmares as a kid, and realized pretty quickly that these were dreams and that killing myself would wake me up. For some reason I'm now remembering one particularly memorable time this happened when I was quite young: I dreamed that I was being forced into a marriage with an alligator by my foreign royal family, and that soon I would have to climb into bed with this literal animal and be eaten and torn apart by it. Instead, I locked myself in the bathroom and stabbed myself in the stomach with a fancy pair of scissors. This didn't hurt or feel like anything, but it was apparent that I would soon die from this... when my family broke down the door, all of them crying as they realized what I'd done. They pointed to the alligator in the bed, now slain, and said that they'd killed it, and I didn't have to get married to it and there was no need for me to die. I was crying a little too at this point, if only because they were so sad, because I was quite ready to leave the dream at this point and didn't really want to stay with this odd, sacrificing-people-to-alligators family. Regardless, it was too late. I died and woke up soon after.

One way to interpret this would be to say that my dream somehow regretted my leaving. But that might be me personifying the dream when I shouldn't be, again. Perhaps I was trying to teach myself that dying to wake up wasn't necessary, and that there were other solutions? Man I'm really not sure what it all means, I need to think about this more.

So I'm reading Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming by Stephen LaBerge, Ph.D. and Howard Rheingold, and now my interest in lucid dreaming is somewhat renewed. The issue is that currently (and for a long time) I've been lacking awareness of my surroundings in some odd sense that makes it very hard to notice when I'm lucid, even though my dreams are generally completely unrealistic and, on top of that, have a constant "dreamlike" feel. This means that if I happen to wonder if I'm dreaming, just that is enough for me to go "Oh yes, duh, of course I am," and start doing lucid things... but it's rare for me to have enough awareness even for that.

I was thinking that my dreamsigns could be things like "a change in context," since that happens almost every time in my dreams, but on the other hand I think my mind simply accepts changes in context without thinking about them at all, and maybe I should pick something a bit more specific that I tend to notice more, such as my dead grandmother, having fully recovered from dementia, making an appearance.

Dream: Castle Shenanigans

So at first it was me, my dad, and my sister, all exploring some sort of enormous castle. And I was trying to get away from my dad (because I hate even being in the same room as him), which turned into me sprinting through the castle at night, down long hallways and up stairs, hoping to eventually lose him. But I don't think I ever did. I distinctly remember turning a corner and sprinting down a long hallway, trying to put the full length of the enormous castle between us, and trying to make it to the end and turn the corner before he could see me. I failed.

A bit later in the dream, I was exploring the castle with him (and it was daytime). It had the feel of him showing me a university that he wanted me to attend, and trying to point out to me what a cool place it was. We visited the castle library (complete with studying students), which had stacks of books against one wall, comprising about three levels of balconies that overlooked the main study space, and with an elevator that somewhat dwarfed its surroundings. I think it may have been for wheelchair accessibility. I think I explored the stacks a bit.

Then the dream changed. Still castle-themed, but now it had the feel of a movie. There was some sort of plucky main character (me) who wanted to get into the castle and join the ranks of the powerful servants of the king, but his approach was to climb in through one of the upper-level windows and try to avoid the wrath of the servants until he'd proved himself enough to be accepted. Or something like that.

Before that, there was a segment where a similarly plucky group was trying not to get killed by lackey-type knights in red who were hunting them with all the personality of machines. One of their solutions was to escape to a church, where, surely, the knights would not be able to perform violent acts. However, upon arrival in the church, they found the pews draped with the bloodstained bodies of several lackey-type knights in white, and through the window spotted the knights in red marching towards the church entrance. So, we all ran down the stairs to the basement, guided by one of us who knew this particular secret, and then crawled through a rather tight, upwards-sloping tunnel in the wall that made an uncomfortable right turn. I hated crawling through this thing because it was such a tight fit, but we made it, and on the other side was a better, safer church. And for whatever reason, my dream repeated this same scenario another few times.

Then, back to the story of the person (lizard?) trying to join the ranks of the castle servants. This time, he was exploring a tower placed just outside the castle, which he hoped to use to jump through into the castle through a window. And this is where things get confusing, because the dream just kind of made up concepts and they made sense to me at the time, and now that I'm awake I'm not sure what was going on. First of all, the main character was a sort of humanoid lizard. And the servants were also animal-themed, I believe, and quite powerful. The lizardman (me) met some of them in the tower and might have been captured by them? And then they might have started putting him through the various tasks that one must pass in order to be one of the castle servants. I'M NOT SURE. IT'S ALL SO HARD TO EXPLAIN. WHATEVER.

--

None of this gave my brain any kind of pause or made me think, "Hey now, all this is sort of unrealistic." And I know this is normal for dreams, but if I were to just have that thought for even a moment, I would realize that I was dreaming.

Instead it feels like my brain locks into some kind of "tell me a story" mode and rolls with whatever the dream does. It kind of has an automatic feel to it. Also, my dreams haven't been that vivid lately. Or it feels like even if they were vivid, I wouldn't be aware enough to notice. Uuuuugghhhhh.