Dream Dream Dream Dream Dream Dream

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...