non-lucid

I want to remember these ones. They had a unique feel to 'em.

Dream - Earlier Boss
I remember being one of a group of three who were trying to bring down this one evil guy, sort of reminiscent of a mob boss but not as business-like. I'm not sure what he was even trying to accomplish.

We were using children to help us out, they had some sort of task that had to be done close to the end of the line. I really can't remember exactly what they were supposed to do, I just remember that they would all run past the boss's inner sanctum into another room with some minions in it, perhaps on their way to something more important, or maybe just in order to disorient the minions with the sudden appearance of children. There was something else about me having a gun but at some point it ran out of bullets, right in front of the boss, I think. I just remember pulling the trigger and it just clicking all lame and I was like frick. That seems to be a recurring thing.

I remember that the boss had somehow played the three of us; I was sitting with my back against some wall all defeated-like, while he explained how he'd tricked me. It had something to do with an origami folding made out of silver-grey paper. I was somewhat distressed when it somehow got unfolded while he was talking, but other than that small hint I have no idea what his ploy may have been.

Dream - Later Boss
In this one I actually worked for the boss I and others were trying to take out. This villain was a sort of jovial, sarcastic guy, trusting no one and confident in this lack of trust, since he didn't need trust for his plans to work out. Whereas the previous boss had seemed a little more direct and capable in the way he crushed opposition, this guy treated a lot of it like a game. But y'know, in a playing-with-lives sort of way.

One of the ways I tried to screw up his plans was by stealing away gems he needed. There was a blue/green gem and a red flame gem... I found the blue/green gem after seeing it shining from inside some guy's face (one of the minions, I think, given it for safe-keeping), between his eyes and a little off-center; he was smiling as though confident it was totally safe in there, but I distinctly remember plunging my hand into that area and pulling it out. I ended up with a few gem-sized chunks that were not gems and something that glistened blue-green through a slimy coating of blood. I'm pretty sure I put the whole mess in my hoodie's front pocket, since there wasn't time for me to sort through it and there were at least two minions looking at me, though for some reason they hadn't seen me flat-out take it.

I remember the feeling of fumbling to try to put another one of the gems in my front pocket; it must've been the flame gem, since it was totally clean. It was frustrating, I could feel exactly what my fingers were doing, and were the edge of the pocket was, and where the gem was, and it was critical that I not make it obvious that I was leaving with the gem, but I still couldn't seem to just pocket it and relax. I think one of the other minions who genuinely served the boss noticed me.

Note on that minion: he was some rather sneaky guy who didn't trust me. He was loyal to the boss and wanted to earn his favor, and he knew I was up to something, though he didn't yet have evidence. He wanted to be the one to catch me and show everyone what I really was.

I remember that particular minion stealing the gem back, saying something as an aside about how he was surprised I'd just been hiding it in my hoodie pocket (implying I was either stupid or lazy). A long chase ensued through a dark city of townhouses, where I tried to leverage flight powers focusing on speed. I managed to get in the air but couldn't work out how to move forward the way I wanted to (I envisioned skimming but couldn't quite figure out how to actually do it, also my initial launch was somehow nostalgic in the sense that I got the impression, while launching, that this was a technique I'd used to do in other dreams when quite young, but that could've been a false memory). He remained in the lead, running and jumping from rooftop to rooftop, some lower than others or forming a long ledge for him to run along. In the end we emerged from the houses to a street next to a large open area, the ground sloping away from the road to where the boss was waiting in his base of operations. I slowed down while the minion raced on, then walked forward and settled myself on the slope to watch from a distance, in plain view of them both, as he handed the gem over to the boss. There were no immediate repercussions for me.

On the other hand, another minion, and one who was actually on my side, was accused of having hidden another gem. She was some sort of flame fairy, accused of withholding the flame gem, and the boss had her stand over this odd sort of torch, with a platform for her to stand next to the fire (which was somehow holding a consistent cone sort of shape). He told her that he would ask her a few questions, and that she should move into the flame for yes, and away from the flame for no. For some reason it was assumed she couldn't really lie to him, and when he asked her whether she'd hidden the flame gem, she said no and moved away from the flame, but with guilt clear on her face nonetheless ... perhaps she hadn't hidden it herself, but she could have had a hand in it. The boss was about to ask her another question when I got sick of the interrogation scene, tackled him and tried to strangle him. I'm not sure what happened after that but it was pretty clear my attempts at subversion were over ggggg

Then there was an end to it, where my group somehow managed to finally bring down this boss. I can't remember many details more than that he assumed, right up until the end, that he'd won, and I had the satisfaction of demonstrating how wrong he was (somehow). Then he was dragged away to some insane asylum or hospital somewhere in the city, while I watched from a sort of overpass nearby.

Other Fragments
- Being in legions with x-friend and a friend I was dueling last night. X-friend was being all happy and excited and my friend and I were just sort of chilling, dueling or following him around while he chattered and showed off his prowess and confidence.

- Seeing two sort of malnourished looking kids, a girl and a boy with small, thin bodies, big heads, and huge eyes, both floating with inflatable red floaty rings in some sort of pool supposedly designed just for this purpose. However, the pool itself was, to my surprise, a good five feet deep, so that if either of them stopped floating and sank to the bottom they'd be pretty much screwed. I ended up pulling them both out of the pool after the boy almost sank right to the bottom before I managed to fish him out.

- - - - - - - - -

GOSH IT'S SO ANNOYING THERE'S STUFF I WANT TO REMEMBER AND PLACE BUT EVEN THOUGH I CAN SORT OF REMEMBER IT I CANT PLACE IT ANYWHERE >8UUU

gosh

w/e I just really liked trying to bring down these fricking bad guys and totally failing at being sneaky and always risking being found out and talking to them and hhhhhh good times

OKAY LET'S SEE

Dream - Disappointment
So I dreamed that I somehow saw a brand new scene from the movie Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, where Cloud was in the Forgotten City being interrogated by Kadaj on the location of something important (my brain apparently tried to come up with something important that Kadaj would want the location of, and came up with "glue"). I really liked this new scene and went looking for it on YouTube after I "woke up", but attempts to search for it by entering such scene-relevant quotes as "Give up the glue" for some reason only brought up videos I had no interest in, such as The Running Man "Give Up the Glue". I eventually became fully convinced, much to my disappointment, that it had only been a dream, and that I would likely never see the scene again. :c

False Awakenings
Lessee, then that YouTube false awakening aside, I had a couple more false awakenings re: something I had to do real quick at 7 AM-ish before falling asleep again. I had two different dreams where I accomplished the task, and when my alarm finally woke me up at 7 AM I was half-convinced I'd already done it a couple times, when in reality I'd never (as far as I can tell) left my bed.

Dream - Frustration
So this one started out with Jess and I chilling in this otherwise-empty house, perhaps abandoned by its previous residents. We were in the bathroom with the bathtub filled with water, but when I looked in it I saw two weird insect-things I'd never seen before. They seemed to be an aquatic version of house centipedes, though with marginally thicker legs and fewer of them, which were squirming on the surface of the water like protozoa (thanks BIO 101). I called in this strangeness to some radio or TV show, who promptly announced to everyone that some 14 million cases of these weird insect-things being in peoples' homes had been reported.

Then mom drove up and frickin' took me away from the house for some reason. I didn't particularly want to leave, but next thing I knew I was in the car and we were racing down the highway. I started sort of crying (it felt like I couldn't really cry, just sort of half-cry?) to try to convince her to take me back to the house, but it seemed to just make her annoyed. Then I tried to open the door to potentially jump out, but the force of the wind outside made it impossible to open. So I settled on crying and hoping Dad wouldn't suddenly appear in the front seat, since he would've seen right through this weirdness and told me to cut it out.

Then I'm not sure what happened. I ended up in the middle of nowhere at night, trying to find a way to head back. I seem to remember performing some stunt where I ramped a truck off something in a reckless manner, and I may have encountered a homeless guy or hitchhiker or something, who was my key to getting back to the house. But I'm not totally sure.

I somehow ended up back at the house. Still nighttime, and now Jess and Mom were on the front porch, apparently witnessing my arrival. I was incredibly irritated by having been relocated, and looked over to see what looked like an 18-wheeler fuel tanker chilling in the dark nearby. I reached out and grabbed it with psychic power, feeling a satisfying sense of weight as I lifted it into the air. I slammed it down on the front yard (apparently lifting things into the air and then slamming them to the ground is a thing I do nowadays). Then I hopped up on top of it, and started channeling intense heat around my hands. I pressed both palms against the truck, and the metal turned molten (though without glowing), allowing them to sink through. As I did this, I noticed that my hands felt at first cold, and then lukewarm; one of the things I worry about when I consider using fire powers is the potential that I would just burn myself, but it seems to be a nonissue.

I think I was trying to cause a gas explosion or something, though not with the intent to hurt anyone. I was just really irritated and lucid enough to realize that I could do what I wanted. I think that's where I woke up, though.

- - - - - - - - - -

Update: April 26 2014 (aka the next day)
At the time I had this dream there was some stuff about it that didn't make sense, like the part where I tried to manipulate mom by crying (very petty behavior, something I don't think I could ever do IWL) and the fact that I saw Dad as someone who would see right through my attempts at manipulation (IWL he's more clueless than shrewd).

Then, today, I got into a big shouting match with Dad. Apparently he'd been building up tension ever since Mom requested that we have the house totally cleaned up by Tuesday, so a photographer can take pictures. He tried to hint at how we should do a little at a time, say five minutes here and there, so it would get done early, although the rambling way he requested it made it a little hard to take seriously. And then he blew up tonight (after some prompting on my part). Some of the things he mentioned was the fact that he feels like Mom and him can't request favors from us (my sister and I) and that he feels like they're too easy on us. He felt that Mom in particular is helpless to request that we get things done, or maybe it's that we won't get things done without plenty of prompting and her being over my shoulder.

After his temper tantrum I certainly felt like slamming an eighteen-wheeler around. The obvious parallel aside, it seems to me that Mom driving me to somewhere I don't want to go while I act passive aggressive about it and hope Dad doesn't show up and make me stop is a parallel to Mom requesting that I get cleaning done while I put it off and Dad tries to have me get it done early.

Not trying to imply that I'm some kinda weird psychic or anything, I think I was just sort of unconsciously picking up on the stress signals Dad was sending out.

The sad thing is it's not like I'm some slacker who doesn't get things done. I'm going to sleep the stress off, wake up after a good night's sleep, grab a shower and some tea and bomb the absolute heck out of my to-do list, and it's gonna be super satisfying, especially after I got basically nothing done today. And all this drama will have been completely unnecessary, except for pushing my bedtime back another hour, and giving this dream some reasoning behind it.

In other news I'm thinking of reading Freud's Interpretation of Dreams. Still pretty skeptical about him (my Psych professor doesn't like him), but the more one reads, the more ideas one has to draw from.

Well then.

Last night was uneventful and it's hard to remember stuff. I feel markedly distant from the occurrences. But I get the feeling SOME intriguing things happened, so I'll just write out whatever fragments come to mind.

Fragment 1 - Magix
I remember being with a group on a quest, though I'm not sure what the quest was or who the members of the group were. One thing I do recall is that we ended up underwater somehow. I and another magic-user began to expand psychic shields underwater, sort of like bubbles that wouldn't pop. Our group could poke their heads in to get some air, or even chill entirely inside one, but the water pressure around the shield didn't crush or distort it.

Fragment 2 - Exam Cram
Dreamed I was trying to get ready for an exam in the morning that had been announced the day before @_____@ or something like that

The teacher gave us a computer game that would walk us through everything we needed to know. There were actually about six to eight different scenarios, and I think I only got close to mastering one. The game itself involved looking at my character and the level map from a top-down perspective, and sneaking into a fortress by sneaking up on the guards and choking them out from behind. Was pretty tricky.

UH so let's see, already wrote part of this dream down but now it's the day after I had it, oh well I'll post it real quick

Dream - Coastal School
So I dreamed I was wandering around this one odd abandoned school (or maybe just closed for the night) on the coast of some beach. I went into this nursery sort of area and found a plastic dinosaur that I for some reason found to be incredibly nostalgic. I picked it up and examined it: half of me was thinking that it was great to be reunited with this totally familiar dinosaur from my childhood, while the other half was surprised by how unfamiliar it seemed. I couldn't seem to remember having a stegosaurus toy with that tan/orange coloration in the sort of rearing position it was frozen in, but the nostalgic feeling was overwhelming. I couldn't help but be happy to see it.

Then, in the same area, the dream switched to third person and I started observing Redwall characters (for those of you that haven't read the books, it's a series about anthropomorphic animals like mice and squirrels set in Medieval times). I watched as a hare (one of the good guys) with an injured leg stumbled ashore, pursued by various rats (bad guys). He managed to evade them until he ended up cornered by two rats with his back to a door in the wall. With nowhere else to go, he managed to duck through.

Inside was warm and well-lit by a fireplace, and a rather strong-looking otter (good guy) sat in an armchair reading. There was another creature nearby, maybe a bird, who was a friend of the otter, but I can't remember details about him. The otter looked up to see the injured hare stumble in and then collapse on his floor after only a few steps, then saw the two rats starting to enter. Having apparently sized up the situation, he started to get up, saying "I know what's going in the stew tonight" (good guy?) as he started to move towards the rats. And then I'm not sure what happened next. I just remember knowing for a fact that this powerful, cultured otter, with his well-kept home, was about to kill and eat two rats who supposedly deserved it. I'm not sure how that made me feel.

ARRIGHT I'm awake wow I'm tired of being sick ugh why now my throat hurts this is lame I can't go back man I CAN'T GO BACK TO BEING SICK LIKE I WAS

...

man exercising was such a dumb idea. making myself write out my dream even though I don't feel like it to build character.

Dream 1 - Ben's Home, Betas
I like that title because it sounds like I'm either lazily listing the things that happened in the dream, or I'm telling some fish that Ben's home.

SO LET'S SEE first thing that happened was Ben arrived back from college on a bus. It was summer-ish and when he got off the bus we headed across a grassy field together where some older peeps were throwing a football around or something. They seemed to be people I'd used to look up to as the older people back in youth group, now post-college but apparently not too different from how they used to be or from how I would tend to view them. They said somethin' about Ben being back, and I tried to respond in a confident but sort of comedic voice which in the end just sounded strange and high to me. I was tryin' to be confident with what I said too, but I think it fell sort of flat like it tends to do.

Anyway I didn't dwell on that too long, and Ben and I wandered into this odd little ... secluded area on the other side of the field, directly across from where the bus had dropped him off. There was a pond with some piled stones serving as a boundary, and something was blocking out the sun and making it feel a little closed-in and quiet, but I'm not totally sure it was trees. Could've been stone walls.

Now HERE it was winter and the pond was partially frozen-over. It may have been flooded as well, because there were frozen beta fish chilling on the grass, three of 'em, all perhaps ten times the size of a normal beta fish. I reached for one, but it swam back to the pond somehow. The other two appeared more incapacitated, but after reaching under one to pick it up and consequently feeling its incredibly delicate jaw bone, I figured it would be best to not mess with 'em.

Dream 2 - Band's Back
wow just typing that made me feel some anxiety OH WELL LET'S DO THIS

First of all I was apparently on a journey to who knows where. As a result, I discovered a particularly talented singer, a girl from some school who I took back home with me. She then became part of our reformed band, now directed by mom and, as usual, featuring my sister and brother (still home from college).

At first I think I was just singing harmonies or playing guitar or somethin', but then Mom decided that I should be the one to sing the chorus. My first reaction was to protest while trying out my voice and realizing how pitchy I was. Then I actually gave it a fair shot, but the lyrics which the girl had sung so easily were considerably more difficult for me to do. For some reason there were always too many syllables in whatever line I was trying to sing, and with each line I grew more and more frustrated. Ben, meanwhile, seemed to be derisive of my struggles, like maybe I was just making it hard on myself by not really trying to figure out how it worked, and Jess didn't seem to care either way.

So it culminated with me storming off. Mom went with me and I ended up shouting at her something like, literally, "I've already tried this s**t before!". It was bleeped out and everything. Also some part of my mind was noticing that I was shouting louder than I'd ever shouted in my life, like there wasn't enough of my voice to get across just how much I hated all of this.

Long story short, though, I ended up wandering back to try again. And then Ben was Sam from Supernatural, which wasn't too different apparently. And then he got hit by a car or something. We weren't too concerned, but we did monitor him afterwards to see whether anything was different. He started painting decals on the walls, which was normal, but we paid close attention to the design choices. They all turned out car-related somehow which we took as a sign of something. And then I think I woke up.

MAN. It's been a while, right?

I'm still kinda sick and it bums me out 'cause I'm tired of feeling constantly run-down, but on the bright side it's given me the motivation I need to sleep more than usual and hopefully work off that sleep debt.

I think what's gotten me to write this entry right now is ... simply the unusual nature of the dream and how vivid it was. And I think I can remember quite a few details, though maybe not exactly. WORTH A SHOT.

Dream 1 - Amalgam
I think one thing I remember is observing Lelouch from Code Geass. His art style was anime, though I think his surroundings were still normal. I'm not sure exactly what he was doing, but he seemed to be manipulating someone in order to advance his plans. His emotions on that matter seemed to range from complete control and a lack of remorse while he was manipulating them, to a sort of rueful rumination on what he'd done afterwards. Mostly he seemed to feel it was entirely necessary no matter how unsavory it was. And I'm pretty sure he was manipulating Euphemia. Sociopath Lelouch.

Next bit I remember is bein' in a room with Hannibal from the current TV Show, and a kid who's an online friend of mine. Super nice kid. I think they were trying to help me understand that I'd injured both my arms very badly from playing legions, but I also remember a little before this. Mostly that the room had been the setting for some time, and it was quite dark and a bit messy and seemed deserted. And there was something about National Geographic.

Anyway Hannibal managed to point out to me that my arms were fricking banged up, and I finally got my shirt off to take a look. The first thing I noticed was some kinda weird, green dead skin on my chest, which I peeled off. I sort of expected that my arms would have the same problem. What I saw instead was that my arms were frickin' covered in bruises and irritated redness. The bruises were an odd sort of star-shape, dark-purple in color but looking sort of like very large asterisks. * And the next thing I noticed was the pain.

So I was just sort of staring down at my arms, watching my hands tremble and turning my arms over for a better look, while Hannibal explained that the damage was from my tendency to fly up to people in Legions and midair them point-blank. Apparently this sort of kamikaze approach to battle had been dealing damage to my arms with every rocket blast for a while now, unbeknownst to me. U tryna tell me somethin brain? Ur gonna have to speak up.

At this point my view on the matter went from "haha what injured I am not injured" to "HOLY FRICK I AM SO INJURED I hope you guys feel bad about this" or y'know "pity me!" or whatever. Also my arms fricking hurt. And I was looking to them to help me out, but Hannibal was doing his typical "you know what let's take this fixable thing and allow it to get worse for giggles" routine. This did not go over well with my internet friend, who was after all right there in the room, and who started demanding that Hannibal give me medical attention right then. Hannibal did not concede, of course, and I occupied myself with gingerly holding my arms and/or examining them and/or somehow managing to get a turtleneck sleeve onto my left arm, which got in the way of me seeing how bad it was. I woke up soon after that, still with the belief that my arms were totally damaged, and was rather relieved to find that moving didn't hurt.

But see what I like about dreams is that chance to be in the position of freaking out over very detailed, injured arms, complete with pain and trembling, but without the long-term life consequences, such as a month in the hospital. Is that weird? That's probably weird.

Dream 2 - SnailFrog
Anyway then another thing that happened was that I was outside with somebody like maybe my dad or somethin', and we found this snail thing. It was actually a very hungry small frog but it looked like a snail. Dad and I took it outside to some swampy place and set it down, and I found a grasshopper and considered lifting it by one delicate antenna (detail!) but got the feeling that the grasshopper (which was brightly colored and odd-looking) would manage to flick itself onto my hand and bite me or something. So I left that one alone and meanwhile the snail had turned into a small adorable red-ish frog with a translucent, slimy underbelly reminiscent of a snail, and he'd spied a small tan, safe-looking grasshopper. And then he went for it at incredible speeds, twisting around to try to keep up with its hopping and rolling all over the underbrush, and managed to eat it. And then he went for another one and caught it as well, after another incredible chase, though this time he ended up with a mouthful of large twigs that seemed to contradict his mouth size.

*RAMBLES ABOUT FROGS FOR A WHILE LIKE AN OLD PERSON*

So I'm not quite sure what else happened. I feel like tons of things occurred but LIKE WHAT? IDK.

- - - - - - -

Hm I can kinda remember what my dreams lately have been like. I think the night before this one I dreamed about playing legions, interspersed with crime scenes that were my doing. This is 'cause my main occupation lately has been playing Legions and watching Hannibal. And maybe thinking about sociopaths. None of those things feel like excellent uses of my time and now it's showing up in my dreams which shows that they're all I've been focusing on and arggghhhhh.

I was wondering when I'd start writing down dreams again. They seem like such a perfect way to track my mental state and get a handle on how my life's going. I think being sick borked it up after almost a solid month of recording, so hopefully this time my streak will be even longer. Feels good to be writing about 'em again~ I think this is one of my best hobbies :33

So it looks like my thoughts got extra muddled thanks to me being sick or something ?? (woke up with a slight cold)

and that meant muddled up dreams and weird nonsense. oh well let's see what fragments I have.

btw I'm putting all these under the same dream header because I know they all happened in the same "dream" because there were some consistencies, like I was always me and the setting was pretty often the same house, when it wasn't space.

Dream - Headcold
Fragment 1
my mom telling me to clean up a mess my brother made because he's a boy and I'm a girl; I consider this a feminist issue and, like a cool, rational human being, convince my brother to inflict upon me some grave injury such as a broken arm to prove something to my mother (at one point he was like "what if I stuck you with a pin" and I was like "no that's a lady injury and it would heal too fast" or something even though he was literally talking about stabbing it through my hand or something) ... I never actually got hurt

I should note that in that particular fragment everyone seemed pretty manic. My mom told me to clean up my brother's messiness and overrode my complaints with a bright, crazed smile, I determined to be badly injured as an "I'll show her!" sort of thing, and my brother gave off an eager, sadistic air as he tried to figure out how to break my arm. So apparently my whole head was just infected with a cold manifesting as irrational thoughts in both myself and my dream characters. Which is pretty neat, though seemingly obvious. it sort of shows the effect my thinking has on my dream characters, right?

Fragment 2
lots of space shenanigans; me and some others were up in space and sometimes drifting along and other times climbing into this little space shuttle

Fragment 3
some bit where I'm practicing breathing through my mouth without using my nose at all (I was doing pretty well and then it made me gag which is a new thing for dreams yay way2go me)

Fragment 4
me goin' to the 7-11 but what for ?? oh yeah I was looking for this really good chocolatey trail mix or cereal or somethin' but I couldn't find it

Fragment 5
ex-friend talking about how he's a Pokemon trainer while constantly having to spit (in the dream this didn't bother me much at all but now I'm like "gross")

Everybody has their off days, right? ;D

Dream - fricking titles how do they work
so let's see

I dreamed somethin' about Granny getting adjusted to bein' in an old folk's home, which is a IWL thing. Bummer, dude. But the interesting bits that I remember aaarreeee~

- reading the titles of books on a bookshelf, which is cool (indicates a good amount of detail)
- gettin' mad at my bro and calling something of his or maybe calling him a "stupid retard" or "stupid retarded" or idk, I felt bad right away and woke up feeling bad and then went OH WAIT I can just go in the other room and apologize in person! and then I was like wait, no, I can't ;-;

there was tons of other stuff but EH. lately my dreams haven't had as much uhh, presence? not so much me making the decisions. I wake up and don't even remember that I was in a dream, which is kinda sucky. geez, what do I call it. I've had dreams where I wasn't lucid but I was still present; maybe not enough to reason out or remember that I'm in a dream, but enough to carefully choose what I'll do next. and other dreams I'm just on auto-pilot and it's irritating. hrmph.

SO LET'S SEE

first of all somethin' weird happened last night, I was drifting off to sleep and I suppose just sort of observing my thoughts (which is a concept I never really understood before but it seems to make sense in this context), and I started continuously knowing when my thoughts had shifted from IWL things that made sense to stories that seemed to be made up off the top of my head. I was just sort of ... listening to my own thoughts, and at some point that I couldn't quite pin down, they would start to get pretty crazy. And for some reason, rather than simply accepting this new development as "factual" (like most of my mind seemed to be doing), I would snap out of it and go "wait that's crazy". Hmm...

It was like part of my mind was the watcher, and the other part was simply dozing, and the dozing part would start to get invested in a story; I would catch myself thinking about something crazy, like maybe an IWL person who doesn't exist, or a story I once heard that I never actually heard, or a game I never played, but my dozing mind would treat it like something I was wholly familiar with, like an old friend. And I think what triggered the sudden realization that it was made-up was when I would think back for an instant, naturally expecting the memories to be a part of my recent past, my waking life, and that's when I would have this chill of "wait that was all just made up." And that happened like, three times in a row, and every time the chill was the exact same. So strange~

—

Now for the dreams. Don't remember too much, I know for a fact there were two separate dreams but since I can no longer remember what happened in which dream, I'm just putting 'em under one header.

Dream - lel my recall is so derpy lately gg
I guess rather than chronological order, I'll arrange this in the order of what I remember best. SO THEN...

Strongest memory would be the part where I was on a dark, fiery battlefield, lots of blackened earth, troops marching forward towards the enemy army or towards destruction or towards whatever waited over there. I was one of 'em, but I was a special snowflake; not exactly "just another soldier". I didn't really have a place in the dream, a prearranged role, no backstory. It was just me chillin' with everyone else, marching forward with everybody else.

AND USING ELEMENTAL CONTROL WHAAAAAT.

I wouldn't really call myself lucid but some part of my mind was naturally invested in the idea of controlling elements around me. And it wasn't really a feeling of "maybe if I do this I will be able to possibly get the elements to obey me", it was more like "hum-de-dum just gonna grab some fire from over there hm that's not very much oh well." Like, I had the confidence I needed, and there wasn't as strong a focus on "breaking the dream" or trying to use my expectations or anything like that. Quite natural.

So let's see I was walking forward and I think I tried to snatch a bit of fire from a fellow soldier's torch (think he was standing by the roadside), but I only ended up with a tiny flicker of flame. It survived for a brief moment, curled up in a ball of air that was cupped in my palm (I mean it was invisible air but I could feel something between the fire and my palm, holding it there). I think the reason I controlled it like that was because in general, when I imagine trying to control fire, I end up concerned that I'll lose control and get horribly burns and stuff like that. And my dreaming, non-lucid mind is apparently the part that likes to inventively come up with little solutions to those problems~ and new ideas for dream powers~ (as in, the psychic poke technique) aaah I love my brain :D

SO ANYWAY next I came to a surprisingly-untouched stream, clear water coursing through a channel in the black ground. I manipulated it a bit, lifting some of it out of the stream in a nice sort of curling trail, but I think my conclusion was that there was nothing I could really do with it, and also it felt sort of ... unsatisfying. Maybe it's just that water physics are so hard to render that I end up with a sort of approximation of water and it's not much fun manipulating an approximation? Who knows.

The third and last elemental control thing I tried was simply that I was still marching, when I noticed something burning coming up on my left. The start of a little wildfire, perhaps, and close enough on my left side that, as I walked past, I got a bit concerned that it might spread to me. So I waved my hand down at it, palm down, in a sort of calming gesture, and the fire almost completely extinguished. Really, given the size of it, it was sort of unexpected that the whole thing would be put out, but I got the feeling that it was easier to simply put a fire out than to try to control it. Fire is wild, but fragile, in my mind.

That was about the extent of that segment.

—

One of the only other things I remember is a brief bit where I was in a dark, rather small room with my parents (think there was a well-lit hallway outside it though), and then my shoe caught on fire. Or something like that happened. I was understandably upset, but my parents did nothing while I put it out myself (for a brief moment, the fire seemed borderline out of control, but it didn't hurt anything except my shoe). Afterwards, I examined the fire damage done to the rubber parts of my shoe with some disgust, irritated that my parents didn't care what happened to the shoes I've had for years and years. GEEZ.

—

UGH I keep getting such tantalizing flashes of how the rest of the dream went. But maybe the concepts just don't translate well to the waking world...

The only thing I really remember is that I was packing up to move, and going down to the basement to retrieve some stuff, and then there was something about a game or story. Impossible to retrieve now.

Hey nice I made it to April neat

uhhh hm let's see I'm not super happy about last night's dream because it was so dark but I guess I'm putting it down anyway. the nice thing was that although it had some disturbing content and I didn't know it was a dream, my mental state was still pretty ambivalent about the whole thing.

Spoiler for icky horror things:

Dream - YT Let's Play + Wicker Man, I guess?
aiight so the main setting of this dream was that I was watching a horror let's play on YouTube, so practically the whole thing was third person. The main character was this incredibly unfortunate little boy and the bad guys/monsters were a bunch of women on an island (so like The Wicker Man, pretty much).

Uh man I don't even remember that much except all the terrible stuff that happened. I suppose the sequence of events was something liiike...

(1) The horror game's entire premise abruptly devolves into "let's watch this boy get sort of ritualistically tortured by crazy people". I remember he was in some odd dark torchlit room with some powerful male guy leading the whole ritual and a bunch of female subordinates carrying out other stuff. I don't quiiiite remember what happened except for the part where the kid, already injured in some way, was standing there looking up at the (very tall and shadowy) male leader guy in horror, and then looked down to see that his left foot had been cut off in the middle of his shin, so quickly that by the time he looked down it was already gone. And he was just standing on one leg. Or something. And that was pretty much just the latest in a long list of things that had already happened but those have slipped my memory OH WELL 8)

(2) Dreamed my (old) cat Mitsie was in the horror game engaging in typical Mitsie shenanigans: that is, doing the thing that you don't want her to do, and running away when you try to get her to stop. In this case, she'd found that chewing on some kinda poisonous gel capsule gave her a nice high, but it was probably also killing her. Some girl who wasn't me (but who I think I was controlling) kept trying to stop her, and had to chase her around because Mitsie was pretty adamant about this course of action.

(3) Back to the kid again. It had now been firmly established that he was at the mercy of the Wicker Man-esque ladies, trapped on the island, and basically totally screwed. It was also apparent that whatever they'd been doing to him wouldn't or couldn't kill him. He may have had advanced healing powers which is basically a must if you're going to vacation to that island, apparently.

Uhhh *thousand yard stare* right yes so then the last bit I think I can remember was that two women were torturing him again, saying that there were two things in his chest that they were going to remove, and their surgery tool of choice was a file. They were going to cut two squares in his chest/stomach just by rubbing the file against his skin until it cut through, which would make one line, and they'd need like eight of those *waxes mathematical*. Even though it was third person I could sort of feel it as they started. So uh. Hm. Yeah that's about as much time as Imma dedicate to recording this.

Last night's theme was my siblings and I as kids again b'awwwww

Dream 1 - Good Times Part I
So real quick uhhhmmm last night I dreamed my siblings and I were young again and the family was moving so we had to sort through all this old stuff in back rooms. A lot of it was bringing back memories of some of the business work we did for dad and stuff, which was interesting. I think we were all surprised how much we'd gotten done over the years.

And then alsooooo there were tide pools or creeks or somethin' in the floor with load of minnows in 'em, ranging from the tiny little guys that're impossible to catch to some big ones that were chilling all relaxed. I picked up one or two of the big ones 'cause they're so fascinating and stuff and they were perfectly cool with it. So that was a nice dream.

Dream 2 - Good Times Part II
I fell back asleep after that, and the setting was about the same, but now we were in the 1319 church auditorium. I don't remember too much about what happened there, except I had Spiderman powers and if I held my hand in that classic Spiderman hand pose I could shoot a web out. The web was super elastic, so it seemed to have about the same physics as one of those weird grappling hooks that pulls the person up after it attaches to something. So I had a lot of fun just shooting web at the ceiling and then bein' launched up there and clinging to it.

I also tried launching myself off the ceiling using two webs as a sort of makeshift slingshot. Looking back the physics were totally wrong but it worked exactly as expected. So that was fun.

I don't have too much time for this but I wanna remember this oneee~

--one midterm later--

SO OKAY now that I've taken my midterm aw yee feels good~

Dream - UHHH. Title. How about ... Ben Driving in 1319?
So I dream that Ben's home and he's somehow ended up as another group member for this class presentation I gotta give for college, and he just goes right along with it without complaint (even though I'm pretty sure he was only staying for a little while so how was that gonna work). He does some research and consolidates the info into a neat little file that has an HTML outline up at the top with hyperlinks that'll dodge you down to the relevant part of the file, 'cause that's just how much research he did. I mean, either that or the links popped open to reveal the info. Either way, I clicked one and saw some kinda math related circle thing. Actually the info looked a little incomplete or sparse but that was probs just the dream bein' weird.

So next thing we're driving through Washington, DC. Actually Ben's driving, though he doesn't know how to drive IWL. Potentially as a result of this conflict, his driving is sort of slow and awkward and I'm watching him and his driving choices with some concern. At some point I notice a cop tailing us, apparently experiencing the same train of thought I was. I get the impression he's sort of amused by Ben's poor driving decisions, that maybe he's tagging along because we're entertaining and/or to make sure we don't run over a bunch of schoolchildren or whatever. At any rate, he's not trying to pull us over, just sort of following us around.

Oh and we're heading towards the 1319 church I used to attend, apparently that's where the presentation is or the class or the group meeting or what have you. That's where we're going don't question it gosh. And that's despite the fact that it's pretty late in the day, and classes or whatever oughta be already over. We're late, I know that much.

We end up at a roundabout, where Ben decides to park (on the wrong side of the street). Nobody's around except the still-tailing cop, and when Ben parks in what is basically the middle of the one-lane street, next to the roundabout, he parks behind us and gets out. I expect him to be a lot more amused than he actually, upon approaching us, appears to be, with sunglasses obscuring his eyes and some neato fancy blonde hair that for some reason caught my attention. He barks something that I don't quite catch, but that sort of sounds like "You're in trouble" or something like that. I'm like "What?" because (1) I'm surprised by his anger and (2) I didn't quite hear what he said, but he doesn't respond. He just glares. Ben, meanwhile, doesn't react in the slightest. He doesn't even seem to be looking in the cop's direction.

The cop leaves without doing anything else (probably because I don't know how the ticket-giving process goes, exactly), and Ben pulls over to the proper side of the street and parks in front of a townhouse. It's pretty dark, probably around evening.

At this point my attention turns to the junk in the car. The stuff we're bringing for the presentation appears to be a lot of folded clothes in various small, separate piles, and there's also a hungry praying mantis. I allow the praying mantis onto my hand, where it demonstrates its hunger by starting to nibble gingerly at my skin (this part had a lot of detail). I'm rather concerned that it'll start painfully biting my hand, (though on a separate level, I'm also concerned that those expectations will cause it to happen), but I allow it to remain anyway.

On closer inspection, there's actually a bunch of dried mud on my hand that it's nibbling on (it's just that hungry :U ), and I can see and feel its mouthparts moving against my skin, and knocking off/scraping off the bits of dirt. Nice HD. Very detailed. I liked that a lot.

So I check around the car for food for the poor thing, and see a small fly chilling on a brown plastic bag. I move my hand down so the mantis can reach, and it instantly grabs the fly (along with some plastic bag) and presumably starts chowing down, but I can't really see it because the bag is sort of crumpled up and in the way.

There was also a short segment where the mantis's legs/feet ended up breaking off and stuck to my hand, which was fairly distressing. It seemed pretty unaffected though, I was just freaking out over the tiny little feet seemingly glued to my hand ;-;

Next some lady comes out of the house we're in front of and starts berating us for some reason. Either she doesn't like us parking there, or she's mad by proxy because we're late to the class/church/whatever. She ends up mostly ignored, though. Oh well.

At some point we'd realized it was like 5 PM and way too late for the class, but we still got out of the car and started trying to figure out which direction we were supposed to head. There were four streets leaving the roundabout; one led uphill to some sort of Buddhist church thing, another towards another roundabout that was supposedly DuPont Circle (except the statue at the center was sort of brick-colored, like the church). We ended up going towards DuPont Dream Circle, which was pretty much the right direction. And then I think I woke up.

So yeh after falling asleep I had a dream I was in Stone Harbor and/or in a movie.

Dream - Stone Harbor in Winter, and Overpriced Pizza
I really hate these Stone Harbor dreams sometimes because Stone Harbor is where we vacation every year and I love love LOVE that place, and generally the dream starts out the day we're leaving. This time was no exception, with the implication being that we'd been there for two weeks, and now it was Sunday and we were leaving (I even checked the day on my computer, whoa that's kinda trippy) and were starting to get packed up. I told Ben that we hadn't even done anything this time, not for the whole two weeks: we hadn't gone to the beach, or into town, and now we were leaving? It would be an entire year before we came back here again! At this point Ben corrected me, saying that HE had gone into town and to the beach, or perhaps implying that I had done those things and just didn't remember. I found this incredibly unfair.

There was another bit focusing more on Jess, where she'd been part of a movie or something. That may have been before the Stone Harbor bit, but it still tied in, with us watching her movie at some point. She was a relatively minor character, I think.

There also may have been some tie-in between the movie and our "real life" in Stone Harbor but I don't quiiiiite recall. Like, maybe some of the characters were wandering around the apartment for a little while, being dramatic. But I'm not sure.

Anyway then Jess and I decided to go into town that night, on rollerblades. On ice. For no reason. Which was pretty fun. I somehow managed to master skating uphill in roller blades over ice while near the water (which I recall being ... somehow very striking). However, the risk of falling in made me a bit uncomfortable, so we decided to move a street over and head back down.

On this street there was a more lively feel, as though it were daylight, perhaps, although it probably wasn't. It was still pretty icy and I had to be careful, but although we were going downhill it didn't FEEL like it was going downhill. Also, where the street would normally be, right at the edge of the sidewalk with no railing, was a deep channel with ice at the bottom, where various ice skaters were happily skating. Close by, a bridge connected the two adjacent sidewalks. Jess was, at first, unconvinced that such a large safety hazard would be allowed to exist like that, but when she neared the edge she realized that not only was the sidewalk around there icy, yes, there were no safety precautions at all.

At this point I got hungry! And I'm pretty sure this is a first in my dreams. It led me to decide to wander into a nearby pizza store that sort of doubled as a fairy tale store place. A strong fairy tale theme, where one would normally expect a beach theme. It was run by a young lady and her macho male assistant, who was a pretty cool guy I suppose. In waking life he probably would've been considered borderline insane.

So yeah I went in there and decided to order a slice of pizza. She said if I had a slice of pizza from another place, I could take advantage of her "two for $6" bargain, or something like that, and get a slice of her pizza for $3. I did not have a slice of pizza from another place but nevertheless I somehow managed to give that impression up until the point at which I was actually ordering, which took like 10 minutes, because of reasons.

I believe I made comfortable small talk for a little bit (which is unusual in dreams, probably because it's unusual IWL, except when I've had caffeine, which I did yesterday, and which I noticed allowed me to be a bit more comfortable in social settings so maybe that's whyyyyyy~), asking her what it was like to run a shop (because I was genuinely curious, which is great because in previous dreams my reactions hadn't been feeling self-motivated and it's great to be back in the swing of things). I tried to ask what she did during the off-seasons when nobody was at Stone Harbor, but what I accidentally said instead was "What do you do on nights and weekends?" and she responded with an uncomfortable silence. I only realized my slip when I woke up, and now I realize it looked like I was going to ask her out or something. And I didn't realize that until I woke up and had a slightly different perspective. THIS WHOLE PARAGRAPH HAS BEEN VERY STRANGE AND INTERESTING TO ME. AHHHH.

Anyway, then while she was getting the pizza ready I had to wait like ten minutes, or I don't know there was something about how I had to be read a fairy tale by her assistant. So he gets a book that's really just a bunch of sheets of paper with illustrations and writing on 'em, and starts to sing/read me this long poem/fairy tale. I can't remember the specifics at all, but it was really interesting because we were sitting on the floor, him singing with an absolutely astonishing amount of emotion in his voice, just absolutely belting it out and somehow managing to be very sad at the same time ... and me moving the pages out of the way as he read them, and laying them on the floor in a pile. I must've been semi-lucid, because while he was singing I noticed that I felt totally comfortable, whereas IWL, when somebody fakes strong displays of emotions near me, I automatically feel awkward and uncomfortable. Same when people are singing, though that's been improving lately. And I think the thought had occurred to me earlier as well, while Jess was acting. So I was certain it was a dream and not waking life, since I was directly comparing the two, but that was the extent of my interest at the time (as opposed to wandering out and trying dream powers). I think dream powers just weren't a focus for the moment. Maybe I was too sad about leaving Stone Harbor, and too immersed in what was happening.

Anyway he sang the whole stinking thing, and I listened, and then one of us helped the other up (I was wearing rollerblades so getting up was a problem) and I went to get my pizza. Or something. I think there was a brief bit where he'd picked me up and I was trying to make sure I didn't rollerblade his feet as he was setting me down.

Anyway then I finally told her that I didn't have an outside slice of pizza and she produced a second piece like it wasn't even a problem, and said something about it being 2 for $6. At this point I took a look at the slices of pizza and realized that she'd cut off about half of each of them with a semi-diagonal cut. All in all, I thought it was an absolutely terrible price, and as I was starting to move my pizza slices towards the cashier to pay for them (for some reason she'd given them to me at a different counter than the one with the register), I tried to remember what the pizza back home was like (I wasn't semi-lucid anymore, so instead of comparing her dream pizza shop to one IWL, I was actually comparing her Stone Harbor pizza shop to one back home), semi-successfully managing to remember that in my (IWL current) home county, a small pizza from Little Caesar's is about $8 (home IWL happening to equal the home in the dream, but not because I was semi-lucid). But Little Caesar's couldn't compare to this pizza. I said about as much, making a sort of awkward hushed comment about how the pizza at home was cheaper, but then stating that this pizza was of a far superior quality, so it worked out (which is a lie, because at my college campus I can get a slice of pizza about as big as her two slices, and just as delicious, for $2 and now I'm really hungry, frick).

I was about to dig through my (IWL) Mega Man 10 bag for a good $9 (apparently the price had jumped thanks to my mental number-juggling), but I woke up soon after, I think. Which sucked because I was really looking forward to that pizza, yo.

-

Btw I think I prefer not being in a lucid dreaming competition right now. Like, I just took an hour or so to write out that dream, I think, and were I in the competition right now it would've been worth one point. Goodness.

In other news I'm going to differentiate between what "low-level lucidity" and being "semi-lucid" mean to me. I'll consider myself semi-lucid when I can compare the dream and waking life to some degree, while not viewing the dream as something to be manipulated or changed. I'll consider it low-level lucidity when I'm thinking about how to trick the dream and use dream powers, but am not necessarily aware of the fact that I have a separate life outside the dream. YUP. I hope I made that clear because otherwise it will give me a headache :U

YAWN.
had a rather lengthy dream but the story was quite convoluted, not as bad as last night I suppose ... and anyway it feels like I forgot most of it already. too tired for this recall stuff. someone make me nap after class today. aaaaaa.

I'm breakin' this dream into two fragments cause recall so baaaad~

(note: when my alarm went off I totally laid in bed remembering my dream but I think it failed because I was tired, so I was too asleep to really think about why I needed to recall everything. and I sort of drifted in and out of sleep while I was doin' that so that may have made me forget some things. sleep so important, yo)

Fragment 1 - Spiny Shrimp Scientist
Bein' in a tide pool watching a couple different scientists perform experiments at various times. One of 'em was a spiky sea shrimp of some sort. I remember being impressed by his dexterity as he maneuvered around inside the tide pool, moving things around, doin' stuff like plugging a tube into something. Neat.

Fragment 2 - Time Travel Girl Mystery
There was a scientist girl who managed to travel through time into the future using a device she built, except it sort of went wrong. I remember seeing the actual attempt, with her in the machine she'd built in the middle of her lab. First it was just some sparks on her body and she was smiling like okay sure this will work, but then there was just a lot of electricity all over her and her screaming and it was like you know she dead. She wasn't, though. She time-traveled but I think she was sort of scarred by what happened.

Then I was there, in her lab after everything, just super intrigued by what had happened and wanting to know why she'd built it and what she'd been hoping to accomplish. I remember investigating a book shelf and checking out little devices on her desks. Meanwhile, my mom was chattering away in the background, which made it impossible to think, until I sort of got mad at her. And then I felt bad right away :U

Anyway the cool thing about this fragment is that I was genuinely emotionally invested and curious about her story. COOL.

IMMA TRY TO HURRY UP AND WRITE THIS OUT SO I CAN MOVE ON TO OTHER LIFE THINGS

Dream - Chewed-up Story Part II
Basically, in this dream... the perspective was all screwed up (no offense, brain), so that while the main story held strong ("An Unlikely Friendship"), the two main characters kept swapping out. Player 1 alternated between being a black kitten, me, and the Agro horse from Shadow of the Colossus, while the Player 2 character was either a black dog, my brother, a sort of horse/dog mix, or the apostle Paul.

At least I think that's what happened.

Overall it was as though someone had taken a bunch of story elements, chewed 'em up, and then spat them out, and pretty much left the story like that. Or it was sort of like the storyline being in the middle while the characters and setting mutate by turns.

So it started off in a school or a facility of SOME kind, where a tiny black kitten was found, apparently dead. Then it started to move, and boom, suddenly it was unexpectedly alive. Huzzah. A large black dog took a liking to it, and they became unlikely friends.

Then there was something about my brother and I being in the facility (I being the black kitten character, him being the black dog character), which was now leaning more towards a boarding school. Don't really remember that part, my outline isn't very helpful.

And lastly there was some third phase where I had been replaced by the horse Agro from Shadow of the Colossus, and Ben had been replaced by a large dog. Except I was now talking to Ben about this story, which had apparently happened some time ago in the past, about how happy I was that this was a thing that had actually happened in real life. I was like man, it's so exciting that a horse and a dog actually became friends, even though it was way back in the medieval ages. At this point the large dog had a sort of odd mane that I remember stroking. Very unusual texture to it.

Last part was something about the dog having become the apostle Paul and angrily arguing with/holding off some other people in order to protect his companion. Or something like that.

THE TAKEAWAY FROM THIS is that my brain has become overexcited by story elements and needs to calm down. Or something like that. I don't really know. IM TIRED. I have to do Linear Algebra homework right now. hhhhhaaaaaaa. brain i love stories but could you please be more consistent next time~