Dream Dream Dream Dream Dream Dream

woke up naturally after this dream and spent some time just lying in bed half-awake before remembering that oh snap I was lucid in this one whaaaat

Lucid #5 Aw Yee
So it started out with me just doing my usual dream thing of picking out various items from a large department store, except this time I tried to leave without paying with everything in my shopping cart, and managed to walk outside (nighttime) before a friendly employee had to lay down the law for me. She said that if I were going to do that, there was a certain price limit I'd need to adhere to, so I had to put back some things and then I could take the rest and pay it back later. I realized that I didn't actually need a bunch of Christmas decorations (mostly it was a lot of that fake green tree stuff you can put everywhere, and a wreath) and decided that those would be the thing to put back.

As I was carrying an armful of fake green tree stuff back through the store, I passed the stuffed animal section, where a kid and his dad were having some sort of strange, stuffed-animal-related argument. I recognized that my dad and I had, in fact, had that same argument before (false memory) and was quite tempted to say as much to the kid on my second pass, now unburdened of weird fake green tree stuff. But I ultimately decided not to. Oh well.

I went back outside, where the employee was waiting with a receipt for the rest of my things. Taking and looking over the receipt, I was quite disappointed to realize that yes, I would still have to eventually pay for all this. Just not at that exact moment.

The next thing I remember is spontaneously becoming lucid simply because it felt like a dream. No reality check, no examining of my surroundings, not even an "aha" moment of "maybe this is actually a dream". My mindset simply swapped right on over to "lucid", so quickly and completely that all I remember is picking out "shooting a concussive blast from my palm" as my dream task of the moment and hopping right to it.

So then I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to shoot a concussive blast from my palm, which was... hard to figure out...? (I'm currently tempted to say "difficult" or "impossible" but that's a bad idea.) The second floor of the department store had a wall of windows which I stood in front of, right arm out, palm forward, left arm gripping and stabilizing my right, and then there was a whole lot of "how do" (meanwhile, a store employee looked on in alarm). I imagined the blast shooting out. I tried to summon the energy from within my arm. I imagined that perhaps my right upper arm might glow, and it may have. I thought about the way I was positioning my arms, and how it felt. (One thing I DIDN'T try was a voice command.) I'm pretty sure I never actually succeeded, though one window did end up broken somehow, and I have a vague-yet-pleasant memory of flying through it to the rooftop of another building in the night. Yay <3 (sorry, store employee)

I also remember trying to stabilize the dream by rubbing my hands together. Like the realization that I was lucid, it felt spontaneous and seemed to come from nowhere. Normally my dream ideas are linked back to the DreamViews forums somehow, like "oh right, I should rub my hands together to stabilize *mental image of the dream views home page*," or something like that. But this time, again, the idea seemed to have no real source of generation. I just tried rubbing my hands together and paying attention to how it felt.

Then I made the mistake of putting my rubbing hands up by my ear to listen to the sound of it, which felt so distinctly real that I started to think I was in bed, starting to move around and wake myself up. At that point I lost my conscious lucidity, though I think my state still qualified as low-level-lucidity. FAIL STABILIZATION. NICE TRY DAWG.

Oh and since it feeling real made me LESS lucid, my guess is that this sort of lucidity was the spontaneous kind that comes from the dream feeling like a dream. Things can be fuzzier in dreams, darker, and the whole dream can have a strong "dreamy" feel that can be picked up on. Which is what happened in this case, and I assume what happens to Tman and Flotsam.

ANYWAY. The last part of the dream was about some physical fight I had with my sister's boyfriend in order to protect my mom. Mom was, I believe, starting to get up there in years (and now had her own little granny apartment), and my sister's boyfriend N had decided to arm himself with sharp implements and barricade himself in the 1319 front office. I'm not sure how that counted as a threat to my mom. I think I saw him as a threat, and since he wasn't a threat to me (it being a dream, still), it translated into him being a threat to my mom, so I couldn't simply leave him alone. I sought him out, armed with sharp implements of my own, though I'm not sure which ones. I know for sure he had a box cutter, I suppose because memories involving pain are easier to remember. (THAT'S CALLED FORESHADOWING)

hhhehehehe so anyway I'm getting sweaty palms remembering this but let's see here.* There was some sort of room divider a short space away from the door, which forced me to go right. He was trying to take advantage of this somehow, I think by blocking my way into the open area of the room, and it became a struggle. This mainly consisted of me trying to stab/slice him, and him trying to stab/slice me (which was of much greater concern to me), and I ended up mostly on the defensive. There were a great deal of "too-close-for-comfort" moments. The only thing preventing the box cutter from box cutting me was my continuous and determined preventive efforts, so it was a largely bloodless struggle at first.

Then my determination finally failed, for a moment. We were locked up, both my implements blocked and me managing to block one of his, but the box cutter was free and I couldn't rally the mental strength to stop it from cutting into my left hand. I was simply mentally exhausted by all my previous efforts and how useless it felt. The pain was quite strong and highly unpleasant and all sorts of other descriptive adjectives, but I think on the whole it was a sort of relief to get it over with after a great deal of worry and anticipation. Which says a lot about my mindset in the dream at that point. Like it was a scripted event. Weird.

Anyway after that I pulled myself together and "defeated" him somehow, though not by severely injuring or killing him. I'm not sure what happened. But next thing we were simply talking, both still armed, and mom was in the room with us, almost as a sort of referee to keep us from fighting again, with her presence. At some point he admitted that his plan, had he been unable to find something sharp, had been to use an ultrafine point red sharpie and scribble madly on my skin, to try to give the impression (in the heat of the moment) that I was bleeding. Not the worst plan ever, I suppose. I said something like "Psychological warfare?" in response to this, and he was like yeah.

There was something else about a Metro train, potentially because those are rad. I don't remember anything else about it, though.

*not that this is a particularly "bad" or traumatizing memory. just quite intense I suppose. I don't know, I wouldn't call it bad.

back to sleeeeep~