non-lucid

I dreamed that I was watching the news with my mom and her partner.
The news was about the coming of a weird EU ban/censorship of a video game which contained content that was found to be insulting to Islam. It was especially strange because it was a very obscure video game on a very obscure old platform called Puma, which I'm sure pretty much nobody would know.

Nevertheless, after hearing the news, we rushed to find that video game and this Puma itself. We weren't interested in the game at all, it was just 100% curiosity piqued by the Streisand effect. My mom and her partner went to look for the video game at the store. Meanwhile I went to the basement to search around in our old stuff.

After searching around in the most abandoned places of the basement, I found my mom's old Puma, covered in spider webs. It was a gray device with a screen, a large cartridge slot and a big button on it. The plastic had an engraving of the real-life Puma logo (the running shoes brand).
I brought it upstairs, and when mom came back with the video game, we blew in its cartridge and in the slot, and inserted it, toggled the big button, and a red LED lit up.
The device showed large black monochrome pixels, and produced muffled beeping noises from inside.

The gameplay was extremely poor. The game's background was a single static image of something resembling a desert, and the play area was under it, where there were static sprites of guys with turbans, beards and scimitars. You repeatedly pressed a directional button to advance your guy toward the right while enemies were coming at him toward the left. When an enemy got near you, you had to quickly press the attack button and the enemy disappeared. When you got to the right, you advanced to the next screen, which basically just meant that some score value was incremented and the position of your guy was reset to the left side of the screen.

We got bored of it after like 2 minutes and wondered what all the fuss was about, and why the heck they would ban this (especially after all those years).

I made a video game! Again!

This game was the third entry in a shooter game series. The first two weren't made by me, but a third was in development and became vaporware. So I decided to make it from scratch, sort of unofficially.

It was the first game in the series to be in 3D. Interestingly, everything was made out of cardboard. The maps were outside areas, but they were inside a cardboard box with a skybox painted on it. The floor was painted green and the skybox various shades of blue and white. The weapons and enemies, the houses and the trees, everything was painted cardboard cutouts. And it was like a video game, but at the same time, the player is physically next to the box, as if he controls the character like a puppet.

I let my friend play the game. The first few maps were simple. He was having fun shooting up enemies in the destructible cardboard terrain.
But then there was the third map, which was very peculiar. It seemed to be a completely empty area without an exit at all. I giggled as my friend was stumped, looking around and trying to figure this out.

Eventually he found out the solution to the puzzle. He put his hand inside the play area, poked a hole in the floor, and tore it to shreds. The exit was located under the ground. I laughed my ass off and clapped my hands because he found it.

In this dream, I'm my early childhood self, and might be set during my childhood as well, but there were some moments where it seamlessly transitioned to my adult self today and then back.

The dream starts off during childhood. I'm at my grandmother (dad's mom). I'm upstairs playing with legos. I make a very complex construction, a sort of house, but then I run out of lego blocks since it's so large and I get bored. I go downstairs and talk to my grandmother. She says "why don't you play outside? the weather is nice", and I go outside.

I run around the neighborhood. The neighborhood has a sidewalk and a few bushes and grass patches, but as a child, I perceived it as being much larger and complex than it actually is, and that's the way I perceived it in the dream. Instead of just a linear sidewalk, it's a sort of square maze filled with sidewalks, bushes and grass, and with no street in sight. The weather is warm and it's all around a very serene experience.

At some point during that, the dream seems to suddenly transition to the adult era, and I get a phone call on my android. It's an invitation from my colleagues to go dine somewhere in the evening at the expense of the company, and I agree to join. During dusk in the maze, I look for the exit to go to the restaurant. By the time the sun is down, I'm in the city and I find my colleagues sitting at a terrace table, waving at me to catch my attention. I join the table, and opposite of me sits my old colleague, who I worked closely together with, but left the company years ago.

While we were waiting for the food, two colleagues were having an argument about something. At some point I get sick of it and I logically analyze their arguments bit by bit, trying to find the core essence of their disagreement. I point out a contradiction. One of them says, in a comically formal yet non-sarcastic tone, "thank you. I'm glad we were able to resolve that."

The waiter comes to our table and asks us individually what sauce we want with our steak. I had pepper sauce in mind, but my colleague sitting opposite of me says "I'll take the azuré sauce". I never heard of that before. The waiter was now awaiting my response, and in a snap decision, I also went for the "azuré sauce". A bit later we were served our meal. On the plate was a steak lying in a pool of this mysterious azuré sauce. It didn't look very delicious. It was thick and looked like something brown with small pieces of carrot in it, whatever it was. Anyway, visually it was quite reminding of fecal matter. I smelled it, and it smelled very bad, like vinegar. I wasn't gonna like this, but I picked that sauce, so it'd be awkward to pretend that I don't want it now. Fortunately, there was only a thin layer of it on the steak, the bulk of it was beside it. I took the steak with my fork and moved it out of the sauce. This left a hole into the sauce because it was so thick. I ate the steak, trying to stomach the little bit of sauce that was on top of it. When we were done eating, I felt a little nauseated. I said to the colleague "well, that sauce was certainly interesting... what is it made of?". He laughed, and he said "well, I'm not sure if you've noticed, but I'll just say this: ever since you took that steak off of it, it's been trying to slowly crawl off your plate!". I looked at the sauce again and saw 2 fisheyes in it with 2 small tentacles between them. I lifted this sauce up with my fork and saw that underneath, there was the foot of a seaslug! Then obviously I felt even more nauseated. (I'm on antibiotics for my illness right now, and that's actually giving me a bit of nausea in real life, that probably explains that part of the dream)

Anyway, after that highly unpleasant experience, we were drinking. I was drinking vodka. The location of the terrace seems to have changed a bit at this point, and we were now sitting by an alleyway. I was telling my colleagues about the warzone in Ukraine. I pointed out to them that actually, we sitting right near the border of Ukraine right now, and if you look carefully into the alleyway, you'll see some broken floor tiles, and that's because of all the bombing going on.

I drink some more vodka and get a little drunk. Because I'm drunk, I accidentally push the bottle off the table as I tried to grab it. The bottle fell and shattered, and I saw a cop coming for me out of the alleyway. I said "oh shit" and ran away into the streets of the city. On the street was a random low brick pedestal. I stood on the pedestal and I pretended to be a street light. The cop was deceived, was guarding around for a little while, and then left. I got off the pedestal and thought "haha, what a dumbass!".

I continued further down the city and I reached the pedestrian bridge. The world seems to have transitioned back to childhood mode at this point. When I was a child, I loved that pedestrian bridge, because much like the neighborhood sidewalk, it seemed much more mazelike to me than it really is. So again, I'm strolling around on a bridge-themed maze hanging over the Schelde river, trying to find the way to the other side.

When I reached the other side, I was near my old school, and I saw a bulky guy there. He looked like a bully, but he was strangely friendly as I talked to him. I had a double feeling about him, though. At some point, he sighed "well, time to go back into my bunny suit, I guess... one more hint: try to get inside!" I didn't know what he meant by any of that. He walked away into a small garage. The gate closed, and opened again shortly after. Out came a monster, and he was like the bully, but he was a large evil cyborg rabbit. He bottom half was a mechanical contraption, like a robot or tank. But top half and the head was a very bulky bunny's. A boss theme from Metal Gear Solid 2 started to play. He went toward a place that contained 4 tablet pc's on pedestals. He took out a flamethrower and started to melt them down. I realized that I needed to protect these tablet pc's, so I took out an AK47 and shot him, but he was invulnerable. The tablets all broke and I saw a game over screen.

I was frustrated and looked up a walkthrough on the internet. The walkthrough says that he's actually a puzzle boss and there's a secret way to beat him. Before he gets into the gate, you can throw your cap at him and he will be mind controlled. So that's what he meant with that hint! He was trying to help me in stopping him from destroying the tablets by proxy. So I tried that, threw my cap, garage gate closed and opened again. This time, I was in the bunny's first person view which had a terminator-like hud. I was now controlling his mind. However, I wasn't sure what to do to kill him. I couldn't use the flamethrower on myself. I looked around in a bunch of closets and found my mom's perfume closet. I saw a bottle of perfume in there, and I thought "if he drinks this, he's probably going to get very ill and die". I had him drink the perfume, became a bit nauseated again, but I realized that that wasn't enough to kill him. So I grabbed another bottle of vodka and chugged it down all at once. Then he became very drunk, and fell off into the depths. I beat the boss battle, and that's where the dream ended.

I've got the flu atm, and I dreamt a whole bunch of short, disconnected dream fragments over a cycle of falling asleep and waking again. I remembered 4 of them. I remembered a 5th at some point, but alas I forgot it after falling asleep again.

In the first, I was heading towards an airport because I had to catch a plane. There was an apparently short route on the left and an apparently long route on the right. I took the short route, but that led to the back side of the airport. I talked to some people to ask for directions, and they sent me on some way which I discovered I would've ended up on much quicker if I just took the "long" route. I'm not sure what made me think the right route was the long one. I did catch my plane just in time! Inside of plane it looked more like the interior of a submarine, however.

In the second, I was working on my software project with my colleague. He turned around to talk to me, and pointed to the sky. In the sky I saw the structure of my project, and he pointed to a problematic part in it. He asked if our project was supposed to support smart contracts or not (even though in real life it has nothing to do with cryptocurrency or smart contracts). I told him that my original designs of the system was supposed to support smart contracts, but it's not terrible if we ended up going for a simpler and more limited solution. He said "good, let's go for the simple solution then. we're running short on time, and if we don't finish the project, we'll fail the exam". (Somehow, the whole thing switched from working on a project for my job to working on a project for a college exam.) I suddenly started to feel stressed because I remembered that I had exams to do, and I hadn't studied anything, I only focused on the project, and I'm barely even managing to finish that. I tried to enumerate all the subjects I had to study for in my head. For each subject I remembered, I got stressier, because I wasn't prepared for any exams at all. Luckily the dream was over before the exams started.

In the third dream, I was sitting in the living room of another family as a guest. They had 2 tvs. One tv was on the "MTV" channel, where the highest bidder can promote their music to popularize it. Next to that tv was another channel, called "Payback TV". This channel took all the music and programs that were cancelled from MTV, and rebroadcasted them there. I was interested in neither channel, so I went to check out the garage. In the garage there was a bunch of trash, and in the pile was a 3rd functional tv that was on another channel called "Trash TV". It turns out that if a program stayed on Payback TV for more than 6 months, it got cancelled from Payback TV too, and continued on to looping on Trash TV forever. The Trash TV screen was black-and-white. It was playing music videos from a very obscure band that I'm a fan of. I was more interested in that, so I watched Trash TV in the garage instead. At some point I felt like I needed to pee and took a piss in the trash pile. Then I awoke, feeling that I need to pee in real life, glad that I didn't accidentally wet my bed!

After the toilet break I fell asleep one more time. In this dream I was looking for a solution to a caching problem in my project for work. A solution had been proposed to archive every page as a static html, rather than rendering it anew every time it's visited. However, there was a problem that the application I'm making is a very context-sensitive - the system behind the user permissions is very complex. So each user basically gets to see a different view of the page. I imagined every possible variable in the context as a dimension in a multidimensional grid. I imaged a process running constantly in the background, trying to fill all the cells in the grid with caches, evaluating a priority function to decide the next cell to cache. I imagined cache invalidation as the clearing of a whole row in either dimension. The background process tried to catch up with the cache invalidation as fast as it could. As I imagined this visually, it turned from an idea into a video game. The player is the cache and tries to fill all the cells, while the difficulty lies in the computer frequently clearing rows of the grid. Since it was simply a grid of coloured squares, the game looked like an Atari 2600 game. It was a very annoying game to play.

This dream was set in a universe where everything is like it is now (and so we have all the advanced technology that we have right now), except that the USSR and all the other communist states still exist. I was almost done with college (computer science), and I had to go do an internship.

As I looked through all the available internship positions on the internet, I saw one that was quite interesting, to say the least. It was an internship as system administrator in communist Romania, for leader Nicolae Ceausescu. It sounded quite crazy and adventurous, and I got to work together with a supreme leader of a country, imagine that! So I was totally into it and I took the internship.

I don't think I saw much of Bucharest or of Romania in general. The dream skipped straight to the offices of Ceausescu. He was giving me a tour around the building, telling me where everything is, telling me what my job is, etc. He told me that I would be paid in a cryptocurrency called DigitalSilver (doesn't exist in real life, by the way).

I ended up sitting in an office that looked a lot like my grandma's (dad's mom) kitchen. I was there together with 2 others, a male cook and a female secretary. We were all doing our thing: I was doing some indistinct tasks on a terminal, the cook was cooking food, and the secretary was filling in some documents. Ceausescu was roaming around the building the whole time, occasionally coming in to check on us.
At some point my mom calls me to ask how everything's going. I said everything is fine.

Spoiler for *** WARNING: GRAPHIC PART ***:

All seemed pretty chill, until at some point, Ceausescu notices an error in what the secretary was doing. He gets angry, grabs a large knife, and stabs it right into her face. It was pretty gory. He cut a whole part out of her face, like the entire middle part cut out like an apple, so that there was only a huge pyramid-shaped wound left. Her eye was hanging out of the socket. As he got the knife out and let go of her shoulder, her corpse fell down on the desk and blood was gushing out of her face. The whole scene was very upsetting.

My heart was beating very rapidly and I looked at the cook. He pretended as though he didn't see it, so I did the same. At this point I was very scared, but I tried to stay calm. I should just continue working, and avoid making any errors, and by the end of the week I can go home. Then it's just a matter of simply no longer coming back (to hell with that school degree). I continued working as best as I could, double checking every command I entered into the terminal. But I felt very very scared, and the thought of possibly getting a knife to the face like what I just saw scared me shitless and I could no longer concentrate. The more I thought of it, the faster my heart was beating, and my hands started shaking.

I wanted to call up my mom with my android phone. I waited until Ceausescu exited the room, and then I ran upstairs. This place looked a lot like my other grandma's (mom's mom) upstairs hall, together with all the bedrooms. I went behind a bed and took my cellphone. However, I had this eerie feeling that Ceausescu might've followed me, so I didn't call yet. Rather I waited for a while to hear if there wasn't any noise coming from another room. And there was no noise, but I was still very paranoid, so I slowly crawled around to check on the other bedroom.

As I peeked into the bedroom, to my surprise, I saw my SNES on a nightstand. That was very suspicious, it might be a trap. So I peeked a little further, sticking my head into the room a little. And, just as I feared, I saw Ceausescu's shadow on the floor, he was waiting for me behind the corner! I was incredibly scared and I froze. Then I made a snap decision to just flee from the place and go back downstairs to the office.

I asked the cook how I could claim the DigitalSilver tokens for the work I had done so far. Somehow, I had the time (and bad priorities) to first claim my DigitalSilver, trade them for litecoins, and sending them over to my wallet. Then I darted for the exit and the dream was over.

A very bizarre one, and I only remember small fragments, but I'll try my best to describe it...

The dream was in some sort of an underwater cave system. I could swim like a fish and breathe underwater.

One of the cave entrances had a bar. When I entered the bar, there was somehow no water inside, it just looked like a normal bar above the sea level, but regardless, the bartender was a fish with a mustache. He was cleaning a beer glass. There was no way to get behind the counter, but in the middle of the room was a box. I pushed it so I could jump over. When I got behind the counter, I grabbed a bottle of whiskey but the bartender didn't care.

In another scene, for some reason I had to chase a derpy eel called Gustenbiebel. Little did I know that he also had an evil twin brother, Kwistenbiebel*. They both lived in a separate cave, but their entrances looked similar. I chased Gustenbiebel, lost him for a bit, and momentarily I saw from some point of view other than my own that he fled into his cave. So I swam to his cave, but I accidentally entered Kwistenbiebel's cave instead, and I was stuck there. Kwistenbiebel looked rather hungry. Fortunately, that's where the dream ended at, it seems.

(* "kwistenbiebel" is a Flemish word that means something like "moron"... "gustenbiebel" is just something my dream made up)

I was away for a few weeks... re-exams 'n stuff... so I couldn't spend much time into dream business. However, I remember a few dreams from the past two weeks quite clearly (albeit briefly). So I'll jot those down now in this combo-post.

Slender Man's African cousin?
Clearness: Fairly clear.
Vividness: Intense!
Realism: Set in the real world, but still unrealistic.
Mood: Creepy... anxious... still, strangely fun.
Lucid: No.

This dream was about me and my sister "designing a video game" (although that didn't happen like in the real world). In order to do this, we played the game set in the house and in the garden (not virtually, but actually).

The rules were to run from a certain starting point and hide. After a few minutes, a strange creature would appear which would come and find us. The last one to get caught is the winner.
I didn't really know what the creature looked like, but I did know he behaved in a similar manner to the Slender Man. Same rule as in the game Slender counted; the more you look at him, the more of a threat he becomes.

So then we pretty much just ran through the garden, keeping vigilant of the surroundings, every once in a while seeing him vaguely pop up from somewhere in the scenery. He looked like a rather dark, shadowy figure. At a moment when he was nowhere to be seen, we decided to get to the basement and hide in there, as we thought he wouldn't go and look for us there. Unfortunately though, after some time obviously he did.
I panicked a little, and quickly "hid" in a quite poor place, but with my face against the wall, so there is no way he could pop up into my sight. I heard his footsteps. He was gradually coming closer and closer, as if his senses could tell him "warmer" and "colder" in his thoughts. Then... he stood RIGHT behind me. I heard his 2 feet land right behind mine and I felt his breath in my neck. I was shivering with fear. Then I felt a hand touching my back, he rudely turned me around, and then I saw his face from really close, which made me shit brix.

His face could best be described as an African male face with features from Aku Aku from Crash Bandicoot, and his facial expression can best be described with this image of Aku from Samurai Jack. It was so cartoonish, yet terrifying.

In the next "scene", our video game was magically created, and we were designing a cover for the game, in some sort of... finger painting like way. My sister drew the image, and I decorated the background with scary lines like "Don't look behind you..." and "He's always watching...".

This dream was blatantly and obviously based on the pc game Slender. Interestingly though, by that time I had never actually played the game yet, I only saw some brief gameplay footage from PewDiePie, so it was more or less based on my expectations of the game. It did make me curious to try the game myself in waking life the night after this though.

Ancient lucid dream inducing room
Clearness: The interesting part was clear, but I remember pretty much only that.
Vividness: Kinda...
Realism: Mostly unrealistic, but unfortunately it was realistic where it shouldn't have been.
Mood: Good.
Lucid: Almost!

So basically in this dream I went on a vacation with my family to... Rome I guess, according to the visual style of the surroundings. Visiting the ruins of ancient Rome, and some museums, toured by a guide.
I cannot quite remember the biggest part of the dream, but I do quite clearly remember the most important one.
At some point in a museum, the guide told us about "ancient lucid dream inducing rooms", which were dark rooms with beds, where supposedly some sort of slight electrical activity manipulated your brain into easy WILDs. All you had to do, is believe that it works.
I was very interested in trying this, as I had been reading about lucid dreaming somewhere before (guess where!), so me and my family decided to try out these rooms and spend the night in them.

I got into the bed, closed my eyes, tried to clear my mind, and after a few minutes, I thought I would open my eyes and try doing a reality check. Now, get this... I actually did a finger-thru-palm reality check, but it didn't work. I think this is probably because I assumed that I had been awake all the time, completely not realizing that I already WAS in a dream all along. So therefore, my reality check had the same result as it would've had in waking life. Augh... so close...!
So then... the next morning I left the room. As a skeptic. Heh.

Ever since I had this dream, I realized I should probably try and take my reality checks more seriously, even though I really already was trying. It's so hard to genuinely doubt reality if you know you're obviously not dreaming. I'll keep up the practice, I guess.

Underwater base action
Clearness: I remember it very poorly.
Vividness: It sure was exciting though for all I can remember.
Realism: Very unrealistic.
Mood: Not particularly good, not particularly bad.
Lucid: No.

This is just yesterday's dream. Nothing important, except it featured my most recurring dream sign, trains.

I can't really tell much about it. All I know is that I looked like Johnny Depp (hey that is pretty awesome!) and it also featured Yuffie Kisaragi from FFvii as the second main character.
It was basically set in a complex underwater base, consisting of hubs that were connected through, guess what, trains. It was probably kinda Rapture-like. The story was roughly about we 2 fighting for freedom... whatever that really meant! I fought with a tommy gun and Yuffie with her shuriken.
At some point something epic happened which involved Yuffie being captured, but she frees herself in some epic way... dunno... aaaaand... well that's it, actually. Nothing new or memorable.

Clearness: Clear.
Vividness: Quite vivid.
Realism: Unrealistic.
Mood: Good. Also kinda scary, but in a fun way.
Lucid: No.

This dream was short, but probably because of that, I also remember it quite clearly.

It started off at my street late at night, and my sister's boyfriend stopped by with his van, opened the window and told me "We're gonna go to the beach to tomorrow. You're coming?"... "Sure", I replied.

In the next "scene" we are at the beach (I'm pretty sure I dreamed nothing inbetween those parts), and me & my sister's boyfriend decide to get into the sea as far as we can, while sis sunbaths in the sand. Everything was realistic up until this point.

We went into the sea by carefully walking on rocks, with sister's bf taking point. The further we went into the sea, the more unrealistic the surroundings became. It seemed as though we were in the middle of the sea and the beach was nowhere to be seen. The rocks we walked on also "changed" into grey inflatable shark/dolphin things.
We made progress, though it was hard, because it's difficult to keep your balance on inflatable balloon things in water.
We then reached the last inflatable shark and we could go any further, so we decided to go back. We needed to make a jump from one shark to another. Sis' bf made the jump right, but I jumped too much to the right, so I had to swim in the water a bit to get on. But then, sis' bf shouted "Watch out! There's a shark swimming near you!", and yes indeed, under the water I saw a blurry black image of a (REAL) shark swimming around. I struggled to get on the inflatable one, and I made it.

A bit further, randomly in the middle of the sea, there was this L-shaped construction made out of sandstone, perfectly made for us to sit on, and the vertical side of it went all the way up into the sky, so... in my dream, it must've "hung on the ceiling" of the sky, which is of course impossible, but really the sole purpose of that construction was that is was created by my dream so we would have something to sit on comfortably.
We reached the construction, relieved that we escaped the shark... but the shark was coming back. And he was gonna bite our feet off. I reached for the swiss army knife that I always keep in my pocket, normally... but instead, I had but a simple butter knife.
The shark jumped out of the water to bite me, and I chopped the butter knife in his mouth, and... somehow... I managed to kill him with it. Go figure.
It ended here, I think.

Recently, in real life, I told someone that "I always keep a knife in my pocket, and it sure ain't no butter knife!"
This probably explains the silly butter knife thing.

Clearness: Quite clear, but I remember only a few parts clearly.
Vividness: Moderately vivid.
Realism: Strange mixture of 8-bit video game and realistic, detailed scenes.
Mood: Fun.
Lucid: No.

There are two things I dream about the most: Either video games, often Final Fantasy, or public transport vehicles, often trains.
This dream was kinda special in that it featured both FF and trains as the main subject.
The dream mainly consisted of SNES tile map visuals, with 8-bit NES music and sounds.

There was probably some more stuff going on before this part, but as far as I can remember, it started at the platform of a big train station, with the screen centered on the rail. I could go to the left and to the right.
I went to explore to the right, and the next screen was suddenly a highly detailed 1st person view on a broad rail way with multiple rails, each of them forking in various directions. I found it a strangely beautiful sight (who knows, maybe there is a hidden fascination for trains and railways inside me? ).
I went back to the first screen, and went to explore to the left, but just as I was about to enter the screen to the left, I stood still and a little "cutscene" with a train arriving from the left occurred. The door opened, I got in, and the train departed.

On the train there were various NPC's but I couldn't talk to em. Yet, somehow, I knew my quest at this point, which is to defeat 5 progressively difficult bosses who are located at the front of certain trains, including this one. I went to the front and interacted with the train driver. A small conversation happened and a battle initiated, which suddenly looked rather FF7-esque (the FF7 boss theme was playing too), and I wasn't fighting the train driver, but some sort of spider-like creature.
I can't recall the battle itself, nor when I won it, but somehow I just... know that I did. So when I did, I arrived at a new location, I can't remember much about it, but I met Bugenhagen.
A while later I went on a train again, fought a stronger boss, and arrived at a new location again.

This location was snowy and it contained a small shelter. I went in and talked to the person inside, who was my little cousin. He said there was going to be an "invasion" tonight (no particular details), and I had to help fortify the shelter with snow before the timer ran out.
This was basically a minigame where I had to interact with snow tiles to break em, pick em up, and move em so that they surrounded the shelter (probably a slight minecraft element here). I succeeded, went in, and another highly detailed 1st person scene occurred.
It was dark inside, a few candles were burning, and we heard the unidentified "invasion" coming (it was a bit like an earthquake). My cousin began to panic and scream, and after a while his screaming annoyed me tremendously.

Oh, and at some point in the dream, but I can't exactly tell when, I was following a long railway on a mountain on foot at sunset; also a very beautiful sight. (Sometimes I get beautiful moments like this in dreams, which makes me wish I was any good at painting )

Hmm... there was probably some more after this, but not much I think. So I didn't manage to complete the main quest before waking up. :<

Clearness: Fairly clear.
Vividness: Fairly vivid.
Realism: Seemed real, but actually it was littered with physically impossible things.
Mood: Most good, but it had a certain grim part.
Lucid: Almost. Well, a little bit actually.
Oh, and... well uhh... I'd say, red text is lucid. Mmkay? I gotta think of a better color key sometime. >_>

In the first dream, I was playing an entirely fictional video game that I think was called... Syncron... or Cron... or Xion... or something in that fashion. Well, it ended on "-on" anyways. Lol.
The game looked a lot like Unreal Tournament '99, same kinda style, graphics, weapons etc, but there were a few twists. There was only one map that was like some sort of space station. It had 2 floors, the top red team floor and the bottom blue team floor. Each floor was a circular corridor with doors to identical small rooms, and an elevator. In every small room, there were 3 random "power ups", that looked like shining colored beads (it was a lot like the "materia" from FF7), stored in glass containers.
Oh, I know, let's quickly visualize it.



And there wasn't even very much shooting involved. The whole game was generally just more like tactical usage of powerups.
I remember the match was going equally well for both teams. At some point, only me, on red, was left, against only one more player from blue. We both realized that the map had pretty much run out of good powerups, so we were just running around, dodging each other. At some point, I found a yellow powerup, with the effect "Kill parents". This would kill the other player's parents..... yes, for real. And in order to use the only powerup left that could frag him ingame, I had to use this one first. All players purposefully agreed to never use that powerup, but I just had to do it, I had to win, I've never won this game before being the last man standing.
So I decided to use the powerup. Suddenly, I saw on the minimap that the other player stood still; probably because he realized his parents just died. I was about to use the powerup that'd let me win the game... but then I felt remorse, and I used the "Revive parents" powerup, which would undo what I've done. Then I disconnected from the game.
Well, that was kinda weird. I don't have dead parents, or friends with dead parents... nor have I ever killed anyone's parents. (^^;

Anyway... next dream.
The second dream was about waking up in the morning and going to school. I got on the bus (I don't even go by bus IRL), but inside the bus it didn't look like a bus at all. It looked more like a rather large rectangular room which had 3 stacked rows of seats. This area could impossibly be inside of a bus. Anyway, not that I cared, I just rode the bus, talking to some people a bit.
Then I got off the bus, and I realized that I was an hour too early, because someone told me I didn't have any class the first hour. So I was just spending that hour hanging around with school friends, visiting some people.
I particularly remember ringing my sister's ex-boyfriend's door (I've never visited his house IRL, but this was the dream version of his house). It didn't look like a spectacular house from the outside, but inside there was a large, luxurious room with a big indoor swimming pool. I talked with him a bit, and then I went off to school.
Then I realized... I actually DID have a class that hour. I was just hanging out with the guys from the other class, who happened to have a free hour, but I didn't. I also saw that the class was Statistics (which covers a span of 4 hours).
I decided I'd better just go home then, because it's very awkward if you arrive in class an hour too late, especially in statistics class (trust me, I've had it before IRL )

Then I arrived home and I turned on the computer, browsing the internet. I wasn't really paying attention to what sites I was browsing though.
Until... my mom came in the room, looked at my screen, and asked "Hey, what site are you browsing?". Then, I paid attention to the screen, and it was this site.
I wanted to say "dreamviews.com", but upon seeing the logo, I suddenly stopped to think.
Aaand yup, then I realized I was dreaming. Next thing I know, I was sitting in a completely blank room. However, instead of remembering to do any dream stabilization techniques, my mind was occupied with thinking about the anomalous things that happened before (the strange game, the bus, the house), and well... the dream just pretty much ended with the conscious realization "Indeed... this was all a dream".

I kinda noticed how, whenever I attempt to MILD, there is a person at the end of my dream who is giving me subtle hints that I'm dreaming. And this time I actually managed to catch the sign, too.
Technically, the mantra I chose did exactly what it said: "Next time I dream, I will realize that I'm dreaming". However, I very simply became overwhelmed by racing thoughts, and forgot to do the next step. Maybe next time then?

Clearness: Vague.
Vividness: Quite vivid.
Realism: Completely alternate universe.
Mood: Morbid.
Lucid: No.

I don't remember much of this dream. I can only tell I was lost in some very dark, morbid alternate universe, consisting of a very complex & chaotic jungle consisting of rusted metal overgrown by huge, nettle-like vegetation, and crawling with huge scorpion-like creatures that can crawl on the wall and the ceiling. I remember giant, brown spiders and roaches too.
I also remember meeting a mean looking, witch-like old woman in a certain room, who lived there, and she told me where I can find a shotgun to keep the creatures away from me. At some point I found the shotgun, and started to shoot the scorpions. When I hit one, blood splattered all over the wall and it disappeared.
This dream was probably quite influenced by Silent Hill and Doom 3.

Clearness: Very clear.
Vividness: Lots of things happened.
Realism: Pretty realistic, with a few fantasy elements.
Mood: Very fun.
Lucid: Attempted, and received a subtle signal, but failed.
Oh, btw, I decided to write side notes in purple.

This was a fun, clear dream. Great one for my first DJ entry here.
So basically I dreamed that a Hungarian friend of mine came on a vacation to Belgium, and various things happened.

At some point I showed him my underground mushroom farm under the basement (this part sort of references Terraria), which was like a little underground forest (resembling the Ancient Forest from FF7), with blue mushrooms growing in it. I told him I had some problems with it, because only blue mushrooms were growing and no red ones.
So he suggested we should go to the market to buy some red strawberries then. (Notice how it's suddenly strawberries...)

We made a walk to the market, and we decided to go to the baker to buy a strawberry cake (Notice how it's suddenly strawberry CAKE he should make up his mind).
The baker wasn't there at the moment, so we just took the cake, cut it in half, and ate it while we waited for him to show up. He showed up, gave us a friendly greeting, and we paid him.
Then, for some reason, he decided to go back by car, and I was gonna go back by bike... even though we went there on foot in the first place. I was riding my bike back home, and I suddenly felt a need to go very quickly... and for good reason, because seconds after I felt that, it started to rain (that ALWAYS happens if I go somewhere by bike).
I arrived back home with my hair being only a little wet, and for some reason, to go back inside, I needed to go up a staircase that has a 90° turn to the right every few steps. In front of me was a man who, at EVERY turn, hit the wall and felt groggy for a few seconds, and then continued. I dunno what was up with him, maybe he was blind, maybe drunk, but it was a funny sight anyways.

When I arrived back in my house, which was suddenly my dad's house, we decided to watch the Olympic Games on tv. One of the disciplines was IRL pac-man, with a guy dressed in a pac-man suit, and four others dressed in ghost suits, and the pac-man guy tried to eat all the dots in the maze as fast as he could.
I joked to my dad and my friend that he's gonna puke if he'll eat so much dots.

Then I watched some weird videos on youtube (from the typically "weird side of youtube") with my friend, and some other minor stuff.

At the end of the dream, quite notably, my friend talked to me about dreaming. This was very probably a subtle sign that I should do a reality check, as I was telling myself in my mantra before I went to sleep, but unfortunately I didn't catch it. Ah, better luck next time then.