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AAAAAAAA I lost my entire journal entry. I hit the back button somehow and I don't even know how!!!! It blanked everything out!

I don't know why it claims it auto-saves when I can never find my drafts. Ever. They never appear, even when I save things as drafts. Not once have they ever.

I'm REALLY upset and frustrated.

Ok, fine, here I go AGAIN.

First dream: Fragmentary. May have been lucid. All I remember is a very interesting looking brown and cream diamond tiled floor. I almost always forget any lucids from my first dream, and everything in them is fragmentary and fuzzy. They're also always only barely lucid, not even worth considering one if I really wanted to be strict about it.

Second dream: Dreamed about a farm. Fragmentary, weird, and complicated. Hard for me to make sense of. I'll write more later. Some bullet points:
- kind of video game farm but also not
- piles of laundry/hay
- helping my aunt
- weird cat thing in a sack
- apple trees
- HUGE tree with a city in it

Woke up, tried an induction. I was trying to end up in Rome, but my attempt failed.

Third dream:
There was a street festival in a more run-down area of my old home town. It was in front of a two-story white house. There were a lot of food vendors, and there was also a stretch of street full of people doing face-painting for children. I was trying to meet up with my boyfriend on the other side, so I picked my way through them, trying not to knock over any paint or step on any children. After I got through, I realized that I could have simply walked along side the whole thing instead of through it.

Before the festival, my boyfriend and I had buried our more valuable belongings along the side of the house and marked it with a long, stiff, silver blade of grass. After the festival was over, we went to go dig it up. But there was a guy who considered it to be his territory, and he seemed aggressive and we thought he might attack us. He was flying around in a tiny plane thing he sat on top of.

So we abandoned our stash, and I couldn't remember if I'd buried my wallet with it, but I hoped I hadn't. We got in my car and started driving away from there, and drove through some thick woods. He disappeared into the trees. We turned around, hoping he was lost or thought we were still in there, and went back to try to dig up our stash before he showed up again.

Woke up. Tried an induction into Rome again... attempt failed.

Then I dreamed about a "cone" on Mars that may have been a tower from an advanced alien civilization. For some reason, though, NASA didn't seem interested in investigating it, which was frustrating. There wouldn't have been a way to analyze the technology anyway without humans there in person, if we could even get ahold of any (which was unlikely) and there wasn't much to gain by sending humans there to do it, either. I doubted the rover would be able to get there and get anything without them destroying it. They didn't even know about the little rover driving around out there, anyway.

Then I dreamed that there was suddenly a new Democratic candidate, a young Latino guy. All of the candidates' faces were up on huge banners, but Hillary's was the only one that had a name on it.

I believe my inductions had such a high failure rate because the environment I was trying to send myself to was very unfamiliar. My inductions into familiar places are much more successful.

Dreamed I was being sedated so people could "train" at doing it... There were people reclining in a long row with their heads wrapped in white gauze, and theur clothes were all completely white. The whole thing was very brightly lit and felt very sterile. Watched a woman - a pretty brunette with an oval face - be partially sedated and then her head was wrapped in gauze and syringes were inserted into her face really close to her eyes in a way that made me cringe. I didn't know how much of it you would feel. Then I was next... But it was some kind of ruse and they were actually planning on killing me or something. But they couldn't completely sedate me, which was a huge problem with their plan.

That's all I remember.

Then, I just remembered a fragment of a dream i had months ago. I was walking through a city with two male acquaintances, both pretty tall. Both of them worked for Amazon as tech people. We kept walking by alleys that smelled horrible, like full dumpsters and raw sewage. At one point I lost them and had to cut through one of those horrible alleys to catch up. It was between 2 tall brown brick buildings and paved with uneven bricks, and just generally gross. I think it was kind of raining, too.

I was panicking about losing them was because they were my roommates, I had just rented the room, and I didn't know the address of the house, even though I knew it was nearby (at the end of a cul-de-sac). I had the key, but no clue where it was, and I was freaking out about never being able to find it - at least, for tonight - and having nowhere to sleep. I didn't have their phone numbers, either, so I had no way to contact them.

I came out at a place that was a border between thick downtown development and a suburb. At that point, the sky was clear and it was nice and sunny. I went up and down the street until I finally found the two of them.

I recall calling my mother because I was upset and freaking out. She sounded sympathetic but exasperated by how irresponsible I was.

The house was messy... White siding, poorly painted white door that was a little warped - the yard was passable, with green grass but not well maintained. Lots of natural lighting in the living room.

Anyway, the guys told me how to get there. After getting slightly lost, I found my way there.

I only remember my last 2 dreams besides waking up briefly and trying to remind myself to remember the prior dream (I forgot it).

Dreamed I was back in high school. I got on the bus and got off at the wrong stop. The bus I'd been on is the bus that I take to work now, but the layout of the city itself had changed quite a bit, and there was a suburb where downtown should have been. I freaked out, because it meant that I was going to be 15 minutes late, and I was already in huge trouble academically. I'd been warned that I couldn't be late even one more time, or I wouldn't pass the grade I was in.

I also realized I wasn't on the street I thought I was on, which would have been a straight shot to the school. I was on a side street I didn't recognize. In fact, it was even a dead end.

Some other students had gotten off the bus at the same time I had, for some reason. They were older kids. So the older kids seemed kind of confused and annoyed by how panicky I was. But they allowed me to follow them. Once we reached a street I recognized, I was able to find my way to the school.

The school was my old middle school. I did get in exactly 15 mins late. I ran into my "brother" - not anything like my real life brother, really just a dream character - as he went down the stairs as everybody went between classes (despite it only being 20 mins into the school day) and explained my problem. He told me "Well, go to your first class, then!"

Then I realized that I had forgotten which class my first class was. I thought maybe it was English, but I wasn't sure. I also didn't know exactly where it was located.

Then two school administrators came up and started yelling at me, demanding to know why I was late and why I wasn't in class. They were wearing brown leather dusters.

My perspective shifted to just outside my body. At that point, I realized that I was a giant floating pink cartoon brain, and so was my brother. He had thick boxy glasses on and a dorky shirt collar and was generally a nerd. He looked down on me for being "stupid".

Then for some reason our roles switched - I watched an outside comparison of my bubbly-squishy-"stupid" state and my much more streamlined-looking "intelligent" state, and my "brother" became the "stupid" one.

He'd always looked down on me for eating lots of junk food and gross/fried foods, one of them being something the school cafeteria served that in the dream was called "cop-burgers" but once he'd switched places with me, he suddenly realized how delicious everything was.

At some point he locked himself in the bathroom with a bunch of junk food and once he'd finished it, demanded to know (through the door) if I had any more burgers. I said, no. But I was also kind of him at the same time, staring into a sink full of fast food wrappers, and yelling, "Do you have any pork drippins'?"

And that dream ended.

I woke up, was a little weirded out by that one, and went back to sleep.

I dreamed that I was looking through what I think was a Walmart for a present for my uncle. I wanted to get him a grill. I was crouched down on the floor looking through the bottom shelves for cooking grills, and there was a tiny propane grill you were supposed to be able to use on your counter top, but it really just looked like a weird tiny charcoal grill. It had little canisters it came with. You were supposed to buy more to refill it, but they were expensive, so my mother (who was suddenly there) argued with me about that. Eventually, I put it back on the shelf.

Then I was in a cartoon and there was a puppy and I ran inside after it. So it turned out to belong to a girl who was trying to give it away. She was a complete stranger, but I just crawled right into her bed with the puppy and went to sleep.

I sort of recall maybe having a conversation with her, but I was mostly interested in paying attention to the puppy.

I dreamed that my old pet rabbit was alive. I was in a room that was sort of a cross between an old apartment I lived in when I was 12, and my current apartment. The floors were the old ragged brown carpet from the old apartment... the layout was like the bedroom of my current one, except instead of a regular closet, there was a walk-in closet. I was keeping my bunny in there. I didn't want to keep her in her cage. IRL, her "cage" was really just her potty, and she was able to come and go as she pleased... it was basically just the crate I used to transport her to and from her vet, combined with being a litter pan. She didn't spend much time in there. She actually liked to just lie there in it with the door open, for some weird reason. I guess because it was "hers".

Anyway, in the dream, though, somebody wanted me to keep her in there. It was way too small and dirty, so instead I kept her in the closet. In the dream, I remember sitting down in the closet and petting her, and playing with the fuzz on top of her head. I miss her.

Then, I started wandering around the apartment naked. I recall lying on the carpet on my stomach (still naked) using a laptop. The carpet was the same sort of dull brown that the old apartment had, but sometimes it was also a wooden floor like my current apartment. It was late morning or early afternoon and there was a lot of sunlight... it may have been summer. The bed I was next to was a mess, unmade and covered in clothes. The mattress may have been lying directly on the floor.

Then realized maybe i should wear some clothing, and put my fleece leopard-print onesie on.

I woke up and I was cold, so that explains at least some of that dream. It was about 4 a.m. Tried to do visualizations, but too tired and needed all the sleep I could get, so I let it go.

Then I dreamed I had a roommate who was a huge asshole and then suddenly stopped being one and I was suspicious of it. Tall dude with long blond hair who fancied himself a "metal head".

Them I dreamed mom and I were driving around the city I currently live in with my brother, and she kept stopping and giving me painkiller injections to numb my mouth. Except they didn't numb my whole mouth. Specifically the left bottom side of my front teeth. My gums were all torn up and bloody there. So eventually she just gave me a syringe full of clear fluid and told me to use it. i asked what the dosage was, and she just shrugged.

Then... We were on the upstairs part of a store... it had a similar layout and looked a lot like the grocery store down the street from us but also sold clothing etc... I wanted cupcakes. The ones on the upstairs clearance rack near the checkout lanes were gross looking and overpriced. Like $3.99 for 2 cupcakes with the frosting all messed up. The rest of the baked goods weren't what I wanted. I really wanted cupcakes.

At some point, mom handed me 3 candy bar things. They were really thin fragile sheets of milk and white chocolate split diagonally along the length of the bar. They were in packaging that was simultaneously gold and shiny but also completely transparent. Unfortunately, they were so fragile that I accidentally broke 2 of them, one quite badly. I was worried they were ruined, that nobody would enjoy them that way, and apologized profusely to my mother. She didn't seem to care very much.

After picking through the shelves of baked goods upstairs (it was really just one display), I went downstairs (the layout of the store was the same as IRL in a lot of ways, but had escalators instead of stairs) to the bakery section, where they weren't much better. I picked through what was there... A helpful employee tried to help me find something, but all of my options sucked, and the store wanted like $18 for a pack of 4 cupcakes. The cupcakes were all in terrible shape - chocolate cupcakes with the blue and green frosting sliding off or mostly stuck to the plastic package.

Then at some point in between, we were driving around my old hometown, around one of the more run down areas... Brown figured heavily in the color palette... Lots of crumbling parking lots and dried out grass... it was midday, warm and very sunny, maybe it was late summer or early autumn. Mom was driving, I was in the front passenger seat, and my brother was in the back seat. I don't remember much about the car. It may have been my car, but I don't think it was. It wasn't a nice new car, in any case.

Anyway, I had decided not to use the mystery syringe because I didn't know the dosing. So I had put the syringe in the glove box and was worried the cops would pull us over, find it, and think it was illegal drugs. But I didn't want to just throw it in the trash because I didn't want anybody to get a needle-stick. For some reason I had a cap, like a pen cap, that could go over the needle... I put it on and put the needle back in the glove box. I decided I'd find a sharps container in a bathroom somewhere and throw it out there.

Then, I was back in the bakery section of the store, still trying to find cupcakes.

There were big security monitors above the cashiers lanes, and writing would randomly appear transposed over the images and then disappear. At first it looked like it was that the monitor was scuffed up. I reasoned it was actually Security doing it from their office. Like they were "writing" on the images in real-time, although I couldn't figure out why.

Woke up and thought about the fact that my dream recall hasn't been great and I hoped I wouldn't forget everything in the morning again. Fell asleep and dreamed about writing in my dream journal... In the dream, I had a notebook and pen on the nightstand. And my boyfriend wasn't there for me to wake up, I was alone in the bedroom. I had the light on and wrote in the notebook while sitting in bed. The walls were a sort of warm creamy yellow color, which they are not IRL.

Then my alarm clock rang.

The false-awakening dream journaling did actually help my dream recall. I really did basically write down everything from the past two dreams I'd had, which helped me remember them when I woke up for real!

I don't remember exactly when this one was, but it was around early October 2015.

It's one of the lucid fragments I didn't bother to write down at the time.

I don't recall what I dreamed about before, unfortunately... I didn't write it down. Stupid, on my part.

However, right before I woke up, I gained awareness while standing on a cliff. I was surveying a landscape covered with sweeping grass, with the ocean in the distance. I could see the waves breaking on a pebbly shore as the grass rippled in the wind. The sun was rising over the ocean. I decided not to "do" anything but watch the sunrise and be satisfied by such a vivid, solid dream after a night full of dreaming, I mostly just remember very being pleased about it all, as if I had enjoyed my night. I still wish I had written those dreams down, but I know there was some flying involved.

I spent a while peacefully enjoying the ocean breeze while the sun slowly rose over the waves. The sunlight sparkled on the waves and tinged the grasses with a rosy golden glow. The sea wind was cool and salty, with a hint of fresh grass.

Eventually, my alarm clock went off and I had to get up for work.

Feb. 26, 2003:

I had a dream I was back in R__ near my aunt's old house, and I thought I could get back to her house from there, only everything was all different and the city just wasn't the same any more. It was like a maze, and every time I turned around, the streets change. So I couldn't get to her house; in fact, I got completely lost! Then I wound up going through this weird carnival type thing that I don't remember much about, only that it was weird. Only it wasn't a carnival, it was this crazy art exhibition, and people were doing all sorts of weird displays and performance art and stuff, except it was sort of scary in a way. And then I went through a playground only it was a really shoddy one and everything was all broken down (actually, that does sound quite like my aunt's old neighborhood...). Then I got to this one tenement that had never been there before, near where the old hardware store used to be, and it was all run-down and broken down. I met my old art teacher Mrs. D___ there and she said there was some guy there that I needed to meet, because she thought I'd be interested in the stuff he'd done and what he had to say. Turns out he was some great printer or something but everyone had completely forgotten about him in his old age, and I'd barely even heard of him myself. However, I went up there anyway, and he was waiting in his apartment... it was a real slum... he was just this shrunken, emaciated old guy with white hair and bleary blue eyes, he didn't seem like much, he was a hermit of sorts and never really went out, never talked to people or interacted with them, and sort of cranky, but once I started talking to him he actually seemed like he was a pretty nice guy, just really antisocial. I guess never going out and talking to people... they sort of forgot he was there, or that he'd done anything important. I felt bad for him.

So he asked me to show him some of my work, and I did. He looked at it and said it had potential, and told me not to give up, that art and the printed medium in particular could be discouraging but to just keep trying. Then he showed me some printing techniques. I don't remember very much about those, only that it looked like some sort of silk-screen but when you drew your finger across it, it made light, and you could actually etch these really neat luminous designs in it this way. So we sat and drew designs together, and then I heard Mrs. D___ calling me and telling me that I'd talked to him enough now and didn't need to be there any more, and then I woke up.

I get nervous about losing my DJ, so I keep it in more than one place.
I'd also like to consolidate it and get all of the rest of it onto here for easier searching and tagging.

Feb. 16, 2003:
I had some dreams I really don't remember, except that they weren't nightmares. Then I had dreams about woods, but they were nice dreams. Then I had a dream about a puppy. It was sort of scary but the end was happy, so it doesn't qualify a nightmare.

Then I had a sort of semi, psuedo-nightmare, but the puppy was still involved... hmm... oh well.

In my dream I was walking through the woods. They were more like deciduous woods, though. Not sure if they were Florida woods at all. I encountered a tall man with light brown hair. I can't remember what color his eyes were, or if they had a color. All I remember is saying "I remember you" and asking him his name. He wouldn't tell me his name

Then there was the dream about the puppy, I don't remember much except that the puppy was going through a temple to save some people, and in the end the puppy managed to save them. It was smallish, sort of like a terrier, with silvery black fur, only it had floppy ears. It was a VERY cute puppy, though.

Then I had a dream I was in a car with J__ following another car through some sort of theme park, and his brakes gave out. Somehow, though, we made it through that alive, mostly because the guy in front of us used the back end of his own car to slow us down (everything was mostly downhill so we would have kept gaining speed). The guy was NOT pleased that he had to total his car, but... hey... we didn't die.

I've gotten really lax about making regular dream journal entries. I know they're really important for lucid dreaming... even if all of my dreams aren't lucid.

I honestly don't remember much about what I dreamed about last night, possibly because I woke up because my neck hurt. No lucid last night, though.

I don't remember a lot. I remember a color theme of dark blue and blue-black. My lack of memory isn't surprising, since those colors might mean that I spent time in a dim dream without much detail.

Something about an outfit or costume someone gave me. Something about putting on black striped leggings/tights. The original pair got shrunk in the dryer, but in the dream they fit again.

There may have been horses. I'll think about it throughout the day, and maybe fragments of it will come back to me.

Another lucid last night. Went in and out of full and semi lucidity, but maintained a thread of awareness throughout.

I became lucid while looking in a mirror in a hallway. That is a common thing for me. Mirrors always induce lucidity. They're one of the absolutely fool-proof things for me. The mirror turned out to be in the hallway of one of my home bases, so I started off with the advantage that I was already at least partially anchored. I don't really remember, I think the mirror was near the door to the outside, because I believe that's the door that I opened later on. I should have paid more attention.

Anyway, I immediately tested my suspicion that I was dreaming by attempting to push my arm through the surface of the mirror. There was slight resistance on the surface, and then my arm sank in. The mirror looked like quicksilver as I pushed my arm through it.

Satisfied with the knowledge that I was dreaming, I spent a while playing with my appearance and examining myself in the mirror. I eventually managed to turn myself into more of a caricature of myself than my actual appearance, which I found very entertaining. While I was playing around with my eyes - moving them around, changing the size and shape, etc - I could hear my brother's voice narrating in the background that he at least liked this current character design better than the last (implying that he really didn't like either). I waved it off and kept playing around.

I was really satisfied by my handiwork because I had trouble with this before. I then spent a little bit more time dressing myself up as a sort of elven-looking sorcerer. Just as fun as cosplay, and several hundred dollars cheaper!

After spending some time tweaking my heroic cloak/cape thing (I settled on something asymmetrical and held up on one side by a nice brooch that I own in real life), I decided to meet up with some friends at a tavern.

I opened the door to go outside, and The Blackness happened. Some people call it The Void. Instead of the outdoors or the tavern that I wanted, everything beyond the door was pitch black. I stepped through the door into The Blackness, hoping it would dissipate. Instead, it enveloped me, and everything went dark. I tried vividly imagining my hands and moving them around in front of me. I briefly saw them appear before they faded back into the darkness. Waving them around some more didn't make them reappear.

I decided to try something I have never tried before. Instead of trying to make it go away, I would condense The Darkness into a form where it could no longer impede me.

I held out my hands and tried drawing it into a form in my hands. It didn't work, possibly because I was unable to see my hands.

I then put my hands behind my back and focused on trying to summon it that way. I felt fur and a small warm body. The Darkness disappeared as it was channeled into the form of a cat.

I brought the cat around to the front. It was skinny, with soft shiny black fur and gold eyes. I petted it and set it on the ground, and it ran off.

Now I could see, through the open door, not blackness but the brightly lit inside of the tavern. It had polished wooden floors and brightly burning candles and torches.

I rushed to the booth everybody was sitting in and scooted in. The booths were tall, made of dark stained wood, and seats were made of leather. While we were waiting for our server, I lost the thread of lucidity and the dream faded.

I don't really remember the rest of what I dreamed about that night.

____

I'm pleased that I finally solved a long-standing problem and completed a successful completely-controlled scene change. I've felt so stupid about struggling with these basic things after even several years and the ability to WILD with regular success. I'm looking forward to honing my skills further, as this has been a serious road-block for me.

One thing I can say is that my ability to maintain dream stability and my thread of awareness has gotten SIGNIFICANTLY better.

I've had a lot of lucids, semi-lucids, etc. lately, and I'm so bad at recording them. I even forget some of them. When I first started practicing, I would have said that's crazy talk, but it's like remembering stuff from your day to day life. After you live enough days, the details of what happened during each one get hazy.

I'll record the one from last night, though.

In this particular one, I realized I was dreaming while I was waiting for a train on an elevated train platform that doesn't exist along that particular rail line.

It was dark and stormy at the time, just generally nasty weather, and it was extremely late (like 4 a.m. late/early) and I was thinking about how tired I was going to be... then I realized that this train platform doesn't exist, and I don't work at the job I was thinking about any more.

The weather immediately switched to daylight/dusk. I hopped off of the platform into the air and flew along the train tracks, exploring this new and different rail line. I ran my hands along the metal, along the weeds as I skimmed the ground, focused on the feeling of wind, so I could maintain my thread of awareness.

I flew down into a neighborhood I wanted to explore and found some apartments where there would normally be a metalworking shop. I decided to explore the inside. Inside of the apartment, the walls were sort of orange... everything was decorated like a grandmother might decorate. Sitting at the kitchen table sipping a cup of tea was a bipedal talking white tiger in a grey-brown trench coat and fedora. He was extremely tall, and he carried himself and spoke with a great deal of dignity.

I decided to see where this was going and told the "detective" that I needed help finding my missing cousin. He was reluctant at first and basically said that he wasn't interested in helping. I was trying to talk him into helping me when my alarm clock went off.

I'll probably run into Mr. Tiger Detective again at some point. Some characters pop up more than once, and he seems like one who will.