dream fragment

I couldn't remember the night before when I tried, so I neglected making a post.

Last night was pretty disjointed. I woke up partway through, trying to remind myself to remember my dream, but I'm not sure I really do. I do remember some stuff, though.

I woke up partway through and considered trying WILD but I was tired and making up for sleep debt over the week. And I just didn't feel like putting in the effort. I'll definitely do it tonight, though.

Anyway, I recall a fragment about... having Skittles, and eating them, and then I was digging through someone's laundry. I had dropped my Skittles in there.

I was doing this outside, kind of in front of a beach area, and it was kind of dark out but not nighttime. Sort of after sunset but before actual night sets in. And it was kind of cold and rainy out.

It was someone's brother's laundry. All of the clothing was a drab olive, or gray, or black, and there were skittles in them that weren't mine, and I was trying to be careful to eat only my Skittles and not the ones that were already in the dirty laundry, but I wasn't sure if I had accidentally eaten one of those, and it kind of grossed me out. I could sort of tell the difference because those skittles had gross spots on them, etc... anyway, I finally just spat out what I'd been chewing into a paper towel that I somehow magically found behind myself.

Then, some of my friends had moved into some low-rent apartments. They were very nice. There were persian rugs all over the floors, the floors were marble and natural wood, there was a nice fireplace, etc. I was amazed by how nice the apartments were. They were a 2-bedroom and even had a nice balcony. My mom complains that "people trash them" so not all of the apartments are this nice.

I wonder if it's possible for me and my boyfriend to rent one of these apartments, but we probably make too much money. I go outside for some reason that I don't remember, and walk a few blocks. I pass a little outdoor eating/socializing area with black cast iron tables and chairs, and think that it would be a nice place to hang out with neighbors. I'm trying to get back to mom's apartment, but realize that I don't remember which one it is or where it is, and it's very dark outside. The complex is mazelike, and I wander around for a long time looking for her building.

Then, I dream about a movie that all of my friends and I have been anticipating, but it's also actually a TV show, and it's about a bunch of underwater people/mermaids. And the special effects are TERRIBLE. The actors just have badly painted face makeup, and the whole thing feels half-assed and unconvincing, and we all feel ripped off. I recall a scene of one of the actors surfacing from beneath the waves and the makeup just looked so terrible, and I was very disappointed.

The next dream... now I am some sort of mermaid, and I live in a high rise, but I'm stuck there and don't have very much freedom, and the whole place is run by some millionaire.

I stand in front of a glass window and look out at the city. I am also floating, because I have no legs.

I sometimes steel a very small plane... but it's not a plane, it's more high tech, like a flying bike or something... and go fly around.

Flash back to another dream I had that this one dredged up:
I am in an apartment complex. It's a very run down complex. I'm going up and down the stairs, wandering around in this place. The carpet is very dirty, the walls are dingy, the whole thing is run down and it smells like food someone's cooking... that sort of general "I smell someone's food" smell where you can't figure out what they're cooking and whether or not it smells good or nasty. I remember the carpet being kind of... yellow brown...

So I go up these stairs, looking for some apartment, but I'm also not really looking for anything. The layout is a lot like an apartment I lived in when I was 13. It is not exactly dimly lit, but not well lit either. The stairs are claustrophobic and narrow and enclosed by walls. And for some reason, there are no doors for apartments. I get up to the top and there's a ledge against the wall running between the stairs, and nothing else.

Then, possibly in the same dream, I walk into an apartment building... it is dark inside... with the same sort of layout, but also falling apart.

And now this leads to recalling a fragment of yet another dream. I don't know if I've written about this one already, though.

I am in a sort of hospital place. Possibly a mental institution. The architecture is very prison-like, bars across the windows and everything is very washed out. I recall going down some stairs and gaining lucidity as I did so. I know this is a dream, but I'm not sure what to do about it. I go through a door at the bottom of the stairs.

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.

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.

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.

My dream starts as sort of a nightmare. The nightmare itself is jumbled and confused - there's not a clean narrative. It's mostly short, quick clips of action strung together and viewed from a 3rd person POV. Mud and rain; earth sliding into a river, pulling people down with it... switch to what seems like a motel and some sequences that seem like they're out of a slasher horror flick, people running in fear, and severed limbs and blood everywhere. It mostly seems like it's just my brain tossing up whatever seems disturbing and frightening at the moment.

Because of how disjointed it is, it's failing to really frighten or disturb me. My mind starts to get more and more distanced from what's going on, and starts paying less attention to it. I gain lucidity in one of the motel/dorm rooms while two women are arguing with each other. They look straight out of the 80s - one has bleached hair teased up a mile high and fake orange tanner, and the other is a brunette with a ponytail and teased bangs. As soon as I realize this is a dream, I am no longer a disembodied observer. There's an oval mirror on the wall - I run up to it and look at myself in the mirror in order to reaffirm that I now have a physical presence.

I immediately crouch on the floor and start running my fingers through the carpet in order to solidify my surroundings. Things seem to be fading, so I stand up and produce a hand mirror from behind myself and examine myself in it. The two women have stopped arguing and are looking at me. I feel embarrassed about them potentially thinking that I'm just extremely vain (despite the fact that they're just dream characters), so I shrug and tell them, "I'm just making sure I still exist."

They lose interest in me, and I lose interest in them, because I've decided that since my scene changes haven't gone so well lately, maybe I'll just mold my current surroundings into what I want. I pull up the software interface for 3D Studio Max and start modeling furniture for the room. Despite being a motel room, it has no bed, so I decide to experiment with creating one. I begin working on it as if it's a 3D model for a video game.

The two women have faded away. I minimize the "software" I'm working with to check and see if the bed has appeared. It has, and looks very solid, but it's the plain solid white of a 3D model that has been imported into some engines but doesn't have a texture linked to it (or the texture isn't loading).

I decide I'll texture it later, once I've gotten the hang of this, and decide to start working on one of the windows. I "import" it into my software and begin tweaking it. The window is a little bit tougher - it resists conforming to what I want.

The dream fades. Eventually, another one starts, but it's non-lucid. I'm watching a bunch of characters in a video game and "piloting" some of them, and the game is sort of Harvest Moon-y but instead everybody is little Lego people and they're going to classes at a university. One of the landslide scenes from the prior nightmare replays, but with little Lego people instead of realistic people. The character I'm piloting is supposed to get a date for a festival coming up and has until 5 a.m. the day of the festival, but because of the landslide, I don't manage to complete the objective and watch the festival play out without a date. The characters go to class, and the professor is very boring. The textbook is 900 pages long, but the professor is focusing on a 4 page section of it. The students have smuggled some pot edibles into class, and when the professor goes to another room for a few minutes, they all leave class to get high. The character I'm piloting stays in class. When the prof gets back, he seems bummed that nobody cares about the lecture.

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 embraced 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 don't remember the first dream I had, although I think it had something to do with my mother. I know I was talking in my sleep again, because I said something and heard/felt myself speak out loud (but still didn't realize it was a dream or wake up).

I recall the second:
I wanted to go Trick or Treating. My brother had gone Trick or Treating earlier in the evening, and he brought home a huge bag of candy, which he shared with me. I felt weird about doing it, though, since I'm 30, but I thought I could get away with it if I tried to look like a teenager. Unfortunately, it was almost 9 pm and all of the porch lights on the houses were off. There was some candy scattered on the ground outside some of the houses, so I picked that up. There were also tiny plastic spiders all over the place. This had something to do with my friend R, but I'm not sure what.

Nov. 19:

Dreamed I was sharing an attic bedroom with a roommate, but there wasn't enough space for both of our beds. She'd already set hers up, and I was trying to explain that there wasn't enough space and I didn't have anywhere to sleep, but she just told me that was my own problem.

Dreamed I had a pet ball python but forgot to get it a heat rock or food. It was living in a tupperware bin, and I fed it hot dogs. Mom had the car, and wouldn't let me use it to drive to Petsmart, but she wouldn't take me either. I was worried that my snake was going to die. Mom said that, instead, she was driving to a different city to return a keyboard she'd bought (because it sucked). I'd bought the same model and asked if I could go with to return mine as well. She still refused to stop at Petsmart.

Nov 20:
I can't recall my dreams. I have a vague impression that they involved cars.

I dreamed about a cop who looked a little like one of the people I work with (but not really), and he was harassing a woman about her ID card. She'd had her ID stolen, and it was a tribal ID, and the cop was giving her trouble over it not being a valid ID while both of us argued with him that it was. I was particularly irritated since the person that the cop reminded me with would never be such a jerk. Eventually, we convinced him, and he recovered the ID, which had been discarded in a parking lot.

I kept waking up and dozing because I was cold. I finally woke up completely and put a warmer shirt on and turned the thermostat up. I tried some visualization exercises, but fell back asleep.

I don't remember much about my dream, but someone was throwing a party, and there were 3 rooms, and each had a different activity in it. One of them was scrabble, but they were using 5 scrabble boards all at once, and people would keep letters they "won" by spelling words with them. One guy had won a lot of letter tiles and had built a tiny tile city out of them. I recall there being furniture in the room in the most awkward places, like a desk that was just sitting in the middle of the room.

I wake up, back to sleep, again visualizations. I'm frustrated because they haven't been working well the past 2 nights.

I dream that I am eating an apple, and it is delicious. It's huge, the size of a grapefruit. It's soft and juicy, and it's purple inside. I somehow know I am in an alternate dimension on an alien planet, and wonder if the seeds will grow new apple trees if I discard or plant them here. I try to convince another dream character (a recurring character, sort of a witch or sorceress) that she ought to eat some of the apple.

Wake up. Lie on my back and try to relax. I'm making some progress with visualizations and then I snore and startle myself. Ooops. Back to square one. Ok, time to turn on my side so I don't snore again.

I'm visualizing and dozing off and bitching to the wizard-cat (another recurring DC) that I'm frustrated with how things are going this morning. We are both drinking coffee out of mugs. I figure that maybe if I hold a conversation, it'll help draw me in. It's actually starting to work, detail is starting to creep into things (but it's still all very hazy and not at all real or anywhere near a dream). I sniff my coffee but instead of smelling like coffee, it smells spicy-sweet. Suddenly, out of nowhere, instead of the dream gently forming around me I'm fully lucid and the mug is completely real. It startles me so badly that I drop the mug and wake up.

There's a weird interlude before I fully wake up where I'm trying to find my arms and they're invisible. I know I'm dreaming, but at the same time I'm not sure, and I'm also half awake, so it's more like a weird semi-OBE than a lucid dream. I finally manage to actually move my arm and wake myself up.

Naturally, I'm irritated. I sigh and work on visualizations again. I explore an imaginary room. I'm in the great room of the cottage near the fireplace when I start to slowly ease into sleep. I'm sitting in front of the fireplace, wondering why there's a fire going and logs in the fireplace, but there's no pile of wood. I reach behind myself, produce some logs, and set them in the bin next to the fireplace. There's suddenly a desk in the middle of the room, the one from the scrabble dream, for pretty much no reason at all. Unfortunately, I lapse into unawareess.

After a gap in time I'm on a bus. I realize that it's almost a completely fully formed dream, but it's so thin and I'm so close to being awake that if I make the "push" that I need to make it super-real (i.e. feel like reality rather than a super vivid visualization) I will probably wake myself up. It's all very flat, like watching a scene rather than being in it. There is another DC there, a sorceress, but she flickers and turns into the warlock character (recurring DC). He is a smart-ass but generally helpful when it comes to gaining lucidity. The bus flickers and fades. I wake up and doze. I am now in some sort of weird geometric environment. Everything is made of white square tiles but it's also like something out of Escher. Warlock DC is there with me, silently walking with me through the scenery. Again, it is close to clarity but not really "there". Instead of trying to brute-force it and try to push through the membrane of the dream all at once to bring it into full focus, I dive to the ground and start running my hands and face on the carpet (that wasn't there a moment ago). I can't make anything focus or make it clear, the sensation is a lot like being really drunk. I go through a door and try to will a scene change even if the dream's not fully formed, hoping it will be easier that way. The room only half-changes, and everything is still white. I rub my hands together, hoping to make things more vivid, but it doesn't really do anything. I get frustrated and wake up.

I don't recall my dreams from last night. I kept waking up because my hip hurt, and I have a vague impression that they were related to the pain in my hip, but that's it. I only got ~5 and a half hours of sleep because of a shitty work schedule. My alarm went off and I kept hitting snooze, which I think destroyed my dream recall.

I don't really recall my dreams from last night, which is sort of disappointing. I'm making an entry in order to keep up the habit of making an entry, and also in case I recall anything throughout the day (which happens).

Original entry dated Feb. 16, 2002:

I had a nightmare that I had a daughter. I don't remember much about it except that it was quite bizarre and I was very unhappy about many things that occurred in the dream.

I had a nightmare about a huge war in a desert, and a lot of people died, but I think that's more along the lines of the typical "post-apocalyptic" dream if not for one of the characters in it. I was 12 when I had it but the girl I met was so compelling that I still remember the dream. She was dressed in blue and had long, straight brown hair and dark, intense eyes. She was in her teens in the dream, but had an oval, almost classic face that was too sad for someone so young. She saved my life. In the dream, there were spaceship like planes that were black and flew very low, and tanklike things that transported weapons. I was almost crushed by one but she threw me out of the way. I can only assume that she died, but the whole scene was enveloped by the dust kicked up by tank-treads.

I had another dream about a bunch of people testing a plane. It looked kind of like a flat triangle. Like a stealth-bomber, but not quite, there was something decidedly different about it. In any case, the test backfired and the plane crashed and burned. Luckily, the pilot didn't die. I can't remember if he was badly injured or not.

This was followed by another, very long and vivid dream, which I'm going to try to actually do justice:

A tree towers to dizzying heights, wreathed in clouds. It is held up by a pillar of massive, mossy trunk. Through the tangled roots springs a city, its buildings sprouting like mushrooms between the toes of a giant. Grey and fading, the tree and city are cloaked by dusk. The strange slant of the sunlight causes the shadows to pool in strange places.

A man walks down the street, turning a corner, only to find himself amidst steaming tropical vegetation, a savage jungle. He panics, running blindly, and stares up into a dazzling sky to see something rushing toward him. That was how a nameless man was splattered in the middle of an intersection. The only person who took the time to observe this event was a small girl.

After pausing to observe this event, the girl continued on her way through the twisting streets. The residents of the city streamed about her in a phantasmal flow of ghosts, fantastic, colorful, distorted, and exaggerated.

Her eyes lit momentarily on a shadowy figure, and quickly jerked away. She drew into the phantom crowd, which closed around her in a flutter of harlequin rags, and she was relieved to see the figure encompassed by the swirl of paraders.

She withdrew from the stream of grotesques and picked her way along rambling streets, tiptoeing across melted bricks. She turned to find the shadow, floating languidly above the flowing pavement. It regarded her cooly with bulbous glowing orbs set into a body that seemed to have no substance at all, except for a blurred grey outline. Ghostly animals slunk behind the wilted trashcans, chittering softly from the half-shadows.

I've broken up some of these dream entries so I can tag them properly. With only 10 tags, it can be a little hard.

I took 3 mg melatonin before bed. I don't know if it did my dreams any good, but I slept pretty well.

I dreamed that I was staying at somebody's house... a couple, who were maybe in their 60s. I don't remember the man very well, but the woman had shoulder-length dyed brown hair and wore sort of flowy pastel blue clothing with lots of jewelry. Their house was on the edge of the water. It was mostly open to the air, with pastel curtains hung between pillars. It reminded me a lot of some of the houses in Florida. When I asked about hurricanes, they said they'd rather live on the edge of the water than relocate to a hotel on slightly higher ground where they would just drown anyway.

Then, there was some sort of hurricane/typhoon. The house was blown to pieces. Somehow, the couple was unaffected by the craziness going on around them, but extremely concerned about me. Even though I hung on, I ended getting blown away.

The dream shifted. I was entering a city that was built on the water. I descended on the city from the air, somehow. The houses' walls were made of white plaster, and the rooftops were glittering ceramic tiles in all sorts of jewel tones. The architecture reminded me a lot of the American Southwest. There were canals between all of the houses. Somehow, all of this was on top of a mesa that rose out of the sea. I recall that I was able to get into the city because my cousin J helped me get a passport.

The environment around the mesa reminded me a lot of coastal South Africa. There was a cave system inside of the mesa, with different levels to it, all of them filled with enough water to pilot a boat around. The poorest people lived in boats in the lowest levels of the cave system (which also opened to the sea, through a tunnel that looked very mouth-like). The richest people lived in the houses on top of the mesa. The lowest level was very dimly lit, and the cave walls were made of sort of a brown clay.

I was at the lowest level, and suddenly had a boat. My boat was a little house-boat, about as small as a house-boat can get. The lowest level of the mesa, where I was, had terraces, with waterfalls. I thought the sound of one particular waterfall was very annoying, so I tried to pilot my boat to a higher level. One of the other residents was an extremely skinny man with tan skin and a shaved head. He stopped me and said they wouldn't allow boats at the higher levels, because the water was too shallow. I thought that sounded like bullshit, but turned around anyway.

The dream shifted. I was somehow involved in a plot to detonate a bomb somewhere in Sweden. I don't remember why. I remember moving there because my friend had moved there to teach English (which she does in real life) even though I really wanted to move to Norway instead.

My great grandfather lived in a run down little shack there, and wore a ratty red robe. I remember thinking that he looked very thin and frail. He was trying to tell me in broken English that what I was doing was evil, and begging me not to do it. I was doing it for his good as well as my own, although I don't remember how. After I had completed the task, I was able to move my great grandfather to a much better apartment. He still wore the same ratty red robe, and he refused to talk to me.

I woke up, rolled over.

Dreamed my roommate was talking about getting married to one of our other friends, but I don't recall anything else.

As I went to sleep tonight, I recited a mantra, "I will stabilize". I also firmly fixed in my mind that as soon as I began dreaming, I would know that I was dreaming.

This worked. I spent some time drifting, and then a dream began. I was lying in bed, and the lights were on. I looked to my left. There were 3 tiny, glowing playing cards floating in the space above my head. I thought, "Yes, I'm dreaming," and snatched the playing cards from where they were floating. It's hard to explain, but the cards were a cue for me - it was specifically seeing the cards that made me lucid. I don't remember what suites the cards were, only that they were 1/4 the size of normal playing cards, they were glowing, and they immediately induced lucidity.

I got out of bed, and my bedroom was very different and not at all like my real bedroom. The carpet was worn out, and an ugly shade of tannish orangy brown. My "dream room" carpet is always this ugly color, for some reason. The door was in the wrong place, and led to a hallway that doesn't exist, and there was no furniture besides my bed. The bed was a twin, but in real life, I have a full. I said, "Stabilize!". I went to the door and tried to visualize that as soon as I went through it, I would be in a rainforest. I tried very hard to convince myself of this.

When I went through the door, everything was dark. I saw shadowy forms that hinted that I was in another room. I got frustrated and lost lucidity.

I woke up, grumbled, and tried WILD. I got past the initial wave and felt as if I was sinking into my bed. I sat up out of my body. I tried to open my eyes, but it was very hard, and I felt like I was opening my physical eyes. I was really tired and had work in the morning, so I gave up on it and lapsed back into unawareness. I dreamed that my head had made a huge dent in my pillow, so now my pillow had 2 lumps of stuffing on either side and nothing in the middle. I tossed and turned (in the dream) and tried to make it comfortable somehow.

I dreamed I was shopping at a store. I've never been there in my waking life. There was a desk on a top shelf that I was interested in - it was $50, and I thought it would make a good room divider. But my cell phone was malfunctioning badly. The screen came off (how?) and then it got hot to touch and melted. I got some of the melted screen on my finger, and it burned me. I kept thinking about how frustrated I was that all of my money now had to go toward buying a new phone. I needed a smartphone, too, so it was going to be expensive.

I woke up. I tried some visualizations. I visualized a room full of dolls, where each doll represented a DC I knew. I visualized putting a doll on the floor and making it grow to full size. (I was not asleep at this time). I began drifting off, but the visualization didn't completely take hold, and I didn't become lucid. Instead, the room became the room of a woman with a group of really odd friends. My dream followed their antics, but I don't recall any specifics on what they were.

Review:
Dream clues:
- Playing cards (instant lucidity)
- My pillow doesn't have stuffing. It's a memory foam pillow.
- Unfamiliar store, without recalling how I got there
- Malfunctioning phone (malfunctioning electronics)
- Spectator perspective

Edit: Believe it or not... I actually figured out the playing cards while I was riding the train home. In my dream, they were glowing like they were lit up LEDs. On the train ride home, there's an installation where LED playing cards flash by the train windows. I tend to stare out the window at them because I'm bored and they're something to look at... which means I'm also staring at my reflection. So, since mirrors instantly make me lucid (for some reason), apparently my brain linked the playing cards with my reflection strongly enough that just looking at a card makes me lucid.

I dreamed that I was part of a crew that was going to ride in a rocket to the moon. The capsule we were going in looked very old, like 1960s era Soviet technology, and it was very tiny. It had one circular room. 2 men were operating the actual controls, and I was supposed to navigate. For some reason, I did this with old-fashioned looking blueprints. Our first mission was successful.

Things went a little wrong during the 2nd mission. There was another woman, Sophia, who was training to be a navigator. They assigned both of us to the capsule for the next mission, but it was far too cramped for 4 people to fit inside... when all 4 people got in, I didn't have enough space to actually do my job. Finally, it was decided that Sophia would stay behind.

Eventually, we docked at a tiny space station with a room with several beds built into the wall.

Then, a perspective shift. I'm now a spectator, and Captain Kirk is leading an old-fashioned-looking starship. He's only doing it temporarily, until they pick up the "real" captain. They run into a very strange colony/organism, it's a giant, translucent, organic bag of liquid with worms and snake-like creatures inside of it. It reminds me a lot of looking through a microscope at a slide full of tiny creatures. Anyway, it engulfs the ship. Kirk leaves the ship and floats into a little air sac/bubble in order to try negotiating with the creatures, but they're sort of evil. Eventually, he decides it can't be done, so he punches a hole in the side of the sac and all of the fluid drains off into space.

Then I dream that my mother gave me 2 bowls of popcorn. One is smaller than the other. I sit and pet an orange kitten, and we both eat popcorn.

Review:
Dream clues:
- I do not normally operate rockets
- It is not the 1960s
- "Spectator" perspective
- My mother is 2000 miles away
- I don't own a kitten