dream fragment

1. I dream I am working at a nursing home. I take care of an old lady, and take her to a doctor appointment, but forget to actually take her in to see the doctor. I send her off (to somewhere) and then remember that the doctor hasn't actually seen her, and start worrying that even though she is healthy she may have health problems that aren't so obvious... but there's no way to fix it without getting in a lot of trouble.

2. One of my less comfortable OBEs. I partially woke up, but my body was still 'paralyzed' and I was half asleep. I tried to settle down and catch onto a dreamlet or something. That isn't working and I'm not entirely lucid, so I try to sit up out of my body. My body "sticks" to me like it's glue, so I try to roll over out of it. I feel like I am tipping and sinking backwards into the bed. I am in the "wind tunnel". I start to panic, and after a lot of flailing around and struggling, I lapse back into unawareness.

3. I dream that there is a huge snowstorm and the whole city has shut down. The city I live in is one I've never seen before in my life. I go outside and start trying to shovel snow with everybody else.

4. I dream I am in a castle. I am moving through room after room. The floor has diamond floor tiles in various brown colors. I can get on top of the walls and run along them, and jump down into other rooms. As I am crossing a hallway, I see a mirror. Mirrors always make me lucid - I approach it, see my reflection, and 'push' into lucidity. Unfortunately, I'm sleeping too lightly, and it wakes me up (not a false awakening).

I grumble and roll over. A few minutes pass. Someone lightly knocks on my door, twice. I ignore it because if my brother is trying to wake me up on the morning I have a day off work, he's being a jerk.

Someone knocks on my door again, a little louder, twice.
I say "what?" but there's no answer. I get up and open my door, but nobody is there. I hear someone in the kitchen. I go into the kitchen and ask my roommate, "Did you knock on my door?"
She says, "No, I wouldn't do that."
My brother is asleep... my other roommate isn't home. My roommate verified that she was, in fact, making breakfast, and that I did ask her if she knocked on my door. Even though it was a hypnopompic hallucination, it still sounded very real, and was pretty creepy.

Review:
Last night was semi-productive, I guess. I'm having more lucids, but the quality has gone down. I don't think it's because I'm getting "worse" at lucid dreaming, so much as I am having a lot more lucid dreams lately and the quality will slowly improve again.

When I say OBE, I don't really mean that I believe it's an actual out of body experience. I mean that it's a specific kind of lucid dream I have where it feels like I am rising/rolling/whatever out of my body, and either end up in the void or end up in a facsimile of my bedroom, while my "body" remains in bed. I don't believe anything paranormal is going on, it's just a really specific kind of dream with a really specific feeling... and a specific set of challenges that I still haven't overcome.

Clues I was dreaming:
- I don't work in a nursing home
- We don't have blizzards where I live
- I don't generally wander around castles

My first dream was boring. I dreamed I was at work and hadn't taken my lunch at the time I was supposed to (I was an hour late going to lunch because I got caught up working on something) and my manager was mad at me.

My second dream was more interesting:

I dreamed I was at Disneyland. I was staying in a hotel building that was white and faux "plantation style". I was on the 2nd floor. The layout was weird because the kitchen was split in half, and part of it was outside on part of the balcony.

Anyway, it was also a first person shooter. I was trying to get out of the hotel room and sneak past Snake and Patrick Stewart, who were armed with laser rifles. I accomplished this by crouching, going out onto the balcony, leaping off, and hiding in a large stand of trees. Unfortunately, a patrol of enemies led by a woman in a strapless top (it was red and looked like part of a ball gown) and camo pants killed me because I used my own laser rifle (which, by the way, I thought was pretty awesome) to shoot the wrong mook. It also drew the attention of Snake and Patrick Stewart. Game over.

I restarted, but forgot to crouch when leaping off the balcony, and got shot.

I restarted again. This time, I crouched as I lept off the balcony, made it, hid in the trees, shot the woman in the camo pants, and completed the level by making it to an opera house/ballroom. It was a large, French-looking manor-like building with a moat and fountains.

Anyway, now it turned into sort of a minigame. I had to collect cartoon pigs and store them in the ballroom. I also had to collect food from various plants around the hotel and either store them in the fridge or use them to fill my Hunger bar.

I felt semi-lucid toward the end, but my alarm went off.

Review
Dream clues: Pretty much everything. If I had to pick one thing, though, I'd say the ability to "replay" reality was a pretty big one (and a potential bridge to lucidity).

I don't recall my dreams from last night, beyond that my mother was in them. At one point, I woke up because I felt cold. I know I had dreams... I just can't recall them. This has happened a few nights this week. It's weird for me, because my dream recall is usually pretty good.

Maybe as I go through the day, I'll remember and then edit this post.

Edit: I recalled the dream as I was eating dinner.

I dreamed I went to eat at an old buffet restaurant with my brother and mother. It was ugly, with lots of cheap wood paneling and muddy-looking murals of pine trees. The carpet was a sort of ugly beige pattern. The interesting thing about the chain was that it was a combo buffet/ "real" restaurant, so there was also a regular menu in addition to the buffet, but nobody ever really went there for anything but the buffet. So, they had regular servers, but very rarely did anybody order off of the dinner menu.

My mother was commenting on how they couldn't keep servers there because they only paid the server minimum wage (servers make an average of $3 per hour in many states in the US because it's expected that their tips will make up the rest) and most people didn't tip their servers at buffets/tip enough, because they didn't feel like their server "did enough".

I don't remember if the food was any good. If I don't remember... I guess not.

1. First, I dreamed I was with a friend of mine. We were walking down the street, somewhere in Florida (I think), trying to find a park, and for some reason there were like sculptures that turned into other things, or they came alive and followed us... I can't remember...

2. Then I dreamed I was in some sort of mansion with lots of halls and rooms. It was dark, gothic, and maze-like. There was some sort of party going on. I was with a friend of mine, who was some sort of monster/vampire/demon (but he was friendly... at least to me). He was actually a much younger looking variant of the Warlock character who shows up from time to time, but he wasn't (as) self-aware. We both looked and acted like teenagers.
I was looking for a different costume to wear, he helped me sneak into a room but told me to be very quiet. The reason was because there were demons behind some curtains, and noise would wake them up. I was scared and very cautious about moving around the room. The room was full of all sorts of costumes and garments, and I picked out some crazy stuff. Think goth-on-acid. Then, we left the room. We went back to the main party room, which was like huge theater, and there were sculptures covered in gold on the ceiling. We went to another room, which turned out to actually be outside, and there was a whole field of lilies in the clearing of a forest. We wandered around in the forest, and there were different clearings with different flowers, including some lilacs with kind of a yellow-gold hue. My friend made a joke about me liking lilacs (I don't remember what it was).

3. The dream shifted (definitely a different dream) and I was in a farmhouse. I had several sisters, older and younger, the youngest was about 8. There was an "evil" sister, whose skin was all white, and she had huge circles under her eyes, and ratty blonde hair... we'd thrown her out of the house, and she was even supposed to be dead.
I send the youngest sister out to go bury the seedling for a tree. I don't remember why. It was daylight, but by night she hadn't returned, and at night the 'evil' sister was trying to get into the house. For some reason, if we could keep her out until midnight, she would go away forever. We had nailed chicken wire over the windows, so if she broke them, she still couldn't get in. I also ran around closing all the doors and locking them, including one that she almost made it to. She was sort of zombielike but I was worried she'd still be smart enough to find and use a wire-cutter. I spent some time rattling the windows with a stick to scare her away, but it would just draw her attention. The youngest sister I sent out never came back, and I was worried that my older sisters would be angry with me for sending her out. I was also worried she WOULD come back, and we'd have to open the door for her, and risk letting the other one in.
I don't know if we ever won or what happened to the youngest sister. The dream faded.

4. I dreamed I was underwater. I could breathe just fine. There was some sort of short blond kid I didn't recognize. I got an octopus stuck in my ear and it was really gross. That's all I remember of the last dream.

The night prior, I had a dream about superheroes. And then there was a tall skyscraper, and I put some of the windows out with my mind from a distance. Then I was caught in a huge wave, that was rocking me back and forth with each surge, but even though I was immersed in it I did not drown. There was a really old guy who was supposed to be a villain.

Last night I dreamed I was on IRC, only IRC was set up more like an image board. Anyway, I found a channel I liked that was full of a bunch of other gamers and role players. There was a kid on there obsessed with Yu Gi Oh to a really annoying degree who kept challenging me to fake "fights", and then cheating terribly. I commented that he was taking an awful lot of Free Actions (for some reason we were playing by 3.5 Edition Dungeons & Dragons rules) and then beat him up with a pair of giant stuffed foam thumbs. A toy he was using as a prop to fight with exploded into a bunch of glass beads, and then he turned into a kitten. I felt bad about wrecking his toy and being so mean to a little kid/kitten, so I picked up the toy (it looked like a doll head, only made out of beads) and began trying to repair it.

Had a dream, kinda... Austin Powers style, I guess? But I don't remember much.

Then I was part of a group of spies who were trying to infiltrate an office. We got seen by someone there but they assumed I was a supervisor (I was one person and a group of people at the same time). Then their boss called a meeting and we were recognized as spies. And the boss turned out to be... Hitler. No kidding. I was going to try to kill him, but...

Then it shifted to a group of people trying to infiltrate a place, and they were trying to infiltrate a blood elf camp or something. I was subconsciously changing the buildings because they did not look blood elfy enough. There were several members, and one of them was kind of a ladies' man who was embarrassed that it got found out that he'd set up a date with a superior officer's daughter, who was somehow also Rarity from My Little Pony (yes... a pony).

After that, I was running out of some sort of office complex, only it was more like an industrial building, lots of concrete. I then fully realized that I was dreaming, but it was dark and rainy outside where I was. I looked at my hands, rubbed them together, tried running them along a concrete pillar... I wanted to do a scene change (I was trying to get to an Inn) so I tried to see a light in the distance, but then everything went black. I tried closing and opening my dream-eyes, but it was still black. I began flailing my arms around and every time I moved I heard a sound like the bell on a cat collar. Then I lapsed back into non-lucidity.

Practices: ADA, RRC, WILD
Pre-bed: small piece of chicken and a cup of apple juice.
My stomach hurt pretty badly last night (unrelated to the food).
Set my intent for lucid goals (taste something, crush a rock into a diamond, go eat lunch with some friends).

#1 - It's snowy and I think I may be a little kid. I'm not sure. I live in an arctic environment. My house is made of wood and snow. We might be fighting someone - I don't remember. I remember something about bosses (as in, video game bosses) and people hiding underneath the snow that would pop up and attack you.

Woke up. My stomach still hurts. Used the bathroom.

#2 - I am in a check-out line chatting with another person in line. We're talking about Grand Theft Auto. I'm telling him about a mod someone made where you basically drive around as Simba from The Lion King. You don't have hands or anything, you just drive around the city as a lion. During the dream, I think it's hysterical because I'm imagining all the reactions people would have to a lion just chilling in a convertible at a stop light.

I wake up. I have to use the bathroom, and my stomach still hurts. I lie back down and begin WILD techniques.

This WILD, I did not have any HI and I did not feel the onset of REM atonia. I used to but it seems like lately I just don't pay attention or filter it out. I don't continue repeating my mantra while making a serious attempt at WILD because it actually distracts me too much. Sometimes I visualize and sometimes I don't, depending on how much I feel it's distracting rather than helping. This morning, I did not visualize.

I get a "lapse" in the middle of my WILD where I feel like I do lose lucidity, but my mind is so alert for any kind of dreams or dreamlets that as soon as a dream starts it will grab my attention again. So I actually do zone out for a while during most of my successful WILDs and I feel like it's why they're successful - you actually have to let your mind wander and dream to have a dream in the first place.

A "flash" catches my attention - a brief but super-clear and fully formed dreamlet. Normally they shock me awake because they come with zero warning - it instantly goes from blackness to a fully-formed landscape. Since I've been working on not letting them startle me, though, I was able to 'grab' this one:

I am in a basement bedroom of some sort. It's very clean, with white walls. I'm standing on the bed. There is a small window high above me that is letting sunlight in. The window frame is made of dark wood.

I bounce up and down on the bed, peering out of the window. It is a brilliant fall day outside and the trees are vivid red and orange. There are leaves all over the ground; some dried and brown, others still brightly colored.

I haul myself through the window frame, ignoring the glass and making it insubstantial. Even though it ought to be too small for me to fit through, I still manage to wriggle through it. The sunlight is super bright and temporarily blinds me with a lense-flare effect as I haul myself out of the window well.

"LEEEEAAAAAAVES!" I crow triumphantly and plow into a pile of red and orange leaves. I roll around in them, kicking my legs and sending a whirlwind of leaves all over the place. I flop my arms around in them and rub my face in them. I remember my lucid goal and begin enthusiastically shoving leaves into my mouth. They are very thin and papery and taste like stale crackers, with a hint of glue. I sit up and spit out a mouthful of leaves. I wake up.

My lucid self cracks me up sometimes. I'm in complete control of my faculties, but I'm so enthusiastic about absolutely everything.

I am in an old apartment, the one we lived in when I was in high school. I dream that I have 3 pet hamsters. I only meant to buy 2, and the 3rd one is very small and snuck in with the others. They're very bitey and nip at my fingers whenever I try to handle them. 2 are typical "golden" hamsters, and one is a mottled tortoise shell color. I have placed them in a cage I purchased, but the cage seems to have come without doors, so they simply keep crawling out of the cage. I finally locate the door for the cage, but it's very dented and doesn't close properly. In addition to this, the cage has little "windows" (gaps in the bars) and they just squeeze out through there. I'm worried since I don't want a hamster population explosion in the apartment complex.

I wake up. I try to WILD but the kids next door are being super loud, which is obnoxious since it's about 7:00 in the morning.

I am in a Dwarven city. I am incorporeal, simply watching the dream. The city is a network of underground tunnels, many of them lined with thousands of polished gemstones that reflect the torch light. The gemstones become more numerous and precious in the tunnels that lead to the houses of the wealthier citizens. There are also a few Hobbits who live here. Many of the tunnels converge in caverns, which have shops and restaurants and markets.

I follow a character who's a hobbit. He's supposed to be an idiot. He's running around inside of the dwarf tunnels frantically looking for someone. There are areas of the complex that are specifically off-limits to him because he caused so much trouble... specifically the home of a very wealthy hobbit whom he caused a lot of grief. He's running around and being disruptive again.

Dream shifts - either it's a new dream or there's a huge break in the narrative. 2 men are trying to canoe across a freezing cold lake. For some reason, they're naked. The canoe tips and they end up falling into the lake, which is super cold. One of the guys tips the canoe back over and the water inside instantly freezes. He climbs into the canoe and starts digging the ice out of it with a shovel. The other guy is still treading water in the lake, complaining about the cold; the guy in the canoe tells him to wait and take deep breaths, he's trying to empty the canoe out.

Mikasan, here is approximately half of an answer to "what was the treasure" for you. This dream was definitely non-lucid, but it looks like the Dwarves still had my treasure map... haha. Apparently, the treasure was a cure for a rare disease:

Scene shift... 2 Dwarves are searching for something that seems very important to them. They have a map. One of them looks like Lokmin, from a prior lucid dream. What they're searching for is apparently a huge cliff above a lake... there was supposed to be an inscription on it, but the stones have eroded and fallen into the lake. They have to fish the stones out of the lake and try to piece them back into place. The portions of the inscription that they can make out alludes to some kind of cure for a disease... something about "the king was the single one I could cure". They need to know what the cure was, which the inscription is supposed to talk about, if they can find the pieces. While Lokmin is dangling from the cliff face, one of the pieces crumbles and falls on top of him (it would have weighed several hundred pounds) and he tumbles into the lake with the slab of stone.

I never went lucid or found out what the cure was. I hope poor Lokmin's alright!

As I fall asleep, I meditate on my mantra and what awareness means.

#1 - Many dream fragments and incomplete dreams. I hover on the edge of lucidity during many of them, but they aren't cohesive enough and I never attain lucidity.

I wake up, and I'm very hot. I still have a fever. I peel off my socks and turn my thermostat down.
I attempt WILD. As REM atonia sets in - much more swiftly than I was expecting - I hear a great deal of loud static and what sounds like a modem dialing. I come very close to entering a dream several times but fail - for whatever reason - and lapse into regular sleep.


#2 - I have a dream about a castle that floats up in the sky. In my dream, I see a far-off view of the underside in a sunny sky full of puffy clouds. There is vegetation hanging from it. In the center of it there is something like a spire but instead of being like a castle it's like a skyscraper. I realize that this island is dominated by a small but elite group of people and everybody else on there toils for their benefit.

Then, I'm on the castle. I'm running around trying to get to the central courtyard or something, I'm not sure. But the whole thing is ledges with no railing and bridges that don't go anywhere. In the back of my mind, I think, "I wonder if I jumped over the edge, if I would fly or if this dream would end?" I realize that - of course - I'm dreaming. I immediately lift off and fly past all of the ridiculous fake bridges.

I land in an archway that leads to a hallway and begin to walk down it. I realize I'd like to visit the "home base", a location I've been trying to create. I see an archway that has heavy double wooden doors set into it with ornate handles, and I decide that I will use it as a doorway to get where I would like to go.

I pull on the heavy handles, and the doors swing open. Inside is my base - or, at least, a room that has many of its key features. They have been heavily altered, however, or some things are just missing. Part of it, I think, was to fit the castle theme - rather than my comfortable lounge, it looks more like a castle kitchen. I also notice that the fire in my fireplace is out. I try to light it by snapping my fingers, but it doesn't work. Not a big deal, I decide - I can breathe fire (obviously). I'll just start the fire that way.

I crouch down on the hearth (whose bricks are "wrong" but I decide it's nothing I can't fix with a little effort) and begin to breathe on the fire. There's nothing but air coming out of my mouth, at first. I focus on the sensation of the air passing through my lips and imagine that the blowing noise is getting louder. The air now has a yellow tinge, and the ash in the fireplace begins to stir. I focus on the yellow tinge in the air and it becomes brighter and glows more. Embers begin glowing in the fireplace. I blow on them harder, and they spread and bloom. The fire doesn't roar to life - it begins to slowly spread and grow like a real fire would.

I decide I would like something to eat. I'm not able to summon anything directly, so instead I call to a servant (they are there but I don't turn to look at them) and telepathically tell them that I would like some food. I consciously opted for telepathy because I was getting the sensation that the lucid dream was getting "thin" and if I attempted to speak to them out loud I would do so in real life and wake myself up. It didn't matter either way, since once they walked away, the dream began to fade. I wake up.

#3 - I dream about a group of high-schoolers, sort of Breakfast Bunchy, except they also have a little girl (a toddler) with them. Sometimes I'm one of them, and sometimes I'm just watching. They live in an apartment complex or condos or something and are wandering around outside in a storm. It's storming heavily but they don't seem to mind the rain, although they periodically lose the toddler and have to keep looking for her. They decide that they would like to go to the beach during this storm.

One of them, a guy with blond hair, says he needs to take care of some business first. The others don't know it but he's actually an assassin and has been working as one since he was 16, and he needs to check his secret base for something. While they're waiting, he gets completely sidetracked. His love-interest goes looking for him and stumbles across his base. Inside is a TV screen with another guy on it (he is hideously ugly) who is a rival assassin who wants to kill the guy... he manages to press through the TV screen and emerge from it physically. The woman starts throwing pottery at him, but stops short at a set of antique vases because she doesn't want to bust them.

The other high schoolers finally find the hideout. One of them is irritated because the storm is now nearly over. Blond assassin guy also finally shows up again. The whole scene ends up with all of the high schoolers in there, throwing pottery at the bad guy. Even the toddler.

After he's defeated, the whole place is full of clothing racks and everybody begins trying on clothing. I'm watching but I'm also the love-interest girl and I am trying to fit into a sweater but the sleeves are too small to fit my hands through (I highly suspect I was trying to punch through my blanket at this point). He helps by unbuttoning the sleeves and helping me work my hands through them.

I wake up. I'm still hot. I turn the thermostat down more.

Continuation of the previous dream - I'm with blond assassin guy and we're driving a very long distance to his family's home in the countryside. I'm talking about getting a Master's degree and a school I would like to attend in France, but I'm worried about the cost of tuition. We arrive at the house and see that it is perched on the edge of a canyon. I run down the steep incline to see what's at the bottom. When I look up, the guy is gone.

I don't know where he's went, but 2 people (hunters) are approaching me, and one of them has a ridiculous "hillbilly" accent. The girl (I've gone to 3rd person again) seems worried that they will try to ask her out and tells them that she can only interact with other people if she has won some clothing. They agree to help her win something.

Clearly, the way to win a prize is to hunt a bear, and the way to hunt a bear is to bounce up and down in a giant net. The 2 hunters tie the net to some trees and use it to propel the girl up into the air, where she waves at and taunts the bear. This pisses the bear off to no end, so it charges at the net. The bear gets tangled up in the net and they vanquish it. Once defeated, the bear transforms into a small pile of First Aid kits. They rifle through the kits looking for clothing, but only find an inflatable bed and a bunch of nonsensical instruction booklets.

#4 - I dream I live in an apartment complex but also a hospital. I live on the 6th or 7th floor, and all of floor 4 is designated for heart attack victims and full of nurses. The maintenance staff has deposited a bunch of bizarre looking furniture outside all of the apartment doors except mine. I'm irritated that I didn't receive any furniture so I run around stealing everybody else's.

Goals:
- Continue ADA and mindfulness on daily basis, as energy levels and attention span allow
- Daily journal updates, in particular, also seem to help
- I need to engage with my environment more

Last night's dreams were mostly fragmentary.

#1 - I dreamed I was playing a survival/horror game in the vein of Resident Evil (old RE) but with a combat system that was closer to Fallout/Fallout 2. At one point, I had to control a character who was an Airdale Terrier who was trying to accomplish some in-game goals and escape. I had to gather some other dogs using the character and then follow an escape route. Although the subject matter was "scary", the dream was not a nightmare and I wasn't afraid of anything.

#2 - Then I dreamed I was traveling to some sort of monastery set into a scenic cliff side, and the inside of the cliff actually held an entire tiny village and economy - but when I got inside it turned out that the whole place was being run by Lady Gaga and instead of chapels there was a huge room full of lasers and balloons.

#3 - Gross dream. Dreamed I was using a tiny vacuum to vacuum zits. Except, at one point, it looked like my face had been full of brown paste or mud... anyway, it was gross.

#4 - Back to the RE setting. I am human now and stuck in some sort of solitary confinement. I miss my dog.

Practices: ADA, Mindfulness, WBTB, DEILD
While falling asleep, mantra: "I am aware"

Dream #1 - I am with my friend, R__. She's driving a car - one belonging to one of my relatives, according to my dream-memory, but in real life none of them own a gray minivan. We're driving around a mall parking lot. We can't seem to find a parking space. She accidentally hits another car while pulling into a parking space, and I cringe at the sound, but she's more angry about it than worried. She decides to try to use a note left on her windshield to explain why she parked in one of the restricted parking spots, by claiming she can't walk that far, but I don't think that will hold up under scrutiny. She finally gives up and parks pretty far away from the mall entrance. We can see it from where we are, but it's quite a walk.

I briefly wake up from the dream and try to carry my awareness with me into my next dream, using my mantra.

As soon as the dream reforms, I am instantly lucid. I'm inside of the mall from the previous dream, but R__ is gone now. The lucid dream has the crystal clarity characteristic of my lucid. Since I'm not outdoors (unusual), rather than the usual sweeping landscapes and storm-swept skies, instead the architecture inside of the mall is extremely grand. Super high vaulted ceilings, probably 80-100 feet high, with graceful arches carved out of solid pale pink marble and golden inlays. Intricate carvings and sculptures. White marble floors. The whole thing looks more like the inside of a cathedral than a mall.

I look around and think, "This is definitely a dream". I inspect my hand - it's perfectly formed. I do a reality check by trying to push one hand through the other, but I can't. I shrug it off - I know I'm dreaming. I try to fly, and hover in the air above the crowds milling around the mall. My lucidity tends to fade very quickly while I'm flying, though - there's something about not having my feet on the ground that does that. So I land, and then crawl on the floor and inspect the marble tiles. There's grime between them and they feel a little gritty - this place needs to be swept and mopped.

I decide to go treasure hunting. I reach into my back pocket - for some reason, I'm wearing a skirt with pockets - and feel around for a map. I feel crumpled paper and tug. I pull out a sheet of notebook paper, folded in half several times, and unfold it. There is a map on it, scribbled in blue pen, but I can't read what it says. It also has little pictures. I decide that I need to go find a dream character who CAN read it, and if I'm going to treasure hunt, I'm going to do it in style - which means having a whole group of treasure hunters with me. I run my hand along the wall as I walk.

I walk toward the food court - well, an archway I have decided is the food court. The floor slopes downward between it in a ramp, heading underground. I can see tables in the distance. I decide that's kind of boring and want it to be something more exciting. As I approach, it morphs into a Viking style beer hall. I'm pretty satisfied - this is definitely more fun.

I enter the beer hall, which is smokey and full of warriors eating and drinking. There is an empty space in the middle with a fire-pit that looks like it's used by entertainers - wrestlers, musicians, etc. The benches on either side are elevated on steps, sort of like bleachers, so everybody can see. Nobody is performing right now, though.

I see a group of 5 or 6 Tolkein-style Dwarves over to one side. They look like they're having a pretty good time. I approach them and introduce myself. Their leader is a pretty buff looking Dwarf. He has long, thick braided brown hair and is wearing a sort of heavy brown leather harness that has what looks like a lion's mane stitched around the neck and shoulders. He greets me respectfully:
"I am Lokmin, son of (I can't remember his dad's name)." He thumps his chest (which is more Roman, I guess, but whatever).
I hold out my treasure map. "I've found a map to potential treasure, but it might be dangerous."
The Dwarves deliberate over my wrinkled sheet of notebook paper, making sounds of interest and approval. Lokmin looks like he's about to make the decision to follow me...

But unfortunately, we never got to find the treasure. I live near an airport - one of the EXTREMELY LOUD jets that I LOATHE flies overhead, waking me up and ending my lucid dream. I was pretty upset. Even now there's another really loud jet flying overhead. I hate those things, and the airport by extension (it wasn't always noisy here - they moved the flight paths).

I go back to sleep, trying to re-enter the dream, but I'm too irritated to focus.


Dream #3 - I dream that I am taking naked photographs of myself using my laptop camera and didn't realize the curtain across the sliding glass door in the living room was sheer. I figure either nobody saw me, or they didn't care.

Last night's dreams weren't very remarkable. I have a cold or some sort of sinus infection, and kept waking up with a fever.

I dreamed that my back molar was completely rotten, and every time I closed my mouth, it shoved the tooth out of place. The tooth was extremely loose - I was able to pull it up and see a pool of brown gunk beneath it. It didn't hurt, but it felt extremely uncomfortable and weird.

I really don't remember much else, beyond a vague dream involving the characters of Avatar: The Last Airbender - a show I haven't watched in year. My brother and a friend were discussing it earlier in the evening, though, and I think that may have influenced my dream.

#1 - Don't recall the dream much, but recall thinking, "If I were lucid, this would be more vivid." d'oh! That's close, though... my near-lucids usually indicate I'll have a dream-induced lucid dream within the next night.

#2 - I dream I work in a store. We are selling $20,000.00 coffee cups, and a whole row of them got broken (not my fault). I get into an argument with my boss, who treats all people with disabilities as if they are stupid, which infuriates me. I call my friend M__ and complain about it because I know she'll understand.

#3 - I am going up a river bank with a bunch of other people. I don't recall why, I think it was a picnic or social gathering or something. It's getting close to dusk.

I suddenly hear gunfire and see the muzzle flash of automatic weapons. Naturally, everybody panics. We weren't doing anything violent and obviously didn't expect to be shot at. There's nowhere to run - we can go backwards, away from the river, for some reason (I don't remember why).

Now we are being shelled as we scramble along the river bank. There's smoke everywhere and everybody is panicking. Up ahead, through the smoke, I see a bunch of soldiers. From their uniforms, they're friendly toward us. They're returning fire across the river and indicating for us to move toward them so they can get between us and our attackers, but there's a whole stretch of bank to cross and it's under fire. In addition, the bank is very crowded and it's difficult to get everybody to move in a specific direction instead of running in random directions and flipping out.

#4 - I am renting a room in an apartment. The room is very small and I'm putting my furniture together and thinking about how to arrange it. My friend Z__ wants to meet up since he heard I moved back to town. I am thinking about how much money I need to make before I can rent my own apartment. I'm putting trash in a trash basket, but it's made of plastic mesh and all of the trash keeps falling through the spaces in it.

I was overtired when I went to bed last night. As a result, my dream recall is garbage. I'll edit this post and add to it as I recall more throughout the day.

I dreamed that my friend K__ was teaching me and M___ to ride motorcycles and explaining how the throttle worked so we could ride up and down hills.

I dreamed that I set the stove on fire (I was in an apartment I don't recognize, but it was "mine") and threw buckets of water on it to put it out.

Woke up and attempted a half-assed wild but my heart wasn't in it. Saw dreamlets of a fireplace (in my "base") and a flash of the reflections of palm trees and a beautiful sunset in the plate glass window of a house on the beach somewhere in California. My sinuses hurt badly again. I am learning to ignore the heater - it helps that the weather's getting warmer - but I need to take a sinus pill before I go to bed at night.

Last night, when I lay down to sleep, I resolved not to attempt to induce a WILD. The reason is that I have been tired the past 2 days, possibly due to waking up between REM cycles for my attempts.


#1 - I dreamed, but don't remember it. I woke up, because I was hot, but immediately went back to sleep.

#2 - I was in class, in a first grade class, but I was my real age (nearly 30). I don't recall the reason for being in the class, there was some reason that I understood in the dream but that was never made entirely clear. I was not an intern or TA, I was definitely a student, and all the other students seemed aware that I didn't "belong". My teacher was a big woman. At one point, she was asking me questions in class out of a work book. I was answering correctly, but she was behaving as if I was not and "Correcting" me. Finally, it got to be too much and I stood up and yelled at her. She started to cry. Later, I told another student, "You know I'm actually 23 years old, right?" (note: I'm not 23). The student acted shocked.

#3 - This dream phased into another one where I was in a romantic relationship with a guy. I was staying with his family. He was kind of a blond "jock" type... not really my type. We had sex in the shower...his family knew we were very good friends, but I don't think that they thought we were involved in that way.

Then, the family attempted to buy a nicer house, but it turned out that there was a bankruptcy that the wife had forgotten to mention on the paperwork. Her husband began to yell at her, and she began crying. The real estate agent told them that they wouldn't be able to get another loan for something like 1500 years.

#4 - My aunt has agreed to give a family friend's friend a ride in their old red Dodge Caravan. We have to make special accommodations for her in the van because she's disabled. For some reason, this involves my uncle trying to fit a shopping cart into the van (he claimed it was her wheelchair). We finally manage to fit it in the back and go to pick her up. She's inside of my aunt's house. Their driveway is very steep in real life. My aunt pulls most of the way up the driveway, but not all the way up, and the poor woman has to walk the rest of the way to the van. She is very overweight, but it's not due to her overeating, she has some kind of hormonal disorder that causes this and makes her bones very soft. She has many small braids in her hair and is wearing a purple dress. Walking the 10 feet to the van is painful for her, but my aunt doesn't seem to care and won't pull up farther. I get out of the van and help the woman walk the rest of the way to the van, and help her climb inside. She thanks me, then sits down on the seat looking very relieved.

I wake up. In real life, I have gathered my sheet up somehow and am clutching it like it's a teddy bear.