Bubble

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.

I've gotten better at WILD, although it took... what... 4 years?

I've found I have much more control over the dream and don't run into the "stuck in the dark" issue that plagues my lucid dreams when I gain awareness during a dream.

I've been horrible about keeping a dream journal, and today I only remember my 2 WILD lucid dreams and not much else. Very lazy of me.

My favorite method for WILD is to explore a specific environment. I have two main fallbacks, two different "home bases". I know a lot of people really want to create a home base. It has been very difficult for me - I had no luck even managing to arrive in my home base for 2 solid years. I think part of it was that my "home" really wasn't a good one and didn't reflect my true personality or needs, and I had to spend a lot of time rearranging and rebuilding it in my head. I have two different ones right now, depending on what I want to accomplish. One is a whimsical home in what looks like the rainforest of the Pacific Northwest, perched on a cliff over the ocean. The other one is a fortress in a rugged landscape that looks a lot like the Grand Canyon, although much more mountainous.


LD #1: Woke up. Had to use the bathroom. Went back to bed.
Began my visualization of home #1... I was on the sandy beach below the cliff. I walked up and down the beach in my mind, focusing on all of the sensations that would go with it - the sound of the waves, the sound of the wind, the feel of the sand beneath my feet and even the slight whisper it made when I walked. How my footprints looked. The sky and horizon over the ocean, and the smell of salt on the breeze. Eventually, the sound of gulls over the water.

I looked back toward my house. There are steep stairs that lead up from the beach to the top of the cliff - they're made from the stones themselves. I walk across the beach to the steps and start climbing upward toward the house. The stones feel solid beneath my feet.

By the time I reach the top of the cliff, the dream has solidified into a lucid dream, although it still feels very fragile. I spend some time on the terrace at the top of the cliff looking out across the beach and ocean, and marvel at how beautiful it is.

I have a feeling that there are some friends nearby heading toward my house, so I move through the bedroom (which has a door leading to the terrace) and then the kitchen area. Things are fuzzy and I've made the mistake of not stabilizing very well because I'm anxious to greet my friends.

I open the front door. The rainforest outside is cool and misty. Wooden steps create a trail upward through the foliage. I can hear their voices in the distance, it sounds like two of them are arguing with each other.

Two of my friends appear at the top of the steps and start heading downward... I can still hear the others arguing with each other, although they're still out of sight somewhere further up the trail.

All of this is very distracting. The dream is too thin at this point, and it fades. I wake up.

LD #2:
I wake up naturally. It's early morning... light outside, but earlier than I'd like to get out of bed. I don't really remember the dreams I just had.

I lie back and begin another visualization; this time, I'm exploring the fortress. The fortress is a very new idea, interesting and a bit more grim. I wander around through some nondescript rooms... I haven't really developed the place much... and eventually become lucid in an area with ugly lemon yellow walls that really don't look very fortressy. I'm sort of irritated since I'd rather be somewhere more fitting for what I'd like, and more interesting. The hall I'm going down twists and turns but doesn't lead anywhere, and I'm becoming more irritated.

I run across a woman wearing a very old-fashioned maid outfit (not like a sexy French maid, think a traditional English maid) but she's very... zombielike. I think I said something to her, and she replied in a monotone. Her eyes were white and milky-looking. I don't like her and don't want to deal with zombies, so I destroy her (with a thought, she basically becomes a blood spatter across the walls and floor).

I run across one of the dream characters who'd normally inhabit this fort (he's a general) but everything is foggy so I don't recall any specifics about him... I need to work on him a little more... and complain about the zombie. He tells me that he and another dream character zombified all of the inhabitants and servants in the fortress when they took it over, so they wouldn't have to deal with any opposition by them but the fortress was kept running and in pretty decent repair. He doesn't care much about convenience and upkeep for himself - he doesn't need that stuff - but the way he sees it, it's more convenient for me. It's sort of evil and disturbing, but it IS something I'd expect that character to do, and he does have a good point.

This wasn't something I came up with myself... I was a little surprised by it, actually. I still don't really like the zombies, but I don't want to argue with that particular dream character very much - he's very stubborn - so I let the zombie thing slide.

As I head toward the main door that leads outside of the fortress, the dream falls apart and I wake up.

Dreamed I was in grade school, but I was in school in Japan.They had started painting murals all over lunch rooms "to encourage kids to eat all of their food." The administrator in charge of planning this said not everybody would like all of the murals because "some are very soft".

The administrator is standing in front of one of the murals, speaking about it. The light is bright, artificial indoor lighting. The mural is a goofy cartoon version of a kid running - but more like an American Peanuts-style cartoon than a Japanese one. The colors are bright; the kid's skin is a peach color. When he talks about the "softer" murals, I can't see them, but I imagine what one might look like, and it is a pink fuzzy blob.

The lunch room has tables like a standard American lunch room (the long brown tables with benches) and the kids are sitting down and eating at them.

They also implemented a new program where they would give kids "tickets" for lunch item menus like meat, salad, dessert, etc. They warned kids not to use up all of their meat tickets at the beginning of the week, or they'd end up eating salad the rest of the week. One particularly enterprising kid bought tickets off of the other kids and "sold" them in exchange for doing his homework, etc. The teacher found a hoard of salad tickets in his desk because nobody wanted them.

I see his desk full of salad tickets. I imagine the child as a husky little boy with short, messy brown hair. Perspective shift - I see a child in line, handing a lunch server a meat ticket, while there is a voice-over of the teacher explaining about the tickets.

The dream shifts a little. I'm still in Japan, but now I am an exchange student with the ability to alter reality to suit my whims - just a little bit. While walking up the steps to a one-story brown brick building (the school), I change the color of another kid's shoes. I walk through the door after him.

---

Then I dreamed about eating at a restaurant that included a shower with the meal. I ate a seafood meal that is basically calamari, mussels, and clams mixed together and sauteed. The inside of the restaurant was a bit dark, and the seafood was just sort of plunked down on the plate (and a little tasteless).

Then I took a long shower, but it became so long that I worried that the restaurant's owners would be pissed. The shower was a stand-up shower with no tub and a sliding door. I had a blue-green loofah.

---

I dreamed I bought a house right off of the highway. It was supposed to be very close to where I currently live, just a little bit further out and with a much nicer yard. It cost me about $500,000. When I showed it to my mother, she liked the yard. I decided that we needed more space, and there were 3 empty undeveloped lots behind and off to the side of it, so I bought those as well - my reasoning being that we could plant a garden there. They made kind of a "U" shape around my neighbor's house, and I got nervous that there would be some conflict over who owns the land since up until now, the neighbor had just sort of used it by default because nobody owned it/was using it. I was also unsure if it was too much space, and if my mother's garden would really extend beyond the original house's garden.

Anyway, the house was up on top of a steep hill, with steps up to it. It was a little one-story house with light blue siding, plenty of windows for natural lighting, and lots of foliage around it. In the dream, it was summer and the sunlight was bright. The whole thing seemed very cheery. There was a patio in back with a few patio chairs and a table, and the yard behind it was lush and full of trees and flowers. The predominating color of the foliage was a light spring green, and you could hear birds in the garden. I told my mother that if you went down the steps to the sidewalk, you could walk into downtown. I apologized about the noise from traffic but explained that it was a great house and the traffic noise had brought the price down to make it more affordable.

I had one of those nightmares where I'm back in high school again and have to repeat all of my old classes. It was only a few days in and I'd already made a habit of being late. The worst part was knowing I was repeating high school yet again. I had some level of awareness of it - I even made a "not again" comment in the dream - but still didn't gain self awareness.

I was renting an apartment with a room-mate - I hadn't met him prior to renting, but needed a place to stay. He turned out to be incredibly weird and borderline creepy, but I tried to stay on cordial terms with him. The apartment was supposed to be downtown in he city that I currently live in. I got into a brief argument with him about exactly where my rent check was going, since I was handing it to him instead of the landlord, and I'd prefer to give it to the landlord directly. When he gave me trouble over it, I asked him if his landlord knew he had a roommate. He didn't give me a direct answer.

The dream reused some locations from old dreams. For example, we went to a diner that was in a building along train tracks, that had multiple levels, and ordered cheese steaks. The cook, a stout slavic man in his late 30s, with thick black curly hair, actually remembered me. In fact, on the way there, I told the DC "room mate" that I'd take him to one of my favorite places to eat. Again, so close... but still didn't quite reach lucidity.

Dreams from previous nights:
I was in an airport. I got a box off of the baggage carousel and opened it. It was full of cockatoos, packed neatly in rows. They were sleeping. I got one out of the box, and it woke up and flapped its way up to the top of my head, and then pooped there. I was really irritated by this. I couldn't figure out what to do with the rest of the cockatoos.

I become lucid while looking in a mirror (this happens a lot). The light is pretty dim (which also happens a lot and is a source of frustration). I don't recall any sort of prior dream, I may have been lucid from the start. I examine my reflection. I'm still trying to figure out if I'm dreaming or not, so I try to put my arm through the mirror. I just bump it away. Ha, I think, not so fast. I know I'm dreaming, I just want to prove it. I push at the mirror again, and put my arm through it. It ripples like water.
I decide to change my appearance. I close my eyes and open them, and my hair is in a long braid. I close my eyes and open them again, and now I am wearing a green cloak.
Unfortunately, the dream fades (I doubt I could have prolonged it) and I wake up (real, not FA).

It's been a while since I posted anything.

I dreamed I was trying to fit my cell phone into a side pocket on my purse and it wouldn't fit.

I dreamed I got up to check my phone (which I had, at one point in the very early morning, when it went off) but for some reason I went to sleep on the couch. When I 'got up', it was pitch black inside the apartment even though I knew it was morning. That didn't really clue me in, though, I just accepted it. Then, I tried to turn the light in the kitchen on. It didn't work. I then tried to turn the bedroom light on - it also didn't work. I realized that this probably wasn't due to the fact that both lightbulbs weren't working, but probably because I was dreaming. I shouted "It's too dark!" to try to create some light, but it didn't work.

I wound up back on the couch, trying to get up, and realizing I was still dreaming. I actually wanted to wake up for real, since I knew it was probably getting late in the morning and I didn't want to sleep in too late, but found myself in another false awakening. Frustrated, I tried to rouse my sleeping body and managed to turn over in my physical bed, waking myself up (for real).

I had a headache. I got out of bed and made some coffee.

Dreamed that I was on the moon.

The place I was in was something like a cross between an apartment and the ISS. It was an academy for teenagers who were learning about science. I recall vaguely thinking about how horrible it would be if someone accidentally broke a window. But there was a mail package delivery and the woman who delivered it was outside of the building, and I remember wondering how she was breathing and why our air wasn't rushing out. It seemed like a normal building with normal windows, but the walls were grey and bare.

She told us that she really liked an environment I'd animated. Suddenly my boyfriend was there and she told him "watch the pink trees, I find it incredibly soothing," (referring to the animation I'd made). For some reason, I was really embarrassed about the animation, I didn't think it was very good. The package turned out to be two huge pink fluffy bath mats, which covered the entire floor of the room we were in once I'd laid them out.

At one point, the professor was explaining how "days" on the moon were different and it rotated in a different way than Earth.

Last few nights...

06/12/14:
I dreamed about a tree.

It was a huge tree with black bark and sprawling, twisted limbs... if anybody has seen a Live Oak, it was sort of like that, but much bigger. I know there is something wrong with it.

It is outside of the fence. The fence is wooden and rickety. It encloses something, but I'm not sure what. It's always dark, always night. The world feels very "small", like the entire world just surrounds the tree and the fence but doesn't spread very far beyond them. I am trying to somehow stop the evil I know is infecting the tree's roots.

Some sort of burrowing creature is inside of the fence, digging through the soft loamy earth. It's like a brown, short-haired dog sized ferret thing that can talk. Its tunnel reaches the "evil" roots. Once they are exposed, the evil is able to spread inside of the fence. It was an accident, the creature was just trying to create a "home" burrow. It apologizes and says it will make its home elsewhere.

I have to attend a class. My homework isn't done because I've been spending all of my time and energy trying to contain the evil. The teacher knows this, and fudges my grade. I feel like my classmates resent me because of it. I'm overstretched, though. The class is for a cello-like instrument. Not only is my instrument damaged, but in order to make a passing grade, I still have to play some songs for an exam, and they're too difficult for me because I haven't had time to practice. I feel overwhelmed and depressed.


06/14/14:
I have vague recollections of a nightmare. There is some sort of evil stitched-together zombie child. It's gray. It's stitched to a man's hip. I am trying to protect some other (living) children to it but it keeps "absorbing" large, bloody chunks of them and the whole situation is horrifying. I wake up but am still sort of half-asleep and the feeling of horror lingers until I fall back asleep.

I wake up from my usual night's sleep in order to go to the restroom. Don't recall my dreams. When I get back, I settle in, noting in my mind that this would be a good time for a lucid attempt, and then I allow myself to drift off.

One of the ways I initiate lucid dreaming is visualization. My particular mode is exploring an environment in my head, in detail. I know I'm entering the dream when the environment becomes easier to explore and more unpredictable. Sometimes there is a sense of "breaking the tension" and moving into lucidity. Sometimes it's more gentle. Sometimes I feel like things are still fuzzy and don't get the clarity I want. Like all lucid techniques, it's a mixed bag.

I grab onto the first location that drifts into my mind - an old apartment I used to live in. I am outside on the front lawn. I walk down the lawn and across the street and head for a stream that is on the other side of the complex. It is lined on either side by thick trees that were simply never knocked down by the developer.

When I reach the stream, I begin my explorations. I decide to do something I did there a lot as a child - look for rocks that would look good once they had been through a rock tumbler. I pick up a few rocks and examine them, but don't see anything I like. I continue walking down the stream, splashing my feet in the water.

The stream becomes larger and deeper. I have reached a part of the stream that no longer looks familiar. I note that my visualization has become more intense. I walk from the center of the stream to the bank on the side, which has become muddy. As I continue walking, the stream becomes deeper and more turbulent, and has cut deeper into the banks. The banks have gone from the soft dark brown of midwestern soil to a burnt sienna color, and are gaining more of a texture of clay. If anybody has been to Georgia, they may know the color of soil I'm talking about.

The stream has become closer to a river. I imagine that a "duck" style vehicle could probably float down it now. For some reason, a roller coaster is now running along the side of the bank, but it isn't full scale. I take note of it. I try to assess my dream state, but it still feels "thin". There's not really much clarity, and I feel like trying to exert direct influence right now may cause it to fall apart.

The roller coaster has disappeared. I now see a pristine snow drift and a snow-covered hill leading upward from the river bank. I decide to see where the snow leads.

I begin walking through the snowy area. The snow becomes deeper, and as I continue forward, I start having trouble walking through it. I am heading up a steep hill, struggling through the snow. I look up the hill, and realize it leads up a mountain. I look down and I can see the path I've made through the snow. The stream is nowhere in sight - I'm now on a mountain in a mountain range. This is the tallest mountain. It's daytime, and the sky is very blue against the sparkling white snow.

I decide to continue heading upward to see what is up there. The sky becomes darker. The snow is almost up to my chest, and the way up is still very steep. I have no climbing equipment, so I flounder and climb the best I can. At this point, I feel like I am "deep" enough in the dream to start changing things, but I'm genuinely curious as to where this all leads.

Upward, in the distance, wind is picking snow up off the drifts and driving it in swirls across the mountainside. Through the wind and snow, nestled under a massive overhang in the rock of the mountain, I see... a fortress? Castle? It's made of stone. There are no lights; even though it is aesthetically beautiful, in a cold way, all of the openings look defense-oriented - places for archers or people with spears. The only place I see a dim light is what I assume is the entrance.

I reach the door. There is a flat area of stone that forms sort of a "landing", a level area carved out of the rock and laid with decorative stonework. A large, wooden door leads to what I assume is the interior of the fortress. The aesthetic is quite Gothic (but think of something in the style of Rheinstein Castle, not something like Cologne Cathedral). There are lights on either sides of the door, but interestingly, they seem more like gaslights than torches. The wood is stained a warm brown color and the fittings look like they are made of bronze.

There is a lever to open the door in front of it. I ponder how that really isn't very, you know, secure, but I get the feeling that not everybody is actually able to pull it. Only certain people can. I pull it with no problem, though. The door opens.

I walk into a gallery with an extremely high ceiling. There are massive chandeliers lit with huge candles, I count about 8 of them, and each one looks like it is the size of a small room. They look a little... Victorian. The whole thing seems cathedral-esque, but when I examine the gallery, I see that there are actually walkways high up on either side where archers could perch. Anybody trying to march through here could be easily sniped.

I'm not sure what I'm expecting. There are 2 doors at the very end of the gallery. The one to the right is open, and in the room there is a small screen, and it seems to be a bedroom of some sort, which I think is kind of weird. Then I realize it's a place for guards to rest, where they could easily access the gallery, so this might be an area that also leads to barracks. I still think it's a really weird layout. I go through the door that is right in front of me, though.

It leads to a dark room with stone walls and outlets to a hallway on either side. I'm not sure what I expected, but it wasn't this. The scenery still feels blurry and not 100% real, which is also a bit frustrating.

I walk through the door directly across me. I am in another room with high ceilings and a large chandelier. Things are getting blurry and kind of falling apart. The architecture is getting weird and I feel like it's getting "wrong". I begin to feel frustrated. I'm still trying to look for a throne room, or something, but I keep encountering weird rooms like this that just don't seem to fit the layout right. I'm looking for a dream character of any sort of significance, at this point, since I haven't really seen anybody.

There's another screen with someone behind it... I look around for a person. I'm actually looking around for what my dreamscape would consider to be the "leader" of this place, but instead, a woman who looks like a nanny appears. I don't know what small children she'd be minding, I assumed the ones of the head of the castle. At the time, I assumed there would be some, but now that I think about it there don't seem to be any. I think they might be around, but I don't see any. I should have talked to her, and asked what was up, but I didn't. I have an irritating tendency to stay silent during these dreams.

I can't get the DC I want to appear. I wake up.

The castle is cool, though. Once I've been to a dream-location, it seems like it can be a little easier getting there again (cottage is still hard, though). I wish I had spent more time examining individual parts of the fortress, rather than just pressing onward. If I end up there again, I probably will.