Bubble

So, I haven't been keeping very good track of dreams.

Helicopter:
About a week ago - had a dream I was in a helicopter with someone. I looked down and there was fog rolling across a field, rolling in waves like an ocean. There was a storm in the distance, I could see it across several farm fields, but it was beautiful. On the edge of the fields there was a forest. The helicopter flew down until it was only a few feet above the ground, and we flew through a forest. I had a vague idea I was dreaming, and I wanted to share this with one of my friends, so I tried to turn the helicopter pilot into one of my friends. I looked away and looked back. When I looked back, her face was blurred out, but she hadn't fully changed. When this stuff happens, you'd think it would be super creepy in a Silent Hill sort of way, but when I am dreaming it's just a "this didn't completely work" sort of thing and doesn't bother me. I woke up.

I've had a few lucid dreams over the past 2 weeks but I've also been bad about recording those, so I'll just record last night:


Lucid:
Woke up ~8 am. Got up to use the bathroom. Went back to bed with the idea that it would probably be easy to transition to a lucid dream at this point.

Fell asleep, as normal. At some point, I became semi-aware while I was in the grey fog. I am familiar with the fog, by now. I knew that because I didn't "have a body" at the moment, I wouldn't be able to enter a dream (this is something it took a while to figure out, and it's just the way it works for me). I decided to do my technique of "walking" forward until my feet took form I could see my feet. I looked down at where my feet would be and began "walking". After spending a while doing it, suddenly my feet came into being. Once they came into being, I decided to try to bring an environment into being. Suddenly, the world popped into place. It startled me so much that I fell on my butt.

I was now sitting in a yard in front of a house. It was very clear. There was a house behind me that I didn't notice very much, and trees all around me. The grass I was sitting on was vibrantly green and soft. I saw some little flowers growing in it (like little daisies) and thought about picking one. Before I did that, though, I decided to look around. Everything was crystal clear, no "dream fuzziness" at all.

I heard a car in the distance. It stopped at the curb next to me. Curious, I stood up to take a look. I could see the driver inside, his features were quite clear without the "dream fuzzies" that sometimes happen when I see a dream character. He opened the door and stepped out and suddenly everything became fuzzy and gray again.

My body had disappeared again. I began to rub my hands together. After a while of rubbing, they suddenly appeared in front of me. I was pleased and tried to cause the landscape to reappear. Unfortunately, I guess I hadn't stabilized enough because my hands disappeared again and I woke up a little bit.

I settled back down and tried to imagine walking while looking at my feet again, and holding the hand of a friend to try to make them appear with me once I "existed" again, as sort of an anchor (I am holding onto them and they are in the environment that we are both in, so they stabilize me and vice versa). It doesn't really work and I feel like I can feel my feet shuffling in my bed (I'm never completely sure if they actually are or it is an illusion that they are).

It doesn't really work. I give up and drift into deeper sleep.

Kitten:
I dream I am robbing banks as an accomplice with a dream character (Caucasian guy with dark shaggy hair, thin and generally unhealthy and unreliable looking). At one point we end up in a production room where people are packing up cocaine for distribution. I have a tiny orange tabby kitten and I am worried about its welfare. I carry it with me at all times. We are going to go rob a bank and crash at a motel and my fellow bank-robber tells me to just leave the kitten outside and it will be fine. I start to leave it there but panic and come back and bring it with me. It's a huge inconvenience, but I cannot bring myself to leave my kitten alone outside where something may happen to it.

I see on the news that I am being listed as an accomplice for murders, but I haven't murdered anybody, and I didn't know that my bank-robbing buddy has been killing people. I decide I need to get away now, that even if I'm on the hook for robberies I'm definitely innocent of killing people. I can't leave my kitten behind, though, I am too worried about it. I'm also worried something will happen to it if my bank-robbing accomplice or the police catch up to me. I run through the woods (I don't have the van/car) and come upon a house there. I know that one of my IRL friends, James, lives in it, and that it would be safe to leave the kitten with him because I trust him. He opens the door and is friendly, as if he doesn't know I've been robbing banks (or doesn't care), and happily agrees to take care of my kitten.

The night before a contact lense appointment, I dreamed that my glasses had holes in them and had become very fragile.

Last night, I dreamed that there were flowers blooming quickly and spontaneously around me. I watched a white lilac bush burst into bloom before my eyes.

The first dream of the night that I recall involves a very, very tall skyscraper. It's so incredibly tall that planes fly around it rather than over it.

I am on my way to the skyscraper. Instead of flying in a plane, I am in something like a swing-set seat, suspended from some sort of flying device. It's just a plastic seat with cables on either side, no sort of safety restraints or anything. The sky is clear, but it's a sort of washed-out blue with no clouds. I'm terrified of heights, so I have my eyes closed and a death grip on the cables. I'm trying to explain to my mother (who is neither next to me, nor on the phone, but she can hear me anyway) that I'm incredibly afraid of heights, and this is terrifying. She doesn't understand why it's so scary. "But you're not afraid of being in a plane," she says. "Planes are solid metal," I explain. "There's something surrounding me. Right now, I'm just sitting on a seat, without anything around me."

As I approach the incredibly thin, super tall building, I recall a dim memory in being in one before and how unsafe it felt. I tell my mother, "Last time I was in one of these buildings, I was terrified and clung to the walls. They're too high. I don't feel safe in them."

As I make my final approach to the building, everything goes black. It's sort of like a scene change would be in a non-lucid dream, if I was paying attention. And when it happens, I do notice this time, and realize that I was dreaming.

The world suddenly pops back into existence around me. I am in what looks like a hotel room. I understand that this is sort of like my brain trying to create my bedroom, but I've been focusing hard on being somewhere different, so it pulls up something that is supposed to be my bedroom, without it being my actual bedroom.

The whole thing is very... "four stars"? Not quite a five star hotel room, but not cheap. But a little tacky, like it's trying too hard. This environment is much clearer than the past few I have found myself in.

Side note: I still don't spend enough time really examining and exploring my surroundings, but I did pay a little more attention this time. I really need to pay more attention to what is around me at first, rather than doing some half-assed stabilization and immediately diving into whatever I am doing. I feel like the more attention I pay to where I am at first, the more successful my attempts to manipulate the dream are.

There is a gilded oval mirror on the wall. I decide to jump into it to see if I can do a scene change. I dive into the mirror, and I am standing in front of it again. I dive into it again, and I am standing in front of it again. I dive into it again, and I am standing in front of it again. I stop and inspect my reflection for a moment to stabilize the dream again. For some reason, my hair is very short.

I try not to let it bother or frustrate me too much, and it really doesn't. I decide that if I can't do a full scene change, I'll start manipulating my environment into what I want.

The hotel bed is very cushy, with nice accent pillows and bedding. The bedding is off-white with very thin red pin-stripes. I don't want red. I want purple. Without even closing my eyes, the pinstripes are suddenly purple, and the colors of the furniture and wallpaper and other decorations have shifted to match the new color scheme.

There is an end table with a small piece of carved driftwood on it. The wood is old-looking and grayish. It has been carved a little bit, but I still can't tell what it was meant to be. I inspect and feel the wood, to solidify things a bit.

I look around. The room has a very nice door, but it's not what I want. I decide that I want something more rustic, and more rounded. I cover my eyes and uncover them. The door has morphed a little bit, but it's halfway between the original (red, then purple) door and what I want. I cover my eyes and uncover them, and it is the shape that I want, but not wooden. I do it again, and I am satisfied with my nice, wooden door.

I look around the room. The furniture has changed a little bit. It's not the frilly, floofy stuff that I didn't like. The chair is more worn, softer, and comfortable-looking. The end table is now made of what looks like old, "reclaimed" wood that was rescued from an old barn or something and crafted into a table.

I turn my attention to the windows, and do the same thing I did with the door. After a few tries, they are close to the windows I want.

Unfortunately, on my last try, I open my eyes and wake up. I do a quick reality check (try to put one hand through another hand) and I can't pass my hands through each other. I'm still not sure if I was really awake, but I roll over and fall back asleep.

I have a vague dream of two women in the hotel room, arguing about something. Then, I dream that I have bought a bouquet of fresh cut flowers, but when I bring them home and try to arrange them, I realize that I have no vase.

Then I am playing a video game with extremely simple Atari-style graphics. There are several characters that you can unlock, and they all have their own individual stats.

I don't recall my dreams prior to waking up. Maybe not noteworthy, or I've just gotten out of the habit, which isn't good.

I also vaguely recall being lucid, but the dream was so fuzzy that I'm not sure. I wish I'd written down my other lucid before I "lost" it, but it may come back again. You might think "How could you forget it?" but it happens from time to time.

I woke up. Decided to lie back down and try a WILD... I would say it was maybe 7 in the morning. I haven't gotten to sleep in for a long time.

As I lay in my bed, I let myself drift. It's true that WILD gets easier and easier the more you do it... these days, it is, anyway. I've been struggling with it for years, though, and it's literally taken years to get to this point.

Anyway, I began drifting. When I say "drift", I do mean it... I sometimes feel like I'm floating on gentle waves. My attempts at WILD used to be unpleasant and frustrating. The "wind tunnel" is no longer really an issue, even though it used to be an extremely unpleasant part of the experience. My ears don't pop and my eardrums don't spasm any more.

I drifted gently on the "waves" and decided to let dreamlets come and go until one of them stuck. I was now floating in the gray fog I've become familiar with. Sort of a 3 dimensional fog.

The first thing I saw was... sort of a motel. An old and run down one, sort of like one we would have stayed in
near the casino when I was a child, except it had 2 levels instead of the one I remember. It was hazy and distant, and quickly faded away.

More drifting and fog. Some glimmers of things, but they didn't turn into anything.

Then, I was standing on a beach facing the ocean. The environment was semi-tropical... not really fully tropical, but warm. The ocean was very calm.

The sun was setting on it, and had become a bright ball of light sitting right on the rim of the horizon. It sparkled and glimmered on the waves. The clouds were ablaze with light from the sunset. For some reason, as I watched it, a series of chills ran down my body from head to toe. I was lucid, but it was beautiful, and I was content to watch the sunset.

The sunset faded. Eventually, a hazy scene began to materialize out of the fog. I was back at work again - ugh. I was standing in front of a shelf full of medicine, sort of in the pharmacy.

I decided that if I kept ending up back at work, maybe this time I ought to just roll with it and let off some steam. I decided to do everything I would normally never get to do. I began running from the pharmacy to the clothing department, running my hands along the shelves and knocking all of the bottles to the floor.

Everything was still foggy, but got slightly more solid as I ran into the womenswear. The whole dream mostly stayed foggy, despite my efforts to make clearer. As I ran past some racks of clothing, I saw that the lingerie section wasn't where it should be. "This isn't what would normally be here!" I exclaimed.

I grabbed a green polo shirt off of the shirt displays - instead of womens' shirts, the displays had mens' polos. I scrunched the fabric up in my hands and tried to make the woven fabric of the shirt look clearer and more vibrant. Then I rubbed it all over my face. It smelled sort of like mothballs or stale cigarette smoke. I decided that I was sick of things smelling like they ought to smell, and that these shirts smelled like strawberries.

I tossed the suddenly strawberry-scented polo away, and began grabbing armfuls of shirts and throwing them all over the floor and other displays, then ran toward the jewelry rack, knocking as many dresses off of the racks as I could on my way there.I remembered that I almost never speak out loud in my dreams, and I decided to change that. And instead of simply talking, I decided to sing. I grabbed jewelry off of the jewelry rack and began putting on as many necklaces, bracelets, and rings as I could grab.

"ALL OF THE JEWELRY!" I sang, and began tossing necklaces and bracelets into the air. "And only DIAMONDS for me!" I held up my hands, and all of the rings on my fingers now had gigantic sparkling diamonds on them.
I guess I was mostly satisfied with the damage I was done, because I decided to change the scenery. My scene changes almost never work, but I decided to

try a variant of "closing your eyes". I closed my eyes and felt around for what I wanted to find - the bed in my cottage. I found it and opened my eyes. The bed was semi-solid, but was surrounded by the gray fog. I tried to see the room's windows through the fog. I saw some window-shaped blobs of light, but the dream began fading and going dark. I tried to hold onto it, but the sound of the garbage truck outside was leaking through as it faded, so I let it go.

As I fall asleep, I practice visualizing and mentally exploring my "base". It has gotten more detailed as it has grown organically over time. I've only managed to reach it in one lucid dream, which was blurry and short, but... well, time and patience. I think part of my problem is that I tend to think of it as 'home', but when my dreaming mind goes "home" I end up in old apartments and bedrooms. I may need to rename/reframe it as something else, like Focal Point, or simply the Cottage. It will be a good springboard, once I manage to make it into a stable setting.

I've worked on visualizing it as I fall asleep at first not because I expect to have my first lucid dream there (there's a great deal of NREM before your first dream) but because I want visualizing that setting to become automatic for my V-WILDs later at night.

I've had a lot more success with V-WILD than anything else, although the dreams tend to be "fuzzier" - not sure why. They tend to fade quickly. I suppose it's something I'll need to work on.

My first few dreams... I don't recall them. I wake up. It's 7-8 in the morning and I don't need to get up any time soon, so I let myself start drifting off to sleep. I decide to try a WILD but I'm too sleepy to want to put much effort into it, so I decide to drift and latch onto the first setting that presents itself.

That setting is the store that I work in. It is a dreamlet that I am standing behind the row of cash registers. I am still mostly awake at this point, but I decide to go with it. I mentally "walk" out from behind the counter and start walking toward the market section of the store.

As I "walk", the visualization gains vividness and clarity. It begins to become more than merely a visualization, although it is not yet a dream. In the past, I may have tried to "push" it into a full blown lucid dream, but that mistake can cause the dream to collapse. I have learned to simply let it gently glide into a dream.

By the time I reach the center of the market, it has become a full blown dream. It's still "thin", though (hard to explain). I am standing in market. The layout has changed, though, and it's not the store I recognize. I'm standing next to an open refrigerated section with several shelves lined with cartons of fruit - strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, etc. The dream begins to fade a little bit. I run my hands over the fruit, trying to stabilize it. It doesn't seem to work very well. I remember that I need to engage more than one sense, and one of those senses is taste. I grab a strawberry and try to shove it into my mouth, but there is something like a force-field in front of my mouth, preventing me from doing so. I can't seem to put it in my mouth with my hand, so I toss it into the air and catch it in my mouth. It tastes how I would expect a strawberry to taste. I begin walking down the aisle, and the dream fades.

When another dream begins, I am no longer lucid, although I still have an instinctive feeling that what is happening is not "real", although I am not sure why.

I am riding in a small, worn wooden boat across a gunmetal gray lake, toward a barren shore. The sky is overcast and gray, and the lake is very flat and still. There is a man waiting for me on the shore. He is very tall and thin - almost gaunt - and dressed in odd-looking dull gray leather armor. There is a thick red woolen scarf wound around his shoulders, neck, and the bottom half of his face. He has messy black hair. I think of him as my cousin, even though he is nothing like any of my cousins in real life except for being very tall. I reach the shore and step out of the boat. The dream shifts and fades.

I later had other dreams, but they were fragmented and I can't recall them.

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.

Fell asleep meditating on the idea of lucidity, and a particular location ("Home Base"). I don't generally expect to attain lucidity during my first few periods of REM, nor do I really want to. Zoning out and just letting sleep happen is nice, in and of itself.

I had some new forms of success and ran into some familiar problems...

Had dreams. Don't recall them. I need to get better about writing stuff down, but don't want to disturb my boyfriend, either. I still don't feel like they were particularly vivid, coherent, or noteworthy... dreams from the first few hours of the night generally aren't.

Settled back to sleep meditating on home base. Slipped into gray fog. At some point, attained lucidity... had the sense that it was near the very beginning of a dream because I have no recollection of a dream up until that point, but suddenly I was sitting at a table with a pile of colorful alphabet-letter magnets on it. I touched and examined them, and then the grey fog reclaimed the dream. I slowly woke up.

Settled back down and began meditating again. Body slowly settled back into sleep; my limbs became numb and I felt like I was drifting.

This is normally the point I'd have trouble with a WILD. At this point, I would normally try to start moving, sit up out of my body, and feel a way that I can only really describe as feeling "tangled in a blanket" - mentally flailing around but unable to really get anywhere or do anything, still stuck in the fog. Sometimes, it's instinctive, so it's been hard to shake the habit, but last night I was actually able to remain mindful and stay still.

I felt as if I was drifting in a river. My body was numb and the idea of being attached to or "in" it was going away. I tried to sink into the river even more... I felt my head sink through the pillow and my body sink through the bed, and sank down into the gray fog.

Drifted for a while. I watched the fog so that I didn't end up drifting out of lucidity. I waited for shapes to appear in the fog. Sometimes shadowy shapes would appear. This is normally where I might have trouble again - trying to will them to BE something, without anything really coalescing... wanting them to BE something... getting frustrated and exerting myself too much mentally and waking up as a result. This time, I just let them fade in and out. I still paid attention to them and tried to examine them, but I tried to remain as objective as possible - trying to see patterns and shapes in them without trying to force them to "be" anything. I knew that if I kept doing this, eventually I could coax one of them into reality.

Eventually a shadowy room came into being, and became reality. I was standing in the living-room of my mother's old apartment in Florida. It didn't have any furniture and was fairly empty. The alphabet magnets from before were scattered on an end table in the center of the room. It felt pretty "solid". I examined the brown carpet and patted the wall. I walked through the room, toward the hallway, running my hand along the wall so that I didn't lose lucidity. I wanted to do a scene change - this place wasn't where I wanted to be, and it was boring. I walked up to the door and willed it to open to a location I actually wanted to be in (again, home base).

I opened the door, and there was... another door? I opened that door, and behind it was another door. I felt irritated and opened that door, willing it to be the location that I wanted, but it opened into the apartment atrium.

I walked across the atrium and opened one of the doors to another apartment. That door led back into the atrium. I got an idea - something told me to try to dive through a door and use it like a portal. I dove through a door and opened my eyes to my actual bedroom. I should have known that this was potentially a false awakening, but instead I just went back to sleep.

I dreamed I was hanging out with a few of my friends. We were going to Full Throttle Bottles, but in the dream, Full Throttle was not the store I was familiar with, and it was not in the location where it would have normally been. Instead, we were all walking down a street full of nothing but liquor stores. We went into one of them and a friend bought a bottle of vodka that was in a bottle like a soda bottle and tasted like orange-flavored cream soda. I liked it, so I bought one myself. I kept thinking that it was odd that the store clerk hadn't carded any of us, but didn't manage to figure out that it was because this was a dream.

We walked up to a place that looked kind of like a castle. It had brown, smooth bricks. I jumped down a wall and my friend grabbed my arm and jumped down with me. I remember thinking it was a very long way to jump and was surprised I hadn't hurt myself a lot, but reasoned that it was because my friend was taller and had held me up kind of like a balloon.

I then dreamed about a flying cartoon skunk whose super power was smelling so bad that the odor killed evil things.

I am in a library. I'm not aware that I'm dreaming at the moment. The library is very odd, not much like the sort of library most people are accustomed to. It's very open and airy, almost more like a gigantic greenhouse or atrium than a library. I'm looking through one of the shelves. Instead of books, it holds cubes and rectangles of light. There's a young woman near me, and I think I vaguely know her. We may have come to the library together.

Someone taps me on my shoulder. I turn around to look at them. The person is an older man, probably in his 60s or so. He has ash blond hair with some grey mixed in. I immediately know that this is The Doctor. He tells me that I'm dreaming. I suddenly realize that I am dreaming, and begin to wonder what I should do next.

He points out one of the massive (4 story high) glass double doors, toward a dock on the edge of the tropical-looking bay, and tells me that a ship is coming into port. The edge of the horizon shimmers, and a cruise ship materializes and sails out of the shimmering portal. It's one of the largest ships I've ever seen, far larger than the largest existing cruise ships, so large that there is an actual city full of glass buildings atop it. I know that it's sailing on the water right now, but is also a space ship.

"Why don't you explore a little bit?" he suggests. "Go on a cruise." The cruise ship is becoming clearer and more in-focus now. I decide that sounds like a fun idea.

I jog to the dock and lift off into the air, then teleport to the deck of the ship. The tropical sun is very warm and bright, and all of the colors are intense. I'm amazed by how intense and realistic it is.

I shade my eyes and look around. There's a large Olympic sized pool, and a woman in a straw hat and turquoise bikini sunning herself next to it. There are various tables and chairs, set up for outdoor dining. It's so bright that I have to squint, so I walk under the shade of a beach umbrella. The difference in brightness and temperature is startling.

I feel the dream beginning to fade. I grab a towel and squeeze it in my hands, running my fingers over it. I drop to the ground and lick the deck (yes it's weird, but it works) but it just tastes like concrete. I'm irritated; why doesn't anything in my dreams taste like anything but what it actually is? I lick the concrete again, trying to make it taste like something else, but it still just tastes like concrete.

The dream stabilizes again. A nearby table has a bowl of fruit on it. I grab a green-skinned apple and bite into it. It doesn't taste like an apple - it tastes like a ripe, juicy peach. It's extremely juicy and very good, so I continue eating it. I toss the core aside and decide to try to explore and see what's below deck. A door appears in the deck, and I open it and try to float downstairs, but everything goes dim and the dream falls apart.

1. I dream that I am in a grocery store, and that part of the grocery store is a bar. There's a girl in a cutoff shirt, or something. I pay for my groceries and park my cart outside the bar. The bar's very dark - the walls and floor have been painted black. I have a beer and buy a 6 pack of cider. When I return to the cart, someone has stolen half of my loaf of bread, and 6 eggs out of my egg carton. I complain to management and show them, and ask if they will reimburse me for the bread and eggs.

2. I dream I am in the attic of an old house. I've broken in. There's a lot of old stuff stored in here, some of it mine... how my stuff ended up in here, I don't know. Some friends and I have packed it into boxes. The attic is filling with water, and I'm moving through thigh deep water trying to sort through these boxes.

We hear people in the house below. I get worried that they will discover us, so I start trying to put the boxes away neatly so they don't realize that their attic is full of someone else's things. I'm also worried they'll notice the water pouring down from their ceiling, since it's draining but I don't know where it went. Another friend gets on a cot that's built against the wall and starts talking about how in his college dorm, it was so tiny that he had to pull his knees up any time someone opened the closet.

We decide the coast is clear and start handing boxes to someone on a ladder outside the door. From there, it's easy to go down the ladder and through a hole in the fence into my own yard. The boxes have some of the homeowners' stuff as well... I plan on selling it at a yard sale.

My house is an old white two story. It's about a hundred years old, and there's nothing particularly special about the house itself. The yard is full of trees; one is much older than the house, and towers above it. It is an old oak tree. My grandpa is there now, and he is talking about how everyone cuts down their trees, and everyone's yard looks the same, and it's bland and sterile. I look at the yards of the other houses on the street (somehow they are bland-looking mansions) and see that they are all treeless and perfectly manicured. I flop down on my side and roll down the hill, and my brother (who is suddenly there) does the same thing, while our mother walks behind us. When I look up the hill, the contrast between my yard and the rest of the yards is striking. The trees rise above my house, and their branches weave in and out of each other. My grandfather comments that having so many trees in the yard is pleasant and adds character to the house. I pat the perfectly mowed, perfectly green grass at the bottom of the hill and tell him that the rest of the neighborhood seems very sterile in comparison.

I wake up briefly and then go back to sleep, and the dream resumes, although it has lost some vividness.

I continue from the bottom of the hill into a neighborhood beyond the bottom of the hill. I walk along a sidewalk. It is bright and sunny outside, and probably June or July. There are some preteen girls standing in a yard, chatting, and a little boy in a red striped shirt on a big wheel. This neighborhood is also quite uniform - suburban America, at its most mediocre. The vividness is returning. I realize I am dreaming and try to push through into full lucidity, but the dream is still too thin and everything goes black, and I wake up.

I had a dream prior to this. I intended to write it down. I dreamed that I woke up and wrote it down and lay back down. As I lay back down to fall asleep, I realized that I hadn't actually written my dream down in real life because I was dreaming. I was really sleepy, though, so I just dreamed about going back to sleep, and it faded into another dream. Unfortunately, I can't recall the events of my prior dream.

I then dreamed about a Choose Your Own Adventure game I was playing. I was playing a boy and his sister. Part of the game involved choosing classes for them to attend so they could build skills (a la Princess Maker or Long Live The Queen). The setting was modern day, though. My first run through, the boy became a thief after wandering into a bad part of town, but died because his skill in lock picks was terrible when he needed to pass a skill check, and he pissed off the thieves' guild. The girl ended up attending some sort of party or event where everyone was dressed in formal wear. In the next game, I completely ignored the boy and focused on making the girl into a well-respected doctor. At some point, I pulled out my dream journal (the one I wrote in in my prior dream) and looked through it, and the notes in it were in big, sloppy handwriting. Apparently, my dream had something to do with Morgan Freeman. I decided that the reason that the journal looked so sloppy and the notes were so weird was because I had written them in my sleep, and I put it away. In the game, the girl needed to find a bathroom (what is it with me and bathrooms?).

The dream shifted, and I was in a library - still looking for the bathroom. I find it, but decide it's not the REAL bathroom (and somehow this has to do with the number 40) because it doesn't look real enough, and I need to find the real bathroom. I wake up, and yes, I needed to use the bathroom.

I dream that I keep receiving random checks. They're from some sort of educational institution. I'm trying to figure out what it's all about, and it seems like they specialize in training people and sending them overseas to do various things. I'm nervous about the idea of living in a country where I don't understand the language. I'm trying to figure out if they're genuinely trying to recruit me, or it's some scam to trick me into accruing debt. I go to some sort of office, where I need to have my passport with me and have a blood test done (to make sure I don't have anything infectious/contagious). For some reason, I have bank notes from several different countries in my wallet, and have scribbled notes across them.

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.

Jan. 21, 2003:
I've been studying that so much I dream about studying for it. I had a nightmare the other night that I was taking the Art History exam and they'd invented a brand new type of architecture that was on the test.

Feb. 15, 2003:
I had this dream about a farm, only the farm was failing and everything... it was like everything was going to hell, and nothing was working out... all the the buildings around it, etc., were failing... and it worked like a sort of medieval manor and everything, well, we were under attack by enemies, to boot, and had to keep retreating, losing more and more land, and then there was a flood the destroyed all of the crops.

As for the family... there was the dad, who in the dream was 'my' father, and he was a real jackass, and he ran the farm/manor like a dictator, and then there was his younger brother, aka 'my' uncle, who was this little bald man with a deformed back, but he was very crafty, very shrewd, and knew a LOT more about what was going on than the guy supposedly in charge... and then there was 'my' sister, who was like drop-dead gorgeous and was marrying some nobleman... and then there was me. Boo, me. I found out that not only was I not getting ANY inheritance, 'my' dad was paying for her education but not for mine, and it made me insanely pissed off. That and I had fallen in love with some guy who was supposedly of a "lower" class than me and therefore 'my' dad was incredibly disappointed in me and thought I was a failure or something.
And, of course, there was a flood. And we got attacked, and buildings were abandoned, and the peasants starved and whatnot.
I guess this wasn't a very cheerful dream...

Dream 1:
I am a member of some sort of death camp or something. This starts out as a run of the mill nightmare - I'm terrified of being executed. The people running the camp use some sort of liquid, rather than a gas, to execute prisoners - it soaks right through clothing, rubber boots, etc. (it doesn't matter) and kills you pretty much instantly. The chambers they keep/use this stuff in look like 1960s era technology. One of these chambers malfunctions, spilling the liquid all over the place - it kills a bunch of little kids who are walking single file through the hallway, but it also kills a lot of the officers who are leading/marching them along, as well as the ones operating the thing... as soon as they realize what's happening, they start trying to get away from the liquid creeping along the floor. I overcome my horror at the situation and decide to escape, but not before locking the heavy metal door behind me. Because f*** those guys.

I escape and it's some sort of heavily forested environment. I am half-dead when I encounter a band of orcs. They decide not to kill me. Eventually, I join their ranks, after a few rites of passage (I'm a dude in this dream). During all of this, there are some skirmishes over territory. One of their older (and more respected) members is old and ailing. Their way of dealing with situations like this is to hasten the warrior's death, rather than letting it drag out. With a great deal of ceremony, they build a pyre, and set him atop it wrapped in ceremonial robes. He's doused with some sort of flammable liquid and they set the whole thing on fire.
I get mortally wounded in one of the border skirmishes. It's a gut wound, which means I'm going to die slowly and horribly anyway. They wouldn't normally allow the honor to an outsider, but I've proven myself to the group over and over again, so I've earned the same honorable death. The dream ends with me climbing atop my own pyre and being set alight.

Dream 2:
I dreamed that I was walking by a bus stop with my brother. The landscape was flat, more like the Midwest than where we currently live. A coworker of mine (T) was there waiting for the bus. My brother and I were going to a bar on a local riverboat (it was John's or Jack's or something). We invited her to come along, but she only had 11 minutes until the bus arrived, so she didn't have time to hang out at the bar with us. She'd been standing at the bus 76 stop, but realized that she needed the bus 71 stop around the corner, so she said she had to go.

My brother and I continued onto the boat. We saw that there was somehow an amusement park on it, and there was a spinning ride that was called The Eagle. We went up the steps to the park (the bar was below) and debated getting on the ride. While we were discussing it, the boat departed from the shore. I pointed out that none of the various rides had safety measures (like railings to prevent you from getting too close to the ride while it was in operation). M and I agreed that it was too unsafe, and decided to head down to the bar.

As we make the decision, the riverboat starts to tilt. Something's wrong, and the boat is starting to sink in the water. It hasn't fully sunk, and the staff is trying to calm everybody down, saying the situation is under control, even though it pretty clearly isn't. The bar starts evacuating their patrons to the upper deck, since the lower deck is getting perilously close to completely flooding.

The boat tilts even more, and water rushes across the deck. Somehow the whole thing turns completely upside down. My brother and I have moved close enough to the edge that as it gets submerged, we're able to avoid getting trapped underneath the boat. We hang on the edge of the capsized boat while I try to figure out if we can make it to shore by swimming, or if we should stick close to the submerged boat and hope that enough of it stays afloat that we can hang onto it. I decide that it's too far to shore, and any rescue operation is going to be looking for us here. I suggest to M that we stay with the boat.

Dream 3:
I am at a museum. There is a huge (like 50 feet tall) tank of water. It's set up so that when you touch it or it comes in contact with a conductive object, lights and patterns flash through it. They drop a metal ladder into it and I'm worried that it's going to break the glass as it scrapes against the side. They're demonstrating the effects that it produces, but the effect right now is underwhelming - all of the lights and colors are inside a little box that a scuba diver in the tank is holding. I was expecting the whole tank to light up. I decide the whole thing is a waste.

Dream 4:
For some reason, I have a collection of Barbie dolls and My Little Ponies. Some of the Barbies are themed (like one has tiny Sailor Moon costumes and there is a Darien doll). Another has a white dress, and I have a package of clothes with long white gloves and high heels, and am thinking about opening her and putting the gloves and heels on her.
I am organizing these toys. They are on what looks like a store rack, but they're mine. I want to play with them, but I realize I'm far too old for that, and that if I open them it might ruin any value they have to collectors.
I am going to play with one, but then my mother starts a fight with me, and when I come back to my Barbies, the mood is ruined. I get some ponies out, but they are only made of colorful stiff cardboard, so I'm disappointed. I toss them up into the air, and they rise higher and higher, and are picked up by a gust of wind, and disappear into the sky.

Dream 5:
I am flying a kite. It's a very large kite. I am with a blonde girl with chin-length wavy hair, and she is watching me fly it. Rather than a string, the kite is attached to a bolt of fabric. It's difficult to hold onto the spool because the wind is so strong and the kite is so large.
The girl asks if she can fly the kite. I hand her the spool and she tosses it into the air. I get angry and say,"Why did you do that? Now I'll never get my kite back!". The spool bounces through the air across the field. I run after it and manage to grab it. The girl asks to fly it again, and promises she won't throw the spool again. I'm an idiot in this dream, so I tell her fine, she can fly the kite as long as she doesn't throw the spool. I hand her the spool, and she throws it again. I yell at her again.
I look in the direction of the kite, and there is a huge rainbow in the sky. It is so brilliant and intense that it looks solid. I want to take a photo of it, so I dig through the car (which is a subaru SUV) for a camera. I find what I think is my camera and turn it on, but when the shutter extends from the body of the camera, I realize it is not mine, but belongs to my friend. I frantically begin digging for my cheap little point-and-click. I find it, but it won't take a photo no matter what I do. I'm getting very frustrated because the rainbow is fading. I start trying to take a photo with my camera, but it doesn't work, and when I finally get a photo, the rainbow has faded to traces of red. I'm really disappointed, but a faceless friend (the one who owned the other camera) reassures me that he got a good photo of it, and he will share it with me once he gets it off his camera. I feel somewhat better.

Dream 6:
I am in a rundown sort of house. There's a great-room that leads to two bedrooms and a bathroom, and above it is a closet, bathroom, and bedroom. I am staying here with my aunt, and have just arrived, but apparently my aunt is She-Ra.
I'm trying to find somewhere to put my coat away. There is a coat closet at the top of some rickety stairs. I shut myself in the closet because I want to be alone. After I eventually put my coat away, I begin to look for a bathroom. There is a bathroom in the downstairs bedroom, but it's IN the bedroom, and I'm really uncomfortable about this because there's no way to lock the door even though there are 50 different controls for the lights. I head upstairs where I know there's a bathroom. I wander through some bedrooms, but I can't seem to find the bathroom, even though I know it's there. For some reason I end up in the coat closet again. I hear some yelling and crashing, like someone is having a tantrum in one of the bedrooms next to the closet. Suddenly the wall collapses. I guess the Hulk is living there too, because he's peering through the crumbling wall and looks as confused as I am.
"What are you doing in there?"
"I just want to find the bathroom "

Original journal entry dated Sept. 10, 2002:

First part is unrelated to the second, they just kinda faded into each other - I was with my family, only it was with my uncle I's extended family. My brother was there, but in the dream he was a little sister instead of a little brother. I dreamt we needed gas, but first we stopped at this one restaurant, and there were lots of badgers inside, and I talked to a waitress who was a friend of my mom's, she was complaining about her hours. Then I went with my family, we needed to get gas, for some reason they were filling up cereal boxes with it and carting them around, I told them this was really really stupid and they told me to either shut up or walk, so I got out of the car and started screaming at them and threw my box away, and made my brother/sister get out too. Then their car blew up. And Melissa Etheridge, in the guise of Alice from The Brady Bunch, came and saved everybody and gave my brother and I a ride home in her truck.

Ok, it's funny when I write it down, but in the dream I was very, very angry and upset and screaming at the top of my lungs. I hope I wasn't yelling in my sleep again.

There was a vaguer dream slightly beforehand but I don't know if it belongs with the one I'm about to describe. It was... sky-rides. You know, like the buckets that go along those lines, between the poles, and people sit in them... sort of... yeah, me and mom and my aunt and uncle were riding those, I think it was on the way to the tour... they were almost like a monorail but hung upside down on the line and they were open to the air.

Then the nightmare, less angry and family-oriented and far more creepy. I had a dream that mom and her friend, for whatever stupid reason they had, decided to go on this one tour with my uncle K and aunt L. It was through something called "The Basement", a really big haunted region, and it was supposed to be this awesome, scary tour, with the catch that all of the haunted stuff was real. Actually, "The Basement" was only a section of the total area, there were other places with names like "The Attic" and stuff, but I forgot the names, and they were pretty minor areas compared to The Basement anyway (it was the biggie). So we got split up from aunt and uncle and lost our tour group, and it was all grey and misty and totally deserted, and I was scared shitless. Mom told me that she went on the tour a long, long time ago with my dad and she didn't see any ghosts, really, except for one that bit her on the top of the head, except that was at the Carnival, which was a ways off. Lori Beth only seemed mildly disappointed that we hadn't seen anything so far. I was wishing that I could magically and instantly teleport right out of the place, since I was terrified and I hadn't even actually SEEN anything. Mom told me that if I got really scared I could go and find my uncle, since he was some sort of weird anti-ghost void type person (i.e. could repel ghosts). We were getting closer to this one old house type place and my mother's friend was debating whether or not we should go inside. I personally didn't want to go anywhere, much less any place that looked that ominous. It wasn't the usual Victorian mansion, more like an old farmhouse but a very large one that a richer family would own (like a plantation house only not so, you know, Southern or elaborate).

Then I woke up absolutely terrified