Bubble

Original journal entry dated April 4th, 2002:

This time, my dream had some people in it I know - S and Sr. S was a nobleman who was a slight notch above a knight, and Sr was a monk. As the dream progressed they sort of lost their resemblances to either person, though, and became characters in their own rights.

Anyway, "S" had gone to the monastery to get some peace and quiet. He wasn't so much ill as stressed out. As he was walking through one of the fields he came across the monk, who was running around wearing butterfly wings and singing. He stopped to watch, puzzled by the strange sight, and the monk came up to him and started talking about how he wanted to communicate with the faeries. The monk had a Bible which was actually (and oddly) bound with the spirit of a demon. There was also a blue flower in the field that was a parasite, and grew so quickly and aggressively that it was strangling the others - this upset the noble/knight guy so every day he would go out into the field and try to hack the harmful plants up... it was a losing battle, though.

Anyway, he went into the monastery to go back to his chamber and was admonished by a monk for being so loud. He was then stopped by a messenger who had been sent by his wife, to tell him that she was arriving there the next day. The servant was a little worried about the Lady's sanity, and as for the nobleman himself, he said, "I believe she is quite looney".

The end of the dream was garbled, though - the Lady arrived, caused a lot of upset, and then through some sort of spell or ritual the nobleman or the butterfly-wing-wearing monk caused an earthquake - a chunk of the monastery that had been built to overhang the cliff fell into the sea, and unfortunately the Lady was in it at the time. And there was something about the demonic Bible, too, but like I said, the end was blurry.

I split this into a separate entry because it is long.

I woke up last night at ~10:30 pm. I had gone to bed at ~9pm. Fell asleep again at ~11:00pm.

Woke up again around 1:30-2:00am. I did not recall any dreams, except for dim impressions. Attempted WILD but was too tired.

I set my intentions to wake up at some point in the early daylight hours before work. At this point, I'd had the dreams about snowy car crashes, unicorns, etc. Woke up again at approximately 5:00am. Felt grumpy about lying in a supine position. It feels like it's going to take forever, too. I maintain the supine position until it's incredibly uncomfortable, then sloooowly roll over onto my side while trying to maintain as much of my trance as I can. Because I have work, I'm not going to fight falling into "regular" sleep too hard but I keep a halfhearted watch for any dreamlets I might be able to latch onto.

Eventually, a "proto-dreamlet" pops up. I'm not asleep enough for it to actually really be a dreamlet... it's still a visualization, just not one of my choosing. Even though it sounds like one, I really want to drive home that it's not an actual fully formed dream... it's like the difference between watching a movie and being the movie. It's an intense visualization - one I don't even fully control - but it is not a dream.

My attention wanes. My mind wanders, eventually producing a ghost of a memory. I am in a convenience store. It's the beginnings of a dream, but too "thin", like a flat image. It is an incredibly detailed visualization, but I'm not "there" yet. Again - tough to explain.

I am in a convenience store. It's old and run down. The walls are yellowing, even though they were once white. I recognize this faint memory - I am in Nebraska. I know that some of the cans and boxes on the shelves expired long ago. I move through the store. I look down... I am wearing sneakers. The floor is beige speckled linoleum, and it's dirty.

I go through a door, into a laundromat. It's full of ancient, coin-operated washers and dryers. They're dented and noisy. There's an old fat man, who looks like Archie Bunker. He's wearing a dingy wife-beater and sitting on a plastic chair. I recognize the laundromat as another dim memory.

The visualization gains vividness as I move through the exit. I am on the outside, on the second floor, on a fire escape. I go down rusty steps. My sneakers make metallic thumping sounds. I am on the ground now. I look around. The ground is flat, flat, flat, covered in brown and yellowing grass, and it is mid-afternoon. I feel very, very close... I move forward, trying to break the "surface tension" of the visualization and turn it into a true dream. It's right there...

But I am in Nebraska, and the landscape is SO BORING. I think that I don't want to have a lucid dream where I'm stuck in Nebraska, since scene changes can be a pain for me, so I try to shift it to the dreamscape from a prior dream. Kind of like a "bait and switch", to see if I can trick my brain into putting me somewhere I want to go.

It's a mistake. The vividness fades to a ghost of what it was. I cannot conjure up the evergreens that I wanted. I try hard to push more detail into the visualization, to no avail. I cannot become lucid in this state - the trance is too light, and the visualization is too dim. I don't give up, though.

I stick with trying to visualize the snowy forest, the towering evergreens... I imagine my "house" is there (my dream cottage). I approach it... shift... I am now in it. I am holding a baby, although I'm not sure why. I set the baby aside, and it disappears. I am sitting on a couch. The cottage only has one large room. I am looking out a large window at the ocean, which I can see through the snowy evergreen branches. There are hazy mountains in the distance.

The DC I have been looking for walks through the door. The visualization is still not a dream - his features are foggy. I decide to explore the cottage, but the visualization is disjointed. I discover that my bed is on a loft under the eaves. The eaves are made of natural, untreated wood. There is another window that lets me look out over the forest. The bed is soft, and covered in quilts. One quilt is a red and white patchwork quilt that I recognize from a memory.

The DC climbs up into the loft and stretches out on the bed. We watch the snow fall. The visualization is slowly regaining intensity and clarity, although nowhere near a full blown dream. My alarm goes off.

Original entry dated March 6, 2002:

I had another one of my weird dreams, I had a dream that I was in Mrs. F's class again and we were in this huge old building evaluating essays, but the essays were all mixed up and impossible to read in order - and she demanded that we write a paragraph on what we thought about each one. The building we were in was very large and very old, but looked kinda like Ringling Museum, and the Fair was going on at the time so there were all kinds of trucks parked outside. That was the relatively normal part of the dream...
In my dream, I could turn into a cat, but I didn't have control over it most of the time. Sometimes I could will myself to do it, but usually not. There was a tom-cat who, if I was around him, I could easily transform myself. Anyway, so I had a son (yes a son) in the dream, and I was trying to save him, only the room he was in was pretty heavily guarded, so I figured that if I could turn into a cat getting in would be easy. Unfortunately, I couldn't will myself to become a cat, so I decided to do it in human form. As I opened the door to the room, several automated guns detected a human form and swiveled on me, I knew that if they began firing they'd kill both of us, so I willed myself harder than ever before to become a cat, and then -

the phone rang.

So I never got to find out what happened...

Lots of dreaming about snow.

In my first dream, there was a blonde woman driving a red convertible around. I think that there was also a movie being filmed... I don't recall, I think it was like one of those B horror flicks. The landscape was super snowy, and it was up in the mountains.
Anyway, she ran into a unicorn. It was gray, with a kind of bronze colored horn. There were some Bad Guys (pretty one-dimensional, they looked like mobster thugs) that wanted to kill the unicorn.
Somehow, the movie was concluded, and the blonde woman started driving around. She drove up onto an outcropping, like a huge ice cliff that jutted overhead, extremely high up... the view I had was from way below, all I could see was a plume of snow kicked up by the car wheels. Then she drove over the side of the cliff (somehow part of the Bad Guys' plan?), but instead of crashing, the car was suspended in the air by a spider-web-like strand of ice.

I then dreamed I was working on an art project. Somehow I hadn't been told about part of my homework. I needed to turn it in TODAY. I was inking my work and crying and arguing with the teacher that I'd joined the class later than everyone else, and it wasn't fair because I hadn't been told about the homework, and I ought to get more time.

Now it's Christmas. There is a Christmas tree full of hamsters that are dressed as unicorns. They have tiny stuffed unicorn horns on their heads that flop around a little bit.

Next, I am drawing Sonic the Hedgehog fanart for N, a friend of mine who loves Sonic the Hedgehog. It's hilarious because the fanart I drew a) Mocked terrible Sonic the Hedgehog fanart, and b) Is something I actually drew in real life. N thinks that my fanart is hilarious. I decide that if the teacher is going to be an asshole, I'm going to turn in terrible fanart as part of my homework, so she has to suffer through looking at it. I am now standing next to the ice cliff that the woman drove off of. I dig out handfuls of snow and eat them.

Original journal entry dated Feb. 22, 2002:

Ok, to begin with, I had a nightmare (what's new?) that I lived all alone in a weird dorm with a basement that had creepy stuff in it. I had a cat, too, but wasn't supposed to. It was a very sweet cat. It was like Abby, only gray.
Then my dream shifted, and I dreamt I was a grandmother. We had packed our two grandchildren (both boys) up into the car when I noticed that one of them looked sort of funny. As in, you know. Headless. So, naturally, I started shrieking at the top of my lungs until my husband came over and showed me he was ok. Apparently, I'd been mistaken (about him being, like, headless). Then I looked over and the OTHER one was missing the same vital part of his anatomy. So, again, I flipped out. At the end of the dream, it turned out that I'd been hallucinating... not that this was much comfort.

The worst part about the nightmare was that I'd wake up, look around, check what time it was, then go to sleep and resume the same horrible dream. This continued from about 7 a.m. until 9:30.

Original entry dated Feb. 18th, 2002:

I dreamed that I woke up and pressed my hand against my forehead. My skin was moving. You know how it feels when goldfish (or any other sort of fish, except for maybe piranhas and oscars) nibble at your fingers? It felt like that - all over my forehead - dozens of tiny moist nibbles.

I got up and looked in the mirror. My forehead was covered in dozens of tiny red... mouth-things... only without teeth. Moist, cherry-red little mouths, each about the size of a pimple, gapping open and closed and each of them making tiny peeping sounds like baby chicks. I couldn't stand looking at them, or bringing my hands anywhere near my face - I just wanted to gouge them off...
...I went to the doctor, and they were apparently some sort of parasitic infection. I learned that, unfortunately, it spread really fast and through skin-contact. There was only one way to treat them, too. The doctor had to inject each mouth - individually - with an antibiotic ointment. It wasn't so much painful as disgusting. When they died, they shriveled up and fell out in tiny brown balls, leaving dozens of tiny, deep holes in my forehead.

Original entry dated Feb. 19th, 2002:

Last night I had a dream that I visited a tribe in some sort of jungle-type place. One of the tribe elders had died and I came to attend the funeral. I believe I was an ex-member of the tribe, or else the daughter of an ex-tribe member. I know that I was blonde. I couldn't quite understand their customs, and was an outsider.

At one point, after the funeral, I wound up climbing a MASSIVE jungle tree to get a hibiscuslike red flower. I can't remember why. It was used in some sort of tribal medicine. I just remember that all of the colors in the dream were very, very vivid.

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

Original entry dated Feb. 16, 2002:

I had a dream that D and I went to buy a new bike. I was gonna trade in my old one. I wound up with a pink one with this weird little engine-thing attached. Anyway, where we lived was this scary supernatural world. Like, the laundry room - nobody went in after dark. If you opened up three of the washers, you'd find creepy, on the verge of horrifying, things. But if you opened the fourth washer, you saw something so incredibly and awesomely terrible that NOBODY was willing to go anywhere NEAR that washer (much less open it). There was a little girl ghost in a bonnet who would wander around collecting change for my laundry for me, and I always warned her not to go into the laundry room at night, and to go nowhere near the fourth washer. Anyway, back to me. There was this weird... like... demon overlord dude who masqueraded as an eight year old child with ice-blue eyes and white hair. When the kid died through some freak accident, he decided that he was gonna make the world a really shitty place. He specifically tried to hurt my friends and me. There was also a house called "Harriet's House", which was a museum of sorts. It was now a Londonesque sort of home, but used to be an asylum type place with torture chambers. People would go on tours through there, but were warned before they did. The proprietor was a tall black lady with her hair drawn back in a bun. She wore a brown sort of pilgrim-looking dress. The rest of the dream was pretty blurry.

I also had a dream that I worked for a company that produced video-games. We were in direct competition with another company that an ex-friend of mine worked for. It all sort of sucked. It wasn't so much scary as really depressing, and I can't remember most of it, except that the rival company stole our hit title idea.

I dream about a man... he is fairly wealthy, he's a respected lawyer. He's tall, with pale skin, blue eyes and very short blond hair. Something happens - he has a mental breakdown, or something - and he loses his job, and everything he owns, and ends up homeless.

Rather than hang around the city, where people might recognize him, he heads out into a more rural area. He's always looking for somewhere to hide in order to sleep... bushes, thick brush, etc. The landscape is very Midwest. It's harder than you'd think, partly because farmers pay attention to what's going on on their land, and partly because in order to be able to get any of the stuff he needs to survive, he still needs to stay near the highway. He's sleeping in some brush when his ex-wife recognizes him one day, and it's very uncomfortable.

He makes friends with a kid who wanders around the countryside. The kid is a little boy, also blond... he has run away from home. Even so, his family is very poor. The two of them find the dilapidated ruins of an old house. A company started building houses, but never finished them because the economy tanked and they ran out of money. A little girl lives in one of the other half-built, decaying houses.

"Their" house has graying wood siding with peeling blue paint. It has 3 floors. It's mostly unfinished, without a roof or anything, although it does have a trapdoor up to the attic. Naturally, because this is one of my dreams, the house is haunted.

The lawyer guy camps out in the attic for a while. The kid takes one of the downstairs bedrooms... despite being half-built, the house still has broken down looking beds in its bedrooms. Lawyer guy has lots of sheets of paper that he likes to arrange in stacks. After a while, the attic gets too uncomfortable because it's too haunted. The kid feels things pull on his leg all of the time. But it's shelter and sleeping out in the elements is still worse.

The kid's mom eventually shows up. She decides that maybe she'd like to buy the house and fix it up. She realizes that the lawyer guy is camping out there... he's worried about what she'll think about him hanging out with her kid, if she thinks he's dangerous, even though he cares about the kid a lot.

There's another kid, a shitty rich kid, who likes to pick on the poor kid. They have a competition involving bottle rockets, and the mean kid sabotages the poor kid's rocket. The poor kid is distraught, because making his rocket cost him a lot of money (for him).

The kid has a crush on a girl, a mutual friend of theirs... she's a bit chunky, with brown hair that goes past her shoulders. One day she starts flirting with him, kissing him, etc... he figures out she had a fight with her boyfriend (the rich kid) and she's just doing this as "revenge". He gets pissed, and tells her to get lost.

Somehow, he ends up falling down an embankment next to the house. He feels something try to shove him into the highway. He grabs onto a tree, but feels it trying to peel his fingers from around the trunk.

I wake up.

Review:
Dream clues:
- Spectator perspective
- Haunted house
- Ghost

Original entry dated Feb. 16, 2002:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I woke up, rolled over.

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

Original entry dated Feb. 12th, 2002:

Last night, I had a dream that by going into womens' bathrooms and walking through a certain special wall in a particular stall, I could reach a magical alternate dimension where witches and warlocks and stuff hung out. I also collected stuffed animals as a hobby, but that was a relatively minor part of the dream.


Original journal entry dated Feb. 16th, 2002:

I had a dream a while ago that there were two villages of little toy-people. Like teddy-bears and stuff. There was a little village at the bottom of a tree, and a little village on a branch of the tree. The village at the bottom of the tree sent a scout up the tree to ask the village up there why they never came down to visit. When the scout got there, he found out that the reason was because they couldn't get down. All of the different villagers had little quirks - like one was always rollerskating, and another one watched a lot of Sesame Street. The scout showed them how to get down - just jump off the branch. The problem was, he had a parachute - and they didn't. So they all broke into little pieces when they hit the ground, and had to reassemble themselves.
So one of them was, like, half of a rabbit and half of a rollerskate, and another one had a TV instead of a torso, and one had two heads, and I think two of the others were joined by a slinky thing, and one of them had heads for his feet...

Original entry dated Feb. 16, 2002:


Nightmare #1:
I had a nightmare that I was in this deserted ruined city-place, and there was nuclear ash everywhere. The city was quasi-inhabited by the ghosts of children, who told me that I couldn't leave because nobody leaves. I tried to leave anyway, by climbing over a crumbled wall and biking down a deserted and shattered highway. I could bike a LOT faster in my dream than in reality - in fact, I was amazed by the speed at which I was going. There was something nameless and terrifying behind me, and I didn't want to look back because I knew that if I did I'd see nothing there but a tremendous wall of brute evil force... like a visual shock-wave from a bomb blast... and then I opened up my eyes, I was lying in bed in the pitch-black and felt something sitting at the edge of my bed. Something like a man but not a man. It terrified the hell out of me. I could feel it there like... a dead weight... solid as a rock. I was paralyzed with fear, but finally gathered the courage to lunge for the light. When I turned it on - of course nothing was there. Perhaps that was when I really woke up and the nightmare ended, or at least I hope so.

Nightmare #2:
There was a house that was - how can I put it? - unfolded. It existed in more than three dimensions, so to speak, and was very frightening to experience. There were ghosts living in it. There seem to be a lot of ghosts in my dreams. One of them was a sort of... respectable old gentleman, who would be kindly if he weren't so sinister in a way. The house was a labyrinth, and I kept getting lost and becoming very afraid.

Nightmare #3:
I had a nightmare that I had died. In it, my mother and brother and I lived in an old Victorian mansion. I couldn't move on, and wanted very badly to communicate with them, but the only time I could was that split second when they hovered between sleep and waking. At night I was chased by hell-hounds, and was sort of held back by things that I thought of in my dream as "death-bones".

Original entry dated Feb. 16, 2002:

I had a nightmare that the devil tried to seduce me, but at the last minute I pulled back and ran out of the room. It wasn't so much terrifying as unsettling. I also had a dream about being chased through an iron tower. It was creepy. I managed to escape and ran out into the road to ask for help, but nobody would pick me up. Finally, a nice young couple was kind enough to pick me up even though they knew the consequences, but they still didn't seem to appreciate the danger that I was putting them in.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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