non-lucid

I had a dream that my old cat was alive, and for some reason, we had to give her to my uncle's ex wife because we couldn't keep her. The ex wife and her daughter cut off the cat's ears because they thought she was too pretty and someone would try to steal her (the cat was a very pretty cat).

I have the flu, so my dreams have been weird or unsettling. This is a few nights' of dreams gathered into one entry.

The first night, when I was just coming down with the flu, I felt like garbage and had weird fever dreams where friends were inviting me to LuLaRoe (it's a garbage clothing MLM) parties and trying to sell me things. I kept waking up angry and wanting to be left alone, then falling back to sleep and having the same dream over again but with a different person. Why my brain was obsessed with people trying to sell me MLM shit, I have no idea, but that was all I dreamed about the entire night.

Last night, I dreamed about 3 different people who were dead, those dreams where you forget they're dead and they're alive again and then you wake up and realize they're dead. The first 2 were dead pets (a cat and a rabbit) and the third one was my stepfather. I woke up from the 3rd dream thinking "Wow it's been a while since I've seen stepfather, how come?" and then woke up a little bit more and remembered that it's because he's dead and started crying. The crying did not help my already-flu-congested face. On the other hand, at least I got to pet my dead rabbit for 15 dream minutes, and she was as soft as I remember.

I dreamed my fiancé and I moved to the country to start quail farming. Then a friend of his (T) showed up and started accidentally stepping on all of the eggs. The eggs were in kind of a ditch area with a lot of hay-like underbrush, and he destroyed almost all of them and kept going "Oops, sorry".

Then it started to storm, and I wanted to run back to the farmhouse, but there was a lot of lightning and my friends warned me not to do it because I'd get struck by lightning. Instead, they decided we should take cover in a forest that was near the quail ditch. The forest was extremely dense, and almost no rain reached us at all... then it formed into like, a 2-story kind of house-like structure, but was still a forest, and there was a loft area full of kumquats and some other small oblong orangish fruit, which the friend invited me to eat. There were also little lights that I thought were maybe fungi, but they also seemed like glowing eggs.

Then I dreamed I worked retail at a Winco and decided to go hide in the bathroom, telling a coworker I'd be "at the clock". Except I didn't come out for a long time, so they came looking for me, and I got in some trouble. There was also another person in the bathroom, kind of a fat guy, who refused to enter his own stall until I had entered mine. I think I was a guy in that dream.

I dreamed my boyfriend and I took his friend's 12 year old son to a theme park. I needed to get somewhere in the park (maybe the bathroom?) and the only way I could find was a very thin ledge along the edge of a cliff, with a sheer drop of hundreds of feet. The ledge was only maybe a foot wide at some points, sometimes with no hand-holds, sometimes with a very rickety railing, and a whole bunch of people were also trying to inch along it at the same time. I was shocked by how dangerous it was.

Anyway, once I reached my destination, I realized that there was another path there that was a nice, wide dirt path through kind of a swamp area.

I dreamed about 3 planets. One was Earth and one was Mars, maybe the third was actually the moon? Anyway, Mars and another one were revolving around Earth, and they all had personalities (which I don't remember anything about) and were having some kind of conversation that I don't recall. Except maybe Mars was jealous of something?

Then I dreamed about... a house that only had a living room and kitchen... and there was an underground part to it, like a basement. The basement was dark and full of buried zombies. They were marked by little circular markers on the floor that were digital markers, and you could navigate through them with something that looked like a mouse pointer cruising on the surface of the ground. But if you got too close to or hit one of the markers, then the zombies would all awaken, and you'd have to fight all of them at once. Some other person (I don't recall what they looked like or sounded like, or if they even had a physical appearance at all) was telling me that he wasn't as good at it as I was. I tried to cruise between two points, but it woke the zombies up. Then, a team of people - young people, late teens or early twenties - who were sort of like X-men all ran into the basement to fight the zombies. They were all doing this at the behest of an old scientist (no, nothing like Prof. X) who looked a lot like a cross between Bill Nye and Ian McKellen, except much skinnier, and he was dressed in kind of a grey tweed suit...

Anyway, once the zombies were all defeated, he started to construct an underground complex beneath the house where he would house everybody. Constructing it was kind of like doing so in The Sims 3. Anyway, it was all dark down there, so he added a bunch of lights, and then in the dining hall he started adding fake windows that had lights behind them so it looked like fake sunlight, and then some HD screens that projected pictures of outdoors, so the whole place felt less "underground" and cooped up, and more like a regular above-ground dining room. I recall that it worked out pretty well.

Then suddenly, there were pigeons everywhere. Just tons of them. And he had a favorite pigeon that did some sort of special thing (I don't remember what) and was super useful. It looked just like a regular gray pigeon. He wanted to breed more of them, because of how super useful this particular pigeon was.

Then I was standing on the edge of a boat... or maybe a dock... but there was a metal railing. And he had created a new kind of shoe that allowed him to walk on water, as long as he walked very carefully and in a certain way, and he was explaining how revolutionary it was even though I completely understood how important it was to be able to walk on water. I began to think about the possiblities (such as building cities on water) but also how annoying it would be to misstep and suddenly fall into the water.

And then I was waiting for a bus. I wanted to go to some kind of concert. I think it was for The Village People. I'd asked my boyfriend if he wanted to go, and he said no, which actually kind of surprised me because I thought he loved them. But I decided to go on my own, even though I wasn't sure if there were still going to be tickets available when I got there. Except that the bus I needed to catch disappeared as soon as it pulled up. I remember the bus driver was a lady with short curly hair. I don't remember what she said to me. But suddenly the bus was missing, and I was irritated because I had to wait for the next bus. So the bus pulled up (it was bus 15) and then it disappeared AGAIN. At this point, I was really starting to reconsider going to this concert, especially since I kind of didn't want to go anyway because my boyfriend wasn't coming with me. So I didn't think I'd enjoy it very much, and I'd be pissed if I got there and there were no tickets.

So while I was waiting, this young-ish woman... late teens/early 20s... started chatting with me, and all she wanted to talk about was some kind of manga/comic book called something like UltraGoth, and which had two of the most annoying main characters I've ever encountered. And it was way overdone, very "buckles and zippers everywhere", and both of them were supposed to be angels or something, and they were involved in a turf war, and one of them was supposed to be something like the king of heaven and the other one hated him. The first guy had super spiky ridiculous looking hair and was shorter. The second one had long hair and was arguably more of an asshole, but not by much. And each issue was just them yelling at each other and having ridiculous battles, Dragon Ball Z style, along with some extremely melodramatic drama thrown in.

Anyway, she REALLY LOVED THIS COMIC and made me read through an entire issue with her. I didn't want to hurt her feelings, so I suffered through it and pretended that I thought it was an awesome comic book even though it was stupid as hell.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don't remember any of my dreams last night, beyond waking up and reminding myself to remember what I'd just dreamed about.

d'oh.

However, while trying to remember at least a few fragments of it, I somehow dredged up an ancient dream from when I was like... 4 or 5 years old.

I was in a store in the mall with my aunt S. It was a clothing store, think of like Ross's but a much older one... the name escapes me... the chain has mostly faded away. I don't think I've seen one in a long time.

Anyway, I lost my aunt somehow. I'm wandering around through the aisles looking for her, when I see a yellow Mylar balloon with a smiley face on it floating in the middle of the aisle I'm looking down. A balloon is interesting, but I'm looking for my aunt. I continue looking down the aisles. When I turn around again, the balloon is behind me, a few feet away.

As I go through the store looking for my aunt, every time I turn around or look down the aisle, the balloon is there. I start to feel like it's following me. It goes from interesting to weird to unsettling.

I finally find my aunt and complain about the balloon. I can't really articulate what's going on or why it's upsetting me, though. Either way, she either doesn't believe me or doesn't care. Little kids say weird shit all the time, after all.

I follow her out of the store and we meet up with my grandmother and my cousin outside in the main area of the mall. There is a giant yacht in the middle of the mall, just sitting there. It's huge. Not quite the size of an ocean liner, but definitely way too big to just be sitting there in a mall. I recall that the lighting in the mall was very dim, and the ground was very... kind of fake brown marbly. Very "generic mall". The yacht was very white.

I wouldn't quite classify it as a nightmare, but I remember that it was an upsetting dream. At the time that I had it, I still didn't have a firm grasp on the idea that dreams are different from reality, so I spent a while believing that a balloon had really chased me around a store. I didn't like Mylar balloons for quite a while after that.

It was very dark out the whole dream, like midnight dark. I was working in a several story high office building, but it wasn't like a skyscraper or anything. Just a several story brick building, very boring on the outside, and it looked a lot like the building from The Office.

Anyway, the woman in the cubicle kind of behind and across from mine was maybe in her mid to late 50s, stocky but not fat, with frosted dark blondish hair. She wore a sort of suit jacket and shell with a skirt and some low heels. Her jacket was sort of a pinky color, her skirt was more of a taupe. I can't remember if she wore glasses, but I don't think so.

There was another woman there, a middle-aged black woman who was very no-nonsense, and I think maybe she was supposed to be one of the Human Resources people.

I vaguely recalled the older lady leaving, but I turned round to talk to her and she was gone... I asked where she went, and the other woman told me she was gone - as in, gone for good, she'd left the company. I was a little bit surprised by this, since I hadn't realized she was leaving, otherwise I'd have said goodbye.

So the other woman was leaving for the night, and I didn't want to be in the building all alone, so I decided to leave, too. I got out into the parking lot and she got into a very tiny white car that looked sort of like an older BMW but very, very small. I recall thinking that it was a very expensive car, and that someone else in the company had one, too. Anyway, she drove off. I didn't have a car. It was extremely dark outside, and sort of rainy.

I briefly woke up. When I started dreaming again, I wasn't lucid, and the office building had turned into a really swanky hotel. I went back inside. The lobby was really brightly lit, and I recall there being a lot of gold stuff... maybe the carpet was even a gold color... it was fancy in the "trying too hard to be fancy" sense, where it came off as not being as fancy as it was trying to be (but still pretty fancy). Not exactly gaudy, either, though.

Suddenly I was a kung fu master who had somehow ended up getting a job at this hotel... for whatever reason. I don't recall what it was. I just recall going into sort of a ballroom/meeting room and everybody was completing handwriting assignments. Not quite calligraphy. I recall a professor coming through and grading them by marking them with streaks of watercolor, and he gave me a really bad grade, which I was pissed off by because my handwriting was clearly very good! I'd just written in a different language than everybody else. So we argued about it - I don't recall the exact words, or even if there were words at all, I think there was more of the sense that I was protesting than me actually saying anything specifically and the assumption that an argument had happened - and then eventually he wiped off the bad mark he'd put on it.

After that, I went out into the lobby and Donald Trump was there with his daughters. He was arguing with the receptionist.

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So I ordered a FitBit yesterday. My boyfriend has one because I got him one for his birthday, and I'm interested in the heart rate tracker and sleep tracker. It's hard for me to tell how much sleep I get, and I know I wake up a lot.

I don't remember much of last night's dreams. I keep waking up overheated, which I don't think is helping me.

I just remember that I was somewhere sort of like an old apartment I lived in in my old hometown, and my mother was extremely angry about something... something to do with a window... and I was really scared and woke up yelling.

Then I went back to sleep, and I don't remember anything else.

So last night, I had a lot of trouble with inductions... again... I'm just out of practice. Frustrating, but I'll get back in the swing of things. I tried to go directly to Rome, but I'm just not familiar enough with the location, so I'll try my house next time.

During my second attempt, I ended up with an Out of Body Experience instead of a lucid dream... yes, I know they're technically the same thing, but the OBEs always unsettle me. And I'm always blind during them, since they tend to send me straight into the Void, which I hate. So I got irritated when it happened and just reclined back into my body and went to regular sleep.

I dreamed that my boyfriend and I lived in a different part of town than we do right now... in the dream, we lived really close to my brother. We were moving. My mom, my brother, and one of my boyfriend's friends was helping us. This particular friend is extremely chill, never gets upset over anything, is even more patient than my boyfriend is (patience of a saint), etc. I was in the car with him, and my boyfriend was in my car with my mom and brother.

We were moving to a different section of the city... maybe even a different city further south... in any case, I lost the address of the house we were moving to, which was sort of like a ranch style duplex thing, and I don't have the directions either. The siding of the house was white. Houses in my dreams always tend to be white, for some reason.

Anyway, so we get onto the wrong on-ramp, and we pass my boyfriend and my car and aren't able to turn around to join/follow them, so we're on the freeway straight to a different city (and no off-ramps along the way). His friend is getting progressively more irritated and pissed off. I've never seen this guy get pissed over anything, ever, and he kind of reminds me of one of my cousins as well, so I think this is hilarious and start laughing. Which makes him angrier, which makes me laugh harder.

I was such a dick in that dream.

AAAAAAAA I lost my entire journal entry. I hit the back button somehow and I don't even know how!!!! It blanked everything out!

I don't know why it claims it auto-saves when I can never find my drafts. Ever. They never appear, even when I save things as drafts. Not once have they ever.

I'm REALLY upset and frustrated.

Ok, fine, here I go AGAIN.

First dream: Fragmentary. May have been lucid. All I remember is a very interesting looking brown and cream diamond tiled floor. I almost always forget any lucids from my first dream, and everything in them is fragmentary and fuzzy. They're also always only barely lucid, not even worth considering one if I really wanted to be strict about it.

Second dream: Dreamed about a farm. Fragmentary, weird, and complicated. Hard for me to make sense of. I'll write more later. Some bullet points:
- kind of video game farm but also not
- piles of laundry/hay
- helping my aunt
- weird cat thing in a sack
- apple trees
- HUGE tree with a city in it

Woke up, tried an induction. I was trying to end up in Rome, but my attempt failed.

Third dream:
There was a street festival in a more run-down area of my old home town. It was in front of a two-story white house. There were a lot of food vendors, and there was also a stretch of street full of people doing face-painting for children. I was trying to meet up with my boyfriend on the other side, so I picked my way through them, trying not to knock over any paint or step on any children. After I got through, I realized that I could have simply walked along side the whole thing instead of through it.

Before the festival, my boyfriend and I had buried our more valuable belongings along the side of the house and marked it with a long, stiff, silver blade of grass. After the festival was over, we went to go dig it up. But there was a guy who considered it to be his territory, and he seemed aggressive and we thought he might attack us. He was flying around in a tiny plane thing he sat on top of.

So we abandoned our stash, and I couldn't remember if I'd buried my wallet with it, but I hoped I hadn't. We got in my car and started driving away from there, and drove through some thick woods. He disappeared into the trees. We turned around, hoping he was lost or thought we were still in there, and went back to try to dig up our stash before he showed up again.

Woke up. Tried an induction into Rome again... attempt failed.

Then I dreamed about a "cone" on Mars that may have been a tower from an advanced alien civilization. For some reason, though, NASA didn't seem interested in investigating it, which was frustrating. There wouldn't have been a way to analyze the technology anyway without humans there in person, if we could even get ahold of any (which was unlikely) and there wasn't much to gain by sending humans there to do it, either. I doubted the rover would be able to get there and get anything without them destroying it. They didn't even know about the little rover driving around out there, anyway.

Then I dreamed that there was suddenly a new Democratic candidate, a young Latino guy. All of the candidates' faces were up on huge banners, but Hillary's was the only one that had a name on it.

I believe my inductions had such a high failure rate because the environment I was trying to send myself to was very unfamiliar. My inductions into familiar places are much more successful.

Dreamed I was being sedated so people could "train" at doing it... There were people reclining in a long row with their heads wrapped in white gauze, and theur clothes were all completely white. The whole thing was very brightly lit and felt very sterile. Watched a woman - a pretty brunette with an oval face - be partially sedated and then her head was wrapped in gauze and syringes were inserted into her face really close to her eyes in a way that made me cringe. I didn't know how much of it you would feel. Then I was next... But it was some kind of ruse and they were actually planning on killing me or something. But they couldn't completely sedate me, which was a huge problem with their plan.

That's all I remember.

Then, I just remembered a fragment of a dream i had months ago. I was walking through a city with two male acquaintances, both pretty tall. Both of them worked for Amazon as tech people. We kept walking by alleys that smelled horrible, like full dumpsters and raw sewage. At one point I lost them and had to cut through one of those horrible alleys to catch up. It was between 2 tall brown brick buildings and paved with uneven bricks, and just generally gross. I think it was kind of raining, too.

I was panicking about losing them was because they were my roommates, I had just rented the room, and I didn't know the address of the house, even though I knew it was nearby (at the end of a cul-de-sac). I had the key, but no clue where it was, and I was freaking out about never being able to find it - at least, for tonight - and having nowhere to sleep. I didn't have their phone numbers, either, so I had no way to contact them.

I came out at a place that was a border between thick downtown development and a suburb. At that point, the sky was clear and it was nice and sunny. I went up and down the street until I finally found the two of them.

I recall calling my mother because I was upset and freaking out. She sounded sympathetic but exasperated by how irresponsible I was.

The house was messy... White siding, poorly painted white door that was a little warped - the yard was passable, with green grass but not well maintained. Lots of natural lighting in the living room.

Anyway, the guys told me how to get there. After getting slightly lost, I found my way there.

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!

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.