non-lucid

I get nervous about losing my DJ, so I keep it in more than one place.
I'd also like to consolidate it and get all of the rest of it onto here for easier searching and tagging.

Feb. 16, 2003:
I had some dreams I really don't remember, except that they weren't nightmares. Then I had dreams about woods, but they were nice dreams. Then I had a dream about a puppy. It was sort of scary but the end was happy, so it doesn't qualify a nightmare.

Then I had a sort of semi, psuedo-nightmare, but the puppy was still involved... hmm... oh well.

In my dream I was walking through the woods. They were more like deciduous woods, though. Not sure if they were Florida woods at all. I encountered a tall man with light brown hair. I can't remember what color his eyes were, or if they had a color. All I remember is saying "I remember you" and asking him his name. He wouldn't tell me his name

Then there was the dream about the puppy, I don't remember much except that the puppy was going through a temple to save some people, and in the end the puppy managed to save them. It was smallish, sort of like a terrier, with silvery black fur, only it had floppy ears. It was a VERY cute puppy, though.

Then I had a dream I was in a car with J__ following another car through some sort of theme park, and his brakes gave out. Somehow, though, we made it through that alive, mostly because the guy in front of us used the back end of his own car to slow us down (everything was mostly downhill so we would have kept gaining speed). The guy was NOT pleased that he had to total his car, but... hey... we didn't die.

I've gotten really lax about making regular dream journal entries. I know they're really important for lucid dreaming... even if all of my dreams aren't lucid.

I honestly don't remember much about what I dreamed about last night, possibly because I woke up because my neck hurt. No lucid last night, though.

I don't remember a lot. I remember a color theme of dark blue and blue-black. My lack of memory isn't surprising, since those colors might mean that I spent time in a dim dream without much detail.

Something about an outfit or costume someone gave me. Something about putting on black striped leggings/tights. The original pair got shrunk in the dryer, but in the dream they fit again.

There may have been horses. I'll think about it throughout the day, and maybe fragments of it will come back to me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dreamed that I was on the moon.

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

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

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

Last few nights...

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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.

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.

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.