non-lucid

I don't remember the first dream I had, although I think it had something to do with my mother. I know I was talking in my sleep again, because I said something and heard/felt myself speak out loud (but still didn't realize it was a dream or wake up).

I recall the second:
I wanted to go Trick or Treating. My brother had gone Trick or Treating earlier in the evening, and he brought home a huge bag of candy, which he shared with me. I felt weird about doing it, though, since I'm 30, but I thought I could get away with it if I tried to look like a teenager. Unfortunately, it was almost 9 pm and all of the porch lights on the houses were off. There was some candy scattered on the ground outside some of the houses, so I picked that up. There were also tiny plastic spiders all over the place. This had something to do with my friend R, but I'm not sure what.

Original journal entry dated July 11, 2002:

I had a dream last night about My Little Ponies and stuff. There was this alternate dimension you could go to by climbing this one cliff, but only if you climbed it along the correct path, and there was an evil wizard queen who was keeping all of them in cages, and I had to crawl through a sewer. And it was all animated.

Then I had another dream, and in it I was with a group of people, and we were all spellcasters or something, and I was a hobbit, and I was with a bunch of other hobbits in an army and we had to drive a big Evil out of our land. Only it killed my best friend. . But somehow, before I was going to die, I got teleported somewhere safe, so I only wound up in a coma, and another hobbit who had been in the battle and survived it befriended me. So we decided that we had to seize the fortress of the big bad guy, and it was set up a lot like a dungeon in a way. Lots of stone and metal grates. But still technological. And it was actually a space ship. So we fought our way through it, only the entire time we were moving forward the badguys were closing in behind us, until we had gotten in too deeply to turn back, and a REALLY BIG evil dude who was like a vampiric slug thing attacked me and started gnawing on my guts, but my party members killed it. We kept going, except we could hear a really big SOMETHING behind us and quickly getting closer. I shut it off from the room with a heavy grate, and we somehow managed to get to the docking bay and blast off in a smaller ship right as it busted through the door. It was like Jabba the Hutt with octopus tentacle things, and it had a whole horde of smaller badguys with it. Then the ship we were in accelerated and we left them behind. And then there were more My Little Ponies, for some reason. The end.

Original entry dated July 10, 2002:

First I was sort of at school. Only it was like band-camp, and all of my friends played the trombone.

I was in the cafeteria getting food with two of my friends, whom I don't have in real life, they weren't real people... one of them was sort of pudgy with sandy hair and whined a lot, the other one was a goth chick with long black hair.

Anyway, in the cafeteria there were actually 2 food counters, and I was thinking that this was good because the lines used to be terribly long, and about how this was my last day there, and I never had to play guitar again (yes I was the only person there who played guitar). So we got in the car to leave and I was going with my friends, I was gonna stay with the goth chick over the summer, she hadn't been to her childhood home in years. It was an old victorian house. She was talking about how her parents were really restrictive and never let her do anything, and when she was in the yard she was never allowed to look around the left side of the house.

So we went into the house and it turned out to be haunted. There was this one demon/ghost who... well... had a really big rack. And green hair. She was chasing us around. And this one ninja dude who kept sneaking up on us and trying to catch/kill us. She was dressed kind of like Lum, only... wearing less.

For some reason I was wearing a full Victorian gown, and I kept falling over and getting tangled up in it.

Nov. 19:

Dreamed I was sharing an attic bedroom with a roommate, but there wasn't enough space for both of our beds. She'd already set hers up, and I was trying to explain that there wasn't enough space and I didn't have anywhere to sleep, but she just told me that was my own problem.

Dreamed I had a pet ball python but forgot to get it a heat rock or food. It was living in a tupperware bin, and I fed it hot dogs. Mom had the car, and wouldn't let me use it to drive to Petsmart, but she wouldn't take me either. I was worried that my snake was going to die. Mom said that, instead, she was driving to a different city to return a keyboard she'd bought (because it sucked). I'd bought the same model and asked if I could go with to return mine as well. She still refused to stop at Petsmart.

Nov 20:
I can't recall my dreams. I have a vague impression that they involved cars.

Original journal entry dated July 8th, 2002:

I was in a hot-air balloon with some other person, and we were running away from zombies. Or something. It had something to do with my old middleschool, the scary one, and a locker combination. I forgot my locker combination, and then I lost my homework and got in trouble, and then I somehow wound up in the hot air balloon. In any case I was convinced we were going to die because had already died before as a result of losing control of the balloon, and neither of us knew how to steer it and we steered it WAY too high, and it was really windy and the basket almost flipped upside down, so I almost fell out. But we did manage to land it, eventually, and were attacked by hordes of undead zombies. And then I woke up.

Original journal entry dated July 7th, 2002:

A lot of people, including me, were going to this one medieval fair thing, and we all had to dress up and stuff. It was really more like a medieval fantasy deal so I was dressed up as a wizard, or something. Anyway, there was the outer fair, which was free, and then the inner fair with all of the special events was behind a wall, and you had to pay a lot of money to get in. I had a sort of miniquest thing where I had to collect various issues of Dragonball, except that I kept getting the same issue over and over again, and it was very frustrating. There was this mad scientist type guy who lived in a tower and he had an issue I really needed, but in return for giving me the issue I had to live there forever. So I figured I'd take the issue, and then run away. Then S__ and everybody else wanted to go to the inner fair and left me behind because I didn't want to pay that much money. A group of people and I tried to sneak in by crawling along the rooftops to get over the wall, but for some reason the old principal from Highschool was chasing us, and we had to get down and hide. So finally, I gave in and bought a ticket, although the real reason for it was sort of different, because in my dream I had this boyfriend (and hell if I remember what he looked like, it was just one of those things that you know when you're in a dream) and I knew this one other girl was after him, and it sort of pissed me off. I got into the fair and she was hanging all over him, and I got mad at another friend of mine for not doing anything about it since he was supposed to be my friend and look out for me. Then the dream sort of shifted and I had to enroll in a school there, and in order to do that I had to get the old crazy scientist guy's signature. So I got it and went to the highschool and tried to enroll but it turned out that I had to go and get the principal's signature too and fill out a form to enroll, and he had the forms, and his office was in the fair, and it was too late to go there because it was closed. But I was allowed to go to all of the classrooms and decide which classes I wanted to take. I went to the language class because a language class was required, except they didn't have spanish, they only had japanese, and I didn't know anything and didn't have a text book. And then I did something wrong I think, and the teacher made me stay after class and said I couldn't leave the classroom until she told me to. For some reason it was then that I realized that I was not wearing any pants at all, but merely had my Star Wars comforter wrapped around the lower portion of my body, and I thought about how silly I must have looked and how drafty it was. In any case, the teacher had to leave to do something, and I got bored and left the classroom anyway because I wasn't supposed to, and some kids started bullying me and took my backpack, so I got mad and beat them up. Then one of the other teachers came along and I got in a lot of trouble, but everything was cleared up and they let me go. I was waiting for my ride, but didn't see the car anywhere, and then wondered if my ride really WAS there but I didn't recognize the car...

...then, for some reason, I was at my grandmother's house. Except it was more like a church, and had pews, but they were all lined up in front of a fireplace. We were supposed to be singing hymns and she got mad at me because I kept interrupting. Then she made everybody move and rearrange themselves on the pews, and I got in trouble for goofing off because I was playing with a raisin.

Original entry dated June 9th, 2002:

We were in a city. The architecture reminded me of something designed by Tim Burton, or maybe Jhonan Vasquez. Very tall, black, and spiky. The atmosphere was blackish red.
In the city there were human survivors, but it was being overrun by these tall icky greyish aliens. Think maybe a cross between one of those things from "ALIENS" and a vampire-fish, and you're starting to get the right idea. Anyway, we (the humans) had this thing we could do, by concentrating really hard as a group we could create a field all around us so that they could not see us, as long as we remained completely quiet. This was REALLY important. So we were holed up in our little cave, concentrating really hard on being invisible, when our scout came back, and the dumbass was being really loud, so of course the aliens found us. I don't remember much after that, and then I think it changed into another dream, but before it did there was a lot of blood.
I had another dream I think along similar lines, but there were big-wheels involved, like the kind I used to ride when I was a little kid. It was weird. I've had other nightmares but don't remember those.

I dreamed about a cop who looked a little like one of the people I work with (but not really), and he was harassing a woman about her ID card. She'd had her ID stolen, and it was a tribal ID, and the cop was giving her trouble over it not being a valid ID while both of us argued with him that it was. I was particularly irritated since the person that the cop reminded me with would never be such a jerk. Eventually, we convinced him, and he recovered the ID, which had been discarded in a parking lot.

I kept waking up and dozing because I was cold. I finally woke up completely and put a warmer shirt on and turned the thermostat up. I tried some visualization exercises, but fell back asleep.

I don't remember much about my dream, but someone was throwing a party, and there were 3 rooms, and each had a different activity in it. One of them was scrabble, but they were using 5 scrabble boards all at once, and people would keep letters they "won" by spelling words with them. One guy had won a lot of letter tiles and had built a tiny tile city out of them. I recall there being furniture in the room in the most awkward places, like a desk that was just sitting in the middle of the room.

I wake up, back to sleep, again visualizations. I'm frustrated because they haven't been working well the past 2 nights.

I dream that I am eating an apple, and it is delicious. It's huge, the size of a grapefruit. It's soft and juicy, and it's purple inside. I somehow know I am in an alternate dimension on an alien planet, and wonder if the seeds will grow new apple trees if I discard or plant them here. I try to convince another dream character (a recurring character, sort of a witch or sorceress) that she ought to eat some of the apple.

Wake up. Lie on my back and try to relax. I'm making some progress with visualizations and then I snore and startle myself. Ooops. Back to square one. Ok, time to turn on my side so I don't snore again.

I'm visualizing and dozing off and bitching to the wizard-cat (another recurring DC) that I'm frustrated with how things are going this morning. We are both drinking coffee out of mugs. I figure that maybe if I hold a conversation, it'll help draw me in. It's actually starting to work, detail is starting to creep into things (but it's still all very hazy and not at all real or anywhere near a dream). I sniff my coffee but instead of smelling like coffee, it smells spicy-sweet. Suddenly, out of nowhere, instead of the dream gently forming around me I'm fully lucid and the mug is completely real. It startles me so badly that I drop the mug and wake up.

There's a weird interlude before I fully wake up where I'm trying to find my arms and they're invisible. I know I'm dreaming, but at the same time I'm not sure, and I'm also half awake, so it's more like a weird semi-OBE than a lucid dream. I finally manage to actually move my arm and wake myself up.

Naturally, I'm irritated. I sigh and work on visualizations again. I explore an imaginary room. I'm in the great room of the cottage near the fireplace when I start to slowly ease into sleep. I'm sitting in front of the fireplace, wondering why there's a fire going and logs in the fireplace, but there's no pile of wood. I reach behind myself, produce some logs, and set them in the bin next to the fireplace. There's suddenly a desk in the middle of the room, the one from the scrabble dream, for pretty much no reason at all. Unfortunately, I lapse into unawareess.

After a gap in time I'm on a bus. I realize that it's almost a completely fully formed dream, but it's so thin and I'm so close to being awake that if I make the "push" that I need to make it super-real (i.e. feel like reality rather than a super vivid visualization) I will probably wake myself up. It's all very flat, like watching a scene rather than being in it. There is another DC there, a sorceress, but she flickers and turns into the warlock character (recurring DC). He is a smart-ass but generally helpful when it comes to gaining lucidity. The bus flickers and fades. I wake up and doze. I am now in some sort of weird geometric environment. Everything is made of white square tiles but it's also like something out of Escher. Warlock DC is there with me, silently walking with me through the scenery. Again, it is close to clarity but not really "there". Instead of trying to brute-force it and try to push through the membrane of the dream all at once to bring it into full focus, I dive to the ground and start running my hands and face on the carpet (that wasn't there a moment ago). I can't make anything focus or make it clear, the sensation is a lot like being really drunk. I go through a door and try to will a scene change even if the dream's not fully formed, hoping it will be easier that way. The room only half-changes, and everything is still white. I rub my hands together, hoping to make things more vivid, but it doesn't really do anything. I get frustrated and wake up.

Original journal entry dated May 22, 2002:

It didn't really start out as a nightmare, it started out as a dream that I was playing Dungeons and Dragons like my friends, and it was a normal session except for the fact that we would literally become our characters. And the fact that the campaign took place on the actual campus, not in a far off fantasy world. This was a whole dream in and of itself.

It then phased into the next dream in this manner:
When we were done playing, we cleaned our stuff up, packed it away, etc. I asked for a ride home but nobody wanted to give me one, although M offered to drop me off at the closest bus-stop. Unfortunately, it wasn't the bus-stop that I needed to be at, which was a mile down and across the freeway. So I started walking down the side of the freeway, which wasn't there at first, but then there were walls along the edge of the road and I had to walk IN the road, inching along with my back pressed to the wall, while tons of cars barreled by. I managed to get across the freeway when I realized that I had miscalculated and overshot the place where the bus-stop was, so I had to go back. As I was going back, I found myself stumbling along a gravel embankment at the edge of the road, and the way that the wall and embankment were arranged, I had to walk away from the actual road and into a sort of hollow near the freeway pillars and supporting structures... all of the sudden, it got way too foggy for me to see, and I wandered blindly until I suddenly felt incredibly cold, clammy hands all over me, and then I passed out...

...when I woke up, I was blind, but I was in a warm bed and a house, and people were talking to me. There were 3 voices - one was a fatherly voice, conjuring up in my head the image of a man smoking a pipe. The second was a daughter-ish voice, that of a young girl. She spent a lot of time talking to me and stuff. The last one scared me, it was a mother-ish voice, but instead of conjuring up a motherly image in my head it conjured up the image of something rather like a medusa (I'm talking mythology, not squid, here). They took care of me and talked to me, but they never touched me. In my dream I think I was an orphan so I guess I finally had a family. I always refered to the fatherly figure as "father", the sisterly one as "sister", but didn't refer to the motherly figure as anything at all. I kept asking them when I would be well, when any important events would happen, when I would be able to go back... they told me, one day, that in a day they were going to go somewhere, and asked me whether or not I wanted to go with - I could go tomorrow, or in a week. I told them tomorrow, and asked them where we were going to go and what we were going to do. They responded, "Tomorrow they will uncover us." As I vaguely began to wonder if my caretakers were something other than... well, alive or human... back in real life, D knocked on my door, and the dream abruptly ended.

So then I managed to get back to sleep, but this time my dream was different, it was about the dorms only the design had changed (for one, they were nicer and the foliage was more lush, the landscape was prettier). There were some design flaws in the dorms, one of them was that in order to reach their own patio the next-door dorm had to cross ours. So there was a debate as to whether or not they also got to use and put their stuff on the half of our patio that they had to cross to get to their own. Then there was some stuff about mom and screen-names, and a bunch of random stuff, one thing of which included a mural with different descriptive name-bubbles that you could choose to put next to the objects depicted in the mural. The Mural of the Week was one with dinosaurs, and for some reason they didn't look sad but they were crying, and some of the word bubbles were pretty silly.

I don't recall my dreams from last night. I kept waking up because my hip hurt, and I have a vague impression that they were related to the pain in my hip, but that's it. I only got ~5 and a half hours of sleep because of a shitty work schedule. My alarm went off and I kept hitting snooze, which I think destroyed my dream recall.

Original entry dated May 10, 2002:

I dreamt I was paddling a rowboat through a sea of kittens.

Original journal entry dated May 19th, 2002:

I had a dream that I was a skater-type person, in a forest with REALLY huge trees, and there was one tree that had an incredible long ramp up into its boughs... the ramp was extremely steep, to the point that one could not walk up it.

I was skating around on the ground, and then these gangster type people drove up in a low-rider and started to threaten me because it was very dark and I was alone... in this one, though, I was male, looked blonde and surfer-dude-ish, and VERY 80s in a bad teenie flick sort of way. So I got scared and pulled a rolled-up rainbow out of my pocket (it was a very narrow rainbow, maybe a foot across) and threw it toward the ramp. It unrolled and created a glowy rainbowy escalator thing, and I jumped on it and started riding up the ramp into the tree. I was holding little metal bars in my hand that made ringing noises, and the pitch of the ringing changed as I got higher, so I would know how safe it was. But I had to hold them very straight and level and parallel, or else they wouldn't ring correctly. It was very dark and humid and exotic up in the treetop, and the sky was a pretty color of deep blue, lapis blue. The foliage was all dewy, and there was a tribal type of llady up in the treetops, and she made sure that I got up and down correctly. So I rode up and down the rainbow...

Somehow, my ex-boyfriend was in on the whole "rainbow" thing and had been watching... so after all was said and done, I wound up hanging out with him at night, God only knows why, and it was around Christmas. He and his mom were looking at various miniature Christmas trees and trying to decide which one to put in the kitchen (which is even more unusual because they're Jewish), they all looked pretty beaten up, one of them spun around and lit up, but they couldn't agree and were arguing with each other, then his mother asked me what my opinion was and I just shrugged and tentatively suggested the spinny one. I thought his mother was being unusually nice to me, considering, but didn't overly dwell on it. For a split second I turn around and he is several inches taller than me, I'm astonished and do a double-take and he's back to his regular (diminutive) height.

He seemed to know more about my life than he should, as usual criticizes me on a number of points and is somewhat caustic. I take it too hard because, well, I always take things too personally. Turns out Joe's been rooming with a female friend of his, I felt a tinge of jealousy but it turns out that they're just roomies in a conversation I have with him, we talk about "old times", then the conversation and dream cut off indefinitely.

Then it changes to a movie set. My friends and I, as our Independent Study Project, are making a movie, but our budget sucks because it doesn't exist, and somehow the rainbow is still here. So we all wind up riding around on it and it tends to defy the laws of physics, and somehow we get stuck in an alternate dimension, where we turn into different sorts of RPG characters, and all still VERY 80s, and one of our characters is a prissy bitch but she's the mage so we've got to put up with her. Even though she sucks at being a mage. But she winds up being REALLY badass later on. Then, I'm swimming down the river because we lost track of the rainbow, and get attacked by these little pygmy people who are shooting arrows - ineffectively - at me. So I laugh at them until the tribal African lady, who has somehow become my guide, informs me that the poison on the arrows was so potent that had one just barely nicked my skin I would have died instantly. So then I got all upset and scared and nauseous...

Anyway, it ended with us successfully completing the ISP with the footage from our adventure, everybody thought that a "documentary" approach to fantasy was really neat-o. We held a screening of it in a tiny theatre-type room that doesn't exist at New College - but in the dream, we went to a big university, not New College - and the professor who evaluated it was very old and sort of doddering.

Original journal entry dated April 28th, 2002:

I woke up with blood under my fingernails, and all over my blankets for that matter. I don't remember any of my dreams but I guess I must have been having more nightmares. In any case, I tore my face up but good and was hoping that nobody would notice this morning, which they didn't, which is good.

The first dream was about a city. I think it was in England. It was old, and I was in the past, maybe Puritan times, I dunno. It was somewhere cold, rocky, and misty.
There was a plague in the village, and there was always a procession of corpses being carried to the graveyard. I suppose, then, that the plague was bad, but not so bad to the point where they couldn't bury all of the bodies.
And yet, everybody was dead. Maybe not DEAD dead, but dead inside. Except that one man murdered his wife, and then the Priest came and they took away the body... one more dead person, despite the cause, didn't matter... and then, either I died or my wife died, but I can't remember which. But there was a crazy, crazy old lady in one of the more dilapidated houses, and she wielded an axe... nobody went there, and maybe she died of plague, or maybe she DIDN'T die because nobody went there. But my wife died (I was male in the dream). Or maybe I did. And they said a few prayers, and everything was washed over with gray... there was an old stone building, it was haunted... come to think of it, the whole town was haunted... and all muddy... it was miserable.

And then the other dream. My brother and mother and I were living in bare shacks high up on stilts, in the mountains. It was snowy and windy and very cold. They had wooden planks for floors, and the wind whistled through the chinks. When I looked out, I could see the tops of pine trees.

I don't recall much of my dreams last night.

I recall a group of children, and one of them had a chainsaw, and I was trying to warn them that the chainsaw was dangerous, but they weren't taking me seriously. I looked away as the one with the chainsaw started swinging it at the crowd.

And then... people who turned into cans of mush? Looked kind of like canned pumpkin. I don't recall why, except that some of the cans were diseased, and they were needed to defeat some sort of evil ghost by piling all of the mush on top of it, and all of this was taking place on a boardwalk above a nasty polluted pond. I also recall a very gaunt woman with stringy blonde hair.

There was a lot of blood involved. Otherwise, my dreams were disjointed.

Then, I dreamed I was buying a bike. The store I was wandering around in also had a grocery section. I was looking for something specific there, but I don't remember what, and then my mother was grocery shopping with me.

Original journal entry dated Oct. 16, 2002:

This one had me and B and S in it and then a bunch of people I don't know because I've never seen them before. We were all fixing up this old castle that was haunted and stuff, and there was this huge library in it, and it was creepy, and old, and dirty, and dusty, and dank... and then there was a store next door that was all for college stuff. And then after we were done, I moved to Antarctica and made a living fishing. I lived on an old barge! It sucked!

And then I had this dream that I was transported to an alternate reality, or the past, or something, and I was actually a ten year old boy with a red bike, and there were all of these aboriginal people, and a canyon, and then they led me to this old professor guy's lab, which looked like one of those power things from Trigun only, you know, somebody lived inside of it. Yeah. So then we found all of these notes in a sort of Call of Cthulhu-esque way, and found out that he had actually gone crazy, and then there was a landslide, and my bike got wrecked.

Sept. 18, 2003:
I had this dream that I was back in my aunt's old house, and there were all of these zombies everywhere. And they weren't stupid, shuffling zombies, even though they were all nasty looking, they were cunning and intelligent zombies. They'd plan traps and pull all kinds of tricks and stuff, and this made them far more dangerous than your average zombie. And of course, the old standby - get bitten by a zombie, and you turn into a zombie.

So I'm holed up in this house, and there are zombies everywhere, and of course houses are not terribly secure, especially old ones. And this person busts in, and I think he's a zombie so I try to kill him, but it turns out he's one of the few people left who's still human... his name is, of all things, Sniper, and he's a sharpshooter. He's also a total asshole, but that's beside the point.
The problem - we have several guns (Sniper's are very nice and very deadly, mine's a worn out rifle and a pistol) but very little ammunition. The odds that this house has ammunition are slim to none. If we go outside to get it, we're toast. I have a feeling that Sniper sees me as a minor annoyance/possible human shield, at best. Especially since I have a habit of forgetting to reload the shotgun and running out of ammunition at the worst possible time.
Anyway, we secure the house as much as possible, you know the drill - board up the windows, etc. Except we're gonna run out of stuff to board windows up with, so we decide to secure a smaller but tactically crucial section of the house. By this point we're running pretty low on ammunition, although I've gotten a few chances to prove that I'm not completely worthless. Just mostly.
So once everything's secured, someone knocks on the front door. Sniper opts to open it since he has much better aim than I do. So he cracks the door open, and there's a woman standing out there, and she's obviously a zombie. But she pleads with him a little bit, says she only wants some money, that she needs to feed her kids (who are little zombie-lings by this point). So Sniper, in an odd fit of human compassion, opens the door to pass some money through, and the two evil children attack him. He shoots them before they can bite him or anything and the mother runs away, dropping a pistol that happened to be fully loaded. So we're like “cool, ammo”.
So then I had to go down into the basement, I don't remember why, I think it was to look for food and see if there was any ammunition down there (even though odds are, there was not), and I get freaked out when I see this zombie (the one from earlier) trying to get in through the basement windows... she can't, though, because there's a metal grating over them. So I grab what I need (no ammo down there) and run upstairs again. And that's when the dream sort of faded out.