non-lucid

I dreamed several dreams, and woke between each.

*side notes
*gaining lucidity
*lucid

#1 - I was having difficulty doing something. That's all I remember. Dream fragment.

Woke. Did Reality Check. Attempted WILD; failed, fell asleep.

#2 - I am in a house. I'm looking for a bathroom. There's no bathroom, because I didn't have enough in-game gold to buy an expansion. I discover that some of the red and white scented candles I've been buying were made by my cousin. He's been lying about having a regular desk job.

Woke, used bathroom. Reality Check. Attempted WILD; failed, fell asleep.

#3 - A wife and husband are fighting over their finances. The husband is unemployed or doesn't make much money, and the wife is burnt out and tired of working overtime to completely support them. The wife decides to make adult videos, and her best friend offers to help her. Her husband finds out and is extremely upset.

Woke. Rolled over and fell asleep.
#4:
I dream that I am riding a bus through a sweeping countryside. It appears that I am somewhere in New Zealand. The landscape is mountainous and verdant. It has just rained, the sky is full of gorgeous, radiant clouds, and it's is very beautiful (note: sweeping landscapes after a storm are actually one of my dreamsigns)

It begins to storm violently, and I'm up in the mountains. I am both riding and driving the bus. It's storming like crazy, and the mountain road is winding and dangerous. I'm high up in the mountains now, going over a narrow bridge. The choppy water has risen to the very bottom of the bridge, and it churns dangerously. The bus hydroplanes, loses control, veers off the bridge. The bus is now an old cadillac. The bus now disappears from around me as I enter the water. Frigid water envelopes me as I sink, and places immense pressure on my body; I debate fighting it, or merely letting myself sink. I allow myself to be pulled under and away with the current.

I wake up on a bus. I don't wake up on a bus; I am driving a car. I'm going to pick up a friend's dad. My friend is a chubby blond teenager wearing a Hulk Hogan shirt. We pick up his dad at a fast food restaurant that looks like McDonald's. He jokes about us being a software development team. He is actually a developer, himself. He looks really tired, and I ask him if he's been pulling long hours. He says, "Yes, and driving is a challenge. I'm practically cross-eyed." He decides to check his voicemail and starts swearing; apparently, his boss/team lead is asking for a whole bunch of ridiculous stuff that he can't possibly do on such a short deadline.

I wake up on a bus. I have stretched out across the seats, and a little girl is commenting to her mother that I'm taking up too much space. I try to pull myself up into a fetal position to free up more seats. My friend and his dad are also on the bus. The landscape is the one as described before; the sweeping New Zealand landscape.

I wake up and feel a bit irritated that my prior attempts at WILD have failed. I see light seeping in through my bedroom window and am a bit upset that it appears to be so close to morning. I'm also irritated that I didn't pick up on my most obvious dream sign.

I fail to do a Reality Check. In retrospect, my bedroom window was INCORRECT. The curtain wasn't there. I shrug it off, telling myself that it's just another chance to try to WILD again. I settle down in bed (note: I am fairly certain this was a FA and I am actually trying to WILD from my FA, which is kind of hilarious because it actually works)


#5 (?) -
I begin to see something forming in front of me, very blurry - it is a field of large, smooth pebbles. I decide that it looks somewhat like a beach, or is close enough to make into one. I try to make it solidify, but it fights me. I try to imagine it as part of a landscape, but it remains a flat plane - almost like a pattern. It is supposed to be the ground, I understand, but it takes up my entire field of vision.

I can feel it there - the dream is blurry, but it's forming. I don't want to lose it or lose consciousness, so I start actively trying to make it stabilize. I focus on the pebbles; they sharpen a bit, and then go all fuzzy again. I run my hands through the pebbles, then dive to the ground and shove my face into the pebbles. They're still fuzzy and immaterial, although I feel the ghosts of sensations from them. I enthusiastically rub my face back and forth in the pebbles. I feel like they're fading away and get upset, so in a moment of desperation, I lick the pebbles. They don't become any more material; they taste like grit and sawdust. I roll around on the ground like an idiot, grabbing handfuls of the ground and rubbing it into my face. I feel and smell dead leaves. Suddenly, there are dead leaves mixed into the pebbles.

I look up. There's more landscape forming! I see fuzzy green. I feel like this is like the edge of a lake or swimming hole. I stumble to my feet and pick leaves out of my hair.

The world suddenly solidifies, as my lucids often do - everything goes from a blurry mess to absolute perfect clarity. I am now on the edge of a small lake or swimming hole, on an artificial beach. I'm at a cook out!

There are tons of people milling around. The dad from my prior dream is grilling food, and there are a bunch of fat guys in tank tops drinking beer out of a cooler. There is a little girl in a purple swim suit playing with the sand. She has a toy shovel and those little plastic sand castle molds, and she's making a castle. She has white-blonde hair that curls in little ringlets around her ears, and blue eyes. She looks like she's maybe 3 or 4, and she's adorable. There is also a black and white Border Collie lying on a red and white checkered blanket next to a guy in a t-shirt and his kids. The dog is panting, because it's hot outside.

The swimming hole has a tall, metal slide where you can slide into the water. The sky above, unlike 99% of my lucids, is vivid blue and brilliantly clear - this is a hot summer day, probably July or even August.

I clap my hands together and yell out loud "YES! Finally!" I immediately run up to the dog and pet her. Her fur is thick and somewhat coarse. I scratch between her ears. She's very friendly, and enjoys the attention. As I scratch her behind the ears, I recall my lucid task.

"I need to destroy something right away!" I tell the dog. I had decided on Simple Task I, which was to destroy an object by any means.

I look around. One of the first things I see is the little girl's sand castle mold, but even thought she's a dream character I feel kind of bad about that. I see a plastic drinking cup with Vash the Stampede on the side of it (I haven't watched anime since the 90s, I don't know where that came from) but decide it's too solid/not interesting. There's an array of picnic stuff - plates, cookware, food, etc. I settle on the one thing that I feel is out of place: an empty carton of half & half.

I point at it and try to make it explode. Nothing happens. I get angry and pick it up and throw it, yelling, "This is MY dream!" It still does not explode. I chase after it, scoop it up, and tear it into several pieces. I begin to throw the pieces at the two fat guys who are sitting in plastic lawn chairs and drinking beer. They think this is hilarious.

I hear the little girl calling to me from behind me. She is running toward me, waving a huge syringe. One of those big, scary-looking ones they use to inject things into your rump. It's almost as big as she is (and for some reason, empty). I laugh and launch myself into the air, hovering above her. She runs around below me, waving the syringe. I rise higher into the air, using swimming motions, and taunt her. She begins to climb the ladder to the slide, which has now somehow gotten higher and scarier-looking and is turning into a bridge.

The dream fades, and I wake up. It is 3 a.m., which means that it couldn't have possibly been light outside last time I woke up.

Original entry dated Feb. 16, 2002:
Regarding several dreams taking place over a period of time:

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

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

(this dream is current, as of last night)

Side notes:
WILD attempt unsuccessful. I felt the onset of paralysis, but the sound of the heater distracted me, so I was unable to "dive". Ugh. I need to not let those things distract me! I may have to turn the heat down, although then I'll have issues with being too cold. I can't wait for summer.

The second time I woke up, I just couldn't tolerate remaining on my back. It's hard to describe the sensation, beyond discomfort coupled with a compulsion to roll over onto my side.


The dreams:
1. I was wandering through a hospital, which was also a university somehow. The elevators didn't work properly. The math professor accidentally locked me in the classroom; I don't remember how I got out. I remember that there were a lot of ledges and narrow bridges you had to climb in order to navigate even the most basic parts of the building, such as the library, and thinking to myself that it was unsafe.

2. I dreamed that M--- and I were driving through a city. It was an unfamiliar city, but it was on a bay or sound of some sort. I wasn't paying attention, and M--- was driving. He drove up the metal framework of an unfinished bridge, and over the edge, into the water. I bitched at him and told him that he needed to pay attention to where bridges end. Rather than letting the car sink, I dragged it along behind me in the bay so that it floated and started the engine, using the car's engine to push us through the water faster.

3. I dreamed I was lying on a mattress with Mom and G---, and G--- was trying to tell me that if you add red paint to yellow paint, it makes green paint. I was arguing with him that it did not, although at the time I couldn't articulate why. Mom began playing with actual paint, like finger paints, and made a mess.

(Woke up, used bathroom)

4. I dreamed I was in a city with high rise buildings. The light was shining off of them.

5. I dreamed I was talking to a rheumatic old man. He had oddly-colored eyes, one was a deep blue hazel with brown in it and the other one had a brown iris shaped like a flower, where each petal had 2 dark brown dots in it, and no pupil. He had a cloth that was soaked in bleach that he would sniff, and told me about how comforting it was to him to smell it, then pressed it in my face - I wasn't too thrilled with it, although I do like the smell of bleach sometimes. He then told me about how the gene for his weird eye was recessive, and asked if any of my relatives had the recessive gene. I told him no, because he was creeping me out. His eye reminded me of a weird cat I remembered seeing (dream memory, not real), a black cat that also had oddly-colored and oddly-slanted eyes.

(woke up and went back to sleep)

6. I dreamed I was grocery shopping, and trying to select food that I thought both my brother and I would enjoy. The grocery store was dark and dingy, and the freezer cases had cloudy glass and didn't seem to close correctly or be working properly. I was loading up on junk food, thinking that we hadn't been able to afford it lately and he would be pleased. I also bought Fresca. I wanted to buy a small sample pack of different sodas, but someone had stolen 2 out of one of the sample packs and another one was nothing but grape (I hate grape). I was disappointed.

Woke up. I need to remember to perform Reality Checks more often upon waking, though.

Original entry dated Feb. 18th, 2002:

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

I got up and looked in the mirror. My forehead was covered in dozens of tiny red... mouth-things... only without teeth. Moist, cherry-red little mouths, each about the size of a pimple, gapping open and closed and each of them making tiny peeping sounds like baby chicks. I couldn't stand looking at them, or bringing my hands anywhere near my face - I just wanted to gouge them off...

...I went to the doctor, and they were apparently some sort of parasitic infection. I learned that, unfortunately, it spread really fast and through skin-contact. There was only one way to treat them, too. The doctor had to inject each mouth - individually - with an antibiotic ointment. It wasn't so much painful as disgusting. When they died, they shriveled up and fell out in tiny brown balls, leaving dozens of tiny, deep holes in my forehead.

Original entry dated Feb. 19th, 2002:

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

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

Had a nightmare that I was doing my makeup and somehow accidentally stuck myself in the eye with a pair of tweezers. I didn't think it was that bad, so I went to the mirror to look at it and realized I'd jammed it in pretty deeply. Despite the apparent severity of the injury, it didn't hurt. I pulled the tweezers out of my eye, still didn't hurt even though I felt the tugging sensation, and realized there were more things stuck in my eye... like a magician's handkerchief or something... all said and done, I pulled out another pair of tweezers AND an eye lash curler. Much to my horror, I then realized that my entire eye was gone and there was nothing but a gaping red hole (which was amazingly not bleeding). I didn't know whether to freak out or not, because I was still shocked by it.

Then, I dreamed that I had twin kids who were about 8 years old, and I was pissed at them for some reason.

Then, I dreamed that I had taken some sort of exam or something like that... scored really well on some test, or something, and gotten a highly coveted award along with a new position. I don't remember what it was, though, except that there was a list of benefits from the position, but for some reason it just felt like something straight out of high school. Also, for whatever reason, when all of this was being read off, I was sitting in the woods, and I was wearing some kind of dress made from calico, and everyone was sitting on logs, even though it was some sort of technical position I had tested for.

I dreamed I was riding a train through the mountains. The train was very old-fashioned and we were also in something more like box-cars than a passenger train. It was being driven by dwarves, and there were elves on board in addition to humans. There was a little girl on board with ragged blond hair who did not talk but liked following me around. At some point, the train broke down and we had to go hiking along a trail to search for a ranger's station. We were also arguing because we thought it had been dark because we were in a tunnel, but when we came out the other side it was night-time, even though it had been broad daylight when we entered it 10 minutes before.

Then, another dream, involving an old production I worked in, an animated short that never got made. Although we never actually got that far, in the dream I thought that the reason we had abandoned it was because we couldn't properly animate a building in it. In reality, the building was stationary, but in the dream it had to fly and had tubes and stuff, the tubes had to rotate, and you had to be able to see the 3D animation of the pilots in the cockpit. Anyway, I dreamed that I emailed my old professor telling him that I knew a way to animate it now, with FLASH. Then, suddenly, for some reason, Barack Obama was my new animation professor.

Dreamed that I was desperately trying to get somewhere. For some reason, I was wandering around a shopping complex that also doubled as a small city. I was lost and wandering through the stores. I accidentally knocked some garbage onto the floor at one of the restaurants, the owner didn't care about it but was concerned about me for some reason...
I was waiting for a friend to come pick me up, he had a motorcycle, he was supposed to take me somewhere (I would assume the place I was trying so hard to get to) and it required taking the highway... the problem was that when he showed up, I couldn't recognize his bike, and it turned out that all he had was a stupid push-scooter.

Anyway, it ultimately ended with the cops looking for me after the restaurant owner reported me, so I climbed up onto the roof area of a large building that looked like it was made of adobe and carved stuff into the walls with my little three-inch knife.

Alright...

Another stupid "haunted house" dream. How boring. I mean, it was terrifying at the time, and I knew something was in the house (the attic, I guess) and I had stuff written in Satanic script on my forehead (much to my horror) and I was terrified during the dream, but haunted house dreams seem to be pretty common for me, so... boring.

Other dream:
I was half-asleep and heard little running foot-steps, like those of a child, and then a child's voice whispered loudly in my ear, "Hey!" I woke up and looked around, but didn't see anything. I then went back to sleep.

Original date 03/19/2006:

Took a nap, huge mistake

Had one of my nightmares and woke up feeling very unwell. I hate how they make me feel physically ill. I feel like I'm going to vomit. There wasn't anything particularly disgusting (to see) in it, but the nerves alone make me feel so queasy. This one came out of the blue and was very weird.

I had a nightmare that left me feeling ill, very ill... physically so, not to mention being coupled with the panic of half the lights in the house not working.

I dreamed that I lived alone in an apartment, on the first or second floor. There was a floor below me. Nobody ever saw the people who lived there (that I knew of). Everything was almost always dark in my dream - even lights were dim.
I dreamt that I temporarily sort of... descended from my own apartment into the apartment below. It was very dark, and there were very deep shadows when you could see anything at all, and there was a sort of shrine there, and there were two childlike entities, and they were whispering to each other, and there was a third entity, much smaller, like a baby.

I know I need to write this down but it makes my skin crawl just writing it down.

In any case, I felt that something was very wrong about this, and I ascended again. I don't know how or why I did this, except that I feel that in my dream it was nonphysical.
In my dream everyone heard odd noises that came from the apartment below mine all of the time. They bothered us immensely, but nobody ever spoke of them.
There were policemen who frequented the area, very fat jolly men, but they would not go near the place, or talk about it.

I dreamt that something happened with the family across the way, possibly (or possibly not) dealing with the apartment below. There was some sort of... incident... a loud and unmistakeable sound of some sort of scuffle, and of a baby (?) being killed... but everybody in the complex was too terrified to say anything, and then there was the other (possibly connected) incident that night with the family across the hall...

The family in the apartment across from me was a 'normal'ish family, with a husband and a wife and a son who was around 10 or 11 years old. I went over to check things out after one of the policement visited my apartment to check to see that I was ok. When I visited the family, I noticed that they had been interrupted while eating dinner, and that the little boy's bowl was unclean.
For some reason, I knew that it was a... aggressive? Challenging? move... but I offered to clean the little boy's bowl for them... they seemed reluctant, but allowed me to do so, and I took it to the sink in my own kitchen and cleaned it.
The policeman followed and chatted to me a bit, and then we went back to the other apartment, so that I could return the cleansed bowl to the family. When I did, I told the policeman that I wanted to say something about the odd sounds that I heard from the apartment below me.

The two policemen there (there was another, fatter one who had hung around with the family this whole time) looked very terrified. The family looked very frightened also, and the mother told me, "Don't mention such things". The other policeman told me, in hushed tones, "Those things are cower-worthy", to which I held up my hands in appeasement and said, "I'm cowering, but something needed to be said."

Then the dream ended, and I woke up feeling very ill, scared, and paranoid.

FURTHER EDIT:
Incidentally, on the earlier dream...

There was some sort of knife involved in the sacrifice/slaying. I don't know how I understood this in the dream, but I did.

I recall part of a dream from the other night: involved a massive mansion, purchasing it or staying in it or something, a bunch of super prissy girls I hung out with, too much partying, and someone puking in a purse.

Then I wandered with my family up the stairs at the mansion into a Jurassic garden full of dinosaurs.

Last night's dream was more mundane, a run-down farm-ish/trailorish building, horses involved somehow, then I was riding a bus while hugging my aunt's cat Jones (who was digging her claws into me).

January 10, 2009:
Lost another dream... sigh... but pieces of it may come back to me.

I know it was sad, and vivid, I was sniffling when I woke up, but I really don't know what it was about. I think maybe I was building something, or trying to find something. It's in the back of my mind, but I can't remember it. It feels like it has a good chance of coming back to me, though.

I recalled a portion of my dream from the other night:

There was a stone lighthouse/tower on the shore of an ocean. It was on the beach, but the entrance was accessible only by crossing water (swimming, or a boat). My mother, brother, and I were trying to get inside. It was a bright summer day.

Once we got inside, the inside was made of wooden beams, and it was falling apart. There was a wooden platform inside at the very top, with a hole going up into it. We had no idea what was up there.

Then I dreamt I rode through the streets in some sort of... robot, maybe?

Then a short fat man was explaining something to me, and he was boring.

Next Night:
Entire dream was boring. Short fat guy and I were riding in a car, possibly through the desert. He's middle-aged, brown hair, top of his head is balding, dressed in a suit, looks like a used car salesman. He is explaining something to me, something somewhat important but I don't remember what. I know he droned on and on, and I was really bored, trying to pay attention but he was so boring. My aunt woke me up from this one, and I recall being irritated that she'd interrupted his explanation of... whatever he was explaining.

EDIT:
Maybe short fat guy will show up again tonight to finish his explanation.

I had another dream last night that I know was very vivid, unfortunately I can't remember any of it beyond the fact that there was some sort of house, and my mother and brother were involved. It's noteworthy that although I think the house may have been run-down, it wasn't haunted or scary. I also have fragmented impressions of lots of greenery (lots of plants and trees, perhaps in a greenhouse) and maybe a short man in a suit. I know that I didn't want to wake up this morning because there was something in the dream I needed to resolve. Also, something about traveling along a highway in a car, and the highway may have been near the sea.

More fragments may come back, sometimes fragments of dreams I've 'forgotten' have resurfaced after a while.

I haven't documented my dreams for a while, so I lost a few. Here are the ones I remember (from while on vacation and afterward):

Dreamed that I had to go get my grandfather (grandpa M) and bring him somewhere - a party, or something. It was sort of important. Along the way, we got dumped into a (freezing) river. He sank to the bottom, and I had to dive down and search around for him and drag him back up, worried it was too late. Every time we got to the surface, he got dragged back down again and I had to fetch him. Amazingly, none of this killed him, and we got to the other side.

Dreamed that I lived in a house - sort of decrepit, or maybe more like a trailer, or cobbled together, but anyway, it didn't have enough walls, some parts were just... open. I knew that there were dangerous things and people living in the hills and was constantly worried, especially since the house was so exposed in the parts that didn't have walls.

Dreamed that I had a little brother/cousin/kid/whatever, a toddler, only I was unable to take care of him, so a former classmate of mine took custody of him. I felt like shit since the main reason I couldn't take care of him was that I didn't have a good enough job. Even so, the place they lived in was very bare, almost no furniture, and not very safe. There was a part on an upstairs landing with no rail at all, period (for some reason, I knew a giant planter was supposed to go there, but there wasn't there and that's why there was just a drop with no railing).