lucid

Escaped from my IRL home onto my IRL street and went lucid when I crossed that boundary line. Started flying, admired some views of Christmas lights, getting less and less realistic as I went on, culminating in a castle with turrets completely covered in white lights.

Memory gap, crossed a lake by a natural rock bridge and entered a cavern on the other side, memory gap again, and then I'm semi-lucid again in a room with three sleeping people I recognize, including Julia. I try to leave without disturbing any of them, fail in this. Mary Jane wakes up, the closest to the exit, and we speak for a while; although we seem to know each other, I'm aware that Mary Jane is wholly imaginary, and that's the point of her in this scene, that she's imaginary. Julia is in the bed across from hers, and eventually wakes up - that's what I wanted to avoid most. I can feel the sensation of pressure from her hand, which stands out - it's the first time I've used that sense in tonight's dreams. Her face has started to resemble Mary Jane's, which is sad but not a surprise; but I think "her name is still her own," which is a surprise and a relief. (This whole scene is about mental associations.)

I'm walking through a party full of sleeping people on couches, looking for a free space to lie down. This place belongs to my family, but at the moment I'm a guest like any other. One of my sisters notices me and gets up from her space, leaving it to me; the man she'd been sleeping with gradually curls up around me in her place. It's comfortable. The part of me that's aware this is a dream appreciates how realistic he feels.

Outside a window, the scenery is moving. I decide this is because we're on a train, but I'm aware of the rationalization. I become semi-lucid and enjoy the scenery for a while. There's a great cloud funnel something like a tornado, but rolling along the ground like a great wheel stretching between heaven and earth. It's very beautiful. But now that I've thought of it as a tornado, it stops behaving like a wheel and behaves like a tornado instead - which is less interesting, but still very beautiful.

I watch one tornado after another moving in the distance, growing closer, passing in front of the train, until it starts to feel like a danger, and I'm aware this could become a nightmare. I speak a prayer to a goddess until it stops feeling like a nightmare. This causes the man who'd been sleeping to take notice of me; he's aware I don't belong in his dream.

He starts talking, asking me questions which I don't answer. He's pleasant to listen to, and I'm a little annoyed because I know I'm not going to remember anything he's saying to me once I wake up. I make the effort to focus on his words to try to memorize something, but I only end up hearing the sounds instead of the meaning behind them. Eventually he stops speaking. He's left; his body's still here, but nobody's home, and I believe the dream will get rid of it at the next opportunity. The train passes through a tunnel, going dark, and when the room lights up again his body is gone. I leave the train and continue with non-lucid dreams.

(Dreaming hasn't been a focus lately, but: )

I'm floating in a void full of clouds and stars, and recognize that I'm lucid. A destination comes to mind - not one I'd planned in advance, it's an impulse. With that thought, I have the impression I've changed direction, moving closer to the earth - slightly negative connotations here; not bad, just frivolous.

I'm in a bar; it serves as a front room for my actual destination. There's conversation, people sitting around at tables; the bartender's a heavyset and balding man. Asks what I want to drink. I believe I'm not physical enough here to either drink or pay for anything, but refusing to order anything isn't acceptable, so I ask for a water. I'm thinking about the unusual vividness of this scene. The man to my right, clearly a regular, starts talking to me and the bartender, talking about the guy who owns this place (the person I came here to see) and the way things are done here; I'm going to have to set up a tab before I can order anything, even water. The bartender asks to see my phone in order to give me the owner's number. I take it out, but the screen's showing what I think of as the real world, in contrast to this place. I'm concerned about the bartender seeing that and recognizing that I'm out of place here. I hand him the phone anyway. He programs the number in without seeing anything out of the ordinary and hands my phone back.

The image on the phone, my 'real' world, is showing a woman with dirty blonde hair, winter clothing, knit hat, walking on a narrow street at night, the outskirts of a small city maybe, lots of greenery around on this particular street but the sense that there's a much more heavily built up area within walking distance. She's talking to someone, male, a friend or a sibling. The scene shifts so I'm there with them. They walk, they talk, they're being followed by something other than me. There's a sense of the dream becoming a nightmare.

As they entered an apartment building, I made the mistake of reacting to the other thing following them, thus letting it realize I was aware of it and attracting its attention. It attempted to latch onto me instead, and in the next scene it's taken on the role of my younger sibling (not one of my actual IRL ones), inserting itself into a role in my dream the same way it had been playing a role in that woman's dream. There was a brief moment where I accepted it as my sibling, before I remembered. It was very shocked when I hurt it in the process of removing it. "Ow, ow, you're hurting me!" "Get off of me, then." It did, and I woke up.

During a string of fairly uninteresting dreams, I escaped out a window and found myself lucid. I was looking at a dark mountain range in the far distance, and hearing a voice saying "Aurora, awaken." Aurora apparently was me, which I thought of as an odd choice of names; I associated it with Sleeping Beauty. I thought of this place as the abyss. I attempted to create a bridge, but found I was altering the scene as a whole instead of individual elements; I saw scenery representing my bedroom around the edges of my vision. I stopped the attempt to alter the scene and exited back through the window instead.

Earlier, was just lucid enough to deliberately fly upward with the intent of getting a wider view, instead lost visuals and wound up in a completely different scene, losing lucidity.

Standing on a ladder outside a suburban home, the wind shifts, hot and dry, a sense of the desert that's going to claim this place and incorporate it into my people's territory. I'm the one who led them to this place, but I feel conflicted now. I excuse myself to the man who'd been holding the ladder, and go inside to take care of some loose ends. There are too many signs of how personal an interest I've taken in this world, learning their language, getting much too attached; I should dispose of that evidence.

Elsewhere, among the troops, I'm speaking to one of them on behalf of a man in this world, Adam, trying to make sure they take care when they process him. I say I've never seen a dreamer with power like his before. Which is true, but I'm also being careful to phrase it in practical terms, downplaying any personal attachment. I have to stress the importance of him as a resource not to be wasted. The man I'm speaking to agrees that they'll be careful, but I don't think he's really paying attention, just brushing me off. I end the scene flying back to that suburban house, desperately searching for Adam.

The following scene focuses on a brother figure chiding me for hanging onto a ghost.

In the previous scene, I'd been doing shots with a man who drinks live snakes, one every day. The bartender gives me a dead one, since it's my first time; it'll go down easier. Now I'm walking around half-submerged ruins where I've been before. There's meant to be a door here, though I hadn't seen it the first time around. Now that I'm searching, though, I spot the fold in reality that's hidden it, pull it through so that it becomes solid. It's set in the base of what had been an empty stone arch.

The other side of the door is an in-between place, and I go slightly lucid in order to pause and enjoy the view. It's a stone bridge hanging in space, pale stone, low and sloping walls on either side, and something like coral growing over it in patches. This space has the quality of light seen from underwater, and floating above there's some enormous, amorphous, diaphanous shape, jellyfish-like. It's all very pleasant.

Along the bridge I run into two women with the tails of snakes, mermaid-like, who are frozen in place, and whose verbal words don't match the meanings I hear - the verbal words are friendly, the underlying meaning is to get me to come close enough and stay long enough for them to kill and eat me. I find them pleasant, too; I can't blame them for being hungry, this place sees so little traffic, and I don't intend to stay long enough for them to kill me, so they're effectively harmless.

When I leave the in-between place, it takes me to a scene where an Egyptian woman with a clipboard is consulting a guest list. I have to wait in line behind some snake-haired triplets while a dead human woman talks to the woman with the clipboard, trying to justify why she belongs inside, citing the royal status of her lover.

After going just slightly lucid, I try to travel through a particular door, but it resisted; it warped instead of opening. I gave it a mental push and found that I didn't have access to the dream on the other side; I need the dreamer to invite me in.

I've drawn the attention of two children on the other side of the glass door. One of them is the dreamer, older than her current dream form. I talk to her, trying to get her to invite me in so I can pass through her dream, get to where I want to go. Not being lucid, this child version of her instead goes off to tell her parents. Irritating. The other child stays, but its invitation would be useless so I ignore it. She doesn't come back.

Generally food while lucid tastes pretty bland for me, but tonight's managed to produce realistic raspberry, lemon, and salt flavors. That hadn't been a particular goal; but I wound up in a kitchen with bite-sized pastries and salted nuts around and was trying to figure out what they tasted like, thinking about how poor my sense of taste tends to be in lucid dreams, and then found the flavors became stronger when I had another. I thought of it as needing to train the tongue, or the mental sense of a tongue anyway.

I watch the magician enter a building. Unusually, he's dressed in modern clothing and wearing round glasses with very thick lenses, and I make a point of remembering to write that detail down after I wake up. As I'm thinking about it, I wonder what dream interpretation would make of those glasses. The assumption here is that interpretation is the wrong way to go about it and will lead to mistaken conclusions.

When he returns, he's ridiculously tall and wearing armor I associate with the temple of Mythal - less about Mythal, more about the temple - which is also unusual but in the opposite direction from before; the mental association is that he's dropped a disguise I'm used to seeing, though this one isn't exactly not a disguise. He asks me about various things I don't remember, and I answer as if I'm providing a status report. He's troubled by my responses.

He tells me to wait for the sparrow. There's a sense that this is a reference to folklore or a fairy tale.

A fragment - I'd just been fighting someone who's run off, and I'm looking at the way our fight has corrupted patches of the ground, feeling regret over that.

A woman is riding in a carriage and carrying a baby, with a small tapestry depicting an angel hanging opposite. She speaks to the angel in the tapestry, referring to it as the baby's father. The angel in the tapestry speaks back.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

An odd level of lucidity. I thought of it as feeling exactly like my waking perspective, which I disliked - I felt like I was stuck halfway between something. I had difficulty controlling anything, or even flying properly, though I could float just a bit off the ground. I was at my IRL home, and since I failed to change the scene at the front door, I started walking down the road, figuring that once I got far enough that my surroundings were less familiar, the scene would change naturally.

At the end of the road - which indeed has stopped resembling its IRL equivalent fairly quickly - I come across a small construction crew, and there's immediately an accident involving a passing car and one of the machines. I'm called over to speak as a witness. Eventually the construction worker invites both me and the driver of the car back to dinner at his house, saying that it's too late to be outdoors, it's not safe.

Some barely-lucid scenes at his home in which I meet one interesting young woman with some chronic disease; otherwise I'm mostly focused on finding an excuse to avoid eating anything and keeping my appearance hidden behind the high collar of my coat, which causes people to come to some wrong conclusions about me. I don't correct them. I eventually find an excuse to step outside.

He was right, it is dangerous to be out this late - many people have been infected by something like madness or bloodlust. It's a kind of miasma. I come across infected people in the woods armed with farm equipment, pitchforks and that sort of thing; they've been waiting in this one patch of shadows to ambush whoever comes along. I enjoy this. Whatever this miasma has done to them, it doesn't affect me directly, not in the way it affects them at least; but their resulting madness is something I sort of feed off of, it's exhilarating.

At a crossroads I come across a group of four people who work for me - a blonde woman with her hair in a bun, a very pale man with long black hair, a small man wearing glasses, and a bald man with a tattoo in the center of his forehead. They've plainly been enjoying the night. As we greet each other, that young woman from the house emerges from the woods and attacks me with a sword. She makes this stunningly noble and upright figure, in stark contrast to the general miasma; I like her instantly.

One of my men intercepts her, and as she's fighting him, she's accusing me of being responsible for everything going on around here. She says she recognized me at the house - apparently I'm someone in the public eye in some way - and that she'd always suspected me of being corrupted, and now I've proven it. She's not exactly wrong. I'm not the one who corrupted this place, in fact I'm trying to hunt that person down - but I am part of the corruption, she's right about that much. When my man's got her restrained, I try to explain this to her; we have a mutual enemy. If she wants to hunt him down, my corruption could be useful to her.

I came across a mirror lying on the floor, remembered the TOTM and went lucid. The mirror's rather small for this - I take hold of the edges and pull it wide enough to stretch out on top of it. Initially, unusually, the mirror showed me my reflection - I focus on the background behind it, and it goes black. I briefly imagine stars in that blackness, but don't actually see them; that acts as a trigger, and I sink into the mirror as if it's liquid.

On the other side, I'm walking out of an apartment building into an alley. I have a thought that this is supposed to represent somewhere in Wyoming; but looking around at the buildings, the vending machines, this definitely looks like Japan. I wonder if that's just my mind filling in the setting with familiar memories, or if this is actually meant to be Japan; I keep walking, figuring it'll work itself out, and I had no particular goal here anyway.

I cut through a shopping area where people are eating, listening to them talk, no one saying anything particularly interesting to listen in on. I'm uncertain whether I'm visible to others; my initial impression had been that they couldn't see me, which is how I preferred it, but there do seem to be a few people here and there who notice.

Out of the shopping area and onto a main street, there are Christmas lights in the trees here. I cross the street and find the sidewalk's lined with little garden plots, blocked off by ropes - some kind of display, or some kind of competition maybe. One such plot holds a tree that fascinates me - it's white, not much taller than I am, gnarled, no leaves, and covered here and there in pale green moss with small blue flowers. Very beautiful.

After a DA:O-based scene about pleasantly passing time with Zevran, I have a false awakening and go lucid in a much less pleasant setting: a college dorm where people are being influenced in their sleep by some sinister mental voice - I could make out his tone but not his words. My initial intent was to investigate this without letting the source of the voice realize I was immune to his influence, mimicking the behavior of his victims, but I approach a stone wall surrounding the building and decide nah, I'd rather just leave. I fly over the wall with some slight resistance which I think of as coming from the source of that voice, unwilling to let any of his prey escape.

This takes me down to a river surrounded by great grey boulders, leading down to the sea; as I follow the river it becomes filled by creatures similar to dolphins or porpoises - but incredibly ugly. I'm still feeling a sort of dragging effect from the scene I'd just left, resistance to moving further away; the water and open air feel refreshing but the animals' ugly appearance reflects some negative feel that's still affecting the dream.

There's a song in my head, and I choose to focus on the song instead of on my surroundings - an upbeat dance song from the 60s. I begin to see a music video that goes with it, though not vividly, more like daydreaming, still firmly aware of my surroundings along that river. I'm thinking this could be an interesting opportunity.

The music video has a wipe transition effect, like a clock hand sweeping around, and I focus on it - and now the music video has changed scenes from a dance hall to a boardwalk, and I've transitioned with it. I'm observing the boardwalk from above, 3rd person, with no more sense of that river with the sea creatures, or of the general feeling of unpleasantness from the past few scenes. I'm surprised that worked. It's unusually unvivid, though, still about the quality of a daydream; I wonder if I'm waking up. I shift my perspective, now standing on that boardwalk in the 60s, with a row of brilliantly colored pinball machines off to my right. That's much better. I drop back to non-lucidity for two more scenes.

I'm seeking a book, something that I think of as 'a way out.' To retrieve it I'm drifting through a cloud of abstracts that sometimes resolve themselves into words floating in the cloud. They're dream images, illusions, but grasping the illusionary versions of this book will gradually lead me to the real thing. But they're difficult to capture - it's like trying to scoop up something small floating on water, if you're not careful the water will carry it right out of your hand again. It takes patience and deliberation and allowing the words to drift into my grasp.

I take hold of one word, feeling the substance of it. This changes the images that are drifting around me - now they're closer to the subject of that word, closer to what I'm seeking, and many of them are in the form of books rather than individual words. I repeat this process, releasing the word I had a hold of and reaching for the first relevant image that drifts into my grasp, and every time I repeat this process there are less individual words and more books, and the images displayed on the covers of the books become more and more relevant.

Now many of the books show images of a demonic face, which is heading in the right direction, but which also has drawn attention. A man I'm familiar with begins speaking with me, a demon or something close enough - I've forgotten the content of this one-sided conversation except that it was about that book I'm searching for. Our surroundings have gotten more solid by this point, and as I move through the cloud I find wooden steps under my feet.

I come up the steps into a room full of books piled haphazardly on wooden tables. There's a young human woman here looking through the books - long dark hair, blue jeans and white t-shirt, I recognize her as someone who has a history with that demon I've been speaking with. Her name's Dawn. Their interactions are familiar but antagonistic - she once struggled with him and lost, though I'm not sure she's realized she's lost yet. In any case, she came to him to search for something, but she failed and became trapped in a dream. It seems she's still searching for whatever it is. I find that sad to watch. She looks at the demon as he climbs up the stairs behind me - or I assume she does; I haven't seen him, he's just a voice to me, but she's looking right through me and to the place I believe he would be. In annoyance at his presence, she moves to another stack of books, further away. The demon sounds amused as he calls to her.

It occurs to me as I watch her that I've been consciously thinking of this as a dream for some time now. Since it seems she can't see me, I decide to step aside and watch the two of them. I settle down on a white couch out of the way and allow my perspective to change slightly. I can see the demon now, and Dawn's appearance has changed as well, both of them now dressed from the late 1700s, France - their hairstyles and clothes are looking rough, as if they started out with a fine presentation but over time the polished image has fallen apart. He's struck up a conversation, and eventually she says to him, "The doctor warns that (something to do with a slow death), and my minutes are done." She sounds defiantly happy about this, as if it's a kind of victory over the demon.

As Constantine, I'm strapped to a chair again while a man in a suit - a different one from last time, older - is loading a film strip into a projector. When he turns it on, it shows an external shot of Ravenscar. I remember this moment in time, this guy with the projector - this is when I was sealed off from magic. It wound up only being temporary, but the observer side of me is terrified of getting caught in the start of that without being able to stick around long enough to come out the other side. I don't want those mental associations getting into my head. I bail out of Constantine's perspective.

I'm on a small boat, the size of a rowboat but moving under its own power, taking me and several others in their own boats across a lake. It's surrounded by walls, artificially made, rounded so that the lake as a whole is circular - I associate this with the moon. The walls are composed of several giant slabs of pale stone, many of them carved with some message in hieroglyphics. Once I notice this, I have the boat back up to the first stone with carvings on it. It starts with the name of the artist and a short line in praise of the king who commissioned this work. The next panel includes two jackals, along with a lot of hieroglyphics I can't read, and I wonder whether the jackals are Wepwawet or someone else - there's nothing that looks like a name or a title, even among the hieroglyphics I can't read. In fact, I'm not sure I should call them hieroglyphics at all - aside from that first panel with the artist's name, the rest of this represents concepts, not words. The symbols I can recognize on the third panel include two rattles and a woman kneeling. This represents music and dance. It becomes clear to me that this entire series of symbols is depicting a prayer ritual - not just depicting it; the walls themselves are a prayer given physical form.

There's a woman who's been running from a very powerful man, and I've agreed to bring her back to him. But the powerful man isn't the one I'm doing this for - the woman's uncle is the one who made a deal with me. For the sake of the rest of his family, he needs to stay in that powerful man's good graces. Now that woman's standing on some platform above me, I'm on the ladder below. She's pointing to two objects on that platform just out of my line of sight, saying, "This is that gun you've been waving around, and this-" But I don't stop to hear the second part - I reach up and knock that gun off the platform, out of both of our reach. She tries to stop me, holding a knife, but she reacts too slowly, the gun's already gone. She shouldn't have wasted time trying to talk with me. We struggle over the knife for a bit, and I manage to turn it so it winds up embedded in the wooden platform instead of in me, but she recovers from that and quickly escapes before I can climb up the ladder.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

My partner and I are breaking a group of men out of a jail or dungeon or something similar. The men insist on taking the time to steal water from this place before they leave - they don't believe me when I tell them the place we're going will have plenty of water. It's faster to let them do it than to try to convince them - but for crying out loud, could you at least stick to the relatively sanitary stuff? Finally we get them moving, and we head up a flight of stairs, my partner leading them, me hanging behind to make sure we're not followed. I wind up falling further behind than I intended; at the top of the flight of stairs, we cross a long hallway with paintings on the walls, and then head down another flight of stairs. By this point I've fallen so far behind that I've lost them.

At the bottom of the flight of stairs, I'm in a place that's something like an airport lounge for travel between worlds, a transportation hub. The people here are speaking French, and I talk to one of them to confirm that I've arrived in the location we'd intended. Through a floor-to-ceiling glass window, there's a great view of the ocean and several green islands. It also overlooks several other glass corridors running through this place, and I see my partner leading the men from the jailbreak through one of them. They look completely bewildered. One of them sees me and gestures, clearly wondering how I managed to get over there. I should join them, but honestly, no one's chasing us, my partner's got the babysitting side of things covered, and that ocean looks really inviting.

After flying over the ocean for a while enjoying the view, I come across an area where a few people are swimming. I drop down into the water and join them. The further I go, the more crowded it becomes - it's beginning to get irritating. I try to talk with someone who seems interesting, but there's a woman right next to us showing off some kind of athletic feat who's talking constantly and difficult to hear over. I comment, "She's very loud, isn't she?" She immediately gets louder, ridiculously loud, and I remember that narrative versus command thing I'd been thinking about yesterday. Whoops. "Be quiet, please," I tell her, and while that's a command, she immediately goes back to a normal volume. Deciding to use the narrative to clear a little more space, I close my eyes, lose visuals, and describe the space clearing out - but while it does feel like I've got a little more space to move, when I open my eyes again, I find I'm opening my real ones.

Circumstances have caused a woman to temporarily move in with me; we're not romantically entangled in any way. At the moment I'm cooking breakfast and she's sitting at the table - she's asked for eggs benedict. I'm mentioning some gadget that was around in the 50s for cooking breakfast that I'd liked, I don't know why they don't make that one anymore.

As we're talking, at some point I make a reference to something else that had happened in the 50s, and she gets the reference and responds as if she was also there. The character side of me doesn't take notice of this, but the dreamer side of me finds it odd that she got that reference - I take this as an indication that she's also, if not immortal, at least significantly older than her appearance. It's also clear that she knows I'm not human, though the character side of me doesn't know she knows.

When I bring the food to the table, I say something to her and she responds with yes, father, and then immediately looks embarrassed. The character side of me takes it as a joke in response to what I'd just said to her - but the dreamer side of me is thinking, that explains it.

I'm dancing with a different woman in my apartment. She's got short black hair in this 20s finger wave look, deliberately trying to recreate that look from the past, but this is the 1990s, and she's mortal. The dreamer side of me thinks of the song we're listening to as 'bland, inoffensive 90s romance music.' She's describing some kind of dull pain that lasts for weeks on end, and asks if I can imagine living like that, expecting the answer to be no. I have, actually. I try to describe the actual sensation without being specific about the setting, but she figures it out immediately and gets excited: "The Inquisition? You were there?" She always gets excited about these big name historical events she's read about, and they're never the parts worth remembering.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Someone of no immediately identifiable gender, who has been on the road for a very long time, parks their truck outside my IRL home and starts to eat lunch, clearly believing that no one is around here during the daytime. When they see me watching them from the window they start to leave, but I stop them, telling them I don't mind them stopping here.

Unfortunately, the dream apparently took that as an open invitation. While I'm outside talking to them, a great deal of people walk into the house - a married couple under the misimpression that it's theirs now and all their relatives. When I confront them they quickly accept that an error has been made, but they still keep standing around in the house. Telling them to get out does nothing.

So I rephrase, framing it as a narrative instead of a command. "And the people walked out of the house."

And giving no indication that they've heard me, as if it's their own idea, they all turn and start making their way out of the house. I'm pleased by how easy and effective that was compared to trying to control through commands - admittedly I hadn't put any mental force behind the command here, but there wasn't any mental effort involved in the narrative approach either. They're moving more slowly than I'd like, so I continue narrating. "It's a beautiful day, so they all decided to go outside." I'm curious whether the weather will respond to that - it doesn't seem to, but then it was decent weather to begin with. They're all outside now, but they're milling around outside the door. "They all decided to go to the park to catch up with their relatives." They start moving toward the road, and the women closest to me have started discussing some cousin they haven't seen in a while. This is really wonderfully effective, I'll have to remember that in the future.