dream fragment

Dreams lately have been heavily influenced by whatever television/film I've watched before heading to bed. I'll often find myself dreaming with the characters who I've watched onscreen making themselves present in my dreams. Why? I'm not sure --- other than the fact that I would've recently seen them --- but it's like I've been implanted into their world.

Stupidly enough, I watched Keeping Up with the Kardashian's the other night and ended up dreaming that I was apart of their chaotic family. They had "taken me in" and I instantly became one of them.

Furthermore, recently other dreams have been becoming more real and real. I've dreamed that I've been horrifyingly late to work, or that I keep trying and trying to get there and I don't make it. That I'm supposed to start at 3:30, and I don't wake up until 3:45. It's a nightmare that feels all too real.

Two weeks ago while on vacation, I had a dream that my dog ran away and we couldn't find her. She was gone forever. When I returned home, we found out she was ill and we had to put her down. Some instances like these (which have been happening very often, where I'll have a dream and then something similar or relevant occurs a short while later) are frightening to me; the coincidence is almost too much to process these days.

As for lucid dreaming, not much exciting. Typical "happy" places; the other night I dreamed of being back in California. That was about it.

I'm going to try doing a DJ here, although I'm not so sure I'll be posting much. I haven't really had any majorly interesting dreams (not recently anyway), but I did have one strange dream last night that I suppose could be categorised as a nightmare. I can't remember it too well, though and it's quite short (may have been a fragment).

I was in my house I believe, and it was very dark. I knew I wasn't alone because I had this feeling. The feeling I always have in nightmares; the feeling something bad will happen. There were dark monsters or something there (they looked kind of human, but also...not) and I just knew they were going to attack me or kill me. I was scared at first, but then I realised it doesn't matter because they can't really hurt me (I must've realised it was a dream). I then just stood there, arms spread out, and waited for them to come at me but something happened. It was like they jumped into me and I got this... dark feeling inside of me. It was scary. That's all I remember. I woke up before anything else happened.

Dreams are so strange and freaky sometimes..

Brief notes/journal entry

So, not really much into manga these days, but Naruto Shippuden was on sale a few weeks ago and I decided to buy it to possibly enhance my dream powers. Only had time to play 3-4 hrs so far (last played two weeks ago).

Why am I giving all of these details? Well, with only this amount of exposure to the game I got 3 Naruto related dreams - Naruto on the cover of a mag, Naruto manga books and today a cool Naruto battle.

I recall only a frag of this non-ld but it really cool. I was watching something game-like at the same time participating as in a normal dream, made some moves with my hands and several times produced this (animated?) fire that reduced the opponent's hit points. Don't think it was a full match to a particular move from the game, but really amazed with the ease my subcon picked the whole thing up. Must do more experiments.

Total sleep: 5 hours
Daytime Techniques: Reality Checks. Asking myself whether or not this is a dream whenever something felt weird or randomly through out the day.

I went to bed around 10:30 expecting to wake up at 6:45 to write in my journal. I also set an alarm for 6am to try RILD.

Dream Title: Supernatural - fragment

Spoiler for for full analysis:

Dream: Something about Sam and Dean or something based on the show Supernatural.
Vividness: (scale of 1-15, 10 is waking life vividness) 0
Awareness: (1-10; or lucid) 0
Length: NA
Emotions: NA
Dream Signs: TV show, night

Woke up around 2am. Didn’t try to remember this supernatural dream because I was too excited to try RILD, which requires you to wake up right before your REM cycle and go to sleep immediately. Throughout the day I tried clapping my hands in order to establish a rhythm. To be honest I’ve done it only a few times because I thought I didn’t need to practice clapping. I knew if that didn’t work I could always just pretend i’m walking or snapping my fingers, whatever. Focusing too much on doing the clapping made me not sleepy and as a result I ended up staying up until about 3:30 am.

Dream Title: Grandfather death threat

Spoiler for for full dream:

Dream: Don’t recall how it all started, but I was in the same place as my mom and my grandfather. Possibly some other characters. It was time to go to bed and I retired to the bedroom. I was watching something on my iPad as my mom opened the door and said that she has terrible news for me. There were death threats to my grandfather. And he had to leave the country. I ran out into the main room and hugged him.
Vividness: (scale of 1-15, 10 is waking life vividness) 2
Awareness: (1-10; or lucid) 2
Length: 1 hour
Emotions: Sadness, scared
Dream Signs: Night, relative’s death

Dream Title: Beer run

Spoiler for for full dream:

Dream: I am driving up my apartment complex road. It is winter. Something seems to be blocking the path. May be snow. I am forced to park substantially earlier. I get out of the car and hear a couple of guys discussing how they need to go to the liquor store. I don’t remember why but I get back inside my car and they get in with me. I look at them and think “Ok, fuck it I’ll give you guys a ride.” The liquor store is very lit. It reminds me of how apple stores are in the mall. Also instead of selling alcohol in bulk they sell them by the bottle and a bunch of people are just standing around drinking. In order to enter I have to give my credit card and my ID. I take out my wallet to order and it is see through and inside of it is all water and ice. For some reason my wallet goes back to normal by the time I have to give my credit card. “But I gave it at the entrance! How stupid and frustrating.” - I say to myself.
Vividness: (scale of 1-15, 10 is waking life vividness) 3
Awareness: (1-10; or lucid) 2
Length: 30 mins
Emotions: Frustration
Dream Signs: Night, Bar

My alarm wakes me at 6am. I try RILD only to run in the same problem as before. Any sort of motion I try to imagine just makes me more awake. Am I not ready to try this? Is it just one bad experience since my sleep wasn’t that strong anyway? Apparently I snoozed instead of shutting the alarm off, so it rings again at 6:09. Then my girlfriend’s alarm finishes off any hopes of salvaging another dream at 6:30.

Being able to recall multiple dreams is definitely an improvement.

The OFFICIAL Foxrally Dream History Textbook

Still not much dream recall today, although I'm satisfied with my efforts. I woke up in the night seemingly in the middle of a dream (around 5 hours after I went to bed), and I realized it was a great time to practice WBTB for the first time.

I didn't stay up long though. I was afraid that if I washed my face I wouldn't go to sleep as easily and lose memories of the dream. I stayed up for around 5-8 minutes, probably not enough to LD later.

Dream Fragment:

I remember someone wearing a bat man suit. I was in a place that looked like Gotham City.

YAWN.
had a rather lengthy dream but the story was quite convoluted, not as bad as last night I suppose ... and anyway it feels like I forgot most of it already. too tired for this recall stuff. someone make me nap after class today. aaaaaa.

I'm breakin' this dream into two fragments cause recall so baaaad~

(note: when my alarm went off I totally laid in bed remembering my dream but I think it failed because I was tired, so I was too asleep to really think about why I needed to recall everything. and I sort of drifted in and out of sleep while I was doin' that so that may have made me forget some things. sleep so important, yo)

Fragment 1 - Spiny Shrimp Scientist
Bein' in a tide pool watching a couple different scientists perform experiments at various times. One of 'em was a spiky sea shrimp of some sort. I remember being impressed by his dexterity as he maneuvered around inside the tide pool, moving things around, doin' stuff like plugging a tube into something. Neat.

Fragment 2 - Time Travel Girl Mystery
There was a scientist girl who managed to travel through time into the future using a device she built, except it sort of went wrong. I remember seeing the actual attempt, with her in the machine she'd built in the middle of her lab. First it was just some sparks on her body and she was smiling like okay sure this will work, but then there was just a lot of electricity all over her and her screaming and it was like you know she dead. She wasn't, though. She time-traveled but I think she was sort of scarred by what happened.

Then I was there, in her lab after everything, just super intrigued by what had happened and wanting to know why she'd built it and what she'd been hoping to accomplish. I remember investigating a book shelf and checking out little devices on her desks. Meanwhile, my mom was chattering away in the background, which made it impossible to think, until I sort of got mad at her. And then I felt bad right away :U

Anyway the cool thing about this fragment is that I was genuinely emotionally invested and curious about her story. COOL.

All I remember from my dream was a ship on a body of water

I was in a kitchen, but a really small and narrow one... or at least just a part of the kitchen. There were pizza boxes with a circular dough sitting on top of foil in each box. They were sitting in a metal drawer to my right. A bowl of pig fat and a bottle of tomato paste appeared. They were the ingredients for tomato sauce. I opened a box and spread cheese on it, and placed it in the oven. I grabbed a second box and begin to put cheese on it. I then remembered that I forgot to put tomato sauce on the first one! I checked the oven and the pizza looked alright... I then squeezed the tomato paste in to the bowl of pig fat. The tomato paste was pink and clumpy. I mixed it but it was too thick. I squeezed in more tomato paste but it was still the same.

Fliers
I'm in my office. I notice a stack of fliers on my desk and start to look through them. They're all for women's products, and many of them have pictures of women dressed in rather revealing clothes. I put them down, preferring to avoid such things. My wife walks into the room and asks if I saw the fliers, saying that my 3rd daughter wanted me to have them. I say I looked at a couple then put them down, and she says that they had to go through the postal service, so they can't be TOO bad.

Outside my window a group of men is working on the lawn. I think something about how they won't move on until their boss, a woman I know, tells them to.


Light demo
I'm using some sort of interactive demo produced by a team as a project. The viewpoint moves along on rails, and if you click in the right places, you get to see more stuff. A message at the beginning says to click on the light. Every so often, there's an opening to the side, a room or a hallway, and each one has a part of the wall or floor that's extra bright; but when I click on them the program looks like it's going to go down them, but then keeps going straight. I restart and try again and the same thing happens. On the third try I figure out the correct hot spot to click; it's rather non-intuitive. The camera viewpoint goes into one of the lit hallways.

Now I'm physically present in that hallway. In front of me are some steps going down, and there are a handful of people already sitting on them. In front of us and to the left is a stage with closed curtains and some kind of project in front of the curtains. My third daughter goes up and looks at it, then comes back. My step-father is there and asks us what we'd like to sing.


House politics
I'm in a bedroom talking with someone about home defense. He says he'd love to have a good BB gun in his bedroom; I reply that a shotgun is much better for home defense. There's a half-made bed on the floor in one corner of the room.
Outside in the hallway I see ??? trying to set up a prank for when ??? comes along; he's hiding under a trap door on the stairs landing. He drops something and opens the trap door to find it. Now there's something about the household inheriting from two ancient houses (i.e. ancestories), and that the prank has given the patriarch the idea to combine the houses, something that's not normally done. He's reticent to do it, since the house name that'll be going away is more his heritage, but he's willing to do it since it makes so much more sense than keeping both houses around. Now I see a bunch of (physical) houses in a row, five or so small ones and one large one, and I see the five small houses get smashed into the large one, leaving a lot of cleared ground behind.


Train troubles
I'm riding on a train, talking with people in one of the cars. I have some concerns about something. At some point, the train stops. We get off, look around, and get back on. Now I'm in the locomotive, somehow in charge of the train. I really don't want this and I'm trying to think how to get rid of the responsibility. I'm also concerned about whether we have enough fuel to keep going. Now we're stopped again, and I'm standing on the ground by the locomotive. Another train comes by, a big one, and sideswipes my train. As if in slow motion, the train starts to tip, then falls off the tracks towards us. We're able to get out of the way, and no one is hurt. With the train on its side, I can see a compartment in the top of the locomotive. It seems to be the coal hopper, but it's just got a handful of what look like large dusty Hershy's Kisses. I make a comment about just wanting to put one in my mouth, to which the engineer just smiles. I say it's a good thing that we didn't go on since there's not even enough coal in here for another day of travel, but the engineer disagrees, saying this is really good stuff and a little goes a long way.

Along with the coal, the compartment also has a bunch of kids' books. I poke through them to see what's there, and a number of Mandy books stand out. Somehow I know the train's owner's daughter is grown up now and has no need of these books, so I think that my own daughter may enjoy them.


Car troubles
I'm on the hill near my house stuck in a long line of traffic. I come close to running into the car in front of me, and I hope that no one runs into me. Now I'm on foot standing in front of my car. I move off to the side just in time, and a car behind mine pushes it forward, smashing it into the car in front. Now I'm walking through the intersection at the top of the hill. I see a police car and a regular car off to the side, with the police officer lecturing the driver about weapons.


Fragment
We're in a vehicle along with at least one child, being driven by a chauffeur. We pull up outside a house, and he announces that we've arrived.

I'm in a grocery store, looking around for the bacon. I see blister packs hanging on metal pegs in a non-refrigerated area, containing bacon that is cut into trapezoid shapes of various sizes. I want bacon that is cut into circles but I cannot find any.

These are dreams from the past couple days. Because getting on the internet is a pain right now, I wrote what I could recall in here.

Too Many Cats
I come home and I see that there are six cats in the living room. I see that there are even more cats all through the house. I run into my mom who says that she has decided to become a cat hoarder.

Publisher

In WL, I recently wrote an autobiography cataloging everything that happened to me up until the end of high school. It contained many personal things that I never wanted other people to see.
My parents had just sent this off to a publisher and collected a large check, about $1500 on the counter. There was also a bill showing that they had spent the money on expensive wines.
Okay, I don't care less about what they spent the money on, but the autobiography I wrote contained a lot of personal information, and it should not have been published. I get very angry and trash my own home.

Cosmic Forest Fire

Now onto the good stuff. I am flying through space, getting some guided tour of the galaxy from what I have been noticing more and more, the "presence" in my dreams. It flies me past a large blue star that is surrounded by this disc of gas and dust. The star looks beautiful and very realistic.
We fly past that to another white star. And (enter dream logic) the star is shaped like a skull rather than just a ball. This was a really interesting and strange sight. There is also a large disc of white clouds around it. The presence flies me toward the clouds and deposits me on them.
As it turns out, I am in a very strange, interesting world. The skull-shaped star is the source of heat and light and the entire ring of gas and dust is the world. Most of it is white, and the white gas turns out to be snow when you actually get closer to it.
I was cold, so I tried to make a fire with some spare wood laying around. There were actually small clusters of pine trees all around. I got a fire started, god help me how. But the fire quickly spread and started burning down all of the trees.
The presence took me out of that location and left me at my house. My parents were there and they were scolding me for starting a cosmic forest fire. After a minute, I started to realize how absolutely ridiculous the situation was. I didn't make it to full-fledged lucidity before I woke up.

Car Chase
Me and two friends are chasing a large truck through a city. We are driving a black corvette. I try to open the door and jump from the corvette onto the truck, but the truck turns away down a side street at the last minute.
I get lucid at somepoint after that, but the dream falls into chaos. I am in some large red cave looking through a satchel full of weapons. I then walk around on stilts in an attempt to fly. I feel like there was much more to this than I can recall right now.

Well this is a very short dream. I remember I was a a baby and my mother picked me up at took me to the bathroom. She sat at the edge of the tub and turned on the water. She smiled and tested the water. You could see the steam coming of the water indicating it was scorching hot but she touched it like it was nothing. My mother then placed me in the tub and I started screaming. She continued to watch me still smiling but the weirdest thing was that I screamed and cried but nothing came out (no sound). In the dream I was 2 years old and instead of seeing through my eyes I was watching my mother and me from a distance (like watching a movie about yourself). I wonder what this means~

After few non-lucid fragments (one interesting one involving a woman and a mythical being something like a bird and something like a qilin, and his 'missing part', which is in the form of another person this woman knows; otherwise dull), my memory picks up in a scene where I'm already semi-lucid (I'm controlling my surroundings and aware that this control is due to it being a dream, but otherwise have fairly low awareness and mostly go along with the dream storyline). I'm walking through a park with another man, while watching someone I think of as a killer, and I mentally push him toward his next target. However, at the moment I expect him to take out a knife, instead he puts his arm around his target's shoulders and hands him a cigarette.

The killer, the target, and the man I'm walking with are all smoking. I take the cigarette from the man I'm walking with, intending to smoke it myself, but I find the dream won't allow it: first I'm holding nothing, it's back in that man's hand; then when I focus I find I can put it to my mouth and feel the physical pressure of it, but it doesn't resemble smoking. I've had similar problems before, when I deliberately focus on improving the realism of some complex physical sensation, and instead only wind up feeling the sense of pressure accurately, nothing else. I then focus on breath instead of on the cigarette itself, and something interesting happens. I have the impression I can control my surroundings far more easily by working in rhythm with my breathing.

My memory's vague for the next two scenes, while I was focusing on breath - I saw this as a great development. (Dream logic inspired by meditation, maybe. There's no reason I should be breathing in a dream at all. I wonder whether I was actually in the same rhythm as my sleeping body's breath or not.) First I saw something like a shadow play, where the figures moved in rhythm with my breathing, under my control. Then I was walking through halls and passing people who appear to be from America of about 200 years ago, all of whom I find vaguely unpleasant; I still had the impression that I was successfully controlling something through breath in this scene.

I wound up in a room where several people are sitting around a round table, and they call me and someone with me to join them. I start to sit down and an old woman stops me, points me to a different chair. To my left is a man holding what I think at first is a young boy. When I get another look at it, it has the face of an old man, and one of his eyes is that of a cat. This is all very unpleasant. I recognize him as my own cat, S., and I believe he's somehow sick. (S. died a long time ago, but I didn't remember this at the time.) We put him on the table, now in the form of a human-sized cat, and I chant a healing spell over him, mentioning a goddess, exerting dream control. Objects rise off the table and hover in the air, and the other people around the table join in, though by just chanting 'heal!' over and over again. I woke up while listening to them chant.

Imager rescue
I'm watching a group of Imagers descend into a strange place, some sort of alternate dimension. It's a "utopia," as clearly evidenced by the people all wearing the same identical flowing clothes and everything being spotlessly clean. The Imagers are here because they received a report that some of their members had been captured. Sure enough, in the main square they find a slaver selling four of their friends. The lead Imager pulls aside one of the junior members and instructs him to prepare a handful of poisoned coins (large silvery things), something that will take effect later in the day after they're long gone. He then starts to talk to the slaver to set the release conditions for the four. I start to talk to the captured Imagers to find out what happened. A young woman in the group tells me they were in the square and realized the best position had been taken, but no one was in it. Going over to investigate, someone had thrown bags over their heads, stopping them from fighting back, and here they are.


Curving fire
I'm standing outside with my wife and with Emily and her family on the grass near the end of "our" driveway. We're all admiring the neighbor's boat and jet ski. Emily's husband say that a jet ski is something they'd love to buy but they haven't been able to yet.

Now I'm setting up some kind of long rack with gas burners built into it. Now I'm carrying something that looks like a big scoop. It's the same width as the rack, two or maybe three feet. As I approach one end of the rack, the flames suddenly curve towards and into the scoop, even from the far end of the rack. It's quite a sight, and Emily is very impressed.


Side scroller
I'm playing a side scroller. I have to throw bombs to open new passages, but I have to be careful not to get caught in the explosions. Now My character is in a large room with some blocks in the middle and at the bottom. The next thing I need to do is to break through the blocks at the bottom and get into a water area. There's an enemy in the room with me, and I need to deal with him before I can continue. He's small and good at hiding, only coming out to strike when I'm not paying attention, so this is taking a while.

There's something about legal torrents of old games ranging from five hundred to two thousand megabytes. Many of the "old games" are actually new efforts designed to look like old games. I think about how pixel art is popular with indie devs, and how much I can't stand it.

Now I'm at the far left end of the room. There are more blocks here, and they seem to be switching every few seconds. Some of them show a powerup icon for a few seconds, then fade as other blocks start to show powerup icons. I try to break the powerups open, but I have to get moving at a good clip to do so, and that means being off screen to get enough speed, and that means I can't see which blocks currently hove powerups. As I move off screen I realize there's a hidden key showing me the blocks and powerups, and I'm able to use it to aim my character to get the powerups. After I've gotten a bunch, a gate comes down blocking my access, and a giant spiky rod starts to come down from the ceiling. I don't move quickly enough and take some damage before I'm able to get to the main part of the room, but then I'm able to use my new powerups, especially some kind of melee weapon that looks like a long rod, to make short work of it.


Bathing man
I'm in a yellowish room watching a very large man get painted all over with oriental style patterns and figures, designed to scare off evil spirits. He then proceeds to lie in a "bath" with water just a few inches deep. I guess the designs were to scare off water spirits? But if he's bathing, shouldn't the paint wash off? Or if it doesn't, then how will he get it off later, and what's the point of bathing now?

Later, I'm talking with him and find out his name is Sm, pronounced Sem. I think that name is familiar and realize it's from one of the Final Fantasies - thirteen, I think. I ask him if he's familiar with those games, and he says he isn't. I consider explaining about them to him, but I decide that's more trouble than it's worth.


Messed up lights
I'm in my bedroom trying to turn on the lights, but something very strange is going on. We have a dual slider fan/light switch near the door, and I'm sure I'm using the light slider, but as I slide it up and down other lights in the room are turning on and off, leaving the fan's light off the whole time. I look more closely and am even more surprised to see that there are two sliders on the same track. I start moving them slowly up and down, trying to figure out the pattern. The first notch turns on my wife's bedstand light; the second notch turns on a light in the middle of the wall and turns her lamp to dim. Other positions do other things. Now someone else is in the room. He's familiar to me (though I don't know who he was). He says he saw something about this in the manual when he got one recently, and he'd be happy to let me borrow it. I thank him but say it probably wouldn't do much good, since each room is wired differently; but he politely disagrees, saying this is exactly what the manual talked about. I tell him I'd love to see it.


Fragments
Something about "medieval court posturing"

I look between two nice buildings to see a house behind them. It's rather run down, but there's a light on upstairs and it looks much more homely than the austere newer buildings.

I'm in a dimly lit hallway.

Barely remember anything of it now.

I am in some sort of spaceship just flying around. I'm in some vertical giant tube with what seems to be the bad guys of the movie. There's a girl below me trying to open a gate. I increase my body weight to 1000T and let my body fall, killing her. Okay, normal weight now. Now I'm just playing with other skills, changing the gravity, speed, etc. A friend of mine is in the other side playing hide-and-seek and I go through a conduit to scare her.