non-lucid

Recalled a lot of frags last night.

I was at the grocery store with my mom. We were buying food for some event at my taekwondo studio. I recommended that we buy 20 packages of spaghetti. (A lot) But she said that would be too much. I had to remind her about the children class at the studio that has like 50 students.

I was outside the grocery store (same dream probably, but I can't remember how I got out here.) Still with my mom, and we were discussing how we were going to carry the groceries home. Apparently we didn't have a car. Another detail I recall was the sky was very weird, it looked like the sun was rising and setting at the same time.

I was actually at my taekwondo studio and the master was having us do this weird new thing with our kicks that was supposed to help us stretch out. When I started doing it, I was pretty bad, but I looked even worse because I was too far into the corner of the studio and didn't have requited room to move around.
After we were done doing 15 of the kicks (all of us) even though mine were pretty sloppy, he dismissed class and let us go.

I was in my math class. We were getting our tests back, and they were pass/fail. I looked at my test and (I kid you not) the number 99.99% was written on the top. Apparently I had dropped a negative sign somewhere on the test. I looked through it and found the circled problem. And when I looked at it, there WAS a negative sign next to the number, be it small and difficult to see.
A called my teacher to show her that she had graded it wrong, but she said that I had written the negative sign too high up, and she couldn't count it.
I started looking through my backpack for a pencil to change the answer. As I did, the classroom morphed into the backstage of a play setting, with people in costumes going on/off stage and people moving props and stuff. But I was still focused on finding a pencil. I never did find one but what I found was much more interesting.
I found a number of drawings, many of them of dream related things. One of them was of two of "me" one of them looked like me from real life. The other of myself when I see myself in dreams. Another was of Manei, my own dream guide sitting in a meditative position.
I actually became mildly lucid after seeing that drawing.
The third and final drawing that I remember seeing was of... I never told anyone about my recurring "Symbol" dream, but that will be discussed later.

Or maybe I'll completely forget to talk about the symbol dream.

And that brings me to the title of this entry. I have had really bad recall and haven't had a lucid dream in at-least two months. But last night I had recall for the second night in a row. It seems like good launchpad to start breaking down these mental barriers.
And that's because I think I finally figured out why lucid dreaming got so difficult. It's all in my head. It only got more difficult because I thought it was going to get more difficult, and It can get easier, too. I know how easy some of my lucid dreams came, and it's not a difficult concept to grasp. So I am starting a project called "breaking mental barriers" to try and reset myself to the mindset that lucid dreaming is easy. This next week, I'm going to act like a newbie lucid dreamer, and go back to the basics of DILD and the likes, with hopes that I can start lucid dreaming again.

Original entry dated Feb. 16, 2002:

I had a nightmare that I had a daughter. I don't remember much about it except that it was quite bizarre and I was very unhappy about many things that occurred in the dream.

I had a nightmare about a huge war in a desert, and a lot of people died, but I think that's more along the lines of the typical "post-apocalyptic" dream if not for one of the characters in it. I was 12 when I had it but the girl I met was so compelling that I still remember the dream. She was dressed in blue and had long, straight brown hair and dark, intense eyes. She was in her teens in the dream, but had an oval, almost classic face that was too sad for someone so young. She saved my life. In the dream, there were spaceship like planes that were black and flew very low, and tanklike things that transported weapons. I was almost crushed by one but she threw me out of the way. I can only assume that she died, but the whole scene was enveloped by the dust kicked up by tank-treads.

I had another dream about a bunch of people testing a plane. It looked kind of like a flat triangle. Like a stealth-bomber, but not quite, there was something decidedly different about it. In any case, the test backfired and the plane crashed and burned. Luckily, the pilot didn't die. I can't remember if he was badly injured or not.

This was followed by another, very long and vivid dream, which I'm going to try to actually do justice:

A tree towers to dizzying heights, wreathed in clouds. It is held up by a pillar of massive, mossy trunk. Through the tangled roots springs a city, its buildings sprouting like mushrooms between the toes of a giant. Grey and fading, the tree and city are cloaked by dusk. The strange slant of the sunlight causes the shadows to pool in strange places.

A man walks down the street, turning a corner, only to find himself amidst steaming tropical vegetation, a savage jungle. He panics, running blindly, and stares up into a dazzling sky to see something rushing toward him. That was how a nameless man was splattered in the middle of an intersection. The only person who took the time to observe this event was a small girl.

After pausing to observe this event, the girl continued on her way through the twisting streets. The residents of the city streamed about her in a phantasmal flow of ghosts, fantastic, colorful, distorted, and exaggerated.

Her eyes lit momentarily on a shadowy figure, and quickly jerked away. She drew into the phantom crowd, which closed around her in a flutter of harlequin rags, and she was relieved to see the figure encompassed by the swirl of paraders.

She withdrew from the stream of grotesques and picked her way along rambling streets, tiptoeing across melted bricks. She turned to find the shadow, floating languidly above the flowing pavement. It regarded her cooly with bulbous glowing orbs set into a body that seemed to have no substance at all, except for a blurred grey outline. Ghostly animals slunk behind the wilted trashcans, chittering softly from the half-shadows.

I've broken up some of these dream entries so I can tag them properly. With only 10 tags, it can be a little hard.

Tre drömmar:

Zuuhs var på bussen, vi var i en liten stad (där hon bodde). Hon frågade om jag bodde här nu och jag svarade att det var svårt att bestämma sig (jag tänkte på Korren, det var som att det inte var Karlstad, men Korren bodde här).

Hanna i socionomklassen var inneboende hos mig. Hon ropade från sitt rum att jag måste sänka teven. Jag gick på morgonen och grämnde mig över att jag lämnat mat kvar på golvet (jag åt på golvet, men från tallrikar och så).


Skulle låna toaletten som var en integrerad del av Haralds rum. Harald pratade i telefon med någon. Jag "bodde" i vardagsrummet. Det var rätt mycket grejer överallt. Jag satt ner och kissade.

It's been a while so I don't remember much, but..

My parents are driving down a neighborhood street and I'm riding in the back. I see the biggest insectivore bats I've ever seen on top of roofs of houses - they were about the size of a large cat (a good thing for me). I get my parents to stop the car and I run out there and there is a normal-sized bat flying around that I manage to catch. There are a bunch of little kids around and I hold out the bat to the kids and teach them about it, and I allow it to lick their faces, which they enjoy.

In another part, I'm at my locker at school and my friend/locker partner is there, and we're putting in/getting out books from the locker. It's very awkward, since I've been away for a while and things are different.

A psychiatrist talking to another doctor about music and musicians, saying this is the type of personality that in these days uses hypnosis to tell themselves "this is my fanciful, flighty dream, that no one lets die." In other words: treating a wild dream as a practical career path, and being convinced to abandon a dream, are both viewed as mistakes.

There's a group of women in a small village, they all wear black and cover their hair, and a while ago they summoned up the Devil. Now he can't leave until a certain thing happens - he's trying to cause that thing to happen, the women are trying to prevent it. The women are talking about another, younger woman, who's either new in the village or has been away, and so isn't aware that this thing must be prevented.

The scene changes to show that Devil, who's been posing as a human man in that village, and at the moment is trying to get home without being caught by the sun and without being seen by his wife, who believes him to be human. He gets out of the building he'd been in by crawling down the side of the wall head first, and sneaks into his own home through the kitchen window, just before his wife enters the room. She finds him there casually drinking a glass of wine, and he mocks her for some supposed addiction problem of hers.

Someone's playing a waltz, I'm looking at LaCroix dancing with a blonde woman. I don't know him (I'm not playing Nick's role this time, though I'm not myself either), but something about seeing him gives me the sense that I'm seeing a path not taken. As I'm watching him and the woman he's dancing with, I become aware that this is Underhill, and a dream; and possibly those are synonyms. (This wasn't lucid at all - the character I was at the time was thinking of this scene as his own dream, not mine.)

I'm glad my recall is improving a little bit. Sure some nights, I still don't remember anything, but if I remain optimistic, maybe I'll be back to a daily recall.\

World War 1.5

Context: It was world war 1.5, happening sometime in the late 1920's. And many different cultures, each with varying levels of technology were all fighting one another.

Anyways, I was having some dream about a world war. We were storming the beach (somewhere). I can remember the beach was about 100 feet from the shore to a cliff. There were gaps in the cliff where it had collapsed and our soldiers were making their way up. But in between these gaps were bunkers where the enemy was shooting with us. It was either nighttime or just very dark, because the sun was blocked out by black clouds.
Some large explosion went off, maybe an atomic bomb. It didn't injure me too much but it flung me out about a mile from shore. I landed on a large piece of driftwood. I found that two other dream characters were also there. One male, one female. And they were both about my age. (I suppose in context with the dream, the armies, desperate for recruits were recruiting underage fighters. I'm 17.)
But being on the driftwood with these three was the part I remembered most vividly. The other boy had a large arrow in his back. (Remember the war was all different cultures with varying levels of technology.) The girl explained that she knew a magical healing spell but could only use it once. And she didn't know if she should take the arrow out and then use it. Or use the spell first, then take the arrow out.
I explained that it was a healing spell, and therefore it probably would stop the receiver from feeling pain. I asked her to use her spell while i pulled the arrow out. We were about to go, but I realized it was a barbed arrow. (You can't pull it out.)
I told her to use the spell, and instead, I pushed the arrow through the boy's body. The girl's spell looked something like the water-bending healing from TLA. I finnaly got the arrow out and there was no blood on it. (okay cool.) She ran out of energy to do her spell about a second later. And when she finished, the boy didn't even have a mark where the arrow used to be. He also said that the extraction was painless.
I went into "spectator mode" where I left my body and was flying around. I went back to the land where I was watching the second battle of the war. The army had advanced inland, and they were talking about using their hover tanks. (Hover tanks in 1920... erm ok).
The two armies met along a four lane road, with a desolate wasteland all around. The army that was "defending" had set up a roadblock with two rows of tanks, and a large number of soldiers. The soldiers guns were weird too, in that they had four barrels stacked vertically.
The attacking army had only a small platoon of soldiers that started fighting. Then a pair of tanks showed up to help them. I thought to myself that those were supposed to be hover tanks, and upon closer examination, I realized that they were in fact floating about a foot off the ground. (But that doesn't explain why they still had treads.)
My focus turned to one female solider on the "attacking" team. Her entire team was pretty overwhelmed, even with the hover tanks supporting them. Everyone around her was getting shot down, but she stood her ground. She was fighting with two small pistols. Eventually she got hit in the shoulder, but she kept fighting. She got hit again, this time in the leg. She fell down onto her knees, but still she kept fighting. A third shot hit her in the stomach. Still fighting, but the enemy soldiers were getting closer.
Finally one of the enemy soldiers, who was overly large and fast charged at her, and hit her three times. He stopped right in front of her, and fired two blue lasers from his gun, one hitting her in the head and the other, the chest. The lasers pushed her away and seemingly killed her.

Fragment.

I called my dad on his cell phone. I told him I was walking home. I was outside my high school. It was a bight, sunny spring day, and I was heading home.
I got an automatic text from a computer system. It was my hoverboard. (Because I guess I owned a hoverboard in this dream) it said that it had detected me leaving school and would automatically fly to me so that I could ride it home. I texted it back telling it to fly home without me. (God what the heck is wrong with me.)

I took 3 mg melatonin before bed. I don't know if it did my dreams any good, but I slept pretty well.

I dreamed that I was staying at somebody's house... a couple, who were maybe in their 60s. I don't remember the man very well, but the woman had shoulder-length dyed brown hair and wore sort of flowy pastel blue clothing with lots of jewelry. Their house was on the edge of the water. It was mostly open to the air, with pastel curtains hung between pillars. It reminded me a lot of some of the houses in Florida. When I asked about hurricanes, they said they'd rather live on the edge of the water than relocate to a hotel on slightly higher ground where they would just drown anyway.

Then, there was some sort of hurricane/typhoon. The house was blown to pieces. Somehow, the couple was unaffected by the craziness going on around them, but extremely concerned about me. Even though I hung on, I ended getting blown away.

The dream shifted. I was entering a city that was built on the water. I descended on the city from the air, somehow. The houses' walls were made of white plaster, and the rooftops were glittering ceramic tiles in all sorts of jewel tones. The architecture reminded me a lot of the American Southwest. There were canals between all of the houses. Somehow, all of this was on top of a mesa that rose out of the sea. I recall that I was able to get into the city because my cousin J helped me get a passport.

The environment around the mesa reminded me a lot of coastal South Africa. There was a cave system inside of the mesa, with different levels to it, all of them filled with enough water to pilot a boat around. The poorest people lived in boats in the lowest levels of the cave system (which also opened to the sea, through a tunnel that looked very mouth-like). The richest people lived in the houses on top of the mesa. The lowest level was very dimly lit, and the cave walls were made of sort of a brown clay.

I was at the lowest level, and suddenly had a boat. My boat was a little house-boat, about as small as a house-boat can get. The lowest level of the mesa, where I was, had terraces, with waterfalls. I thought the sound of one particular waterfall was very annoying, so I tried to pilot my boat to a higher level. One of the other residents was an extremely skinny man with tan skin and a shaved head. He stopped me and said they wouldn't allow boats at the higher levels, because the water was too shallow. I thought that sounded like bullshit, but turned around anyway.

The dream shifted. I was somehow involved in a plot to detonate a bomb somewhere in Sweden. I don't remember why. I remember moving there because my friend had moved there to teach English (which she does in real life) even though I really wanted to move to Norway instead.

My great grandfather lived in a run down little shack there, and wore a ratty red robe. I remember thinking that he looked very thin and frail. He was trying to tell me in broken English that what I was doing was evil, and begging me not to do it. I was doing it for his good as well as my own, although I don't remember how. After I had completed the task, I was able to move my great grandfather to a much better apartment. He still wore the same ratty red robe, and he refused to talk to me.

I woke up, rolled over.

Dreamed my roommate was talking about getting married to one of our other friends, but I don't recall anything else.

Original entry dated Feb. 12th, 2002:

Last night, I had a dream that by going into womens' bathrooms and walking through a certain special wall in a particular stall, I could reach a magical alternate dimension where witches and warlocks and stuff hung out. I also collected stuffed animals as a hobby, but that was a relatively minor part of the dream.


Original journal entry dated Feb. 16th, 2002:

I had a dream a while ago that there were two villages of little toy-people. Like teddy-bears and stuff. There was a little village at the bottom of a tree, and a little village on a branch of the tree. The village at the bottom of the tree sent a scout up the tree to ask the village up there why they never came down to visit. When the scout got there, he found out that the reason was because they couldn't get down. All of the different villagers had little quirks - like one was always rollerskating, and another one watched a lot of Sesame Street. The scout showed them how to get down - just jump off the branch. The problem was, he had a parachute - and they didn't. So they all broke into little pieces when they hit the ground, and had to reassemble themselves.
So one of them was, like, half of a rabbit and half of a rollerskate, and another one had a TV instead of a torso, and one had two heads, and I think two of the others were joined by a slinky thing, and one of them had heads for his feet...

Two non-lucid dreams and one lucid dream.

Non-lucid dream number one: I found out I was adopted. In real life, when I was born, something went wrong and they had to remove my mum's uterus, so she can't have children anymore. In my dream, my mum was never able to have children. My biologic mother had that problem, but she died, so my parents adopted me. Now that they had finally told me about this, they wanted to adopt another baby.

I wasn't happy, and I was also living with an old professor? We shared a house and she mentioned to someone who was visiting her about my current situation and that got me even more pissed off. My cousins were also there and I wanted to talk to them about it.

Non-lucid dream number two: I was taking my dog for a walk. He entered this condo. Since I had to go out, I left him there, since he'd be safe there. I went back later to get him and the doorman was angry at me for just leaving my dog like that there. He said I could only do that if I knew someone there. This dream also involved lots of driving, but I'm not sure how.

Lucid dream: I was walking into my room and talking to my dog. For some reason, I thought "how funny would it be if this were a dream?" so I randomly counted my fingers. They were okay. Wait. My thumb was weird. Then I realised I had no thumb. IT'S A DREAM!

I stopped walking and thought of what I wanted to do. Last night, I told myself that if I had a lucid dream, I'd like to summon the main character of the book I'm writing and talk to him about the plot, and maybe even get him to take me to his world. I remembered that and started shouting "EFRAIM!" over and over again. He didn't show up, so I got sad and decided to wake up instead.

Dream recall from today's WBTB/naps.

Dream 1(fragments):

There was some stuff at home and some nonsense talk about credit cards.

Dream 2(fragments):

There was a fight between two groups of people near some house, one group transformed into werebeasts and there was one werewolf thgat was afraid of hallucinations that one person from different group could cause.

Dream 1(fragments):

I was on some minecraft server and we had problem setting up some stuff, i was using command line while trying to fix it and suddenly game turned into gmod, then as i continued fixing it turned into dreamviews chat somehow and commands started working totally wrong, op command was deopping and other way around, plus every time command was entered it spammed chat with weird messages.

Dream 2:

I was playing minecraft with 3 people(That were my friends in dream but i didn't knew them), we were in some brown land place with bushes around and some kind of ruins. Nearby were a few wooden buildings, one was like an inn of some kind, night was approaching as well so we went here.
Then at night some ghosty things started attacking us, so we fought them and noticed a gate at ruins that looked like creeper's face. We went out to investigate and land started filling with some kind of dead bush leaf blocks, the gate was active and there was lava under it.
Then i wake up, in different room, and i decide to expect someone to appear near bed.Surely some kid appears and i realize that i am dreaming(So opportunity for october TOTM comes only in november, lol), i ask him who is he and such, but he ignores me. I get up and ask again, he only responds with 'I need a doctor' and then shortly disappears as i look around. I shrug and continue with my goals, i switch to quadruped stance and go for window, but dream fades out shortly.
I wake up again and get distracted because i notice that i slept too much and then family distracts further as i talk about schedule being broken again.

Original entry dated Feb. 16, 2002:


Nightmare #1:
I had a nightmare that I was in this deserted ruined city-place, and there was nuclear ash everywhere. The city was quasi-inhabited by the ghosts of children, who told me that I couldn't leave because nobody leaves. I tried to leave anyway, by climbing over a crumbled wall and biking down a deserted and shattered highway. I could bike a LOT faster in my dream than in reality - in fact, I was amazed by the speed at which I was going. There was something nameless and terrifying behind me, and I didn't want to look back because I knew that if I did I'd see nothing there but a tremendous wall of brute evil force... like a visual shock-wave from a bomb blast... and then I opened up my eyes, I was lying in bed in the pitch-black and felt something sitting at the edge of my bed. Something like a man but not a man. It terrified the hell out of me. I could feel it there like... a dead weight... solid as a rock. I was paralyzed with fear, but finally gathered the courage to lunge for the light. When I turned it on - of course nothing was there. Perhaps that was when I really woke up and the nightmare ended, or at least I hope so.

Nightmare #2:
There was a house that was - how can I put it? - unfolded. It existed in more than three dimensions, so to speak, and was very frightening to experience. There were ghosts living in it. There seem to be a lot of ghosts in my dreams. One of them was a sort of... respectable old gentleman, who would be kindly if he weren't so sinister in a way. The house was a labyrinth, and I kept getting lost and becoming very afraid.

Nightmare #3:
I had a nightmare that I had died. In it, my mother and brother and I lived in an old Victorian mansion. I couldn't move on, and wanted very badly to communicate with them, but the only time I could was that split second when they hovered between sleep and waking. At night I was chased by hell-hounds, and was sort of held back by things that I thought of in my dream as "death-bones".

Original entry dated Feb. 16, 2002:

I had a nightmare that the devil tried to seduce me, but at the last minute I pulled back and ran out of the room. It wasn't so much terrifying as unsettling. I also had a dream about being chased through an iron tower. It was creepy. I managed to escape and ran out into the road to ask for help, but nobody would pick me up. Finally, a nice young couple was kind enough to pick me up even though they knew the consequences, but they still didn't seem to appreciate the danger that I was putting them in.

first dream:
I am at our family friends place that live out in the country on a farm and we are looking at pics that were taken from our last visit and there daughter says that in all the pics one of her freinds is grabbing my dick and when i look its true couse she is and i was real dissapionted that i didnt get in with her and then they say that were going for a walk and we do and the next thing i know were all the way out in deep heavy bush like real thick too and were trying to get to these huge sand dunes so we can run down them and shit and after ages of walking through tons of bush we get there i pick up a handfull of sand and the dream fades away.

second dream:
i am on a skateboard skating down the street (i dont skate in real life though) and i am going past this house and a guy says he wants me to come up and help him with somthing so i do and i go up to his house and he gives me a toy gun and says to shoot everyone inside and so i do and it shoots like a real gun and they all die but then they come back to life and i sit down with them and talk to them for a while and they seem pretty cool then they ask me my name and i make up a fake name witch is james but they dont believe me so i give them a fake last name witch is knight but they still dont believe me so they ask me to leave and i do and then i am skating back to my house and i stop to talk to some dude for a while then he skates off as well and before i can make it back to my place the dream ends.

I hardly remember anything at all, but, I remember that I was talking to someone about how we were currently in the care of a higher race of beings (that is, they came into being long before humans and so are more evolved, physically and technologically). They weren't malevolent or degrading or anything, they were just out there somewhere, aiding us with advanced technology and making sure we don't get hurt. At some point he and I go through a transporter, like on Star Trek (for the record, Star Trek had a lot to do with why I had this dream, I'm sure).

They were telling me about them/our situation, since apparently I didn't know and yet was going to live there. I don't know if that means I'm on a different planet, or I just came out of a coma, or what.

I don't remember if the person I was talking to was also human, part of that race, or part of another race with evolution similar to my own.