non-lucid

Awake|Dreaming|Lucid

I start off on a bus with old classmates, heading out on a school trip. I have various conversations that I couldn't recall, probably nonsense, until we arrive at out destination - a shopping centre similar to the one in my city, only slightly different. The teacher told us as we got off the bus that we could go home at 12:15pm if we happen to get lost/separated from the group. Immediately as the group leaves, I fall behind but soon catch up in the food hall, and get some destination information from the teacher assistant. I look on google maps and it points to a city 45 minutes away by car. I ignore it and go my own way to get KFC. I find myself back at the entrance of the shopping centre, this time with the other students, who are sitting down in some kind of lesson outside. I decide to play Spelunky for a little bit, with Matt Heafy from Trivium assigned to protect me for some reason. A large lantern falls off a post right next to me, startling us. I pick the lantern up and cut myself, causing my finger to bleed. I felt the pain as I carried the massive lantern into the shopping centre to give to security. I pass it to someone and he puts it on top of a wardrobe to look at later. I head back to class and decide to help an illiterate student learn to use a keyboard. This keyboard, however, is totally nonsensical, with some keys being labelled as simply "ooooo" and various punctuation. I get scolded by the teacher for not paying attention, but answer all of her questions correctly and brag about doing so on Facebook. Soon after, I draw a really childish caterpillar in MS Paint but have trouble filling the shape in with green, and eventually wake up.

Possible recurring elements:
-Spelunky
-Schoolmates
-Bus
-Local city

Notes:
-Second Spelunky dream, I've been playing almost daily for the last couple weeks. Ref. Dream #8
-Yet another dream involving schoolmates on a bus. Ref. Dream #1 and #2. I've noticed in some of my later 2012 DJ entries, I commented how the school dreams were returning. Seems like this has been an element for years
-First dream in the local city, but a local area nonetheless

Awake|Dreaming|Lucid

I start at work, having an argument with my sister. Nothing in particular, she's just mad at me for whatever reason my brain decided to generate. We're arguing outside, where it's dark but active with people. She sends some disgusting, bald, mutated horses after me, but I escape and lock myself inside the warehouse - the door being notably different than in real life. My sister and I decide to have a contest to settle the score, and a big black guy ripped straight out of Bayonetta escorts us to a neighbourhood, still night time. I get in a car and immediately crash it into a house, where I get out and run into a nearby forest with a very familiar layout. Now I am with an old 2012 friend I had from here, walking with flashlights through the dark forest pathway. We spot movement on a bridge that seems to be 2-3 bears of varying fur colours. They leave and we move on. Finally at the end, now daytime, I see a large house on its own that now belongs to me. There's a rich kid sprinting around it in circles, he seems familiar from my last dream also themed around contests. In the distance, down a very long road, a radio/electricity tower stands. After some vague discussion, it falls over, and we head over to investigate. Somehow, we pull it back up but it falls back over.

Though very hazy, I think I recall more competitions at the previous house.

Possible recurring elements:
-Local forest
-Work
-Family
-Competition

Notes:
-Same forest path as Dream #6
-Work and family, two pretty standard occurrences
-Two dreams back to back with competitions of some sort

I will color every part from now on to make it easier to figure out what is going on.
Black = comment
Grey = awake
Yellow = non-lucid
Blue = lucid

---

[30.04.2020]
Strange respirator
I was in my living room and put on a respirator I own. Suddenly, it's like I am overtaken by a creature and all of a sudden I get the instinct to run around and destroy everything. I felt way stronger than usual. I ran in extreme speeds into a different room and ripped stuff off the table. I fought a bit against it, but somehow I liked it, as if it was made so I didn't want to put the respirator off.

I woke up, but it was quite early, so I decided to continue sleeping.

Spectating strange couple
I was sort of spectating a couple. I only really remember that they had booked something like just flying through the earth's orbit, through the atmosphere. I was sort of in the camera perspective of the man. The woman was enjoying herself, but I as the observer was not really a fan and it actually scared me quite a bit. There were all sorts of strange visual effects, which, in the dream, were from scraping at the edge of the earth's atmosphere and the light being distorted because of that. I tried closing my eyes, but it didn't really work and the strange light bending made it so that you see everything, even if you close your eyes. When I opened them again, it was in reverse from normal blinking and opening them made no light reach the eye. I didn't end up actually seeing the man.

[01.05.2020]
Anime-like self-aware world
I was in a sort of village, surrounded by maze-like hedges. I felt they were there to protect the village. It was quite early in the morning, and I saw a building in front of me. I had to sort of register myself. I think they knew I was dreaming or something like that, and that I was only visiting for a bit. I met a villager there, and we became friends. He told me something about the ancient Japanese spirits in the forest, and how you should always be inside at night, as we walked through the maze. Towards the end of the dream, I think we said bye to each other as I felt that I was waking up.

Morning of May 3, 2020. Sunday.

Dream #: 19,494-01. Reading time (optimized): 2 min.



In this dream from late morning, I maintain precursory liminality after I re-enter sleep. As a result, I recall Zsuzsanna and a few of my waking-life associations (including the instinctual perception of being in bed), though I lose recall of what a dream is (as I ordinarily do in this mode). Even so, it starts with my focus on our bed, but the setting is undefined at first. As Zsuzsanna and I are standing in a different room, I watch the sheet on the bed lift by itself and move back as if manipulated by an invisible person. (Note that this correlates with the management of precursory liminality and has happened in many previous dreams.)

Zsuzsanna and I walk into the unknown bedroom, and I am astounded by the realistic detail and precise rendering of the events (a thought process that never occurs in waking life - how many people, for example, would watch a car go down the street in waking life while thinking, “Wow, that looks so realistic”). Over time, my dream resolves the room as having the essence of the Barolin Street house’s lounge room (where a bed never was in waking life).

Eventually, the supposed ghost of a teenage girl is present and is responsible for the previous inexplicable activity. Her name is Sophie.

“Are you the same Sophie from years ago?” I ask her, but my question does not make much sense. She cheerfully confirms that she is by nodding. (She is an older version of Sophie Wender from John Wyndham’s “The Chrysalids,” also published as “Re-Birth.”) I move my hands through her hair, saying how “realistic” it seems as imaginary somatosensory dynamics increase exponentially. (Note that in a different recent dream, this same process resulted in removing sandspurs from a resting wolf’s fur.)

Eventually, with Zsuzsanna still in the room, another supposed ghost materializes. This one is Marcella Boyland from Daniel F. Galouye’s “Tonight the Sky Will Fall,” though I do not interact with her as much.

The need to wake to use the bathroom integrates into my dream’s content, resulting in liminal management and its personification as an unknown male ghost married to Sophie, a status previously unbeknown to me. (His manifestation annoys me, as Sophie is “mine,” but discarding the waking transition would be unwise.) As a result, I gaze into a mirror (though I do not see myself at any point, as the mirror is higher than my line of sight), with liminal drop anticipation. From this, the sketchy drawing of a crow fills the mirror, part of it including random zigzagging lines.

“Can ghosts influence what people see?” I absentmindedly ask the male. “I had that mirror back when I lived in Chicago,” says the male, which is the usual nonsensical response to questions asked in liminal mode. (Ghosts typically result from liminal management with waking-life identity being “incomplete” when between dreaming and waking.)

The “ghost” walks into the bathroom, causing me to realize that I need to wake up and go.

---

Pulling Sandspurs from a Wolf’s Fur

Morning of May 2, 2020. Saturday.

Dream #: 19,493-02. Reading time (optimized): 2 min 30 sec.



I am sitting on the floor in the living room of a unique variation of the Loomis Street house near the front door. An unfamiliar man is present to my right (closest to the door). I am stroking the fur of a wolf that is lying on his left side. For a time, everything is relaxing and uneventful.

Somehow, I get sandspurs stuck on me, and they immediately form at least two lines on the wolf’s fur, closest to his back. I determine that they had come from an area on the carpeted floor to my left. I become annoyed, as now I have to pull each sandspur from the wolf’s fur. As I do this, I complain to the man that I had not been outside recently, so they could not have come from me.

As a result of my sense of touch increasing exponentially for a few minutes and establishing a higher level of (somatosensory) cortical arousal, my dream processing changes to a scene where I look out at a parking lot setting from a doorway. A few unknown people are walking around, but a man with an unrealistically big head appears and dances about irritatingly. Using a combination of telekinesis and mentally willing more sandspurs into existence, I cover his body with sandspurs from more than ten feet away as I wake.

---

Get the truth about my dream and some of its familiar causal factors here:

My dream’s first scene is a unique but familiar form of a process that occurs at least once every sleep cycle. Often, the first discernible rendering is a result of my instinctual awareness I am dreaming. For example, the wolf is resting on his left side, co-occurrent with my sleeping orientation. The unknown man is to my right, co-occurrent with (in this case, subliminal) environmental monitoring (as my right side is more exposed to my real environment).

Wolves, bears, lions, and most other kinds of animals still occur in my dreams regularly, often as an animal semblance of my reticular activating system as here. However, their nature typically correlates with the ultradian rhythm curve of my sleep cycle. (For example, I had this dream after sunrise, and wolves are nocturnal, and that is how I perceive them.)

Despite my waking-life identity being absent from my dream, there are incidental compartmentalized associations with the coronavirus. (Even so, I have not yet had a dreaming experience with a viable recall of the pandemic. The processing factors of my dreams have not changed at all.) For example, although I have dreamt of cenchrus (sandspurs) before, they have vague visual similarity with the coronavirus. Removing sandspurs from the wolf’s fur also stems from a distortion of Zsuzsanna removing them from one of our cats (a typical synthesized distortion to prevent confusing dream content with waking life).

A parking lot usually only occurs in the last scene of a dream in the last dream of a sleep cycle as liminality begins to increase during the waking transition, and it signifies the status of awareness between dream space and precursory waking space. One association is parked vehicles (the body being motionless in bed). In the real world, a parking lot also represents liminal space.

The man with the big head is a liminal association with a YouTube video I saw yesterday, supposedly featuring a caricature of UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson in bed with the virus (with doctors and nurses dancing around) even though it was part of the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony. The character is “out of bed” in my dream as signifying me getting out of bed after waking.

---

Ultimately, despite my dreams likely seeming surreal to the average person, they are almost always extraordinarily easy for me to decode and resolve.

---

Morning of May 1, 2020. Friday.

Dream #: 19,492-02. Reading time (optimized): 1 min 30 sec.



My dream’s foundation is a result of imaginary somatosensory modulation, but atypical. (I often cup my hand around a vertical bar of the head of our bed for this.) Ordinarily, I summon an egg to increase a dream’s illusory sense of touch (other than in a later rendering of a dream’s timeline when it is more often coins), the reason being that an egg is a perfect size to focus on the area of my palm and the underside of my fingers when I cup my hand. This type of modulation is usually in an indoor setting. However, in this instance, there is a precursory vestibular perception that results in the common sky-watching scenario, though in this case, it is seemingly in the late morning rather than before dawn.

Over time, I see a flying saucer high in the sky. Many other people are around in a mostly featureless field. I focus on creating small rockets to blow up any spaceships.

The exponential increase in my dream’s illusory sense of touch stems from the middle of a small rocket first materializing in my cupped right hand. The top and bottom of the miniature missile telescope from each side, coming into existence with minimal effort in my summoning the feature. It is partially reminiscent of a toy plastic rocket I had as a boy that comes apart in sections.

I mentally cause the missile to ignite and leave my hand to destroy a flying saucer. Even though it is less than a foot long, I have a close view of when it reaches the spacecraft (as if looking through a virtual telescope). I enjoy the explosion (as I usually do in this mode of dreaming).

Over time, as more spaceships appear, I indulge in the same activity, several times, enjoying my pointless entertainment. I experiment with different visualizations and anticipation of the results. At one point, I send my rocket to a feature with the resemblance of a rocket booster (similar to the rectangular aft skirts in some science-fiction movies). From there, the rocket goes inside the middle of the spacecraft to blow it up.

---

I ordinarily only end up doing things like this when I lose interest in sustaining sleep for longer, concerning creating a new dream scenario.

---

Awake|Dreaming|Lucid

This dream starts with me walking with some people out of my local forest and towards my old school just outside of it, where a kid is skateboarding up a single, large ramp. I seem to predict that things will go wrong, almost like a moment of non-lucid dream control, and by no surprise, the kid slips over. He smacks his face really hard on the ground, there is no blood or signs of injury but he's screaming really horribly and desperately. It was a pretty grim scene, causing me and the people with me to back up towards the forest. We head back to the scene and everything seems normal again, the kid is skating and he has a woman standing with a flag near the ramp. This time, the kid reveals the whole thing is a trick in order to distract, but I couldn't make any sense of it. He performs the accident again and someone else appears behind me. The kid and I mutually propose some kind of contest, which we soon depart on.

The next area is similar to Skyrim and Minecraft in some elements, mostly Skyrim, as usual. It was a sky complex above the clouds, with everything made of stone like a castle. It seemed our contest was a race to gather something, or perhaps kill something within this fortress. I run across a bridge among many, fighting a wraith-like entity on my way, and across a few more bridges until I reached a small separate building. Inside, the visuals turned more towards the Minecraft style, but this section is a it hazy. On the way out, I hear an announcement about three prize winners for a separate contest themed around drums, hosted by a metal drummer. He has a small speech and reads out some names, to which none respond to claim their prize. I think about claiming the prize myself and the dream ends.

Possible recurring elements:
-Local area
-Skyrim

Notes:
-The same forest from my lucid in #5, as well as the same school from #7
-Skyrim elements again, I've already begun reality checking while playing

Forgot to post yesterday, was too busy trying to develop a reality check habit on Skyrim so I could get potential lucids on 90% of my dreams

Awake|Dreaming|Lucid


This dream starts with me playing a weird version of Final Fantasy, seems to be mostly close to V, but with random, nonsensical characters. I'm taking the party through a stone fortress in a black void, then not much is clear after that. Eventually, after things I can't recall, I find myself in a Runescape graveyard, talking to some people about a quest which involves using a flame gauntlet. I spend some time in the graveyard and surrounding areas fighting monsters in hopes to get some required gear drops for the quest. I then go into a mine, and it becomes a Spelunky-style gameplay. I drop down a few levels until I see a blue disc hidden behind a wall, which then becomes real-life visuals again. I pick the disc up and identify it as one of four discs I need for some Goddess quest.

I move further along and end up in my bedroom, with a very old furniture layout from many years ago. I search my old wardrobe for quest items relating to the disc and the previous gear situation, but get distracted by something. I have a false awakening, and wake up with a friend of mine in my bed. He keeps making fun of English accents an I join him in doing so, then he squeezes my stomach extremely hard to make the sound funnier. He vanishes when I am yet again distracted, this time by a facebook post from 2 week ago. I see someone insulting my girlfriend on it, so I tell them to "die in Bravil".

The people then argue amongst themselves and I continue searching my wardrobe for items.

Possible dream elements:
-Local area

Notes:
-My own house for local areas this time, though nothing much else
-I've been playing Spelunky lately, might want to keep an eye on this

Awake|Dreaming|Lucid

This one was very tough to recall, I had woken up and fallen asleep twice, and for a few hours, after having this dream and managed to keep the pieces of the dream in the back of my head. Pretty impressed with how it came out

I start off at work, everything seems pretty regular, things I have experienced while awake in my daily life at my job. I'm getting more orders down than I typically like, but it happens. These orders are for industrial grade batteries that I ship out on small pallets to replace the ones in the machines we sell. I tell my manager I can't keep up with it and that it isn't safe for me to lift this many batteries on my own. I decide to leave the warehouse, which has a slightly different layout, and into the yard outside. I'm with a group of people, who I believe to be the main cast from a movie I watched recently. For some weird reason we start having semi-digital, almost holograph type Pokemon battles with bug catchers. They're like 2D sprites projected and animated into real life in a very weird but somehow natural way. I experience a loop of the same animation of this fat Hiker-type Pokemon NPC, until we move on. We travel through a Skyrim-like plains landscape, with small ponds and giant mudcrabs, which we fight. We also fought a giant yellow Pokemon, with a very vague form that I can't wrap my head around.

After this, I head back to work, except the layout is the reception corridor from my secondary school many years ago. The office ladies of my job are there, sitting on white chairs and giving me fetch tasks. I was given the task to retrieve a bag from a hotel, which I headed over to. It was a massive shopping centre-esque building, like a holiday resort hotel. I managed to get the bag from a massive wall with nothing but doors on it. I call out for the owner of the bag, but I get no response, and deem the bag noncollectable. I place it on a smoking post and move on deeper into the resort, where I find myself in a separate guest-room area with my family at a table eating together in celebration. Most notably, my step brother shows me something video game related, perhaps Pokemon. I decide not to join and instead go further into the building, feeling as if I was there to meet someone. A boy came down some stairs and there were a couple of other people in the small, caravan-sized room. I think I discussed something relevant to the bag I put down earlier.

Moving on from this, I found myself walking down a familiar shopping centre, where I then woke up not too long after.

Possible dream elements:
-Work
-Family
-Skyrim
-Local area - School

Notes:
-I can perform reality checks at work to make this an easy one, though first of its kind since I started this series
-Family, step brother in particular, but no bottled up anger involved this time
-Skyrim yet again, 100% a recurring element for me. Playthrough definitely needed soon
-Another local area in my dream, worth keeping an eye on, but first time I've dreamed of being on school grounds. I have dreamt several times in the last week of students I attended with, though

I was at an anime convention, checking in to the hotel before my fiancee got there. I was dressed in a hand crocheted Aerith costume, and I walked past my sewing friend who didn't recognize me, then almost instantly ran into one of our mutual friends, coffee friend, who did. We talked for a bit, specifically she complimented my dress before asking where the friend from before went. I asked her not to mention my costume, as me and the first friend were both fans of the outfit and I wanted to surprise her. We parted ways and I took off the costume to reveal a t-shirt and shorts underneath it. I walked outside intent on getting something to eat and ran into a couple of my other friends. I forgot (in the dream) the name of the person I was talking to prior, because I wanted to say that I saw her to my lawyer friend, but woke up before I could remember it.

Awake|Dreaming|Lucid

The dream starts with me sneaking around a set of Skyrim-themed stairs, of which I go up and into a building, also vaguely Skyrim themed. I avoid various guards and I go inside a separate room, where an old, dying man rests in his chair. I steal something from the drawers and alert the cards, then escape the room and outside the building where the stairs are. A guard at the staircase attacks me, I run back inside and hide, where I meet two friendly people - a man and a woman. The woman resembled Delphine from Skyrim. They help me fight the guards around the room I stole from, and we kill a guard firing arrows from atop a wall. Soon after, a large group of maybe a dozen or so varying types of people, presumably the main enemy force of this building, march around the corner from behind the wall with the archer, and I run away as the two friendly people stay and fight. There is a brown-skinned girl among the enemy group who I seem to have some kind of romantic connection to.

I make my way far out of the area and into a forest with a path cutting through. There are fields behind fences on each side of the forest, with trees and bushes between the path and fences. I sneak through the bushes as the large group of enemies march through in search of me. Nearby, I see two dog-like creatures, which run past me and join forces with the enemy group. I continue sneaking in the bushes, following the enemies, when suddenly the brown-skinned girl from before jumps through the bushes to scare me. I jump back but immediately find myself extremely happy to see her, she kisses me and leaves.

Not long after, the view changes into what appears to be an RTS game, similar to Age of Empires II. My troops are fighting a much larger army and losing, my forces wipe a group out but are then swarmed by a massive purple blob and I lose. I end the dream trying and failing to upgrade my samurai.

Possible recurring elements:
-Skyrim
-Sneaking
-Local forest

Notes:
-Skyrim has been a foundation for many of my dreams over the past few years. The sneaking aspect is from my very recent thief/sneak playthrough of Skyrim, and has been present in a couple over the last couple of weeks, most notably in my lucid from last night (Dream #5)
-I might play another Skyrim sneak build soon to help form a reality check habit. Should be very easy considering how common and accessible this element is
-The forest is very similar to a forest nearby to my house, but not the same as in Dream #5.
-My recall is improving very rapidly after coming back to my dream journal format, which is apparent in the length of the text I type. I am almost clearing entire pages in my notebook

Awake|Dreaming|Lucid

I spent a while recalling this one, extracted a fair bit more than usual.

I'm in an unfamiliar city, with a hotel across the road. In the near distance, just up a small hill, there is a warehouse with coffins stacked outside. A weird man invites me to follow him into the nearby hotel, which I accept. He goes first, and pokes his head out of the very top window. I head up there and upon arrival, I look outside the window and see that the coffins in the distance are empty - with some workers moving them. Within seconds, a swarm of vampires of wildly varying aesthetics fly around the top floor of this hotel building, which is now large and open like a warehouse. Many guards, presumably from the opposing warehouse, fight the vampires in an Oblivion-like fight. I decide to join the vampires, and I head down some stairs and out of the building, where I find myself fighting an Argonian female on a path near the city of Windhelm in Skyrim. I win the fight.

Possible recurring elements:
-Vampires
-Skyrim
-Sneaking

Notes:
-Second vampire dream out of 4

Awake|Dreaming|Lucid

I have a false awakening, perhaps not the start of the dream due to being very hazy. My immediate thought was "nah I didn't have any dreams". I start complaining about things, to which my step brother, staying the night in my room, tells me that he's pretty tired of my whining. In response, I hurl all kinds of insults from my bottled up anger.

I couldn't recall anything after that, probably for the best.

Possible recurring elements:
-Family
-Anger, bottled up feelings

Notes:
-Bottle up feelings seems to be something that carries over from reality, I may be able to use this to form a good reality check habit

Awake|Dreaming|Lucid

The dream (potentially, as far as my recall can acquire) starts with me waiting in my local town with old school friends, very similarly to the previous dream. We are waiting for buses, which follow no particular time schedule. The journeys involve random conversations with people I went to school with. The bus always ends up at the spot it picked us up from. Upon exiting the bus for the third time, I hear a cry for help in a nearby, horror movie-esque house, which I go inside and investigate. A woman is laying in a sack, tied up next to a wardrobe - I free her and she reveals to me that she is a vampire. She isn't harmful, but we hear a noise that we believe to be the owner of a house. The vampire says he is a serial killer and likely the one that kidnapped her.

The dream ends here.

Possible recurring elements:
-Vampires
-Old classmates, school
-Local city centre

Notes:
-Two local area + schoolmate dreams in a row

First of all, this is my first post in years. Decided to keep old posts but start from #1 for my recent dream journal. Below is a colour code format to help identify the points of lucidity and which is a regular dream point.

Awake|Dreaming|Lucid

The dream starts in my local riverside village, with a group of who I think were students went to school with. We were approached by a man who would talk about movie trailers, and would show us various ones. Eventually, traits of the movie trailer would merge in with the surroundings - a child-size car driven by two small darkskin elf-like people sped by, crashing into nearby objects. Chaos ensued, as the trailer man mentioned a lack of ice cream was causing issues in the village. Not long after, the group and I headed over to an ice cream stall and worked a shift to provide the people with blue ice cream.

As far as my recall goes, this is where the dream ends.

Possible recurring elements:
-Old classmates, school
-Local village

Notes:
-Not much I can utilise here, but it's a start
-I have been to the local village before in dreams