non-lucid

The side-scroller
I'm playing a side scrolling game with stick figures. Oddly enough, it goes right to left. All the characters are represented as small black stick figures. It's incredibly hard past a certain point. Eventually, a boss type character shows up; she doesn't look any different from any of the other figures, but she's a lot harder to defeat. The first time through, I have trouble controlling my character and she quickly kills me. The next time through, I do better. This time, I get to a downhill section where she kills me. The next time through I get to a part where she gets into a large walker vehicle and starts chasing me. I'm supposed to shoot her out of the pilot's seat, but it's hard to aim. Somehow I get behind the walker and end up fighting Roy and the other characters from The Order of the Stick. They're much bigger and actually look something like who they're suposed to represent. I die fairly quickly. Somehow I realize that there was a way for me to hover in the air directly above the boss's cockpit to shoot at her more easily.

Now I'm looking at the level editor for the game. I'm not actually making a level myself; I'm just seeing a beta level the developer is working on. Near the top, I see a ladder going off the screen. Something isn't right - I see the top of the level in the editor, but there's a flashing bar where the top of the screen would actually appear, and it's lower than the top in the editor. I don't know why this is.


Driving from the back seat
I'm driving. It's very difficult to drive - I seem to be sitting in the very back of a bus, but somehow I'm still driving it. I have to duck down and squint to see out the front, and my view is still terrible. I'm constantly worried about hitting something or someone. Thankfully there aren't too many cars on the road. At one point I find myself coming up on an older woman on a bicycle; she's right in the middle of the lane. Somehow I'm having a really hard time seeing her. I accidentally turn the bus a bit to the right, and I end up with half the bus off the road. It works out ok, though - I just barely pass the women on the right. I'm glad i didn't hit her. Shortly after this, I come to a T intersection with traffic coming in from the left. There's a traffic light here, but I don't know if it's still green for me (I haven't been able to see it for a while). The other cars don't move, so I keep on going. I hope I didn't cut them off.

Now i'm passing some buildings on my left. I've had trees to my right the whole time. I start veering a little to the left, across the wrong lane (no one is coming) and towards the buildings. I can't seem to get straight. I wake up and have the weirdest sense of moving to the left even as I'm still laying in bed.

My ex step mother was planning to move to the country. I didn't agree with this at all.

Some old asian lady invited me to some meditation teaching. I got up and went so fast that I left her and didn't have the directions to get there. I looked at the ad to give me the address. I started to get upset because I couldn't remember it long enough to put it in my gps. I ran into jerrette at a coffee shop. He said he was going to a teaching as well. We thought we were going to the same place until we realized we both had different addresses. I thought do I really need to receive another empowerment from a teacher I dont know and a lineage I know nothing about.

08.20.2012

School Bus and English Class (Non-lucid)

NON-DREAM DREAM LUCID

There's a girl who's trying to find her father because he took something that she needed to get to somewhere I think.

I forget if this girl is a blonde, since I think I slept again instead of typing it on my laptop because I was too lazy to turn it on.

All I remember from this is that the girl used a bicycle, and her father had a faster model of another bicycle or motorcycle. I thought the girl wouldn't catch up, but she managed get to the same speed as her father. When he realized she really wants to talk to him, he finally stops.

He gets off the bike and gives the girl a plastic bag with some random items in it, but most importantly, he also gave her the item she was looking for, a very transparent bead.

The dream shifts, and now I'm inside of a yellow school bus. I couldn't see the outside, but based on how the seats were arranged, it definitely had to be a school bus. There were quite a few people inside, but there were two people I had most of my focus on.

Before doing so, I think I looked at myself at the mirror, but I'm not sure if it's me, it looks like a female.....am I in a female's body?

Whoever it is that I'm looking at in the mirror, she has some white cream on her face, so I take some object, probably a paper towel or something, and slowly wiped it off her face. It doesn't take long for me to finish this, and then I listen to the two girl's to the right a few seats in front of me. One girl was talking about how her Adviser told her she had to take some other course because of some condition I can't remember.

The girl had to leave, and then her friend called her to declare that in short, her Adviser doesn't know what she's trying to tell her at all. She starts telling her that she can do whatever it is she thought she couldn't, and after they talk for a while, maybe a minute or two, I see the same girl who left walking around on the cell listening to her friend to respond,

"Okay."

The girl was wearing a black leather jacket, white shirt, and some dark colored jeans. I don't do this often, but her visage wasn't very appealing to me, in fact, she reminds me of a girl in High School when I was a senior. She was on the cheerleader team, but I knew that someone like her would be the one talked about behind everyone's back as not looking good enough or something like that.

She hangs up and after that, everything is quiet. Then another random girl, who is a redhead, wearing a light gray shirt and the usual blue jeans is talking about people's weight. As the bus is taking a very deep curve to the left, while I'm on the right side of the bus looking at the window of the arrows signaling vehicles to take a deep left turn, the girl talks about how that if she sees someone obese in her neighbor, she takes that as a compliment.

It took me a few seconds to process how that can be a compliment, but for some weird reason, I found some logic in her twisted and cruel declaration. It makes sense, when you apply it as petting her ego and making herself feel better. She was a little pale in skin tone, and pretty skinny, but not too skinny, she had a little substance in a few regions.

The dream shifts again (everything seems to be following the same theme for me)....now I'm inside of a school building, and I'm on the top floor. There's a classroom I have to go to that's "Room 113," something like that. The overall setting are shades of brown, very dull and boring.

However, the room is closed, so we have to wait for a while, so I decided to walk around the hallway a bit and look around for any other classes that have started already. I get a hunch that someone is coming near Room 113, but it ends up being a student instead.

It's one of my short-term friends, Marissa, and she's wearing a think black cotton type of jacket with some kind of brown or dirty colored shirt and dark pants. Her face looks just the same, but she has a brown beard showing.

I can see why I didn't find this weird because she actually did a play where she had to paint a beard to act as a man....

The teacher eventually comes, and everyone is already trying to find their new seats. There's probably 10-15 people inside, excluding the teacher. Most of these people are familiar faces. There's one guy who looks like Gere wearing a black shirt and dark pants. Then there's this skater dude that I sat near a lunch table with in middle school, though he was a douchebag in waking life.

He's still skinny as ever, and is wearing a white shirt, though I can't remember the color of his pants. Then there's Marissa, who I already mentioned, and then there's another guy that I'll nickname "Hay" for the sake of being anonymous as well. I'm not too sure on that, but whenever I try to recall the details of the classroom, he always pops up.

I also think another girl from middle school who had a family history of sickle cell anemia there as well wearing a thin black jacket like Marissa, except she was shorter than her. The teacher was also wearing a thin black jacket and probably a white shirt underneath.

I think she had an inverted bowl shape hairstyle, which reminds me a lot like my first English AP teacher before I switched classes. While everyone is quickly finding their seats, I end up being the last one trying to pick a seat, and the teacher isn't really patient herself, in fact she told me,

"It shouldn't take long to find a seat..." (paraphrasing here).

I awkwardly acknowledge it, but I forget where I decided to sit down. I think she hands out some sheets, and while I'm scavenging through them, I find there's one worksheet that asked two questions. One was related to something about having a specific type of camera. I think it was a Yes or No question. I was confused about this because I thought this was an English class.

But I think the reason why I assumed that is because I saw Marissa, who I only met my English AP and U.S. history dual credit class.

It seems this is some type of photography class, and I think other people start getting confused as if they're in the wrong class.

I can't remember anything else.

_________________________

08.20.2012

House (Non-lucid)

NON-DREAM DREAM LUCID

In a house with father and mother probably, there was some talk about ants and how they don't go onto certain animals because of their stench....house feels incomplete.

Not a lot I can remember here.

_________________________

08.20.2012

Tennis in the pool (Non-lucid)

NON-DREAM DREAM LUCID

I wake up, making grunting sounds, and I felt really tired as well. I see one person to the left of me who looks like Jerry in waking life. He's wearing dark clothes. In front of me is a pool, but I can't remember if it's full or not.

It had a sky blue glow to it, and apparent, there was supposed to be a tennis match near the pool. I think I ask Jerry if I can join in, but I don't hear anything from him.

I see three fluorescent green tennis balls on the grass. I pick them up and formed them into a triangle. A random lady comes out of nowhere and looks at me. It seems she's going to pick up the tennis ball, but I can't remember what she does. She's a little overweight, and based on the cap, she looked like she could be the umpire.

This area seems to be the backyard of someone's house.

_________________________

08.20.2012

3D Thong and Rear Display (Non-lucid)

NON-DREAM DREAM LUCID

Spoiler for 18+:

Random butt of a lady is displayed wearing a full bikini suit. The front area was barely covering her vagina, and the back side....it's basically a string. It's not even covering her asshole at all, and it just looks weird only seeing the butt and not the whole lady.

Fitness with Laci

Just when I think Laci's video is over, a bonus clip starts, showing her trying out a cardio fitness class. For example, one of the exercises is something like the following: Start from a standing position with your legs fairly wide apart. Then crouch into a lunge position facing your right side while bringing your right elbow across your body to touch the ground on the left side of your right foot. Then on the next beat, straighten up again. The tempo is quite fast, so I discover to my surprise that it's actually quite a difficult workout. I also discover upon closer examination of my form that I'm not quite doing the step right. Oops. Meanwhile, Laci is laughing about how exhausting the workout is, and after a few short clips showcasing different steps, the video ends on a joking note as she accidentally drops one of the weights that the class is using to work out.

3-D Go

My parents and I run into two girls about my age and their mothers. They're all new to Go so we decide to try a team game. For one of the girls, this will be her very first game, or thereabouts. One of the mothers, an Asian one, shows us the board she brought. It looks to me like it has more than 19 rows, so I try to count them. The count comes up fine, so I guess my visual estimation skills are just a bit off. Anyway, we start playing the game using colored Legos on one of those green base plates. My team is white, and the adults are playing red. The newbie girl keeps trying to play in the upper left, but it becomes clear after a few moves that Red is setting up a very strong framework in that area.

"Stop that!" I say, the next time she tries to play in that area. I feel a bad about snapping, so I try to recover by turning it into a teaching moment. I explain about frameworks. I'm not sure she entirely gets it, but she doesn't argue, or anything.

Once, she moves one of her previously placed pieces before putting down a new one. At first I assume she's just tacitly taking back her previous move, and I don't say anything, though it makes me uncomfortable. But later I wonder if she just didn't know that in Go you can't move pieces once they've been placed on the board.

At times during the course of the game, I turn back to the board to find that a more or less intricate Lego construction has appeared in the middle of it. For example, once, a rectangular green tower of about twenty (Lego) stories appears. Someone tries to take it by removing the last liberty at its base, but I point out that they should have to remove all the liberties for every story and the top, since really it's all just one big group. But then the second girl, the more experienced one, points out that that's not usually what you need to do for one-story groups. For those, you just need to take the liberties on the sides. I realize she's right.

At other times, cutesie farmhouses or tessellated color patterns appear. These are clearly the work of the newbie, and they're interfering with the game. I don't think she understands the point of Go at all. Eventually I get fed up and declare, "I give up on this game." I sweep my pieces into a bag and stalk upstairs. Maybe they'll try to continue without me, but in any case it's good riddance.

Upstairs, I dump out my pieces and try to sort them by color. It's going to take a while, because there are several biggish structures that use a lot of different colors in alternation.

At one point, I notice that I can make some cool percussion sounds with the Legos, so I do some one-man-band improv using the Legos, my voice, and any other noisemakers I can find. I think it turns out to be pretty neat. It's not exploring any new territory, musically, but it's got a pretty nice groove. The only person watching is my Mom, doing something in the kitchen, but she doesn't say anything.

Okay, this one is fragmented, which makes it hard to explain. I am a mod3 on a Minecraft server, and we remove homes if they are old/abandoned, also we allow flying.

I am just walking around, and I see what looks like a griefed cobblestone house from Minecraft (Interestingly, it looked realistic instead of the normal block-like minecraft style.). I go inside and say that I should remove it, as it is pretty old looking. So I see like cardboard inside that I start tearing down/deleting as it hits the ground, then I hear some two punk kids behind me..apparently they live there, and are mad that I am destroying their home. I am thinking they are bums hiding out there. I start telling the one about how depressed I am that I didn't have a dream that night that I remember( How did I not notice? This was from a WBTB attempt. I woke up at like 7:00am then went back to bed. Layer zero much?), then he gives me some challenges of which I do not remember. They were not easy, but I completed them, earning the appearance of Gandalf the white. I started flying above the scene proud of whatever I had achieved. I start to think how I crafted my staff I was holding, I start thinking blaze rod, iron stick... The dream ends here. I'm glad I remembered the major details, but sadly the minor ones have been forgotten.

I had three dreams last night (that I can remember):

DREAM #1

I am semi-lucid during this dream.

Kermit the frog appeared next to my bed. And then we both float up into the air and start flying down the stairs and out the front door. I decide that I wanted Kermit to glow, so he starts glowing. Then we’re just flying through the sky and singing together, and that's about where the dream ends.

DREAM #2

I'm sitting in some kind of loft type place, with some guy with a beard, and we're watching soccer on TV. I have a feeling I don't like this guy. Not a very long or detailed dream.

DREAM #3

I'm in my backyard, and Acacia and Abby (my friends) are there. I'm commenting on Abby's hair because it has all these weird braids in it that you can somehow see from the back but not the front.

Suddenly, Acacia decides that she really wants coffee, and we decide to go to McDonald's to find some. There's this random McDonald's window near my house. The lady working there is one of the cafeteria ladies from my school. Unfortunately the McDonald's is closed. I check the time on my iPod and see that it's almost 9 PM, when for some reason I thought it was only around 5 or so.

Acacia and I go to a different McDonald's, where we have to stand in line for a minute because there are a few people ahead of us. While we're waiting, I notice that Acacia is wearing a black hat and sparkling purple lipstick. So I'm like, "Ooh I love your lipstick!" And Acacia is like, "Thanks!"

So I try to decide what to order, but I can't see the menu from where I'm standing. Plus there's all this random stuff piled up behind the counter. Acacia tells me they're selling one brand of coffee called Coldwell Scent that only costs a dollar, so that is what we both decide to order. The lady who takes our order has black hair pulled back into a messy bun, and I think she seems nice.

I wake up before we actually get our coffee.

... Well, at least I was kind of lucid during that first dream. I realized I was dreaming and controlled one small thing. Not much, but it's a step forward I guess.

Part 1
I was in some Hatian village. Me and my group were hold up inside of a small building. There was a sniper shooting at us. I was afraid and I was flinching a lot. I noticed my little cousin was there in a pink shirt so I stood in front of her as a meat shield. We had an opening so looked around the building and found a knife. I had looked for explosives but I didn't find any. I saw one of the bad guys riding away on a bike so I chased him. The seen changed into part of my old neighborhood. I wasn't able to catch him. When I went back to the neighborhood it had changed again. It became a really colorful place. It was like I was going back to a place from my childhood which didn't exist on this reality. It was based off of the show Doug and I saw some of the characters. I also saw Goofy there chilling on a lawn chair.

Dream - Lucid

I was having sex with Jake in his room. I thought it was something we'd probably regret later since we weren't using a condom. The fact that we aren't dating anymore in waking life didn't seem to be an issue. Oh well, I guess it's already happening now. He then pulled out for awhile.

Then, I was playing FFVII in the living room at my house, and I wanted to tell my brother that I beat it. I then didn't remember fighting Sephiroth. Hmm...

More fragments, but at least now I'm actually remembering things instead of waking up with vague feelings and having the dream "on the tip of the tongue" so to speak.

[COLOR="royalblue"]Non-Aware (Dream)[/COLOR] - [COLOR="blue"]Partially Aware (Lucid Dream)[/COLOR] - [COLOR="navy"]Fully Aware and Vivid (Astral Projection(OOBE)[/COLOR]

This night I stayed up with my friend and we played Dead Island Co-Op. I was planning on going to bed early anyway, but the game bugged and made me lose all my best weapons so I stayed up in front of the bright TV-screen and had to do it all over again. So I ended up going to sleep, very late and my dream recall was destined to be bad.

[COLOR="royalblue"]I did end up remembering some dream from the morning though, but I have no dream recall from the night dreams. I also woke up from some bug flying around in my room around 03:36.

I was playing a high graphic version of some World of warcraft like game. I remembered that I were some kind of ice monster and I were doing a dungeon boss fight with some friends. My best ability was a channeling ice attack. I also remember that I canceled the attack by mistake, usually like I do in League of Legends and that my team mates got angry at me.

I were in some garden and I saw my parents smoking cigarettes and they both hate cigarettes for real, so I wondered why they liked them in this dream. I also took a cigarette just to do the same thing as them and make them think about what they taught me. I have some memory of me packing a bag and saying good bye to everyone.

In some other dream I was playing Counter-strike with a friend, but it was lagging so I tabbed back to my desktop and tried to see if there were any programs that made it laggy. I remember seeing that another game was running at the same time, that game seemed familiar to me in the dream, but I have no idea what it was now. Also when I tried to close some programs, more program popped up. Kind of like a gamer nightmare.

Then I was watching a soccer match, Barcelona VS Aston Villa. It went to overtime and the time was 20:00 in the dream and I remember that everyone started to walk away and didn't wanted to see the ending because 21:00 was too late. I also remember seeing an 7 year old girl screaming that she wanted to see who was going to win. I also remember meeting my friend Johan in this dream, but I don't remember what we talked about.

I woke up and wrote Barcelona - soccer match on a piece of paper and imagine that it felt so blurry and I wondered what was going on, then the dream changed and I was in the Dead Island game.

I was in a cage and zombies were approaching us in the distance. I see a man with a Electric Shotgun (Don't ask me what that is..) and he was going to shoot me. I screamed for help but nobody helped I got shot and woke up.[/COLOR]

It have been a while since I had a false awakening, but I will try to take advantage of these opportunities from now on.

I were somewhere in town with some friends of mine. We wanted to meet at a specific house, then we split up tp reach our gole alone. Not everyone managed to come there, because one was called by his parents on his cellphone he came later. We did not stay there long, however two of my friends and I came to my place.
I don't know why, but my parents were not there, instead of them my neighboars had access to the apartment. I noticed some strange thing: There were three cats in this house.(In rl I have only one cat.) I noticed the first cat being "Filemon" (which died years ago in rl) and the second cat being "Gienek". I did not know how the third cat came there or how its name was, the neighboars said it was a strayed cat. Its appereance was exactly like Gienek, so it couldn't be just a cat of someone I know.
I was called by my friends waiting in the kitchen. They both discussed about a videogame, they called it a pointless war. I had the same opinion about this topic.I told them about the cats and wanted to look after them. They were asleep, all three of them were in a basket and slept at top of each other.

Before I could do anything I woke up.

Non-dream Dream

Dream 1:

I am at the mall shopping for a gift for my wife. I decide to skimp on the gift on purpose and to surprise her with a vacation later. Everyone thinks I am a loser because I don't get her a present. I buy her another ring she wants.

Dream 2:

I am in my backyard having a pre-wedding party. There is weed hidden all over the yard. PH from work is there and gives me a huge handshake. I am out on the lawn and I see all of teh clouds in the sky get pulled down to the ground a few miles away. The clouds then explode into a mushroom cloud. I yelled "mushroom cloud!" and tell everyone to get inside. I knew that a war was starting so I frantically look for my wife. I felt like the radiation from the blast would hit at any moment and we would die, then I woke up.

Alright...Writing this halfway through the day, but I can recall just as much as I did 5 minutes after waking.

Demon Dog
This dog comes in our house, on a leash, from someone..I only saw that hand that gave the leash to me. It is apparently an artifact from the show Warehouse 13, I get some story of how it used to belong to this old dead guy(lol, inside joke about my pastor), so I grab the leash, and close the door. This dog was medium to large size, pitbull looking face, all black, but looked pretty nice. However, it went mean whenever you did something..forget what. I think it was either pride, or lying. Anyway, I screwed up, and the dog bit me as hard as it could, four to five times in the arm, leaving me in serious pain, then it calmed back down, and was happy again. I bring it to my mom's room, she screws up, then the dog goes after her. I, remembering the pain grab the dog by the collar, hold it back, then that dream ends as far as I am aware.

Wagon Bible Study
I am on this wagon(kind of like a school bus with no roof, hard to explain), and the guy in front is talking about something from the Bible, I am listening intently, and very interested in what is going on, we go around a corner to a rich neighborhood, and as I am listening, I see this mountain, with orange things on it. I first assume it is like prisoners up there for some reason(like in bright orange jumpsuits, you know?), but I look closer, and it is like a bunch of orange flags..I turn my attention back to the road we are on, and I see one person checking their mail, and another who was raking their lawn, we stop here, and the guy keeps talking, meanwhile both the people outside are listening to us. I remember having a short conversation with the man raking leaves, but I don't remember what any of the conversations were. I think there was more to this dream, but I cannot remember.

Two dreams recalled, two nights in a row! Pretty cool, but no lucids yet, and both feel like fragments. The Wagon dream seems like it had a level of vivid-ness to it, specially the mountain. I also believe the fact that the person was talking about the bible may have something to do with the amazing conversation I listened to last night with a person who thought he was a real Christian-ly person, but was living so in the world, and someone answering questions about it, guiding him to what really matters. My recall seems to be getting better!

[I must have woken up after just about every REM cycle last night. Not sure how I pulled that one off.]

Soiree

Some of my cousins arrive for a function my family is hosting. They brought cupcakes--chocolate and one other flavor. They ask which flavor I prefer, because somehow the arrangement of cupcakes in the baking tin will reflect the seating chart for the event. I reply, "Probably chocolate."

I've agreed to contribute to the evening's entertainment by playing a short (two page) piano solo by Gershwin. I know I haven't played piano in ages, but everything on those two pages looked sightreadable when I glanced over it a while ago. However, when Dad discovers my plan, inexplicably he freaks out. I guess he's really concerned that I'll embarrass myself in front of the relatives. It's annoying, though. In fact, Dad's been annoying me a lot lately. For instance, he's recently gotten it into his head that he should learn to play piano himself, and he expects me to sit down with him to prepare piano duets. That does not sound like fun at all.

The previous group finishes performing, and now it's my turn. I figure the crowd is busy socializing, and they won't mind if I take a minute to look at some of the tougher chords. But to my horror, I open the music and discover a third page. What I thought was the end of the music is just a thin double bar! The third page isn't unplayable, but it has a lot of fast arpeggios over several octaves which will be very, very difficult to sightread. I probably should have taken a closer look at this. I start to feel uncomfortable about the amount of time I've delayed, now; the audience is probably getting impatient.

John Green the Sponsor

I've just finished TAing for today for a two-week class for math teachers in primary education. I and the teacher for the class spend a few moments calculating in percentages how close we are to finishing the class. It's towards the end of the second week.

It's dark outside as I walk through the quadrangles on my way home. On the way, I pass someone who looks exactly like John Green! I didn't know he was in Chicago! But I pass him without getting the courage to ask for an autograph. Mere steps later I consider turning around to chase after him, but I don't.

Inside a building, I run into one of my students from a previous summer math program. We talk for a bit, but we both have to be getting somewhere, so he leads the way out of the building. The building's door is rather heavy, and I feel bad that he tries to hold it for me. The pathway outside is narrow. I follow it into a smallish quad that's packed with people. I learn that it's called "Jones Quad," and it's a popular after-hours gathering place for students. I also know that I've been this way before. A girl from my house waves at me from inside a pack of her friends. I wave back--rather saucily, to my own surprise (namely, by lifting my left hand and repeatedly bending and unbending the last two knuckles of each finger simultaneously). Someone else waves at me, but I don't recognize her, and she makes a disappointed grimace. I run into someone else from my house and we remark upon how many housemates seem to be on campus tonight, despite the fact that it's the middle of summer.

It occurs to me that the John Green I saw might just have been a very close look-alike to the famed vlogbrother. I decide that I should go find him again and look more closely. As I wander around, something weird happens with the lights and the music in the building, and I guess that must mean it's about to close down for the night. No one seems in a hurry to leave, though. When I come back a few minutes later, everyone's still there, though they leave soon thereafter.

Back outside, I walk around a street corner and see a pizza place across the street. On a screen above the building, an advertisement plays. It's this same John Green guy. He's basically sponsoring the pizza place. I guess the pizza company must have heard about the Pizza John shirt and decided to capitalize on it. I still can't decide if the guy is actually John Green, though. It seems unlikely that he would do something so commercial.

Locker Checkout

It's the Saturday after finals week, and I'm trying to do my last bit of packing before going home. I've been storing some stuff in a locker on campus, so I head over to the building to pick it up. To my dismay, the building is locked. Apparently Friday was the last day to remove your belongings from this building. I spend a few minutes mentally cursing the idiot who thought that was a good idea, but then I decide I'd better try to do something about the situation. Using cleverness, I'm able to reach the first of my two lockers, which contains a fairly new car battery. I've been switching this one in and out with my car's old battery. Only, it seems like doing the swap would be a fairly complicated operation, and I can't remember ever having done it before. Oh, well. I must have known how at some point, and it's just been so long that it's slipped my mind temporarily. It'll come back, I'm sure. I put the battery in my backpack.

Unfortunately, the second locker is definitely unreachable. I check the building's hours, and unfortunately it won't open again until long after I've left town. By that time, they'll probably have thrown out my stuff. "My stuff" includes my Tae Kwon Do uniform, so I definitely don't want this to happen. Then I suddenly notice a sign on the window proclaiming the location and hours of this department's interim office. It's open today! Until 4:00! I hurry in that direction, checking the time. It's 4:11. Just my luck. Well, maybe there will still be someone around. My mom hurries to follow me.

I enter my target building to find a stark concrete entryway with stairs going both up and down, and hallways going in a few different directions. For a moment I'm disoriented, until I remember that the interim office is in a basement room. I go down the stairs, which twist and turn a few times before depositing me in a hallway only slightly more furnished than the original one. Along the wall to my right, dozens of cardboard boxes have been haphazardly stacked. Incredulous at my good fortune, I run down the row of boxes until I find one that's been labeled with my initials: last initial first, then first. Opening the box, I find my Tae Kwon Do uniform, along with everything else that's supposed to be there. Well, that's a relief. But I should probably talk to someone before taking it, else they'll think I stole it, and I'll be in trouble when I come back next term.

I continue down the hallway into the interim meeting room, which is actually a concert hall. That's kind of funny, but unfortunately I don't see anyone in the room except a female custodian up on stage setting up the ghost light. I turn back and try searching the hall in the other direction. I manage to flag down a dark-haired woman just on her way out the door. She seems to know me from somewhere, and it turns out she's coincidentally the one who's been answering my questions over email about Study Abroad. She tells me she's not the one to talk to about locker checkout. Fortunately, she says that the right woman to talk to is still in her office; it's right back there in the direction I've been going.

Wading

It's the day after finals week, but some of us are still hanging around to hang out. A girl from my high school class invites me to visit the forest with a group of friends.

"What forest?" I ask. You'd think I'd know the forests around here by now, so I'm a bit embarrassed by my question. Oh well.

She replies with the name of the forest, which I don't recognize. I agree to come anyway, and we head out. Soon after, we enter a restaurant on the outskirts of campus. While we eat, some housemates start planning what they're going to do to earn points for a big school competition which started today. For instance, apparently this restaurant (or the hotel it's a part of) is a sponsor for the event, so you get a points multiplier for eating here. I wonder why it was decided to hold the event after the end of Autumn Quarter, when there are so few people around. Vaguely I recall that it has to do with avoiding conflict with a big Study Abroad event happening in the middle of Spring Quarter, but that still doesn't explain why they didn't decide to do it during Winter. Oh well.

We leave the restaurant. Most of the group is heading back to campus from here, but I take a different path, one that leads toward the forest. At some point, I'll have to cut across the grass. But the grass is actually flooded quite deeply with water. The water's clear, but due to refraction it's difficult for me to tell quite how deep it is. Would this be an okay place to wade across? Tentatively, I start lowering my foot into the water. But even by the time the water reaches the top of my knee-high waterproof boots, I still haven't touched bottom. I retract my foot.

My friends are calling to me from across the water, telling me to go around the way they did. Yeah, their way was probably smarter. Meanwhile a boy from the group that decided to stay on campus is trying to tell me not to wade across anywhere, because it's all too deep. But I don't listen to him, and when I try the route my other friends suggested, the water's only about a foot deep.

All three of us are in werewolf form (from Skyrim) with the silver pelt and claws of an Ancient Behemoth (from Heroes III). I splash up to them and I attempt a growl. It is rather feeble, and one of the girls giggles. I introduce myself to her, and she shakes my hand, although she points out that she thinks we've met before. "No doubt we have," I reply.

Jumping Ahead

My dad and I have been taking turns playing a 3-D platform game while one of my high school friends watches. The gameplay of this game is a lot like rock climbing. You have to move each arm or leg individually, trying not to put too much strain on any one of them for more than a split second. We're trying to get to the top of an outcrop that has a sort of half-enclosed tunnel zigzagging up its vertical face. There's this one tricky spot where you have to jump over a gap, but one of the most attractive handholds actually attaches to a section of rock that swings down on a hinge. It can really upset your balance if you're not careful. Also, in order to get enough height, you need this section of rock to stay in its upright position.

I try it for a while without much luck, then hand it over to Dad. My friend points out that we don't actually have to go up this way; there's an easier place to ascend a little bit farther along this switchback. But I'm kind of stubborn, and I'd just like to prove that it can be done this way, even if it's not what the game's designers intended. Unfortunately, it proves to be a bit too much for Dad, and he falls off the edge to his (cartoon-style) death. That means we have to start over from the beginning of the level, which is frustrating, because I really thought I would get past that section on my next try.

But Dad's bored of this level, so he jumps way ahead in the game to the last level he did on his own. That's his style: don't bother with continuity; as long as you finish all the levels eventually, you're golden. Oh, well. The level selection screen is itself a 3-D environment, and the levels are yellow dots lined up in a path laid out along the ground. He realizes that he needs to buy a new "computer," since he lost the old one when he fell. When he does, the dots change to yellow rings, rather than filled circles. Also, two new "assistants" run in from the side of the screen, get a powerup of some kind from his character, then run off again.

He selects the level he wants. A bunch of enemies start running at him from all sides, so he starts beating them up using combos. Somehow he discovers a new combo--something like "knee in the face, punch, power kick"--which sends the unfortunate recipient flying backwards for about fifty meters. He encourages me to try it, but I have trouble until I realize that I'm doing a regular kick. For a power kick you need to hold down R1 at the same time. I feel a bit overwhelmed, but it's kind of fun once you figure it out. The animation's also cool because my character looks like a Star Wars bounty hunter.

Later, we're part of a larger party in the middle of a battle, trying to help the weaker members level up. This involves passing around 5-foot playing cards from character to character, which we all hug to our sides using our arms. The cards also double as protection from enemy characters, so there's some strategy involved in how you distribute your cards. Unfortunately, I'm running low on cards right now, and a thickset, bald thug is advancing on me in a rather intimidating manner.

Frags:

• dictating to my dream diary in Spanish
• other various false-awakening-dream-journal-writing

A fantastically strange dream I had this morning, 19 August 2012. We begin at a Level Two dream, a dream-within-a-dream.

The time is approximately 4:30 am. I have been unable to sleep all night, and we are all partying in the French room. I feel the beginning of a depressive episode, or more accurately, a disrupted-sleep cycle episode.

I talk to random people about even more random stuff. This one guy sits in the corner, brown hair and blue eyes, looking positively stoned. I try to talk to him by waving my T-shirt in front of his face. Nothing.

Finally, I get him to speak. He asks me a bunch of game show-style questions, and says a series of long words, with each one supposed to be longer than the last:

1. pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis
2. supercalifragilisticexpialidocious
3. antidisestablishmentarianism

Clearly, those are in the wrong order. He then asks me some questions about golf. I know nothing about golf - have never played.

I wave my shirt in front of his face again in the shape of an Ouroboros. Nothing.

I then sit down at a table with some classmates. A girl is reading this book about careers and life decisions, and a guy she's friends with is talking with us about it. She seems to have the wrong assessment of it, though, by giving a bunch of false analogies about how your decisions are like making a cake or something, about how important it is not to mix certain ingredients together. The basic premise is that once you set off on one path, you can't set off onto another. The guy said that this is not true.

With her permission, I begin to write down some of what she says in my all-purpose notebook, which becomes a fury of words and doodles. There is more than one path to reach any goal, I think.

Suddenly, the teacher, who reminds me of my Cantonese French teacher from grade seven, terminates the "Party" in a military-style manner. I pray--I know, that I won't be included in this disciplinary action. I go to the front of the room to dispose a water bottle into a recycling bin, as it has been done since the dawn of time. She yells and says it was the water SHE bought, but dumps it away anyway. I begin to wake up from this second dream.

An anti-depression group on Facebook sends me a huge message in which the entire group of more than 1,000 people are included. The leader of the group asks me to "get help" for my actions at the party. What?

It is OK to take a winding path.

LEVEL 1.5 DREAM - TIME SCALE: NONE.

A book lays out four points. Yes, this is the same book that the girl was reading. Point one: STDs are bad.

"Internships are also bad, and you'll be frustrated with them for the rest of your university career. Just kidding! Teen life after graduation isnt that bad".

It goes on a bit about the importance of sleep, or rather, why sleep is something to be taken advantage of even when you can get none of it...

LEVEL ONE DREAM - BEFORE THE INCEPTION

I go to bed at 11 pm, but I continue not sleeping. Was that anti-stigma depression group on Facebook involved to a certain extent? I draw conclusions and make recommendations about a certain university in the vicinity of Cambridge, Ontario, noting five: Waterloo, if not Waterloo then Wilfred Laurier; McMaster, Guelph and Western, maybe Queens...

I drift off to "sleep", which isn't really sleep at all.

One inception later...

LEVEL ONE DREAM - AFTER THE INCEPTION

It's almost 8 am, and the building I'm in looks like a mix of all the styles of buildings I'd stayed in during my visit to China three years ago. It has the appearance of a hotel, my bedroom to the left and back of a bathroom, the door near the front, my parents' room to my left.

My mom questions me about that online chat I had with three different guys that appeared on the room in different colours, red, green and blue, or maybe mauve. It's Monday. For some reason, the chat takes place at about the same time as that "Party" in the French room, and it continues until about 4 am, when I "fell asleep" but drifted into that other dimension.

Suddenly, I'm back in my normal house again, but there has been no discrepancy in surroundings. It's dark outside, despite the time of day. I check the weather forecast: the fourteen-day trend shows today below normal, about 9C (about 48F), and Tuesday is above normal. Wednesday is below normal, and Thursday's temperature is actually unknown after the thunderstorms, but it turns out to be about 12C (54F). Friday...snow?! At first, first glance, the first three days are unknown in temperature.

LEVEL 0.5 DREAM - TIME FRAME: NONE, NOWHERE, literally "no WHERE"

I'm tracking my depressive episodes on a spreadsheet, as the yellow lines jot up and down. I think about how my earliest episodes had negative healing energy, and how my late grandmother suffered from it. This time, I had better consult positive healing.

I'm reading a book, or maybe an Internet page similar to Dream Views, on a guide for lucid dreaming. The page is attached to the main server like a paper clip, like a yellow banana-type paper clip!

The columnist's name is Heather, or maybe Courtney, or maybe Stephanie. She comments on a method, and asks, "will your gin/ be like that"? I think that's a typographical error on my part, sorry, cheri-o.

Back to the method granted during the 1.5 dream level: does that mean they're saying you should avoid STDs as much as possible, and reach for your career goals as much as possible? In other words, are they telling you to be a virgin, and stay a virgin?

Which university should I pick?

Of course, I am advised, to take home foods, and not drugs! Consult my spiritual 'minister' instead, who is along for the journey this wjole time. I pray--I know--that your dream will awaken.

Before the military-style party-coup takes me away for the excecution, I announce to a TV-style audience interview that I discovered THIS part of the brain, as I point to the area above my ear, whisking my hands in a scalpel-like motion, the temporal lobe...

The manifestation of spiritual ecstasy...

We must always question reality, even when it seems we are not dreaming, in order to lucid dream. I try to do a reality check, but I am actually aware that I am NOT dreaming...

I awaken for real this time. It's 4:30 am, and I have a cold, which is not apparent in my dream.

Moribund. I see Orion rising in the east. It it a winter constellation. Soon it will be back to slow yet. There are two very bright "stars" in the sky, one atop Orion over eastern Taurus at about magnitude -1, which is Jupiter. The other is barely visible behind some tree, near Gemini, about magnitude -4, quite obviously Venus.

A'ho Calalami - a sacred chant (an even more sacred ritual by sacred beings on this sacred Earth). The ramble, the ramble, the ramble. Timetable of an elongated executive quasi-quarter century.

PART II

I think, in fact, that there is no recollection between my first falling asleep and my first memory of being in my dark bedroom. Maybe this is actually a WILD experience.

I check the time, and it appears to be consistent. Around 5 am. Yet, I look at it again, and it flashes all over the place, and I realize I don't need to do my second check, of reading what I had just written.

I am in a dark room. The mirrors scare me greatly, yet I look into them with interest. I realize that it is a dream and I begin to be lucid, and I walking into the mirror, apparently stuck there for just a moment, entangled, before I emerge into another universe...

LEVEL TWO DREAM

I walk out into the living room, trying to smash through the front windows. It stops me, yet darkness has turned to daylight, about 7:30 pm, near sunset. I walk into a mirror again, when it was dark, and I return to my bed, I return to the mirror...

I walk toward the front door, opening it. I see the reflection of a woman in the mirror, who looks like my mom's face merged into somebody else's. She apparently beckons me not to go outside, but I do so anyway, and walk out onto the street.

The theme of today's mission is nutshot.

I walk into my street, turning left, but 100 metres in, I stop. I decide that my mom was right after all, and I turn back. When I check the mirror again, there is no more reflection. The mirror no longer scares me. I am no longer afraid. I walk to my bedroom.

The sun has almost set now.

LEVEL THREE DREAM

Without any discrepancy, not even for a moment, I fall into another dream, perhaps through sleep, and awaken as I climb down a set of stairs. It does not scare me, as huge stairs did in the past.

I'm walking down into the depression group's cavern. There are literally hundreds--maybe thousands--of people here, each one applauding as I walk down. It resembles a set of circular stairs more than it does a Maya temple, but it is easily 500 metres en plus from top to bottom.

A frail-looking elderly woman in a wheelchair is pulled up as I step aside to let her pass. I walk to the right, and to my left stand thousands of people, each with a different face, applauding, just applauding.

Finally, I reach the bottom. The lights are on and it looks like one of my friends' basements, only MUCH larger, but just as low-hanging with the ceiling. I ask one person as soldiers stand by. "Why", I ask, are there more people down there?

"They're probably just reproducing. Ha, I'm kiddding. Say, Junior, know any grade 12s who can handle a rifle?"

This is a real program. In room 1, I find strangers talking.

I then step into Room 2. Here are four people I recognize sitting on a sofa, along with more people I recognize sitting all around. This includes one guy who said I'd helped save him from a life of suicide.

I ask them where I might find the bathroom. I was also going to ask me whether they saw my crazy moves at that party in the French room, because at least one of them was here, but I didn't have the time, I needed to pee. They all point me to the girl's bathroom.

"What! Dude, that's the female bathroom!"

They all laugh.

You idiot. You know if you pee in a dream, you'll wake up and actually have to pee in waking life. Have you lost your mind, or more accurately, your lucidity?

I then walk into room 1 again, speaking in an Indian accent, "do yoo know vherre dee bathroom is?"

Some guys are sitting there talking, "he didn't have a rifle". I shrug and then smirk incredulously. Where they looking for me?

I wake up. It is around 6:40 am, and I go to the bathroom. The golden sunlight pours in but I manage to drift back to sleep.

PART III

I'm in a backyard garden of some sort. Somebody's kid might get charged for violence, because the school's charter expressedly prohibits violence against another student's "dick", "nuts" or "ballsack".

I read a hithertofore-yet-unknown chapter of the Bible. It's called Hittites, and near the end, a voice that seems to be God asks a man to renounce everything he's known to date about religion. It has an Egyptian air to it. With much haste and hesitation, he does. "Let ye forget all you have learned, and seek God's salvation from here anew. Replace all your man's word with my word. A new pearl will appear in your forehead".

The Bible I'm reading has excluded a certain chapter beginnign with the letter L. It's certainly not Luciferians.

It then goes onto the New Testament. I begin to close the book.

Should I go to church today?

Now, I'm on a boat of some sort, without any discrepancy. The founder of a project, who is female, talks about the benefits of getting dolphins and humans to play together in this lake. First, she says, the dolphin feeding will attract phytoplankton, causing a bloom. This will then stretch out, and bring gold nanoparticles to the surface, as well as lower global carbon dioxide levels, in a method not yet unexplained. I thought they'd tried iron fertilization for algae blooms and that failed to lower carbon in the atmosphere by any significant amount?

This is the same method, she continued, of bringing gold to the face using algae, and creating a gold mask and a gold leaf that one will now wear on the face.

When I wake up again, it is 8:20 am.

This dream was pretty long too... So it started out in a three story house. On the top floor there was pizza. I only had 2 slices and wasn't allowed to have any more. I couldn't go up there and try to steal some either because my dad and some other guy were up there too. I remember in the dream that I was just really hungry. So then it turned nighttime, and I decided to kind of army crawl on the floor towards the pizza. While I was where the pizza is, there were some other things there too. There was some kind of jar of something... And a random box of candies. They were spherical and hollow and were coated in sugar... My dad was on a bed nearby sleeping, and the other guy was across the room in a sleeping bag... Well... Sleeping. I remember I somehow starved to death in the dream and I died.... o.O But then I... Respawned...?! But after I did, I went a bit insane. I didn't care if I was caught trying to steal the pizza, I just made roaring and growling noises like some sort of monster and I ran up into the room as fast as I could, swiped one piece, and ran back to the second floor and hid in a corner to eat it. I devoured the slice in like 5 seconds. But I was still hungry and wanted more. My mom came out of nowhere, and decided to help me I guess, so then we were outside all of the sudden. My dad was in the garage and awake so we had to be quiet. My mom walked up quickly and took the box of candies and brought it back. She said something, kind of loudly too, and I reminded her to be quiet. But as we were walking down the driveway, away from the house and garage, my dad came out of the garage, and we started to walk over to him. Something else happened, but I forget what. Next, my mom and I were walking down a street with some random kid who was carrying a sword, and we were talking but then the kid turned right, and went down another street. And I remember saying "He better be careful. If you're caught with a sword on that street, you're killed."

That's all I remember...

30th Dream Journal entry