side notes

Right now, it's 20th March, 2am in the night. But I'm now going to write about the day that passed by for over 2 hours ago.


I woke up in the morning, sometime after 9am, wrote down dream I had. I was alittle tired even though I had slept for 8 hours. So I thought I will just keep sleeping a while.
Woke up sometime after 11am, thought time passed by so fast and didn't expect myself to sleep 2 more hours, I had a guess I only would sleep 30 minutes to 1 hour or so.
I went up, started the computer, went to the bathroom.
Checked the fridge, nothing to eat. Sat down behind my computer while drinked some milk.
My dad and his girlfriend left the house a couple of minutes later. About one hour of sitting behind my computer I went to the store to buy something to eat. I felt like drinking some dr pepper and some chips and pizza and all food that ain't very good.
I bought me a small pizza, one named burning pepper that I like alot, and I bought an coca cola (this store seems to be out of dr pepper so often), and some onion rings (didn't buy chips).
Went back home and ate the pizza and drinked coca cola behind the computer. Ate some onion rings as well.
At the computer I surfed around, didn't do any much. Viewed Facebook, chatted some, read on forums, news, watched YouTube videos etc.

Time passed by.
When time was 7pm, my friend told me he cannot go gym today as we had decided since yesterday. Not surprised, as it happened mulitple of times before that when we are going to gym in the evenings (as he either use to sleep all morning/day or having school all morning/day). I prefer going gym in morning/day time. So if I really knew that he wouldn't go gym today I probably would have gone on the day possible.
Anyway, I was though wondering where dad and his girlfriend went, as they had been away for over 7 hours.
I also started to feel hungry, so I made macaroni, while I made the dinner my dad and his girlfriend came back home.
I ate in front of my computer, continued to do what I done all day.
Then around 9pm I packed my gymbag and started to walk towards the gym.
Arrived a gym around 10pm. Made a 6 min warmup on the bike, and then strength workout for like 1 hour.
Those exercises:
- Barbell bench press (chest)
- Pec fly machine (chest)
- Ez bar curls (biceps)
- Zottman curls (biceps + forearms)
- Wrist curls (forearms)
- Barbell shoulder pull up (or whatever it's called. Shoulders)
- Pull up and chin up (no idea what muscles really..)

Did mostly 4-5 sets for each exercise.

After that I got on the bike and did quite intense cardio for 10 minutes.

That done, I drinked my Whey FX proteindrink, took a shower and then walked back home that took me a 50 minutes.
When home, time was about 1am. Went instantly to the bathroom for a pee as I had hold in for a 20 minutes.
Then I brushed my teeth, packed up the gymbag (well, only the towel and the shaker as I'm lazy now).
And then I sat behind my computer again, where I am right now.

I will be on the computer some more time, maybe I go sleep in a 30-45 minutes from now. Time's like 02:18 now, so it been taking me like 20 minutes to write this all.
I need to write a mail now about the teamwork with an EU project that me and my friend was meeting the Monday that was.

Despite my increased motivation to LD, the recent two weeks have not delivered to my perhaps unrealistic expectations, so I decided it’s time to analyze what has been happening.

Negatives:
- Sleep schedule disruptions: unfortunately guest stay-over during the weekends (on bf’s initiative) means having exhilarating conversations up to 2 am, then listening to bed preparations, and I fall asleep at 4-5 am. Obviously, this makes it harder to wake up early, and go to bed early, and this is spiralling into the week.
- Increased sugar intake: I have been very tired last couple of days, mostly like because of the above reasons, but I’m thinking that eating some ultra sweet desserts before bed in the last few evenings has contributed to this. Don’t usually consume that much sugar and this dehydrates and exhausts me.
- Reduced physical activity: have not touched dumbbells/jogging, etc., really don’t feel like moving at all! I probably should go back to exercising, this does help my sleep and improves my mood. Just do it!

Positives:
-RCs: after registering at DV, I have been doing a nice amount of RCs, including starting the day with a RC
-DJ: I keep the tablet near my bed, so it’s pretty fast & easy to jot down any dreams
-Sleep recall: I have been writing down dreams every day, even if it’s just fragments, and that helps me remember more
-Just let it be: I try to have a positive attitude, perhaps my body is tired and needs more sleep, so I just let myself recharge, confident that things will eventually align
-Dream Yoga: as mentioned before I was conducting the experiment, having to fall asleep, while concentrating on a white letter ”a” on the area below navel for seven days in a row. That helps me fall asleep faster, plus usually helps with LDs, so I think I will try to incorporate it into my every night routine.

19 March Dream Fragments

As mentioned, was really exhausted last few days, so I slept like a log, didn’t even wake up to go to toilet.  After waking up still tired as hell, I couldn’t remember anything. I was beginning to get rather pissed off, but did a RC anyways. I also repeated my DS – there are lots them. If not anything else, I catch the feeling that I dreamt 3 DS, I sit on the sofa and try to concentrate (got interrupted by a phone call and conversation in the process).

Dream1 [Fragment]: I am at my grandma’s apartment(DS). She is also there and plans on going to the city center with the tram. I tell her that she will be really uncomfortable in the tram, taking into consideration the way she is dressed. She wears a green sweater, similar to one I had but never wore in the past, and she has a semi-transparent red-orange blouse from a lighter material over the sweater, so basically these are reverse and I tell her that she needs to change, so that she is more flexible in the public transportation. [there was more I can’t remember]

Dream2: I am in my first school (DS) and a schoolmate (DS) from there tells me he wants to find our teacher from second grade. We go into one of the classrooms (I am always amazed IRL at how accurately I remember my schools in dreams!), looking for our teacher. She is behind the teacher desk, her hair has greyed, she behaves like a puppet. I tell her that my schoolmate was looking for her and wants to send his regards to her. While I am saying this, she behaves like a robot, doesn’t even look at me, but continues writing down on some document, which she signs, and perhaps tries to pass to me. We leave the room and I continue in the corridor, towards the school gym. In the corridor are two girls from my high school (DS). They are happy to see each other, talking to each other. I remember during the dream that they are good friends. I continue towards the gym and see some more girls from high school. A narrator’s voice is telling me something about the two girls, how the mood of the one was actually influencing the behaviour of the other all the time, or something like this.

Dream 3 [DS recall only] – I am sure that I dreamt the guy from high school, that I called main DC in the previous DJ post…

Hmm, I could have swarn I wrote a dream down at night. memory fooling me! Either it told me "you already wrote that don, so don't bother" which is something my mind has done to me before! or wouldn't it be amusing if I had dreamed of writing in the dream journal, and assume I did.

I remember some combination of previous dreams: the number 3, the name fluffy, and perhaps a few others, and to my sleeping fuzzy brain they all made some sort of weird sense about dreams of course.

Been really out of commission, lately. Just busy, really. Still keeping notes on (most of) my dreams, so I'll have some updates to post, shortly. They wil probably be only notes, though, as I'm having less and less time to actually write out my dreams in detail. Just keeping ya posted!

Didn't sleep the greatest last night and I kept waking up, but I still remembered a few things.

Dream 1: The setting was possibly a cave-type place. There was something about a mission where one had to dress up as a girl and pretend to be distraught, until a monster or something heard you and dragged you away. In this case it was Harry Potter, I think.

Dream 2: Setting was my grandma's house or something like it. Me and a girl with long, darker hair, possibly Indian, were lying on blankets or something and talking. Either she was my moirail or she mentioned something about one. This part is a little blurry, but there was something about spawning or generating a creature, and how the one I got was named "Dogg", which apparently had been a name I had gotten in the past.

[Gap]

I was in my aunt's room? and there was a dark man there talking to me, and he held up a really small dried up/dead baby snake and was telling me how you have to take care of them or this happens, and I was thinking about how it was 5 A.M. and I was busy doing something important so I couldn't take care of that too.

Dream 3: Two? people are listening to Kankri and Karkat from Homestuck talk, and they're being sarcastic and joking, and they banter about something off-color, and one of the watchers turns to the other and concludes that Kankri must have done something inappropriate to Karkat? o_O

Fragment: I think this might have been apart of around the #2 dream: I spit a wad of gum out of my mouth and was picking pieces of it out of my teeth. (Side-note: Gum is one of the items in my memory palace, so it might have come from that.)

I was at poker last night and I had quite a lot to drink. I didn't dream (that I remember), but I did win poker. Both the league game and the cash game.

Another dream fragment again on dreams:

This was a dream about a DV thread. I think I started it. I don't remember exactly what it was about,but I remember it involved the number 3, and blackbirdrising in my dream interpreted the number 3 to mean complete, done.

I woke up, and almost managed to persuade myself to not write this down again.Grrr!

I think this is my last dream for the night. Is it my third? No, it's only the second one I can remember.

my dream recall is going bad and is making me have a ld dry spell. i have not been making detailed personal dj entries. i havnt had the time to but im going to have to find the time. im going to start with writing key points of my dreams and draw a picture too and when ever i can put more details into it. wish me luck on the recovery of my dream recall and to get past this dry spell.

I am trying an iPhone app Smart Alarm,which works by Laing my iPhone on my pillow and it detects vibrations and deduces from that my sleep cycle stages!

In my sleep I dreamed that for this app to be effective I needed to give it a name. And not like Smart Alarm, but my own pet name, a nickname. A name to give it power, A name to give me power over it. I wonder whether it's the old magic concept: if you know someone's name, you can use that to overpower them.

It was stuffy again so I had a hard time sleeping, and then I woke up out of the blue at 6 A.M. and laid there for a while. But I figured if I could get back to sleep, I'd remember a dream or two at least, and I did.

Dream 1: The first thing I remember thinking when I woke up with this dream was 'Hannibal Lector'. In it, "I" was a doctor checking over a row of patients in bed. I may have been the woman in the Hannibal Lector movies. One was one important guy in particular. [Gap] I'm slipping into a room that the guy is going to be kept in. I wrap an item in a cloth, hoping it won't be found by anyone checking over the room. I need to put something there to identify who left it, so I go look through my desk stuff for a post-it note, but I can't find the ones I'm looking for, so I end up using my "F" letter ones (except they're a solid green unlike in real life, and they're not sticky). I stick it onto something on the bed.

Note: The bed made me think of my aunt's, and I use her room as a loci in my memory palace so I wonder if it came from there.

Dream 2: I'm drawing on a big whiteboard, except it's like an online drawing board so I'm not physically drawing on it. It seems I'm leaving a specific message for someone. A woman comes up to the board and looks at it, and says something about how to draw the zodiac symbols - she proceeds to draw them in black marker, except they're just regular shapes, like circles and triangles. I am confused.

Dream 3: Me and mom are in a building, I think we're looking for my sister. I had given her this card to save on something, perhaps for $3, but she said it wasn't a good deal or something and I was a bit miffed at her. Either it was already dark, or the power then went out as I tried to catch up with her.

This was one of those dreams abut dreaming. I remember it was lengthy but alli recall now is fragments. My son woke me up by hopping into my bed, so no chance for gentle dream recall.

There was some sort of panel of judges for evaluating dreams and dreaming behavior. I remember arguing with them on some point or other. They seemed strict and conservative.

Dream Fragment 1: I'm a male DC struggling to survive in a dystopic world. I distinctly remember thinking about Lost and something similar to but not The Walking Dead. It's like I was trying to narrate my own story but couldn't decide where to make it take place. Me and a few others are making our way across a hazardous area and I lose my brother (though I think we meet up again later). Later, I see a little girl wandering around alone. I go up to her to help her, even though I know I should be keeping on, and there's someone ahead of me waiting. She doesn't know where her parents are or anything, so I take her up to a house and put her inside.

Dream Fragment 2: My grandma on my dad's side has passed away*, and I find out that I inherited all of her things. Me and my mom are in a sad state as we go to my grandma's room to spend the night. There's a big white bed, and some gifts from well-wishers, and there's a package from my grandma. I can see a letter inside and kind of want to read it, but mom seems to want to just go to bed.

*: She's long since passed away in real life.

I dreamed of normalizing numbers to enable better comparison, and plotting them on a chart.

This is actually something I am currently working on at work: an unfinished task which I shall do on Monday.

I wonder if the numbers in my dream represent something different than the numbers at work. Was this a straight dream of just working on a real life problem, and practicing it to help me do it better on Monday, or was it a reapplication of a technique from waking life to a different problem in a dream? I do not know. I do not remember anymore whether in the dream I knew what the numbers represented, I do not remember the actual numbers nor the resulting charts.

Yesterday morning I did remember some dreams and tried to store them in my dream palace, but I wasn't really awake enough to make it stick, so I forgot them the next time I woke up. :/

I lost some of today's dreams, I wish I had tried to store more before they were lost. I need more practice coming up with imagery on the fly. (I can think of some now that would have been perfect!)

Dream:

I turned in homework to an old teacher (Ms S). It was two pieces of artwork. I had to cut one to a smaller size, which was a headshot of Eridan from Homestuck. I cut a little too much on one side and had to cut the other to match. When I handed them in, the other piece turned out to be Eridan too. I said the headshot was from years ago, like it was a punchline. The headshot piece starts falling apart in her hands and turns into curly fries with bacon bit pieces. She acted like that was what she figured was supposed to happen.

The scene changes.

There was some kind of aristocratic-like party going on, the style reminds me very much of From Eroica With Love, with the more grayscale coloring - including the gay aristocrat figure. There was something about a guy who found the main DC attractive, I think someone was pointing it out to him...

Fragment: Ordering coffee with someone and sitting down together.

Was too tired, and consciously chose not to record a dream in middle of the night.

All I remember now is that it was an issue dream of some sort, but probably a REM not NREM, even at bet all I had would have been a fragment, and I remember thinking that it was not an important issue and not very interesting.

Btw, I woke up with the desire to try a WILD again only to be disappointed by finding out that it was almost time to get up on a work day. Tomorrow however is Saturday, and maybe I can try to WILD tomorrow morning.

EDIT: Interestingly I remember also thinking that this issue in this dream fragment was the same as in another dream fragment that I forgot once I moved.

It occurs to me that maybe my subconscious is trying to resolve some issue that it does not want my conscious to participate in at this time. Either that or my subconscious is blaming dream recall effort for my being too tired lately. Should I take a break and try again after a while?