cbernard

1. I am standing in a bathtub/shower, but not bathing. It's night, and the lights are out, and it would be pitch-black except for a little nightlight plugged into the wall. I am taking a sort of emotional bath- there's no water involved, but I am being washed with a feeling instead. I can physically feel the feeling: it feels kind of like sand, but more fluid. It's very comfortable and mildly warm (definitely not hot, but better than lukewarm). I am looking at the wall opposite the bathtub, where I know the door is, but I can't see anything. Suddenly, a soft white light turns on behind the door. It must have been really bright, because I can see it right through the door, as if the door was translucent. However, the light that gets through isn't very bright and is kind of in a blob-shape, resembling a shape that spilled water would make. When I see the light, I quickly step behind the bath curtain, which is pulled all the way to one side, but I can still see the light through the curtain. After about half a second, another light comes on, in the middle of the old one. Light #2 is much brighter and rounder, like a flashlight's light. I am starting to become very nervous. After another half-second interval, a third light comes on. It is laser-green, and it forms a ring with a dot in the middle, like a cross-hair, but without a cross. It is very bright, so bright that in real life it would probably damage your eyes to look at it for too long. As soon as I see it I drop to the floor of the bathtub, trying to get all of myself under the rim. While I am still falling, the final half-second interval passes and the last light comes on. It is an intense flash, like the flash of a camera, but so bright that your vision becomes completely white for a second, even if you're looking in the opposite direction. It was a scanner that the badguys were using to see if I was in the bathroom. Apparently we were being raided in the middle of the night. I don't know who 'we' were exactly, all I knew was that I was in some sort of base with my allies, and this raid was from an opposing faction. They were coming specifically to kill me, and they didn't really want to get in a fight or cause a commotion because there weren't enough of them- only three or four. So they were trying to scan all the rooms to find me before just barging in. While I was hiding, I was trying to figure out why they wanted me specifically. I thought that maybe it was because I knew some of their secrets, or maybe it was because my side would crumble without me to hold it together. I wasn't really sure. Anyway, since the light had flashed while I was still dropping, I was worried that they had seen me, but apparently they hadn't. They kept warming up and flashing the light every ten seconds or so, and I was trying to stay below the rim of the bathtub, but it was really hard and I kept slipping, so that my toe or something would be sticking out. However, somehow I was managing to keep out of the light. They started asking me questions, trying to trick me into giving myself away. I was answering the questions, but I don't remember what I said.


2. I was in a star wars jedi battle. I was on the good side, and all of us were running to meet the badguys. We finally came up to them, and all of us started lightsaber-battling the jedi who was in front of us. I noticed that all the goodguys had blue lightsabers, and all the bad jedi had red lightsabers, so I said, "hey, this is like color stereotyping!" I was fighting Anakin Skywalker, and he was already evil. He chopped off my hands, and I fell down. He grabbed me and dragged me through the battle and into this tunnel. Obi-wan Kenobi was following us, and he was really upset that I was dying. Anakin threw me into a spaceship at the other end of the tunnel. I sat up as it was taking off, and looked up, and there was a princess girl with hair in the shape of a giant fan and white face paint (can't remember if there was anyone like that in star wars), only her face and mannerisms looked like Lucy (a girl at my school). There were four of her (because she had four lives) sitting in a row. The spaceship was really small and rectangle-shaped, and they were against one of the smaller walls, so the four of them took up the whole wall. In the back-right corner was a bed. When they saw me and how I was dying, they all expressed shock: first the left-most one, then the next, then the next, then the right-hand one. Then, the left one's hair turned to grey, and then the next one, all the way down the line again, then once they all had grey hair, the left one said, "I'm dead!" (because apparently she had died from shock/grief at seeing me), then the second one said it, then the third one, and I was thinking, "oh no, the princess is about to lose all her lives here and now", except the last one didn't die but said something about how she would have a hard time coping with her grief. It was as if their shock took away like 90% of their collective lives, so the clone for 1-25% died, then the clone for 26-50% died, then the clone for 51-75% died, but the clone for 76-100% didn't die, just got really injured. I don't know if that makes any sense. Once I saw that the princess was not going to die, I struggled my way to the bed and flopped down.

I dreamed that it was the start of the school year and I was supposed to pick up my class schedule and then start going to classes, but I had lost my keys and key card and I needed the card to get into my classrooms. I started looking for it, and for some reason it was dark outside even though it was morning. I reach into my pocket to see if my card is there, but it is not. My keys are in there, though. I decide to go to my dorm room to look for my key card. I enter the dorm building and find my room. I go in using my keys, and find my roommate from last year standing there instead of who I'll actually be rooming with. Seeing my old roommate struck me as really odd, and I was thinking, "how can this be possible," but he said something about having signed up as my roommate again. I was fine with having him again, so I stopped worrying about how it had happened. We had a huge, long, room, about the size of three hotel rooms all lined up in a row. On the left were the beds, and on the right were a bunch of drawers. Everything was wooden, including the floors, and dusty/old. There was a wraparound window running from about halfway down the right wall to about halfway down the back wall. I looked out it, and it was bright outside. I looked at the clock to see how this was possible, and it was 10-something. I thought that it was probably the tinting of the windows that caused the difference in brightness. I decided to look through the dresser and see if my card was in there. I opened the top three drawers, but they all had my roommate's clothes in them. He had left the bottom two drawers for me. While I was searching the drawers, Christian came in. We said hi to him, and then I reached in my pocket and pulled out my wallet. I opened it and looked at all the cards. None of them looked like my key card except for one. I tried to pull it out to get a better look, but it was really hard to pull out. I finally got it, and it was a gift card instead of my key card, but I was still pretty excited because I had pulled it out successfully. We were all laughing, and I looked at the clock. It was 11:21. I was thinking that I probably had a morning class, which meant either that I had already missed it or it was still going. I decided just to go to class and hope someone would let me in. My roommate and I tried to talk in Chinese but we didn't know any words, so we started laughing again. We started walking outside, and ran into my roommate's friend, only he called him his little brother. Then we went to my roommate's car to get his keys. I got in the passenger side and reached across to pull his keys out of the ignition. My roommate and Christian were following along. They were laughing about something, and my roommate says, "That's bad." I say, "Simpsons bad?" He says, "Yeah." and we laugh even more because that was funny for some reason. I turn the key and pull it out.


-----------------------------------

There were so many places in this dream where I should've done a reality check, but my brain just rationalized it every time. Any tips for how to get better at this?

I remember three dreams, and each of them is centered around a certain pattern. The basic pattern was a continuous image with parts covered up by blocks that were all the same color.

1. My brother brings a movie to me and we decide to watch it. He puts it in the player, and I tell him that I've already seen most of it. When it loads up on the screen, it shows how much of the movie I've already seen. It displays a representation of the movie as something like a combination of a mural and sheet music. There were horizontal rows of images going down the screen, and so if you 'read' each line you could see what happened in the movie. However, a lot of it was blacked-out because I hadn't seen those parts. You'd think that if I hadn't seen the whole movie then I must have seen maybe the beginning, and then maybe some scenes from the middle or something, but the screen showed that I had seen one or two hundred tiny segments that couldn't have been more than a couple of seconds each, and they were scattered evenly over the whole duration of the movie. It looked kind of like the 'mural' was missing pixels.

2. I am thinking about my eyes. They are an unusual but kind of nice color of blue (my eyes are not blue irl) and in the dream I thought they looked kind of like that painting by Magritte:



I was travelling while I was thinking. It was sort of a combination of walking and falling, mainly forwards but pulled a little to the right as well. It felt like three different things:
1. Like I was in orbit around the sun
2. Like I was walking
3. This one's kind of hard to explain, but it felt like I was a bird of prey swooping down, except the whole scene was sideways. Kind of like if you were lying on your side so that the grass was on the right and the sky was on your left, and you saw a bird swoop but it looked like it was going right instead of down.

Anyway, I felt like I was in control (since I was walking), but I also felt really stylish because I was orbiting. I was 'swooping down' on some friends who I knew were around the corner, and I was thinking that they were going to think I was so cool when they saw me. But I was still thinking about my eyes, and I thought, what if I got my eyes painted (as in literally painting my eyeballs)? I thought that would be so cool. I was trying to decide what pattern to paint on them, and I settled on a checkerboard pattern where I would paint white squares that matched the white of my eye over the colored part of my eye. Then, as I pictured this, I scaled the blocks up and down, trying to decide what was the best size. When they were big, I thought it looked kind of retro. Then I made then shrink, and it started to resemble the 'nothing channel' on TV (I don't know what it's really called but I'm talking about the black and white fuzzy one). Finally they were too small to really be detectable but they made my eyes look glittery or sparkly. I liked all of them but decided on the glittery one.

(This is the second time I have dreamed about having different patterns on my eyes)



3. I am cooking a pie with my sister. I walk in the kitchen as she pulls it out of the oven. For some reason we baked it without crust on top. I don't know what kind of pie it was, but it was kind of bluish-purplish-blackish. I got little crust squares and placed them in the checkerboard pattern on top of the pie.

1. I wrote 'comic books' in my DJ, but now I don't remember that dream at all.

2. The second dream I remember a little better. I was riding in a canoe with some people, including my mom. We were riding through canals in the middle of the city. You could take a tour through the residential or business side of town. We passed some kids who were smoking marijuana in the canal (?). I looked in the canoe ahead of us (there were a bunch of canoes all lined up in a row, kind of like water rides at an amusement park) and was looking at the people in it. No one was wearing anything colorful except these two ladies. One had a purple swimsuit, and the other one was wearing a blue swimsuit. I then realized that their swimsuits were the exact same design. Then my mom put her hands over her eyes like goggles and started looking around through her imaginary binoculars. For some reason I thought that she was doing that to cover up her eyes because they had turned into mushy charcoal-stuff.

1. It was the end of the summer, and I was going back to school. My cousin walked with me. To get there we went through this really pretty forest. The school year was going to start with our class going on a train ride and having class with snacks in the train. Everyone was supposed to bring a couch to sit on. Even though my cousin wasn't part of the class, I decided that he could tag along. We picked out a couch from several that were just sitting in the forest. It was royal blue, and the seat cushions were very light yellow. Pretty hideous. I picked up the left end, and my cousin picked up the other end, and we started carrying it to the train. We got to the train, which was sitting just outside the forest. The track went for a little ways where you could see it, but then it curved into a gorgeous canyon full of fruit trees. The non-forest place was lighter than the forest. The forest was like a night but with really bright moon and stars. The outside place was like a day but with a really weak sun that had very yellow light. Anyway, I told my cousin to put down the couch and I went into the train to scout it out and find a good spot. It was already really crowded, and the only spot to put a couch was right in the doorway. D was sitting on the left side of the couch that would be to our right, and I wanted to sit next to her, so I decided to orchestrate the couch placement so that I would end up next to her. The problem was, my cousin had the right side of the couch, which was the side that would be next to the left side of her couch. We picked up the couch, and I hurried forwards so that I would be the first one in the train door. Then, I maneuvered the couch so that it was backwards. That way, our left side aligned with her couch's left side. The downside of this was that our couch was looking at the wall so we wouldn't be able to see the professor, and also we would look weird. I wasn't too worried about that, though. I sat down on my side of the couch and sure enough, I was right next to D, only on a different couch. I expected my cousin to sit down on the other side of the couch, but I guess he didn't want to sit backwards, because he wandered off. I thought he would probably be able to find a seat somewhere else. The next thing I knew, I was on the right side of the couch. I kind of questioned how I had gotten there, and my mind said that the train had lurched forward and that I had slid. Someone got up to close the train door, but they left it a little open, and since my couch was facing the door, I could see a silver tree with pink leaves out the doorway. I looked around and saw Cassie to my left. I started telling her about some interesting tree I had seen in the forest, but she interrupted me and said, "We haven't seen each other in like three months!", the point being that I hadn't even said hi but had just launched into telling her a story. We both started laughing and hugged each other. Then she started rubbing her shoulder against me, like a cat. At first I thought this was weird, but then I decided that it was a reasonable thing to do, so I started rubbing my shoulder against her.


2. I am in the car with my family, pulling out of the driveway. My brother asks, "Where are we going again?" and I tell him, "We're going to California to eat, because that's where I picked for my birthday." My friend texts me, only my phone beeps differently than it does irl: sort of a short-long beep that's the same pitch both times, and the tone reminds me of the color blue. The text says, "Hey, happy birthday! We wanted to come over and make art with you, how does that sound?" My vision switches to him and Cassie putting glitter on masks. There are about six other people with them, but they are all wearing masks so I can't recognize them. I think, "aww, that's really sweet" but I tell him "Sorry, I'm going to California with my family, and I won't be back until tonight, so we can do it then." I don't text him or even call him to say this, I just say it out loud, but I know that he heard it.

*Recovered from 6-13-11*


Sorry it's been a while; my computer was broken.


1. I was part of a small group that was supposed to infiltrate the enemy base. It was situated in a snowy forest It was in a sort of pit, such that only the top four or five feet popped out over the snow, and to get to it you had to slide down this steep slope that would be hard to escape from if you wanted to retreat. We crawled close to the base, to see how they were guarding it. There were about five guards on every side, except for the back, which had no guards. I crawled around to the back, and then, with my back to the wall, moved left until I got to the corner. I peeked around to get a close look at the guards. They wore white and grey helmets with matching vests, and black boots. All five of them were holding cellos. I darted around the corner and started fighting the closest guard (they were all standing shoulder to shoulder, looking straight forward). I grabbed his cello so he couldn't whack me with it, and for a second we just pulled it back and forth, then I grabbed his bow and started using it as a sword, and he started using his cello as a giant club. I smashed his cello, and at this point the other guards were beginning to notice the fight, so they all gathered around me, trying to whack me with the cellos. However, they were too close to be able to whack effectively, and instead all broke each other's instruments. Suddenly a trumpet sounded from behind me (I was facing the wall at this point), and a bright yellow and green light illuminated the wall. I broke away from the guards and rolled backwards toward the hill, since there was no way I could take all five of the guards, even if they didn't have weapons. I was lying against the hill, watching them come towards me and feeling afraid, when I started to hear sounds of fighting from behind me and also from the front side of the building. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw someone from my team emerge from the forest and come riding down the hill on a llama. He came down the hill that was associated with the front, but all the way to one side, so that he could charge down my corridor. He was galloping closer, and so the guards that were coming for me got distracted, preparing to deal with him. I took the opportunity to scramble up the hill, intending to investigate the yellow and green lights which had been getting brighter. When I got out of the pit, I saw a giant grey spaceship landing in the middle of a battle which was taking place on a large snowy plain in front of me. I thought, "who are these people... are they with us or are they another group of attackers?" I didn't think that they were on our side because a big attack wasn't part of the plan, so I decided that we had to finish the mission quickly. I turned around and looked down the hill.The llama guy was retreating around the back of the building. Several guards were lying on the ground, but by this time more guards were coming out of the base, so a bunch of them were coming from the front to chase Mr. Llama. I took a grenade from my belt and threw it down the hill, trying to throw it a little ahead of the guards so that it would land by the time they got to it. It exploded in a bright yellow flash, that's the last thing I remember.


2. I was sitting at a piano, and I played a nice chord: C, C#, D#, F#, A. I was very pleased by the sound, and I started thinking of my cat.


3. I was at college and I ran into a girl who goes to my school, whose name I don't know, and we just kind of looked at each other and didn't say anything, but we were communicating without speaking. It's kind of hard to recreate the conversation since it didn't really have any words, but I will try. She showed me the concept of music, as if to say, "You're musical, aren't you?" In response I sent something from Don Giovanni to her, then a duet from Saariaho's opera L'Amour de Loin (which I just watched yesterday). She gave a sort of half-smile, like she was glad to know that her intuition was correct, but she was still waiting for something. I showed her a picture of her playing Chopin on an upright piano (I have heard her play Chopin irl), along with a feeling of admiration, but the admiration had a sort of flavor of, "will you play for me?" So she started walking across campus to where the pianos are, and I was following her, sending her Stockhausen and Messiaen music along the way, which gave us a feeling of a thick blanket and a cat.

I am outside a gas station at night when I see this girl I took a class with like two years ago. We recognize each other, and she invites me to a movie. I can't remember whether I said no or yes, but she then invited me to drink with her. I said, sure, but, are you over 21, because I'm not, and we need someone to buy the beer. She said she was between 20 and 21, but her brother will buy beer.

I had two other dreams which I had in my head when I woke up, but my alarm made me forget them.

1. My brother claims to know how to play Norwegian checkers. Since the game is legendarily difficult, my sister and I are asking him a lot of questions

sister: "Who taught you how to play?"
brother: "A girl in my class."
sister: "Did she know how to play?"
brother: "Of course!"
sister: "Did she really know, or were you just taking her word for it?"
me: "You know, a lot of people claim to know how to play chess, but they actually change a lot of the rules. Is it like that?"
brother: *nods* "I just took her word for it. I don't think anyone knows the exact move order."

2. I am playing a computer game with my brother while texting Cassie. I tell her that I am thinking of buying some Mishigami furniture (I don't know if mishigami is the exact word, but is was pretty close to that. Apparently my brain just made up a japanese-y sounding word to represent japanese furniture.) She responds with something like "For mishigami, i don't ask around at parties." In the dream, I realize that she is talking about some party we had been at (all fictional) where she had been telling me about japanese furniture. Now, she is accusing me of having 'stolen' the information from her.

Meanwhile, in the computer game, I boast to my brother that I have all the monk upgrades. He says, "I think I do too." I say, "I don't think your civilization can get all of them." He points to his market and says, "See, I have all of them." I point to the monastery and say, "You get them here, not at the market." He says, "No, the monastery is just so you can unlock the stable, and that's where you trade your resources, when you unlock it." He pretty much turns out not to know the proper function of a single building in the game, and I am very surprised that he is a competent player and I wonder how he gets by.

3. I have joined a website, and I am still trying to figure out the culture of the community. I submit a short story, and it is featured on the front page of the website, so I think, "good, I must have done my research properly." I get a pm from some girl that goes something like:

Hay i lyked ur story. my fav part was te wizzard. r u a cristian? i am a cristian nd i luve jesus. i am a shaman with a tedy so join my clan.


EDIT: also I remembered a fragment, about a baby toddling around in the snow, with a giant pair of hands picking up snow and packing it onto the baby, making him a walking snowman.

The only thing I can remember is that I was on some website, and I looked up at the top, and it said "Private Messages - 1" or something like that, notifying me that I had an unread message.

EDIT:

I just remembered, and this may have been from another fragment, but I was talking to my friend Laura, who doesn't like twentieth century music, and I was telling her that she should listen to Poulenc's flute sonata.

I am trying to decide what to get Dani for her birthday, but I don't even know when her birthday is. As far as I know, it could be any day of the year, but I'm kind of paranoid that it will be today or tomorrow. I tell C to find out when her birthday is (apparently she doesn't know either). Occasionally my vision switches to watching C try to figure out when Dani's birthday is without asking straight out. In the meantime I am looking for a gift. I decide to get something small, so it will fit in my pocket, so that way if Dani and C walk up and C is signalling that today is her birthday, I will be ready. When I picture the sort of present I have in mind, I see a little grey ball about the size of a hacky sack, only made out of metal.

Fragment:
Cassie asks me, "Am I silent?"
I tell her, "There is no silence."
The dynamic of the conversation was like, she brought up Kierkegaard's Bird of the Air, Lily of the Field, and I responded with John Cage's 4:33.

EDIT: Oh yeah, and while I am saying 'there is no silence', suddenly my mind is flooded with sounds of wind, birds, and even the sound of ants walking!

1. I am at a nice restaurant with my friend Erin. After we finish eating, I suggest that we order some wine. She says, no, let's get beer instead. I look over at where they keep their drinks and I see this Brisk strawberry melon drink that I like in real life, and I jump out of my chair and grab it, saying something like, hey, you're gonna love this.

2. I am riding in the car with my cousin D, listening to metal music. I have some sort of telepathic link to my aunt, who is criticizing the music. After a certain section of a song plays, she says, "How is that art?" and I start comparing the section to a part of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring in order to help her understand the music. (This is strongly reminiscent of a conversation I had with a friend a few weeks ago, where I played a metal song for him, but he wasn't able to take it seriously, so I gave him a little analysis of the song, complete with references to classical composers who had used the same techniques, in order to persuade him that metal was a valid genre.)

3. I am in a department store, and I see a mannequin that has fallen over. It's like the kind that they usually have modelling clothes, only it doesn't have any clothes on, so it looks like someone pulled the clothes off and knocked it over in the process. It is made of transparent plastic. When I look at it, sometimes its head is attached, but sometimes not. I walk over to it and start kissing it. (I wonder what it means? )

I and a bunch of other people (20-25) are sitting around a large square table. We go around the table and each person has to share some sort of artwork. Most people display their photography, paintings, or film. It is all visible on a screen to my left.

I am kissing Cassie.

Dream #1:

M, J, and K are in a soccer league. M + J's team is playing K's team. K's team is winning. M is goalie, J is something like a defender. I am watching from the sideline, but on M + J's side of the field. I am on M's right. The goals are close to the corners of the field, and are tilted at an angle. M + J's goal is on the opposite side of the field from me. The field is divided into zones, and you can only hit the ball in one certain way, depending on what zone you're in. M is not doing a good job of staying near the goal, and the other team keeps scoring.

Later, I am goalie in a different game. A couple of balls get past me, and I look at the back of the goal. There's a little poster, the size of a regular piece of printer paper, which is white with a picture in the center of the top half, and a quote on the bottom half. The picture is of a dejected-looking robot, who also looks kind of wimpy. The quote is something like, "We're hanging on - that's all we can say." It's supposed to look like someone on our team said that, but I suspected that the other team just made it up.


Dream #2:

Mr. K asks me what my favorite piece of music is. I am taken aback. I tell him I have three candidates. I then adjust this number to four. I start thinking, trying to narrow it down. I throw out the piece that I thought of that made me change the number of candidates to four, which was something by Beethoven but I don't know what. Then, I say, "My third favorite piece is Beethoven's string quartet no. 14." I feel kind of guilty saying that it's my third favorite, because it used to be my #1 favorite. Next, I say that my second favorite piece is Messiaen's Twenty Gazes on the Infant Jesus. I notice that he is typing on a computer (which I don't think was there before). The screen is pointed away from me, but I can see the keyboard, so I watch him type and figure out that he's typing the name of the Messiaen piece, but in French. He has to backspace a lot, but he finally gets it. I tell him, "If you want to buy it, you should get Peter Hill, Roger Muraro, or Nigel Simeone." I get confused, because Nigel Simeone never recorded it. So I say, "You know what? Just get the Muraro. And watch out for Yvonne Loriod's recording. She was Messiaen's wife, so she knows the piece better than anyone, and it's a good recording, but the sound is bad." I was going to tell him that my #1 favorite piece was Messiaen's opera St. Francis, but the dream ended.



Dream #3:

J is at Brandon's birthday party. He is eating pizza. B+T show up. I want pizza, but J eats it all. First, he eats what's left of the sausage pizza, which I wasn't interested in, then, I see pepperoni and reach for a slice, but he grabs both the remaining slices before I can get one. Then, I see a canadian bacon pizza and decide that I will have to settle for that, but he scoops up all the slices. It was a thin crust pizza, cut into tiny little squares, so he just grabs the five or six squares that were left. I ended up not getting any pizza.



Dream #4:

Something about a lava lamp. It had red, blue, yellow, green, purple, and orange little lava things, but the purple and orange dominated.



Dream #5:

My sister and I are at an outdoor celebration. Someone is giving a speech, and I am supposed to launch a rocket at the end of it. The rocket launcher is out on the lawn, and the button is on a wooden table with a lot of wires on it. The button is red, coming out of a green little stand. I accidentally knock the button over, and it rolls off the table. The cord doesn't allow it to fall all the way to the ground. I pick it up by the cord and start to put it back on the table, but the cord brushes against another wire on the table, and this triggers the rocket. I look over at the rocket. There is a red explosion, which doesn't seem to have any purpose, then a white explosion which launches the rocket. It only goes up about 15-20 feet, then falls back down. Since it was in the middle of the speech, people are confused and start clapping a little.

Later, my sister and I are looking for a little v-shaped nail. She finds it in a sandbox, but it is too small for her to pick up. I bend down and grab it, but as soon as I move it, ants start pouring out of where it used to be. I tell my sister to move, but she is laughing and looking at something. I keep telling her to move or the ants will get her, and finally she moves, but she doesn't seem too concerned about the ants. I realize that the whole time I was trying to get her to move, I was standing right in the middle of all the ants, so I retreat and start brushing them off. However, every time I brush them off, more start crawling up my legs! I get into this pattern of taking several steps away from the anthill, then brushing my legs off, but I never can get far enough away that they stop coming.