DarkestDarkness

Not dream: I woke up earlier than usual, woken up by our friend staying over and remember dreaming something, but in no detail, and soon fell asleep again. Woke up at the normal time and stayed in bed for 45 minutes, seeing whether I'd sleep more and dream again or not. I didn't but remembered some dream fragments and got up. I knotted two of my fingers as I've seen a friend do, to remember the fragments and my intention as I go through doorways in the house, as I first go downstairs to make tea and then come back up to write my fragments as follow:

---

Fragment 1 (non-lucid):
I was playing a special player vs player mode in a game I'd been playing recently in waking life, where I'd throw bombs at other players and vice versa, with the objective of making each other fall off the platforms until only one of us was left. What was different from the real game was that I was able to use my character's swords as well in this game mode.

Fragment 2 (non-lucid):
I remember talking to old friends and they were inviting me over to their estate across the river; in the dream I had a memory of what the estate was like, but I felt like something was off, as I also didn't remember this estate actually being so big. How could I remember and not remember at the same time? The "memory" was vivid, so I think that in the dream it's more like I was actually at the estate and that's what made me question it a bit.

---

Notes:

• In waking life, there is a phenomenon that when you go through a doorway, your mind forgets current thoughts and changes how it thinks. I think I remember reading that it is believed this had to do with contextual adaptation, before humans made so many artificial thresholds themselves, such as going from the tundra to the plains and to the desert and so on. Interestingly in dreams, doorways and thresholds in general can have very literal scene changes beyond them. For me, anyway, they do.
• Keeping fingers knotted like this causes a good deal of pain, especially since my joints are hypermobile, but focusing on this lets me focus on the intention I set when I started doing it, even when I go through thresholds, as I've observed my friend do. I don't know the mechanic behind this, but it just seems to work.
• The friends from my second fragment are like extended family, but I rarely see them anymore, and in fact, in waking life it is impossible for me to casually see or hear about them, because I no longer live in the same country, so in my dream I was back in my native country, and should have realised this to be unusual.

Memorised the dream about 3 hours ago, when I got up from bed, but haven't had a chance until now to write it down, so some details are missing along the way. Non-lucid dream:

I can't remember how the dream started; for the first part I was in some sort of library, with two floors, a ground floor and a first floor. There were some sort of MIB agents downstairs and I was on the first floor, seeing them from behind the banisters - they realised I was there and started trying to grab me and I was trying to keep myself low but avoiding them; they were trying to get up by climbing, though none of them remembered to try and use stairs initially, I felt like they would be trying it soon; I saw a doorway that leaded to a concrete (and stone maybe) stairwell and I went through quickly and saw that the stairs went up and down.

I decided to go down, quickly going down step-by-step since I wasn't familiar with the stairs, otherwise would have done every 3 steps instead to go down quicker, and I could feel that the agents were looking for me here; I reached a point where the stairs still went further down but they were cut off by a small wall, so I jumped over it and there was a little ramp that I slid down on - I didn't stumble and kept going down for what now seems like it must have been quite a while, and finally reached a bottom, where there was a doorway to an "outside".

As I stepped outside everything had this sort of yellow-green tinge, like there was a lot of dust of this colour, and there was daylight, but I looked up and saw that the stairwell was a block of concrete coming down from what looked like an enormous black metallic machine with a central column that hung over this area I was in, with the rest of its supports, five or six of them I think, further out; the central column had tubes going to the other supports and other sections... Down on my level it was like a small city or town with dusty roads and pavements and there was nobody else apart from many of these MIB types and futuristic military vehicles, but the buildings looked fairly normal.

I can't remember exactly, but I think some of them noticed me and started chasing after me so I got into a small armoured vehicle type thing that had a gun mounted on top and here there's sort of a transition from the normal perception of things (from my eyes) to a third-person view of the vehicle, as in a game. I sped up and followed the curvy town roads and noticed a bigger military tank with some sort of cannon was chasing me, so I started trying to fire the gun on my vehicle, but it didn't seem to do anything to do the bigger vehicle; they didn't fire at me but kept the cannon pointed at me and I think I must have gotten to a dead-end or simply decided to get out, and ran into an alleyway and seemed to lose them, my perception being normal again, i.e. from my eyes, since I got out from the vehicle.

In this alleyway I remember seeing plenty of these guys just sitting around doing nothing in their suits and sunglasses, and I made particular note of one of them sitting on a wooden bench in the shade of a building. They didn't seem phased by me and weren't getting up trying to get me or anything. I stopped and looked at this guy on the bench, I didn't feel like I was being chased anymore. He was looking down to the ground, resting his arms on his knees, sort of hunched forward.

All of a sudden I heard loudspeakers across the town, saying something like "... and the winner of tonight's lottery is: Tom (indecipherable)". As this happened I saw the man change; his clothes were different, more casual, his sunglasses were gone, he looked like a regular guy, but he still had this empty expression; one of the other agents loitering about looked at him and said "Hey it's the third time you win in a row, this isn't fair!", visibly angry at this guy for constantly winning - of course, now the speakers played again, pretty much saying the same thing, more of the other guys getting angry at him; him keeping his empty expression, but I think looking at me.

I don't remember any more of this dream, so I can't say for sure if it ended here or not, but this is where my memory of it ends.

---

Some notes:

• I've recently been watching the Matrix and the Animatrix again, which always gets me thinking about dreams, so I know that a lot of this dream's atmosphere and theme is around that. Other things like the military vehicles come from a different number of games.
  
• During the dream I did not feel particularly distressed or anything; I was simply running along with a situation, not thinking about it or the context.
  
• The only normal dream sign that appeared was the stairwell; dream signs related to travel (trains, stairwells, elevators/lifts, long car journeys) are some of my most common signs, but I almost never remember to think about them in dreams.
  
• This is my first DJ entry here.