Exploring My Mind

This batch of dreams was remembered sort of all at once this morning!
I was on a date with a random dream character, and we were spending time at a house I didn't really recognize. A lot of the time consisted of binge-watching episodes of Steven Universe (and wouldn't you know it, I watched that the night before). Eventually we grew tired of watching that and instead began to... kiss.



... After that we sort of explored the surrounding neighborhood, though it was hard to see, as it was surrounded by tons and tons of trees. We ended up stumbling upon an abandoned house somewhere. The interior looked kind of like the house I lived in for most of my life, but much larger. We proceeded to play some games and then, you guessed it, kissed some more. Not sure what can be taken from this dream, but it wasn't terrifying or weird like some others I've recalled, so that's nice.

The second dream:
I was in a computer room (it kind of looked like a computer lab that my high school would've had), and using the computers were a group of four YouTubers I watch called the Best Friends. They were playing games and recording commentary, and me, I was just sort of beside myself, trying not to annoy them but amazed that I got to meet them. Suddenly, something distracted my attention: a commotion out in the connecting hallway. I remember exiting the room to go see what it was, but the recall drops there.

Oi, oi, I'm back from the shadows of a five day slump of upset emotions and sadness. Things have cooled down now though, and I've brought two dreams with me for this entry!
This first one was from the morning before this morning.
I was in a school (who would've thunk it), or more specifically, a choir class. We were all singing some song, and for some reason, all the kids around me were 5th graders, while I was the only young adult in the room, aside from the teachers standing around watching our performance. Suddenly, alarms blared! Doctors came in from every which way! What was going on?
The answer to that question appeared in the form of the head of the doctors, a nurse with a demanding presence but kind demeanor. She strolled her way in, feet clacking on the floor as we all stared in a mixture of confusion and horror. She stopped walking, waited a moment, and explained to us that a virus was going through the school. Not just any virus though; it was a lethal, fast-spreading virus, and all of the kids had to be quarantined immediately. With a snap of her fingers, the doctors began rounding up the kids and escorting them out of the choir room. For some reason, nobody came up to me, making me the last one in the room, along with the teachers and the head nurse. There was some more to this dream involving me questioning the nurse about the outbreak, but I don't remember it.
Next is my fragment from this morning. And it's real sparse one at that; only specific scenes and characters remembered.
A school was involved. (this may as well be a dream sign at this point along with K and my ex). My ex was there. For some reason I was viewing the dream as an observer, but another me was in the dream, or rather, my middle-school-aged self, as one of the participating DCs. My dad was in the dream too, and he was running for president, campaigning through the school.
Lately I've noticed a trend that whenever my emotions get upset or sad, it tends to dip my recall the following mornings, whereas if I'm feeling happier and more clear-headed, I tend to have more consistent recall. Don't really know if there's anything to that, but it's been an observable enough pattern that there may be something to it, at least for me.

Back on a steadier pace, and I think it helps that things haven't been so busy. Today's dream brought about, yet again, another recurring person.
I was in a huge hotel of sorts, that had all sorts of lavish rooms, hallways, and lobbies to explore. Present in the dream with me were my family, the girl who I've been referring to as K in a lot of my previous entries, her boyfriend, and her family. We were all there on vacation, and more than ready to relax and have a good time. Said good time is hazy, but two key moments I remembered happened in chronlogical order. First, that night, we all set up on this very cozy balcony and watched a movie that was projected onto the wall in front of us. Despite being a projection, the movie looked to be in full HD. Can't quite remember what the movie was, but it was in black and white, oddly enough.
K, sitting next to me, glanced over at me and laughed. I did the same. Everyone else with us was a little more quiet than usual, but I think they just seemed like they were absorbed into the movie. Just behind the projection, you could see the sky outside through a large opening in the hotel building, the setting sun burning up everything it could touch.
Later on the next day, we all decided to go swimming. K and I were the first ones to arrive at the pool, which as it so happened was inlaid right next to a beach. It struck me then that the whole place looked similar to a place my family and I go on vacation every year for Thanksgiving. Shaking the thought, K and I had fun swimming. However, at one point when I went under to see how long I could hold my breath, I discovered upon emerging from the water that K was no where in sight! She was just next to me a second ago, but she seemingly vanished out of thin air. I was frantic. What could have happened to her? I sprinted out of the pool, and noticed her boyfriend running down the stairs by the pool. He looked equally as frantic. I explained to him what happened, and the search began. Man, why does the plot always ramp up when the recall drops off? One thing I can say for sure: Once I get much better at having lucids, I'd love to visit this place again.
There was another smaller dream recalled when I went back to sleep. Seems my current no-alarm, wake-up-twice schedule is producing similar amounts of dreams.
I was in a virtual space. Best way I can describe it is it looked like a dream scene straight out of TRON. By my side was a cute little fluffy dog. Apparently he and I were tasked with taking down this deadly, gigantic machine that was in the middle of the area. The machine was shooting off blasts of electricity all over the place. Along the ground, however, were glowing arrows that flashed red and green corresponding to when we had to move or stop. Using these, we quickly dashed our way to the machine.
So there's the daily couple. What's interesting to me is the prevalence of K in my dreams lately. I said in my last entry that she may be a dream sign, but now I'm starting to believe it fully. As to why she's been so prevalent...well, that's a whole different thing. Her and I don't speak much IRL except for a few comments here and there on social media. Thing is, K is from a time in my life, in my past, where things were really nice. She's from one of the happier periods in my life, a period full of day-long stretches spent with friends doing fun things like we did in this dream. Lately, I've been longing for these things, and to get back to something akin to that. Therefore, I think her appearing so much in my dreams is a reflection of that. Maybe it's something else. Maybe a mix. Who can say? Ramble done.

Lately I've been changing up my sleeping routine and just not setting my alarm. It seems to be helping with recall...so far.
I was in a little house that rested on top of the clouds. The house wasn't any that I recognized, but the sight outside was beautiful. Strangely, our house was the only one like this; no others were in sight, just an endless sea of clouds.
In the house with me were my dad and my aunt. We were all gearing up to ride on some airships to this festival that would be taking place down on the surface, beneath the clouds. While we were preparing, multiple people I knew IRL also came to visit, popping up through the clouds on their own airships. The airships themselves looked like motorcycles without wheels. One guy who I didn't recognize popped up and laughed loudly, cupping his hands around his mouth and shouting towards us, "ARE YOU GUYS READY YET??"
Eventually my grandpa appeared on his own airship, parking it on the house's balcony and coming in to chat with the lot of us. Unfortunately, if we did go to that festival, I certainly don't remember it.
The next dream recalled was much smaller, and I think I had it after going back to sleep when I woke up to write the previous one.
Me and my friend AJ were in this strange place that looked like a combination between my high school and a shopping mall. /for some reason, quite a few of my dreams feature warped or weird versions of shopping centers or my high school. I don't recall much from this dream, just that AJ was trying to lead me to some place, but I ignored him, as I had a bad feeling about it. Instead, I went upstairs to check the lockers, for some reason expecting to find something in them that was apparently very important.

More radio silence for an entirely different reason this time around. These past handful of days, I've been recalling little fragments. Although they were little, however, they held important significance. Each one dealt with a pretty symbolic subject matter corresponding to stuff that's been going on in my life lately. A shame more detail for them wasn't recalled.
Which leads me to how things have been IRL these past few days. Lately, I've been undergoing a change in attitude. It was a busy week for me and my family, as we had my aunt and cousin over and we never see them since we moved, so we did a lot of stuff. One thing of note we did was go to the beach.
The beach holds a lot of meaning to me, when it comes to lucid dreaming anyways. First and foremost, it's a relaxing place. Everything about it; the sounds, the breeze, the vastness of it all. It helps that we went at dusk. It also holds meaning due to my use of it in my lucid dreaming story Dream Gazers, as a meet-up place for the protagonists' shared lucid dreams. I find myself thinking about lucid dreaming a lot whenever I go to the beach anymore, and sometimes it can bring on strong, vivid dreams. In this case, it didn't, but that's okay.
Since that night at the beach, I've sort of been re-analyzing my path in life and what I'm doing, where I'm going, what I want to do now. My life got turned upside down last year, and I've been scrambling to piece it together since then, barely able to grasp hold of something concrete. It's just difficult, sometimes, figuring yourself out, y'know? I've had to re-adjust all my expectations, all my feelings, all my views after losing someone special, and now, I think I'm starting to gain a foothold.
Multiple plans of action have been laid out before me, and in thinking hard about these things, I've felt a lot more happy and clear headed these past few days than I have in a while. I've been doing my standard LDing practices in the course of that time, but I haven't been 100% going at it, as I've busied my mind so much with the future. In any case, that's done nothing to throw me off the track, and I'm thankful for it. To cap all of these thoughts up, I remembered (and wrote down) a non-lucid this morning, with moderate detail. ^^
I was visiting my friend's house (call him A) and hanging out with the girl (K) from my prior dream (I'm starting to think she may be a dream sign) where she asked me to that dance. IRL this girl is A's niece, and I'm good friends with both of them. Strangely, A appeared to be absent. K said he was upstairs, but while we hung out down in the kitchen eating breakfast, he was no where to be seen, and we certainly couldn't hear him upstairs. What was strange about the setting of this dream was that it was shot like a movie. I could see myself in third person, and multiple dramatic effects and music scores would play when certain things happened. At one point later in the dream, I rushed back into the house, my mom and aunt following closely behind me. We were running from something outside, but I don't recall what it was, or if we even knew what it was.
Also later on in the dream, K appeared on the news. Nothing bad had happened, thankfully, but I don't remember why she was on the news or what they were talking about, yet she was sitting right across from me still. She looked at the TV with an amused expression, and we resumed our daily activities.
So that's been me these past few days. Life's just being life.

Monday morning's dream was a pretty teeny tiny fragment, involving a super smart yet annoying guy barging his way into my house and demanding me to solve his riddles.
This morning, however, was a bit more fruitful! Especially due to the re-appearance of a dream sign of mine.
But first, middle-of-the-night-wake-up-fragments.
I was on a huge ship in the middle of an ocean being ravaged by a raging storm. Alongside the storm was, of course, a sea monster, and the whole crew (me included) had to square off against it in an RPG-styled battle. And thennnn!
I was homeless, and wandering the cold, dark streets of a city I didn't really recognize. I was trying to find shelter in whatever place I could, till eventually I met this family who decided to take me in for the night.
Now for the non-lucid.
I was in the house I used to live in, and sitting on the couch nearby was my ex and her boyfriend. All three of us were getting ready to watch a movie, but I was feeling pretty glum and sour about the situation, so I moped my way over to the kitchen area and pet my ex's dog for a little while. Eventually, I decided I'd just leave, and this was no small undertaking as I knew it'd be a long 6 hour drive back home. I relayed my plans to the two of them, and my ex pleaded that I stay and enjoy the movie. I, however, was resolute. I headed out. The in-between here is a blur but I do remember driving my way home on dark roads.
Too bad I didn't do an RC. I've been training myself IRL to reality check whenever my ex sends me any messages, or if I catch a stray thought about her. However, she hasn't appeared in my dreams much lately; this was the first time in a little while now.

Haven't posted any entries in 4 days, but rest assured, I'm ALIVE. Rather than not posting due to no recall, however, I didn't post the entries for the 1st and 2nd of September simply because they were extremely mundane dreams.
Literally all they consisted of was me hanging out with my family and going about day to day business. Nothing really to write in depth about.
The dream I had for the morning of the 3rd (or, yesterday, as of this time of writing) was an interesting one involving the concept of inception.
My cousin was going to get married to this jerk of a guy, and I wasn't okay with it, so I decided to pull a Leonardo DiCaprio and delve into her dreams to perform inception. A dream about dreams, as it were. Deep.
And then, this morning's. All of these dreams don't have a whole lot of detail recalled, but rather, specific plot points. One thing that has been improving though is my ability to recollect these things even after falling back asleep, as usually that's enough to simply wipe my memory of it if I didn't write it down.
I was hanging out with this girl I used to know really well IRL (we haven't hung out in literal ages), and we were sitting on this outdoor park bench. Yet, half of the area was covered in what appeared to be a house. So it was like half outdoors, half house. I can't even find a good way to describe that, it was a sort of reality warp-ish type of dream scene, the kind your dream self can understand just fine, but in real life you're like 'wtf'
Anyways, strange dream scene aside, we were sitting on this bench, a nice breeze blowing through, and just sort of happily people-watching. All of a sudden, she turns to me and nervously asks if I'd like to accompany her to her school's Snowball dance. Shocked, but pleasantly surprised, I happily accept. Almost immediately, in comes a lot of people I know and associate with this girl. They just begin walking by, mumbling their thoughts about that turn of events. Sorry if this one sounded bizarrely described, but that's cuz it really was sort of bizarre. It had a nice peaceful atmosphere, but a lot of weird stuff that you'd usually only notice upon waking (or maybe not, in the event of a successful DILD, which has yet to come. But that's okay!)
Anyways, sorry for the radio silence, and happy dreaming.