false awakening

Last night's dreams are pretty fragmented, but I figure since I'm fairly behind in my journaling I should get a move on.

To start, the first thing I remember is trying to get into a building of some sort but being hindered by a huge mob of snakes. It was me and one other person (maybe my girlfriend?) along with a huge golden retriever. We were trying to move the snakes with sticks, but eventually I ended up with a hatchet, so I just chopped them up. After a while I felt hopeless for some reason, like there was no way we'd ever make it through the snakes, so for whatever reason I just started sawing at the dog's leg with my hatchet. I soon realized that was ridiculous and cruel, so I stopped and hugged the dog while he ate the rest of the snakes.

I really honestly don't remember any sort of chronology for the rest of it. I do remember having several dreams within dreams, and for some reason I feel like I was trying to infiltrate someone else's dream (or maybe the dreams of multiple people, I don't know). At one point I ended up at my high school (which didn't look anything like my high school) for some sort of beginning-of-the-year orientation, even though I just graduated high school in May. I kept trying to figure out why I was required to be there, and I kept looking around for anyone I might know that had graduated with me to confirm that graduated seniors were actually supposed to be there, but I didn't find anyone. After I went through a bunch of hand-stamping and other weird shit (I did note that when the lady stamped my palm, it looked different every time I looked at it--I'm getting so close to a lucid dream but I can never remember to actually think that I'm dreaming, even if I notice things are ridiculous!), I started talking to a woman who was evidently the new leader of my "team" at the high school (right now we have a dean for half of the student body, then another dean for the other half, so I guess she was replacing one of them). She talked forever about absolutely nothing, and at one point a young man walked up and started making fun of her, saying I was only here for one thing: to see the ladies. At that point he very quickly drew a cartoonish girl on a piece of paper, and I smiled at him and walked into the cafeteria.

The tables were arranged in such a way that I think it was impossible to get to certain seats. It was set up like one of those impossible geometric shapes, like the endless staircase or the Möbius strip, so when I spotted my brother sitting at one of the tables and he waved at me (my brother's gonna be a junior in high school next year, so it made sense that he was at the orientation), I just jumped up on the tables and walked across them to get to him. I heard a female voice chastise me for it--when I looked to my left there was a girl yelling at me, but seeing as how she was still a student at the high school she was younger than me and I therefore didn't pay her any mind. Another dude started yelling at me for being an asshole to the girl, and I apologized, but I tried to explain to them that if I hadn't climbed over the tables I would had to go all the way around the cafeteria to get to that spot. They were still pissed and eventually I stopped talking to them. Also, for whatever reason, I had sunglasses on the whole time.

The next part was the last part. It made absolutely no sense, but that's because it was like a string of continual false-awakenings. I remember some sort of flood happening, but I don't know what that has to do with anything. All I can remember is that through all my fragmented dreams last night, I can remember feeling the presence of a certain being--a cat with a wizard's hat on it. He changes color depending on what dream I'm remembering him in, but he was always there last night. Finally my last dream consisted of me actually conversing with him in an entirely abandoned clearing surrounded by forest. We were on a brick-paved circular clearing and I was sitting in front of him. We were talking about whether or not I had proven myself capable of infiltrating other people's dreams for him, and I was really really desperate for him to consider me worthy. All I asked was, "Do you believe in me?" And he said yes. It was at that point though that I woke up at an earlier point in the dream where the flood was happening again. As I encountered people during that flood (my girlfriend included, I think--because at some point we had a conversation with her mother about our sex life, and I'm pretty sure her mother doesn't know that we HAVE sex life...yeah.), I laughed to myself, because none of them had any idea what was going on, but for me it unfolded exactly the way it had in my dream earlier, so I knew exactly what was going to happen. Then I had another false awakening and found myself with the cat again, and realized he'd tricked me. Still, I couldn't be angry because I realized he was just testing me to see if I was good enough to infiltrate dreams, and I'd just failed his test. I asked him if he stilled believed in me, and he said, "Of course I still believe in you."

I feel like that process might have repeated itself a few times...but finally at the end I was watching a movie with my girlfriend and two other people, a guy and a girl who were siblings that I didn't recognize, and as we watched the movie I realized that all the movie was was a replay of the flood from earlier. Before I realized that the siblings' mother would come in and out bringing us popcorn or whatever, but the instant I realized that I'd lived through the flood that we were watching, their mother came out in the form of a cat. And that's when I was sure of it--this cat is my dreamguide. The cat talked to me and the girl (not my girlfriend), but I don't remember what he said. Eventually I turned to face the girl and her eyes had become like cat eyes...and that's when I woke up.

It was pretty fragmented last night, but I got pretty close to lucidity I think.