lucid

Finally got lucid tonight! WBTB certainly is a miracle technique.

Last night I had a terrible time trying to sleep because I'm currently out of town staying in a hotel with my family. As such, I'm sharing a bed at the moment with my eleven-year-old brother, and he's quite...active when he sleeps. So I really didn't fall asleep very hard until he'd gotten out of bed.

Once I was asleep I know I was at a friend's house. He's the same friend from my first dream journal who sells weed, but this dream had nothing to do with that. I was staying at his house, which was unusual because I've never done that before, and I think he really needed me to leave (along with many other people who were also there) because either his parents were home and didn't want us there or they were going to be home very soon and wouldn't like that we were there. Either way, that's all I remember of that.

The only thing I remember of the dream after that is grabbing my ex-girlfriend by the sides of her face for some reason.

After that I was definitely walking through some very deep snow, and I was with a couple people, but they weren't anyone I know. I don't really know where we were going or what we were doing, but there were some very definite distances ingrained in my head for some reason (25 being one of them, but because I didn't think of any units I don't know if that was 25 feet, 25 meters, 25 miles...it was just 25). Whoever I was with wanted to return to wherever we'd come from, and I followed suit. That's probably about when my brother got out of bed and I was able to really fall asleep.

Before that though, my mother woke me up, so I was awake for a while. I was in sort of a vague sleep for a while, one where, if I tried to, I could easily shake myself awake, but I didn't want to because I was trying to visualize. I tried to visualize my dream guide from last night, the cat with the wizard's hat on, and it actually worked. I pictured myself in the same clearing with the same brick laid beneath me as when I met him last night, and he was suddenly there. We started walking through the forest that surrounded us and I think we were talking about a task he had for me to do. Eventually we came upon a house in which he said was someone whose dreams I had to infiltrate. Somehow this was supposed to increase my ability to control my own dreams, but I wasn't sure how. Either way, I trusted him, and I climbed the hill next to the house and dropped in through a hole in the roof. What I came upon inside wasn't another person, but actually myself. A direct copy of me. I think we talked a little, but I don't remember what was said, because soon after we broke into a fistfight. It wasn't a particularly drawn out fight, and eventually I pinned my other self on the ground and punched him in the face a few times. It was then that I understood: My dream guide was having me break into my own mind, break through my own mental blocks in order to achieve lucidity. So I gave my other self a headbutt and felt myself literally melt into him. Our dreams became one, and I fell deeper into the dream.

The next thing I remember is being with the character Banjo from the N64 game Banjo-Kazooie, if any of you are familiar with that. We were in somewhat of a secret corridor I guess, and we were trying to figure out how to get into the next room without alerting the guards. I immediately realized Banjo could shoot eggs from his mouth (even though Kazooie is the one who can in the games) and for some reason thought that if I squeezed one of Banjo's boobs (which he doesn't have, because he's a dude) it would shoot the eggs out. So we were trying to aim at the guards and were preparing to shoot when we both realized that Kazooie, Banjo's bird friend, was in the next room anyway and could probably take care of the guards herself. So I continued on, but Banjo didn't follow me.

I found myself at the top of a fairly long staircase. At the bottom was my girlfriend, and I ran down to see her. She was evidently upset because she was at an orientation of sorts for a biology class that she was going to take and she thought it was stupid I guess. We were in a dark room. I remember seeing another young lady whom I recognized from high school, but I don't remember who it was. I think her boyfriend was there too but I don't exactly remember...regardless, I eventually found myself sitting in a nice cushy chair when my old physics teacher came in, saying that he was the one that was giving the orientation because Mrs. Hoikka, the actual teacher of the class, wasn't able to make it, and since he also had experience teaching biology she had asked him to cover. I think I stood up at that point and that's about when I realized I had induced this dream myself. I had a brief conversation with him. I think he was talking about some of his gripes with the government for some reason, probably in relation to state benchmarks that he was required to teach that he didn't think were necessarily important. I achieved a growing level of lucidity as the conversation progressed, and eventually I started to feel the dream breakdown. I tried to think of how to stabilize it, remembering that spinning in circles was supposed to help keep things intact, but I remember thinking that that would probably seem weird to my teacher, so I didn't try it. Unfortunately I should have, because the dream broke down completely after that and I woke up.

Regardless, I finally attained lucidity, so I'm happy about that.

Very few of my dreams are memorable from last night except one from later in the morning due to some WBTB goodness, though I still didn't achieve lucidity because I'm terrible at identifying dreamsigns.

To start there was a very bizarre dream about me having a son. My girlfriend was suddenly very pregnant, and what was funny was that early on in the dream she told me it would still be a while before she had the baby. Regardless, next thing I knew she was in labor, but we jumped there rather than like her water breaking and me driving her to the hospital like you'd think. That was one sign that I was dreaming, but I didn't listen yet again. Either way, I laid down beside her while the baby came out, and the scene jumped to me with the baby on a bed. My girlfriend was suddenly out of the picture, and I was sitting with this baby trying to figure out why it was a Japanese baby. The baby was able to talk some very basic English, and at one point he told me it had been eight days since he was born. I remember feeling bad that I was sort of forcing English on a Japanese baby and wished I knew Japanese so I could expose him to what his native language should be, yet the whole time I didn't think about why in the hell a redhead and a white boy made an Asian baby. I keep missing dreamsigns.

I don't really remember the rest of that dream, and after that it jumped ahead to a totally unrelated scene.

I was in a car with a few people. One was a girl I knew a long time ago when I attended a high school in Minnesota, so that should have been my first sign that I was dreaming, but again, I didn't follow it. We were in the backseat of a car with Michael Caine (the actor), whom I believed was her grandfather (go figure). Driving was my girlfriend's cousin, whom I believed to be the Minnesotan girl's sister. In the front passenger's seat was a man whose face I didn't see, but I assumed it was the Minnesotan girl's father. I've met her father before so I should have seen his face. Basically every single one of those people was a dreamsign that I missed. I need to get better at that.

I don't really know where we were going. I have a feeling that all of those people were in my dreams from earlier in the night and we were on some kind of trip, but I don't know to where. At one point we were driving over a bridge with a bunch of rocks around the base of one side, and on those rocks by the shore of the body of water we were crossing I saw a Vaporeon (yes, the Pokemon), but I convinced myself I was seeing things. What I should have convinced myself of was that I was dreaming.

A little before that we stopped at a store that was closed, but for some reason the girl I knew from Minnesota was able to knock on the glass door and get let in to buy some chocolate. I did the same thing, walking in to a closed store and asking the man at the desk if I could get some chocolate. He nodded kindly and I went looking for M&Ms. Unfortunately, all I could find were huge boxes shaped like Hershey's Kisses, which I assumed were filled with actual Hershey's Kisses, but I remember thinking that since I was going to get the chocolate for free I should get a smaller thing. After a while I settled on a box of Hershey's bars, but they were oddly shaped, and when I got to the counter the woman there charged me anyway: $1.54 for the chocolate. As I was buying it the man who had let me in originally was talking to the female cashier as she got my change, and I think he was talking about how tired he was, probably from the day's shift. They talked briefly about another man whom I assumed worked there as well whose wife was pregnant, and for some reason they expressed concern for this man. It seems that the man they spoke of also had some marital issues, because the man who had let me in said, "Oh, are they still together?" I turned to my left and saw a man walking down a corridor, and I instantly realized that this was the man they were talking about. I only saw half his face as he turned around and walked away. Then I got my change and left the store.

I got back into the car with the Minnesotan girl, Michael Caine (her grandfather), my girlfriend's cousin (the Minnesotan girl's sister), and the mysterious man in the front passenger seat, and we began driving. The Minnesotan girl's sister turned on some music as she drove: "Pieces of the Night" by Gin Blossoms. Since that's one of my favorite songs, I yelled to the Minnesotan girl beside me as I started eating my chocolate, "I love this song! I love this band! I love your sister!" As I continued eating and listening I realized that while the song sounded right, there were weird aspects to it. I tried to explain it away by saying that it was maybe a live version of the song that I'd never heard, but I don't think that explanation worked for me because the dream started to destabilize. I think that's the closest to lucidity I've gotten. It was the billionth dreamsign I encountered last night, and since I finally listened to the dreamsign and started to gain lucidity it started to break down. That's when I woke up.