Harlequin

Notes

• Sleep quality: so-so, I wanted to sleep longer but stayed in bed an hour without being able to fall back asleep.
• Sleep time(s): 11:30PM-4:15AM, 4:30AM-6:00AM
• Before bed activity: watched an episode of Jury Duty
• Goals or intentions: remember a full non-lucid dream (pretty much got that one) and/or have another lucid dream to continue the competition tasks (not tonight)

Construction site*

• Awakening time: 4:15AM
• Level of detail: fragment
• Lucidity: nonlucid

I'm driving a piece of machinery around a construction site. There is terrazzo floor in different colored sections.

At some point I meet up with a group of people sorting little bags. I go up to a woman who has two different bags, each comes in brown and in purple. We both agree she shouldn't take the same color of each bag, because the dye is actually slightly different and they don't match so well, I suggest she should mix and match them but she doesn't seem too thrilled.

At some point someone tears aside a square in a white piece of paper in the sky and a giant eye peers out, the people are hiding from it.

I see a large pigeon trying to balance on the peak of a portico.

Through closets**

• Awakening time: 6:00AM
• Before the dream: reflected on my usual resolution to remember dreams as I was disappointed by not remembering the last.
• Level of detail: detailed
• Lucidity: nonlucid
• General mood: uncertainty

Stage and Russian men

I'm at a hotel for an event like a conference. It's almost time for me to go on stage with a group of other women. The stage is in a brownish candlelit room, with tall antique-looking windows behind it. It's dark outside and the place where the audience sits is also dark. I'm not ready for our show - I have to put on a costume which includes a dress and high-heeled shoes. The others are kind of annoyed at me, but I promise to be quick. I remember there was also a pill I was supposed to take that they haven't given me yet, but I think I'll wait until later to ask.

First I run to large, dim, and low-ceilinged room off of side hallway. There are at least two guys in hazmat suits cleaning the room, and I seem to remember they are Russian (maybe we spoke in Russian? don't remember exactly). They let me go in quickly, I think I should have left a bag of my clothing in this room, and find one near a back corner underneath a grand piano.

Now I need a place to look through the bag and get changed. Using a stairway that branches off stage right, I go upstairs. The stairway goes around the outside of a huge rectangular room, and I kind of float up the steps. Going up, I notice the hotel looks more like an IKEA or similar store, like with the cafeteria part.

Football fans and new hotel room

The upper floor is mobbed with football fans in jerseys. There is a big game and the fans of the two teams are both staying in this hotel, each team's fans have taken over half of the floor. The colors remind me of the Pittsburgh Steelers and the New York Jets, but those aren't the team names in the dream. I pass through the crowd of fans in white shirts to the green shirt side and find a doorway to go in that I decide will be my room.

When I get in, it's just a closet, like the size of a bathroom stall. I close my eyes and try to change it to a full room - nothing happens. I close my eyes again, push my arms and legs against the walls, trying to make it bigger - again not much success. I think on the third try, I visualize the space and the furniture that should be in the room, and it works. I'm now in a pretty large hotel room, with at least three beds and other rooms branching off. There are even some other dream characters in it, including an older woman who is sitting on a bed near the front, and the atmosphere is somewhat chaotic, like they are getting ready for this imminent show too.

Closet search with A.

I go to a twin-size bed at the back of the room by two wooden wardrobe closets, where I find my suitcase on the floor. A. is also there, sitting on the bed. I ask him to help me find a dress to wear. There's nothing suitable in my suitcase, so we have to look through closets. This proves difficult. For example, one closet we try is not a closet but just a door hanging on the wall. Another looks promising, but it is blocked off by an ironing board with an iron that the older woman left plugged in. A. goes over to the older woman to ask why she did that and what's going on. From there, we see a closet nearer the front of the room, which we enter.

The closet is the size of a small bedroom and looks like an attic - unfinished wooden frame walls with exposed insulation, boxes of random stuff, and so on. There's another disused bed in there as well. I see two birds - one is something like a robin or a crow, the other is like a duck or a goose.

Since A.' favorite color is black, I find a black silk Edwardian style dress. He says he likes it but he prefers me wearing colorful things. I also remember feeling some padding in the chest that doesn't suit me. I kind of construct another dress in my mind, a 1970s Americana style one that I think is "quilting" themed. It's red with yellow buttons and I wear bright blue shoes like sneakers with thick white soles.

Bank transfers

I go downstairs (transition unclear) and I'm sitting at a table with X., with W. and D. and V. (?) at a table next to us. It's implied that more of our family is there. The tables are white plastic with attached chairs, the walls are yellowy and the room has flourescent lighting, it looks like a diner or cafeteria. For some reason I have to transfer money out of my bank account, that's coming in irregular payments of 8 dollars and change. Using a mobile app, I'm transferring it all to W.'s account one payment by one payment, I say because he's the only person I know with an account at the same bank. D. sees what I'm doing and starts cracking up, saying it's a dumb idea, and I realize it really is.

Side Notes

*When I first woke up, I thought of this dream then for some reason thought "Oh, I already wrote that one down, what was I just dreaming about?" I did not actually have it written down, and searching for this other nonexistent dream made my recall of this one very bad, hah.

**This dream was pretty interesting. Like the one I had a few nights ago, I was not lucid at all, yet I was conscious that I could manipulate reality and did so. I knew that my expectations and wants would affect what I saw around me. And in this one even, I tried multiple times when it didn't turn out as expected.

Color Code
Dark Green = Lucid
Brown = Partially Lucid
Anything else is nonlucid

Notes

• Sleep quality: alright, had some trouble falling asleep and also just felt ready to get up with less than seven hours sleep.
• Sleep time(s): 12:00AM - 4:15AM, 5:00AM - 5:45AM, 6:00 or 6:15AM - 7:00AM
• Before bed activity: was falling asleep downstairs watching tv then of course felt more awake in bed (classic old person move). As I laid in bed, I tried to focus on clearing my mind and my intention to remember my dreams.
• Goals or intentions: At some points throughout the day I would think "I look forward to having a lucid dream tonight." If I was lucid, I intended to try working the DreamViews summer competition three step tasks since I hadn't done so yet.

In bed with Typhon

• Awakening time: 5:45AM
• Before the dream: I remembered nothing about the previous dream when I woke a little after 4, thinking it was pretty late, I made a mental note to check the DreamViews competition rules of what to do when you have no dream to report. I got up briefly and saw the full moon blazing through the blinds. Strangely, I heard a group of people outside, not too far away, yelling (it was actual people because I heard talking at different volumes, it wasn't like foxes screaming). Lying in bed I didn't feel drowsy at all. Actually I felt extremely horny. But I realized I should really try to get some sleep. I changed my focus from remembering dreams at all to just sleeping, reassuring myself "there's still plenty of time until morning, and even if it doesn't work now it's okay, I can even take a nap in the afternoon." I think I was kind of remembering working overnight jobs and how even getting four peaceful hours of sleep is much better than that.
• Level of detail: #detailed
• Lucidity: #nonlucid (very briefly) to #lucid (DILD)
• General mood: exhilarated

I'm lying in bed, not sleeping.* Dad calls me to go out to help on an overnight job. I get up and I'm about to go, then stop myself like "fuck that, I want to try sleeping a bit more." I lie down again, but on the opposite side from usual. The blinds are up and the moonlight through the windows is bright, otherwise the sky is pitch black.

All of a sudden, Masha runs away, and I see/feel something moving fast under my covers. I feel a presence and know that I'm dreaming and Typhon is there.[1] I'm happy to see him, as I was remembering that previous dream before sleeping. We are holding each other again and there is more movement than the last time - we are floating and twisting around the room, I feel the movement of the sheets and blanket. Though I don't see him, I do keep some vision this time, see the outlines of furniture and walls in the dark bedroom from different angles. The angles are changing almost kaleidoscopically, with one of us simultaneously before and behind the other. And this time there is no penetration, just stimulation. I feel his face blindly with my left hand - his lips which catch under my fingers, his cheek, his closed eyelid and eyebrow. I run my fingers through his chin-length hair. Under my hand his head seems to shrink in size, like a doll's head.

Then I realize, "wait I should stop, I can just be horny when I'm awake anyway, let's try some dreaming-things." I defocus my eyes more and see a faint outline of white chairs appear in the center of my bed, but they dissipate. Then I try making a rhyming spell (which I forget now) to enter a dream. I feel myself floating, lifted by my ankles, to be dropped down headfirst into the dream.

Then the garbage truck and train horn wake me up.

Brief neighborhood excursion

• Awakening time: 7:00AM
• Before the dream: I was pretty annoyed about the trucks, though I was pleasantly surprised to have at least some kind of lucid dream even though it was interrupted. I considered just getting up but decided to lay down for a few minutes more. I was thinking some nonsense thought about moving from my left brain to my right brain, but another truck came down the street so I was trying to hold onto the thought while "retreating" from all the noise and I think that's when I fell asleep.
• Level of detail: #detailed
• Lucidity: #lucid (WILD)
• General mood: calm

I'm in my bedroom with the windows fully open on a sunny morning.[2] I get up easily** and walk around the room a bit. I want to go somewhere or see something dream-like, so I try summoning a dream character then a scene by saying rhymes and opening the closet doors. However, it doesn't work, it's just my closet. Thinking I might not have much time, I decide to just work on staying calm and stable, and maybe the three-step task for the competition.

I decide to go out on foot. However, I have the feeling going through the house might be a bad idea. I go to the front window, open it, and lift the screen, then slide onto the roof and down to the edge. I repeat to myself a few times, "I will float gently down," then close my eyes and jump off the edge. Closing my eyes was not a good idea - at first I start falling too fast and too long for this not-very-high roof. I see the back of my waking-life eyelids, but return to the dream by "retreating."***[3] When I come back, I'm falling more slowly. First my fingertips touch the rough concrete walk, then I gently land, crouching on my feet.

The neighborhood looks pretty much as it does in waking life. I got some of the tree types wrong, and there are people walking in the street, but otherwise nothing seems unusual. Cars and garbage trucks are passing in the street every so often. The morning light looks almost like the light before or after a thunder storm, when the sky is bruised gray but there is strong golden sunlight coming at an angle. The kind of light where you might see a rainbow. Overall the scene feels very peaceful and quiet, with the sounds muted. The air is cool and pleasant.

The first part of my three-step task is becoming invulnerable. I say to myself a few times, "I am invulnerable, I can get hit by this car" and try to step in front of different vehicles on my street, but they all swerve out of the way. I cross the street and walk to the corner at the bottom of the hill. There's a pine tree by the blue house there that is not there in waking life, and a family with children is walking by in the street. I decide to try flying a bit since falling wasn't so bad. Again by talking to myself, I float gently up through the tree branches, and look down at the street and around at the neighborhood.[4] I don't go very high, maybe about the height of the top of the hill or the trees. I'm impressed by how my brain can store or construct all these different views of my neighborhood and how detailed they are. I float back down gently. Somewhere in this rise and fall, I saw the back of my eyelids again, but again was able to retreat back into my dream-eyes.

I walk up to the top of the hill by the four-way stop, repeating my invulnerability mantra. I remember how people like to speed around here and see a few of those, but by the time I get up they're gone. I do manage to catch a guy making a left in a red hatchback, jumping in front of him. He hits me and it doesn't hurt, I just kind of get pushed down the road. But he's also going less than 25 miles per hour, so I'm not sure that counts for the task.[5]

My vision fades for the last time and I wake up, this time I'm not successful at returning.

Side Notes

Before I got up, I was thinking how these dreams are not very exciting, but I think it's good lucid dreaming practice for me. The whole reason I chose invulnerability as the first step of the three-step task for the competition was how often I find myself in chase scenes, and I had none of that. I didn't see anything really out of the ordinary, but my visualization is so much stronger and different than while awake, even on mundane things. I do wish the first wasn't interrupted because it did feel like I was on the brink of a full scene change, but oh well, that will be next time.

Also... I got into a WILD by accident. I thought I could never do that on purpose even. So that is cool to know.

*On DreamViews the other day Meiseki quoted me writing "false non-awakening" and I was like huh, on second thought that phrase does not mean what I wanted it to mean! I think actually non-awakening would be like continuing sleeping, this is like I dream I'm in bed and never fell asleep at all. Maybe "false sleeplessness" is better.

**Other times I've had trouble getting up in dreams. I don't know what was different this time. Maybe I just didn't think about it?

***Hopefully I don't forget how to do this, but I will try describing it. It's like I can either go forward or backward. Forward is how I would focus in waking life, working my eyes to see something in the distance better. Instead I go backward, like I'm giving up my eyes, and taking my consciousness out of my forehead completely.

Summer Competition 2023

[1] First DILD of the Night - 10 points
[2] First WILD of the Night - 10 points
[3] Reality Check / Stabilization - 1 point
[4] Fly or Change Gravity (depending on interpretation, it's one of those) - 5 points
[5] MAYBE? Gain Invulnerability - 5 points

Notes

• Sleep quality: fine, I got a normal amount of sleep or even more than usual, but I think due to geting to bed later than normal I feel kind of out of it or tired this morning.
• Sleep time(s): 1:00AM - 4:30AM, 5:00AM - 7:30AM, 7:45AM-8:45AM
• Before bed activity: was watching a movie from the 1960s. The plot and the acting were mediocre, but it was the kind of thing hard to look away because of the strange costumes and situation, just thinking how much the world has changed and how once this must have been the "cutting edge" and what was fashionable. Listened to a little bit of Opthalamia in bed before passing out.
• Goals or intentions: I thought it would be nice to have better recall and lucid dream again for the challenge but was too tired to productively focus on anything.

Building a neighborhood*

• Awakening time: 4:30AM
• Level of detail: fragment
• Lucidity: nonlucid
• General mood: upset and emotional but then more curious

Destroyed banjo

X's car is parked in the street outside of mom's house, and I'm helping him pack up the trunk with mom's fiance. There are a few heavier suitcases and I have my banjo. X also has a banjo. It's in a case, but I can tell from the weight that it's probably a four-string banjo with no resonator. Evidently, mom's fiance gave this to X as a gift.

I'm trying to pack things up slowly and carefully, putting the heavier items on the bottom. On the other hand mom's fiance is in a rush and throwing things into the trunk with no regard. He breaks X's banjo, then goes on smashing it until it's completely destroyed.

Mom joins us and we are driving somewhere. I'm very upset and trying to explain to mom what happened, it's not just the destroyed banjo that bothers me but his attitude toward it. However, she's siding with him and they don't think anything is wrong.

Street construction

We continue driving. Both X and I want to get out of there. I think X is planning to go to an amusement park with some friends, and I consider going but think there won't be a place for me. Instead, I think I should spend the night at R's. I now have the feeling we are teenagers and I'm going to hide out at his house.

As we drive, I decide where the streets should go in my mind to build R's neighborhood. I don't get it right at first, but as I correct myself the vision changes and we are driving through it. However, mom's fiance won't stop the car for me to get out. As we are driving up a steep incline, I open the door and roll out onto the street. I stay calm, and everything happens slowly and easily - I tumble out, then get my balance to stand and walk down the hill. I hear/see the others in the car saying "wow, she's not just rolling down the hill, she's walking!" and then they are gone.

The neighborhood and house I've constructed are strange. The rows of streets remind me of aisles in a supermarket, so it becomes partially a supermarket. R's house is somehow part of the neighborhood and simultaneously the neighborhood itself, so it's like both inside and outside.

Friends and neighbors

I arrive in R's house, and there is a group of people there, including A, and some of T's friends.

Though surprised, I'm happy to see A but also very emotional and crying. I'm telling him that I'm there to spend the night at R's. He seems jealous and/or confused, so I'm trying to explain to him that R is gay and also R and I are teenagers so chronologically this is before A and I even met.

There's a plastic box divided into at least six sections, each with a pair of glasses. They belong to our ex-boyfriends and girlfriends. I'm trying them on, but all the ones I try are too small for me and/or the prescription is wrong.

I experience false memories of growing up in this neighborhood with R, I suppose I'm telling them to A. In one of the houses whose backyard faces his, there is a family (either Italian or Indian) whose daughters would go out rollerblading topless. The town authorities decided that it was their right to do so, and shut down the street at certain times so they could go out without people coming and staring.

One of R's next-door neighbors is an Eastern European man who is openly abusive to his family. After reflecting on his story A and I decide he's irredeemable. We twist wires into a noose and hang him, trying to make it look like suicide.

Then, because like I said the house/neighborhood is a supermarket, I go back through the freezer section and hide on the loading dock (this part of the dream is kind of in third person). I think the police should be coming soon, and I see flashing police lights through the front glass of the supermarket. I wait awhile and come out front and tell the officer I was just out getting some peace and quiet and have no idea what happened.

Mothers

• Awakening time: 7:30AM
• Before the dream: tried reaffirming "I remember my dreams because it's easy/natural for me" and visualizing myself remembering as much of a dream as possible.
• Level of detail: fragment
• Lucidity: nonlucid
• General mood: confused, flustered

I'm in California with A and our families as well as some unfamiliar people. The house is pretty tight, it has concrete floors and wooden furniture/cabinets. The downstairs rooms are squeezed on either side of a central staircase.

Some of the California people I don't know send him to drive to a special supermarket in Colorado to get sushi and ice for a party. He calls me on the way and we have what feels like a pretty long conversation (which I don't remember now). I'm talking on the phone with my mom sitting at the kitchen table. When I hang up I say "I love you" and she thinks I'm talking to her then realizes on the phone, and I have the feeling of being "found out," somewhat nervous, like she'll tell me we just started dating and it's too soon.

Later I'm upstairs and someone else is on the phone with their mother. I'm going downstairs, and the mother hears my steps and the stairs creaking, and asks frantically "who's leaving? Where are they going?"

Down in the kitchen A has returned. I have a false memory of him telling me that "paint water" is a cure for many physical and mental illnesses, and his mom always tries to push it on him but won't drink it herself. I see her now washing different-colored paint out of palettes and into bottles in a sink. It blends into gray water with little flecks of colors. He's trying to convince her to drink some.

Games and desert motel

• Awakening time: 8:45AM
• Before the dream: had to run downstairs to use the bathroom, then focused again on "remembering my dreams is easy" because "I'm grounded/solid/active in my dreams" and thought of the possibility of being lucid. However, I fell asleep again very quickly. At first I didn't even realize I'd fallen asleep again until I noticed the strange thought from the dream-end in my head.
• Level of detail: fragment
• Lucidity: nonlucid
• General mood: concerned, happier towards end

Video games

I'm playing video games with X. It's an unfamiliar black controller with two joysticks and four buttons around the left joystick are named V B J K.

First we are playing a game where we make a character move around an environment that looks like a cave or a castle dungeon, mostly brown and rocky. There is a limited time for the character to collect as many coins as possible by running through them. However, you can add time by running through cats with have an amount of time (in seconds) floating above their head. To help the player, the cats with higher amounts of time wear crowns, and the more time they have the more fancy and celestial-looking their crown is.

X is telling me which of the V B J K buttons to press, but I keep accidentally hitting the wrong one and sending us back to the game menu. X is getting annoyed but saying "at least my progress is saved, you almost erased it." There was something about him getting to take out a boss in the next level, I remember the boss being something like an 1800s man in black coattails driving a black horse and carriage filled with firewood. I'm annoyed at myself too for messing up the buttons and nervous to hit the wrong one and erase his progress.

The scene changes to a different game, where I'm no longer observing a character but instead in full-body. We're in an SUV about to go to the Tappan Zee bridge (in the dream it looks more like the Throgs Neck or something, a single span with one or two lanes each direction and a concrete central barrier, but I think it's Tappan Zee because I see road signs for 87 and 9W).

I'm in the front passenger seat, and I'll have to take over driving. We're at a red light. I realize I'm barefoot and my sandals are on the floor, and I take time ot carefully put them on. The light turns green and I feel stupid because I realize I should have first gotten into the driver seat. Now the car is moving and I have to crawl over the central console while trying to steer, and then reach the gas pedal. It's even harder because we're at a place where the thruway south branches off from north, and I almost lead us on the wrong turn.

From my sloppy driving the car crashes (slowly) into the central barrier of the bridge. When this happens, I see a pop-up that tells me I have more tries left so I feel like I "dodged a bullet" and clear the menu quickly to start driving again, hoping no one noticed my bad moves.

Desert motel

I'm at a motel in the desert with a group of people I don't recognize. The ground is orange with blowing sand and the sky is twilight gray. There is highway with a median and two lanes going in either direction. It is implied that the motel is on either side of the highway and the office is in the median. We're staying in the part on the west side of the highway.

At some point we are out sitting at a picnic table. We're looking at the Instagram of a young woman in the group. Another woman is telling me it's suspicious that she's friends with a certain guy. His name is Jack Scherter and I try to search him online. I spell his name wrong because I get the Latin alphabet mixed up with the Cyrillic alphabet (writing something like Werter), and I only get one search result, a hate-post on a musician's blog. The blogger writes that the guy sold vape/tobacco products targeting musicians, and also that he is strongly anti-vaccine, and all musicians hate him. The woman I'm with tells me he's now like an internet personality and uses the pseudonym Jack Squirt and imports random products. I'm trying to think if I know him, and I'm concerned for the young woman.

Later we were on the east side of the highway, and crossing back to our side. I see a man in an SUV making a left turn and I think we speak through the windshield. I also think earlier I had said something about Victor.

As we're crossing I hear from the office that V is looking for it. I say "Oh no, not him!" (playfully) because I'm thinking of V the cat. But instead, when he arrives at the parking lot where we are hanging out, I see it's V the person, and I'm actually quite happy to see him. We have Chinese takeout in the parking lot, I think it is beef sauteed with broccoli. V asks what I ordered but I can't answer because I'm chewing and I feel broccoli stuck in my teeth.

Side Notes

Today, I remembered only fragments. However, recalling them seemed much easier than past nights. They bubbled to the surface immediately when I awoke, which I hadn't experienced in many nights. Next to work more on remembering the full dream, if possible. I think I should focus more clearly on my intention to be solid/grounded/aware in dreams, because for me I think this contributes to both better recall and lucidity, the two go hand in hand.

*This dream was fully nonlucid, but it was mainly first person, and I had the distinct sense of deciding what should happen or what I expected to happen. It was interesting.

Color Code
Dark Green = Lucid
Brown = Partially Lucid
Anything else is nonlucid

Notes

• Sleep quality: pretty good though interrupted a few times. Stayed in bed for an hour after waking up thinking I might sleep more, but there was too much activity in the neighborhood (the house construction was not so bad, but when the leafblowers began I knew it was over for me).
• Sleep time(s): 11:00PM-(?)-1:30AM [woken by cat but didn't check time], 1:45AM-(?)-5:30AM [I think I woke up since the fragments I remember feel separate but didn't note time], 6:00AM-7:15AM
• Before bed activity: drawing (animation) while listening to black metal (Kyprian's Circle - The Nightwind Tunes demo), finishing a crossword puzzle, then doing some stretches to relax
• Goals or intentions: if I became lucid, I wanted to work more on stabilizing and changing scenes.

Architecture and spider fragments

• Awakening time: 5:30AM
• Before the dream: I didn't remember any dreams when I woke up, still made myself write a note in my phone since I think getting lazy with that might also negatively affect my recall. Had some water and tried to focus on remembering at least something of my next dream, doing the "fishing" visualization.
• Level of detail: #fragment
• Lucidity: #nonlucid
• General mood: a bit apprehensive but somehow entertained

Like I wrote above, I have the feeling these two fragments were from separate dreams. I didn't check my phone for the time or notes in between, I just remember waking up and reciting some keywords of the fragment to myself. So it //might// have been a false awakening, but it certainly did not feel like one (I was just where I had fallen asleep, it felt like I fell asleep rather than entering any strange situation, and the fragments have no connection).

Concrete house

I am in a forested area. There is a wide trail made of steps carved naturally into a large tan rock. With another woman, I am planning out the layout of a one-storey concrete house, and as we argue about what should go where, the house changes with our commands (like we're building it with our minds, we're not actually using the material with our hands). We have a disagreement about where the front door should go, if it should be in an alcove. She is also adamant that the eaves should **not** overhang around the whole house.

Dancing spider

I'm in the hallway upstairs at home. I see a black spider, a little smaller than my palm, with a kind of bright red bulb-shaped body that sticks straight up. It's lifting two legs and dancing, swaying the red body back and forth. Every few moves, it jumps a little closer to me, starting on the top step and moving into the hall. I'm a little freaked out so I go to hide in the bathroom.*

X. is in there shaving. I tell him about the spider and check that it hasn't crawled under the door - I think the space under the door is too small for it to crawl through.

Then another woman comes in with a plastic bag of chicken cutlets that she is marinating. She sits on the toilet and starts talking to us. I'm confused because I have no idea who she is.

Florida and the Void

• Awakening time: 7:15AM
• Before the dream: Again, tried to refocus on remembering dreams, telling myself that my dreams are important to me, but trying not to put too much pressure by recalling that I still benefit emotionally from them even if I don't remember them. Focusing on being active and grounded in dreams and experiencing them as real.
• Level of detail: #detailed
• Lucidity: mostly #nonlucid with #partiallucid to #lucid in the middle (DILD)
• General mood: curious, at first frustrated then calm after lucidity

Seeds, glasses, and marsh

I'm visiting my family in Florida, though the house I'm in isn't their waking-life house. It's like their house and neighborhood from waking life have expanded almost in a fractal pattern.

I'm walking around this huge house, as people are doing things in other rooms, and get to the kitchen. I remember the kitchen as blue and purple with flourescent lighting.

I see a purple plastic food dish on the counter, like a combination of a child's lunchbox (with different food sections) with a watercolor palette (many small sections). I think it's clean and grab a towel to dry it and put it away, then notice it was dirty and I was wiping some of the food away. I wonder if I should wash it, but it seems to be a lot of food, and I think maybe they wanted to save it. I shake it a bit to even out where I wiped the stuff away, and a bunch of chia seeds spill out of one section onto the counter. I wipe them up with my hands, feeling the fun and gritty texture.

Baby keeps stealing my glasses.** When I get them back, I notice that the screw holding the right arm on is loose. I ask if anyone has a glasses repair kit, and H. says yes, but I can't find a screwdriver in it. I ask L. and she gives me a regular screwdriver, which is too big.

Everyone is sitting around a table that is like a bed - the top is soft and the things on the table get lost in the covers. I push them around, finding jewelry hidden - necklaces, bracelets, and two rings. I give them to people and they discuss without me what belongs to whom.

I don't know exactly what makes me aware that I am dreaming, maybe the frustrating glasses situation or maybe the weird table, but I know now. I don't do any reality checks, and maybe because of that I feel "less" lucid than other times, and my memory does not feel as strong. That includes my memory of this dream for when I wake up, and also it seems my access to my previous memories within the dream is less than usual.

Once I know I'm dreaming, I casually walk out of the house and into the neighborhood. It's full of candy-colored Victorian gingerbread style mansions surrounded by pale yellow marsh grasses and connected by gray boardwalks. The sky above is gray but it's not raining (yet). I try to walk calmly. To reassure myself and keep from a chase scene developing, I make almost like a cut-scene where back at the house they're not sure where I am and don't know I've left.

Sex in the void

On the boardwalk, I call out loud for a dream guide from the void, who I will call Typhon.[1] This is more successful than my Kali attempt last night. I call a few times and enter darkness.

Actually, at first there is a filler image in one of my eyes. It's a nonsensical cartoon, mostly with blue and purple characters. I defocus my eyes to try and get it in both, but there's still a ring of blackness around it (like in previous dreams). Then I realize it's kind of like those TikToks where they edit in someone playing a mobile game below the main video because people can't even focus for like 30 seconds and think "wow that's bleak" and stop paying attention and don't see anything.

Anyway, while that's going on, first I feel my legs lifted and swaying side to side and my body lifted. We have sex while floating in this void - I feel his body pressing against my back and him penetrating me from behind. I reach back to feel his chest with my hands, and turn my head over my right shoulder so we kiss, first softly and then with tongue and teeth.

At points I feel I have trouble breathing. I move my head, either by shallowly waking up and forcing it or maybe convincing myself that I did (still not sure which - I was sleeping on my chest).

Then I feel this sudden pain and ask what's going on - and realize it's my cat in waking life jumping up onto my ass, and I'm feeling her nubby little paws. I definitely can't move enough to throw her off of me without completely waking up, so I try to dive further and immerse myself in the dream-sensations over the sensations on my body in bed. As a result, my lucidity fades.

Return to the marsh, with swords

Someone (one of my younger cousins?) comes into my room to call me away from my bed. I think something also comes through the window by my head? I go down and I'm back in the same place with the same people as before I was lucid. Typhon is there with me, but nobody else can see him.

Downstairs, there is a large room with multiple levels (connected by short flights of stairs) full of beds or sofas in nooks, with windows along one wall looking out on the marsh and the water. There is also another huge kitchen, with multiple rows of long counters, like a factory.

In the big kitchen, I hear M. and R. talking jovially about how they have to cut off the turkey neck before frying it because B. doesn't like how it gets gray and rubbery. Then the rest of the group starts ordering drinks and cocktails for the evening, and there's more chaos with people looking for each other and so on. I go outside and have to step into a marshy area for a family picture, standing behind X. and our grandmother sitting in an adirondack chair. I feel the mud and the hummocks of grass on my feet, how the ground sinks slightly beneath me, which is pleasant.

I have just a low level of lucidity, just remembering that I wanted to change this dream. I return to the big bed room, looking for Typhon and maybe to escape. While I've been away, Typhon has made me a weapon by sharpening the handle of a mop.

He is sitting on one of the sofas, and others come and sit next to him. He's still invisible to them, but I can feel him as I sit on top of him and he tells me that I have to use the mop-weapon.

I then see everyone else has two swords. Everyone's swords are of different kinds. Some are straight, some are scimitars, some are plain and others are made with pink resin and decorated with jewels. Everyone crosses their two swords to prepare for fighting.

I have to fight against a beautiful light-skinned black woman, with her hair styled in loops framing her face and ornate tattoos along her jaw. She has two swords made of wood. Somehow, with my mop, I manage to chip them away bit by bit, from the tip down to the hilt. When the blades are nearly gone, she tells me they're done and I can stop. But something tells me to keep going. As I cut away more, I see that she has a little blade hidden in each, like the blade of a razor or box cutter. So I keep hitting them until those too fall away.

Side Notes

I'm still having a lot of trouble recalling dreams, more than feels normal. They feel faraway when I wake up. Like comparing with my older entries my last dream is definitely detailed/full not a fragment, but feels patchy compared to others. Hopefully it comes back, maybe I should return to some of the meditation things I was doing to help before going away. It is annoying though, like there are traces but nothing I can put into words or pictures. Like the places I still remember from dreams from before I started dream-journalling.

*This evening, when I returned from walking in the storm and took a shower, a bunch of pieces of flowers fell out of my hair and all over the shower. Without my glasses I thought they were little spiders and got creeped out and started washing them all down the drain. Later I realized they were just plant pieces and I thought to myself "if this was a dream they'd be spiders."

**She kept doing this when I was visiting last week.

Summer Competition 2023

Remember a Non-Lucid Fragment - ½ point
First DILD of the Night - 10 points
[1] Basic Summoning - 5 points
+5 points if it is a fictional character from a book/movie/TV show/anime or Dream Guide

Notes

• Sleep quality: pretty good. It was nice and cool and breezy. I woke up earlier than I wanted, getting less than 6 hours sleep total, but didn't feel I could fall asleep again (maybe because I was used to getting this little sleep over the trip? I think I kind of psyched myself out not wanting to forget details of my dream, and knowing my alarm was coming in less than an hour too). I just laid in bed for an hour and let thoughts run through my head. So I'm kind of tired now and hope to go to bed earlier tonight. But also thankful to wake up and go to sleep somewhere peaceful.
• Sleep time(s): 11:30PM-(?)-3:45AM, 4:15AM-5:45AM [Sleep was interrupted some time in there by unusually loud sirens.]
• Before bed activity: took a shower, checked DreamViews to remind myself of the Summer Competition tasks, did some stretches and tried to calm my thoughts.
• Goals or intentions: My main goal was to remember a full dream, since I hadn't really done so while away. I thought it would be nice to try and become lucid for the Competition but I was careful not to emphasize this to myself too much, since it might mess with my main goal if I got too excited or fixated.

Through the Lighthouse

• Awakening time: 5:45AM
• Before the dream: When I woke at 3:45AM, I didn't remember any dreams, but I made a note in my phone to keep up the habit. As I went to the bathroom and got some water, I tried to keep redirecting my thoughts from "oh shit I don't even remember anything and it's already almost 4" to "I have plenty of time to sleep and I don't HAVE to remember anything anyway." When I laid down, I focused on //why// I should remember my dreams rather than just telling myself to remember them - that dreams are important to me for my emotions and memories, that I can easily remember my dreams (and know when I'm dreaming) as long as I am grounded and active in them. When I started thinking about other waking life stuff, I kind of "retreated" from it (like I'm in my head and I'm stepping back away from my eyeballs, is how I can describe it) and went back to those thoughts to fall asleep.
• Level of detail: #detailed
• Lucidity: #lucid (DILD)
• General mood: many strong emotions, mainly fear and admiration

False non-awakening with broccoli

I'm eating Chinese broccoli at a table with some other people, and I drop some on a red blanket that I have on my lap. (There are conversations that I don't remember now). I curl up on a couch with the blanket to get some sleep, and I want to throw it to the side and take a clean one (the white cat blanket that we have), I'm too tired to wash it now and I'll deal with it later, but it feels like an irresponsible thing to do.

Dad comes in - this is his house (does not resemble his waking-life house at all). He asks if I want to watch a movie with him and T. I check the clock and it's 9:30AM. I tell him no thanks, "I've been awake since 3:45AM and got really bad sleep all week, I really just want to rest in a quiet place." I start to tell him //why// I want so much to rest in a quiet place instead of with a movie on (because of all the people talking in the house on the trip last week non-stop), but then I see L. behind him in a kitchen and I don't want to seem ungrateful to her so I cut myself short.

False awakening & public bathroom

I wake up and start to write down my dream with the broccoli and dad. I check the time and it's 11:33AM. I close my eyes and think "No way, that's too late to have slept" then ask out loud "Is it really 11:33?" (I'm sure it's not and I'm dreaming). A dream-character confirms the time. When I open my eyes I'm in a public bathroom, laying down on a formica counter. Even though I'm sure I'm dreaming, I figure it's good practice to do a reality check so I push my feet against the metal bathroom stall wall next to me, expecting it to bend, but it stays firm. Oh well. I didn't really need the RC.

My vision kind of fades and I almost see the back of my eyelids but my vision returns (this happens throughout the dream, I lost track of how many times. At some points I feel my body in bed but push through until I can only feel the sensations from my dream-body). [1]

Lighthouse room

Now I'm in a dim room with reddish walls and a high ceiling. In the center, there is a round table, and on top of the table there is a black and white lighthouse that is maybe 6 or 7 feet tall. I keep returning to this room as a central point throughout the dream.

I can't decide what to work on as far as goals, so I try summoning a guide (with thoughts). Instead, I feel a negative presence in the room, at least two people who want to chase me. They also won't leave throughout the dream, I'll call them the (corrupt) dream-police.

Kali

There is a bit of a chase - I always have trouble remembering these kind of scenes since they flash through so many things and are high stress. I feel things are turning bad, though, and I want a reset.

So, I call out KALI, kind of like a petition to tear everything down and start over.[3]

I see myself sitting up in bed, with my face lit up. Except I have my hair in two braids rather than one as usual. The scene is in a cartoony or graphic style. I'm scared, especially scared to look into my own eyes, it seems like a dangerous thing to do.

I call KALI again and my "self" changes to a black dragon with eighteen heads.[4] The light becomes stronger until I can't see.

Then it's the back of my eyelids, then when I float back into the dream it's the lighthouse room again.

Pigs in a barn

The dream police are still in the room. So I float myself over the top of the lighthouse,[2] ask to go SOMEWHERE SAFE and drop down through the lighthouse.

I am now in a barn with sawdust on the floor. Tiny figurines of pigs wearing clothing sit in rows of chairs in the center of the room, and around all four walls. I laugh because they're adorable. As I look around more, I see humans mixed in as well, wearing similar outfits to the pigs.

One dream character is speaking to another, criticizing his choice of outfit - "If I'm dressing up as a pig, I need to have pink curly hair."

The longer I stay the less cozy it feels, the lighting seems to become colder and I'm bothered by barely anyone or anything moving.* I start to float up and out of the lighthouse again. Then halfway through, I wonder if I should have maybe tried to interact with one of the dream characters. I go back down and see Brian, a guy from some of my Russian literature classes at college. I try and go talk to him but he doesn't move at all. Then I remember and say out loud, "Oh right, you're just here because I saw you when I was cleaning out my contact book before" (I was doing that the evening before while awake). I leave again.

Final chase

When I get back to the lighthouse room, I try summoning a guide again. I kind of feel him with me, behind me and to my right, but can't see him. The dream police are there and chasing us again.

Again, the flash of scenes is unclear. At one point I try bringing us into the woods to crawl into the hollow of a tree. However, I can't find a break in the tree-bark. Then we are in a garage, and one of the dream-police has weapons. I try to shield myself by bringing a forcefield out from the center of my body, but I can't tell whether it works or not - the guy is not deterred, at the same time I'm not hurt, just vexed. I try to make him disappear by turning away from him, but he stays.

I let go of lucidity a bit, and watch as some people pack into a car into the garage and have a conversation. I feel I will be waking up soon, and just roll with it, getting back a bit of lucidity but stopping trying to control things.

Forest and stream

I feel myself falling through darkness. Then a shift and I am floating horizontally, backwards, under a cover of beautiful trees away from the bright yellow sun setting over a field. It is beautiful and I want to stay, but I keep floating away. Back behind the trees I see just blackness, and I'm scared again, but go through it.

I come to a stream, one bank on a green grassy field and the other covered in trees. I feel a presence with me, again a person that I don't see.

I see people wading in the stream, with friends and with dogs, and one group has a boombox playing an acoustic country (old style, not like country pop) version of the Christmas carol "Hark the Herald Angels Sing," despite it being clearly summertime. I don't mind the music. I start wading up the stream myself, and I'm just sobbing like a maniac because it's so beautiful. The water is very shallow, flowing over gray and gold pebbles, and throughout the stream I see fallen cut flowers - red, yellow, and other colors.

I notice the bottoms of my pant legs are getting wet - I briefly think, it's ok, this is a dream, they aren't really getting wet at all, then I remember/decide that I do like splashing around and getting wet, whether it's awake or dreaming. I'm enjoying the feeling of the cool water on my feet and legs.

Near the top of the stream, I see another dream. It starts to go past a building, then there is a beach boardwalk, and three dream characters hanging out there - they are young country musicians, one looking like a 1960s Dolly Parton, the others are a woman named Arlo and a man named Frog. But I feel I've been dreaming for hours (not really the case I found out) and it's time to wake up instead of going into another, so I float up and back into bed. My eyes are actually wet when I wake up.

Side Notes

*My sleeping mind being based and redpilled, safety is overrated and only for pigs.

This dream seemed more difficult to remember than my previous lucid dreams (not that I've had many. Maybe because I'm still pretty disoriented from traveling?

Summer Competition 2023

First DILD of the Night - 10 points
[1] Reality Check / Stabilization - 1 point
[2] Fly / Telekinesis / Change Gravity, should count for one of those depending on your definition - 5 points
[3] Basic Summoning or maybe just Unspecified Dream Control - 5 points
[4] Theme: Dragons - 5 points

Notes

• Sleep quality: sleeping in the office again. As with previous nights, not great - not much time, hot and stuffy in the room, but I was pleased that I was actually able to fall back asleep this morning for once!
• Sleep time(s): somewhere in 12:00AM-6:00AM, then 7:00AM-8:00AM
• Before bed activity: earlier in the night I went to the cemetary with M. and X., when we got back J. taught me how to play a Puerto Rican card game which is very like an Italian game I know - everyone else was too tired to play and we were up late.
• Goals or intentions: still given up on setting any during the trip.

Various Fragments

• Awakening time: 6:00AM
• Level of detail: #fragment
• Lucidity: #nonlucid
• General mood: none

Ocean and wedding

I float out of an old stone mansion into the air over a gray ocean. I'm flying up and down and skimming the waves. I realize I'm naked and other people are there - I think my hair should be enough to cover my chest but I "make" myself underwear for the bottom.

I float to an enclosure like a large version of the chicken coop, filled with people who are there for someone's wedding. Instead of dirt/dust, it's filled with rocks, and naturally carved steps lead down into the enclosure. A.S. and R. are there.

Inside, there is a tall structure of wooden decks connected with metal ladders, and I am climbing with some others, trying to find the highest point.

I had gifted someone a picture book about a city-state (I forget the name, but I remember the silhouette was shaped kind of like Maryland) and I point out where they can find some specific piece of information they wanted.

Cars and monster

I'm walking with a group on a rocky woods trail covered with snow, with houses fairly close together (like a suburb) on either side. We're knocking on doors looking for replacement car parts because some of ours were stolen.*

One of our group is a strange creature that looks like a Troll doll dressed up as Daphne from the Scooby Doo cartoons. I see her in a clearing, and shut my eyes as the Creature from the Black Lagoon jumps out from behind a stand of grass to grab her.**

Later, I'm making budgets with B. using crayons. I pick out a teal crayon and a pinkish one called AQUAMARINE RED.

Knife

I just remembered this in the car on the trip home.

I'm walking down the street in the town I'm visiting with my knife blade flipped out. Then I remember that they have ambiguous laws about carrying knives and think I'd better put it away, but I have trouble closing it.

I only realized this memory was a dream when I remembered I didn't bring my knife with me on the trip at all.

Birds and loud lucid

• Awakening time: 8:00AM
• Before the dream: got up to use the bathroom, for once did not get jumped by the big dog (only the cat), said hi to J. who was leaving, laid back down on the bed and tried to remember more of the fragments. I decided to just write down some keywords in my phone, even thought I was too tired to type them out in detail, and tried to reflect on them to reassure myself that my ability to recall dreams wasn't totally lost. I heard everyone getting up and talking and stuck my pillow over my head to muffle them a bit... and though it wasn't my intention I drifted off while doing this. They were talking loudly as usual, the dogs were barking, and the baby was also out playing for at least part of the time.
• Level of detail: I'll say #detailed since I cut it short myself
• Lucidity: #lucid (DILD)
• General mood: on edge

Packing and birds

I'm in the dining room at L. and M.'s packing up my suitcase and getting ready to leave. L. calls me into their bedroom to grab the comforters we brought since she just washed them.** I take one from her and there are two more on her bed - I'm not sure which is ours. I lift one up and say "this one must be yours, since it's too heavy for me."

When I go back out their house doesn't look like any house I know in waking life. There is a square deck made of pale tan wood, looking out on a gray leafless forest. Two sides of the deck are enclosed by glass walls of the house. It is a sunny day. M. calls me to one glass wall to look at the birds. "You see that one with the round body?" At first I see nothing, then I see a hummingbird's wings and body, but floating in separate places, not lined up. It's a brown bird with colorful spots. I think the misalignment is just that my eyes are crossed because I'm not wearing any glasses, and manage to turn my head so that the bird's head and body are attached right.

M. gets my attention again - "Look over at that one with the curved beak." I see it - "The woodcock!" It's actually in the house, on top of a bookshelf against the other glass wall, and it's with another animal (a frog?)

False awakening on futon

I wake up on the futon in the office, just like when I went to sleep except it's dark like the middle of the night with the lamp on. I'm happy about the bird dream because it's the first dream I've had all week that feels really like one of "my" dreams and not just a fragmented scramble of the day, and I'm excited to write it down. I try making notes on my iPad but people talking keep interrupting me.

I notice that it's an absurdly frustrating situation, and realize I must be dreaming. To confirm, I turn my iPad screen into a mirror.

I try manipulating the scene a bit - I go over to A. on the futon next to me, but he's laying upside down and his skin is unusually dark. I go back to where I was sleeping, and make a dark window at the head of the bed to drive through.

BUT I have second thoughts. First of all, I can hear everyone talking loudly in the next room, which makes it really hard for me to concentrate on what I want to do and how to do it. I also remember that I fell asleep with the pillow over my head and the air is stuffy, so I'm concerned about breathing. So I'm kind of debating, excited to be lucid but also feeling like it's not the best time. In the end, I decide to quit while I'm ahead and wake up.

Side Notes

*At dinner there was a conversation about stolen muscle cars.

**My nephews were talking about the Creature earlier.

***In waking life, we did not bring any blankets of our own on this trip (just sheets and towels).

I never really thought before about how my senses go into my dreams. I knew obviously about getting woken by loud noises, but this time it was like I could hear the constant conversation outside even while I was asleep. I'm sure it was also top of mind, because all week I've been falling asleep against the night-owls outside talking and waking up to the early-birds talking again so I'm in "fight or flight" with just wanting a quiet place to sleep. So even though I didn't do any interesting dream control I learned more about how important it is to have a quiet and undisturbed place.

Note for DreamViews: I will be transferring my notes about my dreams for the past weeks from my phone to my computer dream journal over the next few days, but won't fill them in here because it looks like I can't add entries on previous days and they're not interesting enough to spam. I have been away visiting my family and sleeping in some odd places. At one point, there were 12 people staying in the same (small) house, so it's been quite chaotic (in a good way!) and not conducive for dreams - not only did I have trouble sleeping, things were usually pretty loud when I woke up which made recalling and making notes more difficult as well! I also had alcohol on a few nights which is unusual for me, but I can't tell whether that messed with my dreaming any more than the rest of the situation did.

I also want to say, that traveling definitely affected my dreams. Because I was in weird situations and seeing unusual things all day long, a lot of stimulation. I often tried to notice things that seemed "dream-like," like really frustrating situations or weird written signs or sights. It feels to me like, because so much was happening, my sleeping mind didn't have much time to reflect as usual, and was just scrambling through processing the events of each day. I can link most of what I saw in my dreams to things that happened that day, which is not typical for me.

Notes

• Sleep quality: good, not too much difficulty falling asleep, only noticed one awakening
• Sleep time(s): 10:30PM - 4:45AM, 5:30AM - 6:30AM
• Before bed activity: drawing and listening to Trecento music... then I listened to part of the new Deathstars album in bed because it was stuck in my head.
• Goals or intentions: again my main goal was just to get a solid rest because we're traveling today and I probably will not sleep well at all while away next week.

Florida, lucid mazes and room-building

• Awakening time: 6:30AM
• Before the dream: I could barely remember my previous dream (one of those where when I "looked at it" it seemed to distintegrate). I was feeling a little down and also starting to get pessimistic about falling asleep as I heard the birds and saw it getting lighter. Then I thought "that's not worth getting upset about, I'm not a performing monkey to perform this same trick every night, I should just rest, and if I happen to have a dream and be aware of it that will be nice, but I don't need it." I fell asleep imagining A. and I going back to Florence and going to the San Marco monastery, and making up paintings that we might see on the walls.
• Level of detail:detailed
• Lucidity: about half #nonlucid and half #lucid (DILD)
• General mood: nonlucid part was kind of confused and annoyed, lucid part was fun/funny

Subtitle

X. and I are kids, we're on a trip with dad and coming back from being out somewhere to a tiny house with white walls where we are staying. I'm trying to figure out where I'm supposed to sleep. The back door is open, and I see little X. sitting out in a yard, wearing a coat, and laughing. Snow is blowing from outside into the room, I see it floating and dancing over the rug. I feel a chill. I tell X. snow is getting in the house, but he just keeps laughing, so I go over to close the door.

House party

After I turn around from closing the door, the situation has changed. I'm an adult now, and I'm in this house with A. and two others. I have a brief moment of thinking it's strange, but then I find that A. and I are sharing a full-size bed, so I get the sense that I found out what I was looking for.

Something happens in between in the day, but I forget. At night, the house gets bigger, and there's a party. Not the house itself, but the location, looks like our family friends M. & S.'s.

I'm walking on the sidewalk, up the hill and away from the party. I see pale yellow coral fungus with orange tips growing in a hole in a tree, but upside down. I call A. over to look. Then we walk back towards the house.

In a side yard, behind trash cans, two women are standing by a covered hot tub, talking about opening up. I notice someone scrawled REVOLTING COCKS in permanent marker on the hot tub cover, and I ask them "Did someone seriously do RevCo graffiti or am I hallucinating?" They tell me it's real and go back to their discussion. During the conversation, A. has slipped inside, so I go in to find him again.

When I get inside, I realize dad's extended family is there for a party, and I'm wondering why I haven't been in yet - I don't remember greeting any of them, so I feel awkward and wonder if I should say hello now. I see my aunt dancing - she has the same glasses as me, and I walk quickly to not talk to her. I get a bit held up in the kitchen with dad and his brother talking, and I wash my hands in the sink.

I find A. in the bathroom, which is in the center of the house with multiple doors and no windows. He seems upset about something but I can't tell what about. I think he's cold, and wonder why I'm not. I run hot water over my hands in the sink.

Map of the world

When I leave the bathoom, the situation changes again. Now I'm married to a woman I don't recognize. She's really into traveling, and she's sitting at a table with a few other people, showing them a world map with highlights on all the places we are going to travel on a very long journey. She's putting stickers on the map for each country. I tear up some stickers to use as tape to attach some different paper country silhouettes to the map.

I get scared, because I don't remember agreeing or planning to go on this trip (I know that as in waking life, I don't like traveling). As she's pointing to an island in Oceania (whose silhouette I don't remember from waking life), I tell her I'll definitely get seasick going there. She gives me a look, as if to say, "Why are you acting so strange?"

I know that she and her parents own a freemium map app for travelers. In reviews, people complain because the free version has many mistakes in the maps, and you have to subscribe for at least 5 dollars a month in order to get maps that are not misleading.

Scooter boys

I somehow get to leave, and I'm driving north toward home on the usual street. There are two guys on electric scooters in front of me, blocking off the entire lane. I slow down and shout, "Really?!" When they turn, I see they're just teenagers, so I figure I should be nicer. I just say, "I would be too scared to drive one of those on this street."

Lucidity on Florida Island

I blink, and I realize now I'm rocking back and forth. I'm laying on my stomach on a boat. I see B., her family, and A.M. We are approaching a barge covered in metal shipping containers of different colors. I ask them where we're going. They say, "Florida Island, have you ever been there?" I ask if A. is with us, and they tell me, "No, he had to stay behind."

The "island" is in the shipping containers. It's a multi-level maze-like construction, with flourescent lighting and almost no windows. It's also a kind of Christian retreat. I think we go to see a Christian performance, which I (thankfully) don't remember well. As we're leaving, walking up stairs, I'm distressed. I wonder what I'm doing here - how did A. get out of it but I have to go? How did I even get here? Then I remember that just before this I was driving home, and realizing I'm dreaming!

To confirm, I lean to reach a small stained glass window over the stairs. It's set deep in a recess, but I can just reach it with my fingertips. I drum my fingers on it, and realize the sound is not matching up with the feeling in my fingers, so I'm now certain this is a dream.

Once I'm certain and turn back around, people become fuzzy, and I have some trouble speaking as I say "This is a dream," but the scene stays and somehow resolves.

Search for phone service

Now that I'm lucid, I think it could be interesting to go to the monastery as I was thinking when I fell asleep. But I have to escape this hell-scape somehow, so I decide the best way would be to call A. Of course, I have no phone service, so I start walking quickly to find any place with a signal.

I realize that was rude, so I go back briefly to try and say "goodbye and nice to see you" to B., but when I go back her face has changed into a different dream character. Oh well. I continue wandering through the island.

I come into a library with blue walls and low shelves, where people are studying at tables. This place seems to be in a basement. I unlock my phone and I can't find the phone or contact apps, so I use the voice assistant instead. She and I have a whole conversation.

"Call A."

"Some advice: don't try anything that goes too against your experience of reality."

"Okay, so that means I can't make phone calls in this room" (I'm thinking about how it's both underground and a library - bad place for cell phones)

"Exactly."

So I ask her to just open up A. in my contact list to use later when I find a signal. I continue wandering.

Auditions

I come into a place like a lecture hall or theather, with tiers of seats facing a whiteboard. There's a college-age white guy in a staff t-shirt standing up near the top, shuffling some papers around on a table. I ask him, "Do you know how I can get outside, or somewhere with cell service? I need to call my husband."

"Sorry, the auditions just ended! I just finished up the documents."

"I'm not auditioning for anything. I'm just trying to call my husband."

But he doesn't get it, and thinks I'm putting on a great performance. "You know what, go out to our main garden. Find Retreatmaster Bonnie. You tell her, 'We're revival singers, we're folk singers,' all that, then you launch into your thing. She'll love it."

I give up on him. I somehow have internet, and I search for Retreatmaster Bonnie - I find reviews of her "services" on some S&M website so I give up on her as a helpful source.

Salmon settlement

I continue walking. I'm a bit torn between hurrying to my "goal" and looking around more. I stop and look briefly - the place seems more like a school. I see a poster on the wall that says something like "Hey kids! Get FUCKED UP with STEM!" in cheery blue letters. I even get outside briefly, but no service still.

I step into a small room with rows of chairs. I come in behind a woman standing at the front of the room, writing with a red marker on a tall and narrow blackboard. She looks like my high school guidance counselor L. She is assembling the meeting for the SALMON SETTLEMENT - something about people who didn't get enough fish. The first two names on the list are both my cat, and I see my cat in the front row. When L. calls out her name, she gives an annoying smug meow, and L. instantly says "Settled! For 55 dollars" and crosses her name off the list. I think it's hilarious, and as a result I start to lose lucidity as L. continues through the list of names, whose demands become increasingly nonsensical. I finally snap out of it and leave the room.

Phone teleportation

I continue walking with my phone unlocked. For a second, I see two bars and 5G in the top corner and think YES! Finally! The contact is still open, but the letters are scrambling, so I just tell the voice assistant to call A.

When he picks up, he sounds exactly like T. I ask, "A. is that you?" He says yes, and laughing I tell him "you sound like T." He replies, "I look like T. too, but that's okay." So I reached the wrong person. Oh well, at least I got a phone call. I close my eyes and ask, "Can you help me get out of here? Can you bring me to where you are?" and he says, "I already did."

I have the sense of being somewhere else. I open my eyes and I'm falling through a tall room with wood-paneled walls. I close them again, and open them when I feel that I'm on ground.

Telekinetic redecoration

I'm in an empty house, alone. I know I've been dreaming for a while, so I figure I won't waste more time trying to get to a different location again, instead I think it will be fun to try and change the room by speaking commands.

Some things are easy to change. I say, "there should be bookshelves on these walls" and I see planks of wood sliding over and forming themselves into shelves.

Some things are not possible to change. I want a window in the wall, but it's like my brain can't decide what should be outside the window, even if it's day or night. So again, I don't want to waste time going down that rabbit hole, I turn around and go through a door behind me into a different room.

This room has vaulted ceilings and is decorated in a French rococo style with lots of blue and gold. I decide to try and make the style of this room overall simpler and more modern. I say the walls will be white, and it happens, but with some difficulty - it's like things in the room keep their shape but get repainted. The walls are white but there are still plaster decorations, the furniture keeps the same silhouettes but turns into neon-colored plastic, rearranging and swirling through the room.

I feel myself waking up, and just let it happen since I know this dream has gone on for a while and I think it will be pointless to struggle.

Notes

• Sleep quality: good!
• Sleep time(s): about 10:30PM - 7:00AM, with at least four awakenings I remember
• Before bed activity: drawing (animation) and listening to Trecento music
• Goals or intentions: A. reminded me before bed, "don't think about sleeping" (or dreaming). I decided I was just going to try and be as relaxed as possible to catch up on sleep. This meant not checking the clock or making any DJ notes in my phone.

Various fragments

Because I didn't write anything down, I don't know the timing of these fragments and I'm not quite sure which fit into the same dream. The earlier ones I am sure were separate, the others I am kind of grouping in the way I remembered them, all the last time I woke up. None of them were lucid.

Map game

This is what I remembered the first time I woke up.

I'm playing a game where one player gets a blank map of a random continent. S/he has to color in the "evil" countries" on the map then the other player has to guess the continent.* I get a map of Asia and color in North Korea in the colors of their flag.

City park mafia

This is what I remembered the second time I woke up.

After walking through a city in the late afternoon/evening, I arrive at a large modern glass and stone single-floor mansion in the middle of an urban park. Along with a white man around my age, I join a group of people in cocktail party attire. The man and I are one woman in the group's "plus two" for an exclusive party hosted by a suspicious group of wealthy and powerful people. We are here to spy on them, maybe as part of an official investigation.

The house is mostly dimly lit and the floors have dark stone tiles. I remember passing through a large open room with no furniture, just plants.

There are two women in particular working for the organization. There is a kind of haggard-looking middle-aged white woman with short blonde hair and blue eyes, and a well-dressed black woman who looks a bit younger. The two of them are rivals.

We sit at a table. My back is to a window, the sill is at the height of my shoulders. The window faces west and the sun is setting. The black woman directs me to roll my neck so my head hangs back, and the sun is in my eyes.

The man I came with is sitting to my right, at one end of the table. In the course of conversation, he makes a comment about how "some well-regarded people did very bad things, such as [names]" (he lists some people who are connected with the organization, who were under suspicion but never officially accused as the organization could cover things up). This reveals that he is an enemy to them, and he has to run, back the way we came.

Some people in charge turn on a forcefield to lock down the building. It turns on as the man is in the door, turning back and hesitating, maybe to see if I or another comrade is coming behind him. I see the forcefield as black oily drops on his clothing.

The scene cuts to two women in the back. At least one of them is accustomed to this sort of thing happening, because she's complaining about the lack of internet, "oh no, not this again." It seems that all they know is sometimes all the phone and internet service cuts out, they don't know about the part where they trap and kill people.

I see the pursued man's head pop up in a dry fountain outside the house.

They catch him, and everyone congregates in the open plant room. The two women are standing in the middle. The black woman asks the blond woman, "Are you Belinda?" and blond woman nods no. She then asks whether she's supposed to report to her (like a higher rank in the organization, I forget the exact wording) and she nods yes. They've come to an understanding now and they hug.

Dating drama

I'm younger and I'm dating three men at once. One of them is long distance, one of them I'm visiting for dinner. This one has a tiny dark brown kitten with deformed legs. I look at a picture he sent me of the kitten, then I look up and see the kitten itself on his kitchen counter.

This one is a male artist that I follow on Instagram in waking life. I briefly wonder if he got divorced, because I know in waking life he's married.** But he's pleasant and I'm sitting on his couch trying to think if I should break it off with the others, and if I have to tell him about the others at all.

Poem fraction game

I'm doing something like an IQ test. One activity is to "perform the multiplication and write a poem using the results." It's a product of fractions, but instead of numbers it's black silhouettes of animals. There's two lines for the answer, one in line with the numerators and the other with the denominators.

I think it should be easy - I see a seagull, a duck, a lioness. But they seem to keep changing and I'm not sure which ones cancel out. More distressingly, I can't tell what the first animal is. At first I think it's a horse, then it looks more like a monkey, or a seal.

Atavism

I'm looking at my face in a mirror, and I have hair growing up the sides of my nose. I'm wondering when that happened - I don't remember seeing it in pictures of myself. I push the hair back and forth to see if it's really growing, and try to figure out how I can remove it.

Texting A.

I'm in a bathroom that looks like the bathroom in the house at Little Ferry. I change or am contemplating changing A.'s name in my phone contacts to an emoji for his nickname (this emoji doesn't even exist in waking life). I send him a message to ask if I can come over today (we don't live together in the dream), he tells me to pack a bag and just stay.

British schools

I'm driving with the family in Newark. We're listening to KMFDM, which confuses me because nobody but me likes them. Somebody skips Juke Joint Jezebel which is distressing.

We pass by gigantic brick buildings behind a wrought-iron fence. They're to the right of the car, and I'm sitting in the backseat on the driver-side, so I can't even see the tops of the buildings past the roof of the car.

I understand these buildings are boarding schools, I see students in uniforms. A whole sequence of horse-drawn carriages races by behind the fence, apparently bringing school teams to sports games. One carriage reads JOHN CLEESE CHEESE SCHOOL. Another school is named for Julie Andrews. I kind of wish we could stop and see more of what these buildings are like, but we are driving by quickly.

Construction dinner party

I'm in an apartment in a building that has recently changed owners and is to be renovated. There are drop-cloths and tools around. It looks kind of like an office space - there's that crappy white floor tile, popcorn ceiling, lumpy white paint job on the walls like it's probably been many layers over the years. Some daytime construction workers are complaining about how people on the night-shift steal or destroy things. They show me that they put a padlock on a bag of green beans to protect them.

I'm here with A. My neighbor R. is there, and I think it's his apartment. There seems to be a dinner party going on. He continues talking about crime in the neighborhood. There's a man who looks like George Costanza, who buys cookies and gives them out to people on the streets. Ralph says this is a bad idea, at first I think because it makes him vulnerable to the criminals, but he says it's because people hate the cookies - they are completely plain/unflavored. In particular, there is one middle-aged white woman in a wheelchair who he always gives cookies to, but she crumbles them up in her fingers to avoid eating them.

The woman in the wheelchair is a guest at the party. She is having a great time talking to a charismatic young white guy with a beard and glasses. He works at a hospital, he is either a doctor or a therapist. They are so absorbed in their conversation that the rest of us leave without them noticing.

When I leave the room, I see at a smaller size, so I can pick it up in my hands. Felt fabric of different colors is pinned up over the walls on both sides. I want to attach it, but I don't have a needle or thread, so I try gluing it, but it doesn't stick together.

Now I'm back to human size. The group of us who left decide to go down to the lobby. Directly inside the apartment, there is a cylindrical chamber, that is somehow both stairs and elevator, and somehow goes both up and down. A. comes in behind me, but the door opening is so low that he has to bend down.

As we're leaving, A. and I ask the others if we should turn ourselves into spiders (we can turn into red spiders in this dream) to stay behind and eavesdrop. However, we decide against it.

The building manager at the front desk is a black man in a wheelchair. Someone tells him about the man upstairs' success with the usually grumpy woman, and the building manager decides he wants to hire this man.

I follow him into an exercise room behind the front desk. Holding the phone, he steps up out of his wheelchair and stands on an exercise mat with weights. I hear his phone conversation - the head doctor at the hospital can't let this guy transfer right now as he's too in demand. The building manager is disappointed but understands. He walks over to the back side of the desk to hang up the phone. I think, "wasn't he in a wheelchair? How is he walking?" and when he gets back to the mat he collapses to his knees.

Parchment paper

I'm at the local supermarket. I need parchment paper or baking paper, but in two varieties (I think one is adhesive). They don't have much left, and I need to pick out rolls from a few different brands to get enough. To make sure I have the right amount, I start unrolling it and cutting it, lining it up with pieces of fabric. When I'm done, I realize that was a bad idea, because they'll think I'm trying to shoplift. I solve this problem by going to the self-checkout.

Carrots and laundry

I'm in the backyard. I'm cooking chicken, potatoes, sweet carrots, and almonds. The chicken and potatoes are for dinner and the carrots and almonds are for desert, but I'm cooking them all in the same big saucepan, and trying to keep them separate by moving them with a wooden spoon.

A young woman with box braids in a t-shirt and sweats comes into the yard. I see her crawling and looking around the ground by the garage. I have a memory of seeing a striped sock blow into the yard and under the deck. I wonder if that's why she's here, but I'm distracted by the pan, and I don't say anything.

She's there for a long time, so long I think it will be awkward to ask, but I finally do ask her, "Did you lose a sock?" When she says yes, I show her under the deck. There's a small pile of laundry that drifted there. For some reason we can't crawl under the deck, I have to fish for her sock and purse with a twig.

When I get up, more people have come into the yard, and we all have laundry baskets. Someone is commentating on what I'm doing, like "she's going to try to carry too much," and it's true, I am going to try and bring two laundry baskets at once into the house. I decide against it, and the person says "good idea."

Side Notes
What I learned last night:

- Dream recalling habit doesn't instantly go away. As I've seen on previous occasions too, even when I'm not consciously intending to remember dreams I can call up a lot of detail, and while I don't have any "full" dreams it is more than I was remembering with effort just a few short weeks ago when I began practicing. So I think this is important motivation to remember on nights when I don't remember so much, to not get too down.
- I could keep the memory of the first fragments pretty much at the same level as when I first woke up just by rehearsing without writing anything down. So maybe in the future if I'm scared to awaken myself too much too early in the night, I could combine notes for my first two cycles. (Though I don't even always wake up after the first.)
- However, I think not writing things down caused my later memories to become more fragmented and scrambled. Because when I would wake up and think "what was I dreaming?" part of what I remembered was those previous dreams. So I would want to have things written down and cleared from my working memory definitely before the third cycle where the dreams get longer.

And a question:

- Do you dream while recalling dreams? Sometimes, when I'm remembering and not writing down, I think I might fall asleep during the process and add or transform them unintentionally.

End notes:

*Yes, this is really not a great game with only seven continents to choose from, my brain will have to get some better material.

**This is not a person I'm attracted to, just my brain filling in "male person." Also hilarious that I'm wondering whether he's divorced and not thinking about how I'm in a relationship and also would never even have the social battery to date three people at once.

Notes

• Sleep quality: bad! I'm feeling very emotional and fragile. I think part of it might be anticipating how badly I'll sleep next week when I'm away? So it's too much pressure to get rest now so I absolutely cannot sleep? I hate it.
• Sleep time(s): 10:00PM - 3:15AM, 6:30AM - 7:30AM
• Before bed activity: drawing (working on animation) and listening to electronic music playlist
• Goals or intentions: just to get a full night's sleep (failed)

Military school

• Awakening time: 3:15AM
• Level of detail: fragment
• Lucidity: nonlucid
• General mood: detached

When I think of the first parts of this dream, they disappear, I remember only the end. I was "in" some parts but it was mostly like watching a movie.

There is a private school associated with the US military as well as with a book publisher.

Administrators, from the military, are trying to rehabilitate Saddam Hussein's image. They're doing this by associating him with some particular missiles and distancing him from others.

I see people eating in a large hall with a high dark unfinished ceiling, like an armory building. The floor is yellowish while the ceiling is black. There is a huge kitchen in the back, so it's also a cafeteria. It's crowded with both adults and younger people, and their voices echo. There is a kind of evacuation, where everyone has to get into tents. In order to enter a tent, they have to present a cake. I see one man assemble a fake cake with his lunch, like a stack of salad and cole slaw. The guards aren't buying it, and they argue with him.

At some point I'm packing board games into a bag.

Later I'm watching a procession on a curved road. I'm on the phone with T. telling him that I don't like pepperoni or fermented foods and he's acting shocked - "not even French pickles?! They are so fresh and green!"

Next, I'm watching scenes unfold in the school library, where the people who work with the book publisher are headquartered. This company publishes new editions of Lord of the Rings. There is one sneaky author, though, who always tries to pass his work off as LOTR, in order to get more clout or readers or whatever. So he puts his books in a fake LOTR cover sheet. He writes about either military history or real estate though.

I hear the publisher say that he's getting craftier. Now he's even imitating the writing style, punctuation, and typesetting of LOTR, just with his own boring subject matter. I see the publisher tearing the spine of the manuscript with a letter knife.

There is a dimmer back room of the library, with blue carpeting and walls and shelves of dark wood. The librarian who works hear is in the habit of psychoanalyzing professors. One male professor was drugged and wakes up in the library - I hear him sarcastically say "thanks a lot Orestes" in a high-pitched voice.

There's a flashback to a female professor in the library, who looks like one I work with. The librarian is telling her she's "Type A personality," which I sense has a worse meaning in the dream than in the waking life. She starts telling him about how she's training her small dog with the "tubes" left over from her deceased larger dog.

Back to the "present," the male professor is asking the librarian what book the female professor stole - it is urgent, "Think! Think!" he says. She is going to use the book to poison people at the school.

Suddenly they start talking about the school harbormaster instead. She is an ex-Marine named Sank U. Addict. I see her on the beach, she looks like a stereotypical woman from the Bronx (and I think like one of the artists on the electronic playlist I was listening to before going to bed). They're saying how ironic it is that she works here, because she's pretty "rough around the edges" and this is a posh private school.

Blue, yellow, red

• Awakening time: 7:30AM
• Before the dream: I tried falling asleep after noting my dream around 3:30AM. First a really annoying bird came to the tree right by the window and was singing for an hour or two (this sounds like a nightmare, but I was awake). I tossed and turned for that time, then got up and worked on drawing and listening to Katatonia around 5:30AM. Then could not take it anymore and started sobbing uncontrollably to "Evidence." Then went and collapsed in tears in the bathroom. Finally managed to fall asleep around 6:30AM in spite of hearing others getting up and getting ready for work.
• Level of detail: fragment
• Lucidity: lucid
• General mood: out of it

Mom comes into my room where I'm sleeping to say goodbye. I try to tell her I'm sleeping but I can barely talk, a blanket is blocking my mouth. I realize I'm dreaming and my legs start moving side to side like a pendulum - this makes me wonder if I'm awake, because it feels very realistic with the sheets and blankets, I even have to push a pillow aside. But I know I'm dreaming.

It's like a wall is missing in the bedroom, and without lifting my head I can see on the horizon three rectangular buildings. I name the colors as they glow - "blue, yellow, red" and when I see the red building I go back into a dream.

However, then I think I really should wake up to say goodbye, so I push myself back up.* I see mom standing at the foot of my bed again wearing a pink dress. She's talking about how her boss needs her to paint something on her break today, and they don't have the budget for an intern, so she has to do it herself. I start to tell her that she shouldn't do it, it's not that important, then remember I wanted to go a layer further up and actually be awake.

I finally wake up to the sound of the garage door closing, and everyone's left anyone, so my little plan didn't go through. I tried DEILD by imagining the buildings again, but couldn't get it quite right, and felt really stiff and needed to stretch and roll over. I tried laying in bed for an hour and a half longer, but couldn't fall asleep. I had both visual, auditory, and other hallucinations, but kept instinctively thinking "not real" and jumping awake. I am so tired.

Side Notes

*I have... many regrets about this. Why did I have this instinct when I was finally asleep?

Notes

• Sleep quality: abysmal, feel like I've been run over by a train
• Sleep time(s): 11:30PM - 1:15AM, 6:00AM - 7:00AM, 7:30AM - 9:30AM
• Before bed activity: watching You
• Goals or intentions: at first to remember dreams (succesful-ish) then to sleep (unsuccesful)

Glass shards

• Awakening time: 1:15AM
• Level of detail: fragment
• Lucidity: nonlucid
• General mood: alienation

Car escape

This part is a blur.

A. and I break off from a traveling group at a rest stop and escape in a car. He is driving. I'm telling him that I'm scared that they will follow us, there is something distinctive about this car that they can spot (though I all I remember is that it's a black sedan).

We are both relieved to arrive at a destination. It's the middle of the night and we're at a big house, which has something like a black void or abyss in the middle that you can't pass through. P. is there in pink pajamas, and some other assorted family members. She's kind of overbearing, and we're just trying to decide where we should sleep before more people arrive. We want to get a good place that is safe. There also might have been a dog involved?

I wonder if we should try sharing a bedroom with my mother, since the people following us wouldn't want to hurt her. But we decide we'd rather be on our own.

We end up in a dim brownish room, but then go into another down a hallway. We come out into the hallway later and something is happening (I don't remember what), which distracts me and I walk away from A.

Novelty chairs

I'm with a group of people who I don't recognize now. There's at least one other woman and two men (one is her boyfriend or husband, the other is her brother). Throughout this part I'm being weirdly passive-aggressive, and I know the brother doesn't like me. We are walking through the corridor, the floor sometimes looks like sand and other times like concrete. It is lit with flourescent lights, like a storeroom or basement, with high ceilings. There are no windows to the outside.

We come to a "house" whose "front door" opens onto this hallway. The woman's husband hadn't seen her in a while, and he is doing some "romantic" surprise where he's playing an extremely annoying song by late era Panic! At The Disco (I remember seeing a black and white album cover with that singer that everyone seems to hate). I really want to get inside so he can stop the music. At one point I say something like "listening to Panic at the Disco, time to kill myself!" (I don't think this is a song that exists in waking life, I really don't know or care that much about PATD).

The front door has windows on either side, and there is an empty anteroom separated from the kitchen by a counter than runs parallel to the front wall. There's another room off to the right and past the front door which I don't remember going into. The kitchen leads into a sitting room proceeding to the left, and there is another room off to the right of the kitchen closed off behind a door.

The sitting room is filled with too much furniture, so I say something to the others like "Wow, this is a shitload of chairs, we'd better get rid of some." I have kind of a sarcastic tone to make it sound like I might be joking because I hope they know this is way too much furniture for a room, but they might not. They kind of go along with it, saying "Oh yeah, we have to direct the guests to sit on the right chairs."

I remember a blue velvet fainting couch, and some other blue chairs. There's also a central section they're looking at where I think they want the guests to sit. There are two tiers of chairs facing us there, and they're all kind of "novelty" furniture. There's a set of two armchairs side-by-side made of colored leather (black, white, red, yellow), made to look like Minotaurs with bulls heads above the headrests and giant dicks in the middle of the seats. There's another twin set of chairs, made of material like plush animals, which look like monkeys (like the old toys that clap the cymbals, but these don't have any cymbals). There are also a few "vintage arcade games," there's one with a green creature in that central section.

Two of the people turn to one of the "vintage arcade" items that takes up like the size of an entire wall. It's called something like SONGBOYS and is made up of a bunch of two-color screens. It's like a gigantic jukebox with very limited storage and in the dream it's an Apple product that was a precursor to HomePods. Again, kind of joking, I say "I hear now they can fit all that information into a device the size of a TV!" and it does not seem to compute with them that this thing is way too fucking huge to be practical.

I have a kind of a flashback to my dad showing me his old computer. He points to the label and says "I didn't realize, based on the weight class, this is a Mac Mini!" I respond, "What are you talking about, you knew what you were buying," because I remember him discussing it with me. For some reason I'm fixated on the charging cable, with a brick made of silver brushed aluminum, which I'm winding up and looping through a few times. I think it's neat because my current laptop charger has a way for the thinner cord that connects the computer to the brick to wind up nicely, but no such consideration for the thicker cord that connects the brick to the wall, but this charger has an additional reel for that cord.

Capricorn At Her Feet

Back in the kitchen, I hear a big bang from the other room, where the brother had closed himself in. I know that the lightbulb exploded, so I tell him not to move and I go to get a flashlight. I first look in a white cabinet at the end of the kitchen counter, where I see cleaning supplies but no flashlight, so I grab somebody's cell phone from the counter and use the light on that.

I shine the light to help pick out the glass shards, while the brother comes in with a dustpan and broom. I'm wearing thin silver slippers, kind of like ballet shoes, and I'm scared to step on the glass - I drag something tall over (a ladder?) to stand on. I ask if he's wearing good shoes and when he says yes I say "Ok good, because you don't want to step on the glass. Well, you could hover over it. I've done that before, but only in a dream" (this was said like a joke, I didn't think I was dreaming, though I did remember doing that in some dream).

The floor of this room is all covered in painted canvas, like the backdrop of a school play (I can feel the rough texture of the paint on the fabric). There is some stuffing underneath it to create the forms of a landscape. The brother was setting up a model train track or something similar in there. The outer part is painted blue like water and there is a high "island" in the center, stuffed into a dome shape and painted with brown and green.

I finally see the glass. It's huge thick shards, like a big vase broke and not just a lightbulb. When I see it, I fall forward, and float onto the island instead, which moves around the room. I got some glass pieces on my right foot, so I'm scared to step down and drive the glass into my feet - I want to sit and shake it off. As I'm looking at the glass shards and kind of floating, I think of Moonspell "Capricorn at Her Feet" because of the situation. I play a whole three-and-a-half minutes of the song in my head, waking up at the quiet part between "the sign of the Cross will take you to bed" and "iiiiin Capricorn!"

Eating twigs

• Awakening time: 7:00AM
• Before the dream: hoping I could sleep
• Level of detail: fragment
• Lucidity: nonlucid
• General mood: confused

I'm at a restaurant with mom and X. The food seems alright but mom is saying it's bad and getting disproportionately upset. She's having an argument with the chef, even though she's sitting at the table with her back to the door and he's off in the kitchen. I'm trying to get her to calm down because it's embarrassing.

Somehow the table changes to an outdoor covered picnic table, and I'm just with Max, and a waitress sitting further down the table. On my plate there is a pile of delicate black twigs with small clusters of dark purple berries, and thorns. I quietly ask Max what they're called, I don't want the waitress to overhear for some reason, but I can't hear his answer.

I take a bite of the twig. It tastes a bit like licorice, both the taste and the physical feeling are "sharp."

We go up steps by a pond to go inside. On a platform in the pond I see [my now-deceased childhood cat], and I wonder why she's here, because I thought she was dead. I pet her and her fur is kind of matted. I wake up.

Side Notes

Last night was not fun. I slept well for a little less than 2 hours and remembered a good portion of my first dream, was feeling optimistic, then just... could not fall asleep? At all? For hours? Maybe it's because I drank tea and had to use the bathroom a few times? I tried taking some melatonin that we had in the bathroom cabinet, but it did not seem to have any effect. I didn't think I was in enough pain to take painkillers, but maybe that also had an effect, since I could not seem to get my heart rate down. I kept stressing about work and then upcoming family stuff and travel in the next week, as much as I tried to get myself to leave that for the morning. So I didn't sleep until the sun came up. Then I was awakened by a phone call from the doctor (where I probably sounded like I was on drugs) so I don't remember anything from that dream, at all. Oh well. Onwards and upwards. Tonight should be better. If not I'll just become Christian Bale in the Machinist, no big deal.

Also I tried whispering into my voice memos instead of typing. Maybe that made me less sleepy, talking? At the same time, it felt less intrusive then having to squint at my phone screen and try to type. I'll give it another go tonight. Even though I hate listening to my own voice.

Notes

• Sleep quality: drugged feeling, yesterday I was experiencing the joys of womanhood which means taking painkillers to not vomit from the pain :-)
• Sleep time(s): 11:30PM - 2:20AM, (possible awakening)-5:30AM, (another possible awakening)-7:15AM
• Before bed activity: listening to assorted songs, ended on Katatonia
• Goals or intentions: It was difficult to truly focus on any

Various fragments

I woke up a few times through the night, but had trouble focusing on remembering dreams due to discomfort. I did write down the times of two awakenings, but other times I was feeling too tired/not wanting to open my eyes enough to take notes and more concerned with falling back asleep before feeling too uncomfortable again. So I'm just writing the fragments I do remember/did note here, I'm not sure exactly in what order or what times they came.

Change in leadership

I'm in a large building with a huge glass wall in front. It's night time and there are lights inside the building in various places, but overall it is dim, especially with the high ceiling in darkness.

Up on a balcony, there are work tables and there's a kind of government investigation headquartered there. There is a change in leadership for the investigation, from one woman to another. I see people packing up boxes of papers. There's something subtle in the plot, like the new leader has a conflict of interest due to connection with the criminals being investigated, but she's trying to keep it secret.

Later there is a dinner party. On my way there I stop in a public bathroom in a hallway, and have to wait on line between two drag queens.* I am floating up in the air and holding my knees.

At the dinner table, a guy is monologuing about how people these days are not adventurous enough. He says something like "You can afford to do anything if you can afford to get there," implying that traveling in other countries is not so expensive and people who don't do so are just closed-minded. This rubs me the wrong way, and I argue that plane tickets are expensive, especially at peak times, and people have worthy obligations like family and children that keep them from traveling.

Two rings

I'm at mom's house and a large dining table is set up in the living room. It's night time and the house is lit up by lamps. My cat is running around wearing a tiny version of X.'s pineapple baseball cap, and we are laughing at her.

R.'s "children" are visiting - instead of his sons it's two daughters. One daughter asks me if I have seen her intricate metal ring - she left it here last time. I tell her I haven't seen it, but I also just got here myself. Just to check, I look through a little bowl of rings on mom's work desk, and it's not there.

The second daughter asks me if I've seen her wooden ring. She says it's very big and distinctive. I'm telling her no, but then I see a wooden ring standing on the table next to mom's desk. It's like a cross section of a branch, with a raw edge and a natural finish. I give it to her, pleased that I found it. However, she says this one is not her ring.

High school art show

I'm in high school and there's an end-of-year art show. The gallery has winding halls and it's very dim. I have trouble seeing many of the pieces due to the lighting, though nobody else seems to have a problem. I'm trying to remember which piece(s) I submitted, and I'm thinking I should have chosen something with higher contrast. I think this is probably my last and only chance to have something displayed in a gallery, and I probably messed it up.

Ultrachaotic DEILD

• Awakening time: 7:15AM
• Before the dream: I was awake and very groggy - I feel like it was dark then I closed my eyes and it was light. I took another Aleve and tried to get comfortable. I started having those nonsense thoughts that come before dreams, trying to let them pass because I knew it meant I was falling asleep, yet still staying partially aware. I was not really intending to have a lucid dream.
• Level of detail: #detailed
• Lucidity: #lucid
• General mood: chaotic

Entering the dream

I open my eyes abruptly (actually awakening), but something about the lighting instantly tells me that it's too early to actually wake up, I'm in the middle of a dreaming phase still. So I close my eyes again, trying to re-enter what I remembered of my nonsensical thoughts and dream, while staying aware by just a thread.

I forget what I was actually dreaming about previously, because the first time I see is a kind of cartoon sequence from hell, like someone is flipping through a bunch of weird channels on TV. I only see it through my right eye, and it's kind of in a circle with blackness around it.** I try to focus my left eye as well, first by physically trying then by "speaking" a command, but when my left eye focuses then the vision in my right eye drops out. Finally, I don't see anything.

I try the "astral projection" strategy again, first lifting up my dream hands and arms, then feet and legs, and feeling myself sitting on the edge of the bed where my hips are where I'm laying down.*** However, at first I'm still in my sleeping body, looking at this dream-golem that is now sitting on me. So I cut my vision out and try to see from the dream-body perspective.

I start by trying to look out the windows (the sun is up at this point). At first I can see very little. So I stand and go out into the hallway, and out of that window I see a construction site across the street, confirming that I'm in a dream.

Chase scenes

I'm thinking of how I can find a portal to get into a more dream-like scene than home. I finally decide on the attic door. But before I can concentrate enough, I think I hear someone coming to wake me up. I think I won't have enough time to make the attic work, so hurry backwards through the bedroom and out through the window over the bed.

I end up in a city, walking with my dad. I float up above the street and over the roofs. But I still have the sense of being pursued. What follows is a chase flashing through too many different bizarre scenes to remember, like Everything Everywhere All At Once. At some points, I feel myself near waking. When this happens, I turn my sight to something gray in the scene and defocus my eyes, then I can re-enter the dream.

Sea fortress

Finally I end up crouching in a little cage, hanging from tracks suspended somewhere in the dark and moving over a black ocean. I approach a large stone platform where a fortress is built. On the platform there are monumental stone statues that move.

When the cage is hanging over a platform, I'm close to a statue of a huge lion with its paws spread apart. I take myself out of the cage, but I realize if I walk closer, the lion will snap me between its paws, so I put myself back into the cage. I then pass over a stone sheep that is devouring a bloody lion cub. Then I arrive at the door of the fortress, which now looks more like a modern 20th century house than a fortress (the front is made of the same gray stone as the platform though).

A short and heavy-set Filipino woman with bleach blond hair opens the door and embraces me when I step in. I'm still rattled from the chase. She asks me to take off my wet clothing, and she is undressing as well. I'm still acting cagey, and she says all the death traps outside are so that we can be isolated/protected. The lighting inside is soft, and we are in a living room that has a kind of 1980s interior decoration feel.

I ask if she's who I'm looking for and she kind of sighs, saying "I thought you'd be in a more of a sapphic mood tonight" and changes into a man. I think it's A. now, but I tell him that I can't see his face - he appears to be headless. I feel us hugging tight, the bare skin of his chest and back. I can feel his face against my neck, and I reach a hand up and run my fingers through his hair, it feels dried out like he's been swimming and it dried in the sun. So he does have a head, I just can't see it. I'll just call this person Dream Character (D.C.) from here on.

I hear water rushing. At first I think it's just the ocean on the rocks, then I realize it's the first time I'm hearing this particular sound. It's a slave ship which is actually a fancy cruise ship with SLAVE TRADER painted on the side where the company name goes, and it's trawling the ocean looking for products. The captain looks like Alan Conway from the Magpie Murders BBC adaptation.****

We get into a car, D.C. is driving. There's a whole loop highway behind the fortress, illuminated by orange-ish streetlamps.† It's actually pretty crowded, but evil Alan Conway actor is after D.C. in particular because he constructed this place. We're finally captured.

Chapel, stiletto, and Caritas

There's now a crowd in the middle of this huge highway. It looks like we're somewhere in the desert, a Las-Vegas type place, in the middle of a purplish night. D.C. is on a platform with the leader, who is putting him through some religious cerermony. The leader is asking him to swear allegiance to "Him," pointing toward a roadside chapel with the letters T.H.M. glowing in red neon on the roof.††

He is taken into a theater. I'm sitting in back, mentally attached to a small blond woman who is now his wife. She is called up to the stage. An Italian man in the audience surreptitiously hands her a long glass stiletto blade. When she gets on stage, she hands it to D.C. thinking he will stab he captors. However, he stabs her instead - I see the clear blade go in, covered in bright red blood. Then he is killed.

The woman survives, though. She has twin children. The D.C. now was a cult-famous black metal musician and she's supposed to lead a tribute show that I'm attending. The venue is a square amphitheater, with a narrow but tall ziggurat in the center. First I try to sit on one of the upper tiers, but it's uncomfortable and I don't want to be in front of the other people that are filtering in.

I go and sit on a bench at the edge of the theater, next to another woman. Choral music is playing. The woman turns to me and says, "don't worry, there's also some Hitler music in this playlist," which makes me think she's someone working at the venue who is biased/not informed on black metal. But I tell her I hope that's not the case, I actually love choral music. I ask her what it's called. Out loud, she tells me it's "Caritas 3" and shows me the title on her phone screen. However, I don't see a performer or composer listed, only the title and that's it's on a lounge music compilation.

Side Notes

*Earlier this day, I forgot to lock the bathroom door in a restaurant and a tattooed guy walked in on me. Luckily I was just washing my hands at that point!

**It's kind of like that scene from Over the Garden Wall where Greg goes up to heaven and it randomly cuts to the little circular window view...

***Looking back... I think I forgot to lift up my "head," hah.

****It's hilarious now, but it wasn't so funny in the moment.

†When writing down the dream, I realized this area kind of resembled two MarioKart levels smashed together, like the stone platform was totally and alt-universe Bowser's castle with the statues acting like chomp chains.

††Before sleeping I was already out of it and kind of sarcastically saying to A. that maybe I should have become a nun. But that it would be impossible first because I was married to him and not any god, but mainly because I would never swear to reject Satan, I said I would never swear myself to the imaginary hero against the imaginary hero in their made-up wars. He countered that he thinks all gods are equally likely to be real.

Notes

• Sleep quality: Went to bed late and got up late. We were hiking until late yesterday evening, which meant having dinner late, and generally throwing off the usual schedule. I woke up a few times but was too tired to write most of them down. I was sweaty when I woke up but cold when I got out from under the blanket.
• Sleep time(s): 12:30AM - (?), (?) - 6:00AM, 6:00AM - (?), (?) - 9:30AM
• Before bed activity: watching TV, then sat up in bed to meditate before turning lights off and lying down.
• Goals or intentions: I tried to "visualize" myself recognizing the dream-feeling in a dream, then vaguely outlining a snowy winter scene (I figure this is distinctive enough to visualize and would also make me sure I was in a dream due to it being spring in waking life, also not too specific). I think I was a combination of too tired and too excited, so my brain just ends up feeling scrambled.

Hometown and hospital

• Awakening time: 6:00AM
• Before the dream: Trying to remember the previous dream and refocus on dream recall, I fell asleep without writing anything down or checking the time.
• Level of detail: fragments
• Lucidity: nonlucid
• General mood: discontent

Moving back

I'm moving back to my hometown, into an apartment with a group of roommates (none of whom I recognize from waking life). We all go down into a bank on Cedar Lane (not existing in waking life) to open up a joint account. Some of the roommates are saying they just tell people they live in New York now, since nobody knows where this town is and New York seems fancier. The bank offers plans to buy different sets of furniture, which all seem very expensive to me.

We go back to the apartment, where we have almost no furniture yet. It is bright, with warm wood floors. We are putting together a light wood dining room table and chairs set. I'm complaining to the others that my family jumps to help my brother move any time, but nobody is so concerned about us moving.

I hear that my childhood friend Rose is also back in town. She was in jail and is now under house arrest with one of those ankle bracelets. The ankle bracelet is also a cell phone, and people are saying I should give her a call. I keep asking for her phone number, but they just tell me I have it in my contacts, which I don't. I think this is the last part of the dream, because that's what I was thinking of when I woke up.

Institutional activities

I'm in an institution like a mental hospital or low-security prison (but with inmates of both sexes). I'm walking down a hallway, looking at signs by doors which indicate different activities in different rooms. I go into a "fashion design" room. It's dim, with benches around the walls, where a bunch of guys sit watching TV. It's playing black and white footage of fashion shows and interviews with designers. I notice that, typically, it's all male designers making uncomfortable and demeaning clothing for women. I think how they're all self-centered sexists, as I do in waking life, and leave mildly disgusted.

I go into another room, where the activity is something about building skyscrapers and pyramids. I see an animated computer graphic of a building going up with lines in different colors (red and green) to indicate the construction process.

Then the group splits up to design our own buildings. I draw a pyramid with a side cut away and sculpted heads inside, and color it orange. I draw this on a computer tablet. Then I start drawing on a piece of paper, intending it for a background for another piece. I'm using markers that drip watercolors, some more saturated and some more drippy than others. On the top of the page, I drip drops of different rainbow colors in diagonal lines to make it look like rain. Nearer the bottom, I'm tracing outlines of three crows in black ink. One crow has a white crown. They're smaller than I intended, or the pen nib is thicker, so I have to go back and simplify the silhouettes to make it more clear they're crows - reducing number of feathers in the wings and changing the direction, making sure they aren't overlapping, and so on.

I see my mom in a cafeteria. She's talking about how she had a joint order with another woman and she seems annoyed or embarrassed that the employees thought they were sisters. The woman ordered something spicy and my mom got some pink dessert with ribbons, and she thought that embarrassed the other woman.

At a cafeteria table people are talking about an old guy named "Gil" who is going to get fired from his job soon, but has another lined up. I think this same guy keeps appearing through the rest of my dreams tonight.

Orange juice guy

• Awakening time: unrecorded
• Before the dream: Tried to focus again on remembering my dreams, but didn't really work, because I also wasn't sure I would fall asleep again.
• Level of detail: fragment
• Lucidity: nonlucid
• General mood: edgy

I'm in my bedroom. It's semi-dark outside (dawn or dusk). I have a large mug that I need to wash. A skinny old guy with flyaway white hair comes in (this is "Gil" again). He takes my hand and leads me into the kitchen, where there is a lot of activity. He's asking whether or not I want pulp in my orange juice. I'm confused and tell him I don't want any orange juice at all. I'm trying to get the cup to the sink (holding it in my right hand), but he's holding my left hand tightly and pulling me fast.

The drainboard is full of dishes, and he pulls me past it suddenly so that a metal utensil sticking up almost pokes me in the eye. I pick it up and try to show him what he did. But now he's just out back on the deck talking to someone else, and doesn't pay attention to me.

Later I'm with a family on two sides of a glass wall, they're shooting snow machines at each other and laughing.

Locusts and authors

• Awakening time: 9:30AM
• Before the dream: Tried to focus again on remembering my dreams, but didn't really work, because I also wasn't sure I would fall asleep again.
• Level of detail: fragment
• Lucidity: nonlucid
• General mood: calm

I'm in my bedroom. It's a sunny day outside with birds chirping (just like as I was going to sleep). I'm with two friends,* sitting on the bed. I notice two cicadas/locusts - one is on the windowpane over the bed, the other is sitting on the nightstand. I can't think of the word for them in the dream - I keep wanting to call them "lanternflies" but I know they're now. I move very slowly, hoping they won't move, and we leave the room and shut the door.

I say something about the bugs to the others. They say "Yes, we saw them, what are you going to do about them?" I reply, "Honestly, I was just going to wait for them to go away. They're not the kind of bugs you can smash, they'll splatter. I think I'll go and stay with A. for a few days until they leave" (In this dream, we are dating and he lives somewhere else). One friend asks, "Can't you just spray them with poison?" I say, "No, I don't want to get that close, they'll probably jump up and fly."

I pick up the phone to call A. Instead I get a call from the Addams family, and when I look out the back door the mother has come over to visit.** One of my visiting friends is also close with this family. She has been working on an article about a famous author named Donald Frump (no relation to who you think), who they know.

We all sit in the kitchen, on stools around the counter, and I pull up a metal folding chair for myself.

I see a picture, and this is "Gil" again - old lanky guy with flying white hair. From his Wikipedia page, someone reads that he was famous for his "long limbs, disheveled appearance, and body described 'like an ocean'*** for all the swaying when he walks" (he was severely handicapped or deformed and I think he walks with two crutches). Someone says he looks like Andy Warhol, and my friend says she tried sending an Andy Warhol headshot for him to autograph, but "he deemed the picture was not up to his standards." He only wants to give an in-person interview. But she's been waiting for him, because he is very ill.

I'm trying to form a question, "What..." and can't think of how to say it. The second friend chimes in, she knew I was going to ask when he was active/why I never heard of him, and says "30s and 40s."

I wake up abruptly and very sweaty. I think the dream might have lasted longer if I was not so uncomfortable.

Side Notes

*Not sure who they correspond to in waking life. As sometimes happens, they seem like combinations of other people I know but I don't want to say it's definitely this or that person.

**While I was waiting last night, I saw the promoted Netflix-ified reboot of this show, and I was really wondering why they would reboot this show at all and who would watch it. Maybe not as damning as my recurring Frasier dreams but I resent when pieces of media that I really do not care for walk into my head.

***I don't think I made this phrase up in my dream, but I can't place it. Tried internet searching it. Maybe I heard it in a language other than English?

Notes

• Sleep quality: feeling groggy today, one of those nights where I was too hot under the blankets and too cold outside of them, general trouble staying in a comfortable position, woke up on my back and feeling sore.
• Sleep time(s): 11:30PM-(unrecorded), (unrecorded)-3:15AM, 3:30AM - 4:45AM, (5:15 - 6:15?), 6:30AM(?)-7:30AM*
• Before bed activity: talking with T. while drawing, talked a bit about dreams
• Goals or intentions: I wanted to have another lucid dream, I put it to myself like remembering to watch out for and question dream-like elements I experienced. I reminded myself of the "dream" feeling to recognize it again. In my lucid dream, I want to go to a particular mountainside. Again, I had difficulty focusing (for reference of future-me, it's been an unusually busy/stressful week at work), and I think I tried too hard to let those thoughts go so it had the opposite effect and that mood spilled over into my dreams.

Dream title

• Awakening time: 4:45AM
• Before the dream: I was disappointed in myself for going into anticipating the next day and not remembering the previous dream at all, so I tried to refocus on dreaming. I was still having trouble falling asleep and getting comfortable. I also thought maybe it was silly of me to expect to have another lucid dream, since I read in Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming that just passive self-suggestion doesn't usually lead to consist lucid dreams like the other more effortful induction methods.
• Level of detail: detailed
• Lucidity: nonlucid
• General mood: awkward and eventually pissed off

Insubstantial sex

For some reason, A. and I are sexting online, but we're also like half physically together. When we're together kissing and holding each other, it feels somewhat insubstantial, like I don't have all my senses. I tell him we should make a new thread because a moderator was CC'ed on our chain of messages which is a bit awkward. We have sex in a bathtub that doesn't have any water in it.

Washing shoes

Later, I'm in a kitchen visiting with J., D., S., and N. There is a huge and deep sink full of water, covered up with a board with some rectangular holes in it. With J. and D. I'm leaning over the sink, dipping mesh sneakers through the holes into the water and watching the air bubbles form from the mesh as I squeeze them out.** We're talking about choosing outfits for some event. D. is a member of some app where users rate each other's clothes (swapping ratings), and since she was an early users she has lots of high quality ratings, which makes it easy for her to choose her clothing. On the other hand, I say people who joined later are not so lucky, I guess because the user base is not as active.

S. is composing a social media post about a project she is working on, some animation of blue bears at a construction site, done along with a whole creative team.

J. is talking about a trip to Paris she has been planning for some time. She just found out that the Dave Matthews Band is doing a concert there that she can go to and everyone is thrilled at this news. I realize they all planned this trip together and didn't invite me (to be honest, maybe it's because I can't fucking stand Dave Matthews Band). I'm hurt but trying not to show it because they haven't come out and said anything explicitly. I remember that I had intended to ask their advice on my passport application for a trip of my own, and I start, but it's too awkward now.


Interlude with dresses

In a modified version of dad's living room, I see a woman standing in the dark and watching TV. She looks sad, she's been depressed. Her daughter comes in with different options of dresses for her to wear. I kind of take the daughter's perspective. The first dress she pulls from the bag is deep red and very very long. It keeps going and going as she extends her left arm up, and I feel the cotton fabric running over the fingers of her right hand.*** There are three dresses total, and as she progresses they get shorter and more pink than red. The last one is sleeveless in a tweedy 1960s style material.

The daughter's wife comes into the room and pointedly asks if the mother will wear "one of our dresses" (the couple are fashion designers). The daughter is a bit chagrined but has to say no, there is something about their dresses that is too dark for the mother's mental state.

Terrible family trip

I'm with both mom's and dad's side of the family, visiting relatives who live far away, but the house is almost exactly dad's house. The living room, dining room, and kitchen are the same, as is the back yard. The main difference is that there are doors in the wall between the living room and kitchen that lead down to a basement where there are closets of clothing.

My one aunt is there, and I'm annoyed at her because she's been sharing pictures on a mass email thread, of the bus she came there in, bragging about coming to a family function for like the one time she actually does.

B. and A. are there, and people are being mean or judgemental of B. In the dream, B.'s father is a short Korean man. He's wearing a red t-shirt that says [something] 2015. He makes fun of her for wearing a similar shirt, and I have to point out that he's wearing the same thing, and he doesn't have any more right to dress casual just because he's a guy.

A few of the group are going out to a town. I get the sense I'm not invited, but I'm annoyed at them all and want to make like I'm coming anyway, like daring them to tell me I'm not allowed. I go down into the basement closet area to look for an outfit, and realize I have no idea what the weather should be, and can't decide between a sleeveless white knit shirt or a long sleeved sweater. I settle on a math department t-shirt.

Everyone is out in the backyard getting ready to go. B. is having a hard time and people are saying she's just acting like a "princess" instead of helping and I'm disgusted by the whole situation.

Pokemon fragment

This just popped up at the end of the dream when I left the others.

A woman is in a brownish bathroom with multiple sinks and a door at either end (the sink counter is perpendicular to the walls with the doors).

A group of boyscouts holding signs passes through. They all chant PIKACHU. The woman says "I know, but I want Raichu instead, I even named him Rai," and they all agree with her and leave.

Ice cream fragment

I'm not sure where this fragment went in the dream.

A gay crossdresser wearing pastel green and purple is dreaming that he's a judge on the British Bake-Off. I see him wake up then return to the dream (third person perspective). He's eating multicolored ice cream with a giant spoon.

Cleaning, uncontrolled lucidity, and sea travel

• Awakening time: 7:30AM
• Before the dream: failed WILD and light sleep (see side notes), but heartened by remembering more of the last dream I refocused on my goal to have a lucid dream, and remembering the dream-like feeling.
• Level of detail: detailed
• Lucidity: nonlucid then DILD then fading to partially lucid
• General mood: chaotic

Needles and bread

I'm visiting T., and his apartment is way bigger than it should be. We're in the kitchen and he seems distracted. He has just got back from the store and he bought me three cans of coffee. I'm trying to think if I should offer to pay him back for all of them, or half, or if I even have money with me at all. He is making lunch and offers me some, something with roasted red peppers. We bring the food from the kitchen into his bedroom in a basket to eat.

He gets a call and has to leave to give his parents a ride before we can start eating. I say "Don't worry, I'll clean up all the food" (there's also food in another room) - privately I'm hoping I can remember how to find the different rooms in the unfamiliar apartment.

Once he leaves, I go into a closet to get a basket to carry the food. I see an open sewing box with many trays. I think it's not safe for the cats to have all these pins and needles out, so I try to figure out how to put it away. I have a little scare where I drop a tray, but nothing spills, and I do get the box together.

My friends**** appear behind me while I'm looking in the closet and ask what I'm doing. I explain that I'm supposed to be cleaning up the food but got distracted by the needles, and they offer to help. I notice that there's a ton of bread in this bedroom, rolls and loaves in baskets and pretzels hanging on pegs in the closets. One friend says, "I guess all this bread just belongs in here?" We both laugh and shrug and just take the other food away in a purple plastic bin, leaving the bread.

I notice that the rest of the apartment is pretty messy. I tell the others he must just clean when he feels motivated which is not very often, but I'm not going to clean anything extra of my own accord because that just sets a bad precedent. We're looking for the other room. The rooms are generally dark and have more strange things in them. In one, there is an extremely dark and cursed looking porcelain doll. One friend says, "I really don't like how it has its own little door."

Reality checks

We come to the kitchen. I turn the faucet on, but then I can't turn it off, I'm turning the handle every which way. I ask for help, and a friend comes over and jiggles it, and that stops the water.

I think, "this really seems like a dream situation," but I don't want to seem too wacky by saying that just in case I'm really awake, so I decide to do some reality testing.

First I lean and lift myself up on the counter with my arms to look out the window over the sink. I think that the counter might bend or there might be something strange going on the glass, but nothing seems out of the ordinary, and everyone just asks what I'm trying to do. I laugh it off, but I still have the feeling I may be dreaming.

Then I notice white square tiles on the walls. I think that in a dream I would be able to bend them by leaning on them, so I lean my entire weight against one. It depresses like a button and then I see it is a button, on an old white corded wall phone. In fact, it's an ALARM button, that makes the phone beep uncontrollably, and also sends this alert to one other person's phone. It even said the specific vintage Motorola model that the sound came from. I'm frantically trying to turn it off, and hope I haven't caused too much chaos to whatever other person it called. Then I see it just sent the alarm to the last-called person, which was me, so it's all okay. Again, my friend asks what I'm doing and helps me to turn off the alarm.

I'm still not convinced that I'm awake. So I ask myself, "What was I doing before this, and how did I get here?" and then I'm instantly sure that I'm dreaming!

I start leaving the apartment, through a dark wood bar room with a single man in a white captain's hat behind the bar. I pass through a set of double doors and lose my vision.

False awakenings

I wake up and reach for my phone to type notes on my dream. I write something like "I wake up and see that it is 14:42." I read the sentence again, and realize that's impossible, I couldn't have slept for that long. So I'm still dreaming!

I roll over in bed to see I'm alone. My vision cuts out again, there is flickering in the blackness and I'm spinning. I say SHOW ME A. but the spoken commands tonight don't seem to work as well as last night. I see a circle where black and white faces flicker past, some are vaguely familiar and some are inhuman and scary, but I don't see A.

I wake up again. I open my phone and try to type the same sentence again, to describe the false awakening and then the dream before. I'm having trouble typing this time. My phone has an autocorrect suggestion bar over the keyboard† and when I type "dream" it suggests DREAM-DEMON, and then I know I'm still dreaming.

My vision fades again. This time I think of astral projection.†† I try to step up out of my body. I still can't see, but I take big steps. I look down at the floor and try to see details, like dust and cat litter, then I look up and I'm in the house.

Neighborhood made strange

I go downstairs and out the backdoor. I remember that I wanted to get to the mountainside, so I'm trying to figure out how to do it - driving will take too long and be too chaotic. Can I use the garage door as a portal maybe? But dad comes out of the garage door and starts following me. I want to stop him because the familiar place and now a familiar person is making it feel more difficult to control the dream.

I step into the yard. The colors are brighter than waking life, and the tree trunks are thicker. I say, "when I fly into the trunk of this tree (the one in the front by the flower bed) I will be on the mountainside." However, I can't get up enough speed, and just kind of softly collide with the tree and remain in my neighborhood. I turn to the right and start walking up the street, with dad still following me.

The street slopes upward, and the road is down in a ravine with the sidewalks high above it. I see a three-headed rooster, the kind with bright white feathers, and bright red crown and jowls. It is huge. I think of cranes and then I see three sandhill cranes flying away from me over the street. Then I see a combination of the cranes and the rooster, a three headed creature with crane-shaped heads and necks but with the coloring of the rooster.

I ask dad to stop following me, but he won't. As we go along, the houses look less and less familiar, and have strange banners hanging on porches.

Harbor crimes

At this point, I'm losing lucidity. We come to a dockside area with a wet black floor. I keep thinking I see A., but I realize he's wearing odd clothing for him (like hooded sweatshirts) and it turns out to be random men and women. A guy tries to knock dad out with a metal pipe, but as he hits him the pipe becomes like spaghetti.

The actor who played Vernon Dursley is sitting at a table and I leave dad with him, arguing about the plot of Harry Potter. I overhear a conversation about a young blond woman with a lot of work done on her face, who I'm supposed to recognize from other dreams. The story goes that after getting cosmetic surgery, all of her many other health problems disappeared, so she opened up the famous STAR RESORT in Los Angeles to sell these treatments.

I go up a staircase to find her. I look out of a door on a landing to see an overgrown balcony, like part of a railway bridge platform, covered in weeds and trash, looking out over the Hudson at the Manhattan skyline.

At the top of the stairs, I come out into a harbor. It's a gray day. I get onto a small red barge with a bunch of other people huddled along a wall. There are sheets of cardboard "protecting" the floor. One girl is tearing pieces out of a package of cardboard boxes. I wonder, is this really working to keep the floor clean?

There is a high balcony on the dock edge over the water, at a corner of the harbor. The railings are red. There are a bunch of old guys sitting on this balcony, the old guard of the harbor. Some are stereotypical sailors (like yellow rain gear), others are wearing suits and bow ties. As I'm looking at the trash floating in the water, empty bottles knocking up against the dock, we hear a radio broadcast about how there's not enough volume (of water or wind?) for everyone who wants to sail, so only approved boats are allowed out today. This barge is not approved, but we're pulling out anyway. We hear the old men chuckling, saying, "the fire alarm is enabled, you won't get past it!"

We go out further, to where more people are sitting on something like red bleachers in the water. At a narrow point in the harbor between the last row of bleachers as a wall, I see a line of flickering splashes and lights. It's now dark, and the blue night is lit by an orange glow from the harbor. This line of lights is the alarm, it will electrify the metal boat and kill us (or something like that).

Hilariously, everyone jumps off the barge, just over the line, and lands on an American flag in the water, and this is considered some kind of victory. The water is shallow enough to wade. I think I see A. but it's Lana Del Rey. This is all a set for a music video or something like that. I wake up as LDR and I are turning to wade through a tunnel.

Side Notes

Main things I learned:

• More reality checks/false awakenings seems to lead to increased anxiety and unpleasant lucid dreams. I'm not exactly sure why I seemed to have no chill last night while I could be so accepting the night before, but I'm guessing it's connect to how many confirmations I needed that I was dreaming.
• Release expectations and specific goals for now. When I'm looking for a certain person or certain place, I can't get it to work now, and I think that also makes things seem more frantic. I need to work with more open goals to get used to dreaming consciousness.
• Memory seems to be a good reality check, so I'll try to incorporate that more through my waking day.

*I actually started falling asleep before 11:30, but was woken up by noises. I didn't bother to write down the first time I woke up and fell back asleep. When I woke up at 3:15AM I couldn't remember any dreams either, I was to my dismay thinking about work to do the next day instead, but that time I did make the effort to open my phone and write down a note to stay in the habit. It felt like it took me a while to fall asleep and get comfortable after waking at 4:45AM. I tried entering a WILD again after writing down my dream that time, but yet again gave up after getting anxious about staying in one uncomfortable position for too long. Oh, and my cat jumping up on my didn't help - I don't think WILD was made for pet owners. I was awake when the sun was up. I feel like I may have gotten an hour or so of sleep during that time, but it was very shallow and I don't think I had any dreams, I remember hearing the birds and seeing the gray light the whole time. Unsure when I actually fell asleep and had the next dream.

**I was vaccuming and mopping yesterday evening, and I think that comes up in a few parts of these dreams. This is like squeezing out the sponge mop.

***This was kind of like how I unfolded a garbage bag for the bathroom that was way longer than expected or needed.

****Really not sure who it was specifically, it was like a combination of people, and I'm not even sure how many people there were.

†Don't have this set up on my actual phone at the moment, so that was a tip-off.

††T. and I talked about this briefly before I went to bed.

Notes

• Sleep quality: fair
• Sleep time(s): 11:00PM - 1:30AM, 2:00AM - 5:00AM, 5:30AM - 6:40AM
• Before bed activity: yoga, pretty energetic
• Goals or intentions: none, one of those nights when I just couldn't stop circling back to personal and work issues

Birds and dolphins*

• Awakening time: 5:00AM
• Before the dream: When I woke around 1:30AM, I couldn't remember any dream but Neil Young "Dance Dance Dance" was running through my head. I tried to let go of my thoughts about life problems and the next day ahead and focus more, and I felt a bit better that it was pretty early in the night.
• Level of detail: #detailed
• Lucidity: #nonlucid
• General mood: strange

Drinking water

I'm in a dark house with high school friends. There is a long kitchen counter and a bathroom with low countertops and a shower. There is a strange mood, almost like one of our group died in this house.

We're getting ready for a hiking trip. I have a belt with two holsters for bottles. There is a bottle of hot tea in one, but I decide it will be better to have two bottles of cold water. I'm very thirsty. Filling the bottles is difficult though - there's no cold water in the fridge so I try the bathroom sink, the water keeps spilling from the bottles, and so on.

Sparrows and dove

I'm in my bedroom at dad's house. There are two sparrows and one mourning dove, sitting on my bed and then fluttering around. I think they shouldn't be in here and I want them out. I call for dad to come help me corral them to get them to fly out the window (the one over the radiator). It's taking him a while to come.

I'm on a video call with T. and his mother, and they want to see us get the birds out. I set my laptop up in a very precarious place, leaning on the shelves over the desk, so they can get a view of the window. The window in question has a kind of pinked stained glass on it, and they admire it as we wait for my father to come.

There's a door near the head of the bed into a bright yellowy room with tiled floor. Birds are strutting around and fluttering in this room, all different kinds. Eventually, the birds in my room flutter away of their own accord, some into the bird room and some into the hall. I am a bit relieved, shutting the doors behind them.

Dolphin congregation

I'm driving with a bunch of people, including Mom, R., and X. We're driving, yet we're not inside a car.

R. and X. and talking about local lakes. R. is in disbelief that X. has never visited some famous local lakes. Then they start talking about which lakes in the area are considered large, some examples are "Beehive" and "Bear Lake." I'm skeptical and asking them if they're sure these are real lakes, because I've never even heard of any of the names they're mentioning. I see memories of R. with his children (not his children from waking life) hiking in a mountain park that I recognize from another dream.

We go on a curve in the road with water on both sides. To our left is open sea, to our right is an enclosed area with rocks arranged almost in tiers, going up from the level of the road to a hill, all submerged in water though.

Looking toward the enclosed area, I see four, then six, then eight, then more black dolphins cresting, moving away from us toward the rocks. I start taking pictures and filming.

Looking at the videos (or the real thing?) and zooming in on their faces, the dolphins begin to look more like seals/sea lions, then humans. They are still dolphins, but people at the same time, standing on two legs. They stand in rows on the tiered rocks and all clap in rhythm, like a ceremony.

There are two important dolphins, one in a "sun" costume and another in a "moon" costume. The sun and moon are headdresses, around their faces. They also wear puffy black dresses. The entire costumes are made of the same puffy black material, almost like a winter coat. They have an adult child who is a "star," with thin black points radiating around his face. They are all androgynous, and their skin is completely jet black, the same as their clothing.

The star says he is leaving the tribe for "girl-love" (he says this strangely, like it is a foreign or ancient word). He fell in love with a mermaid, he has a doll of her that he shows to the others - she has lilac skin and a seafoam green tail. The dolphin congregation is scandalized at this declaration.

More mundane matters

We arrive back at a house. R.'s birthday is coming up, and Mom wanted me to make him a card, but I see she already bought a card, so I'm trying to politely get out of making my own.

I'm emptying a dishwasher, and I see Robert Downey Junior doing an ad on TV. He's promoting university in Switzerland to Americans. It's a really awkward ad, like he's obviously reading from a teleprompter and has no idea what he's saying, and he just kind of stops at the end. I'm laughing at it and mention it to mom and R. They say he's been doing these for years, always for some new scam. A famous one was a hack medicine that he supposedly used to cure his Grandma. R. and I are talking about what a sleazy guy he is, and mom jumps in to kind of defend him, saying "if he's so bad then stop working with him!" and we just laugh and say "we're not working with him!"

Delaware and dream diner

• Awakening time: 6:40AM
• Before the dream: I moved my alarm a bit later, but not too late since I had a doctor's appointment early this morning. I thought I would try WILD, and started getting to a dream-like state lying on my back, but then the sun started coming through the window and hitting my one idea, and I figured this would not be ideal so I rolled to my side which set me back. Then I thought screw it, I just need to sleep before this appointment and rolled onto my front, and just used autosuggestion about noticing I was dreaming.
• Level of detail: #detailed
• Lucidity: #nonlucid then #lucid (DILD)
• General mood: joyful

False awakening with tarot

I wake up and see it's 8:37AM. I go out into the hall and call out "I MISSED MY APPOINTMENT."* I am disproportionately annoyed and trying to figure out how I would explain it to the office. But then I realize I'd just misread the clock, it is 7:37AM and I still have time. I go back to my room.

I go downstairs into the living room at dad's house. X. is there watching TV, and I have a big backpack that is mostly empty, that I am unpacking to re-pack. Outside it seems to be the size of my usual backpack, but the inside is bigger. I find unfamiliar tarot decks at the bottom of the center pocket. There is a mass-market Florentine minchiate that has been opened, and I'm relieved to see it's not too beat up from being at the bottom of the backpack. There's also a new Marseille tarot that's still shrink-wrapped. Both are cleaned up versions with bright, flat colors. I want to look through them, but I don't want to explain to dad and X., since I have the feeling I should be getting ready to do something else. So I find a little bag to hide them in and take them to my room. Unsure how this scene ends.

Christmas DILD

I arrive in Delaware with X. and mom for a family reunion - I drove us in my own car. We park in a lot outside a restaurant. As we get close to the building, X. and I realize we need to get something else from the car, so we start back in that direction while Mom goes in.

When we get back to the car, I think "wow, I did a terrible job of parking straight and leaving room to get in the trunk." As I'm thinking this, it's like the car moves by itself to be parked perfectly.

I'm looking through the trunk, and Max is leaning into the front passenger seat. I see J. coming out of the restaurant, wearing just an undershirt like he's at home. We share a look, and I know he wants to sneak up on X. for fun. He hugs X. from behind, and then comes around and gives me a hug too, lifting me up from the ground a bit.***

He has been traveling in the American Southwest and got a game as a gift for us (mostly for X.). For some reason, the game is in the trunk of my car. It's a little stuffed animal, connected to some real-world high-stakes puzzle game. He and X. are talking excitedly about the game, and I'm asking questions but the rules go a bit over my head.****

We go into the restaurant, which has dim orange-y lighting. Mom is showing people a huge photo taken of her department at work. It's black and white with some red accents, like one lady's statement necklace. The colors are so crisp that the people almost look alive. I can look and almost walk through the background of the picture, like it's three-dimensional. I'm confused because I see washing machines in the background, but then I see two coffee machines, and the window, and I think "oh, they're just in the kitchen at the office."

I go into a side room with X. and J. There is a wooden floor and dark walls, and no tables set up. As I'm talking with them, I notice that there are Christmas lights and decorated Christmas trees all around the room. I say, "Seriously guys, they have Christmas stuff out?! It's summer." Then I get a funny feeling all through my body, a sense of déjà vu or dreaming this before, and realize I'm dreaming. To confirm, I run over to a mirror on the wall. My face looks very dim and far away, like looking at your reflection in a window not a mirror. This confirms it!

While I'm doing this, X. and J. have started returning to the party. I run to catch up with them, saying "J., I'm dreaming!" But he doesn't respond.

Interlude in darkness

The image cuts out, everything is black. I move my hands, and in a familiar way I just see "outlines" of them. I feel a cold wind whistling and whipping around me, and see flickering on one side like my eye is opening. I start spinning around uncontrollably.

Out loud, I say STOP SPINNING, and it works.† Then I saw SHOW ME THE HOUSE. I want to get out of the wind. It's still black, but I start moving my legs, pretending to walk up to A.'s and my home. It takes a while, but an image comes. First I think I see the ground, then some warm light higher up. I get excited and think it will disappear, but manage to relax and the image comes fully.

Dream guide at the diner

It's dark, with the sense of early morning rather than late night (deep blue sky). There's snow on the ground. Ahead of me there is a little one-level yellow house. As I look, large glass windows open in the front, with a neon OPEN sign - it's a tiny roadside diner. Through the windows I see people inside talking and eating.

This isn't the place I wanted, and for a second I think I should try changing the scene. Then I think it would be better to just go in and find out why my mind wanted to bring me to this place.

I'm nervous walking in, not knowing what to expect. Coming through the door and to my left, I go up to a table where and older black man with a kind face sits with a woman, both facing the door and windows. I'm not sure what to say to them, but the man talks first. He kind of winks at me and says, "Is anything here real, [Harlequin]?" I'm elated that he knows it's a dream! He and the woman say something about exercising, but I miss it in my excitement. Then the man tells me, "Not only can you eat in dreams, but the food here can taste different and better than in waking life. In fact, one of the things here was actually invented in a dream. See if you can find it!"

With a smile, he gets up and goes behind the counter, to my right. I start looking around, to meet his challenge. It's warm and warmly lit in the diner. There's upbeat city pop kind of music playing at a medium volume, and it's pleasant.

When the man was sitting, I noticed an orange foil packet of Brown Toasted Bread on the table next to his arm. I wanted to take that, because it looked very official and I thought that was a good candidate for the dream-invented food.†† But it's gone now. I start walking clockwise around the diner. There are things like croissants with sprinkles on tables, baskets of rolls and bread, and so on. I want something less dry, because I'm still thirsty.

There is a little supporting wall in the middle of the diner directly across from the door, I guess also serving to block off the kitchen/bathrooms a bit. Behind this wall, I see a table with a basket of chocolate macarons. I go toward them, because macarons do give "invented in a dream" vibes. Before I take one, I mentally run through the previous parts of the dream, to make sure I have them in mind when I wake up.

Then I hesitate - can a little roadside diner really make good macarons? When I think this, I see they're not really macarons. They're tiny yeasted buns, topped with diced almonds, and stuck together with an apricot jam. The texture is not what I expect, but it's one of those foods that's weird at first then grows on you.††† A group of little old ladies comes into the diner, and they're discussing the different foods, especially these buns. I notice I'm waking up and just let it happen, figuring this is a good note to end on.††††

Side Notes

*Oddly enough, I thought I remembered nothing of this dream when I first woke up. But I remembered seeing advice on DreamViews to still write in the dream journal even if you remember nothing, and when I rolled over and opened my phone to type "don't remember anything," that was when I remembered the dream!

**Really, this should have been an indicator I was dreaming, how rude is that?

***Also very strange behavior, in the dream I was writing it off that he had been drinking.

****Originally I wanted to practice LD for visualization purposes, but now I'm thinking another LD goal should be to learn the rules of a dream game. Because I dream about games every so often but can't remember the rules when I wake up, I think that would be interesting!

†I read this advice, to speak commands, on DreamViews forums. At the time, I thought it sounded silly. I was wrong! If I try to WILD again, maybe I'll remember to do something like this to get out of the black period.

††I honestly thought this was as real brand of crackers, even when I woke up. I was internet searching in disbelief. I think I may have been thinking of Toast-Chee crackers with the orange, but I imagined Brown Toasted Bread was like rye chips except flat and rectangular.

†††I want to try making these in waking life now, thanks dream man!

††††A bit embarrassingly, I was salivating when I woke up. That's what I get for dream-eating!

I count this as my first "succesful" lucid dream! In the past lucid dreams since starting this journal, there's been loss of control and panic, difficulty with vision, or just losing lucidity. I was definitely fully lucid and stayed that way, with access to my memory as well. Sure nothing amazing happened, but I was very happy when I woke up. I now feel like I have a better and definite handle on the "dream feeling" to recognize it next time!

Notes

• Sleep quality: felt well-rested when I got up
• Sleep time(s): 12:00AM - 5:00AM, 5:30AM - 7:00AM
• Before bed activity: listening to black metal (mainly IC Rex)
• Goals or intentions: remembering dreams - I visualize myself waking up and catching onto the end of the dream and also throwing like a line back to get the beginning.

Baltimore boarding school

• Awakening time: 5:00AM
• Level of detail: #detailed*
• Lucidity: #nonlucid
• General mood: happy

Steady as the rain

I remember something about dark trees.

I'm in a public bathroom (with stalls) that feels like it's at a school. Someone is in the other room. There is rain pounding on the windows - I think it's the middle of the day but the rain makes it dark. The rain is so loud that I can barely hear anything else. I have the feeling that I must listen for someone knocking on the window or door, but the rain drowns it out.

Porch arrivals

I'm at home which is also a boarding school in the dream and also seems to be in Baltimore.

A bunch of students are arriving for a term, and there are many people packed into the dining room area of the house. A thin metal suitcase gets delivered and left in the front walk, and another large item (a vase of sunflowers? It's taller than my torso). These are for one of my students.** She arrives, and I help with her bags. She is happy to be there and I am in an optimistic mood as well. She runs in to meet the cat. Surprised, I ask, "You really haven't met her before?!" and she says no.

A bit later I'm on the porch with a female "AI" - like a human woman's body with artificial intelligence. She is new to the world and I am "training" her by talking to her. It's a sunny day outside and I'm trying to keep things positive for her first experiences.

Later still, I'm watching through the peephole. There are letters on a table or box in the middle of the porch, and I watch a mailman come and pick them up. He leaves another stack of papers behind, and I wonder if he was supposed to take those too.

The appearance of porch changes slightly through this part of the dream. It's recognizable at home but something about the angles/orientation feels wrong.

Garden cottage

I'm looking at a website for a restaurant/club where we are supposed to go. It's a litle pink cottage, and I remember it being on my college campus near where the president or dean's house is.*** There is a rose or a pink tulip in this place's logo.

As I'm trying to remember when I was there, I look at pictures/show them to someone else. In back of the cottage, there is a steep slope, and stairs go down from the cottage to a little terrace. It's next to a narrow river spanned by a rusty railroad bridge (the kind with metal arches). I "zoom in" to the pictures to confirm that I'm actually in them.

Church secrets

Dad is talking about jobs to be done at the church. One concern now is a new suggestion box. For some reason, they're having trouble making it anonymous. He says this means "people are risking their lives" when they add suggestions.

One solution they came up with is that the priests should not be able to read (like, really illiterate). There was a precedent for this in some old churches. Dad is sketching out how to achieve it by adding another story to the building - "my preference is to do two ladders across, then one ladder connects to the other ladder and down, and the second ladder connects to the other ladder and goes down..." and the rest of the floor is a balcony around the edge near the ceiling. I see that the room is mainly made with warm-colored wood, and the top floor is where the priests will hang out and have their dressing room. The implication, I thought, was that some slaves on the lower level, sworn to secrecy and able to be killed if disloyal, would read the suggestions and only pass on the relevant information to the priests. I think in the historical version the slaves were hidden away in a dark basement but in this more modern solution they were on the main floor. I really don't understand exactly how it works, but I wake up before I can get more explanation.

Frasier**** and the supermarket

• Awakening time: 7:00AM
• Before the dream: repeated my intention to remember an entire dream and also tried to resolve to not roll over like last time.
• Level of detail: #detailed
• Lucidity: #nonlucid
• General mood: light-hearted

Savannah†

It is night-time, and I've just arrived at the hotel VUE SAVANNAH AVENUE with a large group (including mom, and I'm not sure who else).

I'm sure something happens here that I can't remember. But the next thing I do remember is getting ready to go out. I'm trying to put on lipstick (black and then pink). But I can't get it to the edges of my lips. There's also a strange bump on the right-hand side of my mouth that keeps tripping me up, so everytime I try to go over it I get a chunk of lipstick inside my mouth.

I give up, and take a little leather purse that's kind of like an accordion folder but taller than it is wide. I put my phone in one filing section, and a 20 dollar bill in another, but leave my wallet in the hotel room. Downstairs, I wonder if I should have brought my wallet after all, but it's too late to go back up.

We drive down the street, which looks more like some place in Delaware than Savannah - a four or five lane highway with traffic lights and chain stores on the sides. The sun is hot and bright. As we're driving I ask my mom to confirm the name of the street.

Old friends and chicken cutlets

The group I'm with changes, so now there's no one I recognize. I'm with a young British woman, an older man who is sometimes Frasier so I'll just call him that, and two (or more or less?) other young men. I work for Frasier. And Savannah is in the UK, the British woman lives here.

We go into an old apartment building, up stairs (that seem to end at the ceiling of the building). As we are going back down, an old man with wispy white hair and glasses comes out of an apartment, wearing an apron. I think he is the building owner. He asks the woman, "Do these chicken cutlets smell too romantic? My old firned is coming to visit. We haven't seen each other in a very long time because he moved to the US. But I don't want him to think this is a date."

The others and I overhear, but the old man does not see us. The friend he is talking about is Frasier, and Frasier has decided that he doesn't want to see this guy. The British woman is on the same page, so we get her to distract the old man near the front of the building, while we sneak out the back. However, he spots us and starts following us through the streets, still in his apron.

It's evening. The city still looks more like a run-down mid-Atlantic town than Savannah or London.

Laundry and tea machines

We go into a supermarket. The old man is still tailing us as we push a cart through the aisles, but he seems to matter less and less.

I'm impressed by all they have in this supermarket, and I'm thinking the UK must be a very advanced country. We're moving clockwise around the edge of the supermarket. In the back they have racks of random clothing and a laundromat. I see the soapy clothes spinning around and around as I touch my hand against the glass of a huge washing machine.

Continuing around the back, there is a series of "tea machines." They're about the size of vending machines, but like the washing machines they have clear glass through which I can see tea brewing and being slowly stirred. Each machine is dedicated to one type of tea, some regular and some with added flavoring, sweetener, etc.

As we pass through a produce section about 3/4 of the way through the supermarket, I think of how it was Frasier's birthday on Sunday and I forgot to get him a card. It's now the middle of the week. I think I should get some materials at the store, since we're on vacation I don't have any of my usual supplies with me.

Self-checkout

It comes time to check out. We're at the end of the supermarket, an area with white walls and floors. We can walk on a balcony around the edge of this large room. The middle section is covered up, there are some covered stairways down, and also machinery.

We pass a stairway down with orange walls. It is roped off with two ropes. An employee in white waves us down. Two of the group go (including Frasier), but I stay with the other. I'm annoyed because we can't bring the cart down the stairs, but there doesn't seem to be any place to check out up here. We are going around looking for either a check-out station or a way to get down with the cart, yelling down each staircase we see for help.

One time when we call for help, it appears in the form of a machine. There are large plastic bags of different colors (made of a material like IKEA bags, but softer) hanging on a track, where they go around the middle section counter-clockwise. We follow them to where they stop in a corner. I put our items in a white one. They have filing sections like my purse did. When I transfer our stuff from the cart to the bag it looks smaller, like suddenly not many things at all.

The bags go around the circuit and come back. I take our things out, and some of them have new labels placed on them. We now have to go to a self-checkout, which is a huge screen with some buttons along the bottom and a small circular red light that scans items.

I ask the other person for help because I'm having difficulty seeing. I can't "zoom out" my vision enough to see both the large screen and the buttons at the same time. Some of the buttons mentioned in the on-screen instructions also seem to be missing.

One of the items in the bag is a stuffed animal, that now is tagged with a wristband. When I scan it with the light, the screen says something like "ceiling pass unlocked," like to get items on high shelves. This pass is for the tire center, which I can see on the other side of the room (across the central area) - it looks empty, and I don't think we need or want tires anyway, so I'm confused. Next I see a lottery ticket printed out on letter-size paper, with a cover sheet.

Then I tell the other person "oh no, I needed to get a card for Frasier!" They laugh, in disbelief that I missed his birthday - "don't you work for him?" As I'm saying this watercolor paper appears in our pile of items. They ask what I'm going to do for the card, and I say I will paint a portrait of him because I have plenty of practice. I'm thinking of a Frasier-themed card that I made for my mom years ago (actually true in waking life).

We leave and go to a dinner, at a crowded table. I'm saying that Russian is the most romantic and beautiful language. Someone else chimes in to say they think German is too, and I agree.

Side Notes

*My memories of this dream are pretty fragmented - for some reason I VIOLENTLY rolled over as soon as I woke up and I blame that for messing me up. Still listing it as detailed because I think I got the important scenes from throughout.

**I am meeting with this student today. Also, I think the crowdedness of this dream came from me thinking about how I'm visiting my family in a few weeks - I was counting how many people will be packed into the house (like... 11 to 13 adults and 1 to 4 children).

***In waking life, I can't remember exactly where this place is either or what it looks like. But I was thinking of this little club where I went in my freshman year for getting on the dean's list (I think?) It's in like a back area of campus behind the main quads where a cobblestone (?) road goes around a little island with plantings.

****The second time in recent memory that I've had a dream about Frasier?! This time though I saw some surreal meme on Instagram that evening with Frasier in it, so I guess that snuck its way in.

†Also, I keep dreaming about Savannah and the UK which are somehow combined? Not places I go or think about often at all.