nightmare

My family and I were getting ready for the upcoming wedding of a family member (note: this wedding is upcoming IRL). My sister and I were trying to get dressed and pack our purses. I was in a state of stress because nothing was going well. I couldn't find my cell phone, my hair was unruly. For some reason, I was desperately scooping up potato chips and dip on the floor into a bag, as they were some kind of joke my sister had set up. I eventually found my phone, but it was low on power - how could I navigate to the venue without GPS in my car? Fortunately, a shared shuttle that looked like a cable car and contained some of my relatives stopped by, and we boarded.

Later in (I think) the same dream, I was in my grandparents' house in a room with many beds. This is the same house my cousins and I would stay in when we were little. As an adult in the dream, I was much too large for my "bed," which was little more than a doll's wooden rocking crib. I woke up (from one dream) in this bed, and realized I'd split it in two. My cousin's weren't impressed.

I stood up from the bed and realized I was dreaming. I hadn't performed a reality check of any sort. It just occurred to me that this wasn't reality. Once I realized it was a dream, the world spun and I did circles in place to stay asleep. It worked, and I continued with a few reality checks. First, I looked at my wedding band. It was there, and the metal wasn't shifting (my typical reality check), but I realized it was thinner in the dream than IRL. I wondered if it was actually a poor reality check after all and noted that I should think about it once awake.

Next, I decided to fly, since I'd been having trouble doing so. I used the advice in the forums and simply assumed I could take to the air. And I did - for a moment, but then had trouble and started merely hovering. Boo.

Some kind of demon or monster came up at this point and grabbed me. I told it to get lost, since this was a *lucid* dream, and if I couldn't even keep monsters at bay then I utterly sucked at lucid dreaming. The monster wasn't particularly scary, but he grabbed me and I was in a pool of water, so it was difficult to spin in place to keep the dream going. I managed to free myself and spin.

I started thinking about the artistic possibility of this lucid dream, and my thoughts became temporarily lost in books I'd read, like the Wheel of Time series. I was in a long building with a high ceiling, and suddenly looked up. A beautiful, animated lightshow was happening on the ceiling. The entire surface seemed pixelated - made of blueish metal squares. But in clumps and shapes, rainbow-colored groups of pixels were bulging and sliding like a bioluminescent mushroom, sending waves of color through the whole ceiling. I watched the show for a moment, wondering how "surprises" and new images are conjured up in a dream that I'm aware of.

After I'd looked long enough at the ceiling, I decided to try and improve my dream control. I decided to create the simplest of environments - a blue sky and black ground - to practice flying in. This environment started to come into view, but I struggled to sustain it, and eventually "woke up" into (I believe) another dream, in which I didn't realize was lucid and didn't remember.

Just a dream fragment: boss sent me a message saying that the reason my project failed was because of me

Note: went to bed very drunk, guessing that affects recall

Edit: Later remembered another dream fragment involved meeting Bill Hicks. I asked if he knew he was dead. Non-lucid, hoping more of this will be remembered later.