non-lucid

4:28am

I was trying to get to the voting booth on time. I needed to vote even though I had voted yesterday - one of those two day elections. I knew voting closed at 5pm, and it was almost 5. I was lost. I was moving further and further West, away from the city, but unable to figure out how to turn around.

My kids were in the car with me. I thought of them as my kids, although I only saw one in this dream, and he looked nothing like my real life kids, but in this dream, I did not question it. There was chewing gum stuck to the radio, which didn't look anything like the car radio does either. And there was something wrong with the outside front of my car, though I don't know what - I got out at a light and tried to fix whatever was wrong.

My husband materialized. I asked how he found me despite my being lost, he did not explain, and I did not ask again. He said he could drive. I asked, don't you have a car you got here in? He said no, but then I thought maybe we would get back here for his car after the election. Though I seriously doubted we could get back in time.

The kid wanted milk. He wanted to know if the juice box contained milk. We said, no juice. He said that he wanted milk not juice. In fact he seemed to already be drinking juice. My husband pointed out there was milk in shopping bags in the car, but the milk was in gallon containers, so not ready to drink.

2:40am

Trying to sign up my older son to private school - he goes to a very good public one in real life. Then the dream got confusing because in my dream he already went to the school I was trying to sign him up for, so as I was trying to find someone in administration to talk to, my son came to me. I wondered how come he could be by himself outside of class now, but did not question it further. i asked if he was having a good day - he said he was. There was an ice cream social at the school. I was told that maybe that's why the administrators I was trying to reach were not there - that I should try later. I said that I luckily have the day off of work, so I van try later.

Bed at 9:17
10:52 pm
I had an almost lucid dream feeling in this dream. I had the sense that I had been counting something in my dream perhaps in my dream journal, when I opened my eyes wider and entered a new scene flying over an ocean with the thought that one can do this counting better this way. This may have been a non lucid dream about being lucid? I think the vividness shifted during the change of scene to much more vivid, and it was almost like being lucid.

In this dream I was part of a huge project creating documentation for the military. My two bosses was the same as in real life, but I had many coworkers whom I had never met before. There were a number of coworkers on this project who were graduate students from a reasearch university, and even in the dream they were new coworkers to me. What was interesting was that in this dream I was significantly younger than in real life - in fact I was younger than these graduate students, and pretty shy around them, trying to impress. However, I was still a major player in the project, often acting as my boss's representative, which was inconsistent with my dream age, more consistent with my actual level of seniority where I will informally at times act that way with my boss's blessing on less important conference calls and such.

So we were building huge amounts of documentation for the military. (This reminds me of my recent other dreams of creating huge amounts of documents on a large ship. The military part of this dream is probably due to my having interpreted someone else's dream about military last evening before going to bed.) I remember this dream as being long, but now I only remember some significant parts. In one of them we are having an informal meeting in what looked like a dorm room: the graduate students, my Italian American boss who is the less influential of my two bosses - more of a project manager) and myself, and one of the graduate students was saying, "we have all this documentation planned, but what about the shopper's guide? We usually do a shoppers guide for this type of project." Me: "I cannot say. You should really ask our government lead, he is the boss, and he is paying you for this project, so you should ask him whether to do this document." Grad student (this one seemed to be like a leader of the bunch, and in a previous scene he and I had been thrown together, and I was now a bit less shy around him - he was cute.): "Yes, but what do you think? Would you like us to make a shoppers guide? Would you think it useful?" Me: "I think a shoppers guide could be useful. However, I don't make the decisions and I am not the one who pays you, so my opinion is not what you should be seeking." My Italian American boss/team lead: "What she is saying is that she does not have the cojones."

In a later scene I realized that a document that my government lead asked me to prepare was actually a version of the shoppers guide. So I went to tell the grad students, and I also said "When dealing with the military, proper terminology is important. This is not the shoppers guide. This is called the acquisitions plan."

I also remember some scene that seemed to be part of the same dream where I was out in a parking lot. It was raining, and I had to retrieve something from a locker in the parking lot.

I have the sense that there was much more to this dream. I think the scene with my government lead telling me to work on the acquisitions plan was an actual dream scene, not just a memory, for example. Also the scene of being thrown together in some task with the graduate student, which made me less shy around him. I also remember walking down a hallway side by side with the grad student.

Analysis: I think I am dreaming dreams of creating huge amounts of documentation because I am having a sense of not being creative enough in my work and just creating documents but not actually creating something. I am thinking as a solution I should start making bread or crocheting at home again to get an outlet which produces more tangible non written results.

Dream: i was at some sort of reception. i told a woman who was affiated with the Roman Catholic Church that i want to be added to their mailing list. In my dream I had just moved into town and did not have an address yet, but i had an email address. I explained that i was no longer Roman Catholic, but wanted to be on their mailing list anyway - out of some unexplained reason. The woman then asked me "Why are you no longer Catholic? Don't you like Walesa?" (Which is odd because Walesa was the Polish leader of Solidarity labor movement that overthrew Communism in Poland, and not a typical figure to stand in for Catholicism, but in my dream I did not question that.) I responded: "I do. I just love my husband more. And he is Episcopalian. Besides priests can get married and women can be priests in the Episcopal Church, and that's important to me." She had never heard of this before, and was shocked.

Fragment: Man with constant erection. doctors peel it like a banana.

Fragment: False alarming material stored in warehouse. I suspected it was not false alarm. Retest. Machines go crazy again.

Remembered anither fragment when woke, but it was gone when i moved.

In is long and complicated dream, I seemed to be in charge or at least deeply involved in disaster planning a huge ship. (In hindsight I wonder, The Titanic? But it was in modern times.)

So as part of this effort I had to write this huge manual on contingency planning, and for this I needed input from a White House staffer. While our project had a White House liaison, but I thought that this one would not do, so I contacted someone else (who happened to be a bearded black man) and persuaded him to give me contact info for someone in the White House. I reached the woman on the phone. She was in the backseat of a car or limo. (Interestingly enough whenever I talked on the phone with someone in this dream, my perspective changed, and I was seeing them during the conversation.) The woman said that this was her time off, and that she had other plans, but I asked her "Do you want this contingency planning done or not? And we are supposed to get help from the White House." So, given these persuasive arguments she of course changed her plans, and came to study the documentation with me.

Meanwhile my coworker (who was the only person in this dream whom I know in waking life) would demo for us what looked like a huge contraption with words and sets of large lights. On the left it would say something like requirement xyz or test abc, and then there were those huge lights that were lit if that requirement or test was completed. I remember noticing that this took up most of the little room and only covered a few requirements and tests thus far. my next thought was, "It is good then that this ship is so huge."

The next scene, still on the ship, is an integration of someone else's dream I read on DV yesterday into my own! (With some changes of course.) I was about to pee on e potty, and so I found a chair and an attachable potty, sort of like one my kid used to have, but a grown up version. One of the people on the disaster recovery team or maybe a White House liaison commented that he always found it kind of embarrassing whenever someone peed in public. I responded that whenever you are on the phone while peeing, which surely you do all the time (no, I don't!), it's like peeing in public, and he should just get over his embarrassment. After all we need to get this work done, and there is notice for frivolous privacy.

Toward the end of the dream I remember being dissatisfied with the effort be ause the quality of writing did not seem good enough to me, sort of assessing disaster recovery documents literary merit, and finding them lacking (shocker!). Another person reassured me that whenever he wrote an abstract (very short as opposed to the work written in this dream,which was a volume larger than a phone book, much larger), he would be dissatisfied, but then put the abstract to the side for a while, and return to it after a while, and then the writing seemed much better that he originally feared.

fragment 1: my 4 year old had a huge overgrown beard of dark hair (in reality his hair is light), and I decided to cut and shave off his beard to look what his face looks like underneath, but I was not going to cut his hair in the back of his head on my own because I feared botching the job, for that I planned to take him to a barber another day. I think this dream ended before the beard was off, so I did not get to see his face.

fragment 2: a library book came with options on the dust jacket, and one of the options was to "keep this book", but then there was a hyperlink (on the paperback book) and when you clicked it, it said, "just kidding, that would be stealing, and against God's commandment, and a smiley."

Fragment 3: also library related but separate dream. I was standing in line at library to find out something, but someone else was saying that the library could not do something because that would be illegal. I don't remember what that something was.

Ok, this was one if those dreams that happen about college years after one is out of college.

In this dream I was three courses short of finishing my Masters degrees, so I signed up for three courses that would allow me to finish. The administration sent my father a letter that one of the courses was full, and suggestion that I take a course in Choreography with the same professor as one of my other courses instead. In my dream my father agreed to this without consulting me.

Meanwhile I was aware of having a leasurely schedule, so I went to have breakfast with a couple of professors I was friends with in this dream (unknown in real life), the breakfast was more like a huge dinner actually. I also needed to drop of my kids for the day, in my dream they needed to be taking medicines, but they had large rashes on their faces, which was due to allergy to these medicines, but in my dream that was ok for some reason.

So after I had the large meal and dropped off the kids for the day, I was ready to get to my first class, and I realized that I was so late that I would arrive just as the class was ending! And so I did. The professor was not happy with me for having missed her first class - it was some sort of dance class. She told me something like, I will see you in my Choreography class then, and that's how I first realized that I had the change of schedule. I asked, "But will that course be appropriate for me to finish my degree?" She said "I don't know. You need to check with the administration with whoever you have been working with on establishing that you get all you need to get the degree." I realized that I had not been working with any ody in administration, and this was a problem which might prevent me from graduating. I just knew that this Choreography course would not do to meet my requirement, so my feeling of contentment at being able to graduate this semester had turned into full out dread by the end of this dream.

5/24/2013
12:30 fragment 1: I dreamed about how if one cannot remember a whole dream, one can sort the dream fragments by length. .

5:00 fragment 2: I caught up with my older son at a busstop to give him one of his homeworks which he had forgotten to take. (In reality he does not even take the bus to school.) He was with another boy. He said it was good that I had arrived because someone was about to kiss (it was not explained who), and it would be awkward.

5:15 failed WBTB attempt: about 15 minutes up, recorded fragment, went to bathroom, mantra repeat, tried to WILD, result: no recall at 6:45

5/25/2013
to bed at midnight due to coffee late in afternoon

6am A blue color worker was telling his family that he got job in better paying job further away as representative worker who could answer company questions about workers. They were so impressed that he was willing to relocate and had the drive to advance to a white collar job.

All I remember is a fragment about dreams and scale from 1 to 10 and there may or may not have an elephant in this fragment as well.

In this long and complicated dream I was somehow involved in politics of Poland (my country of origin, where I was born, but now I am a US citizen in real life).

There was this blond thin very pretty very charismatic woman who in my dream was in a position of power in Polish politics and was also a close family friend on my mother's side of my family.

She and a large group of people where house guests at my mother's home, and I was communicating with them mostly via phone and texting.

One time we arranged to meet. The setting was an outdoor cafe with the tables and chairs set up on a bridge for some reason. When I arrived, the important woman, a male assistant of hers, and a prisoner were already there. We were going to interview the prisoner to find out important information from him, but I do not know why he was a prisoner and what the important information was. There was no chair for me, so when I arrived, they first pulled several empty chairs from a neighboring table, and had to readjust it, so that there was only one empty chair for me. The prisoner's restraint had to be removed so that he could talk more freely. It turned out that he only had one restraint to begin with: a hair restraint, and so the assistant cut the restraint restraining the prisoner's hair. (How a hair restraint would suffice for a prisoner, and how it would prevent him from speaking freely - my dream did not explain any of that, nor did I question it.)

Change of scene to a political rally. The important woman was talking and saying "... And that's why capitalism failed in Poland." I interjected, "Excuse me, but as a proponent of capitalism, I have to correct that capitalism did not fail in Poland, it was designed to fail. What those in power called capitalism was designed to be unacceptable to people, so that they would beg those in power to abolish Capitalism. Which is what those in power had wanted all along." While I was talking about begging, I enacted the gestures of putting my hands together in exaggerated begging, and my perspective changed so that the powerful woman was higher up and I was begging her from below.

I do not know what the consequence of my interjection was because I then woke up.

Fragment 1: about personal finances and 401k retirement plan.
Fragment 2: a fragment of a dream about my grandmother go alas is no longer alive. In my dream she was frail, so toward the end of her life.

I came home to find our main aquarium on the floor over turned. Miraculously it was unbroken but either all or most of the water was drained. I quickly set it back up while very nervous, refilled it, and started trying to save the creatures. As I found them on the floor I proceeded to add them to the aquarium. It was dark and I had trouble seeing. one of the weirdest creatures I found and added was a tiny blue aquatic bird. I somehow caught it in my fist. It's fluttering was hurting my hand, but I held on and plopped it back into the water where it swam / flew safe. I knew that there were supposed to be others like it, but did not know whether they were safe inside or still missing. the aquarium was full of lights which were time and looked amazing, but made it hard to see anything else. I wondered whether I had plugged everything that needed to be plugged into the electricity back in, and whether all these plugs were indeed aquarium related, but I had no time to check, I had to try to save the creatures. While crawling on the floor under the stand, I saw something rolling fast: it was a Malaysian trumpet snail (this is a real creature from my tank, unlike the blue bird, but in reality it could not roll like that). I caught it and into the tank it went. I wondered whether my favorite fish had been saved, but could not check yet, must go on searching. I thought, well, at least now don't have to worry whether the tank is overstocked or not, but that thought did not make me feel better. I was confused that the plants seemed to be missing, even though in reality I have tons of aquatic plants, and yet the tank seemed rather full already.

I woke up without completing the strange rescue.

In this dream I was a male member of a software development team. I remember I was a white man, tall and skinny and strong.

I don't know what our application was supposed to do, but there was an email component. The developer of the email component was I think a subcontractor of a different company, and the lead of our project wanted to exclude him as much as possible.

First scene was like a demo, and during the demo the email developer figured out how to make things visible in 3D and in color. the lead resented this even though these were crucial developments in our project but she did not like that this was him who figured it out.

Second scene, we are in our work area and our lead is telling the email developer that he cannot come to another meeting. I say to the lead, "You cannot exclude a member of the team and remain a member of the team, especially not after what he has done!" I bodily lift the team lead up. She is a petite woman. I sit her on a desk, and jab a finger in her chest to make the point. Then I suddenly get the insight, "Hey, I guess that means you are not a member of this team. Out!" And I point to the door behind me. She says, "You can't do that. I am the boss." And I say, "Yes, I can. And no, you are not. He is." I just know without looking that our boss who is her boss and everyone else's is in the doorway behind me. Will he support her or me? I wonder.

I never find out because I wake up instead.

Side note: Even though this dream was non-lucid it had this powerful moment of insight, where I felt empowered. this dram is inconsistent in that I say that one can't exclude a team member, but I exclude her.

1:30am Fragment: Victorian Loose Woman Getting Drunk

Disclaimer: Both the drinking and the promiscuity is completely out of character for me, but I was not myself, so ...

I was not my self. This was set in the Victorian era. I had the sense that I was a fairly loose woman who had been with many men. in this scene I was in some sort of formal room with two finely dressed gentlemen. We had known each other before, but had lost track of one another, but had recently become reacquainted. One of the gentlemen was pouring vast quantities of alcohol from a bottle into my mouth, and I was drinking it up eagerly. I knew that I was going to have sex with both of them soon after, and I was becoming very aroused in anticipation.

Failed WBTB attempt:
2:15am WBTB intension - plan for next lucid dream: I will go back to sleep in a few minutes. I will remember to realize that I am dreaming. Is this a dream. When I become lucid, I will reality check and focus on my hands to stabilize, then I will get chocolate from my pocket and eat it. I will then turn around, find a door, know the Taj Mahal is on the other side, open the door, and then I will fly to the Taj Mahal or through it and out of it if I find myself in it when I step through the door.
Result: No lucid, just the following fragment.

Another fragment: work database related 6:30am I remember dreaming of a sample database. Also some questioning by my boss of how much it would cost DBAs to check who used the system when, and DBAS responded that it depends on whether the most competent DBA is given the task or the most incompetent that the price will be different.

Second failed WBTB This time all I did was write down the above fragment, and go to bathroom,and will try to WILD in a moment. Result: Couldn't fall asleep for a while but when I did, all I got was the following fragment.

Fragment: if delete something, would help dream? ok this fragment was either confusing computer and mind or using computer as analogy for mind. It suggested that if only I could delete something (don't remember what), is would help with my dreaming effort somehow.

woke up at 8am

Dream: Daring Escape

So me and this dwarf or hafling fantasy creature of some sort were doing an escape from a building owned by bad guys. I don't know who I was, definitely not myself. The dwarf or hafling did not dare escape because he thought it was a bad idea because we would definitely be caught because the bad guys, whoever they were (it was not explained) were all powerful and no one escaped them, but I was daring and confident. My plan was to escape by just using the doors and stairs because they would not expect that at all, so by escaping in plain sight we would be successful. And indeed the staircase was all empty, and while we were full of tension we did not encounter any bad guys. Once we exited the building we got some sort of car somehow (not explained - probably just poofed into the car) and this completed our escape.

Fragment: Broken necklace

In this dream fragment I had a necklace which was falling apart. It seemed really poor quality, though I knew it had been expensive. It had been a gift from my father, I knew. I had to put it down on the table for him to see in the morning to get it fixed, but had trouble finding a spot of the table where there were not too many bread crumbs. Side note: in real life my dad would be nuts due to bread crumbs, a pet peeve of his.