Night Vision

In Media Res, as usual. I am with a group of people, exploring a large underground area. We’re on a sort of high-up walkway that has passages leading to other areas. I’m leading the way, but at some point, I notice that the others aren’t actually following me - rather, they’ve taken one of the side passages, a hanging metal stairway leading up somewhere. I double back and follow.

I find them stopped in front of the entryway of what appears to be a church - a windowless version of one, anyway. There is a rather video game-ish obstacle, a retractable spike floor, blocking the way in. They seem adamant that it’s too dangerous to pass, but I’m not so sure. Those spikes look pretty puny - I kind of suspect I could just walk on top of them without any harm done - and there’s probably a way you’re supposed to go to avoid them, anyway. I find it pretty easily, by going around on the left. The others seem content to wait for me to return, so I head further in.

There are three rows of wooden pews, and as I head towards the aisle on the left, a man stops me to give me an admission stamp. I hold out my left hand, and he stamps the back of it - five small blue dots, in a pattern that looks a bit like braille. I head forward, looking and listening to my surroundings. It is fairly full, and seems to have a wilder vibe than I would associate with a church. There may have been music playing, but I can’t remember many details. I take the other aisle back around. Maybe because of the better angle, I can see that among the people there are several couples having sex, either on the pews or just on the floor. Yeah, I don’t think I’ll be spending too long in here. I’m glad I ended up going because of the stamp - I’m sure this will also get me admission into other places further on as well, although given what I’ve seen here, there may also be places where I won’t necessarily want to admit to having been here to get it….

21.5.25


I am walking down a hallway when it occurs to me that I’m aware that I’m dreaming, and if I want to have a lucid dream, I need to take a moment and actually consider the implications of the situation. Having done so, I continue, interested in exploring my environment.

My memories of this are unusually unclear for a lucid dream, quite possibly because there was a period of NREM sleep and another nonlucid dream before I woke up from it. But it appeared that I was in a university of some sort, and the early part of the dream mostly consisted of walking around and talking to two people. I remember that the second introduced herself as Caroline Friend (which I might be tempted to consider the most unimaginative name for a dream character ever if I didn’t know there was an entry way back in my archive featuring two characters called Bob and Not-Bob…).

Still lucid, but interested in playing along, I have been tasked with going to Burger King King Walmart, where I will be starting a new job. (That is not a typo, and I thought it was pretty weird in the dream, too.) The university leads directly into a mall, and the place I’m looking for is apparently here somewhere. It looks like a pretty nice mall - really, unrealistically nice for one. I think to myself that it’s the second dream I’ve had of being in a mall recently, which is kind of interesting since I don’t remember having had any others, but perhaps my dream self could.

The store doesn’t seem to be on the floor I’m on, and so I have to find a way downstairs. Maybe there’s one hidden somewhere in the back of the arcade, which I’ve discovered on the far end. The first couple machines I pass seem to be out of order, but further in, it’s clear that the first impression was misleading, and it’s a pretty lively place. Various enticing electronic noises and snatches of music fill the air. I’m not going to let myself be distracted from what I’m looking for - but maybe I’ll be back here later….

Turns out there were indeed stairs back there. It takes a bit of walking before I finally find the store that looks like the right one - no sign, but I wouldn’t expect to find more than one big everything store here, and this looks like it. There’s what looks like a customer service counter right in front, and I approach one of the people behind it and say I’m here to start a new job. She immediately responds by getting out from behind the counter to take me somewhere. The dream is getting a bit unstable by this point - I’ve been wary of it fading even before that point, since it’s been going on for what feels like a long time - but I manage to pull it back. However, there aren’t any memories after that point, except that I remember it didn’t last for much longer.

—

I am in an arcade - guess I made it back after all - only where I am now looks more like a computer lab. There are long tables with various old computers lining both sides - and I sit down in front of an unoccupied one and turn it on. Apparently, only some of these have games on them - all of them have only one program each, a different one that’s no longer accessible on more modern machines. There’s a paper by the monitor that apparently says what’s on this one, but I don’t even look at it.

The computer is taking forever to boot up. A blond guy wearing dark blue walks up and presses two buttons on the keyboard. I figure he knows more about these than I do and is doing something necessary to get it going, but nothing happens. The screen is still dark. Turns out it really just is that slow. We talk briefly, and that’s all I can remember.

22.5.25

It is late at night (or you could also say very early in the morning). I’ve been out dancing somewhere, in an earlier part of the dream I’ve now forgotten, and am now on my way back to my car. Or, at least, it starts off as a car, but then it decides it would rather be a motorbike, and that little segment of the dream replays with the change. It’s in a line of vehicles on one side of a little triangle of parkland where what looks like a wooden caravan is just packing up to go. They seem to have left fliers on the nearby vehicles, so I look at the one on mine - a half-sheet of peachy pink paper that says they’re holding some kind of musical event here tomorrow (as it kind of looks like they’ve done today as well). I stick it in the folder inside my messenger bag and stow it in the motorbike’s compartment, and the people in the caravan give me a friendly wave as they drive past.

Possibly left over from its brief time as a car, the motorbike has a built-in GPS, which I turn on so I can find my way out of the city, which is an unfamiliar one to me. I don’t ride it, though - I plan to walk with it until I’m close to the highway. As it turns out, though, the GPS is thoroughly confused and does not seem to be taking me any closer to where I want to go. The city seems to be a pretty nice place, old-fashioned with a lot of cobblestoned areas not accessible by car (although it does take me along a major road a couple times, and I get another sighting of the caravan). At one point, I pass a lit-up fountain in a tiny, irregularly shaped plaza. It’s about at that point that it becomes clear that the GPS still has no idea where I am and seems to have just been taking me in a big circle.

The city also has what strikes me as an unusually large number of people out and about at such an early hour. I have seen some of them enough times to suspect that they are probably lost too. I ask a nearby woman - she looks to be in her mid-20s, with pale skin and wearing a dull blue hooded jacket - where she is going. She says she is on her way to church. Oh, right - I guess that’s also a thing people sometimes do at ridiculously early hours of the morning. (She has an accent that I can’t place at first, but a little further into the dream, after my brain has had time to make the necessary connections, it occurs to me that it’s probably Finnish.) On further questioning, it turns out she’s got to go in the same direction I'm headed, and so are a couple others people nearby, so we decide to go together. I will use my phone GPS to take use there, as I’m sure it is more reliable than the other one.

It already seems to be going a lot better - the layout on the phone is actually matching up with the streets we’re walking along. At one point, we arrive at a major thoroughfare, and across the street is a large, baroque-looking building. I’m struck by how beautiful it is, the moonlight shining down on it from among the dramatically piled clouds. Do we go left or right from here? I check my phone. Oddly, it seems to be telling us to go straight through the building. But, now that I’m looking for it, I can see that there’s a narrow passageway that we can take. No crosswalk, but there’s barely anything on the road, so we just wait for a truck to pass and then cross.

Somehow, the passageway ends up taking us inside of the building. (The actual transition is rather vague, and so unfortunately I can’t say exactly how it went with taking the motorbike up that staircase….) This area is brightly lit, with white walls and largely white furnishings, and is vaguely familiar to me. People seem to be busy there setting things up in preparation for the next day. We end up stopping to talk to some people near a large table, where several of us sit down, and at some point a man approaches me, asking if I can help get my parents’ cat down from upstairs.

I agree, and he takes me to an adjoining room where there’s a kind of tunnel with a ladder in it leading up into a loft area. That’s where he is. I’m not looking forward to this. I have memories of this place, and that passage is a little narrower than my shoulders, which makes it uncomfortable to go up, but even worse coming down. I can only imagine what it’s like coming down it while trying to restrain a highly strung cat.

I climb the ladder partway, up to where I can see a little ways into the room, and call his name. Immediately, I see his pointy little Siamese face poking over the edge, looking down at me. Straightaway, he jumps down - the tunnel is sloped towards the top - and approaches me. He recognizes me. I was not expecting to get this lucky.

When he’s close enough, I grab him. He squirms, but I hold on tight, knowing it’s probably going to be a lot harder to catch him if he gets free and runs back up there, and bring him down to where the man has a carrier ready for him. I drop him down through the carrier’s open door, which he then closes. It’s done.

(As a note, the cat in this dream died a couple weeks ago - he was an old cat, and his kidneys were starting to fail - which gives an interesting dimension to all of this. You gotta wonder sometimes….)

17.5.25

The last dream of another night where there were too many to record…. It starts off with traveling to a convention with a group of people - at first by car, but then it seems like we’re on something like a metro train, which also changes at some point to not be an enclosed vehicle. As we get closer, enormous centipedes keep getting in our way, and I have to push them aside so we can keep going. I know that they’re part of the experience that the guy in charge has provided for us - there was actually a part earlier in the dream where somebody called him up to make sure he knew to get everything ready.

At some point, it changes to walking through a series of mostly empty rooms. As on the train, I’m in the lead, aware of the others being somewhere behind me. After a couple rooms, there start to be multiple doors available, the idea being (I think) that all of us will end up alone in different rooms.

Eventually, I find myself in a larger room than the previous ones, apparently some kind of laboratory. I am aware of having entered some kind of boss battle scenario, and I’m now effectively stuck in this room until I can fulfill its exit conditions. The room is tall-ceilinged with a number of raised, fenced-in platforms housing various machines, mostly. A large, insect-like creature with thin, black, spiky limbs is moving about in it. Not attacking me, though - it mostly seems to be helping a woman there whom I assume is its creator moving things around the lab.

Since it doesn’t seem interested in initiating a fight, I look around to try to gather more information about this place and what I’ll have to do here. I find a sign, a bit like something you might see at a zoo exhibit, and read it. It turns out to be annoyingly cryptic, although it does give me some helpful information about the creature. It’s apparently based on a flea, which tells me that it’s probably a very impressive jumper. The sign claims that it weighs 85 pounds - so light, considering its large size. There’s also a very strong hint that I’ll have to take the creature’s body to a garden there - I can see it, a small one on one of the raised platforms - and use it to feed the plants before the exit will unlock.

I’m still not satisfied, though, and so I decide to get some further information. I summon a display out of thin air to pull up the lucid dreamer’s information page corresponding to this location. I understand this to be a well-established trick used to find out more about dream settings, which is interesting for a number of reasons, not least because I haven’t actually gained lucidity at any point. The page actually resembles a spreadsheet instead of being an informative blurb like the sign, but I have no trouble understanding it, and what it’s telling me is very interesting. Apparently, feeding the garden is actually the only condition I need to fulfill in order to unlock the door. And there’s nothing saying that I have to do it the way the sign is suggesting.

I run my left thumb across the palm of my right hand, and a cut appears there. It does not hurt, and I am aware of doing this through making changes on a chemical level rather than physically breaking the skin. Better to do it this way. Anything with an exoskeleton is just too cute to fight. Pretty much anything without one too, but yeah, I definitely have a weakness for arthropods….

6.5.25