lucid

All the most interesting dreams from this week involved music in some way. These included:

-Applying a temporary tattoo of the notation for the amen break to my face, apparently for some event I was going to attend.

-Working on a piece of music. As the dream progresses, the different parts become associated with characters, and a story plays out among them. The characters all travel somewhere special, like the moon, a number of times. I think it ended with everything being absorbed back into the composition again. Unfortunately, I can’t remember many of the details as I woke up to one of the cats getting ready to cough up a hairball and had to immediately turn on the lights and make sure she didn’t do it on my bouzouki.

-Programming a couple weather patterns on something that looked suspiciously like a groovebox. I’m doing this at somebody’s request, at the shop he owns. There’s a sense of the machine making the process much simpler than it would be otherwise, just a matter of pressing a few buttons. When I’m done, I make a mental projection of the future to check that my proposed patterns won’t screw up the weather in other places, and since everything looks OK, I confirm them.

At some later point in the dream, I gain lucidity flying over a place that’s a cross between a highway and a waterway, with cars going one way and ships going the other. I decide to go back to the scene from the earlier dream, and I speak with the man to find out if he has anything else I can do there. It strikes me as an interesting thing to do while focusing on maintaining lucidity. I woke up not long after, though, which wasn’t surprising as it was actually getting rather late into the morning.

27.6.23-3.7.23

Touched by a Yeti

I have traveled somewhere with a large group of people, possibly by ship. I’m a different person (male, early 20s, with a Spanish-sounding name). We’ve just arrived here. It’s unclear exactly what kind of setting this is, but it’s clearly not contemporary, and maybe entirely fantastical. Everything is currently covered in snow.

I am happy because I have a new sword, and it is awesome. It’s a long, slightly curved blade, and there are etchings of animals on it – wild boars, maybe others. I have it out, showing people, when a strange creature appears – I know it to be a yeti. It’s white and shaggy, but actually a little smaller than an average human – overall, a very vague visual impression. (Although maybe not vaguer than my visual impressions of dream characters in general. Or, really, people in general, as I am pretty much face-blind and have had to work out other ways of recognizing people.)

Anyway. The creature is lightning-fast and moves in unpredictable ways, including short jumps between locations. In the brief time they have to react, people are trying to get away from it, but it just moves straight past them and appears right next to me. It touches my arm, which it does something to me that makes me lose consciousness.

I’m woken up by someone what seems like only a short time later – same setting, only more people are around now, and the yeti is clearly not. I go with some people to have a conversation with someone who can explain what’s going on. The person (who seems a lot like NR) explains that the creature is the guardian of this place, and it didn’t like the sword – or, rather, its symbolic charge, so to speak – what it represented, which was being an outsider here and coming in intending to fix problems as an outsider, without being a part of it, which is arrogance.

This makes sense to me. I now feel as if I understand the creature – not just from the explanation of its behavior but because I can tell that I now have some kind of connection with it. I know that it’s here all the time, even when it’s not manifesting physically. At some point later, as I’m talking with some other people who haven’t yet heard about the incident, I mention the yeti to them, and I turn around, expecting to see it there behind me, and it is – and from their reaction, I can tell that they can see it there too. I also know that eventually, when the time is right, I’ll take the sword out again, and use it this time, but in cooperation with it.

28.5.23

Cycles

I’m in a room in a house at night, sitting at a keyboard. (It does seem to be me this time. Probably.) I’m playing with settings, designing sounds that I’ll be able to use for projects later on. While I’m doing this, I have a strong sense of my aunt’s presence, which seems connected with the keyboard in some way even though she isn’t there in the dream.

Later, I’m somewhere like the dining room table of my current house, also at night. My parents are there, and I’m showing them something on a laptop: a vst instrument that I’m thinking about getting. It is called The Curse. The sound has an evolving quality to it, and it is accompanied by simple images that change alongside it as it cycles through its various stages. It had six different settings, all represented by images of people shown in bright neon outline against a black background going through different transformations. The first was fairy tale-like – that’s all I can remember about it. Another image was of a woman holding a baby: it showed the woman growing old rapidly and then becoming young again as the baby continued to look the same. Some of the images I didn’t see the cycles for were of a young man and woman holding wineglasses in a celebratory pose, and of a woman in a short dress wearing a helmet like the one Athena is portrayed in – one of the only lone figures – and a man and woman I surmised were in some sort of muse/artist relationship, since the woman was holding a quill pen.

1.6.23

Smell Epiphany

I am a different person (female, Asian, maybe around eight years old) living in a house with my family. The house is somewhat similar to childhood home #5, at least in the size/location of the kitchen area. Something is bothering me – I’ve forgotten some of the points related to this – so I go outside to sit by the garden. There’s a steep, rocky slope lined with trees that leads down to a small garden where vegetables are growing. I sit on the slope, shaded by trees, and stay there for a while.

Later, I’m in a building with my father and older brother, walking down a hallway. It’s a busy area, and many of the walls are lined with shelves full of bottles and boxes. He seems to be some kind of medical professional, and he is giving us a lesson, something both my brother and I find boring. He tells us to take a certain amount of a certain kind of powder on a shelf, so we do, putting it containers we have with us. He asks us how we can tell whether it’s good quality or not. I know the right answer, and so I give it: by its smell. He tells us to go back to where we got the powder and smell it. We do. My brother goes first, and when he’s done, I lean down to smell it. The stuff looks, and also kind of smells, like curry powder. As I smell it, I realize for the first time just how many dimensions a smell can have. It’s like a whole world. The idea that people can extract meaningful information doing this was just abstract to me before, but now it’s real.

5.6.23

Also a Couple Lucid Dreams

I won’t describe them in detail, though, since I don’t think walking/flying around and looking at things would make for very interesting reading. The first (10.6.23) had an interesting setting – I get lucid after the dream’s ‘plot’ seems to come to an end, fly through a wall, and start exploring. I gain height and fly around an industrial park at night – brightly lit in different colors, with the reflected light from the overcast sky giving it a vivid atmosphere, while lightning flashes in the distance. I go in and out a number of times and make my wings appear at least twice – notably, just based on my shadow, they seem to be smaller than normal, which maybe makes sense as I can fly perfectly well without them, and so there’s no real need to make them look like they’re actually serving some purpose.

In the second lucid dream (13.6.23), after some dream events I can’t recall very clearly, I’m leaving a school and happen to see by NR looking at children’s artwork hanging in the hallway. He’s wearing a wide-brimmed hat, and so I can’t see his face. I walk past, but then it occurs to me that I should really take the opportunity to talk with him. I turn around and see that he’s begun to vanish, and I realize that I’m dreaming. I decide that I’ll go somewhere else, just leaving the location up to the dream.

I keep walking towards the entrance, close my eyes, and let the dream fade around me. My sense of having a body, and therefore of having my eyes closed, vanishes completely, and once it’s gone, imagery begins to arise again. In a flash, I see bare tree branches in a thick, white mist. Accompanying the visuals is a strong impression of early spring. Then everything comes into full focus again, and I’m standing in a bare garden underneath a bare-branched tree by a pond. I (wrongly) identify this as the backyard of childhood home #5 and am a little disappointed – just think of all the more interesting places I could have ended up. But maybe there will be some value in revisiting the place here in a dream – it’s not exactly one I have good memories of.

And so I walk up to the house, jumping through the garage doors but then opening the one to the inside normally for some reason – maybe I just expected it to be unlocked. The layout of the house does not resemble the one I’ve mistaken it for in any meaningful way other than having hardwood floors. I walk through the various rooms, ground floor first, then upper floor. Nobody is around – I only see a couple cats in one of the rooms. My alarm awakens me before I can explore the whole house.

I am somewhere like a dorm room, which I seem to share with around three other people. The beds are really low, maybe just mattresses on the floor, and we’re sitting on them, listening to a woman in some kind of position of authority who’s speaking to us. She takes a feather comforter from somewhere and hands it to me to replace my current one. My bedding is all extremely tangled and twisted - I’ve slept badly. I tell her that it wouldn’t be that difficult to untangle it, but she still wants to give me the new one, so I take it and set the old one at the front of the bed. She then leaves.

My old friend Ona, who seems to be one of my roommates, is trying to tell me something now, but she’s wearing something over her mouth sort of like an underwater breathing apparatus, so I have trouble understanding her at first. Eventually, with the help of one of the others, I understand that she’s saying something about a concert she saw me play in yesterday – also something about how she had previously been familiar with only one of the composers whose pieces were played there.

This next part may or may not be part of the same dream – there were definitely parts after that one that I forgot, anyway. But I’m in a restaurant now. It’s a large, bright space, lit mainly by daylight streaming through full-length glass windows, but a little crowded – all the tables seem to be filled, and there isn’t much space to move between them. Saimi passes by the table where I’m sitting and makes some kind of signal to me with her hand. This somehow clues me into the fact that I’m dreaming.

I get up and follow her out to the balcony to talk. As I pass through the glass window, I can feel some sensations from it, especially the dividing metal bars, which is unusual and a little surprising – possibly it has something to do with the overall level of realism seeming especially high this time. Saimi watches, pauses for a second, and then opens a glass door and walks out. I jokingly say that I haven’t used a door in a dream for years now.

We jump down from the balcony and walk around while we decide what to do. It’s now clear that the restaurant is located on a college campus – one that’s dream-familiar to me from at least one dream I know I’ve recorded. Saimi says that before meeting up with me, she was waiting for my Aunt O so that they could see something together. She seems to want me to guess, so I do. A play? No. A movie? Also no. Apparently, it’s something like episodes from a TV series being screened somewhere on campus. She still wants to do this now, while lucid. I don’t think this sounds like a very good idea – looking at a screen for any considerable length of time seems like a pretty good way of losing lucidity to me. It could be interesting to see if my aunt shows up, though, and to talk with her, so I agree to wait with her. Since they agreed to meet in the restaurant, we head back there, flying back up to the balcony and going back where we started.

I figure I should probably do something to keep engaged with the dream. This doesn’t strike me as a very interesting situation to work with initially. I wonder, though: what if I try to read these people’s minds? I look around the room, getting a read of the atmosphere – just in a way one might in waking life. How should I do this? I focus on one woman sitting at a table near me, trying to access her mindstate. What happens is that the dream imagery itself seems to transform so that now I’m seeing her in something like a large version of a baby’s high chair, chewing a mouthful of food with evident displeasure. So the form of the dream changed to reflect my intention, rather than my experiencing her thoughts as some kind of verbal overlay – fascinating.

I wake up soon after, but quickly fall asleep again and find myself in the same setting, this time with my cat Ronnie. I’m trying to tie something around one of his paws, but soon I remember that I’m dreaming. I wake up again before I can do much of anything.

-16.12.22

The earliest parts of the dream I can still remember involve going around a house at night so that I can listen to different pieces of music being played on various radios and other equipment. All the rooms are dark, and I think I’m trying to avoid being seen by somebody. There’s a deliberate quality to what I’m doing, like it’s some task I’ve got to complete. Then, walking through a large room, possibly some kind of storage space, I remember that I’m dreaming, and so I can just do what I want.

I walk further. Up ahead are two large windows set at an angle. I can see scenes playing out on the other side – it alternates between a bird’s-eye view of a large herd of dinosaurs of various kinds that looks a little unrealistic and something else I can no longer remember. (This was circa 4-5 am, not long after I’d finally managed to fall asleep, which would explain the relatively fluid, early-dream quality to some of the imagery.) I decide I want to get a closer look at the dinosaurs, so I jump through the glass when they’re visible.

I start somewhere above them and to one side, but flying seems unusually difficult. I just feel too exhausted for it and float down towards the ground. But once I land, there’s suddenly someone there – I think at first that he’s my father, but it’s immediately obvious that he isn’t – the thought was probably a lingering remnant of the nonlucid dream that preceded this one. I ask him who he is. He seems a little sad at the question and, in fact, never actually answers it – he only says something that implies my not knowing already indicates some unfortunate state of affairs.

We fly together – it is much easier now, with him. He wants to head back into the building I originally came out of, which is quite tall, almost like an office building. I ‘recognize’ various rooms I see through the glass. Among our surroundings out here, though, I can now see a place that strikes me as familiar among the array of them surrounding us in a rather physics-defying way. It’s hard to describe my impression of it – it’s like I’m looking into a realm that is the night sky, filled with colorful ballooning shapes, a little like kites, which I know to be sentient beings. I have good memories of that place. It isn’t just familiar: it feels as if, in some way, I belong there. I’m reluctant to go back inside when it is once again right here in front of me. But I follow my companion back through the glass, somewhat higher up than the level I exited from. We walk through a close, dark space which I know to be a puppet theater and into the room beyond, at which point I awaken.

3.12.22

In the earliest parts I can remember, I’m traveling on a ship with a friend when the water underneath starts to swirl. Soon, a whirlpool has formed, and we’re spinning around as the wall of water grows higher around us. It now seems to be just us in the water – the whole dream was a bit iffy on continuity – and I see a smaller spiral under the surface near me. I move away, but it follows. It strikes me that this thing is only after me, not my friend, so I pass them something which is supposed to be a useful tool of some kind and encourage them to leave.

I am alone now. The ship (or something, anyway) seems to be back, and there’s nothing to do but wait, I figure. I pull out a book—The Hobbit—so I can read until it feels like manifesting.

At some point, a dark, oppressive energic atmosphere begins to form—not something visible, but a feeling hanging over everything—and it does show itself – in the form of Bilbo Baggins. Simultaneously with this, I now seem to be Frodo. “Bilbo” starts going on an exaggerated diatribe about what an awful book “The Hobbit” is. This goes on for quite a while, interspersed with my occasional sarcastic responses. The continuity continues to be rather sketchy, with “Bilbo” occasionally disappearing and subsequently reappearing elsewhere, and once, apparently accidentally, walking into view undisguised before the previous one has finished talking, appearing as a figure cloaked in black, face hidden beneath a hood.

But then, a little later, it’s back to “Bilbo” again. He now has his own copy of “The Hobbit,” enclosed in a bubble wrap packing envelope which he’s holding by one corner as if it’s something disgusting. There’s a whole tub filled with bubble wrap beside him. I haven’t been taking anything that’s happened the least bit seriously so far—I’ve been treating it as if it’s some kind of unavoidable everyday nuisance rather than an actual threat—but somehow, in this whole improbable series of events, it is the bubble wrap that gets me thinking critically about what’s going on. “Bubble wrap. Why?” I say aloud. There is no bubble wrap in Middle Earth. I think it over just to be sure. No, it’s quite impossible. Couldn’t happen.

I then proceed to do the only logical thing one can do under the circumstances: transform myself into a cat and leap into the bubble wrap-filled crate. But it’s just then that the dream ends, and I awaken.

4.11.21

(Note: The longer my dreams are, the harder it is for me to remember details, particularly conversations, and this was a long one. There’s several hours’ worth of material here that I can only remember happened at all because I can remember remembering it in a later part of the dream, and this does raise questions of whether they ever actually played out. But, for what it’s worth, it doesn’t feel to me as if that’s what happened, and I do have many cases of knowing dream memory is working in that way to compare it to.)

The earliest part I can remember is of a disaster taking place, a flood sweeping through a public building of some kind. Everybody is trying to get out. I’m one of the last out, but I wait, holding the door open so that the waters don’t forcibly close it and trap the one person who’s still there. It took him a while to believe this was actually happening (understandable, considering how weird it is), so he didn’t get out as quickly as everyone else.

After this series of events is the biggest memory gap, which seems to mainly consist of meeting up with a large group of people and preparing for some kind of expedition together. I become lucid not long before we’re going to set off, although it’s not so much me realizing that it’s a dream as it is the unconscious knowledge that it’s a dream, which I’ve been acting on this whole time, becoming conscious. And this sort of makes it feel as if I’ve been lucid the whole time, if that makes sense.

I’m looking out the window of a house onto the rolling fields beyond as it happens. I still have some preparation to do here, though, so I’m still here packing as everybody else is leaving. I’m taking my hiking backpack, the black one with yellow trim. It occurs to me to wonder whether I need to do this in a dream, since I can just make things appear if I need them. But I have the impression, based on earlier conversations, that I might not be able to do that in some of the places we’re going, and so I’ll want to make sure I have essentials with me, at least. The last thing I grab is my brown aviator-style jacket, which I fold and pack into the backpack before buckling it and heading downstairs and outside.

I can just see somebody disappearing past the other side of the house, down a broad stone staircase. That’s where everybody’s gone. I try flying part of the way, but perhaps because of the hiking backpack—even though it doesn’t feel heavy—it’s hard to get more than a couple feet off the ground. But flying seems to be slower than running anyway, so I just run around the side and down the stairs.

I’m now in an area with several platforms rising a distance above the ground. Next to one on the far side is a cliff wall with a small tunnel partway up, a little above head height. A young women is nearby – it seems she had to stop to do something before going onward. I jump onto one of the platforms, where I see some piled-up clothing. I recognize it as a kind of uniform for us to wear. It looks a bit like a karate gi: loose pants and a shirt that ties around the front, white, though a little discolored with age and threadbare in places. On some of the edges, flowers are embroidered in pale colors. I put it on over my clothing.

Jumping onto the last platform and up to the tunnel—taking off the backpack and pushing it in first—is practically effortless, much easier than it would be in waking life, which makes it kind of fun. The tunnel is not tall enough to walk in, and it narrows considerably not far ahead, so I push the backpack in ahead of me. It barely fits, and I can see it slide down once it gets past the narrow point, where the tunnel slopes downward. I barely fit, too – I actually have to turn my head to the side to squeeze through. But soon, it’s large enough to where I can crawl again, and then walk upright.

The tunnel is made of squares of some smooth material, solid black in the center but with a stripe of red-orange around the edges that glows, lighting the way. As I walk, it slopes further downward and eventually drops me into a corridor with a grimy, institutional feel to it. All dimly and artificially lit, as if I’m somewhere underground.

It has a distinctly unpleasant vibe – although part of the reason may be because of what I know about this place. It is actually a sentient environment, and not a very nice one, and now that I’m inside of it, it’s going to be tracking my every move and shaping itself according to my actions and reactions. It’s not the destination – just somewhere we have to pass through on the way. There’ll be a test at the end that has to be passed before we can get out – but this place doesn’t like people leaving it and will be actively throwing obstacles in our way.

My backpack isn’t here – the place probably hid it somewhere, and so I’ll have to be on the lookout for it. I turn towards the right, reading the plates on the doors as I go by, deciding which room to enter first. The place looks to be some sort of school judging by what they say.

As I walk, faint, unpleasant feeling-tones arise, like the ghosts of memories with an archaic, dark quality to them, although they definitely don't involve my personal past – not in this lifetime, anyway. Or maybe they’re anticipations of what I’ll find here, behind the doors. Or maybe both. I also see a set of stairs leading downwards, but I don’t want to leave this floor just yet.

After reaching the end of the corridor, I head back, still making up my mind. It’s not terribly important where I go first, but I am aware that, as the first deliberate choice I make here, it will give the place some insight into me, will establish the course of how things will go. I decide on a room about midway between the end of the corridor and where I started from labelled “Faculty Lounge.”

As I open the door, I’m surprised by what I see. It’s a little room, somewhat like the bedroom of a hostel, with two bunk beds, a table off to one side and some assorted furniture – overall, quite nice apart from the lack of windows. But the really surprising thing is that it’s already occupied by two people from the group I started with.

Sam is there—Sam, maker of ukuleles, fixer of anything with strings and frets, host of concerts and an accomplished musician in his own right. His dog is there with him. The other person isn’t waking-life familiar, although he does somewhat resemble one of my coworkers, with dark hair, pale skin and some kind of facial hair, I think. A dog has come in with me as well, a large, black one. I don’t pay much attention to it besides noting that it’s mine and hoping that the room isn’t going to be too crowded now.

Sam greets me – but he uses a different name, a man’s name. They must be seeing this place and this situation differently than I do, I realize. It had been mentioned at the earlier gatherings that it would appear differently to everybody – but I had assumed that we would also be going through it alone, individually, and so it hadn’t occurred to me that I’d find myself in this kind of situation. But I can roll with it.

We talk for a little while. At one point, one of them advises me to be careful not to give this place “the impression that I’m somebody it can f*** with.” Sam mentions that he’s working on a puzzle—it seems to be set up on the table there—and I say I’ll leave him to it. I mention, though, that I’m good with puzzles, and he invites me to come help put it together. This must be part of their test, I realize – and it strikes me that maybe it isn’t a coincidence I ended up here to help them with it, although from everything I’ve heard, it would be uncharacteristically benevolent for the place to intentionally direct me to them.

The puzzle seems to mainly feature cute baby animals, and it is close to being finished. I help assemble the remaining pieces as Sam tells me some anecdotes he’s heard about a 20th century Viennese composer. He can’t remember which one they’re about. I notice, though, that the bottom edge of the puzzle isn’t complete. Sam is stirring some sort of gooey blue liquid, and I realize that that will also be part of it: the tests, though different, all have one thing in common: incorporating two bowls of these brightly colored mixtures into them somehow.

14.7.20

In the earliest part of the dream I remember, I'm stepping into an elevator. I seem to be able to see through its walls, into the shaft and the mechanism it runs on, and the rough, dark area around it. I want to go up a floor, but after getting about halfway there, the elevator stops. Then it goes back down, past the floor I got in on – down and at an angle as it follows the track. It seems to be headed down to the basement floors, which annoys me. I hate it when this happens.

I think it must have dawned on me around then that the earlier experience I was thinking of took place in a dream, and that this too was a dream. But it’s hard to remember exactly because once I’m out, the dream turns out to be one of those lucid ones where my senses don’t seem to be working properly. I can’t control the dream; even moving around is laborious. But, knowing that these are problems that often goes away on their own, and that I rarely experience them in outdoor areas, I keep going, trying to make my way up to the surface.

Eventually, I do make it up. I’m in an unfamiliar house with large, light rooms, including a sunporch, visible through a glass window. Since the problems from before don’t seem to be affecting me anymore, I step straight through the glass to the sunporch, then through that glass to the area outside, where there’s a small lake.

There’s ice on the lake, which gives me an idea: I could try ice skating in a dream. But the ice is breaking up and thawing even as I watch, and it doesn’t seem quite right to freeze it again. But this is a dream, after all, so why shouldn’t I be able to skate on liquid water?

I step out onto the lake, surrounding my bare feet with a slippery layer of air, and kick off. It works perfectly, a bit like self-propelled jet-skiing. It’s an exhilarating experience.

The lake is long and irregularly shaped, with small, rocky islands, purple and green with lichens, and beds of rushes and lily pads. It’s bounded by a stone wall too tall for me to be able to see over, not far past the lake’s edge in some places. And there now seem to be a number of cats around, sitting on the rocks – watching me, perhaps. Near one of the wall’s corners, I see one that looks like the feral cat my household took in but who died of cancer the previous week. I reach out and pet him – something he would never allow a human to do – and he responds affectionately.

After making another round of the lake, I’m starting to get curious about that wall. What’s on the other side of it? I circle back, pick up speed, and jump towards it with the intention of going through – and suddenly find myself bodiless in empty space. I guess there was NREM on the other side.

I prepare myself for maintaining awareness in this state – but it only lasts a minute or so before I wake up.

-27.2.20

I am on a computer, looking through files. I’m trying to find papers from an earlier part of the dream where I’d stayed after a math class drawing, and the teacher had brought over a stack of graded assignments he’d apparently been working on while I sat there. I’d just glanced at them and seen that’d I’d done really well on them before taking off, but now I want a closer look, and this was apparently where they were.

I scroll through small pictures, some of which began to move. One has expanded to fill the whole screen. It shows a house on fire, people running out. It scrolls past a small stage on which two double basses stand, one the traditional sort, another more metallic – electric by the look of it, but still a roughly double bass size and shape. It sits in a sort of flower-shaped metal pad. It catches my attention, and I’m struck by the level of detail.

I am now – not sure in what order – both present in the dream and lucid. I’m in a park-like area, a clearing with groves of trees and some woods not far off. Another stage is nearby, this one a roofed circular platform on which sits another of those big electric basses. I consider giving it a try – that could be fun. But it occurs to me that I’ve never produced frightening scenarios in lucid dreams before, and I should try it at least once.

Surrounded by demons is the first thing that occurs to me for some reason. That’ll do. I will them into being. As I focus on the intention, everything around me grows dark, swirling and immaterial. I’m floating, moving vaguely backwards. But nothing else seems to be happening. Oh, well. Maybe I’ll give that bass a try after all.

I let go of the intention. The original scene immediately returns, and I walk back towards the area I started out in. But not far from it, by a ridge in front of a forested area, I spot a strange figure. Its head looks like a skull, bovine in shape, with horns that curl around to the front and knot around each other, and it’s wearing a black and white herringbone tweed blazer with a thin purple scarf and a long grey-black skirt. It looks like I managed something, at least, although I can’t say it’s especially scary.

As I approach, it waves its hand, causing a small sphere of darkness to shoot towards me. This startles me a bit, but it doesn’t seem to have any effect. I keep walking towards it, ignoring its attacks. As I pass the pavilion, I notice the instrument sitting there looks different now. There are also now a number of cats up under the roof, lying in big cat piles that seem to extend upward into tunnels. They seem to just be waking up. The grey and orange tabbies stay where they are, but a few black cats stretch and jump down onto the stage.

As I turn back towards the figure, I see that it is now a cat as well – a small black one. I pick it up. It doesn’t look happy with being held, but it makes no attempt to escape.

At that point, I wake up.

9.1.20

The dream begins in large building of indefinite function—mostly a large, open space with various rooms branching off, somewhat like a mall, although it doesn’t have the feel of one. At one point, I enter one of these rooms. It’s filled with plush toys of various kinds. On top of one cabinet is a series of small narwhals. One of them is gray and fuzzy, with a string going around it. On it are a few metal beads with letters on them spelling out a name. It’s exactly like one my friend Nina made for me when we were children, and it occurs to me that seeing it here can only mean one thing: I’m dreaming.

I walk back out into the larger room, where I take a look around. The floor is made up of black and white tiles in a checkerboard pattern. I could have some fun with that. In response to my intention, the black tiles glow red, blue, a whole series of bright colors in succession. Then I decide to change things more dramatically. I simply intend for the floor to change, not specifying how, and in response, it shifts into an abstract pattern, tendrils of color curved across a white background, made out of smaller tiles than before—like a mosaic. They’re predominantly salmon pink with subdued green, as well as tiles in darker colors, which give the patterns depth and contrast.

Looking across the large room, I see a wall of glass windows. Beyond it, the sky is visible, and a bit of the landscape below, as if this place is located somewhere high up. Some people are gathered out on a landing on the other side. I decide I’ll go over there next. But the floor is changing again: this time, into blues, greens, yellows, touches of orange. It’s a map now—specifically, a topographical map. I didn’t do that.

Rather than heading over to the windows, I examine the new floor. There are words written over locations, like they would be on an actual map, but there seems to be more written here than just names. However, the language is an unfamiliar one—possibly Spanish. But, I think, that shouldn’t be a problem for the place names since those tend to stay much the same between languages.

I am standing over the part showing the Aegean Sea. The island directly in front of me is labeled 'Mykonos'—and memory tells me (and Google confirms once I’ve awakened) that it does indeed have that island’s distinctive shape. I look over near the Turkish coast, but the islands there don’t match up nearly as well. They don't even seem to be the same islands at all. I look around various areas of the map until I wake up.

22.5.19

As usual, I seem to have become aware that I’m dreaming without being able to remember how it happened. I’m in a house along with two other people. I believe that they’re other dreamers—not sure now on what basis.

In one part early on, I’m looking at a still scene in front of me, like a picture. It takes me a couple minutes to puzzle out what’s happening in it. A young man is shown looking into a body of water like a lake. The sky is colorful and full of varied light, with a couple odd-shaped clouds in the foreground. I figure out that the cloud that looks like a unicorn’s head is going towards the cloud shaped like a dragon’s, which represents an attack on the sun by the moon, and the man is watching it through the reflections in the water.

When I’ve realized this, the scene comes to life in front of me. The clouds converge, and the sky darkens, with the moon appearing. It behaves strangely at first before taking up a normal course in the sky. The man gets up and heads in the direction it has gone. He’s going to try to fix the situation.

A lot of the dream faded from memory when I woke up, but in the subsequent parts, I was with the two dreamers. I only remember one person well, a guy. He is apparently already familiar with this legend—I get the impression he knows a lot of them.

At some point quite a bit later on, the others are somewhere else, fighting a monster of some kind. I guess some people don’t feel like they’ve really accomplished something unless there’s an epic boss battle at the end—but I just don’t find those things very interesting. While that’s going on, I’m standing near a grove of palm trees, above which the moon is floating in the form of a little, glowing crescent shape. Once we get ahold of that, we’ve won. According to the man, however, there’s something odd about the palm leaves, and a person will die if they touch them. But they just look like normal palm leaves to me, and so I figure I’ll take my chances with them. Anyway, I can fly in from above and avoid the leaves that way.

First step: make wings. I’ve been using shortcuts so much lately I figure that this time, I’ll do the full procedure like I used to. I stand facing my shadow on the ground, and will it to grow wings. Immediately, I see them unfolding, and unfolding further, out to their usual considerable span.

But this time—perhaps in response to my wanting to get a better view of what happens when I do this—there are also reflective surfaces nearby, although I can’t say now just what they were. I can see the wings themselves reflected in them—and since I’ve never set an intention for anything beyond generic wings, it’s a bit of a surprise to see how they’re turning out—red-gold in color, and faintly glowing. I climb up onto a nearby object—again, I can’t remember specifically what it was—and from there, hover over to the trees and grab the crescent moon.

In the process, though, I brush the tips of a couple palm leaves. And, perhaps because of that— or perhaps not— I soon find the dream fading around me until I’m in complete darkness. I’m still lucid, though. It feels as if I’m moving forward, but with nothing visible except for occasional faint shapes in the darkness, it’s impossible to tell—or, for that matter, tell how much time is passing. But after a while, I feel like it’s a good time to go back. I open my eyes, intending to be in the previous setting.

And I’m there, as before, and so are the two people. I can remember even less of this later part than I can the previous one—although I can recall the second person definitely being female in this one, whereas I can remember nothing at all about them from the first. There’s a series of events involving a deep pit filled with boiling water that opened up in the house. At some later part, the others seem to have lost lucidity. They're acting somewhat zombie-like, and are unresponsive to my efforts to get their attention. Not long after that, I wake up.

8.12.18

I’m at the counter of a coffee shop that looks like one in a town not far from where I work. They seem to be selling small squares of chocolate cake, and I decide I’ll get one with my espresso. I’m hoping that it will be less expensive than their big slices of cake. But the total comes out to a little more than $10—meaning it was actually quite a bit more expensive. The woman behind the counter tells me that, if the total comes up to just a little more, which it would if I ordered a different kind of coffee—but actually, I can’t seem to get her to explain what’s supposed to happen and why it would be a good thing.

After a couple attempts, though, it occurs to me that I’m probably dreaming—possibly just because it was one of those rare scenarios - rare for me, anyway - that’s enough like waking life to where the differences are obvious. I look around the room. I have just enough time to observe that this is actually quite a good rendition of the waking life location before my vision starts fading.

I head for the door, and stepping outside seems to fix the problem. I can see just fine here. I’m now on a street that’s a little reminiscent of the waking life one that I’d expect to be here, but more vibrant and interesting. But I don’t stick around: I start running down the street, then flapping the wings I know will be there when I want them to be, then flying.

I rise higher, above the treetops, then make a strange kind of turn—I ought to be flying straight up, but somehow I’m parallel to the ground in a different location. I seem to be above a forest now, and above me is the evening sky. There’s sort of a natural path here, a groove where the foliage is lower, and I fly along it. I pass a lamppost on my right. It’s an interesting thing, very modern-looking—just a smooth, cylindrical pole with a vertical slit near the top that has purple light shining through it. I note that it would be completely useless from the ground—almost as if this is a real trail I’m flying along, and it's lighting it.

Was there anything I was planning to do next time I had a lucid dream? The only thing I can think of is actually looking at my wings. I never seem to think of it until—like now—I’m already in the air. Oh, well.

In the sky, above and ahead of me, I can see a red light—really, more like a small circle of lights. I figure I’ll go see what it is. That might be interesting.

I fly towards it. Pretty soon, there’s nothing in my field of vision but sky and the red light. It will be harder to maintain lucidity with nothing more solid to focus on, I know, and so I increase my concentration.

Once I’m closer to it, I can see what it is: a meteor, headed down towards the earth. I wonder if I should try to keep it from hitting. I aim myself towards it, but miss and end up behind it. I fly back down towards it, manage to catch up, but miss it that time, too. But, as I happen to glance at the fields below, I spot chunks of broken-up rocks in a few places. They look like the same type of rock the meteor is made of. And it isn’t a very big one—only about half my height. Maybe this isn’t something to worry about, then—this is something that happens all the time here.

I watch as it hits and breaks apart and then land to get a closer look. Among the fragments is a pile of colorful rocks. Some look like red and white crystals, some like turquoises, others like amethyst geodes. I gather them up.

I notice that someone’s nearby—an Asian man, maybe in his 20s. It occurs to me that he might want some of the rocks—and really, I don’t have any claim to them. I was just the first person to get here. I offer him some. He says he’s only interested in the turquoises right now and picks one out—a particularly smooth one—and sets it among a large number of others he has in a bag. I insist that he take another one, too, but then wake up soon after that.

(8.10.18)

The dream starts out with a scenario very much like the waking one I must have just left: having trouble getting to sleep. I’m initially on a thin mat on the floor of a room in a house, in a sleeping bag, but I give up and move the sleeping bag to the couch, where I do finally manage to fall asleep.

The dream I subsequently find myself in is a lucid one. It went on for long enough to where entire segments of it have faded from memory, and I’m no longer entirely sure whether I have the order of the things right. But here goes.

The earliest parts, probably, were of flying over a city at night. I’m just looking around, observing my surroundings. I spot a brightly lit area—tennis courts—and fly down. But as I’m getting close, the lights suddenly turn off, leaving me in the dark. I imagine my wings—which I’ve been doing without until now—and use them to propel myself up from just above the ground. But not long after that, I figure that it might be better to walk—there are people I’m looking for here, and it might be easier to find them down there. So I land and continue going that way.

This city seems to be a modern one, and the area I'm in is well lit. To my right, I spot a large building that looks like a hotel, and further on is another one. No people around, though. I pause to examine some graffiti carved into the gray paint of a metal pillar, possibly supporting an overpass. Most of it is illegible scribbles, but I distinctly read the name “Joseph”.

Nobody else seems to be walking around. I do eventually spot some people (specifically, four guys and a ferret) through the glass-walled corner of a building and have a brief conversation with them, but it seems to cut off partway through, and I find myself as a disembodied point of view, looking at a bunch of grapes. They’re hanging on a vine that’s grown around a tree in a forest. I remember reading something on Dreamviews about being able to play with the perspective of visual imagery—and there’s no way in hell I’m going to be able to visualize that well while awake, so I figure I’ll try it now. I find I can change the angle just by intending to, can zoom in and have a closer look. Even close, it looks incredibly realistic.

But before I can get even closer, there’s another transition, and I find myself in a house. I’m near a large window—I can’t see anything outside since it’s light inside and dark outside, and it just looks black, but I figure I’ll jump through it and see what happens.

I jump straight through the glass as if it wasn’t there and find that what I saw before was actually accurate—there really is nothing here but featureless darkness. I don’t even seem to have a body anymore. I consider the situation. I’m not worried about waking up: I recall that I spent quite a while lying awake before this—having correctly remembered my waking life circumstances rather than mistaking the dream I fell asleep in for real, which isn't always what happens in these situations—and so I’ll still be catching up on sleep.

The idea occurs to me to sing a song, one I remember singing in choir when I was a kid. I then think that it’s kind of a silly song—why would I want to do that? But no, it’s better to go with my first thought. It’s probably the right one—it’s better not to second-guess this kind of thing. And so I sing it there.

Long ago, in a far off land,
Lived a child who loved to sing.
She opens up her fragile heart,
And the song, it takes wing…

Although it’s not exactly like I’m singing it, since I still seem to be somewhat disembodied. I’m surprised by how good my voice sounds here, though. It resonates in a way I wasn’t expecting in a space that appears to be a complete void.

At some point after that, after some unknown transition, I seem to be in the same house as before, just looking around. It has multiple floors, and above one staircase, I find what appears to be a clock playing a waltz-like melody. It sounds a bit like a calliope.

As I listen, it occurs to me to try another experiment. I clear my mind, getting everything else out of the way, then wordlessly sing, improvising a melody that might come after what I've already heard. And I find that what I'm singing exactly matches the tune the calliope clock is playing. It's as if, one way or another, we’re drawing from the same source, which is fascinating. So it is just me after all.

There’s quite a bit that happened after that, most of it involving the man who lived in the house—but, unfortunately, I can only remember the very end, as he was walking out. Shortly after that, I wake up.

(3.10.18)

In the earliest part of the dream I can remember, I'm reading a news article online. It’s about an odd discovery that was recently made—what seemed to be a fossilized person on a bicycle.

I pull up a map website so that I can have a better idea of where the places I’m reading about are. It starts off as a map of Europe—more or less. The only major difference I can remember was seeing a series of small countries along the (more or less) Baltic Coast.

The place I’m interested in is further west of that, around Luxembourg, I'd say. I zoom in until it’s more like looking at a satellite map, and I can see the spot the story is talking about: a place in the woods where the grass gives way to gray rock, and in the rock, the figure of the cyclist can be clearly seen in profile, looking rather cartoonish.

I look up and find I’m not looking at a screen on a computer anymore: I’m actually there in the forest. And there’s only one way that’s possible: I’m dreaming.

The gray rock isn’t there anymore. There’s just forest in every direction—deciduous forest, with foliage that isn’t so thick it blocks out the sunlight. I pick a direction and start walking, not having any particular goal in mind.

The forest is quiet and still: there don’t seem to be any animals around. The only notable feature of this place is the mushrooms I see growing in small groups among the undergrowth every few meters. They’re red with white spots—obviously fly-agaric. I recall a recent discussion on DreamViews about hallucinogens in lucid dreams: what would happen if I ate one? I’ve never been curious enough to try it before—I wasn’t even curious enough to read the thread, for that matter—but here they are, and here I am. Guess I’m going to find out.

I get down close to a group of them, pull a piece off a small one and put it in my mouth. But then I see that the mushrooms aren’t mushrooms anymore: they’re red flowers now, poppies by the looks of it. Still in an experimental frame of mind, I pull off some petals and chew on them. They’re completely flavorless and slightly cool. It is an extraordinarily realistic experience of eating flower petals.

Shortly afterwards, I wake up.

(7.8.18)

I manage to maintain awareness while falling asleep quite early in the night and find myself in a house. As with most lucid dreams that are on the long side and include a lot of conversation, I can only remember some parts of it clearly, and without clear context.

The house is not a familiar one, although its layout seems slightly reminiscent of Katya’s house. I’m in what would be the front room with two other people—one man and one woman—and three dogs. I can feel a connection with one of the dogs—a medium-sized one, possibly a Border Collie—and I sense that he’s somehow mediating between me and the rest of the dream. I think it’s likely that the other dogs were doing the same for the other people and somehow making it possible for us to be together here.

One of the dogs is briefing us all about something. He’s a very large dog with short hair, probably a Great Dane. He communicates with us for a while—I don’t think he actually spoke, but my memory is fuzzy on how it happened. At one point, he mentions something about a llama farm, then cuts himself off and lays down. I realized this was something he didn’t want me and the other woman to know about, but he had let it slip, and now he’s sad about it. He refuses to say anything else, so I go into an adjoining room so he can talk to the man in private. In the meantime, I strike up a conversation with a bird on the windowsill.

It’s a small bird, a bit like a titmouse but pure white. It seems friendly, and has an odd habit of repeating each phrase after it says it. After a bit, it flies off: it’s decided it wants to catch me some kind of small marine crustacean that it eats—as a kind of gift, I suppose. Aww.

(26.7.18)

As usual, I find myself lucid in a dream without being able to remember how it happened. I am on a stage, a raised platform at one end of a tall, rectangular room with no windows and a door at the far end—picture a racquetball court and you’ll have a pretty good idea of the layout and size. The area where I am is lit while the area where the audience is sitting is darker, with some light shining in from the doorway.

I’m singing up here and simultaneously trying my hardest to get my bouzouki to show up so I can accompany myself on it. I look around the stage area periodically, whenever I get the chance, but it just doesn’t seem to be turning up. I notice a couple guys in the audience heading for the door. Annoyed, I will them back to their seats, but they seem to sense what I’m doing and bolt. Oh, well.

In the meantime, though, my efforts to materialize myself some accompaniment seem to have paid off. There is now an array of stringed and fretted instruments in the center of the stage, a dozen or so, leaning against stands or lying on chairs. Many of them are exotic instruments I don’t recognize, and unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a bouzouki among them. I settle for the closest match— some kind of lute, judging by the angled neck and larger body. Maybe I can intend it to have a string configuration I can work with. I pick it up and sit down in the chair it was on to play. I was singing “Greensleeves” before, and so I start again from the beginning, this time accompanying myself.

Alas, my love, you do me wrong
To cast me off discourteously…

This is more like it. It seems to work best if I don’t focus too much on what I’m doing with my hands and let it take care of itself, like a spot of localized non-lucidity.

Partway through the song, though, I find myself in another room—there seems to be a small memory gap, but I’m guessing this was a false awakening I managed to identify as another dream straightaway. This room is very similar to the one I was just in—it could be the same one if not for the lack of a raised stage area and the fact that there is now a door where the opening was. It’s a metal door painted bright green.

The room is empty apart from a mat on the floor which is furnished like a bed. Looking at it stirs faint memories of sleepovers with friends—nice memories, ones I haven’t thought about in a long time. Much of the wooden floor is covered by a rug patterned with dragons—the Asian sort—in red, blue and green. As I look at it, they move and shift in mesmerizing ways, and the perspective flattens a little as the rug occupies my field of vision. I think to myself: I’m dreaming, I’m dreaming. I don’t want to get so absorbed in it that I lose awareness.

I look away to consider the door and what might be beyond it. Thoughts come to me—memories, almost, if I took them more seriously—of rooms and people beyond. But that’s a rather serious-looking door.

I wake up.

(11.7.18)