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    false awakening

    False Awakening

    1. why is a raven like a space station?

      by , 01-01-2012 at 04:08 PM
      Good morning, everybody.

      I don't think I've ever made an out and out joke (albeit corny) in a dream before this dream.

      This dream is another instance of so-so dream control. I was watching the video below yesterday afternoon. I thought it might be fun to dream myself onto the International Space Station.

      But I got afraid of messing up the machinery if I actually projected myself up there. So I told myself not to try, after all. Anyway, the dream I had is a result of that thought process.



      Dream #1

      It was a sunny day. I was flying over the roofs of some really nice, 19th century-style mansions. I was apparently searching for a book I'd lost. It may have been some sort of classic book. But I think it was actually a porn novel or porn magazine.

      I think a bird had stolen this book. I may have seen evidence that the bird was on the roof of a house just in front of me. I may have seen something like a little nest on one of the peaks of the roof. I may have felt like the book was now a part of that nest.

      But I was now floating in between two mansions. The mansions both had complex roofs, with a lot of different angles of sloping. My oldest nephew straddled the roof of one of the mansions. My mom sat on the roof of the other mansion.

      I may have been here now in order to get some books for my nephew. My mom had a couple of books on her roof. I think I was going to bring those over for my nephew. But there was still one book missing.

      But now a cartoon bird landed at the edge of the roof of my mom's mansion. The cartoon bird was black, so I thought it was a raven. But it actually looked like the Warner Bros chicken hawk character, Henery Hawk.



      The "raven" had the missing book on top of its head, for some reason. The book was real, even though the raven was a cartoon.

      I thought, Whoa! Now's my chance!

      Still floating in between the two mansions, I turned to my nephew. I said, "Hey! Why is a raven like a writing desk?"

      My nephew said, "What?"

      I bobbed back around to the raven and said, "Why is a raven like a writing desk? Because it has a book on its top!"

      My nephew said, "Oh. I guess."

      The raven now, for some reason, did something like faint. It slid down the right slope of the roof, taking the book down with it. I floated over to the peak of the roof and sat there, looking down at the bird.

      I was a little sore that my nephew either didn't get my joke or thought it was corny. I was trying to blame him for the fact that he thought my joke was corny.

      I could see the book laying at the bottom of the roof's slope, as if it were about to slip off the roof's edge. I guess the raven had already slipped off the roof's edge.

      I thought about getting the book, before it slipped, too. But I really didn't want to do my nephew any favors, after he hadn't liked my joke. But I could see the other books, near my mom. And I figured I'd get those ones for him.

      My nephew asked me to get the other book. He couldn't see it, and he didn't know whether it had fallen or not.

      But I told my nephew I couldn't get the book. I said, "It's in too hard a place to reach. I'm an old man, now. I can't reach into all kinds of places like I used to."

      I now really was an old man. I was a tall, white man, with a big belly. I was bald, with dirtyish grey hair on the sides of my head. I probably wore a nice button-up shirt and blue jeans.

      I was walking with two extremely hot women, probably in their mid- to late-twenties. They were like models. But they were astronauts. They were dressed in these extremely sexy, silvery jumpsuits which, I guess, were their space suits.

      We walked through an automatic, sliding-steel door on a vanilla-yellow wall. We walked into some area that looked like a cafeteria. But not far above my head were all kinds of staircases, as if there were a maze of balconies above this eating area. At the other end of this room was a huge window wall, revealing a gigantic swimming pool area.

      I knew that one of these women was my daughter-in-law. The other woman was a partner on the flight that my daughter-in-law was about to take.

      I was here to see my daughter-in-law off on her space flight. My daughter-in-law and her friend were dropping me off here to relax and wait in the preparation time before launch. I knew that this cafeteria was part of some fitness area, and that the girls were probably going to do a little exercise before their flight.

      We walked toward some sort of booth table, talking and joking. My daughter-in-law, even though she was incredibly sexy, had a kind of low self-esteem. I tried to make her feel better about herself. So as we sat into the booth, I made some kind of sly comment implying how cute she was.

      This made both of the girls giggle giddily. I had a bad feeling that both of the girls were now sexually attracted to me. I thought I should back off a bit. I didn't want my daughter-in-law to be attracted to me. But, I thought, it wouldn't be so bad if her friend decided she liked me.

      The girls had to leave me now. They may already have been gone. But I at least heard my daughter-in-law telling me, in my head, "You know, they have the ----- (press conference?) going on right before the flight. Everybody's welcome to come to that thing. And we'll be there, too. You should come, so we can see you one last time."

      For some reason I didn't think that was a good idea. I told the girls I'd probably just take a walk around before the launch, instead.

      I was now myself again. I was sitting on the ground or on a concrete floor -- somewhere. A tall, heavy, white man with feathery, black and grey hair, stood by a blackboard at a wall. The wall looked like it was part of some warehouse or unfinished building. There were thin, metal beams running from the floor to some kind of half-ceiling.

      The man was explaining something to me about Judaism. He was making calculations regarding verses in the Torah. He was trying to show that the appropriate method of studying was one passage of the Torah per week. He said that this was all a person could really handle, while keeping a balance on his spirituality.

      I saw a number of -- what I would describe as traffic poles -- like the yellow-painted concrete poles with convex tops. But these poles were comprised of crystal cogs, all stacked up on top of each other.

      The cogs were all different colors. But they were piled up so that cogs of the same color were near each other. One pole, for instance, started with orange at the bottom, worked its way up to a pinkish-red, then into a green, then blue.

      I told the man, "It doesn't make sense to me that people should only study one passage a week. It seems to me like a person could actually study a passage a day and be fine."

      The man was a little shocked that I'd said something like that. I felt like I had kind of insulted either his ideas of religion or his ideas of spiritual balance. I think I felt like I needed him for a teacher. So I had to find a way to apologize to him for having made a comment apparently against one of his major theories.

      We were both standing outside now. The man was up on a sidewalk. I stood on something like asphalt -- maybe in a parking lot? The man was taller than me by his own height and the height of the curb. And we were separated by some kind of railing.

      I decided that the best way to apologize to the man was by showing my knowledge of other religions and concluding with the idea that, compared to his religion, all the other religions I knew about were lacking.

      I had a whole bunch of papers in my hands. It was like I was going to flip through some kind of PowerPoint presentation on the faults of all the other religions I knew about.

      There were some slides regarding some religions on the top of my stack of papers. But I wanted to save those religions for later. I shuffled those to the back of the deck. Now the top slide was about some religion that was somehow based in the teachings of Edgar Cayce. I figured that would be a good place to start.

      I gave the man some explanation about the tenets of this religion (I wish I could remember them now!). I was going to move on to how I thought they were silly, compared to the tenets of his religion.

      But the man interrupted me -- as if he thought I were trying to convince him that this religion was really good. He took the same tack with me, now, that I was trying to take with him. He became really interested in what I had to say about this religion. He wanted to know more.

      I felt a little defeated. I was trying to learn more about the man's religion. But now he wanted me to teach him about mine!

      I stood up onto the curb. The man and I turned to my left and walked down the sidewalk, down a slight slope, to a complex of buildings like a university campus. There seemed to be a decent amount of people walking around down there.

      I was explaining something to the man. But now I was in some kind of limbo space, floating around and discussing things in my head. I was now apparently talking to someone, kind of like the Apollo 11 Command Module Pilot Michael Collins.



      Collins didn't believe in something about psychic phenomena. But I was trying to convince him that psychic phenomena did exist.

      Collins and I were now driving in a car at night. I had gotten onto the topic of psychokinesis. I was trying to make some point about how it was already being used in outer space, and that it wasn't causing any harm.

      To illustrate this, I had a chart in my mind. It was a white background, with an x-arrow and a y-arrow. Both arrows were really bold. The plane made by the coordinates was of either twelve or sixteen rectangles. The rectangles were stood vertically. The grid was four rectangles wide, and either three or four rectangles long.

      In this grid, I drew something like a jagged line bouncing down through the rectangles. This was made to show the minimal damaging effect that psychokinetic powers had in space.

      Somehow, Collins and I faded into some place like a residence area for astronauts who were about to head up into space. We were both inside a room with thin-panelled walls, like the fake wood-panel walls inside a double-wide trailer. The entire floor of the room was covered with mattresses, except the left side of the room, which had a set of bunk beds.

      In the center of the room was some very space-stationy-looking computer area. A pole hung from the ceiling. Suspended from the pole were a big computer system and a seat at which someone sat while using the computers.

      Collins was sitting at the computer station. I was laying on my back, on a mattress, looking up at the back of one of the screens of the system.

      I was shocked to see that the logo of the computer's manufacturer was a circle with a stylized, interlocking P and K. I thought, PK! That's psychokinesis! Is this whole computer part of some psychokinesis project?

      Apparently, though, I had been continuing my argument, because Collins, at some point, told me that I'd won him over. I don't know whether he actually believed in psychokinesis. But he at least seemed to believe that, if it existed, it wouldn't do any harm.

      Somehow, I was now asleep, my back propped up against the back wall of the room. But now another astronaut opened the door of the room.

      Even though my eyes were closed, and I was sleeping, I could see the woman. She was blonde, a little frumpy-looking, with frizzy-curly, long, blonde hair. She was maybe in her late forties. She wore a red sweater and red-plastic-rimmed eyeglasses.

      The woman poked her head in through the doorway and asked Collins, "Do you know anything about debt for the companies ----- (can't remember, ----- (Provate?), and Fluxcil, that you might be able to help me with them?"

      These were biotech companies. Collins said, "No. I don't know."

      But the woman wasn't really asking Collins so Collins could help her. She was hinting to him that they should test me out, on my knowledge. But Collins didn't get the hint. So the woman had to make it a little stronger.

      But the mention of the biotech names got me kind of interested (why? I don't know anything about biotech), and I was already waking up, lifting my dark, heavy eyelids, as the woman said, "Well... do you know anybody who might know about that debt? Like... another astronaut you work with?"

      Collins might have said something like, "Oh. Yeah."

      But I was already too interested in what the woman was talking about to wait. I stood up -- still incredibly groggy! -- and said, "Oh? Debt? I think I can get you some information." I knew I didn't know anything about biotech. But I was already making a plan in my head for how I'd do the research.

      I walked over all the mattresses, toward the doorway. The woman may have said something to me, then asked me, "Do you think fifteen minutes will be enough time for you?"

      I said, "Yeah. I can get you something in fifteen minutes."

      I thought I'd have to use my own computer. But I wondered if my wireless would work all the way from up here on the space station. I thought that the satellite system would be all messed up.

      Then I realized we weren't on the space station yet. It was still the night before we even launched up into space. I thought, of course my computer will work.

      Collins had gotten up from the computer station. He was walking out of the room, to go down the hallway for some kind of meeting with the woman. I walked back toward the back of the room, to pull my computer out of my suitcase (???).

      But I'd forgotten the names of the three companies. I turned around and caught the woman before she walked away. I said, "So the companies are... Probate... ?"

      The woman said, "-----, ----- (Provate?), and Fluxcil. You know Fluxcil. They make -----."

      I felt a little insulted by that. I didn't want the woman to think I was stupid. Of course I knew that Fluxcil made -----. But I was just having trouble keeping the companies' names in my head. My brain was still so groggy!

      The woman left and I walked back toward the back of the room. My suitcase was huge -- maybe waist-high, and as wide as two of me. I knew my computer was in a pocket at the back end of the suitcase.

      As I walked toward the suitcase I was already trying to figure out how to get my information. I knew that I'd start by pulling the most recent financial filings for each company.

      I started wondering if fifteen minutes was enough time. These filings were for biotech companies. They might be huge.

      But I thought that there were two other things I should do if I had enough time left in my fifteen minutes. One thing was to do a debt schedule. But I thought I would probably have to ask the woman if she wanted that before I actually did it.

      I also thought that, to get the most recent debt issuances of the companies, I'd probably also have to go through the most recent press releases for each company.
    2. drunk sister; hollyhocks and dog kiss; late, to school

      by , 12-20-2011 at 03:41 PM
      Good morning, everybody.

      Happy holidays! The icy Dream Views logo is really fun. And the Santa Claus flying through the moon is cool, too.

      Dream #1

      It was night. I was either getting into or out of a car with my sister and my brother-in-law. The car was probably my sister's. It was a kind of short car, and it was packed all around by some bigger SUVs.

      My sister was drunk, but she was trying to act like she wasn't. She was trying to act nice for my sake.

      We now all got out of the car. The parking lot the car was in was in some downtown-like area. There was a really big, ominous-looking, tan-brick building right at the edge of the lot.

      We walked out to the road, which felt very old and run-down. This place was like one of those downtowns that shut down completely at night. We were all alone here. The streetlights seemed like in a horror movie -- the light was all grainy, almost sepia-colored.

      My sister was now not able to control her drunken appearance at all. She even asked, "Hey, isn't there some place we could pick up some booze?"

      I knew there was a store somewhere -- maybe even just across the street and around the corner. I could even see the store, still open, like a chain drug store, its greenish fluorescent lights shining out through a window-wall in a stately, stone building.

      But I figured I'd do what I could to keep us from going to that store. I think my brother-in-law felt the same way.

      Somehow we decided we needed to go to the bathroom. I knew where there was a free public bathroom. We walked off to our right, toward some park-like area, then along a nice, stone walkway.

      The light was just becoming blue with early morning, and there were already tourists out here -- it mostly looked like mothers and daughters.

      We went to some area that looked like a fast food restaurant. It had the same color scheme as Dunkin Donuts, but with a lot more brown. And it was shaped like a wide, low public restroom in a park.

      I knew that this bathroom had either been sponsored by the restaurant or was the restaurant itself. I probably thought the restaurant was McDonald's or Burger King. I think the restaurant itself was closed, but that the bathroom was always open.

      I think we first walked through the restaurant's seating area, which was huge, but completely empty of people. I think we then walked through a concrete-floored, cinder-block-walled hallway that felt like it was a bridge over a road, between two buildings.

      The three of us were now in the bathroom, which was a wide, concrete-floored, cinder-block-walled bathroom, like a really nice public bathroom in a park. But it may have had a Dunkin Donuts color scheme.

      My sister was still drunk -- kind of wandering around randomly. But I myself was now really distracted. Eventually I decided I needed to use the bathroom. I went to a stall, so I could take a crap.

      But I was having trouble closing the stall's door. It wouldn't stay closed. I was also trying to close it by twisting the little doorknob using a huge, wadded up piece of toilet paper. It was like I was afraid to touch anything in the restroom. So I was protecting my hands with toilet paper. But it was really hard to do anything with the amount of toilet paper I had in my hands.

      Then, at some point, I felt some kind of erotic feeling. It related to the feeling of taking a crap. I thought I was going to do something really bad and gross in the stall. And it turned me on sexually. But I didn't want to get caught doing it.

      Then a mother and daughter came into the restroom. I was kind of annoyed. I knew that if a couple of tourists were coming in, then that meant that a whole bunch of people would soon be coming into the bathroom. Everybody would know I was here, and they'd all start harrassing me. So I might as well leave now.

      I might have walked back out of the stall, passed the mother and daughter, found my brother-in-law and sister, and walked back out into the long corridor.

      Dream #2

      It was a nice, sunny day. I was probably in the backyard of the house where my family lived while I was in high school. But the backyard was now three or four times as big as it was IWL, and it was filled with flowers. It was an incredibly huge, English-style garden! Where our garage had been, there was some big, shady kind of pagoda-like structure made of greyish, dark wood.

      There were some little kids running around and playing in the garden. I thought of these kids as something like my friends or siblings. They were all angelically beautiful, like the golden-haired children of storybooks. I feel like they were all involved in some task. But I can't remember what it was.

      My attention was caught by the huge, stalk-like plants near me. I couldn't put a name to them. They seem, now, to have looked like hollyhocks or foxgloves. But they weren't those flowers, either -- I'm pretty sure. They had a kind of fuzzy look. And some of them had bud-like centers: tight, green bulbs, inside a collar of thin, peach petals.

      I was suddenly laying on my back. Our old dog, a cocker spaniel, was standing over me, vigorously licking, or "kissing," my lips. She was actually licking off a bunch of honey that I had on my lips.

      Some voice in the distance (or in my head?), probably a child's voice, asked me either if my dog liked honey, or if my dog liked to kiss me.

      Whatever the question was, I answered, "No, she's just getting the honey off my lips. She's really excited to go traveling. She loves to go places in the car. In fact, when she ----- (can't remember) -----, we'll probably get a nice car for her. Then she'll be happy to go!"

      I now had an image in my head of a white, horse-drawn carriage, like a nineteenth century carriage. But the carriage was very short, proportioned, it seemed, to fit small children or dogs. And there was no top to the cabin of the carriage. It was flat and open, kind of looking like an ornate, white Radio Flyer wagon.

      A man in a suit and top-hat sat in a small front area and drove the carriage. He may also have been holding a white, lace parasol.

      I could see that there was a main seating area: a small square. But there was also a smaller, back rectangle, which, I now guess, could normally be used for luggage.

      But I guess my dog was now dead, because she was stiff and motionless, and we had laid her in the back area, as if it were some kind of coffin for her, or a space that would have fit a coffin for her.

      But I'm pretty sure the carriage wasn't taking my dog to a funeral, but to a wedding. And I may have been a part of the wedding. This was probably whatever I'd been referring to when I'd spoken to the voice. But I'm pretty sure this image didn't have anything to do with what I'd actually said.

      Dream #3

      I was in some kind of huge place, something like an old, French palace, mixed with a museum, mixed with an old, run-down, slummy apartment. The place was filled with all kinds of clutter -- boxes, junk, all over the place.

      There were no lights on, and it was night. The only light coming into the place was extremely dim, orange light from the streetlamps outside.

      There were a few other men in the structure with me. They were all in one room. The place was huge, but we were all sitting in just one room, which had a bunk bed and a computer desk in it, but which was so filled with junk that we could hardly fit ourselves into the room.

      The men may have been Latino, and they may have spoken very little English. They seemed to be in their late thirties or early forties. They were short, a little overweight, and a little tough-seeming.

      The men were being nice or indifferent to me. But I had a feeling that, as time wore on, they'd probably start annoying or harrassing me.

      My mom now came into the room. I was happy just to have someone familiar to me in this environment. It kind of diluted the bad emotional sense I was beginning to get from these guys.

      My mom looked a bit different. She was skinnier, and she had shorter hair. She sent me off to some other room. She told me that we were both getting up early tomorrow morning to take care of some task. She stressed the importance of getting up on time.

      I was excited about the event. And even though it was already late, and that I wouldn't get very much sleep at all if I wanted to get up on time, I was really happy and determined to get up on time.

      I lay down in bed and closed my eyes. Almost immediately, I re-opened them. I realized that I had woken up an hour late!

      I ran out into the hallway to find my mom. It couldn't be true, could it? Had I overslept for the thing I was so excited for?

      My mom was at the other end of the hallway. She said, "Yep, you overslept. But I wasn't going to wake you up."

      I could tell my mom was disappointed in me. I felt horrible. But my mom now said something like, "Hurry up. If you just get your shit together and get out the door right now, we can still probably make it on time."

      I was back in the room with the Latino men. Some of them were sleeping on the bunk bed. One was still up, sitting at the computer desk. The light was still dark. It was still very early morning, before sunrise.

      I crouched before the bunkbed and began arranging something on the cuff of my right shirt sleeve for some reason. It was like I was peeling back my cuff and then twisting it back and forth. It felt like I was trying to put some kind of steel band around my wrist.

      But I realized that I was just wasting my time doing this. My mom was probably out in the car, waiting for me. If I didn't hurry up, my mom would either leave me, or else she'd wait for me and we'd both be too late to make it to our task.

      I stood up to get my shit together and go downstairs. But I was so unfocused. I really couldn't remember what the hell I needed to do. I didn't really know what I needed in order to get the hell out of here. And the Latino men didn't help. It was just like they were waiting for an excuse to distract me.

      I now found myself in a car, an old, clunky station wagon, like the one I drove IWL when I lived out in the desert for a couple of years, working for the Park Service. The car was inside -- in one of the rooms of the house. I sat in the driver's seat. One of the Latino men stood just outside the door, looking in.

      The car only had AM radio (IDL and IWL ). I had a plastic tub -- like the plastic tubs you get for various purposes during hospital stays -- filled with little, plastic knobs, each about 2cm in diameter. I had to put all of these plastic knobs onto various parts of the radio's face. Only after that would my shit be together enough so that I could leave.

      But I couldn't fit all of these knobs onto the radio face! I think I managed to find ways to fit some of them onto the volume and tuning knobs. I also popped some of them onto the set-station buttons. And I may have tried to stick some onto the actual station indicator plate. But I was running out of space. And I had a ton of knobs left!

      I was now by myself in a large hallway, probably inside an apartment. It was night, and the hallway was pretty dark.

      I stood near the front door. The door was made of old, worn-out wood. I could feel something like a gentle wind whispering past the door. I knew it was some kind of presence. I partly thought it was a ghost. But I also thought it was some person -- or, a person coming, not a person who was actually there yet.

      I knew that I was still a bit early. But as long as I kept aware of the situation, I'd see the person. Then I could meet the person just outside the apartment. I may actually have just thought of this person as only a breeze of wind.

      I was now looking out through my door through a small, square window that was maybe 30cm directly above the doorknob. Looking out, I saw the dark sapphire sky of morning. I could see that out there was something like a brambly yard, which may have been something like a big, nice garden.

      I was telling myself something very soothing, like the person who was coming to me was a very nice person, and that I had nothing to worry about or be afraid of.

      I watched one or two people crossing my field of view. They were walking along some path, I think, that crossed between the garden and some much wider field. They were a man and a woman. A man may also later have crossed by himself.

      I told myself, "See? See how nice they are? When they come for you, they'll treat you nicely. You have nothing to fear."

      I was now outside. It was a bright, sunny morning. I was drifting up a very, very slight slope, on a long, wide lawn that led up to a sidewalk and an asphalt road.

      I saw a man and a woman walking along the road, heading from the right to the left side of my field of view. The man and woman both looked like they were in their late thirties. But they wore clothes and had hairstyles like from the late 1970s. The man's hairstyle was particularly chunky and bowl-shaped.

      The man and the woman seemed to be in a kind of peevish argument with each other. It scared me a little bit. I felt like if I got into their field of influence, they'd probably start getting all peevish and annoying with me.

      But they were walking pretty quickly. And they were already away from me by the time I got up to the sidewalk.

      Now that I was on the sidewalk, I noticed a few handfuls of people, all adults, walking toward a building. I realized that I was near a university campus.

      The campus neighborhood reminds me now of my occasional visits to the Princeton campus. But the university building, which I saw off to my left, looked more like an elementary school mixed with a modern, suburban church building.

      All the people walking toward the building seemed to be in their thirties and forties. There were men and women. Sometimes people were in groups, talking with each other. Other times they were walking alone.

      Some of the people wore suits or formal attire. Others were wearing caps and gowns, like they were attending a graduation ceremony.

      I also noticed that a lot of the women had very masculine faces. Some of the women were definitely women, just with very hard, squarish faces. But some of the people dressed as women may have been men.

      As I got to the actual building, I realized that it was more like an elementary school. The adults I'd seen funnelling toward this area were actually teachers. They were all now dispersing toward different parts of the building: to their classrooms, I assumed.

      I was in a square, concrete-floored courtyard of the building. There were a lot of kids running all about, rushing, I supposed, to get to their classes.

      There were some adult women posted here and there, apparently to make sure that nobody was getting out of hand. I figured I'd ask one of these women either where I was, or where I was supposed to be. I didn't really know the answer to either of those questions.

      I saw a woman posted just under the covering of the building, at the back, right corner of the courtyard. I figured I'd approach her and ask her what I was here for.

      As I walked toward that woman, a girl wearing a pale pink sweater ran through the courtyard with a clear, plastic bottle of water.

      One of the other women admonished the girl for some reason or another. The girl thought she was being really grown-up and helpful for doing something. But she was also using her task to avoid having to do some thing that all the girls her age needed to do. She knew this. So when the teacher admonished her, she listened.

      But as I was about to reach the woman, some kind of alarm went off. The alarm was the prayer bell. Wherever you were, whatever you were doing, when the prayer bell went off, you had to stop, crouch down on your knees, bow your head to the ground, and start praying to god.

      The ritual seems to me now to be Islam-influenced. But the prayer was more like a Christian prayer mixed with something like the United States Pledge of Allegiance.

      I bowed, too, because I at least knew what all this meant. I was near a stairwell. A girl wearing a Muslim-style head-covering bowed near me.

      As I looked at the floor, I noticed it was tiled in meter-square tiles looking like flecked granite. But this tile was all chipped away in a corner, so that almost a quarter of the tile was chipped into an oily blackness.

      During the prayer-pledge, the girl in the pale pink shirt ran out of the doorway of a classroom near me. She had the water bottle again, and she was about to rush off somewhere. But the woman I was trying to approach told the girl to kneel down and pray, like everybody else.

      The girl said something like, "Oh, yeah. Right." She didn't kneel down, though. She just sat, in some kind of athletic pose, with her back to the wall, and waited for the prayer to finish.

      Something about the girl's face made me think she might have Down's Syndrome. But the girl was really smart and active. I liked her a lot.

      When I got up from the prayer-pledge, I approached the adult woman. I had a feeling now that I was here for some kind of volunteer project with New York Cares. So I asked the woman if she knew where we volunteers were meeting. The woman pointed to the stairwell behind me and said that New York Cares was meeting up on the second floor.

      But before I could go upstairs, a little girl grabbed my hand and told me to help her with her spelling. She dragged me over to something that looked like folding gym mats stood up on one side and w-folded, to look like a gym-mat version of Chinese screens.

      Before the Chinese screen was a long, school-like table that was only 25cm or so above the ground. Both the little girl and I had to kneel to sit at the table. The table had a long sheet of paper across it. The paper was filled with items like multiple choice questions.

      For each number, there may possibly have been questions, probably ridiculously inane questions, like, "How do you spell -----?" as if a kid wouldn't know how to spell a word he was looking right at. But there were no answers in the multiple choice spaces. It was just A, B, C, D, with no answers beside the letters!

      I think what the little girl actually had to do was choose the correct letter, A, B, C, or D, and then correctly spell the word in the space beside that letter. I think the little girl may actually have explained this to me herself.

      The little girl was probably learning impaired. But she seemed really smart, as well. She seemed to be doing well enough spelling for herself. And maybe she just wanted me around for the heck of it while she was doing her work.

      But every once in a while I'd have to help her with spelling. At some point, I even chose, and circled?, the letter "C" on one of her questions. I also remember something about one of us writing in cursive.

      Then the little girl's brother came up. He was also, apparently, learning impaired, though not as much as his sister. He may have been a bit younger than the girl. He was climbing all over both me and the little girl, though he mostly seemed to be climbing all over me. He really wanted my attention, and he wanted to prove, I think, that he was smarter than his sister.

      At some point I stood up, as if my lessons for the little girl and boy were over. I told them they'd both done a good job.

      But the boy wanted to see my cell phone for some reason. I was pretty sure that that was not a good idea, because I think I'd been looking on some sort of fetish website before I'd come here. The boy didn't need to be seeing any of that kind of stuff.

      I then saw my phones screen, as if it were flickering on, like a TV would, with a bit of vertical hold striping a black screen, as the TV is getting started up and getting a hold of itself. The striping was yellow -- so it seemed to me that this was "effect" for a production, not real vertical hold striping.

      There was then, probably, some kind of video, maybe starring Hyde from the j-pop band L'Arc en Ciel. But I can't remember anything about it.
    3. old landlady; table troubles; haunted shower; missile birthday cake

      by , 12-06-2011 at 03:17 PM
      Good morning, everybody.

      Dream #1

      I may have been flying through a neighborhood like the neighborhood I lived in as a teenager. It was a partly sunny, partly grey day. I landed in a backyard like my great grandmother's backyard.

      I started walking along the side yard, toward the front of the house. My old landlady, Ms. U, was walking up from the front of the house, on my right side.

      Ms. U still looked old, maybe in her late sixties. But she seemed to be in better shape, and to have a slightly smaller frame. She wore dark jeans and a dark green shirt, as if she were out gardening.

      I waved to Ms. U. She reluctantly waved at me. It was like she didn't really want to talk to me. I knew why. It was obvious to her, like it was to me, that I wasn't going to be able to pay my rent soon. She didn't want to talk to me because she was disappointed in me.

      Ms. U was now behind me. She met up with one of her friends. They were both going to walk down to the supermarket together. They were walking behind me. I turned right, as they did, and walked down the sidewalk, to the corner of the block.

      As I walked, I thought that maybe I would be able to pay my rent, after all. Maybe I would get a job. Then Ms. U wouldn't be so disappointed in me. So, if all that was going to happen, and I could believe it, why could't Ms. U? Why did Ms. U have to not talk to me?

      At the same time, I got the feeling that maybe Ms. U wasn't very disappointed in me. Maybe she would talk to me, if I'd just slow down and walk with Ms. U and her friend.

      The sidewalk was gone. But we weren't walking on the lawns of the front yards. We were walking on grass like grass that edges vacant lots. The grass was dry, tan, rough, and clumpy. There was a wooden fence to my right at one point. At another point there was at least one orange traffic cone. I kept feeling like I was going to lose my balance and fall into the road.

      Dream #2

      I was sitting in a restaurant. My table was basically all by itself, in a space that looked like the hallway of a house. It was dark, lit by a dim, blue light, like candlelight in a blue, glass holder. My table was in a little, doorway like niche in the wall. I sat so I faced the restaurant's front door, which was barely visible to me from where I sat.

      I knew that there were a lot more tables in another room. The room was somewhere off to my right, i.e. down the hall, and around to the right through another hall.

      People kept coming by, apparently angry or jealous of me for having this table all to myself. Some of them started trying to do things like leave their stuff on my table.

      One person had a huge, black, wire-cart, like for laundry or groceries. She tried to slide it in between the unused chair of my table and the wall. I stood up and said, "Don't put your stuff in that space!" I moved the cart right out of the way. I may have stuck it in some dark corner just off from the niche I sat in.

      I decided that people were jealous of me because they thought I had this space all to myself. So I tried to make it look like I wasn't alone. I laid my bookbag and my jacket on the opposite seat, like somebody else was sitting there. I then pushed the seat far back, so that nobody would try to sit anything behind it. I also figured I'd act like I was waiting for someone to come back.

      Time passed. I was now being sternly lectured by a Meryl Streep-like business woman in a white blouse and long, beige skirt. The woman demanded to know why I had been away from my seat for so long.

      I vaguely remembered that I had had to go out the front door of the restaurant to help people who were loading something out of a semi-truck's trailer. It had, I remembered, seemed really important for me to have done this. If I had sat here instead of gone out to help, I suspected that this woman would have been yelling at me for that, instead.

      The woman told me, "Don't you know we have an important client coming to visit us today? How long were you runnning around outside? Do you even know? Even if it was just a few minutes, the client could have come inside while you were missing. He could be wandering around lost in the restaurant right now. And we wouldn't even know it!"

      Dream #3

      I woke up. I pulled my blanket off of myself and looked at the upper right corner of my bed. My bedroom light was off, but my hall light was on, and it lit my room a bit. My blankets and sheets were brown.

      There was a fly crawling across the corner of my bed. This kind of disgusted me, as if it were a far worse insect than a fly. I brushed the fly off and started worrying about bugs.

      I stood up and walked down the hallway -- possibly (I'm not sure), because I heard a strange noise coming from my bathroom.

      I got to the bathroom. The lights were on and were really bright. The shower was running, which was odd in itself. But after a moment of focusing, I realized that the shower itself was acting weird. The water was rushing way stronger than usual, and the nozzle seemed to be spraying out in a few different, weird directions.

      I looked closer at the shower pipe. I now saw that it didn't even have a head! No wonder it was spraying all weird. I decided to shut off the shower water and figure out how to solve this problem.

      I turned off the water. But now there was a strange rumbling in the bathroom. The walls seemed to shake. Suddenly the portion of the wall just beside and below the shower pipe began spouting out water through little holes! The force of the water I'd shut off was so strong that it had burst through the wall in little, fountain-like holes!

      I stood back from this and watched it all. I knew that this kind of plumbing problem was much more than I by myself could handle. I'd have to call in my landlord.

      I really didn't want to have to call in my landlord. I knew he was already against me for a number of reasons. I didn't want him wandering through my house, peering aroud like he thought he'd find some sort of incriminating evidence about me. But I knew, regardless of the inconvenience to me, that I'd have to call the landlord.

      But now, suddenly, the wall over the side of my bathub also burst open with little fountains of water! These fountains of water were either bright pink or else left bright pink stains on the wall. The fountains of water were also more like jets -- they blasted in a flat, sideways pattern, along the wall, almost like sheets of water pouring down a sidewalk on a rainy day.

      And then all new things came out of the wall! I thought of these things as leaks and water. But they weren't water: they were steel. They were like surgery or dentistry implements, stainless steel devices, attached to steel cords, like the ringed cords on receivers for payphones.

      Some of these cord may have had robotic, or even white-gloved, hands attached to them, holding the implements. The number of cords, hands, and implements springing out of the wall seemed to be increasing and increasing, cluttering up the whole top of the wall.

      Dream #4

      I was with a couple of men, one of whom may have been my brother. The other man was something like an ex-Marine. He was tall and muscular, slightly tanned, with blue eyes and pale-blonde hair in a buzz cut.

      We were in some kind of suburban area. It was possibly early morning, just before sunrise. We may have started out at a house or a small shop. We were loading things into a truck. These things were either items for security systems on houses, or else they were nuclear bombs.

      We drove in a pickup truck to some place. As we did, I thought about what we were doing. The man may have been talking to me about it as well. I knew we were definitely installing security systems on houses. But we also had nuclear missiles in our truck, and we were definitely concerned, in some way or another, with a slightly touchy situation regarding nuclear deterrence.

      We drove into and through a big parking lot, to a small, one-story building, possibly with white walls and a flat, steel-siding-like, blue roof.

      Somehow I now saw as if I were now twenty or thirty meters behind the truck. Missiles were being pulled out of the back of the truck. There were probably two missiles. I only saw their tail ends. They looked like the tail-end of an X-15 manned rocket, not a missile.

      I now stood just inside the building with the man. There were a few other people about, including a few little, Latino children, apparently. The inside of the building felt completely unused. There were no lights on, though there may have been some dusty office equipment. The front window may also not have had a glass pane in it.

      The man and I were talking (somehow -- telepathically?) about some woman who had had some sort of difficulty in her professional life.

      As we were talking about this, I kept hoping I'd just say the right thing. I felt like the military and government had me under suspicion. My appearance alone, I knew, marked me as suspicious. If I said the wrong thing, I'd be detained for sure.

      I wandered down a front deck and onto the parking lot, toward the Latino children. I was still "speaking" with the military man. The kids were looking at a hole in the parking lot. It was a rectangular hole, about three meters long and two meters wide. It seemed to go down a long way.

      As I looked into the hole, it began to appear as if it held something inside, like a gigantic birthday cake. The cake was covered in frosting that was colored with brilliant swirls of blue, turquoise, green, and white. Tropical fish, either plastic or sugar, also adorned the cake.

      I was now "speaking" to the military man about how the woman we had been discussing was probably suffering from an animus possession. She was letting the male side of herself dominate her personality. It was making her overly aggressive, so that nobody could work with her.

      As I "spoke" of this, it now became my task to scrape frosting off the cake. I was scraping huge, huge globs of solid green, solid blue, and solid white frosting off the cake. Occasionally I'd also scrape off a few fish.

      The scraped-off frosting all went into some deeper part of the pit. It was now like the cake was L-shaped, so that the upper left quadrant (as I faced it) of the rectangle was left free for this deep pit, this extra space for the frosting.

      But I noticed that as I scraped off the frosting, it became kind of mushy and unappealing. It still looked very sweet. But on the cake it had been firm, which would, I assumed, add to the pleasure of the taste. Off the cake it was just sickly sweet and mushy.

      I wondered why the frosting had to be scraped off the cake, anyway. Someone apparently thought there was excess frosting on the cake. But I didn't. I thought the frosting was good, and that there was just enough.
    4. japanese doll; alex' friend dies; haunted bathroom; cemetery drive; chicken mouth; old co-worker

      by , 11-23-2011 at 04:19 PM
      Good morning, everybody.

      Dream #1

      I was walking through the hallways of a school, possibly walking faster than usual. I headed into one classroom, off to my right. The classroom was big and bright, partly with morning light and partly with fluorescent ceiling lights.

      The front half of the classroom seemed empty of desks. But right at the front were three microphones, spaced about two meters apart from each other.

      One or two girls, maybe around twelve years old, may have been standing at the microphones. The girls may have been dressed very primly.

      The girls were going to give some kind of presentation for this class, which was a Japanese class. The presentation would be some kind of recital, maybe even a mini-concert.

      One of the girls may have asked me about my presentation. I realized I had to give one, too, even though I probably wasn't prepared.

      I was now "upstairs," in some room with my sister. The room had furnishings in it like might be found in a bedroom or living room. My sister may even have thought of this room as her bedroom.

      My sister was getting ready to go "downstairs" to school. She was going to bring a baby doll to Japanese class, as a kind of show and tell project.

      My sister had the baby doll sat up on the floor. The doll's legs were stretched out in front of it. My sister put a diaper on the baby doll. But the diaper was huge on the doll -- so huge that only the doll's head poked out.

      I didn't want to make my sister feel bad. I wanted her to feel like she'd done a good job of putting a diaper on the doll. But I may have made some joke about how the doll looked.

      I may then have told my sister that she should use a smaller diaper on the baby doll. But I couldn't think of what kind of diaper would be appropriate.

      Dream #2

      An episode of the 1980s TV show Family Ties. Alex Keaton was in the kitchen. He'd just heard that one of his best friends had died, right after leaving Alex' house. Alex was upset. He made some kind of sarcastic comment in a shaky voice.

      Alex was about to leave the house, either to go to the hospital or to go to the funeral. But his family stopped him. Alex' mom Diane told Alex that the family would leave the house together. Diane told Alex he wasn't to blame for his friends death. So he should just relax and go with his family.

      Everybody in the family left the house. They were all -- including Alex -- wearing hooded sweatshirts or hooded parkas. The hoodies were all in pale or pastel colors.

      The family was now in front of a door to what looked like another suburban house. I knew this wasn't the hospital or the friend's funeral. I was wondering if Alex' family wasn't purposely trying to keep him from going to his friend's funeral.

      Diane again, while waiting for the door to be answered, reminded Alex that it wasn't his fault his friend had died. So, she told him, he should just relax and take his time in getting to the funeral.

      The family all now walked in through what looked like a mix between a fancy restaurant and a living room, lit by natural light coming in through a big window at the back of the room. They all sat down -- probably at a couple different tables.

      The family was waiting for some kind of social engagement, possibly having to do with someone who would give the family money. I knew this had nothing to do with Alex going to see his dead friend at the hospital or funeral.

      Dream #3

      I walked into a school bathroom. The walls were a brown-painted concrete, and the walls were of glossy, pale-tan, wide bricks. The light was a greenish fluorescent. I had to walk through a tiny passage to get to the main area of the bathroom.

      I felt like I was all alone. But then I heard somebody's voice. It sounded like the person was annoyed that I was in the bathroom, so they were trying sigh and breathe out loudly to make me feel bad for being around.

      Out of nowhere some faucet on the wall to my right sprayed me with a bunch of water. It only hit the outside of my right leg. And it was only on for a second. But the force of the water was so strong that my pant leg was soaked.

      I was a little afraid. I didn't know how the water could have turned on and off, all by itself. For some reason, I assumed that only a poltergeist could have done something like that. (???) So I now thought the bathroom was haunted.

      I walked back into the main area of the bathroom. There were toilet stalls on the back wall, to my right, and either urinals or sinks on front wall, to my left.

      I heard the man's voice sighing, like the person was annoyed that I was here. Suddenly one of the bathroom stall doors slammed violently shut. I had been looking toward the urinals or sink. When I looked at the bathroom stall doors, they all looked equally shut.

      The slam of the stall door, though, had been so violent that I was sure the person wasn't just annoyed, but was really angry that I was around. I was pretty sure I was going to get attacked. I thought the person had hid in one of the stalls so that when I went to a stall, I would get surprise-attacked.

      I looked under the doors of the stalls from a distance. But I didn't see any feet. I thought the person may be hiding from view by standing on the toilet seat. But I suddenly felt like there really wasn't anybody here after all.

      I thought I would use the bathroom. But I felt like if I went to the urinal, I would get surprise-attacked while my back was turned. So I just decided to leave the bathroom.

      I walked into a school hallway. I was walking really fast. My pants leg was still wet from the faucet spraying on me. I didn't want to be seen like this. I wanted to get to wherever I was supposed to be, so I could just sit down and hide my leg.

      A black man, who I guessed was a teacher, came walking down the hallway. He was a bit taller than me, skinny, with long dredds covered in a hat and wearing a white t-shirt. As I walked past him in the hallway he seemed to try to indimidate me in some way or another.

      I got toward the end of the hallway. There were a couple of fat, black women, who I also thought of as teachers, gabbing with each other in the hallway. They saw me and seemed to peer at me, as if they were thinking of some way to bother me.

      A really pretty black woman, also a teacher, I thought, in a purple tank-top and tight blue jeans, walked down the hall. She got directly in my way, so I moved all the way to the right, out of her way.

      But she got back in my way. I walked really fast, figuring I'd just have to bump into her if she didn't move. But she got out of the way just in time so that we only brushed against each other.

      I was kind of turned on by how smooth, and slightly muscular, the woman's arm was. But the woman only seemed to be annoyed that I didn't try to get even further out of her way. I had been right up against the wall as it was!

      Dream #4

      I was in a National Park with my family. We were at the visitor's center, which was a complex of one-story buildings and a long, narrow-parking lot surrounded by a Southwestern kind of forest of pine trees. It may have been late afternoon -- the sky was dim and silvery grey-blue.

      My mom's old boyfriend, N, oversaw this park. He was, apparently, going to be busy doing some stuff with my mom and the rest of my family, like showing them around the park. So either he or my mom asked me to take care of something for him.

      My job was to take an urn with the ashes of somebody who had just died to a cemetery in the park. The person who had just died may have been a friend of N. But it may have been N himself. (???)

      So I took either the park-owned pickup truck or N's personal pickup truck and drove it down some wide path in the park to get to the cemetery.

      The pickup truck was really big. But the path was wide enough to accommodate two of these trucks, like a two-lane road. I kept to the right side of the road, as if I were driving on a regular road in the US.

      The path was asphalt, but it also had a coppery, gravel- or cinder-strewn look to it. On either side of the path were dense stands of tall, leafy shrubs.

      A white mother, tall, blonde, and pretty, though with a kind of worn-looking face, was walking back down the path, back toward the visitor's center.

      The mother's little girl, maybe two or three years old, had come toddling up ahead of her. The little girl wore a black dress that didn't go much farther down than her waist, and exposed a big diaper. The girl's blonde hair was done up in a top-knot, or a ponytail on the very crown of her head.

      I had to brake fast to avoid hitting the little girl. But I stopped in time. The little girl ran off to the left side of the road. The mother called to the little girl and seemed grateful that I politely stopped and didn't make a big deal about the little girl running all over the road.

      I drove on a bit more without encountering anybody else. I was proud of myself (???) for not having hit the little girl. But suddenly a gnawing suspicion came into my mind. What if I'd actually hit tons of little girls with the pickup truck so far -- but the truck had been so big, and the girls so little, that I hadn't even noticed?

      I now came on a group of black people, mostly fat women. They were spread all over the road, talking and laughing with each other. I kept to the right side of the road. But now they all veered over into the way of my truck!

      I pulled as far over as I could -- there was now a shoulder of grass to the side of the road, and I was trying not to hit that. But the women seemed to be trying to "spook" me into driving into it, by getting in my way.

      I decided to just stop the truck altogether until the women passed. As I did, I twisted the truck (or else the truck slid as it braked) so that it took up half the road.

      The women saw that I wasn't going anywhere. So they'd either have to walk onto the grassy shoulder or move over to the left side of the road. They all moved out of the way of the truck. I started driving again. But as the women passed me, they all gave me the evil eye.

      I drove on a bit more. I was now kind of worried that those women would sic some men on me to "pay me back" for having made them move.

      I just wanted to get to the cemetery and take care of my job. But I realized that I didn't really know where the cemetery was. I hoped it was close. But I didn't know if it was going to be far down the path, deep into the forest.

      And, I thought, once I got to the cemetery -- if I were even able to spot it -- what would I do there? Would someone be waiting to take the urn from me? What was I supposed to do with the urn?

      I thought I might even have to "bury the body" myself. I imagined myself having to dig a six-foot-deep grave. But then I imagined that there was already a hole dug in the ground for me, and that all I'd have to do was fill it after I'd put the "body" inside.

      I came up to a fenced-off area to my right. I could tell this was the cemetery. I stopped the truck on the side of the road.

      I looked at the cemetery through the pickup truck's window. The area was a well-groomed lawn about the size of a football field. Through the middle of it ran a concrete path, about the size of an average sidewalk. In the center of the cemetery was a huge, concrete column. The lawn was dotted with flat, plaque-like grave-markers, most with colorful bouquets placed on them

      I opened the car door, as if I were getting out to go into the cemetery.

      Dream #5

      I was somewhere -- possibly in bed! -- eating a chicken drumstick. I was eating it in some weird way, like taking swiping bites off of it, so that I'd bite down at the tip of the meaty part and then tear down all the way to the bony tip.

      But in one bite I'd rubbed the greasy joint of the bony tip against the left corner of my mouth. I was disgusted. I could feel that the corner of my mouth and a good section around it were now all gross and greasy.

      I got really panicky and decided I needed to go wash my face off right away. I couldn't seem to get enough motion into my body, though, to do this, and I just got more and more panicked.

      Suddenly I "woke up." I sat up in bed in the dark. I knew the whole "chicken leg" scene had just been a dream. But I still felt really gross, and I still wanted to go wash my face.

      But all I could manage to do was thrash around in bed, going from a sitting position to one where I was half-crawling and half-laying, facing the bed.

      I somehow managed to look at my alarm clock. I saw that it was only 2:37 AM. I told myself I should really be getting back to sleep.

      Dream #6

      A view of my old co-worker, DC, possibly as he stood over me while I sat at a desk.
    5. theatre, back to the future, and gothic lucid; dragon's jaw

      by , 09-20-2011 at 01:01 PM
      Good morning, everybody.

      Dream #1

      I was with a couple of "friends." One of the friends looked like a person who has attended a lot of the anime events I've gone to IWL. He's white, kind of pale, tall, with jaw-length, brown hair and eyeglasses. This friend was organizing some kind of theatre event. He had gotten me and my other friend to volunteer.

      We had first been discussing the details of this event in some bar. The bar hadn't seemed very well-lit, and it also seemed a bit empty. Then we were discussing the details out on some hilltop, out on the driveway of a house in a residential part of town, probably in the kind of early morning.

      The theatre friend said, "We'll have a lot to do. We'll barely have time to go home and go to bed at 11 AM, before we have to wake up at 1 PM and do the second show."

      As I realized how much work my other friend and I had volunteered for, I saw, probably in my mind's eye, dark grey clouds rolling overhead. I told the theatre friend, "I don't think we can do both shifts. At least my friend can't. We didn't realized we'd be going all the way through 11 AM. And we already signed up to volunteer at another event. Your second show will overlap with that event. At least my friend has to go to this event."

      At this point the friend I was defending may have been my brother.

      I was now in a small theatre. It was either before or after a show. The theatre was only half lit. The stage didn't have any light on it at all. The area felt like a cafeteria in an elementary school's basement. The walls may have been sea green. The seating area was made up of folding chairs. There were a good amount of people sitting in the chairs. Some people were also milling around in the empty space behind the seating area.

      I sat near the back row of seats and near the aisle. So I turned myself around to look at the people milling around in the back area. Most of the people looked pretty normal. But there were a couple of older black women wearing very flashy, dressy outfits. They stood out from everybody else and seemed to demand being treated in a very special way. They each sat in chairs against the very back wall, at some distance from each other.

      One of the women wore a turquoise dress and hat. The dress seemed almost to have been made out of a crepe material. The hat had a big, round, kind of floppy brim. My theatre friend immediately came up to the woman and started saying all kinds of nice things to her. But I could tell he was trying to get something out of her. So I telepathically told her to watch out for the man.

      We were now watching a movie which was supposed to be Back to the Future. There were a few scenes, kind of randomly put together, which gave the feel that the movie was more about a group of kids working together to create a time machine than anything having to do with Doc Brown or Marty McFly.

      One of the scenes showed Amy Irving, like she looked in the Brian DePalma version of Carrie. The view was of the girl's face, framed in a misty circle, looking up toward some kind of blue, moonlight, garden light and singing some kind of rock song. The girl's eyes glowed bright blue or green. I liked the girl's glowing eyes and the rock song a lot.

      There were also a couple of scenes, apparently from the future, showing some kind of time travel bridge being built. The scenes were all in some kind of way overexposed, really pixellated video. The coloring was almost black and white. But it was more like the sky was all colored brownish-grey, while all the solid bodies were pure black silhouettes.

      The bridge was somehow being built backwards. I watched (maybe through time lapse?), the "tracks" (?) of the bridge being built backwards through a frame of standing columns. It seemed to be in a mountain setting. I then watched a similar process near an ocean shore. This bridge had a sign over it, kind of in an old, Coca-Cola-esque style. It said something like "B-Way Bridge" or "B'Way Bridge."

      I then woke up in my room. I stood up and looked down at the floor. Something seemed not quite right about my room. I walked really slow. I could hear my breathing rushing though my head, like I was wearing a space helmet.

      Something seemed really weird about my floor, like it was made out of grey-painted concrete, especially where the floor met the wall. I then saw that my table was pushed away, at least 33cm away, from my wall. I thought it was possible that I could have pushed my table away from the wall. But not that far away.

      I looked up and noticed that the walls in my room were now painted green. Some of the walls were a dark, pine green, while at least one of the walls was a slightly lighter shade.

      I told myself, "Well, obviously I'm dreaming. My walls aren't green in waking life."

      I figured since I was dreaming I would try to fly out of my house and out and around my neighborhood, to see what kind of views I could gather. But I must not have been totally lucid. I went flying toward my bedroom "window," which was actually a thick, ornate, wooden wall. This didn't seem to register with my "lucid" mind at all.

      I was about to penetrate through the wall when something stopped me. A very polite woman's voice spoke to me through telepathy. It said, "We're sorry, but at this moment we cannot access the outdoor scene you would like to experience. Would you like to have a Gothic lucid dream instead?"

      I said, "Oh, well, yeah, okay. That sounds nice." But I didn't want to have a Gothic lucid dream. I just wanted to go outside, into my neighborhood and gather data on the environment. I think I was thinking that I was having an out of body experience as well as a lucid dream, and I really wanted to gather some hard evidence of it. So I was disappointed that I couldn't get out there.

      Dream #2

      I stood inside a room, looking out to some area like a dock on a river. It was a nice, sunny day. The dock area was all a kind of beige-white concrete. A man was out working in front of two cars. The two cars themselves seemed to be junked. They also seemed to be wrapped up in coppery brown garbage bags, or in adhesive tape with the coppery brown color of VCR cassette tape.

      The cars were parked one in front of the other. Either the hood of the front car was open, or else the windshield of the front car was completely missing. A huge object like a leather suitcase, possibly also all wrapped up in tape, was jutting out.

      The suitcase-like object was open, revealing the snout and tip of the jaw of what appeared to be a gigantic lizard. Just given the size of the snout and jaw, the head of this creature must have been taking up the entire interior of this car! The jaw had leathery-looking, brown scales all over it.

      I was now outside, near the cars, even though I could no longer see the dragon's head. I was with another man, but not the man who had been working outside while I had been inside. That man had been like a dock worker. This man was a wealthy business man. He was really tall and strong. He carried himself well. He wore a nice suit and a clean, beige overcoat.

      I came to understand that the dragon had been killed. The cars were used as containers for transporting the dragon's body. Nobody had thought dragons existed. But this dragon had been discovered by accident. Possibly it had emerged from the sea.

      Luckily the dragon had been killed before it could kill anybody. But people were (or I was?) worried that there were a lot more of these dragons, and that it wouldn't be so easy to kill them every time they posed a threat.

      I told the man that this whole thing seemed to have been foreseen in a science fiction book written by a Russian man. I tried to tell the man the author's name. It was something like Gogol or Sergei. Finally I settled on one of the author's names, possibly his first name, being Selkei.

      I saw a view of the book I'd bought (which seemed to have the name Selkei as the second name). The book was paperback. The cover was kind of glossy. There were a lot of swirly, black and white stripes all over the front cover and on the first few pages of the book.

      The author was apparently either from the early twentieth century, like from the 1920s, or else his life was so impoverished in the late twentieth century that it was like he lived during the 1920s. But his sci-fi writings had a lot of subversive political content, and a lot of it seeemed to have been really prescient.

      The man with me may now have been closer to me. We were still out on the dock -- or out on some shore cliff -- but we stood behind some kind of screen-like display, like a big text display at a museum. The man told me, "You just go into places, like bookstores and libraries, and you seek out these guys, don't you? You don't know who they are. But you know what you're looking for. And you find them.

      "But people think, when they see you with all this stuff, that you've stolen it somehow. They don't understand the work you've made to discover it. They just think you've stolen it all.

      "This book, for instance --" The man and I turned toward some kind of black, basalt cliffside as the man opened up a wide, short book full of pages that looked like coloring book bages. The pages were all colored in. They had drawings on them reminiscent of Henry Darger. But they were apparently supposed to have been by William Blake.

      One drawing showed a little girl, colored pale peach and in a pale yellow dress, against a maroon-colored hillside. The drawing looked kind of crude, and the girl seemed very lonely, especially in the context of a Darger-like drawing such as this.
    6. muppet funeral; mcdonald's roofs; co-workers and dallas stars; talking, complaining, flying

      by , 08-28-2011 at 01:07 PM
      Good morning, everybody.

      Dream #1

      There were a number of views of some place, possibly "Virginia." The views were like pans across landscapes. Some of the views may have been still. Others were in motion. The views were possibly supposed to show some kind of unique situation regarding "Virginia." I was frustrated because I never saw any evidence of this unique situation.

      There may have been one pan across a residential neighborhood. All the houses were tightly packed together on the blocks, and the area was all set on a series of rolling hills. The colors in this photo may have been almost washed out, close to sepia tone.

      The rest of the views all took place in some area that seemed like a city park, even though I also got the impression that it was supposed to be a beach. There was a huge lawn, pretty much flat, dotted pretty closely with thin-trunked, tall trees. At the edge of this park there may actually have been a beach.

      One view in this park was of masses of people, packed all close together, lying out on their stomachs, as if they were all out on the beach, getting suntans.

      Another view was of masses of birds, packed together (like the last shot in Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds). The view, I understood, was supposed to be of all kinds of exotic birds. But there were very few exotic birds. Right out, I only recognized one parrot. Most of the birds were ducks, seagulls, and pigeons, some of which were deformed or ugly.

      It may have been at this point that I became frustrated with this "program." I was supposed to be seeing something unusual in these images -- specifically something unusual that had happened to alter the area. But these were all "normal" images.

      The view changed to a view of a crowd of people, still pretty dense, but not packed all together, out on the beach. Among the crowds I saw the head of a big muppet, red, like Animal, walking along. The muppet must have been two meters tall. But it looked like Animal. I then saw a big, blue muppet. Then it seemed like there were a number of muppets in the crowd.

      Now, off to the right, in a space of the park empty of people, there came a muppet funeral procession. The procession was very long. At the head of the procession there was something like a float.

      The float was like a flat-bed wagon. On top were images of Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy. The images were laying down. They were probably around two meters long, as well. Kermit was wearing a groom's tuxedo, and Miss Piggy was wearing a bride's gown. But both Kermit and Piggy were dead. This was their funeral procession.

      Dream #2

      I was in a car with my family. I may have been preparing to leave after a visit to my home town. On the way to wherever I was going to be dropped off, we passed a few different McDonald's restaurants. As we passed the restaurants, I had to quickly make an assessment of the roofs.

      My brother complained, asking me why we had to do this. He thought it had something to do with me criticizing him or keeping an eye on him, to stop him from doing bad things, as if I thought he was doing bad things.

      I tried to explain to my brother that my job was to inspect roofs. McDonald's just had a lot of new roofs put onto all their buildings. So I had to inspect them. And my mom had agreed that we could drive past all the McDonald's on my way to being dropped off.

      We passed another McDonald's. I don't know how I saw the roof. But one-third of the roof seemed to be missing. I remarked to myself about something regarding a special compartment being put into the roof.

      We passed another McDonald's by going along a road or a stretch of asphalt that ran along the outside perimeter of the back end of the lot around the restaurant. The asphalt of the road was continuous with the asphalt of the lot, connected by a steep, asphalt ramp. The road put our view just over the roof.

      We then drove along some road and up a steep hill in something like a residential neighborhood, although something about it all felt a bit artificial. My mom began discussing some new movie that was out. Its main characters were a few old people.

      We all started talking about "old people movies," and whether they were good or bad. My mom was angry at me for some reason, and she'd sensed that I liked movies with old people in them. So she said, "Old people movies are made for old people. And if you aren't old, they aren't any good. They're just boring."

      We reached the top of the sharp hill up which we'd been driving, and we'd woven our way into some kind of stone maze. My mom now drove up and around a curving road, up to the foot of a huge, stone staircase with a stone gate. Some distance up the stone staircase I saw some bright, yellow image. It may have been a person wearing a bright, yellow robe.

      My mom now mellowed down a bit. She said, "Well, old people movies aren't all that bad. There are a couple that I like. And if you go to any old people movie with (my grandma) J, they'll always be interesting. Because she always has something interesting to say about them."

      I now had to get out of the car and go up the stairs. I may have opened the back, passenger-side car door. I may have said some kind words to my family, maybe even hugging and kissing one or more of them.

      Dream #3

      I was leaving a building, probably after some kind of event or some kind of task I'd had to take care of. The building was kind of like a multi-floor school building. But it also felt very classy.

      I was on a high floor. I was walking down a staircase to get to the exit. The staircase was wide. It doubled-back at each half-floor and opened out at each floor.

      At some point I realized there was a guy following me. He was maybe half a floor up from me, but he kept that distance. Eventually I slowed down my walking. I figured that I would slow down until he caught up with me.

      But as I was making this decision, I was already approaching the ground floor. Instead of hearing the guy, I now heard JF, one of my old co-workers. She may have been talking to JS, another one of my old co-workers.

      I was now on the ground floor, passing through a big area and walking toward the front door. JF and JS now caught up to me. I could tell by the tone in their voice that they wanted me to include myself in their conversation. So I turned around to get a better view of JF and focus on what she was talking about.

      At this point I was past the first door out of the building. There was a small foyer and then another set of doors. At the final set of doors I turned around. JF was just coming through the first doors, still talking with JS.

      I may have walked all the way out of the building. But then I may have turned around right as JF was coming through the second doors. But now it was like I was behind her. I don't know where JS was -- perhaps she was outside.

      JF started talking about the TV show Dallas. She asked about some key characters. I somehow mentioned Victoria Principal and Peter Duffy. I knew this satisfied one question JF had and made me look like I knew about the TV show.

      I was actually back in the building, walking back toward the staircase. I realized I'd said the name "Peter Duffy." I called back to JF that I'd meant to say "Patrick Duffy." Apparently JF was writing all this stuff down on a clipboard. I also mentioned the name "Ron Hagerty."

      Drream #4

      I was in a library, sitting at a table and reading. There were no lights on in the library. The only light coming into the place was from the windows all along the walls. But the light was very dim. It felt like it was early morning. My eyes also felt scratchy -- kind of like they feel when I "wake" into a lucid dream, although I wasn't lucid.

      I was apparently on the phone with my mother. I was explaining something very important about my life. I was talking rather loud. And although I was holding onto the phone, I don't think I ever actually held it to my ear.

      I eventually put the phone down -- either under the table and on my lap or else under or beside a book on the table top. I didn't stop talking. Instead, the "scene" with the conversation faded into the exact same "scene," except that I was no longer talking.

      There was a woman, maybe in her twenties or thirties, seated in front of me. A man, maybe around the same age, sat to my right. The woman and the man both asked me if, next time I came to the library, I could please refrain from talking to myself so loudly. I think the woman had asked first, and that the man asked the same thing again.

      I was surprised. I asked, "I was talking to myself?" The woman said yes. I couldn't quite believe it. I thought I'd been on the phone with my mother! I wondered if I was going crazy. Suddenly I couldn't remember very much about the conversation at all. I wondered what I'd actually been doing and saying!

      The man repeated that I'd been just sitting in the chair, looking forward, and having a conversation with myself. He said it was really annoying and asked me if I could try never to do it again.

      I was now "downstairs." The downstairs area was actually like some kind of indoor version of a small amusement park like Coney Island. All the booths around me had some kind of pale-turquoise or sea-blue color-schemes. Everything was very clean. Nothing was operating. It was all quiet.

      I stood over some table, leafing through a thick file in a three-ring binder. A co-worker from an old job of mine, JM, came up to me. He looked very young, even thinner than usual, and kind of pale, with facial features a bit smaller and tighter than IWL. He wore a blue dress shirt and, possibly, grey dress slacks.

      JM asked me how I was doing and what I thought of my new job. I didn't tell him that I'd quit my job after having a fight with my boss. I just told him that things were okay, although they could probably be a lot better, and that I hoped I could eventually find a place where things were good.

      I seemed to be walking away from JM now, and deeper into this subterranean amusement park. But for some reason I didn't feel like what I'd told JM was enough. If he ever found out that I'd quit my job, he'd think the reasons I gave weren't sufficient, and that I'd been weak to quit.

      So I ran back to JM and told him, "Look, I really hate my boss. I didn't want to tell you this. But he's a complete jerk, and he does all kinds of stupid things. I really don't think I can take it for too much longer. I seriously hate him."

      JM looked a bit surprised by what I said. He walked away. He was going off to talk with some other people. He wasn't necessarily in the amusement park anymore, although I still saw him there.

      I was nervous about JM talking with people. But I was also kind of happy about it. I jumped up in the air, as if to get away from the situation of having to worry about what JM would say or think about me.

      I was floating a meter or so in the air, and descending slowly. I realized that as long as I jumped quickly enough, so that I didn't lose the floating height I'd gained, I could keep increasing my height.

      I really wanted to get away from the situation I was in, so I kept jumping and jumping. Eventually I had gone far above the amusement park. I was floating into the blackness. I couldn't see anything around me.

      I'd changed my flying motion from "jumping" to "swimming." I was now swimming through the air. Some sort of realization came to me. I couldn't really, physically, be flying. So I thought I was having some sort of out-of-body experience.

      I didn't get overexcited about the supposed OBE. But I kind of began to doubt that I could be having that, either.

      I had a false awakening. I was in a bed that wasn't mine. I lay face down. I felt like I was making swimming motions. I told myself, See? You only thought your astral body was flying by making swimming motions. Really, it was all just a dream, and you were lying here in bed, making swimming motions with your physical body.

      But I still felt myself making swimming motions. I looked down at my body and saw it wasn't moving at all. And, yet, I saw a second body, like a ghost body, still making the swimming motions. I faded back to blackness, thinking, Well, I guess some part of me was swim-flying somewhere. And it wasn't my physical body.

      I may have had the idea that I'd "flown up" into my body from the space I'd been in in my dream, and that, on joining my body, I'd woken. I may have thought that if I fell back to sleep, my "astral" body would sink back down through my bed and continue its swim-flying activity. I may actually have felt my body sink back down below my bed as I fell back to sleep.
    7. reflecting on dream; driven by mom; friend and bed

      by , 03-29-2011 at 11:43 AM
      Good morning, everybody.

      Dream #1

      I was with my family in some kind of parking lot in the mountains. It was early morning, with pastel blue and pale gold light of dawn and cold dew still coating everything.

      The parking lot was set in two levels. But the levels were separated by a big hill. My motheer had driven me, my brother, and my sister here. We were apparently waiting for something else to happen before we left the parking lot.

      But somehow I was now in another car, driving around in the upper parking lot while the rest of my family was driving around in the lower part of the parking lot. For some reason, I felt like this whole thing had been dreamt, and that I was now awake and out of that dream.

      I rehearsed the elements of that dream in my head while I looked down at my family. My family drove past some kind of small path which had a little foot-bridge that went across a tiny stream.

      Dream #2

      My mom was driving me through some neighborhood at night. My mom was probably taking me to the airport. But we ended up driving in some weird pattern that took us up into some totally wrong area and then back to where we'd started from.

      My mom mentioned something about six hours, like it would take us six hours to get to the airport, or like my flight didn't leave for another six hours. My mom stopped at a fast food restaurant. I may have stayed in the car while she went in to grab the food.

      Dream #3

      My friend H and I had been driven to some place by a man, possibly my old friend D. The place seemed to be a cabin or shack out in the middle of a huge lot of barren soil, possibly somewhere in the mountains. The sky was grey, and the air was chilly and damp.

      H and I were in a bedroom in the cabin. We were in bed. We'd just arrived here, but the man was thinking of taking us out somewhere, either for a fun dinner or to pick up some stuff we needed. But now H wanted to have sex with me.

      I was already laying on H, making sexual motions with her. But I told her we couldn't just up and have sex while the man was waiting outside for us.

      I was now outside, by myself. I realized that H was still inside. The man was now somebody like H's old boyfriend, C. I realized that H could be mad at me for not having sex with her. She could end up convincing the man to have sex with her, just to spite me.

      I was walking on some kind of line that had been drawn on the soil between the two cars. The line was a double-line, like the yellow lines in the center of a road.
    8. grocery store kids; bon appetit, Marilyn Monroe; lost and lucid

      by , 03-11-2011 at 12:46 PM
      Good morning, everybody.

      Dream #1

      I was in a huge grocery store. At some point I was in the produce section. A boy and girl and possibly one more child, all siblings, stood at some stand displaying apples or some other kind of fruit. One of the children may have been writing on a piece of paper that was resting on the apples.

      Dream #2

      I was in a dim room that was full of people. The place was like a club mixed with a museum. I sat on a really low chair or sofa made of red leather.

      A bunch of little kids would come up and sit with me. They didn't know me. They just thought I was interesting. I was kind of flattered. A few of the kids were Asian. Their dad was nearby, looking at paintings and talking to people. One of the Asian kids looked like an old person. He had longish hair, but he was balding on top.

      I and one little boy were now watching what was supposed to be Gentlemen Prefer Blondes on a video screen in the floor. The screen was about the size of a small TV screen.

      In one scene, Marilyn Monroe walks into a fountain at night. She was apparently naked, and she apparently said "bon appetit," though I did't hear or see any of this. The boy asked me what bon appetit means.

      I tried to explain to the boy that it didn't mean anything bad. The scene now replayed itself. I thought, there's no way Marilyn Monroe was naked in this movie. They wouldn't have allowed it!

      Marilyn now walked into the fountain, which was an enormous pool of water at the foot of a staircase before a huge building. She was wearing a thin, body-length dress. The soaked dress became kind of, but not extremely, see-through.

      Marilyn now swam up to the camera, which was positioned at the side of the huge fountain, and said "bon appetit."

      Now all kinds of weird blue and green digital drawings blotted onto the screen like crude versions of fireworks.

      Dream #3

      I was walking home at night. But somehow I had lost my way. I was walking through some kind of suburban neighborhood. I would turn down streets and think I was finally in the right place. But then I'd see I was still in the wrong place.

      At one point I got to a streetcorner which looked exactly like a streetcorner near my house. But it was completely empty, and the buildings were all shut down and featureless, maybe even windowless. I wondered what had happened to my neighborhood. But I suddenly realized this wasn't my neighborhood. The buildings I was looking at were part of some huge hospital.

      I turned around and walked another way. I was now in the parking lot of some area like a church. I felt like I might not even have been in the right borough. I turned to walk out of the parking lot. I grabbed my phone, which was my old phone, to try to get an idea of where I was.

      I wondered how I'd gotten so lost. It didn't seem possible. I thought, Maybe I'm dreaming. I didn't think it was possible, but I tested myself anyway. I jumped up into the air to see if I could fly. I began floating a little bit. So I was dreaming.

      I couldn't control my flight. I was floating backwards. I managed to get floating forward, about 3m off the ground. I was coasting through some suburban neighborhood. I still didn't know where I was. I told myself, You can't see where you are because it's dark. If this is your dream, then make it light.

      So I made it light outside. But the world suddenly got very blurry.

      I was now floating down toward something. I thought I had woken from my dream. I floated past one of my co-workers, C, who was giving some self-important lecture about something.

      I was down in the frozen food section of some grocery store. I was looking at some children's picture book or some piece of paper on which I'd scrawled some stuff. I was still thinking to myself what a disappointment it was that I'd woken from my lucid dream.
    9. department store dresses; naked on the stairs, lucid and sightless; replacement interview

      by , 12-14-2010 at 01:26 PM
      Good morning, everybody. I think these dreams are both influenced by other dreams I've read on this site.

      Dream #1

      I was in a department store. The light was somewhat grey and dim. I walked to my right, into an area with a lot of dresses for little girls.

      I walked past one long rack of dresses. The dresses were all shimmery. Most of them had one single color, like purple or pink. Some may even have had pointy, brimless "princess" hats (which now remind me more of the I Dream of Genie headdress).

      All these dresses were supposed to be long on little girls. I assumed they'd hardly even fit onto my body. But for some reason I was still thinking of trying these things on.

      I walked between two long racks of dresses. Some of these dresses seemed to have black velvet tops and gold skirts.

      As I walked along, two or three tall, young, black men came walking from the other direction. The men were all dressed in shiny, satiny outfits that looked like jester outfits. The front guy may have been wearing sunglasses.

      I scooted out of the way a little bit. When I did so, so did the guys. I excused myself and said sorry. The front guy said, "No problem, no problem."

      I now found myself out in a wider area of the store. I was trying to figure out whether I wanted to go back to the dresses or go somewhere else.

      Dream #2

      I was possibly somewhere like a room in a library. I was probably with a group of peers, which was probably led by an older, tall, balding "teacher" figure with grey hair, glasses, jeans, and a denim shirt.

      At some point I realized I wasn't wearing any pants or underwear. I was just wearing a big button-up shirt. I knew I needed to get fully dressed.

      I walked out into a large stairwell like a big, open stairwell at a museum. I knew I was on the third floor and I needed to get down to the first floor. There were people on the stairs and on the floors between the stairs, walking in and out from exhibits. I had told myself I would run down the back stairwell. But I now realized I was going down the main stairway.

      I thought for a moment I could keep going. I thought the shirt was long enough that nobody would see I was wearing no underwear. But then I saw that people had noticed I was wearing no pants and underwear. I was embarrassed. I hurried at the next landing to a doorway to the back stairwell.

      I ran past a couple people and into the smaller stairwell, which was more like a fire escape stairwell. I was all alone. I started speeding down the stairs, almost flying down them, taking a lot of steps at once.

      I went too fast and found that I had gone too far down. I was in an area full of white-painted pipes. The area was huge and well lit, and the pipes were all so neatly arranged, like bookshelves in a library.

      I felt way out of place down here (although my state of undress didn't seem to bother me anymore). I knew I needed to get up to the correct floor. I imagined workers finding me and trying to do something bad to me.

      I now imagined (???) a tall, black man in a beige denim jacket and black sunglasses standing before me at the bottom of the staircase. My view panned through the aisles of white pipes which also seemed to be decorated with white Christmas lights.

      I imagined myself asking the imaginary man a weird question, like which way was the way out. I imagined the man first telling me something weird, like telling me how to get to the position in the basement where the exit would actually be on the first floor. I even imagined a huge painting, like a huge equestrian painting that might be seen in the lobby of an art museum.

      I then imagined, as my view panned through an area of white pipes lit almost entirely by tons and tons of white Christmas lights, that the man asked me something, like he was asking me on a date (???). I imagined that just around the corner from this area there was something like a themed food court, all done up in a confectionery style, like old merry-go-rounds.

      I thought that if this guy wanted to go have all this fun at "the festival," I'd have to get money from an ATM. I could hear Mexican music, like Mariachi music, playing somewhere.

      I found myself in a place like the parking lot of a shopping plaza from when I was a kid. The shopping plaza had a number of large stores, like a big clothing store, a big grocery store, and a big bookstore. It was night, and the light was deep blue, with all the lights in the shopping plaza turned off. But I still saw the lights, felt the warmth, and heard the music of the festival somewhere.

      I walked around trying to figure out where the festival was. I felt like I had woken from a dream. I may have been trying to convince myself that the music and light had only been in my dream, and that I was now just having trace memories of that stuff.

      But, I told myself, I'm still dreaming! There's no way I could be just walking around here right now. This is a dream, too.

      Realizing this was a dream, I felt a lot more clarity. The sky may have even gotten a bit lighter.

      I decided to turn around and look for the festival. But as soon as I turned around, everything went black, like I had closed my eyes. I tried to "open my eyes" and see again. But I couldn't. I walked around. I felt and heard myself walking. I even continued hearing the music. I even had some idea of where I was in the parking lot. But I couldn't see anything.

      Dream #3

      I was in "my office," which was larger than my office, much more like an office floor for a larger company.

      I got up from a cubicle when I heard that a couple of women were getting ready to interview a man for a position. I felt like they were interviewing a replacement for my position.

      I walked a little ways, then looked through what seems to have been the underside of a large semi-truck's trailer, to the elevator bank at the front of the office floor.

      I could see the interviewee in my mind's eye. He was a little kid, maybe 10 or 11 years old, dressed in a nice suit. One of the women interviewing him was a stout, Hispanic woman with short, black hair.

      I heard from somebody nearby that my boss was getting fired, and that the person was interviewing to become my boss' replacement. That was a relief for me, considering I had been thinking all this time that I was going to get fired. I only hoped that management would decide to keep me after firing my boss.

      I may have thought about the complications for this actually being possible. Maybe the man already had somebody like me on his team. So maybe he'd just bring that other person over from whatever company he was coming from. I also thought that it might not be worth it to work for this guy, anyway. Maybe he would just turn out to be a jerk.
    10. kids in stairwell, leg levitation, lucid wall-cross fail

      by , 11-20-2010 at 12:35 PM
      Good morning everybody. I remember three really short dreams from last night. They were all from after 2 AM. I had coffee last night and couldn't fall asleep until 2 AM.

      The third dream was pretty much all lucid, even though it was short.

      Dream #1

      I walked through some room toward a staircase. The staircase was just past a doorway and was part of some slightly larger hallway, like for a small apartment building.

      The room I was in was something like a mix between a living room and a small apartment lobby.

      I had to maneuver a little bit past some kids who were rough housing with each other right in front of the doorway to the hallway. There were boys and girls, probably in their early teens or just a little younger. Their parents stood nearby. I thought the kids were funny, and they looked like they were having fun.

      I wallked into the hallway and turned toward the staircase. A group of kids ran just in front of me, blocking me from the staircase. The began wrestling and rough housing with each other. I thought they were pretty funny. I just waited for their rough housing to pass.

      But then I remembered that the parents were in the doorway, watching the kids. I thought that the parents would think I was weird for hanging around and watching the kids. I decided to get moving. I tried to edge past the kids. It was really difficult, because there were so many kids, and the hallway was so small.

      Dream #2

      I was in "my bed," in "my bedroom," which was a lot like my bedroom in waking life, except messy. My lights were on.

      I was laying face-down on my bed. I was thinking bad thoughts about God. For some reason, I was really angry at God. The more I cursed him, the more amusing I found the activity.

      Eventually my legs began levitating off the bed. I wasn't controlling it, but I thought I might be able to. My legs lifted higher and higher until my body was almost perpendicular to the bed, with my head on the bed.

      At some point, I noticed little specks of dirt or something black all over my bed. There were also hairs or cotton fibers, also colored black, all over my bed.

      I started trying to blow all the dust and dirt and hair off my bed. Some of it would blow away. But there was so much. I wondered how I could have let my bed get so dirty.

      Dream #3

      I was in "my bedroom" at night. I was crouched down on the floor, possibly naked, with my knees to my chest. The bedroom lights were off, but I could see by the purplish evening light.

      I told myself that this wasn't actually my bedroom. That seemed pretty obvious. I told myself I was dreaming.

      As soon as I told myself this, I had a false awakening and sat up on "my bed." But I was still lucid.

      I stood out of the bed and told myself to remain calm. I figured I would walk out of the house and see what was around. The house seemed like a suburban house.

      I was heading for the front door. But suddenly I thought, Why should I exit through the door? If I'm in a dream, I should be able to leave the house any way I want.

      So I decided to walk through a wall. I turned right, into another room, possibly another bedroom. I walked straight up to the wall, which had a window on it that started at about my chest.

      I thought I might climb up onto the windowsill and walk through the window. But I figured I didn't need to go throgh the trouble. Walking through a wall and walking through a window were basically the same thing.

      I began to walk through the wall. It seemed pretty easy. But suddenly I saw a bright light. I felt like something was resisting. I got kind of mad, and I pushed really hard through the resistance.

      I'm pretty sure I lost lucidity at this point. I fell past the wall and fell a couple stories down to the ground. I think that as I fell, I was telling myself, Oh well, I guess I woke up from that dream.

      I sat up. It was daytime. I "had awoken from my dream." To my right was a red brick wall. To my left was a beach, possibly like Coney Island. The sky was deep blue and the light was dim, almost as if I were looking at an old film.
    11. Susan Faludi flies away

      by , 11-02-2010 at 12:10 AM
      (Good -- um... afternoon, everybody. On the weekdays, I usually write my dreams in the morning, on my subway ride in to work. But this morning I didn't think I remembered any dreams.

      Then, sitting at work (really stressing over something, in fact), I suddenly recalled this dream. Weird.

      The dream is weird. I'd say at least part of the influence on it is the fact that over the past couple days I've been reading Jack Kerouac's Book of Dreams. In one dream, Kerouac meets Dinah Shore. That dream was so charming, I think I also wanted to have a dream where I met a celebrity. So my unconscious obliged... kinda.)

      Susan Faludi was out in the desert doing research on a new book she was writing. The book was similar to The Terror Dream. But this book had less to do with feminism and more to do with some general national conspiracy. I probably identified with Faludi or saw through her eyes.

      Faludi had discovered whatever it was she had been trying to discover. She may now have been standing by her car in an empty road in the middle of the desert. Faludi may have slammed down the trunk or hatchback of her car with an air of finality.

      She intended to go somewhere. Instead of taking her car, which now may not even have existed, she flew up into the air, possibly by means of a red and white striped parachute.

      She flew away to her right, along the road. She knew that she actually needed to head along the road, but in the opposite direction. She flew over a small overpass. This overpass was a landmark telling her she was definitely going in the wrong direction.

      The wind was carrying her in this direction, although she "had control" over "her power of flight." She kept telling herself that she would work up the momentum of the wind in order to get swinging around in the correct direction.

      But she kept flying and flying in the wrong direction. It was now night. Faludi was in the woods. It was cold and snowing. Still flying along the highway, I/Faludi (I definitely was part of her decision making process here) saw a billboard. The billboard was on a 50-foot tall, steel column.

      I knew that if I/she grabbed on to the guard rail in front of the walkway before the billboard, I/she could stop the uncontrolled flight and at least get my/her bearings. So Faludi grabbed the railing and did some kind of elastic flip onto the walkway before the billboard.

      The walkway was snowy and lit by a few fluorescent flood lamps. Othewise, everything was snowy, cotton-grey dark. Some pine trees may have reached as high as the billboard.

      Faludi huddled behind some weird, clear, plastic rectangle which I figured was some kind of a solar panel for powering the billboard's lights. Faludi thought she could call someone, perhaps her husband, to pick her up here. But it was just so cold, and she felt like it would take forever for someone to get here.

      I had a false awakening. I was going about my "daily life" when somebody, possibly my mother, told me that Susan Faludi had died. I was really surprised and upset. I regretted the fact that I'd never gotten to meet her.

      But it also seemed weird that Faludi should have died. She had always seemed like such a healthy person to me.

      Somehow I saw a photo of her -- possibly on the web. The photo showed Faludi in a motorized wheelchair, like they have at the front of grocery stores, the kind that look almost like cars or scooters with baskets on the front. Faludi was overweight, with short, grey hair. She wore a white t-shirt and black slacks, both of which were sloppy and tight on her.

      Again, this didn't make sense. I thought, There's no way Faludi could have changed this quickky. I began to doubt seriously whether Faludi was in fact dead.

      (Just one small note on this, from November 14th. After looking at some news images, I realize that the image Susan Faludi is hiding behind in the snow is a teleprompter. I'm not sure why a teleprompter is hanging out on a billboard. And I'm not sure why I thought it was a solar panel.

      But, then again, I'm still not sure why this dream involved Susan Faludi. The actions in this dream are completely the opposite of what I feel Falud's actions would be. They're more like what I think my own actions would be. So maybe the dream is saying I wish I was like Susan Faludi, but that I'm just still horribly, embarrassingly like myself. Oh, well.)

      Updated 11-14-2010 at 10:10 PM by 37466 (Added note at end)

      Categories
      side notes , non-lucid , false awakening