MadamAurantia

I've slept three times today, including the usual. I'm a little on the sick side, may have had a fever. Things got a little blurred there towards the end. Woke up wondering whether I had got up and gone to the gym or not already. I didn't, of course, but that took some time to work out. Details include some old roommates appearing, a formal event at the local college, which I've never attended.

Formal wear made of little plastic Chiclets, didn't cover much and that was the point. Flashed between Missouri and Illinois, blended towns. Roommate was substantially thinner and sexier than I remember, she had divorced from her husband (also a roomie) and looking for a new victim.

A strange man, heavy-set and blond, claimed to be my father (looks nothing like him) and started singing. Freaked me out in the dream. Where's Kreuger when I need him?

I remember an earlier dream, something involving spies that had an actual plot, but I don't remember any more than a clear bag (Plastic? Mesh?) of colored thingies about the size of marbles but shaped kind of like legos. They were important, some kind of data storage, and plastic.

Somehow, I was on the Enterprise (Original Series). They had given me a job working in the library, or a bookstore, or something that wasn't on the Enterprise in the series. Kirk and Spock were roommates (possibly more? They shared sleeping arrangements.), and Spock was avoiding their room. Not only was Kirk watching Lifetime Romances, he was broadcasting the sound all over the ship. Nearly had a mutiny on his hands!

The only place safe was the bookstore, and my quarters behind, so the two of us wound up watching the old Bill Bixby Incredible Hulk series. Spock seemed to approve of the storyline.

WTF?????

Has simply trying to do something about my subconscious visitors done the trick? Also, Inception mind-screwed me quite nicely. Loving it.

The first thing I remember was the second level of the dream. I was dreamscaping, doing a favor for the landlord of an apartment building that was a strange hybrid of the house where I grew up and the apartment building where I live now. I never manage to dream about any building where I actually live, if I do I know it's an OBE. Hasn't happened for some time, though.

I can't remember what the second level was, but it dealt with my old dollhouse (Haha, Christopher Nolan!) and I was wrapping metallic gold thread around something, like a small spool or something but it felt like a craft of some kind. I think the small something was soft.

I was lucid on a certain level, that the second level was a dream. A phone call woke me to the first level, which was not lucid. I vaguely remember returning to the second level, because I remember playing out some of the cliches of Inception (How did I get here???). But the phone turned out to be my Dad calling to say "Hello." We chatted about what was going on, I told him about the favor, and I mentioned that I smelled an odd kind of smoke. Dad became Overprotective Dad, getting all skittish that something was wrong. I told him that it was probably just the heater (apparently, this smell was normal?) and that any tenant could fix it so the handyman neighbor would probably be down soon to deal with it.

I got off the phone and wandered downstairs to find the landlord (who was somehow Willem Dafoe...) talking with the handyman neighbor who doesn't exist IRL. I mentioned quietly that the favor was done, and the neighbor said that something was very wrong with the heater. Dafoe made a crack that he wasn't getting much of his investment back on THIS building and left without doing anything. I made a comment about him being a slumlord, and woke up.

This time I was so confused at the first level being a dream that IRL I started checking for oddities. Pinch hurts, and I'm in my own apartment, though I always think that I'm in my own home so I COULD be wrong. And Hubby's here, more evidence that I'm awake. I even broke my first rule of surreality by looking into a mirror and a dark window. Freddy Kreuger's not there. I still haven't looked too closely at the TV, though. No nerve.

I tried something a little desperate. I started scanning through TvTropes' High Octane Nightmare Fuel database right before going to bed. I used to use Freddy Kreuger as a lucid dream starter, so I figured what the hey, maybe this might give me a dream alone?

The first one went horribly right. I dreamed that I was in a strange 90s sitcom, with characters from Family Matters (Laura Winslow and a clone?) and Fresh Prince (The short, nerdy one. I never really watched it.) all working at a trendy shopping mall in Japan. I worked there too. We go to see a movie together, there's a theater in the mall. We watch a J-horror film, which involved the ghost of a murdered girl haunting everyone she could (Think Grudge, with more blood). Her MO was to show up wearing a pretty close-fit knit sweater in pink and orange, then point above her left breast and say "Here," at which point a wound would appear and a literal river of blood would start flowing out of her. In the dream, this was terrifying.

We all left the movie scared and laughing, then when we were heading up a flight of stairs taking about heading back to America tomorrow morning we looked up and the creepy Japanese chick was at the top of the stairs. She did her shtick and the river started forming a blood-fall down the stairs, with us stepping away to keep from getting blood on us. We left through a WalMart (One of 2 WalMart layouts that keeps showing up in my mind) that was attached to the mall.

Next thing I knew we were packing our things in a car the next day, heading for the airport. Everywhere I turned around, this chick was about 100 yards away pointing above her left breast and bleeding.

I woke up, and went back to sleep. This time I dreamed about a neighbor who IRL has just gotten evicted. He got drunk one too many times, terrorizing the whole apartment building and running around the neighborhood screaming at about one in the morning. I was the one who called the police, and I was the one who let the landlord know about it. And he knows who did it, and I've been rather scared since. We share a balcony, and it wouldn't take a large brick to break in.

In the second dream that Neighbor finally moved out, but I looked out the front window and saw that before he disappeared he had thrown all of my container garden plants off of our third-story balcony. My berry bushes, roses, herbs, and small trees were all over the sidewalk. IRL, he knows how proud I am of my garden. What he didn't destroy, he stole and sold to our other slimy neighbors. I woke up about the time I started storming around the neighborhood looking to kick his a**.

I do remember that before I saw the destruction, my kid sister (who was for some reason staying with us) had left to hang with one of her trashy friends from childhood, driving off in a red sports car and playing VeggieTales music at top volume. Reflective of our childhood IRL: everyone wanted to show how respectable and Christian they were, so everyone listened to VeggieTales because it was safe for all ages. I hated VeggieTales.

BUT Mom and PsychoEx weren't there. All was welcome.

For starters, it should be noted that my mother and I have a very complicated relationship. She was rather abusive, though rarely physically. Out of the six daughters, two have cut off contact with her to protect their children. Three have become just like her. I maintained contact because I'm the last one to want to speak to our father, who Mom tries very hard to turn all of us against. They're still married, but she treats him like she used to treat us. It's a mess.

As part of this relationship, Mom pressured me to get into another abusive relationship when I turned of "marriageable age." She wanted a good, Christian son-in-law that would keep me "accountable" to God. That lasted 3 years, without marriage, before he decided that I was too masculine. I was two months from my marriage to my current husband before Mom took Fiance 1 out of the family album. This is all necessary to understand my dreams, I promise.

I used to lucid all the time, even managing an OBE a few times. I don't lucid as much anymore, and hardly ever OBE. Annoyingly, both Mom and F1 show up in my dreams far too often. When F1 used to appear, I'd wake up and my husband would be bruised and scratched from my thinking he was F1 and trying to fight him off. After a couple of years, this stopped happening, and eventually he stopped appearing. Unfortunately, last summer he contacted me again wanting to get back together. He's married, and knows that I'm married too, but... yeah... He started reappearing after that, about once a month.

Mom used to show up once or twice a month, always turning the dream into an emotional nightmare. No fear, really, just lots of pain to wake up with. Often, the dreams include a big blowout that I've been expecting for years, the one where she finally disowns me for good. Or she does something new and I start screaming all of the things I've wanted to scream for years but couldn't.

This Thanksgiving, she insisted for months beforehand that we had to come spend it with them. My husband couldn't miss his family's dinner and I didn't want to, so we spent one night. This was the first time I'd been under their roof overnight in 5 years. She was alright while Dad and Hubby were nearby, but as soon as they were gone she turned sadistic. Things so small that I couldn't really complain without looking like the bad guy, but calculated to hurt.

Since then, every dream has been entirely centered around her. I can't lucid, I can't have any dream other than dealing with her. It's been a horrible drain. I haven't been functioning awake like I used to, and at the end of the college semester that's not good. The campus shrinks are no help, the last time I went to one they decided that I was suicidal. I'm the last to know everything, aren't I?

Anyway, to the dreams. There were 2 sleeps today. The first one was the usual nocturnal, with the addition of someone who used to be in my dreams all the time but not in the last year or so, and is slowly returning: my husband! Yay!

We were all graduated, and had just moved back to Southern IL, where Hubby's family is. It's only a few miles from where I grew up, though the parents moved away long ago. We were living in a trailer in the middle of nowhere, felt about halfway between Benton and Thompsonville (Oh, Deja vu. I've dreamed about typing this before, I think... that happens often...). We had a pet duck and a monkey, for some reason. The monkey liked to play in the forests around us, and I had wild berry bushes nearby to munch from. My grandfather was alive (died over 10 years ago), and helping us get settled. We had just unpacked, and were getting everything arranged. There was something about driving on the gravel road to get there, it's very vivid... I remember, we were sad about something happening to someone close to us.

No, Granddad wasn't there, but my father-in-law was and was called Granddad, but we didn't have children yet. We were coming home in his old pickup (how I know it was him), with the news that Hubby and I were going to be taking care of a baby only a month or two old. Her parents were close to us, but something had happened and we were fostering her until they could take care of her again. In retrospect, I do note the absence of two if our RL friends who we have planned to live with after graduation and who may or may not be a couple. It may have been their baby? That would explain the "Granddad" thing, the male friend is practically another son of his.

When we get there, I have a handful of (very red, and sweet) berries and let my father-in-law taste some with me before going inside to prep an impromptu nursery. I find my mother there, she came down to help, and she begins trying to convince me to send the baby away: "You should hold her for a while before you decide. (WTF does that mean???)" "Are you really willing to donate what this baby will need?" "What baby could possibly be happy with you?" etcetera.

I try to ignore her as best I can, then leave the nursery to find myself in the house I grew up in, right outside my bedroom door. I wander over to the sofa, and see an empty binder. I don't know the binder IRL, but I know it as a makeshift photo album that used to be my school binder. Finally, staring at the binder, I tell her "I will be SO glad when you move out, you are so f***ed up!" This is the last thing I remember before waking up.

My husband works graves, so we rarely get to share the bed. After a few hours, I took a couple of Benadryls to sedate me and went back to bed. I had just watched Inception, and found this site, and wanted to see if I could lucid. Benadryl has a hallucinatory effect on me, but I don't want sleeping pills in the house. I'm depressive, and it just doesn't seem safe, you know? Silly me, should have used mugwort.

I remember my older sister, Mary (One of the Mom clones), living with her boyfriend Tom. I was with Mom, Dad, and my little sister, Shawna (Another clone, but much more sympathetic) visiting her. They lived to the north of my hometown, a couple of hours away. I think Salem, but it was a ritzy subdivision in the woods. She can't afford that IRL. I think the car we were driving was the green Taurus station wagon, which we got rid of in... '99? But I was an adult in this dream, married though Hubby was elsewhere at the time. I think he was back south with his family.

We stopped at a gas station I've seen many, many times in my dreams since I was young, a mini-truck stop. I don't know it IRL, but now it was in Mount Vernon and we'd stopped there many times over the years. Now I know where in my dream geography it is. We stopped to eat, a greasy spoon diner, where Mom made all sorts of jabs at me that I don't remember while Dad stared at his food and Shawna tried to ease the snarks by laughing back at Mom.

I left the table, seeing a newspaper headline that Mary had bitten Tom and the police were looking for her. I bring the paper to the table, saying that it must have happened after we left (though how the paper was printed that fast is kind of screwy), and I see Mom holding up a half-empty foot-tall salt shaker shaped like a juice bottle. She yells "Your salt intake is high! You're pregnant aren't you?" She's ecstatic, but making fun of it in front of the whole diner. I finally snap, and start telling her off that my cycle ended a week ago (not irl, of course), I hadn't had sex since then, and if I WERE pregnant it would be none of her business and she wouldn't be involved in any way. There's more yelling, and I wake up.