non-lucid

Well, I remember discussing family oddities with Fonzie while my little sister did something involving dolls in the other room, then I woke up and crashed again.

Then I dreamed that I was desperate for a place to study, so bad that I broke into the first church I ever went to. Now, this place is a common element in my dreams, but it's always a building with one of those layouts that you can never escape from. Open an exit, it opens to the entrance on the other side of the building, and all that.

Well, I opened a door to one of the classrooms, hoping for a table and chairs to work with, and found a pastor there. He said he was going to call the police unless I watched a video the church had prepared. It seems that they had been having problems with burglars, and even with all my homework on my back I couldn't convince him that I wasn't interested in theft. I just wanted to study. I had homework due.

But he made me sit down and watch a cartoon (with anthropomorphic animals, no less!) about how no matter what my friends thought, breaking into buildings was "not cool." Very cliche.

"Look, Miss. The person breaking into that church is a rat. You don't want to be a rat, do you?"
"You do realize that I'm 26, right? Not 5?"
"This isn't funny, Miss. This is very serious. This is your future we're talking about. You're on the road to drugs and prostitution."
"That's nice. Can I do my homework while I watch this?"

Finally he let me go, so late that not only had I missed my assignment, but the class it was for. I had flunked my class. He asked me if I ever wanted to break into a church again, and I told him that I was never setting foot in any church again. I think I added a "you bastard" to that. On my way out, I found his a woman by the side of the road with a blown tire, and offered to give her a ride. Turned out she was the pastor's wife, come to pick him up from guard duty. I dropped her off back at the church, and the pastor started cheering that he had saved another lost youth. I flipped him off as I left.

Somehow, I wound up neighbors with Duncan McLeod, and he was teaching me to swordfight. I wasn't an immortal, it was just for fun. There was something involving My Little Ponies, and my old church, and of course a fight. I don't think I want any more details, really. This was quite enough 90's flashback for me.

I need to not take Benadryl to sleep. With all the family issues going on right now, it wasn't good.

I was about 18, and my younger sister was 15ish. I don't remember exactly what was going on, but she started following me and telling me everything that was wrong with me psychologically. Every time I told her to leave me alone, she analyzed that too. I finally stormed out of the house, just leaving home to get away from her. She followed me still, chirping about how disturbed I must be to be running away from home. I stopped, gripping her wrist and bending it backwards until she started crying, and cussed her up one side and down the other telling her to f*** off and that I hated her. Then I woke up.

Before this, I was with my husband visiting an adult-themed shopping mall. It was a fascinating place with kinkiness that I didn't know my mind was capable of. Yay, me. But when I tried to leave, I suddenly found myself uncontrollably vomiting until I went back inside. I threw up blue hair at one point, and something pinkish and still undigested. I never ate, but I hurled several stomachfuls of yuk before waking.

On waking this first time, I saw my husband asleep next to me but he somehow registered as my Dad. I was shocked and disgusted at my cuddle instinct until I realized who it was beside me.

The sister thing is reliving some family drama, but a different sister is the one doing this. My elder sister has decided that something has damaged me to make me convert from the family religion, and is determined to heal me by the power of the family deity whether I want it or not. She recently sent me a Christmas card full of rather threatening rhetoric about what this god will do to me if I don't repent. And since I'm the only one of my faith in the family, no one will back me in this. They think she's a little over-the-top, but still in the right mind-set.

My little sister has come the closest to supporting me, and I'm very big-brotherish in my overprotectiveness of her no matter my femininity. I'd never hurt my Bugg in reality. Dunno why my mind translated my older sister into her.

I don't have many scary nightmares, just rage and screaming fits.

Feeling much better. Over the last couple of days, I've had some rather interesting elements.

At one point I flew a couple of miles straight up in the air (Not so good at actually traveling, but I like to hover. This was non-lucid.) at night. I saw stars dancing and flying around in formation, coming towards me. I got disturbed, thinking it was possibly divine in some way and not wanting to really interact with them. I made a troop of them disappear in a flash, simply by willpower. It was as if I wasn't supposed to be up there, and they wanted to catch me for it. I let myself drop, both to mischievously spite the dancing stars and to just enjoy the falling feeling. It's not the first time I've flown high simply to ride the freefall. But this time, instead of hitting the ground, the ground simply opened up beneath me and I kept falling into the hotter layers of the Earth. Like the "divinity" was crossing my escape by sending me southward (if you know what I mean...). I thought "No." to myself, and suddenly kicked awake into reality.

Another time, well, I was ovulating for the first time in years (Off the Pill) and the downstairs neighbors have a baby who's either teething or has an infected ear. The poor thing screams and cries nonstop, which combined with my hormones meant that I dreamed of a baby. I was a teenager, and we had a new baby brother (never in reality, though), but I wasn't "good enough" in my mother's mind to care for him. My younger sister was given the job, and I was told not to mess with the baby. But I heard the crying outside, and learned that my more "responsible" sister had gotten distracted and left the baby outside in early January. I rescued the baby, still crying, and gave it to Mom. I told her that the responsible one had left my brother in the cold, and Mom chewed me out for messing with the baby when I wasn't supposed to. The younger sister was never in trouble, and told to keep taking care of the baby.

I remember another time, dreaming of a woman I knew several years ago. I don't remember what she was up to, but that I saw her.

I've been both sick as a dog, and out of town. Dreams have been so crazy. At one point, I was nightmaring lucidly about the Saw movies, which I don't even watch (Saw 1-3, then gave up.), then woke into a higher layer non-lucid to find myself having sex with Jigsaw. Ew? Think this had something to do with seeing my rather useless brother-in-law. I think he fits the vic profile nicely.

Yes, you can nightmare in a lucid. It's like watching a scary movie of yourself: you're a spectator, not a participant. Yeesh.

There were a few others, but nothing as vivid as last night. That one broke into my reality for a short time. I was totally lucid in a dream of my hometown (Dream-world geography again!), and I figured that I'd have some fun in an antique/thrift shop by playing dress-up. I'm never as mature in dreams as I am in reality, but I'm much more fun. Unfortunately, there were no dressing rooms, and the outfits I had started to shrink as soon as I started walking around looking for one, so I figured that since I'm dreaming, it was alright for me to start changing there in the store in front of everyone. I got a couple of items on, then the proprietress appeared and told me that it was inappropriate to be changing clothes in the store and that Id have to leave.

I tried to reason with her that this was all a dream, so it didn't matter because she and everyone else were imaginary, but several of the other shoppers physically threw me out. Then a Gothic chick with short, fire-engine red hair and a low growly voice (I swear she was one of my old Harry Potter fanfic characters!) showed up and told me that the proprietress was very powerful and her friends were coming to beat me up for embarrassing her like that.

We ran all over my hometown trying to get away. I could have flown, and I knew it, but I didn't want to leave the girl who helped me. I was wondering how unreal they were since I couldn't control them, and was concerned for her well-being. Suddenly I was aware (watching, as if in a film again) that the proprietress was a sorceress, and to avenge herself on me she made my friend aware that she was a dream, and not "real."

She cursed us both that we would know reality. This didn't bother me, the real person, but suddenly the redhead started screaming and chanting that she wanted to know, see, hear, and live reality. She attacked me, trying to claw her way through me into the real world. When she hit me I found myself awake in my mother-in-law's spare room, yet in sleep paralysis. The dream redhead appeared as a lump in the blankets, completely non-humanoid yet I recognized her, and attacked again by biting onto my left breast and clinging on. I couldn't move to fight, being paralyzed, but I managed to get out the thought "HELP ME" aimed at my husband. He was sleeping next to me. Then the blanket-chomper vanished, only a blanket over my breast, and we were both awake. He is completely unaware of what happened, so I dunno if he helped or if I jerked and startled him awake.

But that freaked me out.

Hmm. The first one involved visiting a city on an island, but unfortunately the island was raised (and balanced, eek) on a stone pillar a couple of hundred feet in the air. I decided not to visit, as I get vertigo and am scared of heights in my dreams. So I took the giant climbing rope with which people were supposed to visit, and played ultimate rope swing with it. Wheeee! I woke from a delicious sense of freefall.

Second and third, don't remember. I've been sleeping in 2-3 hour shifts, had several over the last couple of days. I just can't keep track of everything, can I?

Last sleep, I dreamed that I was attending a CLC church (nightmare fuel, for my mind: no good memories there) lunch before a big service, with my parents, my husband's grandmother, and my granddad. BTW, Granddad's still dead IRL. Grandma-in-law's still alive and awesome. My dad did something I can't remember, but I was so offended that I told him I didn't want to see him in public anymore today and I left.

Next thing I know, Dad's driving me towards the big house that my husband and I just bought. While I was getting offended at CLC, my husband and our two future-cohabitants were getting all moved in. I was going home, but Dad keeps "missing" the house. He drives past it over and over and over, until in anger I get out of the car in a traffic jam (road is somehow full of RVs) and try to walk there. But now, it's suddenly on a 50 foot high plateau. Somehow I'm not bothered by the heights, and begin to climb with no trouble whatsoever up the cliffs. I get about halfway up, and wake up.

This is very odd to me. IRL, I'm almost never this angry with my father. Since I started journaling, my mother finally left my mind and now Dad seems to be taking her place of sadism. Why???

The two high goals remind me of a common theme in my subconscious: staircases. There is often a staircase, a long one, that I can never master. I've had missing stairs that couldn't be passed, endless stairwells, vertigo, and moving stairs throwing me off. A rope ladder is another climbing tool, and this time I simply dropped the goal and enjoyed the ride. Once I became angry and determined enough, I could scrap the stairs completely and make it up without trouble. I've made it to the top once, years ago, and what I found I'm still unready to discuss.

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.

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.

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.