Dreaming on my feet

11.28.10
Type: Lucid, Memorable
Lucidity: 8/10
Vividness: 9/10

I'm just going to write this one as a pretty direct translation from my dream journal.

Library with my Dad.. return to the library later with my friend alex. I'm sitting on the couch with my cousin L and also J.Z., a girl I used to like and respect in highschool, in the same library, playing guitar. I think we are all playing music together and the sound is incredible and everything just flows together like water in a stream, really beautiful. The dream changes and we are exploring a massive basement in a house, supposedly JZ's, concrete floors and generally abandoned. Feels like a warehouse almost. One room we enter has a big worksmiths metal cabinets with boxes of junk and tools, as JZ passes by she laughs and pulls a joke by pulling out in succession boxes with rocks paper and scissors out- very funny and cute. We leave and go to 2 other rooms, one is dilapidated like one of those rotting/falling apart old abandoned houses I saw quite often in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, also massive and completely empty, like a house inside of this basement. The other we enter and close the door, steel push handle pretty classic big heavy door. There's a huge AC/furnace in the room big enough to power a hotel, and there is a massive storage unit which JZ jokes that she might use if only she were tall enough to reach it, and indeed it is about 12 feet tall with no way to access it.
Now here's the really incredible part of this dream - I realize that I'm dreaming when I experience a sort of dream overlap which I haven't ever experienced before, I described it upon waking like this:

Somewhere along the line I realize that I'm dreaming because I feel LIsa's foot moving next to my ear. It is like my view is 50/50 in the dream state, half of my perception is occupied by feeling her foot moving and see the foot/ my head interacting in some sort of architecture rendering mode, all grey and blue lines like a vector model of the scene mapped out - on top of that or simultaneously I see the dream scene, the room and L and JZ on top of that. It's like a ripple in the dream state.

I tell L this and she says that we should wake up since it isn't good to leave out your instruments while we sleep since the temperature change at night could ruin them [lol..s igh] but I insist that it is okay, trying my best to convince her not to wake up, which I do wind up convincing her not to. I feel this sensation of overlapping dreams several times. Lisa jokes that she can't open the door as if we are stuck in this dream room, and JZ and I are like wtf you're joking and she is, we all run out of the room laughing and vault up some big concrete stairs with yellow large painted railings like you see at loading docks at supermarkets. At the top of the stairs we walk into the same library that I have already visited twice tonight, and though I don't realize it we are all sleeping in some corner of that very room [so I believed at the time]. L asks what I want to do now before we wake up, I think about it and recall some hilarious joke images I saw earlier in the night [ or maybe in waking life] that I wanted to enjoy again or recreate.. I feel the dream starting to fade, so I touching things and focusing on their texture- clothes, large leaves on a potted plant nearby, stone of a raised circular sitting area, and finally the carpet on the floor, which has tiny raised squares and is soft with a very pleasant active texture which brings my dream back into full vividness [sweet, first time I've remembered to use this and it as very successful].. at this point though I lose some lucidity and walk over to the library computers and pull up the images which are displayed in some sort of WoW/WC3 program, some of them are funny internet type joke images and just weird, but after going through a few I get bored and feel that L is waiting for me so I log off and find L and tell her we can wake up now, and I actually do wake up : )

SO.. pretty incredible and exciting experience for me. When I woke up I was totally blown away by what had just happened. Becoming lucid in a dream within a dream shared with other dream characters! haha! I realized I was dreaming when my perception was interrupted/expanded [I wrote down this phrase "interruped/expanded" in my DJ and I feel like it describes the sensation perfectly- has anyone else also had this experience?] to the view of the food near my head on the pillow. I wasn't fully fully lucid though I don't think, since I had confused my situation in that the last dream I had exited to be waking life, instead of just being the last dream I had experienced. Also, this lucid had a much different feel to it than all my other lucids.. in those I became totally aware that I was in my head and imagination or whatever, and thought only about my control over the situation and what sort of things that I should do, almost like I'm set in that white loading dock in the Matrix movies where you can summon guns and everything, but with nothing really happening around me.. But in this dream I was aware that I was dream while simultaneously enjoying the freedom of interacting with a fully formed dream scenes and stable dream characters.. I really enjoyed this a lot. In the other lucids I was so focused on my own ability, my own power, that it felt almost crippling, like I was trying to grasp desperately onto what I might be able to do, my lack of capability for control, etc. This dream felt so free and revitalizing in comparison.

I think that perhaps the overlapping perspective may have been an actual awareness of my physical body, my head on the pillow, and the foot may have been a hallucination that my mind used to compensate for a stable world environment.. what tricks the mind plays in order to keep itself afloat! Really beautiful experience though. I hope everyone is waking in their dreams, and having liberating experiences.

Sweet jam I just found, not anything to do with dreaming but fun to write a DJ to hah