dream fragment

Monday, 9/14/20, Core 2

I resembled my waking life self, although I was in a strange place. I seemed to be underground. The dirt floor was damp with pools of water and there were various discarded items strewn about. I removed a bird from a wicker cage. I think it was a white cockatoo. I was thinking of it as my pet, despite never having had or even held a bird. I wandered around and the bird sometimes rode on my shoulder, sometimes on my hand, sometimes flew short distances away. At one point the bird landed on my hand and I tried to pet it on the chest with one finger. It decided it didn't want me to and started gently biting my finger with its beak. At first I thought it was cute and was playing, but then it began to bite my finger harder. I realized I knew nothing about handling birds. I stopped attempting to pet or play with it but now it latched on hard to my finger and it was pretty painful. I regretted not bringing the cage.

After some more traveling, we ended up at a pool party, perhaps in someone's backyard. Other people had brought their pets as well, and I had my camera to take pictures. DV member MoonageDaydream made a cameo! She was recording video of a small white terrier dog, then she switched to taking video of all the animals. She shrugged semi apologetically, and told me something like, "I have plenty of footage and I want to get the other pets too. I only was focusing on the one dog because my mom was worried there wouldn't be enough footage of him."

Spoiler for Additional Notes:

Upon reading back this dream, I finally put two and two together and realized that the wicker cage, the bird, and the underground place with water and debris meant I'd been in the old text adventure game, Colassal Cave!!! So it turns out "get bird" is not so simple in practice, okay? Definitely use the cage. Maybe I'll XYZZY on back there sometime

Sunday, 9-13-20, Core 2

After a couple of long, regular dream fragments I found myself in the upstairs bathroom, sitting on the toilet. It was night and I was spacing out a bit, staring at the fan grate in the wall (which was on the wrong wall though I didn't notice at the time.) For a few brief moments, the grate I was looking at blurred and faded, and in fact everything in my visual field seemed to "glitch" and become less solid. I stared hard at the grate to try and unblur my vision, and it seemingly popped back into existence, becoming even more sharply defined than before. This whole experience was very similar to common waking life experiences where one might defocus one's vision when tired or consciously refocus on an object in order to sharpen one's vision on it. However, I found the extreme degree to which this happened here unnerving as it seemed as though the reality around me was liable to disappear altogether without constant attention to it. This is very likely a dream. I thought. My mind threw up the requisite resistance in the background due to the realistic, mundane nature of my experience up to this point. No, this could be a dream. I insisted mentally. I thought backwards, remembering the previous two dream fragments as if they were part of my day, then thought back further to remember myself getting into bed for core 2. There had been something a little strange about everything after that point, when I thought about it. I haven't woken up since then, I realized, I am dreaming!

I decided to test gravity by seeing if I could think myself into floating, as I habitually do upon first becoming lucid. However, this time I felt heavily weighted down, as if my body were made of lead. Everything was vague and I knew I needed to stabilize the dream. I went to raise my hand in front of my face so I could stare at it to bring more clarity, but I couldn't raise it a single inch. I was genuinely surprised. Why do I feel so heavy? I asked myself, If it's just my expectation I should be able to change it with a thought... I tried this and failed. I then noticed that I could seemingly sense my waking life body where it lay. I could even feel where one of my feet was hanging off the end of the bed. The sensations mapped to the position I remembered falling asleep in. REM atonia? I wondered. Am I closer to a waking state than in previous lucids, but still deeply enough asleep for the atonia to be present? Is my brain translating my bodily sensations into this dream experience of extreme heaviness?

I looked around again and realized the dream had faded more. Brute forcing things wasn't working. While I didn't feel close to waking up in terms of sensation (the level to which I could sense my body wasn't changing), I was reluctant to sit in a blurry dream scene for an extended period of time. If this is due to atonia, maybe I can work with that. I'll let images come and go they might in a WILD, observe them and wait for them to stabilize to a more solid dream. After a few moments, the fully blurred out scene randomly gave way to a vision of water, waves, the surface of an ocean. Before the scene could fully form, however, my consciousness lapsed. I know I dreamt some more before waking, though I don't remember the content.

Spoiler for Additional Notes:

Although this lucid was brief in terms of dream time and actual action, I'm very happy with the ease of logical thought in this dream, whether or not that reasoning process was completely accurate. There was definitely a greater awareness of myself in relation to waking life and a higher degree of observation within that context than is usual for me. I've certainly had other lucids where I recalled what I wanted to do with the dream from waking life, but I don't remember ever tracing back through my dream memories all the way to a waking memory of going to sleep before! The recall process isn't usually that effortless, either. It's just too bad my dream control wasn't equally effortless this time.

Monday Night, 6/1/20

Finally broke my dry spell and got a lucid! Didn't last long but I'm happy for the change. I recalled a ton of dream plot from last night but I'll skip to right before the lucid section:

I was running down a deserted street in a suburban neighborhood, accompanied by a DC named "Chris", an in-dream boyfriend of a few months according to my dream memories. We'd just finished some schenanigans that ended with me shoving him behind a bush in front of his dwelling so he could finish getting dressed without the neighbors seeing him half naked. Don't ask Anyway we were laughing and running down the street and I started taking some leaps and jumps into the air as I ran because I was feeling quite happy and energized. I found that each jump carried me quite high, and I started to test just how high I could go. Soon I was floating up into the air. "Flying means dreaming." I muttered to myself because that sounded like a familiar phrase somehow. "Wait, I'm flying, so I'm dreaming!" I said. I glided along and spun around a bit.

"Woah, look what you can do!" Chris said from where he was running on the ground.

"You can do it too!" I told him, grabbing his hands and pulling him into the air. I let go and twirled him around in the air by making a circular motion with my hand. Right around then I heard my alarm start beeping. Chris and I stared at each other for a moment then the dream started to fade.

When I opened my eyes I had that heavy, difficult to move feeling that told me I could still go back into the dream if I wanted to, if it weren't for the fact that I had to get up to turn off the alarm. A little annoyed, I broke the connection to the dream by moving and went to turn it off. Tried laying down again but was too awake by then to get back to sleep.

Spoiler for Additional Notes:

Throughout the earlier dream I noticed a few strange things. Two or three times where items appeared as if by magic when I knew I didn't have them but looked for them anyway, my dream sign of a yet another toilet with no privacy that I could see from another room, and clocks multiplying from just one to three of them on a wall, all with conflicting and rapidly changing times. Then once I started flying that phrase "flying means dreaming" popped into my head the way a catchy commercial jingle might. It's a phrase I've repeated to myself in waking life many times, especially when going over old records for missed opportunities. A few moments after saying it to myself in the dream the actual meaning sunk in. I haven't done much with mantras in the past, but I think I'll be focusing on them more now that I've experienced the potential benefit first hand - and almost by accident!