Nazrax

October 13, 2013

A side-note
A lucid dream
A dreamsign

These dreams came after insomnia kept me awake from 1:30 to 4:30. Before going back to bed, I listened to the dreaming self-hypnosis files I made for myself.

Drugs at a wedding
I'm at a wedding with my wife. We're walking around "back stage." Lots of people are moving around, getting ready. We pass the photographer's area and see at least half a dozen giant camera lenses - they're inches wide and at least a couple of feet long. I think ruefully back to the few weddings we shot with our "cheap" DSLR.

Now I'm standing above the seats. The place looks like a concert hall, with the seats in a semicircle around the stage. The floor is incredibly sloped, going down at at least a 45 degree angle. There are countless rows, so the stage is far, far below me. The curtains are still drawn. My wife is sitting on the top row, which is still a good 10 feet below me. Her chair is all by itself, with a table and lamp next to it. I realize she'd expected that I would sit with my friends while she stayed in the back to feed the baby. Now I'm next to her, seeing if there are any seats nearby we can move to and sit together.

Now we see a group of her old friends a few rows beneath us. They see us, too, and are waving at us to come down to them. Now we're with her friends. They're in a roughly circular area that's clear of chairs. I don't know any of them, so I'm staying at the edge of the clearing, near the chairs. I want to sit down, but even though this area doesn't have many people sitting in it, they're sitting in such a way that no three adjacent seats are empty: if I'm going to sit, I'm going to have to sit next to someone. I finally resign myself to it and sit by a stranger.

Now my wife is gone - I don't know where to - and her friends are acting very strange, very loopy. They're trying to give me something that will make me feel really good. I don't know what's going on, but I want no part of it, so I start to walk away. A girl from the group comes running around in front of me and tries to slap something on me. I don't know what she's doing, but I'm sure it's nothing good, so I dodge. I think she missed me, but then I notice there's a small sticker on my nose. With horror, I realize it must be some kind of drug patch. I try to peel it off, but it's too late. I feel the drug start to take effect, and the world slips away.

Now I'm on a pool deck. I feel very strange, and I'm not myself. I think I'm a mouse, though I'm really just very small. A tiny dog is nearby. The deck furniture towers around us. We swim out into the pool and make it to a small floating platform, which we climb onto. I manage to tie the platform to the dog, then we both jump back in and swim back to the pool deck, with the dog dragging the platform behind itself.

Now I'm in a dusty town. Something is wrong, though I'm not sure what. I see the town sheriff and deputy go up to a large door with two keyholes. They each take a key, insert it into a keyhole, and turn at the same time. Somehow, I know that they were given these keys by a stranger, and that by unlocking this door they've corrupted themselves and unleashed destruction on the town. Now I'm running from something in the town.

Now I'm running down a wide hallway when giant yellow squash, a.k.a. Squashers, come bounding in from the other direction. I hope they didn't see me and try to get out of their way, but one veers off towards me. As it's pushing me towards the back wall, I wonder what it's like to be killed in a dream. That stray thought gets me lucid.

Candy and flying
Now I'm in a small room, the size of a small closet. It's kind of like a little tiny cubicle, since it's not actually closed on all four sides. At this point, as is usual for my lucid dreams, I'm still following the dream's plot. I decide to make the room bigger, so I point at one of the unconnected edges, then move my finger, and the edge of the wall follows my finger, growing longer. I make a similar gesture and push the wall back.

Then I remember that I have 2 goals I want to accomplish (flying and one of the basic tasks of the month, eating candy) and I should be doing those instead. I decide to tackle eating candy first. I start to think about how best to summon some candy. I remember that most of my attempts at direct dream manipulation in the past have failed, so that's out. Believing that something exists behind me, then turning and finding it, has always had a great apeal to me; unfortunately, it's also always failed in the past. Then, I remember reading that ordering DCs to change the dream tends to be very reliable, so I decide to try it. I walk through the gap in the wall into a living room. A few women are sitting around on overstuffed chairs, some with ottomans, some without. I walk up to the nearest one. She's in a tan chair next to a small round side-table with a lamp, with her feet resting on an ottoman. She's wearing an intense blue, maybe a purple. I tell her to give me candy.

She looks up at me, and I see that she's a friendly middle-aged woman. She gives me a motherly smile, grabs her purse, and starts to look through it. It's packed full of odds and ends, but nothing looks like candy. She looks up at me, then points to a long, narrow, zippered bag (also a violent blue) on the ottoman. It's already open, and it's packed to overflowing with all sorts of candy. I pick it up and look through it. I remember that in the waking world I'd been planning to try to eat some chocolate, so I look for a chocolate bar. I manage to find a "Fun Size Snickers" bar near the top of the bag, so I take it. I tear off the wrapper and look at it. It looks just like a tiny square chocolate bar, with smooth brown sides and a wavy top. I take a bite through the middle; it tastes like chocolate. I look at the section I bit through and see that it looks like a Three Musketeers bar, but with a thin ribbon of dark chocolate running through the middle. It actually tastes about as it looks.

One goal finished, one to go. I leave the house through a sliding glass door. I find I'm at the top of a grassy hill. In front of me, the hill leads down to the ocean. I can see the waves lapping against a rocky shoreline with just a bit of sandy beach. Off to my right are a few trees. To my left, the grassy hill just goes down with nothing in the way. I turn to the left and start to run down the hill, then jump up and spread my arms like wings, holding them straight out to my sides. At the height of my jump, I'm three or four feet off the ground, but I quickly come back down and stabalize in a glide just a foot or two above the ground. It's not quite the flight I'd hoped for, but I'm still moving quickly through the air.

I'm half pleased, half disappointed. Gliding in the air was neat, but I'd really wanted to *fly*. Now I'm back at the top of the hill. I get another running start, jump, spread my arms, and start flapping. I have a clear picture of the roofline of the house - I believe I managed to hang in the air for a few seconds this time before coming back down. This time, I'm gliding so low that tall pieces of grass are hitting me in the face.


Motorcycle seat
I'm outside with Andrew, looking at his small motorcycle. He's trying to fix it, but he needs to go get something. He asks me to hold the bike while he steps away. Now I'm holding the bike, but I don't know why. Don't motorcycles have kickstands? I look down and see not one but two: one on the front-right, and one in the normal place at the back-left. Both kickstands are already down, so I gently let go of the bike to see what'll happen. The bike starts rolling forward, pushing the front-right kickstand back. The rear-left one is holding. I stop the bike and try to reposition it so that it'll stay up on its own.

Now Andrew is back out with another man, someone who looks at home on a motorcycle. There's something wrong with his seat. It's a piece of leather with a plaid pattern inserted into a square wood frame. During the cut, they removed the sealant keeping it watertight and pulled it up from the frame, away from the glue that held it down. They've fixed whatever the problem was and have re-glued it, but now they're worried about how to reseal it. They keep talking about using tape, but none of us likes that idea, since it wouldn't work very well, not to mention looking very tacky. I suggest using more of that same acrylic sealant that was used on it originally, but they shoot that idea down. They're fixated on trying different kinds of tape. I'm still convinced the clear sealant is the way to go, but I suggest they should call the motorcycle company and see if they can order some of the original compound. They consider the idea for a moment, then realize that it's a holiday so the company won't be open, and later in the week is an important company event, so they'll be too busy to talk to people about fixing broken seats.