lucid

Last night I tried sleeping with melatonin rather than Ambien, and although I didn't sleep well, I remembered a ton of dreams and dream fragments.

The first I recall was of being on an unfamiliar street in a familiar neighborhood. I was somewhere near the Montrose area of Houston, and a female police officer was chasing down a suspect. She had forgotten her gun back at the nearby police station and she asked me to run back to grab it for her. She said it would be in the second slot to the left. I ran to the station and looked in a parked squad car before I realized she wanted me to look inside the station, and maybe I'd get in trouble for messing with the police cars. I went inside the strangely deserted station, which was more like an old converted house. I found a room with lots of metal storage slots, and they were all marked with lengthy numbers printed in white font against a black background. I pulled a gun out from the second slot to the left, and a woman came in just then to ask what I was doing. I told her the officer needed her gun to arrest a suspect, and the lady said, "That's not a real gun. You have to give me the slot number so I can pull the corresponding bingo bag." I had no idea what that meant, but okay, she got me the gun, and I ran off. Somehow the suspect was waiting patiently for the officer to receive her gun in order to arrest him at gunpoint. I made sure to hand it to the officer handle first with the safety on.

The next dream was more of a fragment than anything. It had something to do with an old movie from the 90's, but I was actually on set with the characters. The movie isn't real in the waking world, but in the dream, I was familiar with it and remembered that it was a really funny film. The actors were happy to be reliving the shoot. That all somehow led into me scaling a tall house with lots of high balconies on it in the midst of a gentle nighttime snow shower. I wasn't quite flying, but I could use different balcony railings to pull myself higher and then drift to the next handhold. It's a dream sensation I'm familiar with. It's as if gravity is really, really slight, and I'm able to swing or hop across impossible distances.

The next dream was where I became semi-lucid. I was just lucid enough to make mental notes of all the incredible, fully realized detail around me, but not quite lucid enough to realize that I have a lucidity to-do list. I was in a small but immaculately decorated house. The decor was quite old and out of style despite looking very expensive; I distinctly remember a fringed lamp on a small table next to an armchair. It lit the small room adequately, but dimmer than I normally like. The walls were ornately decorated with fancy wallpaper. I walked into the next room, which was like a dining area attached to a porch. It was nighttime, and the screens of the porch kept out the bugs. There was a young boy there with crayons and shelves of art pencils, and his mother explained to me that he wasn't taking well to his art classes. I talked to him about what he likes to draw, and I told him that I also took art classes when I was in school. Then he started to become interested in all his cool art tools. The mother thanked me for kindling his interest and asked me if I'd spend more time with him, so I made a hollow promise to drop in sometime. (I remember feeling uncomfortable because the mother didn't know I was gay. I didn't want her to turn on me later when she finds that out and then decides I'm just not the role model she wants for her son.) She went on to explain that her mother still haunted the house, and that's why it was so dreary and so old. I headed into the previous room to make my way toward the front door, and the old woman appeared near the table. She was impossibly tall, and her gray hair brushed the ceiling. She had a round, white face like a Tim Burton character from the Nightmare Before Christmas. I reached up to put my hands on her cheeks as I told her, "You need to let these people live their lives." She smiled a toothy, jack-o-lantern grin and vanished, her face collapsing between my hands as she went. With her disappearance, all the furnishings transformed into bright, childish colors. The boy came rushing in, delighted to discover that everything was now made of candy. I licked the blue, sugar-coated mantel on the wall of the front room just to verify, and indeed, it was all candy.

My next dream was incredibly fun. I was flying awkwardly, as I ALWAYS do in my flying dreams. I can never fly straight, I have little control over where I land, and I usually go way too fast. There was a pitched battle raging nearby against a fort high on a dusty hill that was occupied by Mexicans, all of them dressed as if they had just conquered the Alamo. The attackers appeared to be American military from World War II, but they were dressed in the non-battlefield uniforms that they might wear while comfortable on base. My flight path swung way out to my right before I managed to come around and land near the American troops. No one was taking the battle too seriously on either side, and the atmosphere was more like a football game than an actual war. The Americans asked me for a favor: since I could fly, would I deliver a stack of uniforms to the Mexicans as a "gift?" In my dream mind, I thought, "How do they expect them to fall for this? They pulled the same thing last year!" The uniforms had been deliberately soaked in wet fecal matter and then dried. The feces had been strategically placed to look like sweat stains around the collars and armpits. For some reason, the Americans were confident the Mexicans would actually don the uniforms after mistakenly thinking they were historical and valuable. I flew the uniforms up to the Mexicans and then returned down the hill. Before long, Mexicans began to appear on the adobe walls wearing the shitty uniforms, and the Americans just laughed and laughed. I grew a little tired of the humiliation of the Mexicans, so I decided to put an end to all this. For the first time that I can ever remember in a dream, I stretched out my arms and successfully controlled my flight! I flew into the fort and landed just like Superman. My feet came down slowly enough, yet the force of my landing shook the whole fort, just as I had intended it to. A Mexican came charging at me with a sword, and suddenly I was holding a flaming Thor hammer, which I struck him with. The blow literally transformed him into a large wicker basket, which disappeared with a small white spark as it struck a nearby adobe wall. I turned to the Mexican general and pointed at him as I said, "Don't challenge me! I am way more powerful than any of your weapons!" I could see my arm as I pointed at him, and I noticed that I was now dressed in the latest Superman costume. The Mexicans put down their weapons and I flew off.

I was becoming a little lucid again, and I knew that this controlled flight was a rare thing for me. I saw a news crew on the ground in a parking lot, and I flew in for a landing near the camera. As I landed perfectly, I could feel the awesomeness of my power and invincibility, as if I had to be careful not to crack the pavement. I heard the male reporter say, "Superman just landed, and we'll try to talk to him a little bit later about what just happened up at the fort." I was surprised at first that no one seemed all that happy to see me, and then I had a false memory of putting another Superman in charge to fill in for me whenever I'm not dreaming. I saw him standing not all that far off, and I could see that he was a little drunk. I super-hopped over to him, and I said, "Man, I leave you behind to be Superman in this world while I'm not here to do it, and this is how you represent me?" He looked dejected and then flew off. I followed behind to see where he was going. We came over some mountains, and I noticed that we were now in some kind of a far-off future. There were MASSIVE bridges, taller than anything that exists now, loaded down with about twenty lanes of cars moving in each direction. I could see huge buildings of odd shapes in the distance, jutting up beyond a bank of fog or low clouds, which were pink in the light of the sun that was rising to my right. Suddenly there was a rapidly approaching shower of something like salt pouring down in the distance. Everything that the salt touched began to crumble and fall, and I somehow knew that this was an alien attack against Earth. The Superman ahead of me turned his head back toward me and shouted, "We've got to help these people!" I replied "There's nothing we can do!" I couldn't think of any way to bring my awesome powers to bear against this threat. He said, "Yes there is!" and he flew down under the huge bridge we were flying along just as the shower overtook us and the bridge began to fall. I did the same one span behind. I saw him catch an enormous section of bridge, and I looked up to see three large sections falling rapidly toward me, each one the size of a skyscraper. I said to myself, "This is going to suck." I caught the piece in the middle, and it smacked my palms painfully hard. To my surprise, the other two pieces froze in mid-air as if I had Jedi powers to hold them all at once. Don't ask me why, but I tossed the three bridge sections away and then flew back to the previous span, which was now coming down also. I braced myself for the catch, and this one hurt even more than the last one. As I set the section down, I thought to myself, "I can't keep doing this."

I think that's about where I woke up. Anyway, it's the last thing I remember.