All DJ Entries

Morning of September 13, 1975. Saturday.



Somehow, my best friend Toby T—-r and I end up in a very isolated area of Australia (I do not recall any backstory other than the perception of having walked over an embankment), seemingly far inland, with no towns close by in any direction.

It is apparently an isolated place called the “Boneyard” and is seemingly a special archaeological site relating to Australian Aboriginal rituals as well as lost treasures and gemstones, mostly opals. There are rocky hills in all directions when we explore one area. At one point, it seems like a school field trip even though I feel as if I am an adult. We find ancient artifacts which are supposedly very valuable in addition to various smaller human bones. We do a lot of work and at one point, are trying to interpret carvings on old stones. We put everything in the same large grayish green bag. I am not sure of the material. I do not think it is burlap.

After a time, a dangerous snake shows up (I am unsure of the species, but it is perceived by my dream self as venomous, and is possibly a krait). One of us, I am not sure if it was Toby or me, as there seems to be a jump ahead in time at one point, apparently had trapped the snake in the bag earlier without considering it was what we were using to put the artifacts in.

We later gather several more valuable items to put in the bag. There seems to be some sort of argument (non-violent) about possible translations on some Aboriginal dreaming stones or whether certain ones were made by Aborigines or pirates.

Near the end of my dream, there seems to be some sort of ironic special ending about getting to the valuable artifacts. Because the snake is in the bag, we would not be safe if we put our hands in it. This seems to be some sort of O-Henry-like dream climax, but in reality, there would be a few options to getting the artifacts, yet in my dream they somehow ultimately seem inaccessible.

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Familiar dream state components and meaning:

Prescient threads: It is pertinent here to go into the precognitive dynamics of this dream before the usual core symbolism. Although my “mystery girl” (dream girl) is not present in this dream, it does take place in Australia. Not only that, Zsuzsanna, when I learned many years later that she was a real person, had not only been to an area to find opals when she was young, she also has an Aboriginal Churinga dreaming stone of the same appearance as one which featured in this dream. This is especially curious as I had no viable knowledge of such things when this dream occurred (and did not really know much about it until after coming to Australia). Additionally, this dream took place on her birthday, though “mystery girl” dreams certainly were not restricted to literal markers.

RAS symbolism: This dream amused me with the nature of its intriguing ending. There was no real threat, as I had started to enter semi-lucidity in the final stages. A snake is often the core RAS dynamic (likely the oldest waking trigger in all primates, including man). Toby is present for preconscious mediation with only mild conflict relating to reading (translation) skills, which symbolize the emergent consciousness factor (as critical thinking skills normally do not function in dreams). The bag with the snake inside is likely associated with waking space and RAS - analogous to a pillow case, as it was about the same size as one. As such, the bag could be typified as a second-level dream state indicator, that is, residual subliminal memory of having fallen asleep (as it is biologically impossible for the mind to not be aware it is sleeping and dreaming, which is why much dream content is based on the dream state itself in the inherent nature of waking from sleep).

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Morning of September 9, 1965. Thursday.

Unnumbered. 34 sec read.

I wander on my own in a city in daylight after walking with my mother. I remain unconcerned about being on my own.

I join a crowd of unknown adults who have gathered in front of what may be the Madison Capitol Building. They seem to be studying “The Thinker,” a statue by Auguste Rodin. (To me, it is reminiscent of a man sitting on a toilet.)

At times, the statue briefly but minimally moves. More people arrive to see if it will move again. I believe it may stand and walk, though not until people are no longer watching. I think that is how I would react under these circumstances.

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Statues as self-evident in-dream sleep paralysis indicators have occurred in dreaming experiences all my life, and a moving sculpture is a self-evident correlation with waking and anticipation of mobility upon waking.

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Morning of September 8, 1975. Monday.



This dream was much as if I was watching some sort of strange “wavy” cartoon yet with a rendering that made it seem at least ninety percent “real” or live-action regarding the vivid imagery. A Saint Bernard appears and ends up in a cave full of bats, where he is bitten a few times - though sometimes it seems to be in an underground chamber where the dog then emerges from near the roots of a tree. He then either gets rabies or becomes vampiric and attacks his family (where there is at least one young boy). I do not see much happening and my dream seems to “reset” several times, sometimes with the events not rendered very well and sped up a bit, yet almost seeming like an “old memory” at times and bilocated in my Cubitis living room where I also seem to be “sleeping” in the northwest corner - though I am actually in my bed in reality. I am aware of a name that is like “Cool Joe” (after Snoopy from the “Peanuts” comic strip, a reversal of “Joe Cool” and first seen May 27, 1971).

In my dream, I was also aware of the name Castle Rock, which is interestingly the name of the fictional town in the novel. The dog also seems to be a sheepdog at one point after one “reset”. This has subtle links to my “Time Divergence” dream (July 4, 1976) and a strange repeating dream experience (and my perception of time extremely altered) related to “Hardcastle and Mccormick”, which I almost always misremembered as “Hardcastle and Rock”. As I have noted before, sometimes these experiences seem more related to incidental word associations through a “higher source” at times, rather than having any real meaning, almost as if the Source is playing some sort of “trick” to see if people are paying attention.

This was surely precognitive with quite a detailed perspective (though there are significant differences in my dream and the actual novel and movie), though rather pointless as with much precognition. The novel apparently did not come out until 1981 (which still feels extraordinarily odd to me as I still feel and “remember” that it came out years before that, before I moved from Florida in 1978), though it is perhaps not impossible that there was talk of it beforehand, though I do not recall reading anything on this and I really did not have access to much news when living in Cubitis during this time. Oddly, I also dreamt about scenes from the movie “Firestarter” (as well as many other movies) before the novel even came out. I have never been sure of why this happens or what the connections (if any) are. Also, it is one of hundreds of more detailed precognitive dreams I did not really think about until several years later. I did not even realize when I saw “Cujo” in real life that it had actually come much later than my dream details. On a side note, Stephen King discusses “Cujo” in “On Writing”, referring to it as a novel he “barely remembers writing at all”.

Morning of August 24, 1975. Sunday (the day before starting 9th grade).



This dream is like an O. Henry tale and as such, is more like an amusing (but nonsensical) ”story” than many of my other dreams. There was a time when I titled it “The Smallest Giant” to have a titular relationship with other (though unrelated) dreams such as “The Smallest Rabbit” and “The Smallest Ghost”.

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In my dream, a fictitious family lives directly south of us and seemingly shares their house with another family, or perhaps they are only visiting them or staying with them for a time during the upcoming school year.

A fictitious wooden fence, much like an old cattle fence (but of only two separated narrower boards high), runs east and west at the southernmost end of our house all the way out to the train tracks. The grass is also longer in our backyard than it had ever been in real life.

The main idea is that there is a “giant” living next door. I think the giant’s name may be John but I am unsure. (There is only a vague awareness at one point of the Edward G. Robinson movie “The Little Giant” from 1933.)

However, the male that had been thought by others to be a giant is eventually seen to not be very tall at all, but he is chubby, and at one point, seemingly only a little taller than the average height for an adult male. He seems mentally “slow”, though. He vaguely reminds me of Kenneth W, a classmate and friend from the year before.

I play a few games with him and Kenny and Karen (neighbors, schoolmates, and friends in real life, though Lisa is not present), mainly with a Frisbee, and some other events take place related to the “giant” making a few odd mistakes in judgement (mostly regarding distance orientation). Near the end of my dream, there is an idea that it is foolish for people to call him a giant.

During the clearest segment of my dream, I call over the fence to him, “hey” and his first name, saying “…Kindergarten starts tomorrow!” Of course, this is a “twist ending” and implies that he actually is a giant but only four or five years of age. I am almost laughing as I wake, being aware of the apparent “cleverness” of my dream.

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This dream has been used here for part 3 of my “Fence Autosymbolism” series. Here, the fence is a main feature of which does not exist in reality. However, in this case, there is a degree of correlation with waking life. It is important to understand that dreams are typically an ambiguous mix of literal factors and autosymbolic factors, sometimes with conscious self correlation.

This dream was, on one level, temporarily making light of my conscious self’s discomfort and uncertainty over the idea of going to high school for the first time, as ninth grade was to start for me on the twenty-fifth of August (on the morning after this dream). My dream colored my mood from mostly negative to somewhat cheerful, at least during this day.

The “giant” was not the preconscious factor in this dream (and not all dreams have a personified preconscious either), but my emergent consciousness. Again, it was making light of an upcoming transition, that for some, might instead have been rendered as a nightmare or at best an unpleasant dream. In reality, I was no longer in the lower grades. I was no longer a child. The fictitious fence appeared in my dream as both a liminal space divider (which was not present in later dreams) and because contact with our real neighbors was nearing an end as was the previous openness with Lisa as had existed in our childhood and early teenage years.

This validates that some dream content comes from current (though liminal) deliberate conscious thought (while other content seems to have no recent source). This is important to understand, as fences which already existed, the ones in part 1 and part 2 of this series, were solely autosymbolic of the dream state and waking process only, and they did not imply creating a new fence in a real-life setting by way of liminal dream control (dream control without lucidity).

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Morning of August 17, 1975. Sunday.



In my dream, I am in the middle school building (DMS), probably implied to be in eighth grade, though I will be going to ninth grade in a different building on August 25, 1975. There is a vague lucidity, enough to use my dream to focus within in expectation of something new, curious, or interesting, in this case, finding a secret passageway as I have often utilized in both liminal dream control and lucidity.

I insert some coins into a seldom-used commercial vending machine (against the north wall in the hall, probably somewhere near the middle of the building) to get a soft drink. However, there is a different response, which I had seemingly been at least partly expecting - based on, I believe, a recent student rumor. You had to put the right combinations of coins in and press the correct product-select buttons to activate and allow entry into a secret area or apparently another world.

The soda vending machine slides over (in the manner of a sliding door) to reveal a secret passageway behind the wall. I soon find myself climbing horizontally on a giant rose plant that winds horizontally through a long large metallic tunnel. This becomes sort of frustrating and boring over time, but I do not seem to be in that much danger (probably because of the usual liminal dream state awareness). Near the end of my dream, I look far down and see the lost city (from “Land of the Lost”, the original television series) but I only see Enik standing around, though he does not notice me. I do not see much potential in exploring a city of Sleestaks at this point and I am unsure how to get down to the area anyway. It is now as if I am looking at the area from a very high cliff.

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Vestibular system correlation (what the majority of my dreams have at one point or another since earliest memory) kicked in fairly quickly, though without fully waking me or even more dominant waking autosymbolism, though there were vague partial awakenings while I was climbing the horizontally-oriented vine, horizontal of course, because of my liminal awareness of how my body was oriented in sleep.

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Morning of August 13, 1975. Wednesday.



This dream was strongly influenced by a random symmetrical inkblot I made (at age fourteen) that looked much like a more detailed version in my dream’s outcome. I am not a main character and seem to be watching as if it is a movie. (Some of the inkblots I made as a teenager, as well as numerous other things I made, including comic strips and short stories, are possibly with relatives and stored away somewhere.)

Two astronauts land on a planet, which, over time, begins to shrink. Not much happens other than the (unknown and male) astronauts reacting to land features that are smaller and closer together than previously. For some reason, their rocket-ship also shrinks, apparently to the same continual proportions of the planet, but they do not. There does not seem to be any in-dream back story over why the planet is shrinking.

In the end, they are seen hanging off the planet from each side, hanging in outer space, almost looking as if they are pressing a beach ball above their heads and the image is perfectly symmetrical.

Morning of August 10, 1975. Sunday.



Someone is stealing our chickens from our large shed in Cubitis, either late at night or very early in the morning (before dawn) and my father and I go out one night to see if we can catch them. Our orange Turkens (a breed of chicken also known as the Transylvanian Naked Neck) are gone without any visible clues anywhere. Although it is first considered that the thieves are ordinary humans, there is pondering of both alien and supernatural possibilities.

Time passes, and the entire shed and external cages area, ground and all, including us as we are standing, seems to be lifted into the dawn sky by an unknown force as we are facing north. There is a sense of beauty, awe, and wonder but no fear. The sense of movement and changing distance from the rest of the ground near our house is very vivid. We are still not sure if this force is alien or supernatural.

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Morning of August 1, 1965. Sunday.



This was a sparsely recurring early childhood dream. Like a lot of my early childhood dreams, I was not aware of my parents being in the immediate area (and I do not feel close to any implied family home) even though it seems very late at night. I do not really feel in danger or lost even though I am not sure of the area - probably La Crosse (possibly somewhere near Rose Street) or perhaps a part of Minnesota. I also feel quite a bit older in my dream for some reason, so perhaps I do not feel threatened as such.

The main idea is related to going near a closed used car lot (again, always very late at night). There is some confusion related to the strung pennants across two sides of the corner business. At one point, I am fairly certain that kites had been caught up in the area and entangled in the string with the pennants, especially the kite tails. In another version of this dream, there is a concern related to mostly small birds (swallows or sparrows?) somehow becoming entangled and an uncertainty of whether I am looking at hanging (dead) birds or the small pennants at any given time, which seem to be of an almost identical shape from some angles. The flapping sound (of the many pennants) at times makes me think that perhaps a live bird (or several live birds) is being trapped somewhere though I cannot see any live ones. No other person is ever around. The sound is not that frequent or discernible.

Morning of July 19, 1975. Saturday.

Dream #: 3,134-02. Reading time: 50 sec.



My imaginary dream self becomes aware of being in an alternate (erroneously detailed) version of our backyard in Cubitis. It seems to be in the late morning. I am aware of my father standing near the back of our chicken shed and digging, but this is not a defined focus.

My attention is mainly on a giant onion that is growing in our garden in the area west of the railroad tracks. The top part of it that is exposed is about three feet in diameter. I do not consider its presence unusual.

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How to understand dreams in my online dream journal: This dream is mainly a result of instinctual sleep-wake mediation and inherently unrelated to my waking-life status other than with partial literal threads (for example, we had a garden in this location in real life but did not grow giant onions).

A feature coming out of the ground is instinctual autosymbolism for emergence from slow-wave sleep. Dreams exhibit co-occurrence with the waking transition as a preparatory function of achieving consciousness.

The top part of the onion in this dreaming experience, being above ground, confirms to me that accessible layers of memory only exist with the emergence of cognizance and consciousness during the beginning of liminality (increasing lucidity) to viable wakefulness.

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Morning of July 12, 1975. Saturday.



This dream is somewhat of a continuation of events I have been involved in in real life, in having a long line of clean jars (which originally contained peanut butter or mustard) sitting across the top of my desk in my Cubitis bedroom. Each jar has a certain amount of water to make a particular pitch and I find it pleasing to play music in this manner. I use a spoon to lightly tap each one to make a particular note and play simple melodies.

In my dream, I become famous for playing glass jars, but seem like someone else at one point. A parade is held in my honor relating to the supposed “revival” of this sort of music. In the most vivid part of my dream, as my perspective is changing, I hear a girl’s chorus sing loudly and clearly (and very cheerfully, almost as if for the final part of a movie), something much like the following:

He likes all kinds of girls

Tall kinds of girls

Short kinds of girls

Dark kinds of girls

Light kinds of girls

Thin kinds of girls

Any girls at all…

The fictional song keeps repeating with various similar lyrics in this same form. The tune is very simple:



As this song is being sung, I see a giant (unknown) hand (as big as a house) in overhead view (while seemingly in my “orb” form) start to “play” a group of roofs on several grass huts (or wooden bark huts) apparently with an equally giant spoon or other utensil - in a row in a small village somewhere on an island in the same manner that glass jars are played and I can even hear the wind-chime like tones. It is a very unusual, yet somehow nostalgic scene. There is also a vague perception that the roofs may be crushed or at least possibly damaged but this only happens during my waking stage (where the grass hut seems to “crack” but not in a seemingly threatening way).

Morning of July 7, 1965. Wednesday.



This was a recurring very early childhood dream. There were a few variations. The main scene involved being in the back seat of a car, on the right-hand side, with my father driving and my mother in the front seat. Somehow, I eventually find myself along the right-hand side of the road with no car in sight and where there are a lot of tall grasses and possibly a trench or ditch. This seems related to my parents stopping for me to relieve myself while they go to a nearby store to come back in a short time. (I get the impression that we had been at a gas station though I could not go because the bathroom doors were locked - this in-dream back story being based on a real-life event.) I soon notice a small green dinosaur on two legs (probably a very small or baby “ostrich dinosaur” or Ornithomimus not quite as tall as I am) that comes out from the tall weeds. In afterthought, I seem taller in my dream, or at least seeing things from a higher perspective. There is sometimes a sense of sadness as if it may be the only one around or the last of its kind. It seems friendly though also somewhat out of place in its surroundings. I am not sure what its fate will be as I usually return to the car when my parents return, though they do not see it and I do not mention it. I may continue to be the only human who ever knows of its existence.

Some of this is based on one of my most vivid real memories. My parents did stop at a gas station and when the attendant said that the doors were locked, I said “That’s okay, I don’t have to use the bathroom anyway” (so as to not be seen as demanding or annoying - I was quite passive and focused when growing up for the most part). My impression of this seemingly very annoyed-looking man towering over me stayed with me. We did stop at a wayside as such a few times (when I had to go to the bathroom), but my parents certainly never drove off for any length of time as in some of my dreams.

Morning of July 6, 1975. Sunday.



In my dream, I am with my best friend Toby on some sort of excursion of which I am not sure of the nature of. I believe the word play, “Safari, so good” (so far, so good) is suggested by Toby. We actually seem to be in Africa (or a reconstruction of certain features of one area) at one point, but I do not have a clear memory of how we got there, although the idea of a school bus having taken us there comes into mind very briefly, which suggests that we got left behind on some sort of field trip, perhaps to Busch Gardens at Tampa Bay. Somehow, as we walk around with no particular implied destination, we end up going into another world through an unseen or unrecognized portal.

After a time, we end up being chased by several mythological creatures, including a minotaur and a centaur. We are not caught or directly threatened at any point, but the landscape and the creatures become more unusual over time.

Eventually, without realizing it, after being chased by surreal mythological beasts on several different occasions, we seem to be back in our own world in the same area from where we started, just prior to entering the other world.

Nearby, a lion watches us from tall grasses and soon roars with the idea he may start to chase us. Even though we start running to escape from the potentially threatening situation, Toby starts laughing, saying rather loudly and somewhat happily under the circumstances, “A good ol’ Earth lion!” which means he is glad to be out of the other world, though he lags behind me. There is no fear at this point; but almost a strange sense of relief and appreciated familiarity of the potential to return home.

This is a fairly straightforward dream-as-a-dream event (as many are, even many of which people try to “interpret”, which in the first place, is something only the dreamer can do, as the dreamer is the only one with the relevant memory of the previous experiences and associations that build the dream in the first place). The lion in the last segment is my emergent consciousness rendered as the waking transition’s symbol of coalescence. This is because a lion in the dream state represents the ability to consume the dream self, since that is always the ultimate fate of the dream self (to coalesce into whole consciousness) even after being in the “alternate world of mythology” (the dream state itself). The implied swallowing is not seen in this dream (and in fact, is not even needed to be rendered since the transition has already developed). Waking transitions of this type are often achieved without any need for disturbing imagery (and again, it was even amusing in this case, which happily colored my mood for the day).

Morning of July 5, 1975. Saturday.



This entry relates to a small part of real-life but “dreamlike” events (also experienced by my wife when she was younger long before we met) of water bugs completely vanishing from a sealed glass mason jar I usually had on the left area of the northwestern jalousie window sill over a longer time period as well as touching a kind of seemingly aquatic (either hexagonal or octagonal) orange “accordion-like worm” and watching them “explode” into tiny grain-like and plate-like parts and dissolve within a short time. I was also the only one at the time (and for years after) to fully know about the non-native snakes, including Burmese pythons (one of which went into our large shed, likely with the intent to eat a chicken) “invading” the area - which no one else seemed to believe at all, and yet which is now a recognized problem in that region (even with a related television series) years later (this has remained a common “trend” for me - to be the first or only one to see or experience something years before someone else becomes known for first seeing or knowing of it - something I have grown very used to, in fact).

Based on a dream about a “new” kind of penguin (as in actually “newly evolved” or created from nothing), I had written a story called “Penguin in a Jar”.

I was in my Cubitis home in the living room and there was a large, tall, cylindrical aquarium that held a small penguin that was very aquatic, more adapted to water and the ability of perfect, fast swimming than being suited on land at all. It would swim in spiral-like patterns from top to bottom and then back up near the water’s surface to perform a lot of fancy swimming while eating very small fish when swimming downwards again. This special new species of penguin somehow just appeared on Earth with no explanation other than being a “new creation”. One person who wants to make a lot of money on the discovery does not get anywhere when the penguin somehow becomes invisible or dissolves completely when out of the water for very long.

Years ago, even before my older dream journal entry on this, there were no other online matches for “penguin in a jar” - now there are many (Google) matches of this phrase - which I originally personally used to connect to the real-life vanishing water bug enigma. Also, to give a little more detail to all the odd coincidental connections to the much later movie “The Gate” (1987) as partly mentioned in another entry, I forgot to point out how the jar in the movie (that the moths vanish into thin air from at one point) was the same orientation (relative to where it was kept by the window and the orientation of the room) as my real-life experiences from years prior (mid 1970s).

Also see: “The New Life”.

Morning of July 4, 1975. Friday.



I have an old leather-bound book that is entitled “The Annelid War”. In some ways I think it may be science fiction, but in other ways it also seems to relate to a soon-to-air television documentary about an upcoming event. Supposedly, various species of worms become gigantic and fight each other, causing earthquakes. One rises up from the ground at a distance. I am not sure if this is a natural event or related to mutations caused by radiation or environmental pollution. My dream is mostly set outside in my backyard in Cubitis. It seems these giant worms can manifest purple lightning or perhaps draw lightning to a particular area of the ground to manipulate it.

Because of their shape, both snakes and worms have associations with the human intestine and the human spine. Because lightning resembles the human nervous system, this one probably relates to conflicting thoughts, the worms, to me, associated with spinal energy.

Morning of June 29, 1975. Sunday.



This dream started by finding myself walking through the parking lot and to the front entrance of my middle school in Florida. As is sometimes the case, I am clearly aware of the real-world time and day. This is in the morning. A classmate, Wayne H, is also on the premises and wandering around.

I “know” that I have to get my textbooks - but this is not a legitimate idea as I am moving on to high school and do not really need these other books. In my dream, I have the false memory of having left them in my locker (recurring), so I am presently prepared to go into the school on a Sunday morning to get them.

Unfortunately, the front doors are locked. After a time, I cause a key to float in the air and enter the lock. At the same time, though not lucid, I am aware that this is supposedly a symbolic metaphor for sexual intercourse. However, after a time, I question if this is because I have been reading dream dictionaries and that the lock is just a lock and the key is just a key and that dream symbols are often not symbols at all (as with literal precognition I have experienced all my life) even though, again, I am not directly aware that I am dreaming. I move the key into the lock after willing it out again and then “explode” the imagery into a fully detailed and labeled diagram that is sort of holographic. The different parts of the lock in the exploded view are labeled.

So here I am, spending a bit too much time on trying to work out which parts of the lock are equivalent to which parts of the female’s genitals. (This was during a time when a lot of other boys my age did not seem to know much about female anatomy, and thus there were “dirty jokes” I heard that made no sense including the “baby as submarine” one.) I look at it for awhile and decide the layout is not compatible with real female anatomy at all.

I go into the building and walk around in the empty maze-like halls and end up in a recurring and annoying dream scenario of trying to find my locker (I had a few different ones in reality and the middle school building was huge). I find a few with stacks of mangled books at the bottom, but they are not mine. This recurring scenario was precognitive when I was a maintenance worker at the college and had the job of cleaning out all the lockers and sometimes finding mangled books and men’s magazines in a very similar fashion as in these older dreams.

Eventually, I find a couple dream dictionaries in a locker, with missing sections (but more like a telephone book in overall appearance), with a picture of an ugly clown and balloons on the cover of one. Annoyed, I throw them at the concrete wall and slowly wake instead of instigating a more lucid dream level, which I then mentally “kick myself” over at the “lost opportunity”.