non-lucid

Didn't have time to write this up this morning and after work I've been playing Civ 5 all day so there's been a bit of a delay getting this documented proper. I managed to go lucid for this one, but unfortunately I think I set a new record for how short it lasted. I'm still going to add it to the pile in light of the daunting lack of lucid dreams thus far this month.

As the dream started I was arriving to work at Metro Drug (where I recently spent a rotation), only the inside looked slightly different. Behind the pharmacy area was a larger, warehouse-like area. I'd managed to arrive before Mike and I didn't really want to see him so I hid in this back area around a corner where I couldn't be seen unless someone came all the way back there. After some time, a female intern I didn't recognize came back there and was browsing around the supplies there, taking some of them for herself. At first I interjected that she shouldn't be doing that, but then it occurred to me that I don't particularly care for Metro Drug and decided to join her in stealing supplies. Up in the pharmacy, it's apparently very busy and Mike is there alone. I realize that I'm not on rotation there any more and am thus under no obligation to help him. Somehow this transitions into the realization that I shouldn't be there, which calls the reality check. I'm not sure exactly what went wrong, I suppose I feel I wasn't ready to go lucid at that particular moment. I closed my eyes for a second, but realize quickly that this ruined previous lucid realizations so I open my eyes but it seemed it was too late; everything was fading into gray. I tried to put my palm on a counter to connect to the dream to attempt to stabilize it but with no success.

Short fragment and a slightly longer fragment tonight. The short fragment was that I was walking down a long isle in a grocery store, shopping with my wife. She was asking me if we should get some juice, but I was like, "Eh, nah." This, of course, would never happen in real life; my wife absolutely refuses to take me grocery shopping.

In the second sequence I was walking down the street with a black woman. We were about to get on a subway. She was telling me about how she was looking forward to riding the IM subway for the first time, only she pronounced it like the "im" in "him". A white woman near us who overheard was annoyed and corrected her that it was pronounced like initials. As we walked down the stairs into the subway, the black woman had her subway pass on some kind of wood or plastic board; she didn't know she was supposed to hold it at a certain angle as she passed through the scanner, but it was hanging at the right angle anyways. As we proceeded she asked me why I didn't need a pass, I told her it was because I had already picked up a special permit which required two forms of ID and that when you show them they only give back one (which I then thought was kind of counterintuitive). As I was telling her this, we were passing by the special permit area where I could remember earlier (possibly even in the same dream here) standing in line to get the permit. The subway looked more like an airport terminal.

Had a couple of dreams. When I woke up after the first one, my wife was awake and using my computer so I couldn't document it, but I tried to focus on retaining the memory and I believe I've still got everything from that particular dream that I remembered as of waking then (though I note even by then it felt like the front part of the dream is partially missing).

I'm living in some different house or apartment and decide I'm going to bed so I go to my room which has just a lone single bed. When I turn off the light, I sense that there's some kind of demon was in my bed so I call an exorcist. The exorcist tells me they'll be over soon, but meanwhile I should put a clove of garlic in my pocket for protection. I didn't have any garlic at home, so I went out to the grocery store to buy one. The exorcist was there by the time I returned. The exorcist brought me into my room and pulled back the blanket the foot of the bed. There was a tiny demon that looked kinda like trolls from WoW, but it had horns. The exorcist explained that this demon was an "Ettin" and is not extremely dangerous but can be annoying. The exorcist showed me that you can stretch and mess with the Ettin's horns. Somehow this transitioned into the exorcist and me (who had both now changed character) walking around a war camp in a place whose art style resembled World of Warcraft (I wonder if I was perhaps just lucid enough that my observation on the Ettin's appearance warped the dream's progression?) We were walking around the camp while the former exorcist explained to me the situation; we were camped in an Elwynn Forest-like area outside of a large gate. I was told that this was the entrance to a fortress that was heavily guarded and we were having trouble finding a way to bust in.

Now I'm reasonably sure I woke up there in that first dream, but there was what was either an interlude before I woke up that I'm only now remembering or the dream semi-continued when I went back to sleep. It featured a handful of characters from the Suikoden series. As it continued, I zoomed out to watch the action. The gate to the fort was the last major fortified objective between the protagonist army and their objective--a large castle in the northwest. As the attack on the fortress was renewed once more, Griffith led a large force out of the castle to the fort, where fighting intensified. Meanwhile an expedition led by Chris was deeper in the forest to the southeast, trying to find some secret weapon that would help them get through the fort.

The following is what I remember from the dream I just woke up from. At first I thought this sequence may be separate, but thinking about it now it makes some sense in context if I argue that the first person sequence that occurs here is where I am part of Chris' expedition. As it went, I remember thinking I was in either some new MMO or some new patch for WoW where there's a new instance. It's inside of a cave in the side of a mountain cliff outside of a large grassy field. I go in with a party of people; the cave is wide but straight back. We fight our way back, but decide to stop and call it a night shortly before reaching the boss at the back; at the back there was a pillow that you were supposed to touch to activate the encounter. Outside I'm talking with some people, apparently mad that we didn't keep going when we were so close. I eventually decide I'm just gonna go in and pull the boss to at least see what they are. I enter the cave by myself but the layout has changed considerably. The cave is still wide and generally straight, but the pathway now winds back and forth and there are many more monsters inside. I run my way back through the cave, dodging attacking monsters. As I reach the end I jump across a series of small rock platforms in the water and then jump onto the final platform, where I continue by jumping onto the pillow. I seem to think there was a black demon that appeared in front of a mirror on the right wall, but I woke up right about here.

Just wanted to get this in before I forget. Had a short dream last night but woke up without any will to go record it. What remains is a fragment where I recall being in a lecture hall with Dr. Kelsch once more. The lecture hall was reminiscent of the larger of the two east rooms coming in from the south entrance to Sudro.

I seem to be struggling with a diminished will for lucid dreaming. I really need to summon the focus to recover my will to lucid dream. It's somewhat discouraging that I haven't been able to get lucid all month. I'm not sure if this is bad luck or if I'm just getting lazy.

I had an interesting set of dreams last night, but my memory of them is rather disjointed. It was heavily inspired by Myst and Riven, which I have been replaying and playing through respectively after having picked up the Cyan pack on Steam (a nice, reasonable $20 for some hardcore classic PC games). The dreams take the form of that sort of exploration through surreal-yet-logical realms. I seemed to have a sense of dread most of the time; I imagine this mimics the emotions one trapped in a Myst-like experience might have. The first area I can remember was sort of a Myst-island style hub area, but looked a lot different. I was in a grassy plains area; there was a path heading through, several large rocks or canyon walls, one path led off to a lagoon area, another path led off to a large, imposing purple-black castle in the distance. Every so often along the path some animals would try to attack me: a swarm of insects near the lagoon, a snake in the grass a ways in front of the castle. I stopped playing this game and decided to try the older original version. I remember seeing an intro sequence and the Myst intro theme music playing, and thinking that this intro sequence was absent in the remake. It was mostly the same as the 3D one, but presented in still images like the original Myst; the creatures attacking me looked like they were relatively poorly rendered. I moved on to an apparent sequel, this one also in 3D. I have a small memory of something in a village that was on stilts above a lake or ocean; the water and sky were both black or dark gray. There was also a forest, with different patches of green, blue and purple, and red and orange forest. I remember having that same sense of confused frustration as to what to do next that I had yesterday when playing Riven. I found a pair of ropes hanging in the orange forest, whenever I pulled one a basket on the end of a rope would come down from the treetops and there would be some unusual objects that were meant to be hints inside.

Thinking about that last bit reminds me of a different sequence, though again I only seem to remember a few details. I was in some sort of RPG. We were in a city mostly. I knew there was a hard boss fight we had to go to at the top of a several-story-high building, so I was spending a lot of time doing various tasks to prepare for it.

This was an unusual one: my wife and I decided to go to IHOP for breakfast. When we got there, we noticed there were only a few cars in the parking lot, so when we got inside and found several dozen old people seated and eating we were surprised. Also, there were apparently no waiters or any other staff. More people slowly collected at the front of the restaurant. I watched Barry arrive on a bike, only it wasn't quite Barry; he was shorter and a bit thinner but had a chubbier face. Just as I was getting annoyed enough to leave, Laura and I were suddenly on a city bus with the old people. Angry and confused, I asked my wife why we were taking the bus home when we drove there in our car. I pulled the string to signal for a stop, but a man standing at the front said, "Sorry, we only stop at the nursing home." The bus then did this sudden turn to run up on the sidewalk, where it narrowly passed by another bus parked at the curb. I realized that this was clearly a dream since normal buses don't do that, however I didn't go lucid, I had a false awakening upon which I described this dream I just had to my dad.

Had a dream that was kind of a weird fusion of the movies Accepted and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Or perhaps it was some kind of Accepted sequel? Anyways, it seems that the dream took place at a sort of run-by-the-students university. It was larger than the one in Accepted, and seemed more like a traditional university with large, old buildings. The main action I'm able to recall was that someone, a school board or something, sent a new teacher to teach and oversee the university (her appearance was reminiscent of the younger NP I worked with at IFD). She quickly instated some kind of tyrannical discipline such that nobody liked her. I was in a class that was in some sort of giant locker room. At some point I decided I'd had enough of this crap, stood up, and declared that she was no longer in charge of this institution. There were murmurs among he other students. Teacher lady came to the back to argue with me, when it was clear I intended to literally kick her out she walked towards a back table and tried to improvise a weapon from items there, needles and scissors. I followed her and disarmed her any time she brandished a weapon. She eventually fled once more to the front of the classroom. I took charge of the class and directed students to unload supplies and food from a truck outside and to clean out the refrigerator (?) in the classroom. Teacher lady started to object again, so I grabbed her in a bear hug in order to physically drag her out of the building. On the way I walked through another large, gymnasium-like classroom. There was a chime overhead and some guy started reading morning announcements. Towards the exit there was a confused-looking girl standing about. I asked her if she needed any help and she replied that she was here to attend the school. I asked her what she wanted to learn and she replied that she wanted to learn how to do morning announcements. Just then the announcements guy did some sort of interesting segue noise, so I asked the girl if she could do something like that and she nervously replied no. I laughed and assured her it was fine, and directed her to get filled in further in the building. Dream ended there as I continued to drag teacher lady outside.

Tonight's dreams came in kind of random fragments, which I suspect might possibly be due to waking up several times over the course of the night and not even realizing I'd dreamed before dozing off again. Here's what I can remember:

I was with my family, we were in a car (it seems it must have been either an SUV or our old Isuzu Trooper, judging from how relatively high I was seated) and one of my parents was driving, I was in one of the back seats. We were on our way to the lakes, which I was somewhat excited for; I had been vaguely wanting to spend a weekend at some lakes place all summer (also, I had read a classified ad for a luxurious-sounding lake cabin yesterday, which probably contributed to the dream's inspiration). The lake area we were going to was in a sparsely wooded area, but for some reason we were going to stay in a hotel at the edge of the woods. As we turned into the hotel, we were stopped by a woman and a young girl. The young girl walked up to the window and was telling my parents something; apparently they were from another family that we were traveling with. Apparently, the hotel we were going to go stay at was either closed or full, so we'd have to go stay in our proper lake cabin. I noticed the hotel was in a fenced off lot, and was several feet deep in water as though it was flooded. We went back onto the road to go into the woods, but a short ways in we came to a line of traffic that was backed up behind the main road, which was closed for some reason. My family used this as an excuse to turn around and go home. I was pissed because there was a clearly visible side road nearby that we could have used.

I was playing Metal Gear Solid 5 (!), and was increasingly concerned that Hideo Kojima has gotten a bit too avant-garde, because it included several highly unusual elements, such as Pokémon. There was one part where I was trying to figure out how this summon thing worked; it would summon a ghost night who would get more powerful with time but the summon didn't last very long. I eventually figured out that you have to restart channeling the spell to continue and doing so wouldn't resummon the ghost knight. Later, I tried to get my brother to try playing the game, but he wasn't interested.

At some point, I decided that if my family wasn't going to the lakes, I'd go by myself. So I took a car and drove there. At the woods there was a large grouping of camp sites and paved areas for RVs. It looked like a fun place to be, but was disappointingly empty, which I attributed to it being early in the season. I found a quaint-looking cabin that I parked at (though curiously I note that it wasn't near any lake).

I'm not sure if there is some chronological shuffling that's going on with my memory, but this is all I recall for now.

Two dream tonight, but unfortunately after waking from the first one I was way too tired to get up and write some notes. All I can remember now was a brief scene where I was up on MS5C (I recall walking down the northwest hallway of the wing towards and around the main nurse's station), only there was some other reason that I was there that had nothing to do with hospitals.

In the longer dream, I was the leader of a group of fighters. There were maybe five or six of us staying in a room, but for some reason the room we were staying in was in the back of a biker gang's bar. Most of them left to pillage or something, but there was one that stayed behind; he burst into our room and started trying to attack us. There were more of us than him though, so we were able to hold him down and take turns beating him up. Somehow he managed to get loose and escape, just as the rest of the biker gang was returning. We were trying to figure out what to do now; one of our guys was small enough to get out the window, so we told him to go send word to our allies, but after he escaped he just waited outside for us to come out as well. The bikers managed to burst into the room again, but there was no immediate fighting. Instead, the leader came to the front and acted menacing. They grabbed one of my guys and were getting ready to torture him. We were hesitant to fight back at first, but as they were about to drive a nail through my comrade's hand I counterattacked. We all managed to fight our way to the door, despite overwhelming numbers of burly bikers, and we escaped and then scattered to regroup later to the north with our camp. I headed south at first, but then doubled back north to meet up with my group's camp (which was in kind of a swampy forest area), where we prepared a small force to invade southwards towards the area where the bikers' bar was.

Managed to salvage a fragment of a longer dream that I awoke too briefly from to hang on to more than a few details. All I remember involved a scene that resembled NCIS wherein there was that kind of office space with a handful of people standing around pretending to be witty until a passive-aggressive, older grumpy guy walked through hastily and told everyone what to do.

I'm quite disappointed I went through the entire weekend without a single good dream to record. Granted I spent most of Saturday and Sunday evenings taking heavy naps and I didn't get much sleep Saturday night...well, now that I put it that way I guess it's not surprising. I want to avoid saying I'm in a dry spell again, but it kinda feels like it.

I was trying out for my middle school's chamber orchestra again, but not as string bass for some reason; it seemed as though I was going through school all over again and had picked a different instrument (seemed to be either violin or viola judging from where I was seated). Afterwards I got on a charter bus to go to some camp, I suppose it was supposed to be reminiscent of IMC. The camp was just a large building in the middle of the woods that was kind of like a hotel, but there was no activities planned, we just had 2 person rooms where we stayed for a while and did whatever. It was raining as we got on the charter bus, so I was wearing my black coat, but I put it with the luggage under the bus. I got on the bus and as we were leaving I was thinking about previous times I'd been to the camp where I had been with a friend who didn't mind that I hooked up my gaming console and just played video games the whole time. I wasn't going with a friend this time, so I was figured whomever I was roomed with would probably want to use the TV, so I'd tell them to let me know if they ever wanted to. I fell asleep on the bus but woke up a little bit before we got there, so I listened to my MP3 player for a while. My dad was chaperoning the trip, and was trying to collect unusual amounts of demographic information (like fingerprints) from me and the others who had tried out for the chamber orchestra to forward to the middle-school-orchestra-teacher-whose-name-I-don't-quite-remember, but he was being really sneaky about it. I realized what he was trying to do; as he was helping me unload my luggage I told him that if they wanted all kinds of unnecessary information I'd rather not get in since I was planning to quit soon anyways because I didn't want to hang out with Mr. Italiano (heh, in my dream I nicknamed him Capitano Italiano). Also, in the dream I forgot I'd put my coat with the luggage and was surprised to find it there. I went to the kitchen area of the lodge and Megan R. was there, she accidentally spilled a 2-liter of Mountain Dew, but as it tipped over it poured into a series of containers that were lined up to the side of it. One of them was a tall glass filled with water but as the Mountain Dew poured into it the cup didn't fill up and spill over; it looked like the water was replaced by Mountain Dew as it poured in. I thought this was awesome, and pointed this out to Megan, who hadn't noticed she'd knocked over the Mountain Dew. Dream ends hereabouts.

Edit: Just wanted to add that I keep thinking there may have been more dream that I'm forgetting on the front end of this dream. Also, that the impression I got during the dream wasn't that I was going back to school retroactively, but that I was reliving my earlier life.

I was at what must have been a Taco Bell. There was a DDR machine against one wall; two guys were showing off and there was a crowd of people watching. Someone said, "I'm gonna get some food then play some DDR." I replied, "Should play first, it's harder to play when you're weighed down by tacos." (This and the way the setting looked suggests it was a Taco Bell.) Several people agreed. There was a TV on nearby, the news was on talking about a black man (I seem to want to think his name was Leeroy) who was just elected the head of the "Memory Party". Leeroy was in a suit, but acted very ghetto and was apparently rather dumb. He was giving a press conference in which he announced that he was going to run for president. His jaded opponent for head of the Memory Party was in the audience and said something about how a candidate for president should have a name like Leo (his name). Leeroy replied with something about how that'll happen when the white man calls black men white and Asians call them white man-san, and then paused like what he had just said was the wittiest thing anyone had ever said ever. He went on to say something about now he was able to his kids "chains and brains and gems and jew'ry". There were a handful of supervillains watching from their evil lairs, and they were all thinking about how they had to steal Leeroy's evil stupid powers.

Got a couple of longer fragments tonight, mostly owing to the fact that every time I woke up during the night I was too heavily fatigued to get out of bed to write some notes. I was able to prepare myself to preserve some general memories of them though, so here goes.

I was one of four famous/elite assassins/bounty hunters that included myself, my brother, a third random guy whom I don't recognize from real life, and Mandy. We all had, at least, some kind of rifle that had four ammo types: a bullet that would kill, a bullet/dart that would instantly knock someone out, a bullet/dart that would slowly knock someone out, and a dart that would shoot out a laser beam to help reveal someone's position. We were all together in a semi tractor-trailer going down a highway in some sort of desert canyon when third guy said something that seriously pissed my brother off, so he stopped the truck, jumped out, got on a motorcycle (!?), and fled backwards the way we came. I quickly jumped out and ran after him, hoping to keep him safe from my brother's wrath. I followed third guy back aways to a shack near a gas station off the highway. I told third guy to get down and hide. I saw my brother following out the window, so I readied my rifle and shot him with the laser-beam dart as he was approaching. I checked myself to see what other weapons I had on me; I had a revolver with only one bullet in the chamber so I set that down and then found another handgun with a full magazine. There was an old woman who had slowly been approaching the shack to see what was going on, as she got close to the door so did my brother. Instead of charge in or wait outside, my brother held his shotgun up to the old woman's head and demanded that we come out or he'd kill the old woman. From around the corner to the door I could see the barrel of his shotgun held up to the woman's head. From there I was able to extrapolate his position, so I aimed where his feet would be and fired two shots. I heard him cry out and fall down, so I quickly came out the door and pointed my gun at him to keep him from getting back up. I convinced him to give up trying to kill third guy, so we brought him in and sat him down. Some time shortly after, Mandy came in, carrying a long case she used to store her custom rifle, and told us that she was retiring, so we held a small retirement party. During the mini-party, I recalled one mission where we were all holed up in a shack like this one, fighting off dozens of enemies that were attacking us.

Second sequence was even stranger: through some freak of nature British law, I and one other American tourist were somehow appointed to two of four vacant seats in the British parliament. The other guy and I were seated at a group of desks with a bunch of old men who were all bickering over how to fill the remaining two empty eats. Across the room were a few rows of seats for observers. American guy and I were talking about random stuff while the old guys argued. At some point I joked that they should just grab a few more tourists to fill the seats, but they apparently thought I was serious and immediately held a vote to do so, but it was too split to pass. Afterwards, I called my wife, trying to figure out how we were going to make arrangements to move to the UK. I was talking to her as I was walking down a sidewalk, observing the traffic; I joked about how getting used to driving on the other side of the street was going to kill me.

I was with a small group of people (probably about 10-15 people) and House. At first we were at some kind of bar or comedy club. One of the guys in the group called "The Goose", a skinny guy with a black t-shirt and short, black hair, was doing some comedy up front. Meanwhile House and I were arguing about something, and I got the impression that he didn't quite like me. After a while, House announced that we were going to have a race with two teams of four; we'd have four tasks to complete on the way and for some reason both teams had to carry a large orange net also. I remember thinking it was weird that the race had over a month and a week time limit when it would only take a few hours to complete. We started running, both teams of four plus the rest of the crowd plus House hobbling behind, first down a highway in the desert. At some point we veered off to the right onto a grassy patch. The first task was two soccer goal nets positioned rather close to each other with a soccer ball, the task was that we had to score four goals. My other three teammates were girls, the three of them carrying the net since I was a little bit behind them, and they got to the task first. They set the net down next to the goals and started kicking the ball; they scored three easily but accidentally kicked the ball around the side on the fourth one. As I got there, I stayed near our net so I could grab it and run a soon as we had 4 goals; I grabbed it early once but was reprimanded by House. The other team arrived as we were trying to work out the fourth goal. As soon as they got it, I grabbed the net, piled it up and tried to carry it over my shoulder as we ran down a path towards the next challenge. To make it easier to carry, I just put the net on my head to help hold it up and carry it that way, but I couldn't see very well. As we went, we passed an Arby's off to our left, I joked, "I should go through the drive through with this net." We went for some ways until we came to this building that looked like some kind of school. Inside we all rested for a bit while House explained the third challenge: a comedy contest (apparently somewhere along the way my team had completed the second challenge while I was carrying the net?). House opened a door that led to the stage of a packed theater. The other team was going first, and they had "The Goose". I was worried because I was the only person on my team that had any comedy experience, but I didn't have a routine prepared. Dream ended hereabouts.

My wife had a speech class in some far away place, so we drive there the day before she has to give a speech. In the hotel room, she writes a speech based on some poem, but she changes parts of it to personalize it. The next day I watch her give the speech to her class; later another student gives a different speech modeled after the same poem. We drive home, but I have my own class to go to where we're giving presentations. We're giving them in a room that looks like the newer gym at my hold high school. I'm sitting behind the stage with a few other people. Someone gives a presentation that includes a speech based on that same poem. I pointed out to someone that this was the third time I'd heard someone give a speech based on that poem (and though I can't remember them now, in the dream I was able to identify the poem's author and the book it came from). For some reason, I have my computer set up backstage and Miles is there with a laptop. I go to point out something on his laptop, but I accidentally hit the power button and it shuts down. It won't turn on again, but I notice a button on what looks like a small desktop speaker, so I press it and the laptop turns on again. I go back to my computer, but now it's acting weird. The operating system looks strange and corrupted, so I conclude it's picked up some sort of virus. I turn it off and take it home. I turn it on again, it looks better but it's still obviously infected so I boot up Norton (which hadn't booted up automatically). I let Norton start to sort things out and walk away to go do something else when the dream ends.

Little bit of bleeding here, I woke up dreading going back to my computer since it was infected, but it slowly occurred to me that my computer wasn't really infected in real life.