solaetia

I went to bed early last night on 3 glasses of wine (yeah I know) and mild depression. I woke up around 2am with memories of a dream where my brother was very angry with me. I have these dreams fairly regularly, where either my brother, my mom, or my husband really seem to hate me and I can't figure out what it is that I have done that has made them feel this way, or to this extreme. I also had memories of being near a black dog -maybe a lab/mastiff mix?- who was viciously defending her puppy from my dog Cayna and I. I was trying to slowly back away and keep my dog from interacting with the angry dog mama, and my fingers were very nearly bitten off several times. When I woke up with these dreams still on hand, I felt too sick and too apathetic to write them down.

I read for about an hour before I laid back down to attempt sleep. WILDs were on my mind, they almost always are in the early morning hours because I've had so many in these circumstances. I usually know I have to lie on my back and remain very still until I feel myself getting sleepy, then the buzzing/synthesizer noises come and then I feel myself push out of my body and float away from the bed. I tossed and turned and slept for minutes at a time until I returned to lying on my back and feeling really sleepy. I heard loud discordant crashing sounds instead of the more usual buzzing/synth sounds. I felt myself rise out of my body, and I floated to my right and up until I was against the wall. Where my face was touching the wall, I could see an Iggy Pop poster hanging there in the darkness. I don't actually have this poster or any poster hanging there, but I didn't think much of this, and I continued to float, but towards the ground at the foot of my bed. My dog's bed is there, and when I landed I saw her; her face slightly distorted like it has been in other lucid dreams, sort of snarling and scared. I tell her it's ok, I'm dreaming. As usual, I worry if I am really at the foot of my bed and talking out loud. I get up and try to fly. It works, and I start wondering around my house. The clarity wasn't the best I've had. My house was dim, somethings were normal, and others weren't. As I approached my front door I thought, 'Wait! I should experiment here. Should I meditate? (I've done this before with strange effects) Then I decided I would try to reinvent the interior of my home, because as I was trying to fall asleep earlier in the night I have visualized a fantastic treehouse/hobbit-hole house in a forest of giant trees. I closed my eyes and told my self that when I opened them, my house would be amazing. It didn't really work. My kitchen had expanded and looked different, but my old rotten house was still mostly there. From here I lost lucidity or my memory of what happened next.

New dream: I was with my Mom and Step-Dad in an upscale department store/hotel. They were trying to exit the store by climbing up some rocks that were part of a display, and I was trying to explain that all they had to do was walk through a couple of hallways back to the hotel and exit from there. They didn't seem convinced, and anyway, had already managed to mostly slip through a crack in the wall to the outside sidewalk above.

Then I was with my brother in McDonalds (!!! I haven't eaten fast food in a long time). We each had our laptops and it seemed like we were having a meeting. I was just going to order some coffee. At first we were trying to squeeze into a booth with 4 other people, and then I noticed all of the other empty booths around and suggested we use one of those. The dream gets even less cohesive here—my brother's wife was there, then we were either at their house or my Mom's. Dialogue happened but I can't remember much of what we talked about. A portion was about Shepherd puppies, and people breeding them, and how one guy had a web-cam on his to help sell them. I was trying to share my knowledge of Shepherds but no one wanted to listen.

Then I was in a car, maybe in the backseat but someone else was definitely driving. My mom and her husband were saying things about me that I found really out-of-touch, like laughing about how I love certain things/celebrities that I haven't been into since i was a teenager. I tried to correct them but they just smiled like they knew better. Then my Dad called. (he passed away last year) He told me Happy Birthday (not my birthday, but maybe I was thinking of Father's Day?) and was his usual excited and goofy self. He also joked about me liking a certain celebrity and things I used to like when I was a teenager. I turned to the woman driving, who I could now see (and I seemed to be in the front passenger seat now) and I knew she was my dad's girlfriend(dream only, not IRL). I tried to tell her that I wasn't the same person they thought I was, and she seemed to pay more attention, but still didn't really believe me.

Last, I was walking and talking to a vague someone and explaining to them how it seems that I must come off as stupid to everyone because it seems like everyone treats me that way. The look on their face told me that they also thought I was stupid, but was trying to placate me.

Thoughts:
I gave a lot of exposition throughout, so there isn't much extra to add. I think I have self esteem issues, anxiety, and guilt over not seeing my family much nor feeling very connected to them.

An environmental catastrophe was about to happen to the Earth. Humans were aware of this, and there was a system installed in which we all had to wait for our name to be called (sometimes in groups, sometimes alone) and step aboard a small asteroid-like rock that floated nearby a cliff. The asteroid was like a disposable mini-rocket, and as it launched off with each group, it begin slowly disintegrating until the people aboard would fall to the ground and die, or be injured and die later. It was terrible, but not very real-feeling. I watched a friend die, then came my turn, and I woke up before I died.

I fell back asleep and entered a similar scenario, only this time it felt more real. I was living in a 'Fall-Out' type village, with very few amenities and maybe 50 people at most. We were under the control of another group of humans, like a military or militia. We had a local stand where a guy sold things like cigarettes, food, drink, drugs, etc. There was a man who delivered small amounts of rations regularly. I saw some soldiers going into some of the other homes on the compound and I knew the end was coming soon, they were going to take us away, and some [vague] bad thing was going to happen. During one moment I seemed to be playing the role of a child, although I also had my current dog, Cayna. I heard that the soldiers weren't allowing animals to come along and I began to panic. I knew I couldn't leave Cayna behind. She would starve. I knew she had been abandoned before and I dreaded the idea of putting her through that again, at my hands. I was leaving the home I shared with other people and I think I told a woman and her 2 kids that I had a dog and I was so sad to be made to leave it. I asked her if she was ready to leave too, and she said they were staying, because they have a cat, and if you sleep outside with your pet you can stay. I was thrilled and went to get my mother [random woman in dream, not real mom]. I saw her in the back of a car being driven away. I cried for her and she looked back and seemed to be crying out in pain of leaving me behind.

I had Cayna though, and now I seemed to be back to my regular age because my husband was with me. I knew sooner or later we would be forced to commit mass suicide. I felt an enormous amount of dread. I thought, 'This is the worst possible ways things could end.' I wondered about Cayna again, and how she would survive without us. I thought she would have plenty to eat for a while—the left behind food and corpses...but then something convinced me that her death would be horrible if I let her live and I began to wonder if the safest thing to do for her was also poison her when we had to poison ourselves. My heart hurt; how could this be happening? I thought wouldn't it be wonderful if somehow, right before the and that someone said we didn't have to die after all? We could go on living! I felt a sting of hope rise and die quickly. I looked at my husband who was teary-eyed as well and told him that maybe the best thing for Cayna in the end would be to take her with us. He cringed and seemed to emote that he didn't want to talk about it. I said, 'I understand but I just wanted to say it now so when the time comes we had talked about it.'

Some time went by. We were outside this entire conversation, my husband and I. He suddenly told me to hold still and he began plucking at something on top of my head. He plucked off a ladybug -still attached to some of my hair- that he said had burrowed itself into my head/hair.

Thoughts:
I had some allergy issues right before bed, and my throat felt tight, felt itchy, and it felt a little hard to breathe. I've had allergy induced asthma before and it wasn't that bad, but I decided to take a Benedryl to relieve my symptoms. My husband spends lots of time playing Fall Out 4 lately, and I think the post-apocalyptic town was designed with that in mind. I have been a little worried about my dog. She is aging, and I wonder if I am giving her the absolute best care that I could be. Do I exercise her too hardly when we run? Do I feed her too much? etc. I found it interesting as I typed it out that my worries about abandoning my dog turned into me playing a child being 'abandoned' by my [dream]mother. I'm not sure what that means though.

I was floating in an ocean in mostly darkness, although I could see below the surface of the water. I could see my legs moving to keep me afloat, and a long rope attached to me, via my waist I believe. On the other end was a camera. I was part of some experiment for me or an unknown identity to explore depths of this water.

Later:
I reunited with an ex from my distant past. I'll call him Jake. My first memory of the dream is Jake and I laying in bed in the morning, sitting up with our backs propped on pillows against the wall. We were talking, and Jake said, 'Don't go falling in love right away.' I was not in fact feeling happy I was there, and felt like perhaps I had made a mistake. I said, 'I'm not, don't worry.' Jake looked hurt, and I realized he had actually seemed very happy we had re-connected, and maybe I had hurt his feelings. We were on some kind of trip, and we were leaving this day. I packed up, and Jake didn't talk to me much. Randomly my mom was there, as well as my step-dad, accompanying us on our journey home. Next we were in a car with a young version of my bio-dad driving. I was in the back, Jake in the front. He said, "We need to talk later, and I hope you remember what you promised me back [at the bleachers? football field? I have a vague image in my mind of what he meant, but I don't remember what he said]. I also didn't remember what I had promised him and I felt a little nervous, and a little like a jackass and I thought I was probably ending things once again with Jake and he would hate me.

Next Jake and I (and maybe my family?) are in a grocery. I have an old, ragged roller suitcase. I stand next to a store employee and notice a crow at his feet. The crow is eating tiny crumbs of debris from the floor. I laugh to the store employee and we both agree the crow is a great little helper (keeping the floors clean). The crow begins to peck and tug at my suitcase, but I don't care because it's old. Then without my direct recognition of this in the dream, the crow is a dog, like an Australian Shepherd, and we are playing tug of war with my suitcase.

We stopped at a small Bed and Breakfast, my mom and her husband resurfaced. They showed us the rooms we would be staying in. The entire Bed and Breakfast shared one kitchen. I didn't like this idea but I wasn't too bothered because I knew we were only staying one night. It was a cozy place, like a grandmother's home. Jake, an older man [replacement for my Dad and Stepdad?] and I sat around the kitchen table. Jake was talking about how many horrible people there are in the world. I said, 'But there are lots of great people too,' I start to mention how I also think about how everyone was once an innocent child, but Jake seems not to care what I have to say. A baby crawls into the room and spills a small amount of soda on the rug. I laugh and the baby giggles, and I teach it how to clean up the spill. The baby, clad in a diaper, seems to only be around 8 months - 1 year old. I ask Jake and the man if they have seen that funny new Hitler movie. 'You know, the German one, where Hitler time travels to present day after he thought he killed himself? It's really pretty funny in some spots."


Thoughts:
The ocean beginning seems very obviously symbolic of me looking deep into my emotional past or sub-conscious. I can also see how it is a well-executed prelude to the following dream. As far as the 2nd dream, I have been dreaming rather frequently about various exes, and finding myself stuck in relationships with them again. I'm afraid this says something about my latent insecurities about my marriage; aspects of it that remind me of things in past relationships I didn't like, or things about myself that I don't like. In waking life I am very happily married, and although my husband and I are working to better ourselves, I suppose I am looking forward to a time in the future where these things have changed.

I fell back asleep this morning while trying to visualize floating on a river. I practice visualization pretty regularly, and occasionally it produces a WILD. When I initially entered the dream I thought that it must be one of the rivers nearby, as the landscape looks the same. I seemed to be floating on an invisible boat, or I just never looked down because my field of vision was just the river and the trees on either side. Instead of moving forward slowly, like floating on a boat, my body felt the sensation of going backwards, and rather quickly, and feeling regular patterns of large swells of waves, almost like a slow, backwards rollercoaster. The scene was in fact similar to the image on a video of a simulated ride. After a little while of really enjoying this sensation, I was plunged into darkness, and had a tingling sensation. I continued to feel as if I were moving backwards, only now it felt more like falling. A tiny fear came up in me and I briefly thought of death. I saw tiny orange and yellow moving geometric figures accompanied by rapid 'tink tink tink tink' sounds as they slid around on either side of my visual field, sort of like a mini tetris game.


Thoughts: The was not quite an OBE, as I did not have the sensation of moving or jumping out of my body as I have in the past.

Hi everyone,

I call myself Solaetia here. I'm a, ahem, 'middle-aged' human female and I've been interested in dreams since I was a kid. The first dream I remember was from when I was around 4 years old, it was short and involved my dog and Robin Williams in his role as 'Mork' (70's kid) I was playing with my dog when I saw Mork was visiting us, along with my grandma and grandpa. ^_^ The first nightmare I remember happened when I was around 5-6 years old, and involved being sucked into a picture that sat on the nightstand next to my bed, and turned into a cartoon. I began having reoccurring nightmares about bears when I was 12, and they lasted throughout my early 20s, although I still have bear dreams now and then they don't have the power that they once did. I had my first lucid dream at 15 before I knew what they were called. I discovered Stephen LaBerge's book 'Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming' when I was around 17 and I believe that is when my true oneironautic journey began.

It's been a while since I've kept an online DJ (I used SawLogs for a few years back when it was online) and I am excited to be back in a dream community. I feel more connected to myself when I record my dreams. My goals are to keep that up, continue to exercise and advance my LD skills, study and practice Dream Yoga, and to become overall more aware in waking and sleeping life.

Happy to be here.

Solaetia