All DJ Entries

Yay! First entry in my online dream journal. We'll see how this goes.

The title is bascially the entirety of the only dream I remember last night.

I was apparently a wolverine (the animal, not the x-man) and I was searching through a forest for water. But everytime I come across a stream, it turned out the stream had been paved over. So I was like WTF? and I spent awhile trying to break through the pavement but it turned out there was just dirt underneath. So I continued on looking for a stream and I started asking anyone I met if they knew what was going on. I think I was talking to a squirell for awhile but I don't remember what it said. The first time I tried to ask a person they ran away. The second person I came across offerred me some water from a bottle but I couldn't make it work with my mouth.

I don't remember anything after that but I woke up really thirsty.

Awake, Non-lucid, Lucid, [Commentary made while awake]

I'm on my laptop, playing one of the mini-games within Petpet Park, when the game interrupts me with a pop-up notification saying that I've set a score record and asking me to fill in the name I want to display next to the record. I type in my player character's name. As soon as I finish typing it, it changes to a completely different, longer name. I think, Computers don't usually change what you've typed after you've typed it. I must be dreaming! I reach up and pinch my nose and, just as I had expected, feel that otherworldly sensation of being able to breathe through it. I feel a strong surge of excitement and happiness.

Suddenly, I find myself lying in my bed in my current bedroom. Still knowing perfectly well that I'm dreaming, I climb out of bed and walk out of the room and down the stairs. I hop down the last few steps, enjoying the way it takes me a couple of seconds to float down and land as gently as a feather on the floor, unlike in reality. In the living room, where the stairs end and where the ceiling is high, I float into the open space like a balloon for a few moments. I'm having a great time.

Then I decide to go out the front door. I start trying to go through it intangibly, thinking, I know I can do this. I've done it before. I can see the door and its interior, which are dark brown, and then the front yard as I begin to go through the door. I don't get all the way through it, though. I end up walking out onto the front path, then realizing that I've made a hole in the door with my face, and my face is still stuck through it; I've brought it with me. “This is stupid,” I say. I peel it off and toss it aside; it feels like it's made of thin plastic.

Now that I'm outside, I start floating again. I see two dogs in somebody’s yard and start flying higher, making sure I'm out of their reach in case they try to jump up and attack me. [Darn irrational fears. I have that one in real life, too. I know I could have confronted it and perhaps reduced its hold through this dream, but it didn't occur to me to do so at the time.] However, the dogs do no such thing. I continue flying, and think, It's good that I'm in my own neighborhood, and it looks just like it does in reality. [Except that it didn't, not quite. The street turned to the right in the dream at a place where it dead-ends in reality.] Down on the street, I see two cartoony-looking kids named Sam and Sarah talking to each other. At some point during their conversation, I woke up.

Fragments

In my dream there was something about a woman dancing, I am also dancing and I am looking down at my feet and watching them, I am saying "1,2,3" then I think " yes, i've only just started learning and i'm better than the instructor" ((lol))

Dream fragment 2

I had a dream that entailed something to do with an animal, a dead one I think! I also remember something about being in town.

Awake, Non-lucid, Lucid, [Commentary made while awake]

I'm traveling to Epcot on a highway. The highway is elevated relative to the park, which is long and narrow, and lush and green. There is a giant, inflated jack-o’-lantern in the center of the park. I’m dismayed to realize that the jack-o’-lantern has become the park’s de facto icon; it was never meant to be.

[Different dream.] I'm at a summer camp somewhere. [The day before I had this dream, I'd suddenly, randomly come to the nostalgic realization that it had been a very long time since I'd been to a camp of any kind. Thanks, brain! :-) ] I arrive at a wooden pickup station (sort of like a bus stop) at 8:15 A.M. [I think], in time to get picked up by a horse-drawn, wheeled wagon. I climb up into it and sit down on one of several benches. The wagon takes me and several other campers to an Old Western town where a reenactment activity will take place.

When I get there, I'm really glad I got up in time to catch the wagon, because the town is pretty cool. There are a bunch of animatronic figures that re-enact the shootout at the OK Corral. They have guns that fire styrofoam bullets, which stick to designated, smooth, flat target areas on the other animatronic figures. I move out of the way and take cover while the shootout is going on, not wanting to get hit by the bullets.

When the shootout is over, a large bunch of balloons comes floating toward me. I understand that it’s to transport me back to the point where I entered the town. I take hold of the ribbons on the balloons and allow them to pick me up and float me over some buildings to another part of the town.

I touch down in front of some town official, possibly the mayor or the sheriff. He asks me, “What do you think of the town?”

“I think I’ll stay,” I answer. When I say this, what I mean by it is that I want to get a souvenir picture taken in period costume. There is a kiosk nearby where you can do this. I’m about to do it, but when I look at the signs on the kiosk, I see that the pictures cost $5.00 each. I don’t want to pay $5.00 for a photo, so I change my mind and turn away.

[Dreamskip.] I’m floating with my bunch of balloons again [I think], heading toward a theme park with a roller coaster. I’m thinking about how theme parks are architectural works of art, and should be appreciated as such.

[I waited too long to start writing this, so I don't really remember what happened between the end of that scene and the beginning of the next one, nor do I remember how or why I became lucid.]

I'm in the entrance corridor of a big, fancy office building with a beautifully decorated interior. In front of me is a long wall with a door in it, and a sign next to the door indicating that these are the offices of a financial company. I know that it's a subsidiary of another company, and that it's in charge of the other company's finances.

I think, Okay. I'm going to try to walk through a wall again. I start walking forward, thinking about that goal. I begin to pass through the wall, and the room on the other side becomes visible. I continue moving forward. Even when I've gone far enough that I should be all the way through, I can still see parts of the ornately-decorated wall; they linger in my vision, semi-transparent and seeming to stick with me, like the strands of a spiderweb stick to you when you walk through it. I think, Just keep going forward. They'll go away, and you'll get through. You can do it. I keep moving forward, and the last strands of the afterimage of the wall finally fall away behind me, leaving me standing in the financial offices. There's no tactile sensation this time, though, unlike in my previous lucid dream when I went through the car door; this time, I don't feel anything at all from the wall. I'm happy and proud that I've finally walked through a wall without leaving a hole in it.

I wander through the financial offices a bit. There are employees of the company there, walking around, going about their everyday work. I think, I'm invisible and inaudible to them. Or, if I am visible, I just look like another employee. Somehow, I just know intuitively that one or the other of these things is true.

Eventually, I end up in front of another long wall, this one made of mirrors. [I don't remember now how I got from one scene to the next.] When I find myself in front of this wall of mirrors, I think, Now that I've figured out how to walk through walls, I'd like to try out another dream ability. I wonder if I can create a portal. Remembering what I read in somebody’s DJ here on DreamViews, I use my right index finger to trace a circle on the mirror-wall. [I don't know what exactly made me pick this destination, but] In my thoughts, I pick “heaven” as the destination that I want to be on the other side of the portal. When I'm finished drawing the circle, the area inside it doesn't transform into a portal; instead, it swings inward, like a door on a hinge. I go through the doorway.

The doorway is on one of the short sides of a rectangular room. The floor, walls, and ceiling of the room are all the same dark, metallic slate-gray color. At the opposite end of the room is a raised stage, also that same color, and on the stage is a smaller-than-life-size, cartoon lion. He's very definitely alive, though, and I know who he is immediately. I kneel down on the floor where I am and exclaim, “My Lord Aslan!” [Hmm. Well. That's reassuring.]

[I don't really remember how I got to the next scene. I remember attempting to create another portal and finding only darkness on the other side of the circular door because I hadn't been thinking of any particular destination, but I don't remember whether that was before or after the above scene. In any case, here's the next scene that I do remember.]

I'm now outside the building I was in before, walking across a grassy field. I happen to glance down at my feet and notice that I'm barefoot, and that I appear to have an unusually large number of toes, sticking out at odd angles and overlapping each other in unnatural ways, just like my fingers sometimes do when I look at them in dreams. I look down again, and this time I see that I have eight toes in a neat row on my left foot. It makes me smile to discover that toes can exhibit the same odd behavior as fingers in dreams.

I'm very pleased with my achievements so far tonight, but no other ideas for new abilities to try out come to mind, and the sky and the grass are so inviting, so I decide to fly. I kick off the ground with my right foot and take off. I find myself being forced backward by some unseen, unidentified force, just as I have many times before when I've started flying. I move my fists into the position I learned from my dream dad in my previous lucid, with my left fist close to my chest and my right one further away from my body, and move them back and forth relative to each other, trying to use that new technique I'd just learned to gain control over my flying. It works. I stop feeling the unseen force, and begin flying forward.

[That’s the last I remember of my dream.]

I woke up and found myself still in sleep paralysis. I didn’t feel any vibrations this time, though; it just felt like my arms and legs were really heavy, and like I couldn’t move them even if I tried. I waited a few seconds before moving my arms from their position up over my head. I didn’t even remember putting them there before falling asleep. A few minutes later, the feeling goes away.

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Side notes:

I get to check another goal off my list of lucid-dreaming goals! Yay! I really look forward to continuing to improve my intangibility skills. Now that I've more or less gotten the hang of going through things, my new big goal is to get good at defining, creating, and getting into dream environments of my choice.

Awake, Non-lucid, [Commentary made while awake]

It's after closing time at a big, fancy modern office building, but I have to go back inside to retrieve something. On my way in, I see a couple of my friends from a club I'm in, and say hello to them. Someone closes the door that leads deeper into the interior of the building before I can get to it. There is a sign on the wall next to it that reads “Shift Workers.” Since I don't have a key to this door, I decide that whatever I was going to get can wait until the next day, and abandon my errand. I walk back out of the building and through the glass front doors.

Outside the doors is a wide, concrete entry plaza with concrete stairs leading down to the street on the side opposite the doors. The plaza and the stairs are crowded with people. As I cross the plaza, I meet Ellen Page and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. We walk down the stairs together, talking. At the bottom of the stairs, a guy in a movie-quality Darth Maul costume is greeting kids in character.

Ellen, Joe, and I have to get to a meeting or event somewhere else, so we start walking there. Ellen is wearing her teal evening gown [the one she's wearing in the picture I linked to above]. As we walk along a road in a semi-rural area, she carries me by holding her right forearm straight out to the side and parallel to the ground, and letting me sit on it. I can feel my pelvic bones digging into her arm. I wonder if she's doing all right carrying me all this way, since I'm bigger and heavier than she is, but I don't say anything, and she doesn't complain. She starts singing a song in Japanese, one I recognize and know well, so I join in and sing along. I think, I didn't know she was an anime fan. When we get to the end of the song, I identify it: “Digimon, season 1, ending 1.” [That ending song sounds like this in real life, but the song we were singing didn't sound like that at all. It sounded a little more like this one, but not really.] I think, The only other people I've had friendships this close with have been my AmeriCorps friends.

We come upon a park. There are several people there with some dogs that they, and Ellen, identify as Rottweilers, but they have reddish fur and look kind of fox-like. I somehow manage to drop my purse and the series of plastic bags containing the components of our picnic lunch all over the grass, and have to get them back without the dogs attacking me. I start picking them up, saying to Ellen, “I don't give a s*** about the food, I just want my purse back!” I'm scared of the dogs. One of them does end up biting my hand, but more playfully than viciously; I can feel its teeth on my hand. I try to get my hand out of its mouth without tearing the skin on a tooth. [I think] I finally succeed, after I've removed the mask that has slipped down over my eyes so that I can see it again. [I was, as usual, wearing a sleep mask in real life. I also remember having to remove covers from my ears in order to hear people at some point during this dream, but I don't remember when. I didn't have anything in or covering my ears in real life.]

We leave the park, and continue on our way down the road. I am now riding bareback on a big, black cow. Ellen is walking next to it. [Joe had disappeared from the dream entirely by this point.] I can feel the cow's fur, warmth, and movement. We're almost to our destination, which is a boxy, white, one-story set of office buildings on the next block. I think about how many different forms of transportation I've taken on my way to this place: walking, being carried by Ellen, riding in a golf cart, and now riding on a cow. [I don't remember the part of the dream where I rode in a golf cart anymore.] The office building is set back from the road a little bit. Before we get to it, and right up next to the road, there is a stable with a whole herd of black cows in it. The cow I'm riding stops in front of the stable, facing it, and moos. All the other cows moo back. This exchange repeats twice. I dismount from the cow so that she can go into the stable. She gets scared of something and climbs one of the support beams holding the roof of the stable up. She clings to the top of it, now about the size of a human child.

I turn back to face the way we just came. A woman is approaching me on the road. She has a geometric pattern of straight lines with corners all over her tan skin, and is busy putting on a silver loincloth-skirt thing as she walks toward me. I call her “Charissa” as I approach her. That's the last I remember before waking up.

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Side notes:

Two of the last things I did before going to bed last night were watching a Star Wars fan video and working on my current Arthur/Ariadne fanfic. I'm slightly surprised both that those elements showed up in my dreams immediately (unusual for me) and that it wasn't the characters themselves who showed up, but the actors who played them.

This was a really cool, fairly vivid dream with a lot of tactile sensation. I was also amazed to realize upon waking up that I'd slept right through my parents' morning routine, the sounds of which usually prevent me from getting back to sleep for that last cycle. This difference can probably be explained by the fact that I didn't get to sleep until after midnight last night, which is later than I usually do these days.

Non-lucid, Semi-lucid, [Commentary made while awake]

Night of February 28 - March 1

Some restaurant is having some kind of promotion where you can enter a code into an ATM and get money out. I walk out of the restaurant and across a parking lot to get to the ATM. I'm dressed in my pajamas, robe, and slippers, and am glad I'm wearing my rubber-soled slippers, because the parking lot is wet because it has just rained. I get to the ATM, enter my code, and receive a $5 bill, then a $1 bill, then a bonus $5 bill. There's also some loose change in a change dispenser on the [extremely strange-looking] ATM, and I start taking some of it for myself, but it occurs to me that I shouldn't take all of it, because that would be greedy.

Night of March 1 - 2

I'm playing PackRat and find several sets of 10 tickets by flipping over cards.

My mom is driving on a main road through an unfamiliar town, and I'm in the back seat. She's trying to find her way to someplace, but she's obviously lost. We turn left onto a residential street. Finally, I ask her for the TomTom, and she hands it to me. It's getting dark out, and I can't see the device's screen very well, so I reach up to the ceiling of the car to turn on the overhead lights. They turn on for a second, then fade away. Pressing them again does nothing. [I laughed out loud when I recalled this upon waking up and realized what I'd done. Once again, dream sign fail!] I complain to my mom that I keep pressing the wrong buttons when trying to enter the address of the place we're going to, because it's getting dark, the TomTom doesn't emit enough of its own light, and now our dome lights don't work. After a few minutes, though, when it's gotten fully dark outside, the buttons light up in bright red and white, so that I can see each letter and number clearly. [The TomTom doesn't do that in real life; my cell phone does.]

I walk into the bedroom I stayed in when I was living in Kentucky. [It didn't look much like that bedroom actually looked, but the bed was the same, I think.] I remark to whoever else is in the room with me, “I haven't been here in a while. It's the same. This is a good thing.” When I say that, I'm remembering dreaming about this place before [although I don't remember doing so now]. I get into the bed, and the two cats who live in the house jump up onto it and start walking all over me. I just lie there, quietly appreciating my mind's ability to generate the totally realistic but imaginary sensations of cats walking on me and the tips of their tails tickling my face. [No, I don't own any cats in real life, but there really were two cats in the house in Kentucky.] Even though I know that this is just a dream, I never make the logical leap from that fact to “I can go off and do whatever I want!” and never become fully lucid. [I'm still counting this as a lucid dream, though.]

I was with S.G. I reached in her blouse and felt her breast. I pushed to cup it fully. I felt her nipple. She gave me O.S. This whole thing happened twice. Very nice.

My dream switched to a large Hispanic or Italian guy with the most beautiful Latina in the world. She was European (white), and had black hair that looked gunmetal blue in the light. It fell to an inch above her shoulders. It was perfectly straight and would have felt as soft as water.

She turned around and walked by. I tracked her, but never got to see her face. She would have looked like Alizee. I don't think it was supposed to be her though.

--

I was looking out into my garden. I saw two Irises. The foliage on one was huge; however they were in the shade, so I thought I should move them into a sunnier area.

Then I noticed some rodent creatures. They were as big as bear cubs. They looked like the little bear creatures in Return of the Jedi. In waking life we watched that movie a couple nights ago. (There is a hint there for all dreamers).

These creatures were eating something that I put out for other animals. They were sitting on a bench or something, and talking to each other. Their eyes were huge.

The area they were sitting in in my garden was kind of protected. They felt safe and happy and had easy grub, so they were talking to each other having a good time.

I knew that someday they would have to forage for there own food and they would be sad about it.

Good morning, everybody.

An old, black woman was running something like a marathon. The woman was overweight. She wore a brightly colored (orange?) skirt and a red t-shirt. She was really having a tough time running the race, but she kept at it.

At the halfway point, everybody took a break. They sat down in a huge, crowded area of folding chairs. I saw a close-up, like video, of the woman as she stopped at the halfway point. I could tell she was exhausted. When she sat, I could see that she was afraid she wouldn't be able to get up.

The old woman was now back on the road, getting ready to run again. There were other people out on or near the road, but the woman seemed like the only one who was actually getting ready to run again. She looked afraid, like she didn't think she could make it.

I went up to the woman. I patted her left arm and told her that she could make it, that all she had to do was keep up her confidence. This seemed to cheer the woman up. I now started running.

At some point I and a few other racers were in a room like an indoor area at a zoo. We had to cross some zigzag maze-line made out of metal poles and wooden handrails. I jumped up in the air and flew over the maze-line, touching down to and bouncing back off of the handrails with my (right?) hand occasionally.

The end of the maze-line was the exit to the room. There was a lot of sunlight coming through the doorway. I saw it as if I were flying toward it from a stomach-down position only a few inches above the floor. The doorway wasn't too far from the start of the line. The line just worked itself through the back of the room and then back toward the front.

As I approached the exit, I kind of lost myself again and passively saw another man getting through the line by running through it. I then tried to imagine how the old woman would get through this line in her tired condition.

I now had a weird vision of some man standing in the air, up above the line. He was some kind of zookeeper. He had been taking care of some kind of animal, which may actually have been a little, blonde, white boy. But the boy was also some delicate kind of monkey-like animal.

The man had taken care of the little creature by giving him human books and games to stimulate his mind. But this zookeeper had had to leave the zoo. The next zookeeper just thought of these creatures as animals. So he gave the little creature only toy's you'd give to monkeys. The little creature lost interest in everything and soon died.

Dream #2

I was standing out in some area like a seal habitat at a zoo, with a big pool and a stage made to look like a rocky landscape. But this whole area was like a line for a water ride at some theme park.

I was video-taping everything, including the water hitting my feet, to prove somehow that this was actually a good water ride. In the distance, under an arch of fake rocks, I saw waves rise up and crash together.

I was then in a big room like a museum. An older man was giving a group of little kids some kind of tour. Apparently this was some kind of museum about old amusement park rides.

I wandered off by myself and found myself between two rows of mirrors. The mirrors all faced me. They had holographic images on them. I suddenly recognized them as images from the Disneyland haunted house ride. I waited for some face to pop up and surprise me in the hologram. But I also wondered why Disney had taken down the haunted house ride. That was a really fun ride.

Suddenly a face popped up on a mirror and said "boo!" I acted scared, and I did a fake scream, which sounded a lot more weak and frightened than I'd intended. I looked over and saw that I'd gotten the kids' attention.

I looked back at the mirrors. A lot of faces were now popping up. The designs on the mirrors were also a lot clearer. One image looked like river stones, except fleshy, like organs.

At some point a little girl from the group came over to make sure I wasn't really scared. I knelt or reclined and held the girl with my left arm. We watched the mirrors together.

Awake, Non-lucid, Semi-lucid, Lucid, [Commentary made while awake]

[I had several different dreams last night, two of which were lucid.]

[Dream #1] I'm playing Neopets. [In this particular dream,] Neopia is a fully-realized, three-dimensional world, but it's still a computer game that I'm playing using a mouse. The art looks just like it does on the real site. The game is played from a first-person perspective, and there are lots of rooms and areas to explore [just like the plot adventures on the real Neopets Web site]. One such area is filled with Neopets who are dressed in vaguely Arabian-looking clothes; they all have their noses covered with veils, which strikes me as somewhat ridiculous, since they all have such different shapes and sizes of noses. This scene makes me think, So Neopia does have something resembling an Islamic culture. I click my way into a hidden area and receive a special reward for finding it.

[Dream #2] I walk into my family's house, which is big and spacious and has two stories [and looks nothing at all like any of our real ones. House #2, our only two-story house, was nowhere near that big and was laid out very differently]. Suddenly, there are several men in the house with me. They're there to challenge me to a martial-arts tournament. I had known in advance that this challenge was coming. In the course of my conversation with them [which I don't really remember now], one of them eventually says that there is no challenge. Having become semi-lucid at some point during the conversation, I say boldly and firmly, “I have better things to do.” I begin making my way out of the house.

Then, I hear my mom yelling from behind me that the house is on fire and I should get out. I do so, thinking, I know I should just get out without stopping to try and rescue other people. I go out the front door and walk down a front walk that leads to a fairly high, steep flight of concrete stairs, which leads down a steep embankment, at the bottom of which are the public sidewalk and the street. I jump off the top step to get down to the front sidewalk more quickly. I fall in a long, slow arc, taking several seconds to get down, and land softly and gently on my feet. I had kind of known I was going to fall that way; I always do in dreams.

By this point, I'm definitely lucid. From the street, I take off and fly up over the neighborhood. Once again, it takes me two tries to take off. After the first time, I realize, I messed up – I wasn't concentrating right. I try again, kicking off with my right ankle and thinking about becoming airborne, as I always do, and this time it works. Flight feels like it always does, too.

I fly up and observe the neighborhood from above. I can see a little bit of the fire coming from the house I just left. After a minute or two, I land back on the street and see a little model of a single-story house standing on a table. I examine the model, concentrating on it, and succeed in making tiles blow off the roof with my mind. This action is directly inspired by the scene in Inception where they're at the cafe and the dream starts collapsing when Ariadne first realizes that they're dreaming. While I'm making the model blow itself to pieces, I think about how, when the characters from the movie are dreaming, they might use Michael Caine's name [*see Side Notes at end] in exclamations of surprise/anger/frustration, etc., as if he were their deity, because he was the inventor of the dream-sharing technology. I immediately dismiss this as a silly idea, though. I keep up what I'm doing, and eventually blow away all the broken-up pieces of the roof, exposing the interior of the model. It has separate rooms inside. There's a small, light brown, flea-like insect inside, with a sort of sail on its back. I know that the insect is my dad. [I don't even know.] I let it crawl onto my finger, rescuing it from the destruction of the model and setting it down gently outside the model.

This scene is immediately followed by an animated sequence of two foxes romping around in a grassy field and falling in love. I know that this means that both of my parents are still alive and got out of the burning house all right.

[Dream #3] I'm outside, in the daytime, on a series of tiled walkways, terraces, and stairways, elevated and built into the side of a hill. Some boy is following me around, singing a creepy version of some children's song at me, changing the words all around to suggest that he would like to do something sexual with me. At the end of the second or third repetition of the short song, I stop, sing the end of the verse for him, then smack him in the face. Then, a passing man helps me throw the offending boy over a wall and down a long flight of stairs. I see him get up after he reaches the bottom, and am glad to see that he can still get up and that nothing's broken.

The scene shifts slightly, and now I'm on the surface-level streets, walking around a city that I remember visiting in a dream before. [Except now I don't – false memory, apparently.] The city is bright and clean and filled with big trees. There is a train station across the street from where I'm walking. On my side of the street, there is an enlarged replica of one of the stores on Main St. at Disneyland. Upon seeing the prominent train station, I remark that my dream city doesn't necessarily have to be in the States; it could just as easily be in the UK. [This, despite the fact that said train station had a sign on the outside that very clearly read “Amtrak.”]

I walk in the main entrance to the store that replicates the one from Disneyland, and find myself in a shop that is part of a mall. I walk through that first shop and into a second one that resembles a Hot Topic (all the walls are painted black), only it's girlier (there are a lot more dresses). This store also has living mannequins that look exactly like the ones they have at Old Navy. One of these mannequins tells me that she wants to try on the dress I'm wearing, which I had gotten from that store earlier. It's a strapless, knee-length black sundress with little pink polka dots, pink lace decorating the top of the bodice, and a pink tulle underskirt part that makes the skirt puff out. There are lots of similar dresses on the racks in the store. [For some strange reason,] I'm wearing mine over the T-shirt and shorts I was already wearing. I'm really enjoying just walking around, exploring this dream. I exclaim aloud, “My mind is so awesome!”

I walk out of that store and around a corner, through one of the hallways that form the connecting core of the mall. I find myself wishing I could change out of the shorts I'm wearing under my dress, and just wear the dress. I go into another store, this one a Sephora. While I was in there, the dream ended.

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Side notes:

*Michael Caine's character's name is Stephen Miles (per the shooting script); that's what the other characters would say if they were to do that. I forgot that while dreaming, though.

Last night, when doing mental affirmations while falling asleep, I focused more on recalling the memory of what it feels like to be in a lucid dream, recalling past lucid dreams, and visualizing and imagining what it would have been like if I had become lucid in one of my memorable non-lucids. It worked really well.

As I was taught when I first tried to ski, people who are right-handed are generally right-footed as well, and are instinctively inclined to lead with their right foot and do most of their controlling of their movement with their right foot when skiing or snowboarding. I'm very pleased and not at all surprised to discover that this principle applies to my flying in dreams as well. I'm right-handed (and right-footed) in real life, and from the beginning, I've always instinctively used my right foot and ankle to kick off from the ground and launch myself into a takeoff.

Awake, Non-lucid, Lucid, [Commentary made while awake]

I'm at a set of buildings that look kind of like an old-fashioned elementary school. I'm there to sign up for offline 'HITs' [Human Intelligence Tasks, small jobs for which I will get paid]. There are various organizations offering HITs to people, such as the Registrar of Voters. To work on each organization's HITs, you have to go to that organization's counter to sign up for them. When I get to one of the counters, I discover that signing up requires you to show an ID card, and I don't have mine with me. I have to go back to my car to get my purse and driver's license. Before I leave the counter, though, I notice a sheet of paper lying on it with P.'s name written on top. That means she's signing up for one of that organization's HITs, too.

When my next dream begins, a boy from my high school class appears. As soon as I see this happen, I lock on to him as the focus of my attention, knowing that the appearance of an image out of darkness like that must mean that a dream is beginning. Then other classmates of ours begin to appear around him, followed by the environment we're all in. We're in what appears to be a restaurant seating area, sitting around long, high tables on chairs designed to match their height. This area is covered and enclosed on three sides, and it's on our high school campus. Every single student sitting in the area is someone I recognize from high school. A female teacher I had and another, male staff member are also in the crowd there, walking around between the tables.

I get up from my seat and walk out of the seating area, heading out into the main part of the campus. Beautiful morning sunlight illuminates the campus. I take two steps, then take off from the ground and start flying around, staying at about the height of the roof lines of the single-story buildings. Typically for me, flying is the first thing I think of to do when I find myself lucid dreaming. Flying is fun, as always, and feels good. I have good flying control this time, but not perfect control. I don't feel like I'm being pulled or pushed in any direction, but at one point, I start losing altitude, and reach out to touch the top edge of a concrete-block wall with my fingers as I pass by it. It feels exactly like it would in reality, but I get the strange sense that it takes a split second for my brain to generate the simulated sensation, creating a tiny delay between touching the wall and receiving the sensory input. I recover and continue flying along.

As I pass the edge of one building's roof, I notice a crawlspace that you can't see from the ground. It's formed by the flat, real roof and the pointy, upper edges of the building's decorative facades, which extend above the real roof and slant toward each other, creating an empty space shaped like a long, triangular prism. I try to make a 90-degree left turn and enter this space, but I find I can't; I just start sinking down again. I shrug off this failure, recover, and continue flying across the campus. I reach an area where the long walls of two buildings run parallel to each other, and have crenellated ramparts [those square things on the top of the walls of a castle] at the top. As I'm flying along in between these two walls, the dream ends and I wake up.

I make a post at the beginning of a thread on a message board that turns out to be ridiculously, insanely popular, so that my computer is flooded with e-mail notifications from people posting to the thread at a rate of about one or two per second. [This dream may or may not have been at the beginning of the previous sleep cycle, I don't remember.]

I'm in a building that consists of a bunch of interconnected rooms that are filled with a colorful, random assortment of furniture and stuff. It kind of looks like a cross between someone's house and an antique store. [I just visited a bunch of antique stores on Friday, February 4.] I know I'm dreaming without any particular clue. I walk through the series of rooms, admiring the details of the dream environment, observing it with close attention. [That has been my lucid-dreaming goal for the last couple of days.] I think, I have to stay here as long as I can.

I reach a point when the sequence of rooms ends in a short T-intersection of passageways. I come up to the place where the long passageway I had been walking through ends. There is a piece of light-blue yarn hanging down in front of a low wall that stands in front of the back wall of the room. I touch the piece of yarn, running my fingers down it; it feels real. Then, I realize that the low wall it's hanging in front of is a mirror. It's a very speckly, dim mirror, and I can't see my reflection in it very clearly, but I can tell it's a mirror. I think, Hey, in a dream, you can walk through these and get to somewhere else. I straighten up and step forward with the intention of walking through the mirror.

First my arms, and then my head and part of my upper body go through the surface of the mirror. It is the coolest feeling. Like when I walked through the wall, I feel a slight resistance at first and then it yields to me, but this time, instead of feeling like something thin and hard breaking, it feels like going through a thick, liquid membrane. The membrane stays where it is as I go through it; I can feel it on my skin. There's nothing beyond the surface of the mirror but blackness, though. I realize that I didn't really think about what I expected to be on the other side before I started going through the mirror. Not wanting to go into the unknown, I pull back, out of the mirror.

I notice another, smaller mirror to my right. Just to continue experimenting with this newly-discovered ability, I start putting my fingers through the surface. Once again, they go right in. I don't really want to try to get anywhere else anymore, though, so I pull them back out. They come away with a silver coating of liquid mercury on them. I shake my hand to get the stuff off my fingers, but I'm aware that liquid mercury can't really hurt me in a dream.

In the small room off to the right, there is a slightly fat, female DC. I know her from somewhere, and know that her name is Melody. [Which is strange, because I've known several people named Melody and this DC didn't look like any of them.] We talk briefly [I don't remember about what], and then I turn away to explore the other side of the T-intersection, the small room off to the left of the big mirror. As I'm going into that room, I go, “Oh, yeah.” I remember the basic Task of the Month. I turn back around and say, “Melody. Melody!” She starts approaching me, and I approach her. When I get close enough, I put my arms behind her head and shoulders and lean in to kiss her. She realizes what I'm trying to do and pulls away with a look of revulsion. I say, “Just on the cheek. Please?” She stops pulling away and just stands there and lets me kiss her. I give her a kiss on the closest, most convenient spot I can reach, which is on the forehead, just above her right eye. Then I let her go, and she leaves. I look back at the big mirror and consider trying to get to Neopia by going through it, but I decide not to because I don't trust my dream control abilities that far. I've never done that before, and I'm afraid of it going wrong.

False awakening in my current, real room. I hear a sound that I recognize as the sound of fish splashing in a fishtank. I also hear P. moving around in her bed, which is on the other side of the room, parallel to mine. I don't open my eyes to look, but I do say aloud, “No! P. can't be here, and neither can her fish!”

“Yes, I can!” says P.

“When did you get home?” I ask her.

“Yesterday.”

“Oh.”

When I woke up for real, I found this FA rather amusing. Also, I was surprised that I'd had a dream that consisted entirely of sounds, with no visuals at all.

Awake, Non-lucid, [Commentary made while awake]

[This is a catch-up post. This dream is from the night of December 22-23, 2010.]

I'm riding in the back of my parents' car as we drive to the home of a friend of mine in Wrightwood. As we drive along the winding mountain road [which has appeared in at least one dream before this one, but I don't think I bothered to write it down], I notice that a Walgreens has opened in this remote little mountain town, and I am bothered by its presence there. I feel that it spoils the natural, rustic ambiance of the place. As the drive goes on, I start to feel sleepy.

We arrive at my friend's house. I meet their dog, and I'm nowhere near as afraid of being met by a new dog as I used to be [in real life]. Inside the house, there is a party going on, with lots of people. I eat dinner with some of them in the living room. The topic of conversation is how people who move out here to the mountains do so because they want to be 100% original and avoid letting big corporations influence their lifestyle too much, which is why the presence of a Walgreens is so offensive to the people who live here.

I wander into another room of the house, where I find a dog and a cat. Oh, great, I think. Now I'm going to have an allergy attack. [This is exactly how I would react to this situation in reality, by the way.] There are a whole bunch of different games set up on two different tables in this room. One of them is a stack of bowls, each with a vocabulary question and answer printed on it and a logo that reads “OKWords.” Another is a fallen phrases puzzle whose solution is an invocation to some mythological (possibly Norse?) god of death. There are quite a few people in this room, too. One of them is wearing a purple dinosaur suite, and another has some Pokemon dolls. As I'm walking around in the room, someone sends me back into the other room to find out what everyone there wants to drink. I walk back into the first room to find out. There is a large tray of cookies and other goodies on the table in that room; I eat a blueberry off of it.

The dream shifts to a new dream. Now, I'm in a movie/book titled Tron. [It has absolutely nothing to do with the real-life Tron.] The story I'm in involves an alternate dimension, which is accessed through a big, hidden doorway. Said alternate dimension is a typical epic fantasy world, and the story that takes place there has a lot of the universal mythic feel of the original Star Wars trilogy. I can understand why people are so insulted by the lightshow that is the new Tron; it has none of this mythic feel at all. [In real life, I've seen the original Tron, but not the new one. The content of this dream was based entirely on Internet hearsay about the new one.] There is a very clear scene in which the bad guys get through the aforementioned hidden doorway, and watch the good guys' actions on giant magical screens that are really interdimensional gateways.

The scene shifts again. Now, rather than being in the scene from the old Tron, I'm watching it with a group of people I know in real life, including Guy and some of my fellow students from his classes. As I watch, I realize that the scene we're watching was shot at Disneyland, due to the disguised but clearly visible Matterhorn in one broad shot of the landscape. I say aloud, “Wow, awesome! I won't say it, I'm just thinking it very loudly.”

The scene shifts again. Now that same group of people and I are on the train that goes around [this particular dream version of] Disneyland. We pass several other park landmarks that have been disguised to look like other things, like the Matterhorn was. The train passes behind a large, white, curved, several-story office building. I am shooting ahead of the train, flying on hover boots. As the train and I approach the Tron station (where we started our train trip around the park), I tell the boots to slow down, because my legs are starting to hurt from being kept bent at a 90-degree angle at the knee so that I can stay upright while using the hover boots. I say aloud, “Slow down, boots. Please?” They don't slow down. My alarm woke me up out of this scene, which disappointed me, because it was a really cool dream. I was also dismayed to realize that meeting the dog and not being afraid of it had been a dream.

Didn't write anything today but still have a bit of recall.

Power Outage
With coworkers in an unfamiliar house. Power outage. It's dark. The microwave has a backup battery, but only enough to power the clock for a few minutes.

Chinese Market
At a small Chinese market with coworkers. One section is traditional Chinese medicine ingredients. I see a tiny octopus, alive, in a small vial of water.

Weird Protective Father Thing
I'm Amish and have a family. We are exiting church with many other DCs. I have two daughters. Outside the church is an area to tie up horses. But instead of horses, everyone has slaves who look like Calvin Klein models. My daughters run off and have an orgy with some guys.

Non-lucid, 'Video-game-controller mode' [see side notes], Lucid, [Commentary made while awake]

My dad and I are on a bicycle ride together. I've just checked out a thick paperback book from the library, and it's in the rack on the back of my bicycle.

I'm outside a movie theater in Florida, with my mom. Directly across from the entrance to the theater is a small kiosk where you can get drinks in plastic cups. She and I get some drinks from it for the whole family.

False awakening in my current real room. I hear the sounds of people shouting something about a surfer dude, and decide to follow the shouting out to the creek, but decide not to wake my parents. As I'm walking out of the house, I see that there's a bunch of writing in thick, black letters on the back wall of the dining room, as well as several papers with more writing on them taped to that wall.

I'm entering an upstairs apartment. My uncle is there.

I'm walking past a junior high school. I see a large group of kids in PE uniforms setting off on a run around the perimeter of the school.

I continue walking, and my route takes me along the street in my old neighborhood that goes around the edge of the park. I'm going in the direction of House #2. I turn around and see a tiny, cartoon kid with a BB gun standing behind me on the sidewalk. I'm a little worried that he's going to shoot me with the BB gun, but in the end, I ignore him and continue walking.

I reach House #2. In the garage, floating vertically in midair, is a menu of choices, like on a DVD. They say something like 'imaginary ideal' and 'reality' [I think; I don't really remember.] I select the former first, and find myself standing in my bedroom at House #2. The room is arranged the way it was in reality, but everything in it is completely white. [I really wouldn't call that design choice 'ideal.' However, when I lived there in reality, almost everything in that room really was white, and I was pretty happy living there.] I return to the menu, and this time, I select 'reality.' After making this selection, I find myself back in the same bedroom. It's still arranged the way it was in reality, only now the bed has a green bedspread with flowers, kind of like the one I have right now in reality [which I bought when we moved to House #3], except that the pattern is bigger and bolder.

I look out the window of my room and see a wide view of rolling grassland, with a lot of people walking around all over the place. There's only sunlight shining on one small, roughly circular section of the scene, though; the rest is in shadow. I speak aloud to the scene, saying something to the effect of, “It should be sunny all over the whole scene!” The sunlight spreads to cover the whole scene.

The scene shifts without my noticing it. The window of my room is now a doorway that opens onto a scene of an arctic landscape, with a wide, shallow pool of water in it. [An aside: After all those times I complained last month about the lack of snow in my dreamworld, I finally had a dream with snow in it, and not only did I completely fail to remember that I was supposed to make a snowball and hit somebody with it, but that Task of the Month is over now, anyway! Argh.] I walk out into the scene. From the far side of the pool, I step into the water, trying to walk on it, but I quickly give up the attempt because I get scared away by an orca and a walrus approaching me through the water. I walk back out. I then get the impression that they weren't really threatening me, after all. I go back toward the house. My mom is standing outside the doorway, and I tell her she can watch me do this if she wants to. I start walking back toward the pool of water again, concentrating on continuing to walk forward, straight into the pool, while believing that the surface of it will be just as solid to me as the ground is. It doesn't work; I end up standing ankle-deep in the shallow water again. [That's all I remember.]

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Side notes:
I'm really not sure for how much of the above sequence of events I was actually asleep and dreaming, and for how much of it I was awake and actively using my regular old imagination. I felt like I was doing the latter for at least part of it, hence the green text, which I always use to indicate a sort of half-awake, half-dream state where I know that I'm using my imagination like a video-game controller to control what happens. The division between green and purple text (indicating a lucid dream) is mostly an arbitrary guess. Then again, I was definitely aware that I was dreaming by the end, so it's entirely possible that I really was dreaming the entire time, and that's what dream control feels like. If so, that's really cool! I really advanced a lot in the area of dream control last night. I will have to experiment with this further.

I'm mildly annoyed, but not at all surprised, to discover that verbal commands work really well to control my dreams. As much as I love Inception and would love to be able to alter the dreamscape just by thinking about what I want to happen, that idea is relatively new to me. I've been a Star Trek fan for years, so it's not surprising that the older and better-entrenched idea that one can change one's surrounding environment by giving verbal commands, like they do when using the holodeck on Star Trek: TNG and later series, would take precedence over the newer idea that one can change one's surrounding environment just by thinking about it. Now that I know what works for me, though, I guess I'll go along with it.

Non-lucid, Lucid, [Commentary made while awake]

[I dreamed for a subjectively really long time last night, but my recall is a bit fragmented. I don't really remember the transitions between most of the scenes, which is reflected in the absence of flowing transitions between paragraphs in this entry.]

I'm lying in a bed that I'm sharing with a man I know. It's not sexual; he's asleep. He rolls over onto me, apparently completely unaware of my presence. I struggle to get out from underneath him, and succeed, standing up.

I'm now in a long, wide, rectangular space with white walls that serves as the entryway to our church's offices, which are within a really big building. A long, straight hallway leading to other offices on the floor forms one of the long sides of the rectangle, and the doors into our offices are on the other side. The center of the rectangle is filled with a row of wide, square, dark-colored, upholstered seats. I'm lying on one of them, with my knees bent over the front edge of it and my feet on the floor. Several people from my church walk by, coming in and out of the doors. They see me, and I say, “Hi.”

I'm in another room in the same really big building. It's being remodeled. There's a couch that's completely wrapped in newsprint, because someone is going to paint this room. I'm standing near the doorway, and I see L.M. [a teacher from my real high school, whose class I was never in] walking by out in the hall. I introduce one of the other people who's in the room with me to her: “This is L.M. She teaches biology.” L.M. is wearing a name tag that says “Sakura Lily [Something-or-other beginning with M],” in Roman characters. I think, I didn't know that was her real name.

I'm looking out the wall of the really big building that's make up of one really big window, at a sky filled with pink and orange clouds. I realize that it's already 3:00 in the afternoon, and I've already wasted most of the day. I'd better hurry up if I want to do the studying I still need to do for my final. [In the dream, I actually remembered having experienced most of an entire day in that really big building, including lunchtime.]

I'm in another living-room-like room, similar to the one that was being remodeled, except that this one isn't. At this point, it hits me: This isn't a real place. I'm dreaming. That explains why I wasn't really hungry for lunch earlier: my real body is asleep, and I had a big dinner before I went to bed. Oh! Since I'm dreaming, it's not really 3:00. The day hasn't even started yet! I still have time to study! Strangely, thinking about the fact that I'm dreaming causes me to feel woozy, dizzy, and sick, and the whole world to tilt. [Probably because I was rereading parts of the Inception shooting script again, in which telling someone that they're dreaming causes the dream to destabilize. Dang it! I know it doesn't have to be like that.] I think, No. I have to keep the dream stable. I kneel down to feel the carpet, which, this time, is a little like the carpet in my real room, except lighter (more yellow than brown) and slightly shaggier. The dizzy, tilting feeling goes away. Standing up, I put my hands under running water. At first, I can't feel it at all, but then I feel the warm water running over my hands. Then, I reach into a fish tank on a nearby table to touch the goldfish in it with my fingers. I've done this before, I think. What did it feel like? This. It does feel pretty much like I remember it feeling when I had my own goldfish tank in reality.

I return to the room that was being remodeled, to find that they're done remodeling it. The couch has been unwrapped and all the other furniture has been returned to the room. This room will be serving as the first-aid station for some kind of event; there's a handwritten paper sign on the door saying so. I feel the need to leave this room clean and neat before this dream ends (I sense that it will soon), so I pick up all the trash and used tissues that are lying all over the middle of the floor.

I'm outside, at night, looking at a couple of brightly-lit city blocks. I think, Oh, cool! Those are the blocks just to the south of home! [What home, I don't have the slightest idea.] I start flying, this time taking off with more of an effort of will and belief than by jumping (it also helps that I'm feeling happy and excited), and go straight up, so as to admire the view better. When I get up high, I start being pulled backward again [see this DJ entry and this one], but this time, it doesn't frighten me. I think, Oh, I must be going back to my real body now.

It turns out that I'm wrong. I find myself in another unfamiliar place [I don't remember where it was]. I pinch my nose and can still breathe through it, which is a pretty neat feeling. I'm still dreaming. [I remember doing this on two different occasions, but I'm not sure when the other one was.]

I'm entering my family's house [but it's none of our real houses]. P. is waiting for me inside, and expresses frustration that I've been gone so long. I'm still aware that this is a dream, but I decide to play along with the dream plot. I enter the kitchen, and my parents are there. I look at the whiteboard/calendar attached to the side of the fridge and see that something I wrote there before has been erased, and the magnets on it have been moved around. I follow my family up the stairs in the house, and we end up in a room filled with barrels of wine.

----------------------
Side notes:

This dream seemed to go on for a really long time, especially considering that I remembered being in the dream building for most of a day. I only wrote down the most memorable moments. I think this is because time dilation was the topic I was reading the most about here on DV before I went to bed last night. I am pleased with this development, and now I'm even more motivated to learn better control, so that I can really take advantage of the time and stability I now seem to have in lucid dreams.

11/30/2010
Dream One:
"Punks 'n a Bat"

I was in some sort of older city. It was modern, but just seemed like an old, sea town. The Keys, maybe. MJ was hanging out with the group, and there were a bunch of punks that were going around and starting shit with people. They came up to our group, and one of them started hitting on MJ. She dismissed him by saying something really slick, and he didn't like it. He stepped up to her, as if he was going to hit her, and I stepped between them. The dude just got in my face and glared at me, anxiously rocking side-to-side. He was shorter than me. I could see in his eyes that he wanted nothing more than to fight me...but he was scared. Had I been someone smaller, he would have relished the chance, but he saw the way I was looking back at him; cool and calm. He knew that I knew I could kick his ass. From behind him, his friends moved in closer, silently signaling to him that they had his back. I knew my friends were standing behind me, as well, so I wasn't really too worried about his squad. He ended up trying something on me. We made a brief exchange of movements, and I ended up dumping him over the short, rope fence on the marina, and into the ocean. I don't really remember his friends trying anything at the moment.

Later, I was walking through the streets, by myself. Still, obviously, in this old, red brick town. Cutting down a wide alleyway, I came upon the same kid from earlier. This time, he was alone, as well. He had something in his hand, though...a baseball bat. We were walking straight toward one another, at the time that we noticed each other. Recognizing me, he ran toward me. I wasn't going to run from him, and the best thing I figured I could do was slip into a range a little too close for him to effectively swing the bat. In a somewhat surprising mood, knowing that he was going to swing the bat as soon as I came in range, I slid to the ground, leaning backward to let the bat pass right over my head. I goofed, though, coming to a sliding stop in front of him after having not traveled far enough. He looked down at me and swung the bat down in my direction, from above. I rolled to the side and stood up, rushing in toward him again. He took one more swing, but I was already in too close. Bracing my left arm for an impact, I swung it up in an outward block, taking a shot from the lower half of the bat while I stepped further in. Confident that I was going to be too close for him to do much damage with it, I completely ignored the impact, now face to face with him. I could tell he wasn't expecting me to just step into his attack like that. I caught just a glimpse of it, when grabbing him by the collar, just before dropping him to the ground with an immediate hay-maker.

Once again, I ran into the boy and his entourage, later the same day. They wanted absolutely no problems, and were trying to act all nice.


Dream (Frag) Two:
I had put together an experimental, makeshift ultralight, in front of my house, out in Canterbury. Apparently, this thing was remote controlled. I don't even remember whether or not it had a seat in it. I had a companion in this dream, who was a small, talking, shape-shifting animal 'demon' (I watched The Golden Compass, for the first time, last night), which just kind of scurried around me, the whole time. Not sure whether or not I could have actually ridden this ultra-light, I took it for a test flight, using the remote control and driving it around the grass around the ditch outside my house. The body of this 'plane' was made out of a lawnmower. And since I couldn't yet figure out how to fly the thing, it was going around in circles and actually mowing the grass. Lol. I finally figured out how to get it in the air, and it took a short flight over the ditch, just before rounding a huge tree, quickly descending, and smashing into my friend Jesse's mom's house. However, instead of being Jesse's mom and dad, who lived there, it was Todd's mom, and a different husband than the one she has now. Pretty random.