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Awake, Non-lucid, Lucid, Dream within a dream, [Commentary made while awake]

[This is a catch-up post. These dreams are from December 24-27, 2010.]

Night of December 23-24

I'm playing Neopets, and I somehow obtain an item that makes a particular level of a particular Flash game easier.

I'm with P. in a hotel/bookstore. It's 12:30 A.M., according to an analog clock. [That's what my handwritten notes say, anyway.]

I'm at my high school, once again visiting the second row of portables located a little distance to the west of the main campus. [These portables don't exist in real life, but did appear in a previous dream, namely, the last dream in this DJ entry.] I'm walking around with no shoes on. As I climb up the steps into one of those distant portables, I wonder whether I'm going to get in trouble for that.

Night of December 24-25

[I only have a very vague memory of this dream, especially now that I'm reconstructing it from handwritten notes this long after the fact (1/15/11). I've reconstructed it from my handwritten notes as best I can.]

I'm at dream!Disneyland, watching a video in a theater. I also have a lucid dream within a normal one. When I first realize that I'm dreaming, I try to fly, but I can't. There are three DCs there, one of whom introduces himself to me and to the other two, and says something about how he isn't sure if we've met in reality or not. [Hmmmm... very interesting.] I actually tell the three of them that I'm dreaming. I get a second shot at completing a mission, and this time, I succeed. The mission involves saving the son of some teacher from someone. To complete it, I have to go into a room full of computer workstations and press a red, rectangular button that I find on someone's workstation. I couldn't find it the first time. At the end, when everything around me is blowing up [I think], I'm lying face down, going, “Please be a dream... please be a dream...” because I'm convinced that it's reality.

I wake up out of my lucid, back into the regular, non-lucid dream I'd been having before.

Night of December 26-27

I'm riding along on my bicycle. A mechanical arm attached to an overhead conveyor belt grabs my bike and pulls it into this big, elaborate, two-story construct that's a combination of a maze, a play structure, and an amusement-park ride, with me still on the bike. I think, I thought things like this only existed in dreams! I didn't think anyone had actually built one as a ride! [LOL, more dream sign fail...] I'm excited to be going into it, though, because I know it's an amusement-park ride/activity and it'll be fun. The conveyor belt goes up at an angle, taking me up to the second floor. When I get there, I get off my bike and go inside a room. Other people are there, including some real-life friends [I think; I don't really remember who now]. We're all role-playing that we're scientists in a laboratory [I think], because that's part of the ride.

The next thing I remember is realizing that being put in [artificial] danger is also part of the ride. I run toward the double doors through which I came into the room and open them by punching them. They swing outward, and I see that I've opened them just in the nick of time – just after the doors open, I see a locking bolt on one of the doors shoot out automatically. If I hadn't opened the doors when I did, we would have been locked inside.

[I don't remember the transition to the next scene.] I'm in a large bike repair shop. My red bike [the one I have in real life right now] has been taken here, and I want it back. The female DC who runs the bike repair shop gives it back to me, along with a brand-new pair of long black-and-gray bicycle shorts, which are lying in a particular spot on the floor, waiting for me.

[Fragment] Something about a [different] female DC who is infected with some kind of microbes that, when active, cause her body to become excessively warm.

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.]

-------------------
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.

[This is a catch-up journal entry. This dream is from the night of November 6-7.]

[Fragments] Something involving making a delivery of some kind using my car. I remember wondering where my car keys were just as I was waking up from the dream. I also remember riding my old, green GT bike in the rain.

IHOP and Denny's are having a TV commercial war. I'm watching a series of commercials for the two chains, one after the other. One of them [I'm not sure which restaurant it was for] focuses on the repetition of the phrase, “Accurate fries, accurate donuts,” accompanied by images of the two items. It means that when you order fries or mini-donuts as a side item there, they always serve you the correct amount. Later, I'm at Denny's with my mom.

I'm riding in a car, passing by the fields of a local high school. I can see their marching band rehearsing, in their uniforms. Some marching band members from my own high school are there, too, also in their uniforms and rehearsing in a block.

I'm walking through the hallways of an unidentified high school. A female student is there, loudly crowing away about something political. The TV monitors mounted in the hallway are showing political advertisements. There's one pro-Whitman, anti-Brown ad that ends with the spoken line, “Last chance to come together, California.”

I'm in a UCSB dorm room, thinking to myself: What's the date today? April 9? 2 months. Meaning, in two months, I will be graduating and leaving the university forever. I think about how hard I'm going to cry when I have to pack up the contents of this room and leave it for the last time. I remember [or maybe I just inferred this after having woken up, I'm not sure] that I went to Kentucky during fall quarter, then returned to UCSB for the winter and spring quarters to finish up the last of my studies. [As opposed to real life, where it was spring quarter that I missed to go to Kentucky.] My roommate Sarah M. is in the room. I have to be on my way and go to math class without my math homework completed, because I've been goofing off all weekend.

A group of Chinese international students and teachers come into the dorm room. One of the female teachers notices a magnet I have as a decoration. The magnet has five Chinese characters on it. She reads them aloud, in Chinese, but stumbles over the last one, giving two different possible readings for it. As she puzzles over the characters, I say to her, in Japanese, “Imi mo nai na no da.” [Translation: “They don't even mean anything.”] I know this to be the case because I know that this particular string of characters came from Hanzi Smatter. The female teacher understands what I said, and agrees with me. She and the other teachers and international students then start a conversation, all in Japanese. When they ask me a question in Japanese, my reaction is, “Oh, God, now I've started it!” I'm nervous and self-conscious because I haven't spoken any Japanese in a long time. It takes me a second, but I manage to formulate an answer to the question in perfectly good Japanese. [I don't remember what the question and answer were, but I do remember that] At some point during the conversation, I say something like, “Kono kanji wa imi ga nai to itte kumatta desu.” I know what I mean when I say it, which is, “I heard that these kanji don't mean anything.” [But I know perfectly well that those aren't the proper Japanese words for “I heard that...” There goes dream!Japanese being weird again.] [Also, what I meant is that they don't mean anything as a phrase. Most likely they mean something individually, or else the teacher wouldn't have been able to identify readings for them.]

[Not sure if this one is in the correct chronological order.] I'm with my church choir, and we're singing a pretty Advent hymn. [I'm pretty sure it doesn't exist in reality, yet. I managed to record six notes onto my phone when I woke up, and someday I plan to compose it.]

I'm driving up toward UCSB with my parents. We see Dale C. performing live on the side of the road, by the exit off Highway 217 that leads to the airport. He's singing and playing the bongos.

I'm reading a little cloth book that Dale wrote about his music career. In the book, he says that he was more excited about the full-time income he would earn from being a musician than any other aspect of the career. This makes me think less of him.

I enter an unfamiliar house to get something. P. is there, and there is an unknown woman sleeping in the back room.

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

Last night, my WBTB went on for nearly fifteen minutes, due to my trying (and failing) to figure out what it was that had gone thump and woken me up. I think it helped me attain lucidity. I should do WBTBs that last that long more often.

I'm bicycling along a sidewalk that winds through grass along the side of a street. Every so often, the sidewalk rises up and becomes a little bridge that allows water to go under it. It goes up-and-down and side-to-side so much that it's a little difficult to bicycle on.

I'm in a building with a group of my Literacy AmeriCorps friends. We're in an open, interior space that runs through several stories of the multi-story building, and has lots of staircases and landings in it. My LAC friends are standing around on the staircases and landings. We're talking about the party that's going on in a room upstairs. One of my friends says that, in order to get in, you have to bribe the guy watching the door in a “touchy-feely” way, e.g., by touching him in a sexual way. I absolutely refuse to do this. At some point during this conversation, I realize, “This is a dream. I can't really be talking to these people.” [I haven't seen any of them in reality since the program ended; we don't even live in the same state anymore.] Then, a bunch of unidentified guys come up a flight of stairs from deeper in the building and start trying to molest me and the other girls with their hands. As they begin to surround me like a flood, I realize this is turning into a nightmare, and try to leave the scene by closing my eyes and turning around. Once again, it does absolutely nothing. The guys start getting their hands on me, and achieve their goal of discovering where my erogenous zones are. I'm scared and shocked and I wish it would end, so it does. I wake up, and go back to sleep shortly afterward.

I'm in a room where I and three of my LAC friends, one other girl and two guys, have been staying. I find a guitar in the closet. A tall guy I don't recognize is also in the room. One of us asks, “Who in this room plays guitar?” and the other answers with “Lisa C.” and one or two other names. [I can't remember now who said what, or what the other two names were.]

I'm in a giant, room-sized aquarium. It's rectangular and about twelve feet from floor to ceiling, and all but the top three feet are filled with fresh water. One wall of the rectangular room is covered with small, enclosed plastic boxes, each containing a different kind of fish. You can open up the doors on the front of each box to let the fish out into the larger aquarium. I'm swimming in the water and can apparently breathe under it. I'm playing with the fish that are out in the larger aquarium, trying to get them to act out some scenario, but it isn't working out too well because there's this one carnivorous fish with big, pointy teeth that keeps eating most of the smaller fish. Eventually, it even starts eating another fish that's bigger than itself. I swim up to the very top row of little boxes, one of which contains a Blue Tang. I think about letting it out, but decide not to because I'm not sure if this one is a freshwater fish or not, and because I don't have very many of that kind. At this point, I discover that I suddenly can't breathe as easily under the water, and I realize that it's because the top three feet of the room are now filled with water, too. [Yes, I realize that doesn't make much sense. No, I didn't realize this during the dream, nor did I realize I was dreaming.] I go to the end of the room and start trying to get the door open so I can breathe the air outside the room. It has a wheel on it that you turn to open the door. While I'm still trying to open the door, before I can either drown or get it open, I wake up. [Dude. That was pretty cool. I wanna go back and play in the aquarium room again sometime.]

[This started out as a regular dream, but it was after my alarm had gone off and I was only partially asleep and partially awake, so I think I was actively using my imagination to keep this sequence of events going, and it felt like I was doing so from outside it, as if my imagination were a video game controller. Hence the shift from teal and present tense, representing a regular dream, to green and past tense, which is what I use for those times when I'm not sure if what I experienced was a really low-quality lucid dream, or just me imagining stuff, or what.]

I'm in the brown car with P. We're both sitting in the back seat, but I'm still controlling the car. [I honestly don't know if I'm just reaching forward and grabbing the wheel every so often, or I'm just telekinetic.] I remember that we've driven this way in dreams before. I say to P., “Thanks again for the ride.” Apparently, she brought the car to pick me up from somewhere and take me home. We're driving up a major street in the area where we grew up.

At some point, we shifted from riding in the car to riding on bicycles. She was on a little pink bicycle that one or the other of us had when we were little. We continued our journey back toward the house on bicycles. I realized that on the route we were going, we would eventually get to a street named Amaranth, where I would get hit by a car and killed. I knew this because I remembered dreaming about it before. [Now that I'm fully awake and writing this, though, I don't remember dreaming about it before. More false memories, I think.] As we got closer to Amaranth Street, I felt a cold chill of fear of my impending death for a moment, but somewhere in the back of my mind, I was also aware that none of this was real. We reached the corner where we could turn to get onto Amaranth Street, or take a different route. I said, “Do you believe in fate? I don't.” P. decided to take the different route, the one that wouldn't take us onto Amaranth Street at all, and we continued riding.

The dream starts out with me riding my bike along a suburban neighborhood road. It curves to the left constantly, and judging by the surroundings, the curve of the road, and my distance from home, I'm riding my bike home from the neighborhood park. The sky is orange and purple, so I assume the sun is setting. Something catches my eye and I look up.

Floating a ways in the distance above the sky is an alien spaceship, slowly heading towards my house. My heart starts to race and I bike as fast as I can, trying to beat it home. Somehow I manage to get home before it, but not before crossing its path. I'm positive the aliens can see me entering my house.

I lock all the doors and try to find a place to hide. For some reason the most logical place is in front of my couch, which is in front of a giant window. I duck down and cower. After a few seconds I get my courage up to look out my window. My heart skips a beat. The spaceship is landing in the street right in front of my house. I watch as the main door hisses and slowly lowers itself open. At this point I get up and sprint into my room, slam the door shut, and hide under my bed. I can feel my heart pounding a million miles an hour.

Somehow the aliens managed to get inside. I can hear footsteps walking down the hall towards my room, and my doorknob turning. Then I wake up.

For some reason when I remember this dream, I also remember a fragment of me being a ghost. People can see me and are chasing me, so I fly away and hide in decorative oil pots. But they always break them open and try to catch me. I don't know how they know where I'm hiding...

1. I'm trying to hack around in Facebook to find a way to see V's profile again (after she's blocked me IRL). Soon, however, I don't have to hack, as she re-adds me just long enough to send a poorly written but very painful letter (I fail the text RC).

2. I'm biking with E and C from the research station in a upscale community, trying to make a lunch date with the rest of the crew. In retrospect, the community has been a dream location before.

1. I finally have returned from my research station, and I meet up with my old friend W at his house. He's suitably curious, asking all about my experiences, if I got lonely or bored and what I did for fun. I show him some of the things my parents brought me to make the time more enjoyable. This triggers a question of advice for his own presents, as his girlfriend's birthday is coming up. She's a nerdy actress, and he shows me two things he's considering.
One is a portable stage light that casts a brilliant circle on demand. The other is a bath towel with a built-in calculator (numbers go crazy, so another failed RC). I laugh at both and suggest the light as better. We continue to discuss girls until my mom interrupts us. We adopt a stony silence and sit awkwardly until W breaks it with a cheesy one-liner. I laugh so hysterically I fall out of the dream!

2. I make a trip to the Louvre in Paris with the students from my research station. I wander aimlessly along the corridors of art until I find a computer lab, in which everyone is hanging out. I feel mildly annoyed that we came all this way for everyone to ignore the art. In any case we all go outside, where Paris is covered in snow. This doesn't stop me from renting a bicycle and barreling down a sick hill with epic jumps. Eventually I wipe out in a crazy fashion, landing somewhat on my neck, even though the snow cushions my fall.

3. I'm on an Amazon river canoe trip with my advisor, and tensions are running high.

1. I've taken the day off to go shopping with the parents. We go to a Wal-Mart, and as usual I start goofing off. However, I soon find myself in a section of the store I've never visited before. It's a "premium" section, one for the extremely rich, even though the prices are still advertised as rollback (Fuck me, another failed text RC). They're selling things like ultralight airplanes and antique cars, but in the back I find a couple of Tour de France level bicycles. The first one I try has the wheels attached backwards, making it impossible to use, but the second is allright. I take it and start riding around the store with the wind in my hair, and feel silly but happy.
As I ride back to return the bike, my cell phone goes off (with the RL ringtone). I pull it out of my shorts, but with only one hand on the wheel I have no way to control what happens next. I crash through two panes of heavy glass in the back of the store, and stumbling from the wreckage fall over a plane! The manager comes up, angrily demanding that we pay, but my Dad only has $400 on him. I start to freak out.

2. I'm answering questions on Twocansandstring.com (an awesome website), when someone asks about spinach and Popeye. I start to answer, but wander outside to underneath a tree at my research station. V and one of the grad students wander over to me. V makes awkward small talk as the grad student strokes her, and I feel extreme jealousy.

3. Las Vegas has become a post-apocalyptic wasteland ruled by pop-punk style overlords. The streets, however, are filled with legions of metalhead zombies. Something happens to one of the rulers, and I see the teeming throngs rise up to take back control of the city.

---

I fade in to a dream. A group of five guys my own age (about 19-20 years old) are walking away from my apartment as I'm walking towards it. I notice each one of them carrying a signal item from our house as they casually walk past me. They obviously do not know who I am. They items they are carrying are a banjo, a keyboard, a guitar, an Xbox 360, and my roommate's orange bicycle.

Once they are past me, I immediately turn around and slam that guy with the banjo in the back of my head with my fist. A fast-forwarded fight results. Once I take control, I am informed they all passed the stolen items off to a sixth person and that he was already on his way to sell them.

Frustrated and desperate, I start to grab each guy individually and pin them underneath several motorcycles from the parking lot of the bar we are now standing in front of. I decide I will keep them trapped there until I get all my stuff back.

---

1. Mom, my brother, and I are driving around downtown Cincinnati, when I notice some interesting graffiti on the side of a tall building. Everyone gets out of the car and starts to climb the building, eventually reaching an outcrop near the tags. One is simple to interpret and just says "Rage," the other is a design that looks like two capital "A" letters that share a leg. I think that the latter symbol is the tagger's way of representing A=A, the Objectivist tenet. This is backed up when I find (and start leafing through, missing a RC) a philosophy textbook. Details afterward are fuzzy, but the conversation among the family turns to something horrible, and I remember a crushing sadness. The textbook falls and shatters as we climb down, and eventually I start to sob.

2. I'm watching a movie-style overview of an epic bike race in Africa. Things quickly go over-the-top; one bike is a robotic monstrosity, one is ridden by an ape-man who carries jungle animals with him, and one is ridden by Spiderman. Crazy hijinks ensue, but details are kind of fuzzy.

Had this dream early this morning (September 13th, 2009).

I dreamed I was back at my parent's house, watching t.v in the living room. Even though the dream takes place in the present, former host Phil Guerrero was back working for YTV. He was doing some art projects or something which he was promoting on the channel and briefly joked about the recession and times being so tough that he had to back to work.

One of the projects was a medieval knights tale which Phil said Marvel Comics was interested in. The panels he was presenting were crudely drawn storyboards for either introduction stories for the main characters, of which there were four, or segments of a pilot episode. The last panel Phil showed was very dynamic and had the main characters in a vertical line, with their knightly powers represented in colours that surrounded them as an aura, and with golden wings which sprang from their armor. The colour sequence from top to bottom was yellow, orange, red, and green.

The program ends and I turn off the t.v and sit in the dark for a while. I get up and go into the kitchen and in the dark (all the lights are off and it is night) I walk into a racing bicycle sitting in the middle of the floor. I recognize the bike as belong to one of my brothers and I begin to search the house because I previously believed I was alone in the house.

I head towards the bedrooms and see the younger of my older brothers walking out of my old bedroom. I am kind of suspicious but instead of confronting him I just ask if he had just came home from work. He replies that he has been here for a while but I am still under the impression that he is up to no good because I know that he has no business in my bedroom.

I still don't know how to confront him and I go into mom and dad's bedroom and fall asleep on their bed. The dream ends there.

Original dream dated May 7, 2008:

I had a dream about a skinny boy who was tormented by a hag, she sat on his chest and licked his face - eventually, he was able to shake her off and take off on his bicycle, where he raced a train that longer and longer, but not like trains are usually long - like silly putty. It also had the front end of a truck. Eventually, he reached a castle full of the ghosts of old soldiers who had to act out their final battle again and again, and was recruited into their ranks.


I also had a weird vague dream that was sort of like I was at work, and there was another person, a young blond French man, who was sort of my friend. My boss was being a jerk about stuff not getting done, even though it was impossible to do so much. Then I dreamed something about owls, only the owls were not owls, they were big beautiful black and white birds that looked more like hawks, and they had chicks. Then, something about photographing another type of bird with chicks, using my cell camera. The dream ended with an earthquake and firefighters rescuing two little girls from their house, which was falling down the side of a cliff.


Then, for some reason, I was a large, muscular man. I had just gotten out of my jeep and waded across a river, I think I was trying to keep someone from tracking me. The landscape was like woods in perhaps Colorado or Northern CA.

Night of September 13, 1990. Thursday.



This was a partly recurring dream a few months prior to making first contact with my lovely wife-to-be.

The world is ending. Or is it only a play/movie from the mind of Ödön von Horváth? (who I had read of at the library, based on an earlier dream). There is supposedly a true story (at least possibly true relative to the quote if not the event itself) - Ödön von Horváth was once walking in the Bavarian Alps when he discovered the skeleton of a long dead man with his knapsack still intact. Von Horváth opened the knapsack and found a postcard reading “Having a wonderful time”. Asked by friends what he did with it, von Horváth replied “I posted it”.

No, the world really is ending, apparently. There is a fire that is consuming the world. It is a fire containing the souls of all of the people who had died under Hitler - or so this seems, as some sort of epic movie-like plot. Their shadows move (walking about) within the fire as it spreads across the planet. It reminds me vaguely of certain concepts from “The Fog” from 1980. Though it has been a common theme since earliest memory to attempt escape from something by going around the world away from it, in as straight a direction as possible, and sometimes back from the other side, this particular scenario is new and unique to this dream series.

For some reason, they are moving in the United States towards Wisconsin (from the west), where I am living at the time of my dream. There is great awe and fear near the seeming opening of my dream, although not quite nightmarish. Also, for some strange reason, only my brother Dennis and I are actively planning to get out in time.

There seems to be enough time to get away at first. They seem about two blocks west of where I am living (but the fire stretches north to south, as far as the eye can see in both directions).

My brother and I get on our bicycles to leave. We start to ride south (not really away from the fire, but parallel to it for some reason).

Suddenly, as we are riding our bicycles, with knapsacks as well as a bit in the back bicycle baskets (I am even aware of the “Having a wonderful time” postcard in his knapsack), my brother somehow immediately has a glass of water which he throws in my face from his left hand (while still steering the bicycle with his right hand). As it splashes my face, I become much more aware and my dream more vivid, but still not fully aware that I am dreaming. This, in turn, causes me to think a little more clearly…why in the world am I riding with my half-brother who has a swastika tattoo on his hand? Wouldn’t that “attract” the supposed entities in the fire in a negative sense? However, at the same time, I get the strange impression I am “leaving” my girlfriend (”mystery girl”) or wife and am starting to question the nature of the setting.

We come to an area on the south-side of La Crosse where there has been some sort of earthquake damage. It is too hard to ride a bicycle there, so I get off and walk. There are “brittle” burned plants everywhere even though the main fire is still behind us.

I turn and look at the fire, which is about as high as a five-storey building. One of the “souls” in the fire is female and now seems quite alive and passionate, seemingly having spent her lifetime looking for me as I, her. I stop and decide to become a part of something I could not possibly have “escaped” from, anyway.

Then it seems that I got it all wrong. These people were not the “ghosts” of those who died under Hitler, but the energies of spirits looking for their partners in life or “twin flames”. Fire is life. Ashes are death. Should I tell the world that there was nothing to fear after all? I wake…

Morning of February 13, 1988. Saturday.

Dream #: 7,726-02. Optimized 1 min 15 sec read.

I find myself in the backyard of an unfamiliar house I associate with being in Southside La Crosse, possibly southwest of the King Street mansion. (It may be on Cass Street though its front is never visible.) It is late morning. Through a window more on the right, I see a group of about five unfamiliar men who are all at least ten years older than me. They are wearing formal clothes in what seems to be a kitchen. I get the impression they are having a business meeting. My bicycle is leaning against the outer wall of a utility room to my left.

When the men come out, none of them seem to see me as a trespasser. I notice one cheerful man in a business suit who is now walking a bicycle not only identical to mine, but it is somehow the same one. I ask, feeling an increase in mental clarity (on the threshold of dream state recognition), “How is this possible?” He says, with a friendly tone and as if he knows me, “Parallel ground, Claude.” The men continue walking away to the right (when looking at the back of the house), presumably to use the private sidewalk adjacent to the house’s east side.

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Bicycles in my dreams are primarily vestibular system response indicators with literal correlations (chiefly imaginary kinesthesia that exponentially vivifies and sustains a dreaming experience the longer I focus on my activity) unrelated to symbolism. In this dream, however, I do not utilize imaginary kinesthesia by riding a bicycle.

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What does “parallel ground” mean? Here, it is a declaration from my protoconsciousness or personified preconsciousness at the threshold of my waking. The term occurs in electronics, so there may also be a reference to the mentation of dreaming and mind-body reconnectivity. It may also originate from the duality of dreaming and metacognitive dreaming as a whole.

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