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non-dream dream lucid

Once again, I was awake to some insane time. Went to sleep around 5 in the morning.

I am in some yellowish transparent tunnel. I walk through for a bit until I somehow teleport to my sister's kitchen.
I look around, and the kitchen is a bit larger than waking life.
There's carpet on the floor and a sink next to the fridge (fridge is on the back wall in waking life).

All of a sudden I become lucid. I increase awareness, and it feels like real life. I look into the living room, and the carpet is gray, and it looks like a DC is watching TV? The window curtains are closed but you can tell its day out.

I walk into the living room and all of a sudden I'm walking a dog on a leash in a park of some kind. It's day out, and there's a few trees around but for the most part it's clear.
I'm walking on a road, with some kind of ditch running along side it.

All of a sudden I see a bunch of cats in the ditch.
They're all playing with each other.
I kind of lose lucidity at this point, but I still have a bit of awareness.
I look at the cats and it seems most of them are white.
There's a few kittens around here as well.

I then see dog shit on the path.

This is all I can remember.
I recall other images, too fleeting to actually integrate with the plot.
I recall becoming lucid another time but can't remember it.
I also seem to remember something to do with SNES games.

I would like to note that when I had woken up from the dream, I remembered all this much more coherently, but if you could get me out of bet at that moment to DJ it I'd be impressed.

despite all that, this is the most immersive dream I've had a loooooong time.

I might edit this post later if I remember something new.

1.
I’m in a house, where a guy offers me a pill. I take it like I was expecting it and go lay on a bed next to a sleeping woman. I’m woken up by him shouting at me from the other room, asking me if I could come there. There was something about ‘3 ounces’, maybe a thought I had as I was waking up. I’m pretty groggy.

Mom is at the door, very concerned/frazzled because she couldn’t find me. She goes on about how much danger I could have been in.

2.
Something about Wynne from Dragon Age: Origins.

3.
Rane ‘orders’ me a baby and two other people?? Picking them up at the drive-through? I wonder if ‘they’ will get long, might have been thinking about cats. I realize this is not what I want at all, and ask to cancel the order.

When you order someone, you automatically get a twitter name with their username being their name plus a four digit number.

Jump.

Sitting at a dinner table, perspective is front to back, I was sitting at the front.

Gap.

At the store looking at the shelves. There’s a decoration you hang on the wall with two cats, their tails are entwined and if you pull down on it, a light comes on.

There are comics on the table and shelves now and I get excited. I remember seeing X-Men.

-Something about signing a doctor’s form.

1.
I’m standing on my tippy-toes up on my bed reaching for something (on the ceiling fan?), wearing the same thing I went to sleep in - my Superman logo shirt.

I come to realize that I’m awake and really am standing on my bed. I wobble back down, feeling confused, before I craw back under the cover and go back to sleep.

2.
Hanging around a house. There’s an autistic boy and his cat. The cat is super friendly, I remember petting it when it snuggled against me.

I played a Pokemon game with him.

I looked in a bottom drawer of something at three of his books.

Jump.

I’m on a porch with a roof with him. We suddenly burst into dance with some music playing. I’m really letting loose, doing all kinds of moves including some flips, which is dangerous because I’m wearing the same clothes as IWL, a white shirt with a butterfly on it and a very long, wavy blue skirt.

We finish, and a group of elderly people pop up outside the windows of the porch that weren’t there before. I realize that we had probably disturbed them, our neighbors, with our noise.

But then suddenly they break out into a choreographed dance! But then when I look at them, there are also mid-aged clones of the same chubby guy. I think how vigorous the dancing is, and how good it would be for losing weight. I turn and ask “How often do they do this?’

After they’re done, one of them hands me a PaperBackSwap book in the default white wrapper. I get excited and open it, but unfold a piece of paper from it. It’s a notice that I’d have to go pick it up since I missed the delivery.

It says I actually have to go to their house to get the book, which I think is bullcrap. Part of the address has ‘Metville’ in it although I remember thinking upon recalling it that it was something else. There was also something written in big print letters on a black square.

Inspirations: I got a PBS book recently, the notice might have been because I was worried about getting my credit for sending off a book. Pokemon from reading past dream entries. Where did the dancing come from?? Need.more.dancing! Waait the dancing may have been inspired by a mod for Dragon Age: Origins! Yesterday I had everyone dance to a folk song in Camp. Chubby guys most likely from The Biggest Loser, since I had just looked at my paper and saw it was coming on the next night.

1.
I’m one of two children of parents who are gods. The parent of one of them came over for us to meet for the first time.

I’m about eight years old. I have short, wavy, dark brown hair and freckles and look sleepy like I just woke up. I walk into the kitchen - everyone else is already in there, including my ‘brother’, who has cropped light brown hair and seems to be about six or seven.

We eat and talk with him. He looks to be mid-age, with dark hair and a beard, reminds me a bit of Duncan.

He tries to show me a trick with Smoke but it backfires:

“Did you notice that he won’t pay attention to me if you call me a bastard? Try calling me one when I walk by him.”

Note: It had the feeling of implying that Smoke snubbed him because I didn’t like him called him a bastard).

He leaves the kitchen. We wait. When it seems like he’s not coming back, he teleports outside the back door of the kitchen. He comes through and walks by Smoke, and I remember to say ‘bastard’ just when he’s almost past. Smoke just keeps on sleeping.

I’m roughhousing with mom but end up kicking her or something and she gets mad.

I leave the kitchen and go to the bathroom. I lock a few locks but they get kind of jammed. I go to the huge stall and climb up to look down into it. There are some items inside. I don’t want to use it because you can see into it from the door easily. I think there was some light from a window coming through.

I go over to a dresser, open the bottom drawer and prepare to use the bathroom there. Apparently I had before.

2.
A guy and his girlfriend get in a terrible accident, but she didn’t survive. He got stuck with her gruesome body in some kind of box container until he could be saved. I think someone had asked him about this story so he told them.

I'm in a Walmart, I'm slinking around the isles and clothing racks because I feel like I'm being watched. Then I see that there is a big commotion in the center of the store so I sneak over and view from behind some things. It's a low stage covered in a red cloth. Some people are sitting on the ledge telling the people standing around it that there is one zombie in the store and that we need to seclude it before it spreads. Then as people as talking a few zombies clumsily goes after some of the people. Me and some people run for the exit of walmart and there are workers only letting the unaffected people out, after a brief search or my acting normal and also for bites they let me outside. Outside I see some zombies attacking people walking around the parking lot doing normal things. The people don't seem to panic until a zombie specifically targets them. And when a zombie does attack them they scream, run, try to fight the zombies off them and everything expected. As I'm watching this mess in the parking lot a zombie forces itself on top of me and I topple over and it tries to bite my face, but I keep it as far as I can with my hands and then roll a little to my right and shove it off of me with the gravity, then jump up and sprint straight through the parking lot. The scene slightly changes and I'm now on the side walk near an old fashioned looking movie theater. It's as though I've run far enough to where the disease hasn't gotten to in this town. I can see into the theaters open door and see a girl that in my dream I know. She's sitting at a table having food with two people a girl and a boy. For some reason I become angered at myself for not being the one with her at this theater, and angry that I haven't told her about the zombies that are spreading and the fact that now I can't walk up to her. So now old friends from high school show up and make me go into the theater with them to see a movie, I have to walk past her and we give each other a strange look. One of confusion and sorrow. Then I just run down the long restaurant area with many booths. It's dim in here and I sense something weird in a lot of theses people. Like I already know they'll be diseased soon and want to eat me. They already have that sinister look. I open the doors to the theater room and all the seats are already nearly full. So I find a seat next to this girl I used to know who liked me but I didn't like. The whole time I never noticed the movie I was just focused on how the girl I liked was suddenly in this theater seated two rows ahead of me to the left, and trying to brush off this other girls advances who's seated next to me. I eventually notice that everything I tell this girl next to me, she immediately gossips about to two girls next to her so I panic a bit and get up and walk through the row the the end left of the room to exit, but then this big blonde haired guy swings his head towards me and his eyes widen and he jumps up and attacks me making the same zombie noises the other zombies where making. Some people in the seats jump up and push off me and I slam hard against the floor and look up to realize some of the other seated people have turned, and are going after people. We all rush out of the theater room and I'm out first, but then I remember the her and shoot back into the room and she's still in her seat covering her head so I grab her arm and we run out and running through the booths area they're all zombies and dragging people by their arms into the booths and we almost make it to the exit, but in the rush we get pushed into a booth and we sit there with our heads down hoping the zombies attention wont be drawn to us. But then a zombie jumps on us so I kick them off and we run out the theater. I see three motorcycles, bicycles, and then this golf cart. For some reason I thought it a better idea to take the golf cart instead of a faster motorcycle. So me the girl, and now for some reason hank hill and bobby hill are on the golf cart driving out of this mess, zombies now everywhere. The scene changes a little and we're driving on cliff side roads that have sharp unexpected turns. I have hank hill lecturing me on the road and -panicking behind me the whole time. Every time he says something I almost drive off the cliff. The scene changes again and we make it to this area of open desert, but the dirt has lots of tired marks depicting somewhat a road. I stop in this circle that's surrounded by lots of dirt paths, lots of ways to go. It's like a compass, and when you look down at the floor these brown arrows move closer to sight and say what is ahead each way. Hank Hill says Billbur City sounds like a smart way to go. We image it to be big, populated, and new. But when we get there it is completely deserted, old, deteriorated. Although there are lots of tall deteriorated buildings. We see a man walking down the street with his head down towards us. Bobby yells to him "HEYYYY". And then it shoots its head up and sloppily sprints to us and we realize it is a zombie and that must be why the city looks like this, then zombies star coming from inside buildings at us, and we speed in the golf cart through allies and junk. There's old buses, tires , and crap everywhere. We see a few cats, and wonder how they are surviving. Then we squeeze the cart through this back yard into under someones carport, and there's junk everywhere, but we see jarred potatoes, I almost grab it because we are hungry but for some reason I don't. Then we see this guy stand in front of the cart and we all freak thinking its a zombie, but it's not. It's a survivor and he's looks covered in ash. He asks us calmly what we're doing here, and none of us know what to say. He points us into the house that the carport is attached to. We get off the golf cart and enter the house. When I go in I realize it's my grandmas house but ti's not, somebody hoarded trash bags in the kitchen, my grandma doesn't do that. Then I walk into the living room and there;'s a blanket on the floor, now the girl hank and bobby hill are all gone and me and my grandma are annoyed that someone put a blanket on her floor under the furniture. And then we sit down confused for awhile. Woke up.

10/17/14

9am DILD

After a series of normal dreams, I fell asleep after my alarm waking me up again (maybe pressing snooze is a good technique for lucid dreaming?! always seems to trigger one) and entered a lucid dream.

I was in my living room and really thought I had woken up, but for some reason, it entered my mind that I should check if this is a dream, even if I thought it was silly because I was awake, and to my surprise, it was a dream! I forget how I checked it was a dream. Maybe levitation, but I don't think it worked when I tried to jump up. Even though my RC didn't work, I think just the process made me realize it was a dream by the tunnel vision I had looking at the floor.

From there, my mind sent me back to my room and I was standing by my bed and looking at my lamp. I knew lights didn't work in dreams, so instead I said "bright" and after a few tries with variations of the word, it works and the room was slightly brighter.

I went back into the living room and tried to turn on the light knowing it wouldn't work (and now that I think about it, I actually don't have a light switch where I tried) and it didn't.

My mind sent me from room to room and from a standing position to my bed quite a few times as I struggled to wake up.

I went out to the kitchen and saw my two cats, one grey and one black, and then noticed a third, white cat. We only have the grey and black cat in waking life. I knew all the while that this was just a dream and took the opportunity to bend down and pet the third cat.

Finally, in bed, my alarm goes off and I wake up. Probably should've explored more instead of trying to wake myself up and just let my alarm do the job! The whole dream I was very aware that I was dreaming, more so than the usual FA lucid dream. I had fun looking at my environment as I was trying to wake up, instead of the usual panic of feeling like I'm half dreaming.

I watch a plane crash on the television as part of a breaking news story. The last part of the clip before they cut it shows the plane flying away from the crash site. It doesn't make sense to me, so I re-play the scene in slow motion. This time, the second plane is a missile. Both are in fact missiles. Nuclear missiles. I get on my computer and try to find the exact town in England where the crash happened, but can't find it. Just a bunch of English towns. Finally, I spot the wreckage.

As soon as I see the wreckage, I'm on a bus that's headed right to the crash site. My mom is on the bus, as well as my good friends. Up ahead is an unexpected building, billowing with thick gray smoke. Just pumping smoke out the top of it like it is manufacturing something. Our bus stops at a gate just before this building and a bunch of men with guns board our bus speaking a combo German/Italian language that I can't understand. Through their non-verbal cues, I understand that they must search our bus and everyone on it before they let us go on our way.

One of the men searches me, but gets upset when he sees that I'm wearing a belt. He passes me to the next guy who also finds nothing hidden. Even more upset than the first guy, he picks me up by my shoulders, and shakes me vigorously as if to get any pills to fall out my ass if I were a drug mule. Fortunately (for many reasons) there is nothing.

They finally let us all go. I sit down back in my seat, cautious not to draw any unwanted attention to myself. I see my high school sweet heart in the seat right in front of mine and we smile at each other. Then I see several layers of cloth all stacked on top of one another. The cloth itself begins to speak, telling me, "There are many ways to love a woman." Then the pile of stacked cloth lays completely flat on the bus seat, melting into it. Seems like good advice I suppose...

Looking out the window, I watch as we pass the building from earlier. It is a power plant that burns some sort of smoky fuel, powering the entire town around it. Set up like some post-apocalyptic utopia, the buildings are all caddywhompus, but well maintained McGuiver style. The bus stops abruptly in the center of the town, and everyone is forced off of it.

I am taken to the front of a tank column and strapped to the front of it as a human shield for the point tank. Definitely not a safe place to be in general, let alone for what I fear is about to happen. Meat shields make me sad, but I'm happy that it's me and not someone else. Completely bound, I tensely watch from the front row of the action as a group of fighters (who I assume are on my side) ambush the tanks. The whole ridge above us seems to have come alive with machine gun fire and anti-tank rockets. Sadly, they are all killed by the tank fire and .50 Cal machine guns.

Due to all the rough driving, my bindings come loose toward the end of the fray and I make my get away, running as fast as I can before they notice. I dart into the first building I come across and hide up in the attic. I get the feeling that ninja-assassins have seen me hide in here, and are on their way sneaking inside. I have to do something to prepare myself.

I magically find in my hand a plastic spray bottle with an enchanted liquid inside that causes whoever is sprayed in the eyes to face their biggest fear. I test it on a nearby cat, who goes completely wide eyed, and then rigid for a few moments before moving again. The cat seemed to enjoy this, and now is like my minion. I direct it to the far corner of the room to help warn me of anyone approaching. Another cat walks right up to my face and looks at me like it too wants to get the fear spray. I spray it in the face once, and it reacts just like the first. Before I decide what to do with it, a third cat approaches and I do the same.

I send one of the cats down the attic stairs to investigate, amazed that the cats are voluntarily helping me through our unusual connection via the fear spray. I am about to spray myself in the face with it, but before I do, I hear someone downstairs. Sneaking down the ladder, there are no lights on anywhere, just a mysterious blue glow. I step on the floor and it is really wet.

A creepy woman's voice whispers directly into my ear, "The true test is how well you can step quietly through a puddle of blood" Quite a sadistic test, especially since she could've just killed me right there instead of toying with me like this. I see now that the entire floor is flooded with about a quarter an inch deep of blood. I get a quick mental flash back of this same woman killing a bunch of soldiers in this room using knives and dodging their bullets, and then draining their blood everywhere.

Thinking about her challenge, my feet change from wearing shoes, to slippers, back to shoes, and then to socks before settling on barefoot as I consider how to stay quietest. Barefoot it is then... The cold, sticky blood is really creepy, and not more than a few steps in, the sticky noises give me away.

She lunges at me, trying to bite my throat in half. I get a clear look at her face for the first time, it resembles a zombie face, with dark red slime and nastiness all around her mouth, crazy demonic eyes, and greasy straight black hair. I push against her chest and stomach to hold her back and get knocked on my back over some furniture. She jumps at me, using her teeth as her main weapon as I struggle to keep her off me. Pushing against her stomach, it turns into a dark empty void like space, but darker somehow. From this void, a second pair of arms reach out to fight me. Struggling with these, I kick at her, only to find another portal open up at her waist from which a second pair of legs come through kicking at me. There is blood everywhere, and she just doubled her limbs while trying to bite me to death. This fact sinks in a bit and I wake up.

Ritual: WTB 1am, woke 4:45am. Read, drank spice lassi, 7 minutes SSILD meditation, WBTB 6am. Relaxation, counting, mantra, took probably 30–45 minutes to fall fully asleep. Woke 7:30am with dreams.

Alchemy: 400mg L-Theanine, 400mg Alpha-GPC 50%, 750mg Aniracetam, taken at end of WBTB.

Notes: Two days ago I was buying ice cream in RL, and it occurred to me that I should use this as a motivator. "You can't eat any of this ice cream until you have a lucid dream!" I told myself sternly. Then last night I was thinking of eating something else for dessert, and I decided to be even more strict: "In fact, no dessert for you at all until you get lucid!" Given everything else that went into my attempt, including excitement about the brand new TOTMs, I can't estimate to what extent this reward-based strategy was a factor in the successful outcome, but it's worth experimenting with some more. Either I'll have more LDs or I'll eat fewer sweets, so it's a win-win either way!

I've been working on my mantra, and I'm currently going with variants of "Do we perceive the dream?" When going to sleep while counting I was thinking this on the off-counts, and as the hypnagogic state started to set in, at one point I noticed myself thinking: "Do we believe the skies?" ("Skies" as in the sporting equipment, so the rhyme was preserved.) This was so absurd I had to rouse myself and write it on my notepad!

By the time I started dreaming, it seemed as though there was a degree of dream-awareness from the start of the sequence, but I don't think it blossomed into full lucidity (with agency) until I remembered my tasks. There was no specific "moment of realization," and yet overall the dream felt much more like a DILD than a WILD, so I'm calling it a DILD.

DILD: I was standing in a narrow lane, enclosed on both sides by walls and buildings, in a residential area. A woman came out from a nearby house and walked past me, carrying a cat. Two other cats were running after her anxiously, so although their size suggested that they were almost fully grown, I intuited that the they must be the kittens of the cat she was carrying. The cat in her arms had wonderful markings, almost like tiger stripes. One of the ones that followed had a similar coat, a cross between tiger stripes and a Bengal's spots. A few minutes later a third cat came along, also striped.

I was so taken with looking at the cats that I didn't want to get too far behind, so I followed them and called the young boys that were with me to keep up. One of them was pushing an empty wheelbarrow but soon left off and went to chase after his friend, who had now gone ahead of me. I picked up the wheelbarrow and pushed it along for awhile, but it was of very primitive construction, all wood, even the wheel was just a disk of solid wood, so it was cumbersome. I wondered why I even needed it. I had noticed that one of the other boys who had gone ahead was giving his friend a ride in another wheelbarrow, and figured if I kept pushing mine, one of the boys would likewise ask me if they could ride in it, which would make it even more cumbersome. So I put it down and continued along the path.

There was a barn to the left, with an open door, and I decided to turn aside and explore it. This meant there would be no way of catching up with the others, but I didn't feel much urgency to do that anymore. The barn was full of old objects, and seemed to be used as storage of some kind. I remembered the TOTM and reasoned that in a rustic place like this it should be easy to find a pumpkin, so I started looking around for one. I climbed a ladder to a ledge which was serving as a shelf for additional objects, and was pleased to find that one of them was a large pumpkin. Everything else was covered with dust, which made me wonder how long the pumpkin had been sitting here. It was probably this concern that made me notice that the pumpkin was looking a bit sagging and rotten, but I recalled that the TOTM instructions didn't specify anything about the condition of the pumpkin, so I figured that it would still work!

Before I could reach for it, I noticed that it wasn't the only pumpkin: now I saw that there were three more on the shelf within arm's reach, all of them of slightly different hues and shapes. I was glad there was an alternative to reaching into the rotten pumpkin, so I grabbed the one whose appearance I found the most interesting: it was small, squat, and had a faintly bluish tinge. I figured I would start with this one, and if I didn't like the results, I had three more to work with.

Part of me wanted to just punch my fist into the pumpkin, which would have been faster but less elegant, so I forced myself to take my time and cut it open properly. I produced a knife from somewhere, without really thinking about it, and began sawing a circle around the stem, just as if I were going to begin carving a jack-o-lantern. When I completed the circle I lifted up the top section, revealing the interior of the pumpkin, and reached inside. The pumpkin was small enough that my hand barely fit, and I was groping around in the stringy goop and slimy seeds trying to find something else in there, hoping to encounter something interesting and unanticipated. All I felt were the pumpkin's ordinary innards, though.

Initially I had left my anticipations open-ended, but now that the dream was coming up empty-handed I tried to seed them with some expectations. Although it was a small pumpkin, there would be plenty of room for a ring. Might there be a ring inside? I squished all the pumpkin innards around in my hand to make sure I wasn't missing anything, but there was nothing there, nothing that wouldn't ordinarily be found in a pumpkin. The only distinguishing feature was that the stringy goop and slimy seeds, despite their very naturalistic texture, had the same bluish tinge as the pumpkin's skin. (I think this might have been day-residue, as last night I had been reading an Amazon review of a set of mala beads beads made in China that complained how the wood had soon developed a weird bluish cast.)

At that point I decided to give up on the little blue pumpkin and get started on the other three, but inconveniently I woke up. I considered getting up and writing my report, but felt that I was still in a state where it would be possible to DEILD, so I fixed the previous events in mind and let myself drift back into dream.

DEILD: This time I found myself in a place I recognized: it was the house of my maternal grandmother that I often visited as a young kid. It is a place that often shows up in my dreams. On this occasion, the theme of "blue" seemed to carry over from the last dream, as I noticed that the house now had a beautiful deep blue carpet that looked brand new. "Nice new carpet!" I said loudly, in case anyone was home. My grandmother is long dead but in waking life my uncle lives there now. In the dream, however, the house seemed quiet and empty, and no one responded to my complement.

I felt very lucid and clear, more so than in the beginning of the last dream, and remembered my standing intention to reflect on my bodily awareness. Sure enough, I could feel the characteristic tingles in my abdomen and especially in my legs that I associate with dreaming. (My hypothesis is that this "tingling" is a product of REM atonia.) I also associate this sensation with the ability to fly in dreams, so I experimentally levitated a bit, and then tried to implant the mental suggestion to be more aware of this body state while dreaming, with the aim of getting lucid more often.

Returning my attention to the environment, I wondered what task I could try next. I had been interested in the other basic task, drinking blood, but I didn't want to have to go all vampire on anyone who I might happen to encounter in this house, given that this was a place where my own relatives lived. "Perhaps if I look in the refrigerator, there'll be a cup of blood in there," I figured. It seemed a reasonable speculation, but after opening the fridge (which at the time I didn't notice was on the opposite side of the room than it is in RL), I didn't see any likely candidates. What would a cup of blood even look like? And would it still count for the task if it came from the fridge? The instructions didn't specify a source. But the idea of drinking a cup of refrigerated blood was not appealing to me, so I thought I should save this task for a more suitable occasion. I much preferred the idea of drinking it vampire-style, especially if I could get the bonus by drinking it from a supernatural creature.

Closing the fridge, I wondered what other tasks might be suitable for this environment. I remembered my lucid dare, and that struck me as a perfect idea: when I was little I always used to walk and play in the forest behind this house, so it was the perfect "enchanted" forest in which to go looking for elves. I continued walking through the house and went out the back door.

The world that greeted me once I stepped outside was startling in its freshness. The colors were deep and rich and luminous, more so than I usually see in dreams, and I was struck by the beauty of my surroundings. There were some distinct differences from RL: in the far distance I could residential areas covered in mist, as though I were looking at a town from the summit of a tall hill. The forest I hoped to find was present, but quite a bit further away than I would have expected. And walking across the grass of the wide lawn that lay before the forest was... a minotaur? I looked again. No, not quite a minotaur... it had the same general lineaments, but the head was that of a horse rather than a bull. Nevertheless, the creature was clearly supernatural, and it reminded me of the blood task again. I didn't want to miss this opportunity, since it was walking right toward me, so I approached the creature.

I didn't want to just grab the monster and start biting him, since he would surely conclude that I was attacking him and fight back, which could be counter-productive. So I went up to him and asked politely, "Sir, would you mind if I drank some of your blood? I only need a cup." He was at least seven feet tall and surely had plenty of blood to spare, so I didn't see any reason he should refuse. To my consternation, he seemed unsettled by my request and tried to demur. But I didn't want to pass up this opportunity, and figured that I had already met the demands of good sportsmanship by clarifying my intentions, so I grabbed his left arm (I was facing him, so it was the arm to my right), extended my fangs, bit him right in the crook of his elbow, and began to drink. Although he was tense and rigid, he didn't fight back, and I concluded that he must be experiencing that peculiar pleasure that the prey of vampires are often said to feel while being fed upon.

I paused to look up, gauging the creature's reaction, and was surprised to see that his appearance had changed. His head was thrown back, his eyes closed, but it was the head of an ordinary man now, no longer that of a horse. The task was to drink from a supernatural creature and see how it changed me, but it turned out he was the one that was transforming! I returned to drinking his blood before he could recover his wits and fight me off. However, the blood wasn't coming very quickly. Either I had picked a bad spot where the blood couldn't flow freely or he was still resisting me in some way, perhaps stifling its flow through the tension in his arm, which was still very stiff. I woke up before I had finished drinking, and promptly concluded that I didn't think I hadn't drunk a whole cup's worth, if we're measuring technically by eight ounces. However, it turns out that it is hard to estimate the quantity of blood you're drinking when you're getting it right from someone's arm!

14.09.2014

September 14th, 2014 Fragments (Non-lucid)

NON-DREAM DREAM LUCID

I had an office for my business and I was planning to look for a new office because apparently, mine was located in a dangerous neighborhood. I drove with my wife there and I could see my office from the car. It was upstaris and it had a gray door without even a name. It looked on the outside like a "weird" business, if you know what I meant, as just a poorly working light was above the door.

From here, something related to my cats

--

A shaman was performing healing on me and he was peeling (literally) layers of bad energy from it.

After some non-lucid sequences in my hotel room, I found myself in the kitchen of my house. I knew I was out of town on a trip, so I felt like I was just checking in. However things were a mess, even I knew the catsitter had been coming. There were lots of bowls of food out but they looked old and uncleaned, and the water was dirty. I went over to the sink to start washing them and I noticed that the sink was already full of dirty dishes. However, I distinctly remembered that I had done all the dishes before leaving on my trip. "Does this mean I'm lucid?" I thought to myself, and decided, "Of course, certainly," and felt that I had been aware that I had been dreaming all along even though I evidently had not been until I noticed the discontinuity. (In one of the earlier sequences I had been confusing about whether I was awake or dreaming to the point where I felt convinced that dream events were impinging in impossible ways on waking life.) I wondered if there were other discontinuities and looked around. I noticed that the catsitter had not taken the check I left for her, and that seemed odd. Wouldn't she have taken it on the first visit? However, I realized that this wasn't necessarily a discontinuity, because there might have been plausible reasons for her to have left it until later.

I started washing a dirty bowl at the sink, one that the cats could use, but then I reflected, "If I'm lucid, maybe I should go do something else. I know! I'm in my kitchen, it would be a great opportunity to go outside and leave a trail of breadcrumbs to try to do the Hansel and Gretel task. But first I'll just wash this bowl and leave some fresh food and water for the kitties." So I stayed at the sink and continued washing the bowl, and also washed and refilled a water bowl.

Even though the dream felt very stable to start, I was a bit paranoid that it wouldn't last long enough to let me get to my more interesting task, and I felt like this anxiety about waking was pushing me closer to actually doing so, and tried to put it out of mind. However, I soon felt my senses disengage and half-woke. But I didn't lose the mental image, and after a moment felt my senses re-engage and knew I was back in the dream. So I rushed to get a can of catfood and put it in the bowl I had now cleaned. A dream version of one cat came out and didn't seem interested in the food I had selected, though I figured, maybe this is a good thing, because if the catsitter feeds her food she likes better, the cat (who is very skittish) might feel more friendly to her. Just as I had finished this and was ready to start on my new task, I woke up again, and though I held very still, the dream state was too disrupted to re-enter.

I was a bit annoyed with myself for wasting a lucid opportunity, but I understood my rationale. Even though I knew I was dreaming, I was not comfortable with the idea of leaving my dream-cats ill-tended, so that took priority over any other task. However, the error I made was in tending to them using the tedious methods of waking life: actually standing at the sink and washing bowls, actually going to another room to get the food and walking back with it, opening the can and using a spoon to empty the food into the bowl. I guess I did it this way out of habit, as it certainly felt like I was going through very familiar motions. I should have just manifested some clean food and water and then gotten to my task much more quickly.

Ritual: Went to bed 1am, woke at 2, too early to do anything, woke again at 5:40 with fresh NLD, so forced myself to get up and do a proper WBTB. Returned to bed at 6:15, did hybrid of SSILD and counting, but kept getting disturbed by environmental factors. Hard to sleep, eventually dozed off without awareness, finally woke at 7:20 and declared it a failed attempt. I could still squeeze in another hour of sleep though so I figured I'd just try FILD as a last resort.

After this things get confusing. My best guess is that I did FILD, then fell asleep and into a NLD, then... I woke up, or thought I did (might have been an FA), and did FILD again (possibly in the dream state). Then I noticed that my arm was lying free on the bed rather than tucked under my pillow as usual, so I thought, "Fine, I'll do the stupid nose pinch RC," and what do you know, I could breathe! So I knew I was dreaming, but I was very perplexed. I had just been doing FILD and hadn't observed any kind of transition or even a momentary lapse of awareness in which the transition could have occurred. How could I have fallen asleep and not realized it? In retrospect, I really do think that this started as an FA that I mistook for a real waking, so I did FILD without realizing that I was already dreaming. Hey, whatever works.

So I sat up, and immediately became more perplexed. I was in a bed, but it was not the one I had gone to sleep in, and the bedroom also bore no resemblance to mine in RL. I got up and started looking around, but then I realized that I recognized the place after all: hadn't I been having a non-lucid dream here, just before I woke up and tried that FILD attempt? (This also argues for the FILD-during-FA hypothesis, and it wouldn't be the first time I've had a "WILD" that was initiated from within an ongoing dream—a DIWILD?)

This is hard to confirm because I always have a hard time putting dream events in their proper sequence, but there were events I remembered taking place in this building that don't seem lucid and don't fit into my memory of the lucid episode, so I think that must be what happened. That is, all the previous events took place downstairs, but the entire lucid sequence took place upstairs in what I took to be the same house.

NLD: Earlier when I was downstairs, there had been some complicated narrative I don't recall, but it resulted in me opening the front door several times to let cats into the house. At one point there was a really big one, an orange tabby, both large-bodied and very plump. When I saw him sitting on the doorstep I thought he was the biggest cat I'd ever seen, and I invited him in and closed the door. But there had been two or three other orange tabbies of normal size sitting with him, so I relented and opened the door again to let them in too. "Okay, fine, we'll just let them all in." I knew we didn't have room for them all, but figured it wouldn't be fair to turn them away after I'd already let in others. We could sort it out later.

After this I stood in the entry and watched the extra-big cat ambling away down the hall. Now it was even larger than it had seemed at first, with a lean, bony frame that was not at all cat-like. In fact, I thought I recognized what it was, and said to someone standing nearby, "That cat looks an awful lot like a moose. You know, I think it might actually be just a moose with no horns." Only it was still orange, which seemed a very odd color for a moose.

DIWILD: So apparently this all happened earlier, before the FILD attempt, and afterwards I was convinced I was still in the same house. In the wall facing the end of the bed was a doorway to another room, and when I went inside, I encountered someone that I immediately recognized as the moose-cat from earlier, although now he was a human-looking man with orange hair. I was still curious, so I asked him, "Are you a cat or a moose?"

"I have three types of glands," he answered, and I had the impression he was suggesting that he was both, and something more besides, a protean type of creature.

The two of us sat down on the couch, and for a moment my dream libido took over, and I started making out with him. But as things got more intense I recognized that this was a distraction and would accomplish nothing useful. Didn't I have tasks to do? I remembered that last night I had been on DV looking over the monthly tasks for August, and there had been one that I particularly wanted to try out. This seemed like the perfect opportunity. So I disentangled myself from moose-cat-man's embrace and said firmly, "Tell me a word in a foreign language."

It was hard to make out what he said at first. It sounded like "Arab mormon."

"What?" I wasn't sure if I had heard him correctly.

This time he distinctly just said, "Mormon."

It didn't sound like a word in a foreign language, but whatever. Run with it. "Alright, now tell me what it means."

"A married man."

I wasn't very satisfied with this result and wanted to try again. Another DC was in this room, sitting on another small couch further along the same wall, so I went and sat down next to him. This time I made sure my instructions were more explicit from the start: "I want you to tell me a word in a foreign language, and then tell me what it means."

"Sprenn," he said promptly.

"Spread?" I repeated what I had thought I heard at first.

"Sprenn," he clarified, and helpfully spelled it for me. "S-P-R-E-N-N."

"Okay, what does it mean?"

At this he smiled coyly, as if embarrassed. "I'll... tell you later."

I had the impression it must be a word for something naughty, but I needed to find out. "Please?" I wheedled. He shook his head.

I decided to be more forceful. "Come on, you have to tell me!" I tried to think of how to back this up, and added, "It's my homework assignment."

He tried to explain in a roundabout way: "It has to do with the city of Myrkbalik, and the laws of Garibaldi."

The two names he mentioned sounded complicated, so I wanted to make sure I had heard them correctly. "What was the name of the city? Mrkbalik?" He nodded. "And the second name? Garibaldi? Garifaldo?" This reminded me of a name I had heard in waking life, so I tried to remember, then joked with him, "The laws of Janeane Garofolo?"

He laughed, though it wasn't clear whether or not he recognized the pop culture reference, and repeated the name for me. It still sounded closer to "Garibaldi" than anything, though I had so much to remember at this point that I didn't dare ask him to try to spell it. Already in the back of my mind I was cycling through data points "mormon... married man... sprenn... mrkbalik..." trying to make sure I would be able to preserve them through waking.

Mrkbalik... that's how it sounded, and I didn't ask him to confirm the spelling of that one either. But he had said it was a city name, and to my ears it sounded Russian or Eastern European. I had a sudden insight about this DC, and asked him, "You majored in Slavic studies, didn't you?" He confirmed this.

I felt as though this conversation was winding down, so I got up and crossed the room. Against the opposite wall was a sort of shelving unit, framing square cubbyholes about the size you might put a pair of shoes in, six cubbies high and six wide. It was resting on some elevated base so that the fourth row of cubbies up was equal with my eye level. I looked in this row and saw that a couple of the cubbies were inhabited by small kittens. Could the kittens talk, I wonder? If so, I might even try the task again. But as I was wondering this, the little grey tabby kitten in the cubby I was peering into addressed me first. It had a tiny creaky high-pitched voice, like you might expect of a kitten, and said something about how its eyes were damaged or hurting. I was troubled to hear this and wondered how I might help. Since this was a dream, I figured the most effective way to help the kitten would be to correct its expectations. I smiled and said encouragingly, "No, your eyes are perfectly fine!" We had a few more exchanges like this, where the kitten would say something upsetting and I tried to reassure it. I don't remember anything afterwards so around this time I guess I woke up, although I don't have a distinct sense of the moment when it happened.

So I'm in this orphanage which is pretty much just a medium-sized house with a lot of people in it, and I'm planning to brighten their day. I know that I can control things, and I dimly know that it's not real, but I don't really know that I'm dreaming, so I don't think I'd call it lucidity. I tell them all that I'm going to summon two of my favorite characters (Kirk and Spock from Star Trek) and we're going to give them... money, or food, or something like that, to support the orphanage. However, as I try, nothing works, and they look at me with looks that say, "you can't really do any of that." So I try opening the door and expecting them to be there, but that doesn't work either. So then I tell them all to pretend they hear a doorbell (because I can't make that happen either) and then I'll open the door, but not all of them accede and they weren't very organized about it, and it didn't work. I tell them I'm better at it when no one's around, and I go outside. The driveway is long and steep and made of black asphault (like the driveway of my childhood home, I now realize). There are a few little kids playing outside. I go down to the very end of the driveway and, when imagining a portal through which the characters come through doesn't work, I get down on all fours.

I know that sometimes, when I act like whatever I'm trying to do is really hard and painful, it's easier to do it. For example, I can't will myself to become a wolf, but I can act really dramatic like it's an excruciating transformation from a werewolf movie or something, and it works. So I... well. I try to vomit the characters up. But that didn't work either, anyway. So then I realize that for some reason, ghosts are easier to summon than living people. So I imagine killing the characters and voila! Their bodies are on the ground before me. I reach down and pull out their ghosts but it turns out that I've somehow accidentally made them into cats. Kirk's cat-ghost is blue and Spock's is green. Not wanting to make the orphanage-people wait any longer, I deem this turn-out acceptable and usher them inside. I don't really remember what happens for a while, but later...

I'm McCoy and I'm a blue cat-ghost (by this point Kirk's color has changed to yellow) and although I still feel human, my view is low to the ground and it's very easy for me to walk around and act like a cat. Kirk, Spock and I are just kind of hanging out and living as cats in this orphanage? There are more old people than kids, even though it's an orphanage. So when it's night-time, I look around for a place to sleep. I go into this bathroom where there's a little cushioned footrest type thing by the tub, and the tub is filled up with a mattress, with a small desk at the end of the tub. I hop up onto the footrest, then onto the tub-bed, and I'm planning on curling up and going to sleep when I catch a glance at the desk. There's a sticky note that says at the top: "McCoy" with instructions that I don't remember. I freak out. This was the bed of a former small girl that got adopted. How did she know that at some point the three of us would die, turn into cats, and come live there? I search through the desk, and there are other references to us. I go and get Kirk (who is simultaneously one of my friends from real life, who I'll name C, for rememberance's sake) and I show him the stuff. When he first sees the sticky-note he says something about how I'm over-reacting and it can't possibly be what I say it is, but I keep showing him more and more things and it convinces him. He's unsettled and doesn't know what to do. Spock wanders in while I'm showing Kirk the things.

A man - or rather something that can look like a man - is a guest in this old couple's home, and he's just won some kind of friendly contest between them. As he's about to leave, the wife tells her husband to go fetch something in particular from the attic, something to give to the guest as a sort of trophy for winning that contest. The husband produces a scarf that he believes has several hairs from a certain genius musician woven into it. It was given to him in Paris long ago in recognition of something, and it's very precious to him, so it's a worthy gift. The guest takes the scarf but sees that the hairs woven into it actually come from a cat. The wife was aware of this. By forcing him to accept this bogus gift, she's tilted the contest in their favor in the end. The guest acknowledges that it's her win, without letting the husband know.

As the guest leaves, he's thinking about the rematch they'll have when he returns to this place in 83 years. The people he'll be having a rematch with are that couple's descendants, but he doesn't understand the difference between a person's descendants and the person themself.

06-13-2014 -- Very strange shifting dream. I am at the Hickory House, probably back to being a kid again, because I am running around the house in the alley, and interacting with Dave and the DuFours and the house is exactly the way it has always been. Then as I walk the couple of doors back to my house, I kind of age, and I am showing up for a visit. I wander a couple of doors down and am talking with Jeff and his parents, and it is pretty late in the evening, something like 9:45 or so. I am telling them that I have to go back home and get something, then come back and speak with them, but I promise it will only take about 15 minutes. They say no way ... too bad. I had bought them a valuable necklace worth hundreds of thousand dollars, that is a very powerful piece of magic, and may save everybody in the area or something. And now that they will not allow me to talk with them about whatever dangerous thing is happening, they will lose out on the protection.

So I walk back home, and it is now the middle of the day, instead of late at night, and as I walk up, the UPS guy or someone has just finished leaving a package. Melody has also just pulled up, and has boxes of stuff. And there are several other boxes and things waiting at the door as well. Turns out it is just a day or two before Christmas, and Melody is telling me she has a nice Christmas present for me, and don't worry, I don't have to wait until Christmas to get it. I am telling her I have a nice present for her, too (thinking about the necklace), and thinking I'm not so impatient that I can't wait until Christmas for presents. Besides, I am very happy that I noticed several boxes from amazon.com among all the stuff waiting in the front yard.

I walk inside to say hello to mom, and then start grabbing the various boxes and moving them inside (while not looking too closely at them to avoid Christmas spoilers) and Melody is talking about how the place is a pig sty and working at cleaning things up. I expect she may want my help, and am explaining that if we are going to work on some cleaning up, I may work on cleaning my room. It isn't too bad, so I am thinking if I can spend just one hour cleaning my room, I will probably be able to get it almost perfect. Meanwhile, we are both walking outside to clean up all the trash in the front yard, and Melody has decided to put her cat, Boots, outside while we are cleaning, but he doesn't want to go, and is digging his claws in and things. Once he's out the door, I pet him for a bit and explain he is still loved and wanted, we just need to clean things up.

So I am gathering up lots of trash in the front yard. Empty boxes, crates from mailing stuff, styrofoam, and a lot of empty pizza boxes, and cramming it all into a very large, but very beat up trash can, which is on the edge of coming apart. As I am doing so, I am telling Melody that as soon as Christmas is over, we may want to replace the trash can. I start telling hew how beat up it is ... and then I notice how it has an address painted on it that I have never seen before, for a street I know isn't anywhere within a mile of here. And I recall a strange sound while I have been driving my car the last few days from Florida to get here, and wonder if I dragged it all the way from Florida under the car, which might explain how bad of shape it is in. Meanwhile, Melody is looking at some of the Christmas decorations, including the angel on the wall with a crown of blinking Christmas tree lights, wondering if it is broken because she doesn't see the lights blinking. I explain they are working fine, and I can see them blinking, but I am looking from further down the front steps and it is darker, which makes it easier for me to see the lights.

I am almost done with the trash, and I need to go to the bathroom, and I can hear the house phone ringing inside, and everything is happening at once. We have a sort of extended family gathering going on, and I think my cousin Lyle has just pulled up outside, and I need to get to the toilet, and that blasted phone is still working. So I run inside and down the hall to the bathroom, just as my cousin walks in the door, but it isn't Lyle, it is Luke ... Skywalker. And he is screaming at me "Answer the @#$%& phone! You never answer the @#$%& phone! Damn it, answer the @#$%& phone, already!" I am sitting in the bathroom, and the whole house is under some construction, and half the bathroom wall has been removed (the top half) and people can just look in at you, and we are in the middle of putting back in the shelves along the bathroom wall. And I yell back at him "I'm in the freaking bathroom! I never answer the phone when I am in the freaking bathroom! Do you?!?"

Meanwhile, everything is changing. The reason we are doing all this construction on the house is that mom eventually sold the house, and the person who bought it was Rosemary (an ex-landlord), and the house that I lived in for several years (in Florida) was the Hickory House, but they changed it and expanded it, and we're now in the process of changing it all back, since we've bought it back again. I finish going to the bathroom (though I am now running around in my underwear. It doesn't seem to bother me any, though.) And I walk up to Luke Skywalker, and tell him I have words for him. I start forcibly explaining how I quit answering the house phone when I got my own cell phone, and I did it for a very good reason. Mom owned the house phone, and if I answered it, and took messages for her, some of them would get lost, and she would never get them. But if I stuck to my phone and she stuck to hers with her own answering machine, we both got all our calls, and we were both very happy. By this time, I am explaining calmly, and explain that I only answer the house phone when I told an important call is expected, and to please answer when it came in ... and nobody told me he would be trying to call.

We are having this discussion in Rosemary's living room, which has somehow replaced my bedroom which was in the house just five minutes earlier. Luke compliments me, and tells me that it was very well explained, and very well thought out, and he is impressed with how I calmed myself and the situation down, with how he had started it all off by yelling at me, and we step outside the house to find that everything has changed outside as well (from when I was out here five minutes ago.) It is still the Hickory house, but instead of being all block it is now half block and half wood. It is still on Hickory Drive, but instead of being a straight, level street, it is now the top of a significant hill, and the street curves out of sight where Holly used to be, to connect with Crescent. The house next door has been torn down entirely, and we have put up a sort of storage shed tunnel sort of thing like the house next door on the other side used to have, and I am saying "I was only gone for a year-and-a-half, how on Earth has everything changed so much?!?" Never mind that it has actually only been five minutes. "How has everything changed so much in under a year? How has the street changed? How are we now on a hill?" I glance toward what should be the intersection of Hickory and Crescent, where there is now a freeway interchange. "How is there a freeway inter ... you know, actually the freeway interchange explains all the other changes. But an entire new freeway in under a year ... that's rather impressive."

The first dream is a blur. All I remember is my mom and myself looking at a cat lying outside our window. He fell, but we heard him land on his feet. Another, smaller cat came up to us afterward.

I was half in a video game and half in real life. I was on a trip somewhere with my class. A couple of things happened. I rode a tiger in third person. When the trip ended, we had to go home on a boat, but it was a bunch of platforms that came one at a time. While I was waiting, I started singing "Drunken Sailor" and a few people joined in. Eventually, everyone was singing and dancing, but my feet kept acting like they do in dreams and didn't do what I wanted them to do.