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10/28/10

Scrambling up wet black rocks, spray from the waterfall soaking me to the bone. Straight up to the top of the vertical cliff face. Looking out over the dark river snaking through the vast canyon, all sound drowned out by the constant roaring of the falls. Green, black, silver, and blue... It's a clear, crisp day, and I let the joy of the moment wash over me.

The water is too shallow for me to jump safely... but this is a dream. I'm already half awake as I jump, as I plummet. Icy tendrils cut through me as I hit the ice-green water with a splash.

I crawl through the interior of a small school bus surrounded by schools of fish. The sunlight from above barely reaches us, filtered through the water to be a dark yellow-green. I push through the wall of the bus, and it gives way like plastic wrap.

I breathe. Around me, in every direction, are silver fish of every possible size and description. A face appears through the murk. A mermaid, her tail flicking around my leg and then she's in front of me. We're reaching for each other and we're kissing and the scene fades...

And I'm sitting next to him, our knees touching as we laugh about some random happenstance.

Seaweed. Scare Factor: 2/10.

I'm a blood angels chaplain leading my squad on a purging of a chaos controlled city (which is odd because I play Tau XD ) Then, a huge daemon appeared in front of us. I and my squad resented the emperor and so we readily joined his side. I remember looking over my army and telling them as the sun rose behind me.

*Scene Change*

I'm now in the city with the daemon. He gives me a tour of the city before showing me the temple that's being constructed. It resembles a huge pyramid made of steel and glass, and it stands about 20 stories high. Me and the daemon are on a gantry above the pyramid and inside I can see thousands of slaves riding minecarts, building as they go. The daemon laughs at them, but I tell him I object to the use of innocent civilians as slaves.

*Scene Change*

I'm in a large town hall, with about three hundred seats in the third closest to the door. Three pillars are set in front of them, leaving two entrances either side to get into the hall beyond. I go through. On the other side there is a door at the far end of the hall. On either side of the door there are small pools. The daemon appears behind me and explains that this is like a gladiatorial arena with monsters. He laughs at my apparent doom, but in this dream I'm super strong. I. Own. Everyone.

*Scene Change*

I'm climbing across complex scaffolding built around a sphinx. A giggling Japanese girl starts taking pictures and flirting with me. I just smile and wave, smile and wave...

1. I'm walking through the Grand Canyon with a school trip. Everything is ridiculously clear and vivid; the sky is the bluest I've ever seen and the rocks are towering above. We go to climb some of the cliffs and the texture of the rocks is rough beneath my fingers.

2. All I remember is shaving, and shaving poorly. Whenever I draw the razor across my face, I nick it and draw blood. Once I even pull a sheet of skin off instead of hair. I'm hurt and frustrated.

[These dreams, all of which were non-lucid, are actually from the night before last. The ones from last night are private.]

I'm at a supermarket. I attempt to get money out of an ATM, but my card doesn't work. While I'm there, I run into Jenny A. [She's a real-life friend of mine.]

I'm with a group of people my own age, and we're all studying for either the A+ or CCNA exams. We're discussing whether or not you should broadcast SSIDs. [That question has come up as I've been studying for the A+ in real life. The sample questions say you shouldn't broadcast them, but they're apparently operating under the assumption that the wireless network is only there for the benefit of company employees. If it's there for the benefit of customers, then of course you should broadcast the SSID, so your customers will know which network is yours.]

I'm outside a tall office building with P. We need to get into a conference room, where lunch is being served. The way we're going to get there is by riding up to the outside window of the conference room on a porch swing being lifted by a helicopter. P. goes up first. She tilts the swing so it's not at a right angle to the chains [by flipping it over? I guess so, but I didn't see her do it] and stands on top of it, holding on to the chain to her left. [I think] I tell her that that's dangerous, but she ignores me and rides up. She has no problem stepping off the swing and into the conference room.

I don't get to enter the conference room by riding up on the swing. I have to get there by climbing up this net of ropes that has appeared on the side of the building. My mom is there cheering me on. On my way up, I can smell the coffee in the conference room. When I get to where I can see into the room, some of the monsters from Sesame Street are there. Also, Mr. Saito is one of the people at the lunch meeting. [Why is he the only one from the Dream Team who's actually shown up in any of my dreams so far? I think it's because of my long-abiding love for Japan and everything about it.]

Quick roundup of this week's dreams. Yay, real life.



09/14/10 - No recall. None. Very little sleep.

09/15/10 - Illegible handwriting. Apparently this was a dream about drinking.

09/16/10
I'm on a family vacation to the States. There's an entire bulletin board dedicated to the "Ground Zero Mosque" in the lobby of the hotel. This starts me off on a rant about religious tolerance.

The Joker kidnaps two children. They're probably more trouble than they're worth.

I find a swimming pool in the shape of a tea infuser.

09/17/10
I'm driving my dad's old Ford truck. We're carrying something explosive, and if we hit anything suddenly, everything will go up in flames. Suddenly, the brakes are failing, and I have three options: I can drive into a fence, a pile of logs, or a swamp.

We hit the swamp, and the truck sinks into the muck and stops there. It's not sinking any farther though.

My dad turns around and looks at me. He's about to start yelling.

"Good thing this is a dream, right?" I say sheepishly.

Pause.

"Hey, this is a dream!"

I spend the rest of the dream climbing buildings. I'm having trouble flying, but I find that if I swing my arms and move my feet, I can walk vertically up the side of walls.

Scare Factor: 3/10
Rating: 3/10

Preface: after taking 1mg of melatonin I went to bed. I know I had other dreams but I don't remember the content. I was able to recall many of the details of this dream later, on my way to work.
It will be apparent that as climbing is more than just a hobby to me, I am not surprised it has made its way into my dreams. I actually hope to possibly improve my technique through lucid dreaming. Not this time though.

Dream: It starts, I'm watching a climbing competition. I see pro climbers doing their thing, mostly bouldering (doing problems at the most like 4 meters high). I begin to get excited and decide it's time to get my shoes and chalk, but I have misplaced my bag. So I walk around the place asking people where my shoes are. All of them guys who I don't think looked like climbers, more like frat brothers or something like that. There is the climbing wall outside, inside is a hallway with a bunch of thin curtains that barely hide mattresses behind them. The beds are beds for things beds are for though, not crash pads. The guys I'm asking about my bag are sitting on some of the beds. I see a girl, not particularly attractive, but interesting to say the least. She is walking the hall, I ask her and she doesn't answer. I decide it's helpless, my shoes, my chalk bag, and my bag are all lost, so I go to a shop and try buying shoes but they don't have any in my size at a price I want to buy them at so I decide to pick up my search again. I walk out into the hall and see the girl dancing. I do a little jig myself cause I do that sometimes, and she glares at me. I wake up.

Type: regular dream.
Lucidity: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Vividness: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Notes:
I went to bed at 3:00 AM last night and I was very tired.

It was fairly dark outside, the area illuminated by street lights, and I was in the yard in the front of an unknown friend's house, possibly for a party. Their house was two stories and all brick, except for the door and two large windows that looked like oak wood. There were a lot of people in the grassy front yard, I'm guessing at least twenty.

I heard this strange noise that sounded like a cross between a squeak and a balloon popping behind the house. A strange man rushed out from the back of the house (which was illuminated like the front and not dark) and said, "the chimney's blocked".

Now, I had my own idea of getting it fixed but my friend probably wouldn't approve of it.

I snuck over to the side of the house, which was completely flat brick and there was nothing to grab onto. I went around to the back, which was lit up by two large circular lights on either side, and saw that in the middle of the house, there was a long rectangular indent. This indent went all the way up from the ground to the roof, and it was a few feet deep. There were irregularly-shaped pipes coming out from the walls of this indent which I used to climb up the wall.

I had to grab the walls of the house itself a few times, because some parts had no pipe. I punched holes in the paper-thin brick walls to pull myself up.

1. My brother and I are at a theme park that seems to be based on world War II. As we walk along, our eyes are caught by what looks like an indoor mini golf course. When we enter, however, the attraction is a kind of real-life platformer. Fiendish puzzles of moving boxes are suspended above pits of water or water colored to look like "lava." It takes a lot of time and creative thinking, but we clear a bunch of levels together. Eventually, however, we reach the final stage, presided over by a cigar-smoking wax statue of General George Patton. In this stage, we have to carry a box of supplies over a very unstable path of floating and sinking boxes. I empty my pockets, knowing that I'll probably fall. They have my real-life every day carry in them, including my wallet, cell phone, keys, and Swiss Army knife. My brother and I then start to carry the boxy, but soon we simply give up.

2. I'm exploring the University of Tennessee in a kind of Space Station 13 style setup. The dream is set during a Latin convention, so the place is crowded, and I get up to a variety of hijinks. Highlights include leading a round of spiritual songs on the dance floor, climbing up recently painted ladders, tracking my friend H's little sister, and causing sonic annoyance on the football field. Lots of activity, but little in my notes.

3. A suit clad woman is driving a car of research station students back from a movie. The scenery isn't rural at all, but instead a kind of cyberpunk corporate hellhole. She convinces us to make an unnecessary fast food stop at a White Castle, and we enter the drive through. As we do so, however, she nonchalantly says "By the way, you're dreaming." I realize that yes, I am, but having a DC tell me straight up is enough to snap me out.

07/22/10

I'm travelling all over the continent. I think I'm driving through the US with some family members. We're passing a city on the freeway when I realize that I've been here before. We pull onto an exit and stop for lunch.

I explain to Oma what the buildings around us are, and mention about three restaurants I know by name that I've been to. We go inside one of them. I see a picture of myself on an indoor climbing wall.

I'm in a small town where my grandma used to live. The population is probably under five hundred. I'm moving in to one of the houses there, because I'm good friends with a few of the neighbours, all of whom are under thirty.

Now I'm getting ready to go back to school in Halifax. I'm planning to fly out the next day. I hear a knock at the door. I answer it, and a man hands me a pile of books, that I apparently ordered. I bought one of them, but the other two are from the Chinook (Saskatchewan) library system. I'm disappointed that I won't be able to read them in time.

The dream shifts and I'm in the Ixburg library to return the books.

I'm part of a group now. One of us might be Buffy Summers. A thin man with short dark hair and dark clothing is showing us an Egyptian hieroglyph, holding up a book that it's illustrated in. He explains that the hieroglyph is the symbol of a demon that's plaguing the town, and we have to stop it.

"If you ever encounter this symbol, run away really fast."

Hey, I think dimly, That's the name of my dream journal.

Library Fines. Scare Factor: 2.

July 1, 2010

Happy Canada Day, fellow Canadians.

People who walk into your life and claim to be a long lost relative are not to be trusted.

Sam and Dean are on a hunt with yet another member of their missing family unit. Let's call her Sue. I think I'm Dean for most of this dream.

The three of us are after a ghost. Sam's in danger, but Sue pulls him out of the way.

It turns out she's a demon. She uses a variation on the Enochian banishing sigil (for angels) to send us careening straight into our respective heavens. "Oh, I'll be fine." She says, "I'm going the other way."

From the third person, I'm watching Dean in his heaven, fixing cars. This weird tentacle being made of energy shows up and acts as the MS Office paperclip. You know the one.

Dean's becoming increasingly annoyed by the little helper. Meanwhile, I'm trying to force myself/him to remember what's going on so we can get out of here and find Sam.

---

I'm in Quickton, taking lessons from a guy with a rusty red truck so I can become a driving instructor. I'm driving the truck, and a guy makes fun of me for it. Then we go protest something outside of Tim Hortons.

I'm driving down grid roads with the truck. I'm going to meet someone. I have to pull over to take a piss, but I decide I should wait until I wake up.

I'm living in a house that I'm helping my parents build. We've already moved in, but we haven't finished building the second floor. My bedroom is up there, so a lot of climbing is involved.

FA. I wake up in the basement of my house in Ixburg. There are little bugs crawling over my blanket. They're about a centimeter long and they look like cockroaches crossed with shrimp. I try to ignore them, but I don't like them.

I'm a ten year old boy in boot camp. I have an upper bunk, and the ladder to get there is probably twelve feet tall. I'm having the time of my life. There's a warning on the top step of the ladder. It says that if you let your kids climb on this, you're a bad parent. The ladder falls backwards and catches on one of the other beds. I'm still hanging on.

I'm telling all my DCs that I've just had a brilliant idea. You know that holographic keyboard?



We should make a box the size of a rubix cube and project games from it. It'd be brilliant. I conjure up a prototype and place it on the desk. Then my POV runs through various games in full-screen.

Cousins. Scare Factor: 2.

The beginning of this dream is hazy. There are a few distinct details, but I am going to leave them out because I'm not really sure where they fit in.

All I know is, I was accused of stealing a book from a schoolhouse. I did steal the book, and when the teacher demanded I return it, I decided that I would.

I put the book in between my teeth and climbed up the schoolhouse (I have know idea why I didn't just use the door). It was a bit precarious, but I managed to scramble around the room, swing under, and get through the window. I put the book back on the bookshelf, but I still had a book between my teeth. The way back was even more dangerous. There were parts of the roof that were extremely narrow, but I made it.

I handed the book back to the teacher. It was wet and a corner was frayed from being in my mouth. The teacher looked at it disgustedly. Then I remembered that I had already put the book back on the shelf. I was good. I took this book back, and I can't quite remember the rest of the dream.

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.

This seems to be a dream within a dream; I start playing Dungeons and Dragons at my research station, choosing the dwarf artificer as my character. Perspective quickly shifts to being the dwarf in a fantasy worldscape. I'm heading with my party into a mining town, which has as its access point an impressive tower that lowers into the mines. I enter and begin walking down the stairs to my assigned bunk. It seems to take ages, and as I pass the other adventurers who have already gotten bunks, I notice that their names are written on whiteboards in the style of a college dorm. All of them have names of people I know from my college, as well.
When I arrive at the bottom of the stairs, I find my real life name written on a board beside a bunk. The space is very spartan, and in the back of my head I wish there were a faucet to wash my hands. When I turn around, lo and behold, there is one! I remember the "turnaround summon" I've read about on the Dreamviews forums, and this reality check lets me realize that I'm dreaming. I get about a second or two of true lucidity as water pours over my hands, but after that I wake up. My eyes are still closed and I try fervently to get lucidity back, but the images I'm conjuring are just like those of a waking daydream and not the full-sense immersion of a lucid dream.

I walk down an empty road, then go climbing.

I'm walking down the highway west of Ixburg. There's a semi-trailer parked at the side of the road. I peer inside, but it's empty. Now that I look around, there are a lot of abandoned vehicles here. The ditches seem to be flooded, as well.

I duck behind the truck as a cop car rolls slowly by, scanning the area for life. Once it's gone, I keep walking.

The road west of Ixburg, in reality, is a mostly flat, straight piece of asphalt leading directly to a bigger highway. In dreams, however, it leads into a treacherous, cliff-like system that's made mostly of mud and would be very bad to drive in during a rainstorm. The Road typically leads to the various parks around Ixburg, the place my Grandma used to live, and Wood Mountain. It's a real place, there just aren't any mountains.

Later, I'll get an image of my mom trying to follow me down The Road in her car. She'll have to call me and ask for directions, and I'll tell her it's more about intent than the road you drive down.

shift

I'm lead climbing on an indoor structure. I haven't hooked myself into the first bolt, and this is a dangerous route to climb. If I fall now, I'll hit the protruding ledge directly below be, probably break something, and go tumbling all the way to the ground.



I look back at my climbing partner, who is... Misha Collins. Hello again. Guess who's turning into a dream sign?

Two men are arguing in the change-rooms. I'm one of them. The other guy is my boyfriend, I think, and he's... um... yelling very loudly that he isn't gay? What?

The Road. Scare Factor: 2.

1. I'm washing dishes in the research station kitchen, when V comes in and says "I like your orange skirt!" I think she says "shirt," so I look down and see that I'm wearing my Star Wars band photo tee along with blue jeans. I respond that I'm confused, but she keeps repeating the phrase a couple of times until I realize that there's an orange ring around the bottom of my tee, presumably from a bad wash process.

2. A kindly and eccentric professor is taking my class outside to do some reading. We emerge into a wood that looks exactly like the backyard in my old house, except there is a huge cliff off to one side. Some people try to climb it and fall, but I ask him how to get to the plateau at the top. He shows me the easy rock stairs on the other side.