Recent DJ Posts

#493 – DILD – 9:08AM

There is some preliminary dream about my wife looking very Asian. I am taken aback by this, but quickly have a false memory that this is how she is supposed to be. I have warm feelings of love and communicate this to her as I normally do in waking life.

Now it's a false awakening and I decide to just go ahead and sleep on the floor... or did I wake up there? I have the thought that the uncomfortable sleep should help me induce a lucid dream since I have been failing all morning. As I try to have a WILD, my wife starts talking and asking questions about what I am doing. Typical dream wife! I don't get too annoyed, but I do my best to ignore her. As I watch her groping hand over the edge the bed looking to make contact with me, I mumble something about trying to have a lucid dream.

Suddenly, I am overly worried about waking up on time for work. I know I must have set the alarm for 5am but I need to make sure. I get up and try to check the alarm clock on the dresser, but none of the buttons are working and the digits are distorted. There is a VCR next to the alarm clock that I take for granted, but the time is all zeros. Frustrated, I leave the bedroom looking for my cell phone, but quickly notice it's in my right pocket. I pull it out and hit the side button. The screen dimly lights up for just a second and then fades out. Then I finally get it! What if I am already in a dream? I do a quick half-assed nose plug and agree that this is indeed a lucid dream. At that point, the dream becomes dark and I nearly wake up, but I quickly stabilize by crawling and peering into the darkness – my usual bag of tricks. The dream quickly stabilizes and I stand back up.

I look around the dream environment and notice that I am in the first house I ever purchased back when I first started lucid dreaming. There is no irony here, just time distortion. Forgetting that, I become over-whelmed with euphoria that I am lucid dreaming and shout, “OH LUCID DREAMING! HOW I'VE MISSED YOU!” Then at a normal tone, “I did it. I really did it.” I notice a large, old-looking, child's book on the floor. I try to read it. I name off some random words that appear out of the alphabet soup swimming on the pages. I decide this random garbage isn't worth my time and throw the book away.

I decide to leave the house but find the back door is missing. I find this mildly curious, but I don't let it deter me as I swiftly move to the front. I pause at the other exit and think about the daylight and the grass I just saw outside the large pained window in the living room. I use expectation to enter that world and not the dark abyss that sometimes grips me when I transition areas. My efforts pan out, but I do notice the somber, overcast sky. The grass is looking really dry with a lot of brown patches.

I recall my dream goal to talk to an animal; I had a really funny dream about a talking rooster the night before and wanted to repeat some of that experience. This time a large white husky type dog comes running to me. He's so excited to see me. He dashes around me letting me pet him a little then runs circles around me. After a moment of play, I mentally tell him to talk and he quickly reminds me of the dog from the movie Up “OH my master. I am so happy to see you.” Something about this is disappointing and I decide to mimic the chicken from my other dream hoping to recapture the humor there. I say, “Cockadoodledoo maaannn.” Yes the chicken from my dream sounded like an old burned out hippie. The reply I get is total unexpected and that's what I love about my dreams. I hear an echoing answer from across the street, but it's no chicken that I can tell. How do chickens sound when they talk? Not like this, I suppose. Certainly not like the dream that had me laughing all day. No, the voice sounds like a little boy and I am curious to find it's owner. We play a quick game of Marco Polo, stoner rooster edition, and I am taken across a large yard to a barbed-wire fence. Because of the nature of dreams, I know this could turn into a tangled mess so I quickly decide to phase right through the wire. There is some fight, but I mange just fine. I sense the boy is calling to me from this old farm house that's now in my sights, but just before I reach it, the dream switches to black and I wake up. Damn the luck!

In some small early 20th century village, I'm the youngest in a family of three sons, and for years now it's been expected that I'll marry the neighbor's youngest daughter when we grow up - we've always been good friends. In the previous scene we'd all been sitting around my family's dinner table; now I've gone to meet her down by the river, which is so full of plants it gives the impression you could walk across them like a bridge. The girl's here waiting, but before I go to meet her, I'm distracted by another girl, a stranger, standing in the center of the river. The observer side of me thinks, I have to remember this.

Her hair is probably blonde, but it's so matted and dirty that it's hard to tell. She's dressed in old-fashioned men's clothes, a shapeless and colorless coat over a blue velvet waistcoat with a pattern of rosebuds. Then I realize that while I've been focusing on remembering the details of her appearance, I've been missing the conversation the character side of me is having with her. I drop back to focus on what the character side of me is doing.

Years later, but near that same river. One of my brothers is handing me a silver pocket watch that belongs to our father, and telling me that he's in Madrid - they've known this all along, apparently. My brothers got me to come back here on the pretense that our father's missing - I'm annoyed but not surprised to find that was a lie. There's a woman here, somehow connected to that girl in the river but not the same person, and something about biting down on a chain, and her little fangs.

I'm carrying one end of a wooden box through what looks like an abandoned house, with that woman holding the other end - it's not particularly large or heavy, just large enough to be awkward for one person. I'm looking at our hands on the box, close enough to be nearly touching. Her nails look thick and discolored, greyish; there's blood ingrained around the nail, but I'm thinking that the blood's not what's causing the dark greyish appearance, since there's blood all over my hands too.

That woman is kissing me and holding me in place, not letting me turn my head to see what's going on, telling me not to move when I try to. Something is very wrong. There's other people here; the observer side of me recognizes this moment and I switch to third person to avoid it. The scene still continues in front of me, they kill her, but I don't see much of it, focusing on remembering the earlier scenes.

As Hemlock Grove's Roman, me and Peter have just entered this old abandoned tower, and I'm showing off some of the tricks I've picked up since the last time we saw each other. I turn myself into a cloud of bats, thinking of this as something I'd learned from that one previous dream, and I come out of it high on the wall, looking down at Peter watching me, able to hold myself up against the vertical wall just by gripping with my hands - it's not completely effortless, but it's still easy. It's a rush. I'm having so much fun showing off with Peter, I want to laugh. This makes me start thinking something about connections with people, and then there's a memory gap.

The next scene I remember is in a different part of the same building, the memory gap only lasted for about one or two changes of scene. I'd climbed up into the metal rafters and I've been heading up in a spiral, and I've just come across a closed door; but I'm not playing around anymore, I'm in a hurry, either chasing or being chased by something. The door has no handle on this side, so I hammer on it and shout, "Open the door. Open the door, mom!" (I was thinking of someone specific by 'mom', but whoever she was, it wasn't my IRL mother or the mother of the character I'd started the scene as - I'm not sure I'm still playing his role by this point.) Door still doesn't open, and I'm not surprised. I step back and look at it. There's no way to open it from this side, just a keyhole big enough to look through - I can see some light through it, and I have the feeling I'm meant to look through it, and that thought pisses me off. I grip the side of the door, forcing my fingers into the gap between the door and the frame, and I wrench it open.

The other side of the door leads to somewhere else completely, unconnected to the building I was just in. It's incredibly vivid, nothing like the dream I'd been having up until this point - which hadn't seemed un-vivid in any way, but I'm thinking of this as a completely different way of seeing things. I'm in a stone hallway, brownish-yellowish stones, filled with many doors, all of them wooden, arched, narrow, dull red. I still have that sense of being in a hurry, and I immediately go to open the first door to my left. But as I do, I hear a woman's voice - the mother I'd referred to before - shouting this strangled "No!" and I hear the sound of a door closing, and footsteps in a hurry. And then I'm awake.

(Really awake, none of the usual transition, just footsteps and "No!" and suddenly in my bed with my eyes open. Was convinced I'd been woken up by the actual front door and actual footsteps - which is not unusual, I sleep while other people are up - but no, just the dream. Back to sleep.)

As Constantine (rhymes with turpentine), I've been in a police interrogation room for a while now when they let in this elegant older woman to see me, calling her "Mrs. Constantine." She's supposed to be my mother, which is a lie of course, my mother being long dead, but I instantly play along with the act. Memory gap, and then I'm being put in a holding cell, and I try to convince someone I pass along the way to have the police find that woman and pick her up, quick. Not sure I made myself clear, though, I'd been passing out, having a hard time staying conscious. I can see the brown smoke of her spell wrapping around me. Blacked out.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I had a classroom scene, so I went lucid and walked out. I didn't have any particular destination in mind aside from getting out of the school, and the first door that I reached for took me into the kitchens - still meant to be part of the school. The next door I can find is a refrigerator door, and I give that a shot - no good, I open it and find food inside. I think to myself that this is probably too strong an association to bother trying again, so I remove the refrigerator from the wall. There's a white wooden door behind it. This one opens onto a satisfyingly different scene - rolling green hills and a mountain in the distance that I mentally compare to Mt. Fuji from its size and the way it dominates the landscape, though otherwise they don't look alike.

I walk along a paved road leading towards that mountain. At one point I come across a house, and the road divides so that one path leads up a slope to that building and down again to rejoin the main road on the other side, and I'm admiring the organic shape of both the road and the house. It's a white one-story building composed of several rounded rooms, with a reddish-brown shingled roof with little spires over each rounded room. There were quite a few plants that I was admiring, and gardening tools, but I knew this was going to be too much detail for me to remember, and a lot of it didn't have any IRL comparisons I could easily make, to make it easier to remember. I focus on a couple woven baskets lying on a bench, with lids with little spires like the ones on the roof, the last thing I focus on as the path leads me back down to the main road.

The path leads me into a town, or a small city maybe, starting in a little square with two clocks standing on black iron poles. Both of them show the same time, 3:00, with the second hand pointing down at the 6; a bell tolls, and then they both run backwards, until every hand points to the top, midnight exactly.

The path leads on to another square, this one with a big brass bell. There are a fair number of people in the streets around me now, but I'm only paying attention to one - a man standing beneath that bell. He calls me over. He's this older man, and I mentally compare him to Mister Rogers, that sort of friendly and wise and harmless impression. His speech is slurred and very deliberate, as if he has a hard time forming English words. He says quite a few things about me heading for the mountain, and preparing for that, and he mentions K., an old IRL friend who I haven't gotten in touch with for a long time. I'm a little frustrated by knowing I'm not going to be able to remember all these details when I wake up, and I'm having a hard time picking and choosing which parts to focus on, but I hold up a hand to stop him and ask about K., ask him to clarify - is he saying I need K. with me at the mountain, that I can't do it alone? He's surprised by the question. He says, no, you can go on alone. And he compares me to "a dry martini: high in the hand, but hard to keep it." Okay, that's suitably convoluted phrasing that I'm definitely not going to remember that unless I wake up now. I choose to wake up so I can remember at least some of what he's said. I regret this decision almost instantly.

There's this machine. I fed it a small living thing to activate it. Now the screen's showing me several options to choose from, words that don't mean anything to me. The one on the screen at the moment is JEON. Swiping between options, I settle on a word that resembles AERIE written partially with Greek letters. The screen changes to show an image of four clocks. I'm aware I must memorize their appearances quickly, because I won't have another chance.

They're very elaborately designed, beautiful things - solid organic lines mixed with jagged exposed machinery; black wood, black clockwork, gold accents. The first is the simplest - a curving tapered pillar with the word MONUMENT in gold at the base. The others have human faces as ornamentation - the third has a woman's face with eyes closed like a mask and a single arm, arranged in such a way that it gives the impression that she's cradling something.

To the left of the screen, a case appears. It has spaces to fit each of the clocks. At the base of the machine, a slot produces several road maps. Without unfolding them, I can see that several places have been circled.

Dream recall from today's WBTB/naps.

Dream 1(fragment):

Something about piloting some craft.

Dream 2(fragment):

Something about dragons.

Dream 3(fragment):

Some shmup boss fight.

Dream 4:

I try to do DEILD but it fails but then i try for WILD and soon transition occurs and FA fades into my view. I get up but it"s very unstable, it's hard to stand and navigate, i try to stabilize but that doesn"t works, then i switch to quadruped stance and go towards balcony door. I try to break through but whole unstability makes me just bounce away. I notice weird mechanism on the wall and there are a few clocks on it, i pick two and one of them is at 4h and another is at 8h, dream fades.

Dream 5(fragments):

i was browsing dreamviews and there were weird spammy posts around.

I fell back to sleep this morning, after noting my first set of dreams. There was a woman truck driver in my dream, and she was pretty good looking brunette. She needed her truck loaded. I got in a nearby loader and took scoups out of a pile of topsoil and put it in her truck. Loading it went quickly, as if I were using the huge loader bucket as a giant shovel instead of it being machine operated. I filled her trailer first, getting it to the maximum capacity like she wanted but not overfilling it, then I did the truck the same way. She took off in her truck, it was a short double, once I was done.



Next I'm with my dad on his property, at least it was a representation of his property that was about 10 acres big and about half woods on it. He was going around marking out spots where he wanted to build circular lookout towers. I didn't understand exactly why he wanted to do this, but I imagined they would look cool once they were finished. He was only marking were to put the foundations at this point. They were circular marks in the ground, supposed to be 6 feet across in diameter, but visually they looked closer to being 10 feet across. Ah dream math.

My dream transitions to me returning to work. I'm on a computer doing or learning stuff. It is next to a wall, and over to my left is a door to the office. Management is in there. Seems I'm early, since my shift hasn't started yet, and I need to get ready. I'm bundled up like its wintertime, strange. So I'm over at the locker area trying to find one to use, which is is as big as a health clubs locker room. The ones I find are either in use, dirty, or too low to the floor. I give up on that, but what is neat is when I leave the locker room the clothes I'm wearing has changed anyway. Now it should have been getting time to swipe in. I had glanced at a clock on the wall, but it was saying something after 11:00. Another one in the hall had a different time, and then the timeclock itself had even a different time! I give up on trying to figure out what time it is, so I ask a co-worker if it is time to do so. She says "yes". She swipes in, and then I swipe in as well, even though the time seems to be off.

I had another odd dream last night. This time, it was just a clock whose time kept rapidly changing.

There were some voices in the background, a few of which sounded familiar, but only one of which I could place. oddly enough, it was Applejack...

They were talking about their faith in humanity being lost.

The entire dream gave me an odd feeling of being in danger.

This confuses me because I don't think I'm prone to having dreams like this.

10 Aug 2011

Something about digital clocks/timers and two different people actually turning out to both be me.

1. I go to the Cincinnati Art Museum with L.H. and Clinton McK. We're there for a special gallery that I've already visited. It contains primarily works by Normal Rockwell, but there are also cases filled with intricate old clocks. The centerpiece is an installation called the "Wall of Memories," which is comprised of hundreds of small video screens. Sometimes they each show a different scene, but the most impressive moments are when all screens act in unison to create a larger picture. An idyllic country scene starts to play as we leave the gallery.

Clinton stays behind as L.H. and I head out. Unexpectedly, she breaks out into a run, and I have to move very fast to catch her. My movement is like a gliding run, almost a skating motion, but I am only wearing shoes. When we reach obstacles and stairs I vault over them, eventually ending up in an auditorium like that from a previous dream about the Cincinnati Museum Center. I recognize this and go very semi-lucid; sensations are more real but I lack control. For whatever reason I start eating a delicious hunk of Cheddar cheese.

2. I go with L.H. as my date, to a grade school reunion, which ends badly. I distinctly remember myself saying, "These people made me the neurotic wreck I am today," but little else.

3. I'm watching ice hockey, and the goalie is making a series of incredible saves.

24.07.2011

Meshuggah/Living Quarters (DILD)

NON-DREAM DREAM LUCID

Lucid task of the month!

I just have a bunch of words scribbled on the paper, and I'm not sure what order all of it came in, so bear with me.

"fish, increase, portal, piano, this is art, something I can't read written here..., sho(?), clock, hotel, keys, Berta (two & a half men), 3am, dog, never, spin, ghetto bitches, scared shitless, massive clock, time"

Bolded so nobody mistakes that word during my swearing spree.


It was a false awakening. There was a glow-in-the-dark thread shaking at one end of my room, while whatever was shaking it was blocked by a pillar just at corner of my bed by my right foot. There was an extremely ugly old lady sitting next to me, and it was very dark. I felt calm, and just closed my eyes and went back to sleep. Now that I think of it, it was my room from Fayetteville, not here in Albuquerque.

There's some dream here, not sure what. I'm in my music room here in my apartment, except there are pianos on both sides and there's a line of drum cymbals above each piano. "Dad... we only have one piano." Boom. Lucid.

I sit down and both these pianos disappear, replaced by one in front of me, whereas my my chair is moved back in order to allow space for the piano between it and my computer desk. I being to play it in the upper octaves in the key of C.







All the notes are in C, but in no way is it playing what I push. There is an excessive amount of hammer noise as if I were playing an acoustic piano, but thank god there was no chorus effect to it. Some of the keys to the left of my hands were pushing themselves.

Another false awakening. I look and see the same thread, same pillar, and same old hag. Wait wait wait, I'm still dreamining.

The thread ends up being attached to one of my Nike SB shoes, which is multi-colored with a white/charcoal base, a turqoise check and turqoise laces. The shoe is hopping around as if it has a life of its own. At this point, I am instantly scared shitless as it hops toward my bed. "Wait a minute.." I thought. "This is a dream. He can't hurt me." And I was no longer scared. The old hag never moved, and I never interacted with her.






Yeah, she was that ugly.

Somewhere in here it is no longer nighttime and I'm out of bed. Don't remember this bit.

I'm in my living room. Well, not mine, but a very nice glass-walled bit on the edge of an ocean cliff. Think of the DirecTV commerical.







Shelves are mounted to the wall at some points. I can't describe this apartment as it would take me days to communicate it. But on these shelves was a giant alarm clock (the one I just bought yesterday at Best Buy.) The text isn't changing.

My dad is out on the balcony hanging over the cliff drinking a beer. I'm still lucid at this point and want to try another goal of mine: "open a portal."

I try to use telepathic powers but this does not work. I then think of the wall as only a dream and non-solid and try to jump through it. I think I would have had much better success if I turned around so I wasn't looking at the wall before I jumped.

I then tried thinking of the molecules, and the gaps in between them. I CHARGED at full speed. Thunk. No such luck.

I leave the apartment and walk out. Turns out there is no door, but the giant party room rolls into the lobby of the most extravagent hotel I've ever seen. I was on the 45th floor. The whole thing was open in the center with the walkways around the edges, a circular building.

I soon learned that my new house was inside an apartment and was still under construction, thus no door. It also appeared to me that the ocean was only where the balcony was, and all the other ocean views through glass were illusions.

There's a skip of no recall. Some chubby girl with black hair, your typical fat prep, was reaching in the fridge. Charlie sheen said "assist you in a sec."
"What?"
"Berta!"
Berta: "Pfft. Right. "
Prep: "Oh bitch what da fuck?"
-ensue ghetto argument-

I'm in a dark room with red lighting and red carpet. A couple Ibanez RG2228 guitars are laid out on racks around me.







I was with Michel from Meshuggah. Yup. He was giving me a death glare with his hands out away from him walking towards me, as if possessed.







Wait, something tells me this dream isn't over.


Another awakening, this time for real. I roll over and... WTF. It's only 3:03 AM. I went to sleep at 1:10, and I remember looking at my clock at 1:40 and spending forever trying to enter SP. I must be seriously deprived. Yet I slept 9 hours yesterday and napped for two. I've been getting 8 hours a night. hmm..

Nope, not a dream.


I never went through any doors in this dream. I've been trying to RC every time I pass a door as they appear in virtually every dream. Somehow this is my only lucid in almost a year and yet it has no dreamsigns.

I think the lucid portion was ten to fifteen minutes long.

So a friend of mine who got me interested in this site has been telling me about the whole "reality check" things to enduce lucid dreams, but I've always failed in them UNTIL TWO NIGHTS AGO...

In my dream, I was in this big city that kind of looked like a tiny packed street in China or Japan or something, with tons of lights and words I couldn't recognize on tons of signs all over the place. My friend Lupe shoes up and she's all "hey, wanna go to this knick knack store?" or however she worded it that made it seem like we were going to some junk shop down the street. I said sure and we headed for the store. When we get inside I see tons of shelves and tons of figurines and such but I can't make out what they are or what they mean, but I somehow know what they all are. There's a clock near the door and a few people in the store. Lupe sees somebody she knows in the store and starts talking to them while I aimlessly wander down an isle of knick knacks. I check the time but the clock is all topsy-turvy like I can't make out the exact time every time a blink it changes or the hands move in funny ways (and that's normal for me in dreams, I can never read clocks. That COULD be a reality check but it never registers for me, I just think it's completely normal and that the clock will tell me the time later haha).

I turn back to the shelves and overhear Lupe talk about her class schedule with the person she ran into in the store. Whatever she said made me think, like "hey, she doesn't have that class this quarter" or "wait a minute, she's graduating next quarter not next year" or something that made me realize what she was saying was wrong. And then it hits me:

ITS A DREAM.

HOLY SH*T.

I start floating.

I'm all in my head "woah, I'm floating, this is a dream and I'm floating YES! I can do anything I want in this dream this is fantastic!"

And then like amnesia, I find I'm back down on the ground and everything in this dream is considered "normal" and I'm back to my fantasy in the dream not knowing it's a dream anymore. I just go through the isles, Lupe catches up with me, and we leave for another store a few blocks away. We don't get to it because I "wake up."

BUT I DIDN'T WAKE UP!

I'm in bed, in a room that is basically my apartment but the scenery is mixed with my apartment and Lupe's living room. I sit up in bed, stretch and see my friends Jackie and Sam are there but Lupe isn't. I groggily great them, head towards the kitchen (I'm suddenly wearing a white robe for no good reason), and pour myself a glass of iced tea like I would do if I actually was awake. I nonschalantly tell them about how I had a lucid dream but I wasn't reacting to it as I the actually awake person I am right now typing this. Everything after that becomes fuzzy and then I'm ACTUALLY awake finally.

So basically two momentous things happened that I'm not even sure really happened: a dream within a dream, which I never have, and a lucid dream, which I apparently had. But it was like I only noticed I was lucid for a few minutes and then I was sucked back into the dream reality. BUT after I was back in the dream reality, I had "split personalities" again, where I see myself in the dream doing stuff like I'm narrating or filming it or something but I can't do anything to change its course. Up til the lucid point in the store, I was in my own point of view FINALLY. I rarely have my own point of view dreams.

So I kind of want an opinion... was this really a lucid dream? Or was this my dream person making myself think I had a lucid dream? It's confusing...

TA DA

Original dream dated 02/04/2006:
So I just woke up from a stupid nightmare...

I do this thing where I'm having nightmares and for some reason I can't wake up. I don't know why. I may even know I'm having a nightmare, I just can't seem to make that shift from 'asleep' to 'awake'. Basically, I know full well that I'm having a dream, I just can't do a damn thing about it.

So first, I dreamed that for some reason I was sent parachuting, only for some reason parachutes had the capability to rise off of the ground. Instead of being strapped in with a harness, I just held onto a handle. While I was doing this, I briefly thought "C would think it was funny that I was having a dream about parachuting". Then, when I was fairly high up, I either lost my grip or just plain let go.
So I 'woke up' a little while later, covered by a sheet, with a nasty case of rug burn everywhere, where I had hit the ground/slid... it hurt like a bitch... anyway, there was some kid there who had found me... I dunno.
Then, for some reason, I was making a movie, and working with some really cool actors.

Then, the dream shifted, and I was dreaming about a skinny old witch who had to go stop a bunch of zombies. So she came to this castle... place? There were a king and queen, and they were complaining about how there was an old man who just wouldn't stay dead...
So she went out to talk to the old man zombie, who said he was waiting for his 'date' who had never gotten there. He was eating some soup. The witch ate some soup, which I guess was pretty good, and asked how old it was. He said "oh, it's not that old, only a year or so", to which she gagged a bit but continued eating out of politeness and a desire to humor him. Then she saw that he had a chess set, and asked if he played chess. He replied that yes, he did, but this one chess problem had been confounding him. She went and looked at it and realized that it was (to her) a relatively basic problem. Meanwhile, he sharpened his teeth on the chair. Before she could tell him how to solve it, he attacked her, making this awful screech. She managed to fend him off. She went back to the castle, where the dog was cooking a stew, and they all turned out to be zombies also, although the dog's stew wasn't nearly as good as the old man's. So she kicked all of their asses and then let out a hypersonic screech of triumph. The screech left them all pretty confused, like, "Why was that woman screaming at us?" so they just went back to eating their stew.

Then I dreamed about a cat howling in the dark. I woke up from the dream and wandered around, but the cat appeared to be o.k.

Then I dreamed about clock hands, and about how there was this giant clock with 3 hands, and how the hands had to be arranged just so to indicate a particular point in time - not just in a regular day, I mean, in the past or in the future or whatever. Like, 10:00 p.m. in 3 days looked completely different from 10:00 pm today. So I dreamed that I rearranged the hands of the clock and suddenly I was back to making the movie again and the king from my last dream was there, telling me how to work the clock.

And then, for some reason, I was underwear shopping, and I was getting very upset that they didn't have the color that I wanted.