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I had a very bizarre dream that I'm compelled to document. It wasn't quite lucid, but...well, read on.

Early as I can remember, I was in heaven in what looked like a cross between a mall and a cathedral. It was very crowded. By chance I found the man who had murdered me in heaven also. I declared that I was going to kill him (smite his soul or whatever) and that the Angel of Vengeance was on my side. After this short monologue I was about to attack the guy, but before I could do anything he stabbed me, killing me. After a short delay I was reborn as an angel of vengeance, called a One (Something--I can't quite recall what, it wasn't "Winged", I think it started with an M) Angel, and not just one--it seems as I had spawned as a squad of armed angels. It seems that this rebirth had taken some time, since after returning the man had been long gone. I searched heaven looking for the man but could not find him. Instead I returned to Earth and, running out of patience, I began to kill anyone who looked like the guy (from the start of the fight to here, the dream passed as some sort of weird top-down camera strategy RPG). It seems that to end my rampage I was returned to Earth with no memory except the name "One (Whatever) Angel". The dream then seemed to follow me on a search to find out what this name meant. I began by asking clergy or people who seemed religious; they all either straight-faced denied that they exist or looked at me in shock and horror and told me to get away from them. As my search went on with no answers I began just asking random strangers (my search took me to a drink stand just as it was closing in what was some in-dream deja vu, as I'd recognized this even from a deep early part of the dream that I don't now remember). Early on in my search I'd come across a girl who had overheard me asking questions at some point and had taken an interest in me. She eventually explained to me that she could help me remember everything through a process that involved dreams (vaguely Inception-style); I seemed to have a vague understanding of this process already and was firmly against it for a while. As time went on and my search for answers grew more desperate I eventually agreed to try it. It was to take place in what looked like some sort of park. As I entered, I came in behind an old, black lady accompanied by a young child. I recognized the old lady as someone I had previously asked about the angel who was disturbed by my question. The child stopped ahead of her and turned around, he asked, "Are you sure you want to do this? It could be the last time..." to which the old lady responded with something about helping these troubled young folk. I followed them to where the girl was waiting for us (I'm going to give her the name Ashley, it seems to fit my memory). In addition to the old, black woman (let's call her Oracle, since she looked like the latter version from the Matrix), Jon Voight was (apparently) helping us. They explained that Ashley would have to sit/lay on top of me in order to merge our dreams and gave me a large bag to put over my butt since apparently the process had several unpleasant side effects (supposedly most people shat themselves upon coming out of it). I sat down on a bench and they gave me some sort of injection and then immediately I was in the back (left) seat of a car, with Ashley sitting to my left, the others in the front (Jon Voight driving). I explained to them that I was once an oneironaught myself and briefly described my first lucid dream. As if to reply and boast of his own lucid dreaming skill, Jon Voight turned his head into an inflated version of Ashley's head. We all laughed, but I noticed that the situation was rather strange so I did a reality check that failed. I quickly exclaimed, "Holy shit, we're dreaming already! That's amazing." Then I looked over at Ashley, who was looking at me also, however she appeared out of it or drunk. I noted here that despite the reality check failing I didn't seem to be able to exert any lucid control; at the time I attributed this to the process occurring in the overarching dream storyline but now that I think about it after the fact it seemed kind of weird. At this point I had a very brief false awakening (I only remember because I awoke to a lit room before actually awakening) which was followed quickly by an actual awakening.

I'm not going to count this among my lucid dreams being as it fit into the context of the dream that my reality check would fail (maybe this also explains my apparent lack of dream control). It was a curious experience. I'm a little disappointed I didn't get to see the end to my search for answers.

Ultrashort fragment this morning wherein I was at a party or social gathering of some sort and we were trying to get some girl to freak out by making it look as though we were snorting cocaine, but it was really just crushed graham crackers and powdered sugar.

Had another dream I was playing Starcraft 2 (I should iterate that I neither own nor have played the multiplayer thereof). I was playing what was evidently my first 1v1 with some guy that I may have kinda known. It was TvT and I was playing predictably newbish and sloppy, but it was a close game that came down to a base razing race that I won just as my opponent was attacking my command center. I noticed some unusual gameplay behavior; he was scanning around his base and I was able to see his scans as though they were my own, and when he started banshee harassing I switched to viking production and my first viking was produced instantly--seems my dream wanted me to win.

A weird sequence, likely inspired with a chance meeting last night with an old FFXI friend as well as an unrequited mystery from those days as well as several related events earlier in the day.

There was an early sequence where I seem to recall a Starfox-style shmup that I can't place within the context of the rest of the dream.

It seems that I lived in some unfamiliar downtown location, and that members of my old TiamatsFangs FFXI linkshell were getting together in real life to do some sort of video game-esque covert operation. We were to try to get into some kind of factory, the entrance to which was on the roof of a tall building, to demolish...something. We went in, and made our way to the end, but my partners started dying as we got ready to blow up the place. There was some kind of weird monster/alien thing killing people. As I fled out I turned and saw it grotesquely kill two people. I managed to escape back onto the roof-entrance, the only survivor. Except it flashed back to before the operation began. Since I knew what would happen I began trying to prepare an escape route, cleaning up excess ammo, weapons, and items on the floor to make picking up things for use easier, however I became frustrated that my partners were sitting around goofing off instead of preparing for the mission so I gave up and left. On my way home I realized I could use the opportunity of the TiamatsFangs' gathering to track down Jillia. I had already called and talked to her at some point during the preparation for the operation, so on my way home I called her number again but she didn't answer. When I got home to a room that looked like some sort of home office I sat down and started to think about how I could proceed. I started looking through the contacts on my phone and noticed I had a second number for Jillia, so I called it. An older woman answered the phone; I asked her if Jillia was there to which she replied yes. I asked the woman for the location of this phone number to which she replied that it was a place called "The Dungeon". I thanked her and hung up to consult the internet for the Dungeon's location; I remember that the first time I searched for it I forgot to specify the city I was in (when I corrected it, I corrected it with Fargo, ND or 58102, so evidently this dream was supposed to take place in Fargo). I quickly found it online, it was some sort of arcade. I went there; inside I met the older woman I had spoken to earlier behind a counter just inside the entrance. Also there were several teenagers there, I thought it odd that several of the boys were shirtless--and also that none of them were playing any arcade games, in fact there were no arcade games at all. The area was mostly empty except for some furniture and beanbag chairs. I asked the woman if Jillia was there again and she offered to take me to her. As we slowly made our way back I continued to observe the bizarre behavior of the children here. The woman explained that Jillia was a poor girl, having been abused and I recall ending that explanation mentally by adding "by these people" to the end. As we reached the entrance to the basement, I observed a short, ugly-looking girl and a boy getting ready to have sex, and they were eventually joined by a second boy. I went down into the basement alone. At the bottom was a large room, the room was pitch black except where it was sparsely lit by a small television in the middle on the other side of the room. There was some kind of clothing rack blocking the direct path to the television, instead leading a path around the outside of the room. In the far back corner there was a green couch that was very brightly lit. I called out for Jillia and she answered, though I couldn't see her at all. I replied, "Now there's a voice I recognize!" She sounded somewhat paranoid however. She instructed me to go to the couch in the back corner. Standing in the light it was even harder to see into the darkness, but I sensed that she had moved from near the TV to around between me and the door. She instructed me to remove my pants and shirt so I removed my black coat, shirt, and pants and set them on the couch. She then instructed me to go over and play the game. I went over, in just my underwear, and sat down by the TV. There was an old school Sega console there with what looked to be some sort of hacked old school Sonic game. I picked up the controller and hadn't even started playing when I heard the door to the basement slam shut. Alarmed that Jillia may have ran off, I quickly got up and returned to the couch to put my clothes back on and try to follow her. As I was putting my clothes back on the lights came on in the rest of the room. The floor was concrete and the walls were painted a bland white, it looked for sure like somewhere people may be held captive and I recall thinking, "Aw shit, I'm trapped down here." I immediately suspected the bizarre people on the floor above of foul play. When I checked the door, however, it was unlocked so I went upstairs to leave. The teens that were there before were outside in the rain, apparently having fun and taking pictures of each other. I quietly left, trying not to draw attention to myself. About a block away I turned and looked back, trying to think of how I could find her now. The dream ends there.

Side note: with some more effort into reality checking around phones as previously planned, I might have been able to catch this one.

I'm pretty sure I just had my first lucid dream. It seemed kind of long at the time but I may only remember some bits and pieces now, gonna try to get down as much as I can. And it's weird, it feels so foggy now. Was a very intriguing experience. There was another dream before it but I want to get down as much of the lucid as I can so I'm writing it first.

I'm trying to recall what it was that triggered the reality check. I think it was that I was laying in bed or on the phone with my wife and she said something absurd (I think it had something to do with her saying she was on her way home from class at university, and I quickly realized she doesn't go to school in reality) that caused me to quickly consider that this isn't real and pull a nose-pinch reality check. I was able to breathe like my nose was just a little stuffy despite the nose-pinch. There was an obligatory, "Holy shit, I'm lucid!" moment. To keep the dream from fading from excitement and to calm down, I closed my eyes and (for whatever reason) pictured a topographical map key. Feeling it was stable, I opened my eyes, did another reality check (marveling of course at how weird it was to be breathing through a pinched nose, and then started wandering my environment. I seemed to be in what looked and felt like my old house on Broadway. I was a little unprepared for my first lucid; I hadn't thought of anything cool to do. The first thing I did was go into the bathroom. I figured since I was lucid I might as well start playing around with how well I could control it. I went to the door of the bathroom and decided I'd summon something on the floor outside and close the door to see if it appeared; I arbitrarily chose cake, and then I sort of glanced up and back down and it was there on the floor, slightly stale and with a big slice missing--I didn't even have to close the door. Happy, I went to the big picture window out front and continued experimenting by swapping between night and day by closing my eyes for a second then looking at the sky. I noted some unusual mixed success, namely whenever I wanted it to be day or night it would literally only be just starting day or night (ie at dawn or dusk). It's a little foggy if there was something occurring between now and what happened next, but the next thing I remember was that I was quickly running out of ideas for things to do, so I thought, "Well, I've always wanted to experience sex as a woman, let's give that a try." So I went back to the bathroom (it's notable that the previous time it was the bathroom from the old Broadway house, but it was now the bathroom from my previous apartment on Oak Street), stripped down, then looked in the mirror. Quick comment after the fact, the mirror worked just fine for its purpose in the dream, but before transforming I started in my normal dream avatar--which is myself as I recognize but much thinner. I was able to transform myself by pointing to the parts of my body that I wanted to transform and focusing on them. I started with breasts, then moved on to my penis. I recall being amused/annoyed that as I was shrinking my penis my foreskin wasn't shrinking with it so I had to do that separate. I started to get a little impatient so I just waved my hand around in front of my crotch and looked up at the ceiling to try to speed things up. Eventually everything looked pretty good, wasn't perfect, and I noticed that at some point I had lost all my body hair without intentionally trying to, but it was good enough for a first attempt. I was trying to decide what I wanted to do first with my new body when I noticed I sorta needed to pee so I decided to get that out of the way first, so I did. Just that was an unusual new physical sensation. There was some toilet paper sitting in the bathtub next to the toilet, so I grabbed some to clean things up a bit (since I was planning to shortly be playing around down there soon anyways); as I was cleaning up the phone rang and I answered it. The voice on the other end was some woman trying to tell me about how there were cloths in the tub that I could use for whatever but to leave them there so she could wash them later (I noticed here that it was hard to focus on what was happening now while I was on the phone trying to listen). I looked back into the tub and the toilet paper had been replaced by dark blue cloth. I shortly regretted flushing a few of them down the toilet. I checked the mirror one last time to see if things were still good and then went back out to the living room. I'm think there may have been somewhere here where I experimented with my new body, but if so unfortunately I don't remember it. Eventually there appeared in my house (as though she was familiar with the place) a thin, light-skinned black girl. Delighted to find another person to help me experiment with my new body, I asked her if she wanted to have sex with me. She seemed apprehensive; focusing on her I first removed her clothes then, noting of course that she too was female and thus would make proper copulation difficult, made her instantly grow a penis. She wasn't very amused by this, however, and she angrily stormed off to the basement. Shrugging, and once again bored, I decided to turn my attention on mentally recreating graphic-update remakes of old school video games I love in my mind for entertainment. I started with what I assume was Final Fantasy 6, though thinking on it after the fact the action doesn't match up properly with the game (though I specifically recall Terra's appearance). At some point this was interrupted with my wife calling, when she called what had been the video game scene taking up my entire stream of consciousness suddenly appeared as though I'd taken it out of full-screen mode on my monitor on my computer at my current apartment. I even had my headphones on, so I had to remove one of side of them to expose an ear for the phone like I usually do. I was annoyed at the distraction but answered the phone anyways. I don't remember the contents of the actual phone message, but I note again after the fact that it started to break my lucid concentration. The last part I remember now was going down to the basement where I found the black girl (who had now been transformed into some sort of small Pokémon-like creature) cuddling on a table with another small Pokémon-like creature. Saying, "Oh, so you'll have sex with him but not me!" and did my own storming-off-angrily upstairs and back to the living room, where I waved my hand and did some sort of mental slash across the table they were lying on and killing them both. My memory of this dream ends here, though when I woke I seemed to think that there was more non-lucid dream that came after this. I awoke just prior to starting this journal entry and did a quick reality check that passed, officially ending my first lucid dream.

Note to self: be wary about answering phones once you're lucid; it seems to help break lucid focus. In fact, I'm going to try to make an effort to start reality checks whenever answering and/or ending phone calls. I'm going to try to remember that the next thing on my agenda for practice when a dream goes lucid is controlling the environment; this time I kind of let the environment do what it wanted around me.

There was a dream sequence either prior to or leading up to where it went lucid. There was a long prelude to most of what I remember, but the bulk of what I remember was that there was this stretch of interstate that I would drive down as though I was in a GTA-ish sandbox type game and try to score points on this segment of highway. The segment of highway was kind of a long straight section with a curve off to the right. I'm thinking I may have lost more memory of this dream out of excitement for the lucid one, so maybe more will come back to me later.

At first when I woke this morning I thought I only had one fragment that I'd managed to maintain, but when I was in the shower I had a bit of a revelation. Since I'd awoken this morning I'd been thinking in the back of my mind, "Crap, I cheated on my wife!" But when I was in the shower and the thought crept up I immediately realized, wait a minute, no I didn't, that was a dream! And then like floodgates a lot of missing detail from that dream came back into memory.

The fragment, which I seem to recall being first, involved having a nosebleed. Oddly, it was coming out of both nostrils. I remember looking down at my chest and the blood was flowing down in two nice neat streams that curved symmetrically sideways and then back down in sort of a Y pattern.

The earliest point I can recall of the larger sequence was parking in a parking lot on the south side of a block that would be across from my old middle school, Ben Franklin. It was night. I entered the school; inside it was dark. I went into a poorly lit room where 3 people were waiting: a female teacher of whom my memory is quite blurry, Dr. Biberdorf, and another girl whom I identified Bethany P. (though she looked more like Emily G.) and seemed to think was either a friend or colleague. We were there for some sort of awarding ceremony. At some point, a fire broke out in the building and my viewpoint switched to a sort of retro-video game 3/4 view floorplan of the building and I watched little flame icons appear where the fire was and spread. As it reached my location it went back to first person and Biberdorf yelled at us to escape. I led Bethany outside and back to the parking lot, where we paused to recover. In a bit of only-makes-sense-in-Hollywood, Bethany and I proceeded to have exasperated survivor sex, complete with Hollywood fade-out and fade-in without being able to see any of the juicy details. Afterwards I offered to drive her home. I remember driving, seeing a few intersections. She lived at a building that looked like a college building, but inside was kind of a wierd mall-with-no-shops/college dorm hybrid. We stopped at some office where she had to grab some papers and some other guys came up to me and asked me if I had sex with her. I confirmed it, smug and apparently proud, and they congratulated me. A few other students (all of them in green shirts with some small, unidentified white words on them) continued to gather and congratulate me. When she came out of the office I waved goodbye and then left. I went back to the middle school, which was again somehow intact, back to the poorly lit room. Biberdorf was still there. I started telling him everything I remembered from the dream, leaving out the sex part (for some reason even now I couldn't remember who the female teacher was), when some random black kid came in. They began discussing something quietly, when I suddenly panicked as I was thinking to myself, "Crap, I cheated on my wife!" Apparently I had thought this out loud, because Biberdorf and the black kid stopped talking and looked at me. After a short pause Biberdorf briefed me on the importance of keeping this secret. He turned to the black kid and told him that if there was ever any rumor that I had cheated on my wife that he would personally kill the kid (I realize now after the fact that this is a little silly, being as there was already a mall-with-no-shops/college dorm hybrid full of people who already knew). I think the dream ends there.

Edit: This is a partial entry with one dream sequence omitted. See file 0818-0819; recall note: mall apartment, egg achievement, delivery man.

I've got a few fragments to record, unfortunately I ran into a problem wherein I woke up perfectly to remember them, thought about the dreams enough to crystallize them somewhat (or at least for sure the fragments I'm about to write down), but then I intentionally neglected to get up to write them down. This is something to work on overcoming in the future. I was reluctant to get up under the justification that it was sort of the middle of the work week and I was too tired to get up and write for a while to justify doing it. Plus some of the subject matter of the first one made me reluctant to bother to remember it at all (in fact, although I feel it's beneficial to write as much detail as I can remember, I'd still kind of rather any readers skip over this post). I would like to congratulate myself on the noticeably improved dream recall though, it's amazing what just a little effort can do to go a long way towards awakening at the end of dreams and remembering plenty of detail.

So here we go. As usually I'll try to keep it as chronologically in order as possible.

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The next one was a shorter fragment. I was with my immediate family. Everything seemed kind of retrograde; my brother was younger and both my parents were heavier as though it was before they both had gastric bypasses. We walked through a small junkyard into the waiting room of what looked like a car repair shop, but was apparently a combination car repair shop/walk-in clinic. Everyone sat down in a chair to wait but me; I paced around the room being annoyed and angry that once again people I'd known for years had nothing but contempt and disregard for my medical opinion. At some point I noticed my mother was missing a foot, and I thought, "Diabetes." Curiously, she was still able to walk fine despite the missing/invisible foot. She got up to ask the receptionist what was taking so long, she sounded frustrated, in pain, and desperate. She then went and sat down at a different spot. She was trying to partially cover her face with her coat, but I noticed she was crying. I continued pacing around and making mental notes about my family members until the dream ended.

One last quick note: just went to start breakfast and I remembered one more super short fragment wherein I noticed that the free expired 2-liter bottle of Dr. Pepper I brought home from work a few days ago expired in 1995.

I remember two, probably related, segments, but my memory of them is a little limited so we'll see how much I can remember as I start here.

The earlier segment I can only seem to remember a few random image of. It was like some kind of futurey sandbox FPS scenario. I remember it was night for the duration of this segment, but it was that kind of movie or video game style night where it isn't really night but everything has kind of a dark blue filter over it (except where there's lighting). I remember seeing gray metal husks of tanks and fires all over streets. I was moving from place to place, destroying vehicles or robots or whatever I perceived as an opponent I guess. I'm not sure what my motivation was or what I was trying to do. I remember at one point I discovered a new way to take out some vehicles and was trying to describe it to an outpost of humans/allies but they were refusing to listen so I left them. I remember a segment where I was moving down a large bridge, with vehicle wrecks everywhere, sorta vaguely L4D2 style (only at night and no zombies).

The second segment was similar. There were two outposts of human survivors whose outposts were on an upper level. These two groups made up two Team Fortress 2 teams, the one I was with had a yellow outpost (and appeared on the minimap in the lower right corner of my vision as yellow), which was just kind of a crowded camp with people wearing mostly yellow clothes, and must have been the blue team since my opponents on the lower level were mostly wearing red. Everything on the minimap was represented by small, colored triangles, yellow and green for the outpost bases and control points, and gray for uncaptured control points. The other team had a green outpost (and was correspondingly green on the minimap) and was apparently the red team. On the lower level was kind of a Doom-style research outpost where most of the action took place. There was three objective locations arranged in kind of a triangle formation on the map that we were fighting over. In place of the usual TF2 characters, it was real-looking people just pretending to be the classes. I was a spy, and playing decent, but being constantly frustrated that my backstab was rarely working. I didn't have an actual spy's knife in my hands but I did the backstab animation with my fist and it would only work occasionally. There were a handful of players, both men and women. I remember there was a spy-girl with the spy's mask and blonde pigtails who would spawn and I'd keep following her and killing her because she wasn't very good. There was a larger guy with a red shirt on who was apparently a heavy. He was running around doing stuff and ignoring me as I tried to kill him. I backstabbed him and he said, "Okay, that's one." and I apparently understood I needed to do it twice to kill him but the second stab refused to work. Towards the end I somehow got to see the green outpost and I remember thinking it looked way cooler than the yellow one; for one it was green, there were light green lights everywhere and the people there looked like a cult, in green robes worshiping a triangle or pyramid thingy that was hovering a little ways up made out of the light green light. I remember a little ways before it ended it transitioned into what seemed like some kind of preview trailer for this little dream game where two people were discussing features; the one that one of them highlighted was how sometimes a third team would enter the game, something that was represented by another team (though I seem to remember it was the same color of green) popped up on the minimap and a line moved from their base to the outposts.

A lot of triangle imagery in the second segment.

Edit: This is a partial entry with one dream sequence omitted. See file 0813-0814; recall note: fast food restaurant, black coat.

Just laid down to get a little more sleep when I remembered some more details of what was either a separate dream or a long segment before the previous one (if so, I was myself at this point and not Bruce Willis).

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And even just now I recall another separate sequence. At this point I'm not sure where in tonight's overall sequence it belongs.

I was riding a bike (with a helmet even, I remember checking--successfully within the dream--a few times to be sure I was wearing one) up 10th street, I think I was on my way to work (noting of course I don't work anywhere going that direction). I turned left onto 19th avenue and decided I move to the sidewalk and stop taking up space on the street, only before I was able to do so I fell into a small crowd (maybe 6-7) of people walking (apparently I was biking really slow?) west down 19th avenue. They were talking to each other about something I wasn't paying attention to. I decided to go along with them as they moved onto the sidewalk and started moving behind some beige-colored buildings where the strip mall would be on the 10th street/19th avenue corner. We kept going and the crowd sorta slowly grew larger; I was still on my bike (I checked for a helmet here for sure at one point). As we reached the end of the buildings heading west still, someone pointed out that there was a large wooden fence blocking further passage west as well as one to our left blocking passage south. The north-south fence was slanted slightly diagonally southwest to northeast, so we turned the corner of the building to the north and kept going. The fence and the building reached a point where the formed a small passage at the building's northwest corner.

I volunteered to go in first and check it out (at some point after turning the corner I'd gotten off my bike). Inside the passage it was very narrow, made out of wood planks like the fence outside, and the passage was uneven (ie not straight, the walls zig-zagged slightly at random intervals, mostly small but with interesting patterns, for instance there were small alcoves where people would be sitting). It seemed like it was not longer outdoors somehow, but there was a really high ceiling. It sounded crowded, like there were a lot of people outside the wooden-fence-passage area that I couldn't see, and even the passage was fairly crowded with random people just loitering of passing through in the opposite direction. It was slanted slightly downhill, so I remember thinking it felt like I was moving out of a mountain passage amusement-park-log-chute-style. My memory of this sequence ended at some point as I was navigating this passage.