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These dreams are a couple days old

Under Water

I was in someone elses apartment. I tried to leave through the garage, but when I opened the door that led from the house to the garage, I heard an evil moan. I turned and ran the other way.

I ended up in a room with an angled floor. (I wonder what that represents). Somehow, I was supposed to be underwater, but I wasn't...though all around me were huge aquariums. The only one I really saw was for penguins.

I was concerned about being underwater even though I could breathe. Eventually, someone who worked at the aquarium opened a door from between two of the aquariums. Seeing my chance to escape, someone else yelled, "Fire!" and I ran out.

I was then in Florida in a neighborhood where every house had a boat on a lift, and every street looked the same, with sandy, shell-littered road. That's all I remember.

A Nothing Lucid

I entered a dream lucid, but I was thinking I was awake, or maybe lucid. I tried to manifest a woman, but I couldn't because I thought I was too awake. In hindsight, I realized I was lucid.

I have concluded in waking life that by the time you do an RC, you already know you are lucid. In contrast, I realize that THIS is why you should do an RC. Oh well.

Later, not lucid, I saw a lady standing a couple feet away in a silk neglige. She scratched herself with her pinky. I thought it must have been very soft.

My family mobed to Florida and we had a really big house. The second floor had a balcony. I was walking around the house, just exploring all of the rooms. Upstairs I came to a hallway. On the right was a room with bright red wallpaper and a cherry wood table. I kept going and at the end of the hallway I entered a wide, open room. It was really bright, despite the fact that there weren't that many windows. You had to walk through this room to get to the other rooms. One of them was going to be my mom's room. I can't remember what any of the others were for. I walked back into the hallway and passed the room with the wooden table. Something about that room gave me a bad vibe, like I shouldn't go in there. I ignored it and went back downstairs.

My brother was on the couch and my mom was standing by the kitchen. I told her I really liked the house, but it was a little hot since we were in Florida. She told me I'd het used to it. After that I felt my nose becoming clogged and it was hard to breathe. This often happens to me in real life. I woke up and my nose was clogged also.

Dream 1: In my first dream last night, me and my friends had all turned into my animals... Body swapping is something that has never been in any of my dreams.
Cay was my cat, Sophie. Their both clumsy and have fluffy hair.


I was my cat, Penny... not really sure what happened there. That cat is evil. So maybe its because neither of us is a people person.


My friend D.C. was my dog Lady, both very protective of the people they love.


And my friend L.G. was my dog Brandy, they both love to eat.


Now, naturally my friends are freaking out that they have turned into my pets. I however was more concerned with what happened to my pets spirits and our bodies. We were all back on my bed in my bedroom. I told my friends to look for their bodies. I found my own body asleep under my parents bed, which is where Penny hides 90% of the time. Cay's was on the countertop in the kitchen, where Sophie likes to sleep sometimes. D.C. found her's outside in the ditch that Lady likes to nap in. And L.G. found her's in Brandy's favorite chair asleep. I was first thankful that they were all asleep and not up roaming around and causing trouble. Then I began to wonder how in the hell we got this way and how we were supposed to get back in our real bodies before they woke up. We searched my house and while I was in my brother's old room I found an amulet, but woke up because Sophie had jumped on my bed and began walking around on my chest.

Dream 2: Not really appropriate to write about on the internet. So were just going to move onto the next dream.

Dream 3: I "woke up" in Cay's bed with Cay at the end of the bed watching Old 97's youtube video's on her laptop. She's been obsessed with Rhett Miller lately. I did my nose reality check like I've been doing every morning and realized I was dreaming. I nudged Cay with my foot, a gesture that normally would have thrown her off the end of the bed. She didn't budge. I teased her about her tired appearance and called her by her nickname, Jim, to see if she was the psycho Cay I'd come to know in my dream. She teased back and called me by my own nickname. A good sign that she wasn't crazy in this dream. I decided to just lay in Cay's bed until the dream ended. I wasn't really up for adventuring anywhere tonight.

Shortly after though, Cay's mom comes in and tells us to pack to go to Florida. Neither of us questioned why we were going to Florida or why I had such a large amount of clothes at Cay's house. On our way to Florida (which only took about ten minutes) I noticed Aaron in a red Dodge Neon that looked just like my brother's, Git-R-Done magnet and all. Since I wasn't panicking I teleported into Aaron's car, this didn't confuse him at all and he just smiled at me. "Hey," I greeted him. "What's up?" He said. "You going to Florida too?" I asked. "Yup. We were supposed to meet at the hotel. I guess you became lucid though." So apparently my DC knows the course of my dreams. Which is good to know. He turned the music up to loud for us to carry on a conversation, so I sat silently listening to Say Anything, most likely what was playing on my ipod since I fell asleep listening to it.

I found Cay when we arrived at the hotel that was directly in front of the beach, with Aaron right beside me. He has a habit of running off and sleeping in random places. As soon as I found her though it turned dark outside and the water in the ocean turned black and it was all very ominous. "Op, we should get to higher ground," Aaron commented and strolled off towards the elevator. I grabbed Cay's hand and started to pull her with me but she wouldn't move and said, "I wanna go to the beach, Spock." I looked at her in disbelief. Maybe she was a psycho. I managed to call Aaron back over to where she was and shove her into the elevator and to the highest floor of the hotel.

I watched as waves consumed the beach and came closer and closer to the hotel. The electric went out as soon as the first waves hit the base of the hotel. Cay was complaining about no air conditioning when tons of people came through the stairs door. I opened the door to one of the suites and the three of us locked ourselves in there away from the people. I struggled not to have a panic attack, because even though I knew it was a dream it still scared me. One of my worst fears is drowning. I remembered a way to wake myself up though and woke up after about six or seven attempts. My fears always seem to find a way into my dreams. I am not okay with that.

[This is both a catch-up post and a repost. Apparently, there was a server crash recently that ate this entry after I posted it the first time.]

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

Some events unfold that I'm not a part of. [I don't remember what they were now, but there was definitely a plotline involved, and I was definitely just an outside observer.] When these events are over, I find myself sitting in a movie theater, watching the end credits of a movie. I realize that all of the preceding events were a movie.

I walk out into the theater lobby, which is long, narrow, and wedge-shaped, growing slightly wider as I approach the entrance. I walk out through the theater's glass front doors onto the sidewalk. There, I meet up with my parents again.

My parents and I are in a strange, [possibly?] open-air, car-like vehicle with a hired driver. I'm showing them around the quaint, seaside downtown of Lake Worth [which, as usual for me in my dreams, looks absolutely nothing like it does in real life; it looks more urban]. We marvel at the awesomely cheesy anti-drug mural painted on the wall of one building.

[Different dream.] I'm flying above M. Road, traveling north, but facing south. I'm being pulled backward by that unknown, unseen force that so often does that in my flying dreams. I realize that I'm dreaming and take control of the situation by concentrating on the details of the scenery around me, as if I were going to stop to admire them. It works as intended: my backward motion slows, then stops. Then, I start flying forward under my own willpower, heading toward home (i.e., south). As I fly, I admire the rich detail of the scene around me and how much like reality it is.

[Dreamskip.] I'm now in a quiet, peaceful, suburban residential neighborhood, on a concrete walking path separated from the backyards on either side of it by fences. I hop along the sidewalk like an astronaut on the moon, making slow jumps that carry me several feet into the air, then slowly floating back down in an arc. I'm enjoying the fun of being in a low-gravity environment, which my dream environments often are.

I get up onto one of the fences and perform several floating glide-leaps from one parallel fence to another, combining jumping with flying. Then, I decide to try to change the dream environment to a different one by closing my eyes and spinning. I think, If I'm going to do that, I'd better start from a standing start. I jump off the fence I'm on and float gently down to the sidewalk. Once I'm standing on it, I think, Neopia, and close my eyes, but forget to spin around.

When I open my eyes, I'm in a much different suburban neighborhood. I'm standing in the middle of a straight street, looking down its length. It's lined on both sides with brightly colored, two-story houses with lush, green trees in their front yards. It doesn't look much like any of the official artwork of Neopia, but nonetheless, I become aware that this is Neopia, and that I've succeeded in my goal of changing the scene and getting there. I'm so excited about this that the scene winks out of existence after about two seconds, and I wake up. [Sigh.]

[Later, different dream.] I'm attending some special event at a theme park on behalf of [the company I've been teaching with]. I'm with SH and TS [two of my fellow teachers]. We're all wearing our white lab coats, and we're walking across a plaza that has a circular concrete beam running overhead, around the perimeter. I see some friends of mine wearing full rubberhead Sesame Street character costumes, also walking across the plaza in the opposite direction. I say to the young man in the Elmo costume who is carrying the head and looking sweaty and tired, “Hi, Mark. Go get some water.”

There are many other people there, changing into or out of costumes. Many of them are hanging their hangers on the concrete ring. TS suggests that we hang our lab coats from it, but I prefer to go back to the trailer, which [only in the dream, not in real life] has sides with panels that open to reveal closets [like my band trailer did in high school]. I want to put my lab coat there because I can make sure that trailer is locked.

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Side notes:

That first scene, where I realized that everything that had preceded it had just been a movie I was watching, was a particularly cool example of day residue. I had just been to the movies the evening before I had this dream. The recent article about how dreaming and watching movies produce very similar patterns of brain activity has informed the way I watch movies now; I always mentally compare the two experiences. In the movie I watched on this evening (Limitless), the ending felt exactly like being suddenly, rudely awakened by an alarm clock when you're still right in the middle of a dream. It's not surprising that that experience gave rise to an actual dream in which a movie ended and I suddenly realized, “oh, yeah, that didn't actually happen, I'm just watching a movie.” Both within the dream and in retrospect, that realization felt very similar to the realization, “oh, yeah, that was just a dream” that I've often had just after both false and real awakenings. Therefore, that moment of realization within that dream felt very much like a false awakening.

It belatedly occurs to me that Neopia is an entire planet. If I chose only one specific locale on that planet and made that the focus of my intentions, I'd probably have better success getting there.

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

[I had four different dreams last night.]

[Dream #1] I'm at the apartment building where I lived in Japan. There are several different landlords who own parts of the building, which is reflected in the fact that different parts of the facade have different designs. [Of course, this was not the case in real life.] Inside the building, though, instead of many small apartments, there is one big, open space crisscrossed by wooden support beams. A few other people my own age are in the building. Several of the wooden beams are arranged in a tall pyramid shape, supporting a large heating/air conditioning unit at the apex of the pyramid. This pyramid collapses and the unit crashes to the floor. At first, I think it's killed the young man who appeared to be standing directly under it, but then I see that he's okay, just scratched up a bit.

One of the other people in this large, open space is President Obama. I follow him up into an enclosed hallway and eavesdrop on a phone conversation he's having with his wife. From the conversation, I gather that he's going to pay for repairs to the damaged support structure and HVAC unit.

[Dream #2] I'm riding on Ellen's Energy Adventure in Epcot. The ride vehicles move up to get to the room with the screens for the film portion of the attraction; I can feel the vehicle moving upward. We get to that room, and the film begins. The film starts out on only one screen, then widens to fill the wraparound screens on either side of it as well, but there are no curtains that pull back to reveal the additional screens. [There were curtains when I went on this ride in reality back in 2000, but according to an article I just read recently, they're not working anymore.] The film contains lots of exciting action sequences, punctuated and made more immersive and realistic by air jets built into the backs of the seats. The seats also have lap bars; I can feel mine. At some point during the film, it dawns on me that I'm dreaming. When the film ends, I exit the ride along with everyone else. As I walk along my row of seats, I say to the guy walking in front of me, “Hey! You're a dream character!” Again, I don't get his attention at all. I continue walking through the passageways that lead out of the building. They're very dark; I make sure to pay close attention to the people and the edges of walls that I can see by the few dim lights, because I know that if I don't, the dream will fade. As I walk, I sing a song aloud, which was my lucid goal for the night. [I don't recall now which song it was, but I have the vague impression that it was a current country song, one I know well, sung by a male singer.] It doesn't even occur to me to do anything other than go along with the dream scenario; this is a ride at Epcot, so of course I'm going to go along with it and enjoy the experience.

There's a bottleneck along the exit route that slows down the flow of foot traffic. This makes me go, “Huh? What's going on?” Then I see what's causing the bottleneck: Suspended by individual cords from a track on the ceiling are multiple pairs of 3D glasses with polarized lenses, with no earpieces, so you have to hold them up to your eyes. Each cord is attached to a little wheel inside the track, so you can move the 3D glasses back and forth along the track. This passageway is filled with painted, Star-Wars-themed scenery, and when you look through the glasses, the scenery looks 3D. I take a pair of glasses and walk with them the rest of the way out of the building. I say aloud, “Oh my God! Rope-Trak!” [While in the dream, I remembered a dream I had when I was a kid that featured a very similar system, only with harnesses attached to the ends of the cords instead of the 3D glasses. In that dream, the purpose of the system was to make sure everyone at a museum followed the same path through the exhibits. I named this system “Rope-Trak” after the fact, when I was awake and used the dream as inspiration for a school project.] I'm surprised and pleased to see this concept reappear in another dream.

I reach the outside of the building. This outdoor space looks very much like I remember it, and I can see everything clearly in the natural light. However, the sky is overcast and cloudy, and it's either raining or just about to; a hurricane is coming in. The dream ended here.

[Dream #3] I'm at my high school, just outside the gymnasium, looking south. Apparently, just being there is enough to make me realize I'm dreaming. It's nighttime, and the quad is filled with students. I decide to fly; it takes me two tries to take off. My first try turns into a big, parabolic jump. The second time, I succeed in getting airborne. To help launch myself forward, I kick off the wall of the gym with my foot, as one might kick off the wall of a pool while swimming. Among the crowd, I see the B. brothers again as I pass overhead. I think, They didn't go to my high school. I fly higher and see that the school is surrounded on two sides by ocean, which makes me go, “Huh?”

[Dream #4] I'm riding in the back seat of the brown car down a street in my old city. It's nighttime. I know where I am because I recognize the trees and landscaping on either side of the car. Looking out my window, I see a white car flying along, above and to the left of our car. This clues me in that I'm still dreaming. I wonder if I can make this car fly. Almost as soon as I've decided to try to do so, I find myself sitting in the driver's seat, alone in the car. I immediately realize that I'm now alone and driving the car, rather than riding in the back seat while someone else drove, because I had wanted/expected to be the driver. My dream control is improving. Cool.

The car is still going down the street at the same speed it was before. I make the same effort of will I used in my previous dream to fly on my own, only this time, I try to focus my will on the car rather than on my own body. As before, I concentrate on the thought of the object of focus rising up, on how that should feel. It takes noticeably more effort, but it works. I get the car into the air. However, I find that it's now traveling backward, and I can't get it to go forward. Looking out the front windshield and over the landscape, I notice that the moon is low on the horizon ahead of me and to the left, looks normal, and is full. Then the dream faded and I woke up.

Non-lucid, 'Video-game-controller mode' [see side notes], Lucid, [Commentary made while awake]

My dad and I are on a bicycle ride together. I've just checked out a thick paperback book from the library, and it's in the rack on the back of my bicycle.

I'm outside a movie theater in Florida, with my mom. Directly across from the entrance to the theater is a small kiosk where you can get drinks in plastic cups. She and I get some drinks from it for the whole family.

False awakening in my current real room. I hear the sounds of people shouting something about a surfer dude, and decide to follow the shouting out to the creek, but decide not to wake my parents. As I'm walking out of the house, I see that there's a bunch of writing in thick, black letters on the back wall of the dining room, as well as several papers with more writing on them taped to that wall.

I'm entering an upstairs apartment. My uncle is there.

I'm walking past a junior high school. I see a large group of kids in PE uniforms setting off on a run around the perimeter of the school.

I continue walking, and my route takes me along the street in my old neighborhood that goes around the edge of the park. I'm going in the direction of House #2. I turn around and see a tiny, cartoon kid with a BB gun standing behind me on the sidewalk. I'm a little worried that he's going to shoot me with the BB gun, but in the end, I ignore him and continue walking.

I reach House #2. In the garage, floating vertically in midair, is a menu of choices, like on a DVD. They say something like 'imaginary ideal' and 'reality' [I think; I don't really remember.] I select the former first, and find myself standing in my bedroom at House #2. The room is arranged the way it was in reality, but everything in it is completely white. [I really wouldn't call that design choice 'ideal.' However, when I lived there in reality, almost everything in that room really was white, and I was pretty happy living there.] I return to the menu, and this time, I select 'reality.' After making this selection, I find myself back in the same bedroom. It's still arranged the way it was in reality, only now the bed has a green bedspread with flowers, kind of like the one I have right now in reality [which I bought when we moved to House #3], except that the pattern is bigger and bolder.

I look out the window of my room and see a wide view of rolling grassland, with a lot of people walking around all over the place. There's only sunlight shining on one small, roughly circular section of the scene, though; the rest is in shadow. I speak aloud to the scene, saying something to the effect of, “It should be sunny all over the whole scene!” The sunlight spreads to cover the whole scene.

The scene shifts without my noticing it. The window of my room is now a doorway that opens onto a scene of an arctic landscape, with a wide, shallow pool of water in it. [An aside: After all those times I complained last month about the lack of snow in my dreamworld, I finally had a dream with snow in it, and not only did I completely fail to remember that I was supposed to make a snowball and hit somebody with it, but that Task of the Month is over now, anyway! Argh.] I walk out into the scene. From the far side of the pool, I step into the water, trying to walk on it, but I quickly give up the attempt because I get scared away by an orca and a walrus approaching me through the water. I walk back out. I then get the impression that they weren't really threatening me, after all. I go back toward the house. My mom is standing outside the doorway, and I tell her she can watch me do this if she wants to. I start walking back toward the pool of water again, concentrating on continuing to walk forward, straight into the pool, while believing that the surface of it will be just as solid to me as the ground is. It doesn't work; I end up standing ankle-deep in the shallow water again. [That's all I remember.]

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Side notes:
I'm really not sure for how much of the above sequence of events I was actually asleep and dreaming, and for how much of it I was awake and actively using my regular old imagination. I felt like I was doing the latter for at least part of it, hence the green text, which I always use to indicate a sort of half-awake, half-dream state where I know that I'm using my imagination like a video-game controller to control what happens. The division between green and purple text (indicating a lucid dream) is mostly an arbitrary guess. Then again, I was definitely aware that I was dreaming by the end, so it's entirely possible that I really was dreaming the entire time, and that's what dream control feels like. If so, that's really cool! I really advanced a lot in the area of dream control last night. I will have to experiment with this further.

I'm mildly annoyed, but not at all surprised, to discover that verbal commands work really well to control my dreams. As much as I love Inception and would love to be able to alter the dreamscape just by thinking about what I want to happen, that idea is relatively new to me. I've been a Star Trek fan for years, so it's not surprising that the older and better-entrenched idea that one can change one's surrounding environment by giving verbal commands, like they do when using the holodeck on Star Trek: TNG and later series, would take precedence over the newer idea that one can change one's surrounding environment just by thinking about it. Now that I know what works for me, though, I guess I'll go along with it.

[Fragment] I'm in a grocery store, sitting at a disused checkout stand. The store has recently been rearranged so that the checkout stands that are actually being used are on the opposite side of the building, but the old ones were left in place.

I'm parking my Saturn [the car I had in Florida] in the parking lot of an Albertsons grocery store [none that I've ever been to in real life]. I notice that the temperature gauge on the car is maxed out [as it usually was in reality]. I think about how I have to make this car last all year because, in my situation, there's no other method of getting to work that will do. [In this dream,] I'm back in Florida for a second year.

When I went back to bed after having taken some handwritten notes on the above dream, I noticed that my body already felt heavy. I decided to roll with it and try to WILD. I had attempted to do so a few days before during an afternoon nap, and had gotten as far as one of my arms starting to go numb before my mom interrupted me with a question. This time, I succeeded, and to my surprise, it wasn't nearly as scary as I had thought it would be. My hypnagogic hallucinations consisted of a buzzing sound in my head that seemed to go on for a few minutes. Then it stopped, and a few seconds later, I find myself lying in my bed, looking around at my current bedroom. I immediately recognize the false awakening for what it is, since I had been expecting to be dreaming. I did it! I think excitedly.

None of the lights appear to be on, and yet I can see everything clearly. In other words, the room looks very much the way it does when early-morning sunlight is coming in through the window, and yet I'm aware that it's nighttime. I get out of bed and start walking out of the room. Just before I walk out the door, I do the nose-pinch RC just to verify what I already know, and for the cool experience. I can still breathe, which I still think is the neatest sensation.

I go out the door and walk down the hallway. This looks exactly like my real house. There's no one else around. As I pass by the door to P.'s room, I notice light coming from underneath it, but this is normal in our house, so I don't investigate. I go to the front door and open it. It's exactly like the real one, too; I even have to unlock the deadbolt on the screen door before I can open it and go outside.

I walk along the front walk. I notice that I'm wearing one of my summer nightshirts, the one with the teacups printed on it and the pocket in the front. It occurs to me that I could have stopped and gotten dressed if I had thought of it, but I didn't, and it doesn't matter anyway because this is a dream, so it's only natural for me to be wearing sleepwear. I'm not cold at all, though. [The strange part, which, of course, I didn't realize was strange until I'd woken up, was that I wasn't wearing that nightshirt in reality; I was wearing my new purple pajamas. It does get cold at night in the winter here, so I always wear pajamas in winter.]

The scenery outside my house looks just like reality, too. When I get to the driveway, I take off and fly in the way that I've learned to do it, by pushing gently off the ground with my legs and feet while thinking about initiating the act of flying. [The mental process involved is very similar to the mental process involved in starting my bicycle moving with that first push on the pedals, now that I think of it.] It works, but once again, once I get airborne, I immediately start getting pulled backward. I try to relax and let myself be pulled along, as before, but it seems I'm not being taken anywhere in particular. Then I hear a male voice that seems to come from the air around me, and yet sounds like it's coming through a radio speaker. It says something along the lines of, “If you always expect life to go the way you want it to go...” but doesn't finish the thought. I finish the thought with, “...you won't be able to control it?” [Hmm. Very interesting.] [Because, once again, I've forgotten to concentrate and pay attention to the scenery,] the dream fades and I wake up.

[This next dream is from my next sleep cycle on this same night. I'm adding this section on 1/15/11. I didn't have time to write all this out on the day I had the dream, but I did today.]

I'm watching a series of commercials and reading some poster-sized ads for kids' day camp programs at a chain of big, fancy hotels. There are two such programs: one is called “adventure camp” and features soccer, while the other is called “non-adventure camp” and features poetry and other non-athletic, creative activities.

Then, I'm at one of the big, fancy hotels, sitting on the floor in the lobby, leaning up against a wall. I use my laptop to log in to a game website, not Neopets but similar to it, that I've been to before. I wonder, Do I remember my password for this site? The login screen plays music. A lady comes by and asks me to go outside, where the music won't disrupt the quiet of the lobby, so I do. I go out to a wooden patio with several metal table-and-chair sets on it. There are people sitting at the tables and studying, though, so I press the Mute button on my laptop. I ask one of the girls on the patio if the chairs at her table are taken. She offers me a seat, and I take it. Another girl sees my laptop screen, and we have the following conversation:

Girl: Is yours a dragon?
Me: (after figuring out that she's talking about my pet on the site I'm logging on to) Yes, it's a silver dragon.
Girl: They know about it.
Me: Who?
Girl: Your 'rents.

I haven't told my parents about this site. They know about my Neopets account, but not my account on this site. I wonder about the girl, Are you my dream guide? but don't ask her. [Yes, I managed to think that without realizing that I was dreaming. I don't even know.]

Me: We don't get along very well right now. This is part of the reason.

I log in to my account anyway. The screen shows animation of the digital creatures on the site fighting each other by shooting beams of various things out of their mouths, like some Pokémon and Digimon do.

As I read some of the DJs I always read about zombies and they seem pretty common, so much so that I think "oh not more zombies!" I haven't had a zombie dream in a very very long time. So wouldn't you know that my dream world would have to bring on the zombies.

aaaaaaaaaaa
Drewam 1: Zombie Apocalypse
Nonlucid
I am walking to a road in a big city with a guy thats a buddy of mine [never seen him before] and on the other side is our female buddy. She has a few guns on her to keep the zombies off but we have nothing. We are trying to get across this heavily traveled highway to her. Apparently it was the start of a zombie apocalypse which had zombies on the street walking around but people still drove in their cars. She waited for us to get to the intersection but for some reason we thought it was dangerous to cross. She didn't want to move much or yell cuz the zombies wouldn't attack unless you looked lively. She yelled at us to moon the cars, to get them to slow down for us, so we could cross. This sounded strange to us and I looked at the other guy with a scrunched up face and we shook our heads as our hands were on out pants. She then yelled and waved her hands in frustration and we felt guilty enough to dodge the traffic but when we got to the other side her waving had attracted several zombies. She waited till they got close and put a shot gun up to their faces and BOOM BOOM, click click BOOM, and their zombie heads were vaporized by the blasts. While I was in a little shock and my ears were ringing she yanked my friends arm "come on!" BOOM, shot one square in the chest, "click click". The shooting was attracting a lot more zombies and we ran for it. Unlike the movies though these guys ran too, well slow running but still. Soon there was a mob behind us of at least a hundred. We ran to a building's doorway where its a safe-house but you are supposed to enter slowly so zombies don't follow you. Apparently zombies don't open doors and search around, they just walk around unless they see a meal. For us there were 200 zombies behind us! We ran in and up a hallway to the 2 hardened steal doors at the end, the zombies couldn't get in at all. The people on the other side were not happy with our huge zombie posse but they were ready for this but they would also have to clear them out at some point. We left their glaring eyes and walked up a hallway. The girl with the guns broke off and went into a room inside a room cuz the zombies would never go in there and they could jump out the windows if things got crazy. Me and the guy decided to find the exit on the other side of the building.
Once out into a hall way there were 2 zombies coming towards us as we lightly ran. He had a knife on his belt which the zombies grabbed at. We then ran faster till we were outside. There were 2 zombies out here and they look surprised to see us. There was a huge chain-link fence (20 feet high). This was good because zombies were the slowest climbers and would probably fall. He pulled out a grappling gun that was spring loaded, he hit back end of it on the ground and the hook shot in the air and over the fence connected by a black rubber rope. I jumped on the fence but couldn't get a hand hold on the fence and a zombie was right next to me. He looked at me unsure how to get a jumping target. I got a hand on the fence and climbed up. My friend was over it already when I got to the top. I saw it was a double fence with an inner fence so zombies would fall between them if they could ever got to the top. I couldn't span it either so I shook the fence till it fell down a bit and jumped to the ground.
On the inside was a zombie free enclosure where people were playing baseball.


Dream 2: Florida House
Not very lucid but with extreme vividness.
I came home to my house which was a single level ranch in Florida [I've seen them and they a very common little white houses made out of cinder-blocks]. I walked into the garage which didn't have the car in it cuz I could pull the car in the neighbors driveway cuz that house was vacant for years and I could pull my car around into my driveway facing the street [I saw myself doing this]. Once inside the very clean and kind of new garage, I found a piece of paper on the floor and picked it up and took it to the garbage pail. Once there I saw that the cabinet was open and there was a piece of paper on a shelf. It was a sticky note of the contact info for a scam artist. 3 thoughts shot through my head, call the number from a payphone and find out what it was about or throw it away. As I reached my arm out to drop it in the pail I thought that I should report this scammer to authorities.
Satisfied I started to walk away but saw my old humming bird feeder in the garbage too. I thought to leave it but I actually felt sad to do that so I took it out and put it back on the shelf. Another thought shot through my head, "we are what we have." I felt proud of myself for having achieved something. I felt that I had finally became who I wanted to be.
Upon awakening I remembered I had this dream twice before. It was exactly the same place and each time felt like the only time during the dream. One dream had me deciding to call the scam artist and another had me throwing the info away. This one I cared about other people and decided to help. Did I set up a test for myself to see if I would do this? I have had 2 other "test" dreams something like this.

Non-lucid dream, [Commentary made while awake]

Night of December 5-6

I'm attending a service at an unfamiliar church. I'm in the choir. The bishop is there, and he shushes the choir, ending the song we're singing early. Two other famous people are there: Arnold Schwarzenegger and H. [a writer who is on the Internet and likely to search for himself]. The two of them and the bishop pose for a group picture. H. is wearing a big, floppy USC baseball cap. We all tell him to turn it around and wear it so that the logo is showing, or else there's no point in having it on at all. He actually looks more like my real-life friend Victor K. than he looks like H.

The service also involves honoring some military people. There is a man in a very highly decorated, green military dress uniform there.

Night of December 6-7

[This was a long, fun, interesting dream with a really cool setting and particularly good recall, especially for dialog.]

This dream is set within the world of a TV show called “Cruiser Island.” Cruiser Island is one of a small group of small, tropical islands, very close together, located just off the coast of Florida and connected to each other and to the mainland by bridges. One of its neighboring islands is called Alo Island. There is a large, single-story building there that says “Alo Island Public Hospital” on the sign on the front.

House #1 is located on Cruiser Island. My family is hosting a sort of sleepover there. I'm in my bedroom, in the top bunk (which is mine), wearing pajamas, ready to go to bed. A boy who's maybe 8 or 9 years old climbs up the end of the bunk bed to get into the top bunk, and we talk. He says he's afraid of some kind of wild animal, and I reassure him by saying that we're in the middle of downtown, and no wild animals are coming here. The rest of the conversation goes something like this:

Me: What's your name?
Boy: Thomas.
Me: Yeah, I thought you kinda looked like a Thomas. I'm (Emiko). (we shake hands)
Thomas: You know that guy who sings with the Parish girls... I'm his younger brother.
Me: Oh, you're Dom's brother!

I decide I enjoy spending time with kids.

[Note: In the dream, when Thomas mentioned his older brother, I knew who we were talking about and knew that he shared a first name with, but wasn't, the protagonist from Inception. In real life, both brothers sang with the Parish girls, but only once, two days ago. They also have different first names in real life.]

I'm standing on the floor next to the foot end of the bunk bed. There are two Vietnamese women, a mom and a grandma, who are sleeping on the lower bunk. Two more Vietnamese moms are standing around in the room and in the hallway, along with a whole bunch of their kids. One of the moms says something about how she doesn't have magical Japanese eyes [I don't even know.] and then sternly commands all the boys to go and brush their hair, now, so that they can go to bed. All the girls have their hair in braids or pigtails, so they'll need their moms' help to comb it out. I think, With all these people in the house for the sleepover and all this excitement, my sleep cycle is getting completely thrown off. I'm not going to get a chance to try to lucid dream tonight. That's too bad. [And yet, I still somehow managed not to realize that I was dreaming at this point. I laughed when I remembered this thought upon waking up.]

I go into the bathroom to toss a few of my stray hairs into the trash can. I don't just toss them on the floor because of all the guests we have in the house. While I'm in the bathroom, I see that my gold cross necklace has fallen into the toilet. Also, I find some bedbugs somewhere in the house, crawling all over some white paper thing. I take it outside, showing it to my mom and explaining to her, as we walk along a sidewalk outside, what they are and what it's like to have them in the house. I say that I'm pretty sure I just got rid of all of them.

My mom and I continue walking through Cruiser Island's downtown, which looks a lot like San Luis Obispo's downtown, until we reach a small light rail station on the street. We look at the big, dark-blue metal signboard there to find out what its schedule is. We continue walking along the streets, turning at least one corner and passing one more light rail station. The street signs are white on blue like in L.A. [not white on brown like in the real SLO]. I talk to someone I pass on the street about which of the streets will be closed for the parade that's going to start soon.

The second night I have seen results from posting here. Things are happening more in my dreams because of my new interest and postings.

Dream 1: Dream Meets Lucidity
As usual I am walking around but then I see some people that like they are playing some kind of shoot'm up game. There are some big chubby guys dressed in those brown sheriff uniforms ducking behind those huge metal shipping containers. There were also girls doing the same thing on the other side of the lot this was all in but the girls were in black bikinis. This looked like fun so I ran up into a warehouse and up to the second level to have a good view. When I thought about doing some shooting a gun was provided as pictured here
I am usually lucid to some degree and that was true now as well. The gun I held was all too real. I held it up and looked at it and felt how heavy it felt, heavier than I thought, this was a serious weapon. I cocked it open and took a look at the bullet from the chamber, and knew just how much damage this slug could do. When I thought about shooting those girls with this gun it made me sick. I no longer wanted to be in this dream.

Dream 2: Daddy Long Legs!
I was over a friends house (they haven't lived there in ages) and was happy to see all the same faces from so long ago again. They all looked so young again! Before I could enjoy my reminiscing 2 women knocked at the front door which I was standing next to so I opened the door and said hello. I have never seen these people before and this little side matter was sapping my lucidity but I wanted to see what they wanted. "Would you like to see some of our samples?" the younger woman said. "Sure" I said half heartedly. They held up a brown paper bag with some little boxes in it. I reached in and a daddy long legs spider got on my hand. They are harmless but still they feel creepy, so I said "Daddy long legs...." to tell them I got one on me and to help knock it off but they just went on explaining what they had. The spider crawled up my arm and as I was saying "Daddy long legs!" again and again as it ran up my back and down my shorts!
I woke up and could still feel that creepy feel their feet give you on my butt! I laughed at the silliness of the whole thing and wrote down dream 1 and 2.

Dream 3: Time Travel Over Florida
I was seeing a view of Florida from about 100 miles up, I could clearly see the coastline of it and a few other states. Still this was Florida 125,000 years ago as said the small sign/scroll on the state it said 125k. As in this picture the state is huge and more much fatter. I moved in hoping to go down and explore but as I did the time on the scroll started to fall and the states shorelines moved in quickly. I a few seconds Florida looked like it does now and the counter reached 0 and disappeared, then I understood that I was moving in the direction of the future. As I moved closer the states borders shrank till it got so small it was mostly a thin needle of a state that then shrank back into the continent leaving behind the longest line of beautiful coral reefs. These reefs stretched from the continent to down around the everglades and I got a sense they are one of the jewels of the Earth (125,000 years from now) and that there was so much different and wonderful aquatic life down there. In some way I wondered if I should be feeling sad for all that human stuff that was down there being lost but I did not at all, not one bit. I was now over the reefs and I marveled at how beautiful they looked.
I immediately woke up to write this down but was so tired that I took the chancy path of recording it to memory instead. I'm lucky to remember this at all I guess.

[Now I'm all caught up. This one is from last night.]

I'm in a [completely unfamiliar] house where my family is staying. My mom is temporarily adopting a baby named Ana from some woman. Inside the house, I pick up P., who is maybe 5 or 6 years old (small enough for me to pick up and carry around) but still thinks and talks like the 19-year-old she currently is in reality. I'm supposed to call her Ana in front of our mother, but I accidentally slip up and call her P. [I don't even know.] There is an actual baby Ana somewhere in the house; I see her there. While walking around outside the house, I pass by the baby's mother as she's leaving.

Our family has also gotten a small, fluffy white dog. While I'm lying in bed in my room in the aforementioned house, the dog comes and jumps into bed with me, and I pet him and snuggle him. He's warm and soft, and I decide I like having a dog. [I've never had one in reality.]

My family and I are walking around on a street outside, at dusk. The neighborhood we're in looks rundown and old, all one-story houses and vacant lots. A bigger dog runs up to me and jumps up onto my clothes. I'm scared and try to tell him to go away [just as I would in real life], but he doesn't knock me over with his paws, and I decide the experience isn't actually as scary as I had thought it was. [Hmm. That's the second time I've encountered and overcome a longtime fear while dreaming, although I wasn't lucid this time. I hope this trend continues!]

We continue walking through the neighborhood. I recognize a lot of the people living in it as students from my ESOL classes at DePorres, which I know is also in the neighborhood. I say to my family, “If I randomly say hello to people, they're my students.” After a short while, there's a crowd of at least 20-25 people accompanying me on my walk through the neighborhood, and I recognize at least two-thirds of them as my students. I say aloud, “This is the best neighborhood ever!” [Not only were my students much more spread out across the area than that, but the neighborhood around DePorres isn't quite as rundown as it was in this dream. Also, I notice that when I dream about Florida, sometimes it's bright and sunny, and sometimes it's darker and grittier than it actually is (well, darker and grittier than the part of Florida where I lived actually is, anyway).]

We come upon a vacant lot that is all dug up because people are in the process of building a playground there. Standing on top of one of the piles of dug-up dirt, I say, “This wasn't here two years ago.” It makes me happy that something is getting built there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[I remember three dreams from last night, the last one REALLY long and complicated. It wasn't lucid, unfortunately, but it was still pretty awesome.]

[Fragment] I'm at a mall. Even though it's late at night, there are still people approaching the entrances, mostly to get to the McDonald's and the Starbucks that are near one of the entrances.

[Somewhat longer dream] I'm at Disneyland, going on Star Tours. There's a really, really long, elaborate queue for it, but I just walk straight through, because there are hardly any people waiting for it. The first part of the ride is a standard spinner, which is up on a platform with a big painting of Buzz Lightyear and his spaceship on it. “Why would they do that?” I think when I see it. [Sigh. I really need to make serious reality-checking a stronger habit.] After we (the guests) get off the spinner, we walk back across the platform to the entrance to the next part of the queue, where we are handed a seatbelt to take with us when we go and board our actual Starspeeder, which has four rows of four seats each. I try to get into the seat furthest to the right in either the second or third row, but I can't; it's too narrow for me. There's another empty seat in one of the rows behind me, but everyone else has already sat down, so to get there, I have to climb over everyone else. I accidentally kick one person in the head and just miss another in the process.

[Really long dream begins here] I see what look like full-page panels from a comic book: each one is a cityscape at night, and there is a glow of sunlight on the horizon. The point of view moves, moving toward the horizon each time, but every time it passes over the horizon and 'turns the page,' there's still the same distant glow of light on the new horizon.

After the fourth or fifth repetition of this, the scene transforms into three-dimensional live-action all around me. I'm still me, but I know that I'm imagining myself into the universe of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” which is what this place is. I'm in a room, and there are two other people there with me, a man with dark-brown hair and stubble and a blonde woman. They're both supporting characters from the show. [I knew what these characters' names were in the dream, but I cannot remember them now, so I will refer to them as “The Guy” and “The Girl.”]

Outside, it's now daytime, but there's a thick white haze covering the entire sky. This has been going on for several days, and it will allow vampires to be out and about during the day.

The Guy, The Girl, and I all go to a class at a school. I'm not playing the role of any particular character from the show; I'm just trying to blend in as a generic student. We enter a classroom, and all the students hand their homework in to the teacher before sitting down. I try to walk straight to one of the old-fashioned, dark wood desks and sit down, but the teacher grabs my arm and asks me, “Did you do your homework?” I say, “No, I don't have it.” Of course I haven't done it; I'm not actually a resident of this fictional universe. Then it occurs to me to try reaching into my backpack, which is sitting on a chair, and expecting my homework to be there in order to obtain it. I try it, but it doesn't work. [Yes, that's right. In this dream, I remembered to apply a technique I learned here on DV, even though I hadn't realized that I was dreaming. My mind is weird.]

Later, The Guy, The Girl and I are all in a car. We're talking about how I'm going to leave soon (or something is going to happen soon), but it's all right, because afterward, The Girl is going to be just the same. “In fact, she'll be whatever you want,” I say to The Guy. I'm the only one who knows that the role of The Girl is actually being played by Bebe, a fictional character I imagined up years ago [both in this dream and in my waking life, by the way], and when I stop imagining myself into the Buffyverse and leave it, Bebe will leave it, too, because she's part of my imagination.

I look out the window of the car and see, in the distance on the top of a hill, the silhouette of a big roller coaster and Ferris wheel. I think, “That must be Six Flags Magic Mountain.”

The Guy, who is driving the car, says something along the lines of, “Are those guys still following us?” We look into the rearview mirror and see four guys walking behind our car. Our car is driving pretty slowly, because we're on a narrow street with lots of other cars on it that runs through town, but still, if those guys managed to follow our car on foot all this way and through all this traffic, they must be ghosts. The Guy shoots a fireball at one of them, but he dodges it, even calling his attack (“Ghost Dodge!”). There is a fight out on the street, and The Guy, The Girl, and I all get killed by the ghosts.

Having been killed, I wake up in some unidentified location. [Not really! I was still dreaming, but as usual with FAs, I didn't realize it was false until after I woke up for real.] Waking up upon being killed is exactly what I expected to happen. I know that that particular dream/imaginary place isn't supposed to exist anymore – I was the only one dreaming/imagining it and I just got thrown out of it by being killed, so it should have just collapsed – but I think, “Screw the rules, I have imagination,” and imagine my way right back into it. [Note that although the rules being screwed here are the ones from Inception, there was no sign of one of their dream-sharing devices during this FA – everything was powered entirely by my imagination.]

I'm back in the Buffyverse, but not in the same place I just left; I'm walking around in an unpaved plaza. Passing by a particular cafe, I find my Starbucks travel mug [yes, the one I have in real life] standing on the ground outside the shop, being used to collect the water dripping off the roof. The lid is lying next to it, and both the lid and the cup are all cracked and broken from being left outside for such a long time. I say something along the lines of, “Did I leave this thing out here for the last few days?” to the cafe owner. Then I pick up the cup and the lid, take them with me, and continue walking. I find several small, brick structures with audio-animatronic characters in them, activated by motion sensors. These structures are actually trash cans; I use one of them to throw away the broken cup.

The next thing I remember is being in my old townhouse apartment in Florida. I discover that the two sheets of notebook paper I set down on the couch a few minutes ago, the ones with notes from my dreams written on them, are soaking up liquid. I pick them up and see that there's punch spilled on the couch. Annoyed, I say, “I have to read these.” My roommate, Laya, is there, and the following conversation ensues.

Laya: Someone threw a cup of punch at the couch.
Me: We don't have any paper towels in the house, do we?
Laya: No.

So I go over to the kitchen sink and get a cloth towel.

Laya: You should pull your weight around here.

I start trying to wipe the spilled punch off the couch. It's a foldout couch, and I've been sleeping on it. An unidentified male friend of ours is looking around upstairs and sees that none of the bedrooms up there are being used. I'm alerted to this fact when he calls down the stairs to us.

Unidentified Male Friend: (Emiko) never sleeps here. [he used my real first name in the dream]
Me (yelling back): Yes, I do! In fact, this is the only place I've slept at all since we've been in Florida this go-round! It's just that I sleep downstairs!

When I woke up for real, I commented, “The kitchen sink isn't up against the back wall, and since when do any of those apartments have foldout couches?” [Also, “this go-round?” Apparently, in this dream, not only had I gone back to spend another year there, but so had several of my friends from that year. Finally, my memory for spoken dialog from dreams has been really bad up until now, but this time it was really good. That's pretty cool.]

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

I'm in Florida, driving my little car to a neighborhood where there's a shopping center I want to go to, only to discover that it's been torn out, leaving empty lots and abandoned buildings. Some thoughtful people have already come to the area and put up posters encouraging others not to allow the area to become a “trash park.” The posters feature the URL to the website for this campaign, which is dontgointolimbo.com. [LOL! I'm not sure whether this is more amusing or disturbing.] I park my car next to a curb and get out. There are two women standing in the street, talking about what happened. I look at my phone and see that it's 6:40 P.M. That means I still have 20 minutes, so I decide to just walk over to the store I'd been intending to go to. [ARGH. I've been practicing checking my phone twice every time I want to know the time, but it's a relatively new habit, so I guess it isn't ingrained deeply enough in my subconscious yet.]

My mom comes into my room to wake me up. She tells me that P. [my younger sister] has gotten sentimental and has invited us all to come and meet her for a day at the beach in some town with a funny name, so I should pack and get ready for one. I think, Okay, I can miss church this once. The other St. Francis anthem isn't that hard. [My third night with that little cardboard-square bracelet brought about another completely convincing false awakening – this one even more convincing than the last, because this time, my awareness within the dream of what day of the week it was and what song I would be missing out on if I missed church matched up with reality exactly.]

Woke up for real. Thought to myself, Oh. I guess I'm going to church after all. I wasn't angry about the FA at all this time; I just took it in stride. Took some notes, then went back to bed. The next dream I had followed on directly from the previous one.

I'm driving in the car with my family, through a city. I look up from something I'm using to occupy myself (book or magazine, maybe) and ask, “Where in Gonk's name are we?” My mom answers with the same funny town name she mentioned before. It's nighttime, and we drive through a residential neighborhood on a cliff overlooking the ocean. We pass a succession of three street signs that read “Ruruoni,” “B-Ruruoni,” and “C-Ruruoni.” There's one big apartment house with a bunch of letter-shaped mylar helium balloons on the roof, spelling out “SOS SHOTS” [as in, the alcoholic kind]. There is a wild party with lots of alcohol going on there. P. wants to go to the party and spend the night in that building, but our parents won't let her, so we're having a family fight.

We're on the top floor of some kind of big, public building with lots of glass walls and a long staircase going down into the rest of the building. P. says to all of us, “Meet you at the bottom,” and starts going down the stairs.

[What's the deal? It's like my subconscious went, “Here, have a big family fight – it's been a while since you've had one in reality.” That kind of sucks. :-( ]

Awake, Non-lucid, Lucid, [Commentary and notes written while awake]

Last night, while going to sleep and attempting to MILD, I stopped to pray. I had stopped to pray the previous night, too, and had had no dreams that I could remember, so I almost didn't want to do it again, but I told myself, Post hoc, ergo propter hoc much? You know that doesn't make sense. Just go ahead and do it. So I did. [I'm only writing this part down because it relates to the first dream I had last night.]

[Dream #1] On the corner of the street my house is on [a corner that doesn't exist in real life – the real corner is just a 90-degree turn in the road, but in the dream, it's a four-way intersection], in the front yard of the corner house, there is a big, tall tree with bright yellow leaves like the leaves on a maidenhair tree. There are also some gourds with faces hand-carved on them hanging from the tree. The house belongs to an old woman, who did the carving. I am reading a newspaper article about this house, in a newspaper called The Syntax. According to the article, a few days ago, a strong wind picked up and blew all the leaves off the tree. Immediately thereafter, people in the neighborhood started having various strokes of both good and bad fortune, and they all claimed that it was because of the wind blowing the leaves off the tree. This sparked a neighborhood-wide controversy: were the good things really caused by the tree, or the bad things, or none of them? Someone who was interviewed for the newspaper article argued for the “none of them” position by quoting the Bible verse about how no one can tell where the wind comes from or where it is going. [John 3:8, for the record.]

[Dream #2] I'm walking through an indoor hallway to get to some kind of high school sporting event that is being held in a high school gymnasium. One of the teams is called the Blue Meanies; they have two mascot outfits, a male and female Norse warrior. The other team has someone in a mascot outfit, too. [I don't remember now what it looked like, or what their team name was.] Each team has also brought just a handful of cheerleaders to the game.

[Dream #3] I'm playing PackRat. [Again.] There are two different limited-release collections pretty much right at the same time, and they've re-released a whole bunch of retired cards for the recipes in the retired collections. The images on one of the limited-release sets are of pipes or cables, and they extend across multiple different cards. They're making it even easier than they did with the jigsaw-puzzle set, I think. [The jigsaw-puzzle set exists in reality; this limited-release set does not.] I find that my pack has been erased and refilled with 5 cards from the other limited-release set, the one with normal art [in Doug J.'s signature style], one of which is the top card.

[Dream #4 – seemed to segue directly from the above, but how, I couldn't say] I'm outside somewhere, apparently in the yard or garden of some manor house or something, and it's nighttime. I see a fireworks show starting up a short distance away; the horizon is low and flat, so I can see it with no obstructions at all. My mom is there, and I tell her that if she turns around, she can see the fireworks show.

Woke up at 2:32 A.M. Took some notes on my dreams so far on a notepad, then went back to sleep, attempting to MILD again. It worked!

[Dream #5] I'm in the house I grew up in again. [Although this is a known dream sign for me, I don't remember specifically thinking, “hey, if I'm here, then I must be dreaming.” Nonetheless,] I'm lucid enough to decide to walk around from room to room of my own volition. When I get to the bathroom, I try to walk through the back wall of the white tile shower, which would take me out into the patio. [Yes, the real house is laid out that way.] It doesn't work; I only get part way into it, not through it. I don't feel anything. I continue walking through the house, and one of my parents sees me. [That's all I remember, unfortunately.]

[Dream #6] My family and I are on vacation in Key Largo. [Apart from having tropical beaches, it's absolutely nothing at all like the real Key Largo, which I've been to once.] It consists of a couple of islands connected by a bridge. On the first one, there is a high, tower-like hill. We climb the stairs to the top and look out at the ocean and the other island, which is where the town and the boat launch area are. I exclaim, “Guess what I forgot! Sunblock!” Then we go down the hill and over into town.

The town, or at least the downtown, consists of one big continuous building with corridors lined with shops and restaurants running through it. The entrances to the corridors are numbered and are rounded, making them look more like tunnels. We go down corridor #8 and pass a lot of shops. It's obvious how small and rivalry-filled, yet close-knit, the community here is by what's written on the signs people have in front of their shops: one of them says that their food is better than the food at another shop (even specifically naming the other one!), and another contains a proposal of marriage. Eventually, the tunnel ends in a rounded food court, like in a mall. My parents and I go over to a coffee shop/bakery toward the far side of the chamber and a little to the right. There are breads and pastries displayed all over the back wall and in long glass cases.

[Very abruptly, the scene changes and] My mom and I are driving in her car back toward the main highway that runs through the Florida Keys. (The two islands mentioned above that make up Key Largo stick out from it at a right angle.) I see the high-rise buildings of Key West [the what now?!] in the distance. The sun is either rising or setting, and the way its light is hitting them is making them glow with amazingly brilliant neon colors. [Some of which would be impossible in real life. It's surreal, but really beautiful.] I tell my mom to look at the light on the high-rises, and she does. In order to get a better view of it from further back, she turns the car so the front windshield is facing the high-rises, then starts backing it up, across the sandy beach and into the ocean. Somewhere around here, I shift to viewing the scene from a third-person perspective, up above the car. The car keeps going across the water for a pretty good distance before it sinks into the ocean and we die. Then I think to myself, “Only not really, because this is a dream.” Then the scene rewinds [on its own, not because of anything I did, thought, or willed]. The car drives forward, back over the surface of the water, with me still watching from my third-person perspective.

On our way back toward the town (I'm back to first-person perspective now), I look back and can see where the main highway is by the telephone poles and elevated bridges on the horizon. When we reach the town, I can see that there's a small railroad that goes all the way around the outside of the building, and every shop has a back door that opens onto the railroad track. This is how they load and unload things. Of course, I think; there's no room for cars or trucks on the island. [Then what are we doing driving our car there?] We re-enter the coffee shop/bakery from before, through the back door, and now we order food: cinnamon rolls out of one of those canisters you get from the refrigerated section at the grocery store. The shop attendant opens the canister behind the counter, and the vertical stack of cinnamon rolls expands, the frosting running down the sides. I say aloud, “Do want!” We proceed along the outside of the glass cases to where the coffee machines are. The signs on the coffee machines show that they contain a milder and a bolder version of Dunkin' Donuts coffee. I start getting myself some coffee, and then the dream ends.

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Some meta-commentary on the lucid dreaming journey:

One of the things I'm really liking about this experiment with dream journaling and lucid dreaming is that it's finally broken me of the bad habit of staying up past 11:00 every night that I developed when I started college. I was still doing it up until a week or two ago. I always used to want to stay in bed until well after sunrise, but the sunlight always woke me up, so I got a sleep mask and got into the habit of reaching over and putting it on as soon as the sunlight started to wake me up, then continuing to sleep, or trying to. I've been in this habit for at least a year, and I'm finding that it's so deeply ingrained that I'm still doing it, even though I'm now going to bed earlier and getting up at or before sunrise. I would be annoyed by this if I hadn't realized that it's useful – I have a natural, biological WBTB alarm set.

Last night, I read this thread and decided to adopt the mantra “I lucid dream” for MILD purposes. I decided to put that sentence in the same mental categories with such sentences as “I play the clarinet,” “I speak Spanish,” and “I write novels:” the categories of “ongoing, recurring action” and “learned skill.”

My previous lucid experience back on the night of October 1 left me euphoric for the entirety of the next day, but this one just left me disappointed. While I was recalling my dreams after waking up, I thought: What did I just say about lucid dreaming being a learned skill? That was only my third time. What was it like the third time I played the clarinet? I know the answer to that one: I only played one, two, or three different notes, because that was all I knew how to play. It took lots of practice and learning before I could play all the notes. I hope, and intend, to master lucid dreaming skills via the same process.