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whoops I thought it'd been like two days since I updated this thing
whoops

Dream: War is Hella
aren't you proud of me for coming up with that awful title
yes

So the dream started off with some Dragon Ball Z shenanigans (I'm more of a Dragon Ball Z Abridged nerd myself). Sort of an apocalypse setting like History of Trunks (the only official DBZ thing I've seen), except Goku didn't die and it wasn't androids and Gohan was still a little kid.

Goku flew off to get something done and when he got back Gohan was sitting on the ground glowering intensely and looking like he was about to cry. I completely misread the mood and pointed at him to someone else and went "Look at Gohan! " and they were like uhhhh... it might've been my sister.

Next it turned out they were working on engineering something that would make them stronger. Goku had got what they needed so now it was up to Gohan to donate blood and he went ham on that. There were like, these odd needles with glowing blue orbs, and he had like 10 or 20 of them sticking out of him. The impression given was that he was stepping up to donate out of some kind of eagerness and sense of duty but also it seemed like everyone else was dead ?? and couldn't donate ?? so whatever ??

Goku took the medicine or whatever and the two of them sparred and they just frickin vanished into speed lines. I was like :000 because it was the fastest (dream-canonically) they'd ever been.

So that was cool. At that point I think they ceased to be relevant.

Then it was time for some war shenanigans. Same apocalypse setting, we were in the city and buildings everywhere were empty and decrepit and enemy soldiers were flying in on these massive airships. I was my rad lucidnerd self, not totally consciously aware it was a dream but flying around exactly as if I were. Like it was second nature.

So then I had a laser which I could point at explosives to make 'em blow up. I tried to use these as anti-air vs the airships but it didn't particularly work and they dropped loads of army men on me. Like the toys. Various sizes, all weak as kittens. I swept 'em off the ... bed I was on. I mean, I was on the roof of a building, but when they air-dropped it was suddenly a game of "get off my bed," so whatever.

After sweeping those nerds I went back to playing with the laser, pointing it at some TNT that was strapped to a rundown building. It was just one corner of the building, 20 floors up, so when it blew up the building didn't collapse. Oh well.

Next I started flying around and ended up on the roof of some building where a flag was supposed to be. It was like, get the flag and you get lots of points. Two other guys showed up, not related to each other but both seeking the flag. I got in a little pointless gunfight with one and the other nabbed it. Oh WELL.

Then I was sneaking into the building we were on. It turned out to be a hideout for both soldiers and schoolchildren (!?!) as well as their teachers. I had fun wandering around, all psyched by the thought that if someone recognized me as an American they would all totally go after me. So that made just walking around there exciting.

Then I ran into Ben, of all things, starring in the dream as an exhausted dirty soldier. I was like "Ben! " and then I was like wait maybe I shouldn't approach him. But it was sort of too late and I was like oh well.

We hung out for a bit and then I wooooke uuuuuuuuuuuup.

Y'know, I would almost call this "automatic lucidity" 'cause it's a cool name but too late, I already named it "low-level lucidity" last year.

OKAY LET'S SEE

Dream - Disappointment
So I dreamed that I somehow saw a brand new scene from the movie Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, where Cloud was in the Forgotten City being interrogated by Kadaj on the location of something important (my brain apparently tried to come up with something important that Kadaj would want the location of, and came up with "glue"). I really liked this new scene and went looking for it on YouTube after I "woke up", but attempts to search for it by entering such scene-relevant quotes as "Give up the glue" for some reason only brought up videos I had no interest in, such as The Running Man "Give Up the Glue". I eventually became fully convinced, much to my disappointment, that it had only been a dream, and that I would likely never see the scene again. :c

False Awakenings
Lessee, then that YouTube false awakening aside, I had a couple more false awakenings re: something I had to do real quick at 7 AM-ish before falling asleep again. I had two different dreams where I accomplished the task, and when my alarm finally woke me up at 7 AM I was half-convinced I'd already done it a couple times, when in reality I'd never (as far as I can tell) left my bed.

Dream - Frustration
So this one started out with Jess and I chilling in this otherwise-empty house, perhaps abandoned by its previous residents. We were in the bathroom with the bathtub filled with water, but when I looked in it I saw two weird insect-things I'd never seen before. They seemed to be an aquatic version of house centipedes, though with marginally thicker legs and fewer of them, which were squirming on the surface of the water like protozoa (thanks BIO 101). I called in this strangeness to some radio or TV show, who promptly announced to everyone that some 14 million cases of these weird insect-things being in peoples' homes had been reported.

Then mom drove up and frickin' took me away from the house for some reason. I didn't particularly want to leave, but next thing I knew I was in the car and we were racing down the highway. I started sort of crying (it felt like I couldn't really cry, just sort of half-cry?) to try to convince her to take me back to the house, but it seemed to just make her annoyed. Then I tried to open the door to potentially jump out, but the force of the wind outside made it impossible to open. So I settled on crying and hoping Dad wouldn't suddenly appear in the front seat, since he would've seen right through this weirdness and told me to cut it out.

Then I'm not sure what happened. I ended up in the middle of nowhere at night, trying to find a way to head back. I seem to remember performing some stunt where I ramped a truck off something in a reckless manner, and I may have encountered a homeless guy or hitchhiker or something, who was my key to getting back to the house. But I'm not totally sure.

I somehow ended up back at the house. Still nighttime, and now Jess and Mom were on the front porch, apparently witnessing my arrival. I was incredibly irritated by having been relocated, and looked over to see what looked like an 18-wheeler fuel tanker chilling in the dark nearby. I reached out and grabbed it with psychic power, feeling a satisfying sense of weight as I lifted it into the air. I slammed it down on the front yard (apparently lifting things into the air and then slamming them to the ground is a thing I do nowadays). Then I hopped up on top of it, and started channeling intense heat around my hands. I pressed both palms against the truck, and the metal turned molten (though without glowing), allowing them to sink through. As I did this, I noticed that my hands felt at first cold, and then lukewarm; one of the things I worry about when I consider using fire powers is the potential that I would just burn myself, but it seems to be a nonissue.

I think I was trying to cause a gas explosion or something, though not with the intent to hurt anyone. I was just really irritated and lucid enough to realize that I could do what I wanted. I think that's where I woke up, though.

- - - - - - - - - -

Update: April 26 2014 (aka the next day)
At the time I had this dream there was some stuff about it that didn't make sense, like the part where I tried to manipulate mom by crying (very petty behavior, something I don't think I could ever do IWL) and the fact that I saw Dad as someone who would see right through my attempts at manipulation (IWL he's more clueless than shrewd).

Then, today, I got into a big shouting match with Dad. Apparently he'd been building up tension ever since Mom requested that we have the house totally cleaned up by Tuesday, so a photographer can take pictures. He tried to hint at how we should do a little at a time, say five minutes here and there, so it would get done early, although the rambling way he requested it made it a little hard to take seriously. And then he blew up tonight (after some prompting on my part). Some of the things he mentioned was the fact that he feels like Mom and him can't request favors from us (my sister and I) and that he feels like they're too easy on us. He felt that Mom in particular is helpless to request that we get things done, or maybe it's that we won't get things done without plenty of prompting and her being over my shoulder.

After his temper tantrum I certainly felt like slamming an eighteen-wheeler around. The obvious parallel aside, it seems to me that Mom driving me to somewhere I don't want to go while I act passive aggressive about it and hope Dad doesn't show up and make me stop is a parallel to Mom requesting that I get cleaning done while I put it off and Dad tries to have me get it done early.

Not trying to imply that I'm some kinda weird psychic or anything, I think I was just sort of unconsciously picking up on the stress signals Dad was sending out.

The sad thing is it's not like I'm some slacker who doesn't get things done. I'm going to sleep the stress off, wake up after a good night's sleep, grab a shower and some tea and bomb the absolute heck out of my to-do list, and it's gonna be super satisfying, especially after I got basically nothing done today. And all this drama will have been completely unnecessary, except for pushing my bedtime back another hour, and giving this dream some reasoning behind it.

In other news I'm thinking of reading Freud's Interpretation of Dreams. Still pretty skeptical about him (my Psych professor doesn't like him), but the more one reads, the more ideas one has to draw from.

woke up naturally after this dream and spent some time just lying in bed half-awake before remembering that oh snap I was lucid in this one whaaaat

Lucid #5 Aw Yee
So it started out with me just doing my usual dream thing of picking out various items from a large department store, except this time I tried to leave without paying with everything in my shopping cart, and managed to walk outside (nighttime) before a friendly employee had to lay down the law for me. She said that if I were going to do that, there was a certain price limit I'd need to adhere to, so I had to put back some things and then I could take the rest and pay it back later. I realized that I didn't actually need a bunch of Christmas decorations (mostly it was a lot of that fake green tree stuff you can put everywhere, and a wreath) and decided that those would be the thing to put back.

As I was carrying an armful of fake green tree stuff back through the store, I passed the stuffed animal section, where a kid and his dad were having some sort of strange, stuffed-animal-related argument. I recognized that my dad and I had, in fact, had that same argument before (false memory) and was quite tempted to say as much to the kid on my second pass, now unburdened of weird fake green tree stuff. But I ultimately decided not to. Oh well.

I went back outside, where the employee was waiting with a receipt for the rest of my things. Taking and looking over the receipt, I was quite disappointed to realize that yes, I would still have to eventually pay for all this. Just not at that exact moment.

The next thing I remember is spontaneously becoming lucid simply because it felt like a dream. No reality check, no examining of my surroundings, not even an "aha" moment of "maybe this is actually a dream". My mindset simply swapped right on over to "lucid", so quickly and completely that all I remember is picking out "shooting a concussive blast from my palm" as my dream task of the moment and hopping right to it.

So then I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to shoot a concussive blast from my palm, which was... hard to figure out...? (I'm currently tempted to say "difficult" or "impossible" but that's a bad idea.) The second floor of the department store had a wall of windows which I stood in front of, right arm out, palm forward, left arm gripping and stabilizing my right, and then there was a whole lot of "how do" (meanwhile, a store employee looked on in alarm). I imagined the blast shooting out. I tried to summon the energy from within my arm. I imagined that perhaps my right upper arm might glow, and it may have. I thought about the way I was positioning my arms, and how it felt. (One thing I DIDN'T try was a voice command.) I'm pretty sure I never actually succeeded, though one window did end up broken somehow, and I have a vague-yet-pleasant memory of flying through it to the rooftop of another building in the night. Yay <3 (sorry, store employee)

I also remember trying to stabilize the dream by rubbing my hands together. Like the realization that I was lucid, it felt spontaneous and seemed to come from nowhere. Normally my dream ideas are linked back to the DreamViews forums somehow, like "oh right, I should rub my hands together to stabilize *mental image of the dream views home page*," or something like that. But this time, again, the idea seemed to have no real source of generation. I just tried rubbing my hands together and paying attention to how it felt.

Then I made the mistake of putting my rubbing hands up by my ear to listen to the sound of it, which felt so distinctly real that I started to think I was in bed, starting to move around and wake myself up. At that point I lost my conscious lucidity, though I think my state still qualified as low-level-lucidity. FAIL STABILIZATION. NICE TRY DAWG.

Oh and since it feeling real made me LESS lucid, my guess is that this sort of lucidity was the spontaneous kind that comes from the dream feeling like a dream. Things can be fuzzier in dreams, darker, and the whole dream can have a strong "dreamy" feel that can be picked up on. Which is what happened in this case, and I assume what happens to Tman and Flotsam.

ANYWAY. The last part of the dream was about some physical fight I had with my sister's boyfriend in order to protect my mom. Mom was, I believe, starting to get up there in years (and now had her own little granny apartment), and my sister's boyfriend N had decided to arm himself with sharp implements and barricade himself in the 1319 front office. I'm not sure how that counted as a threat to my mom. I think I saw him as a threat, and since he wasn't a threat to me (it being a dream, still), it translated into him being a threat to my mom, so I couldn't simply leave him alone. I sought him out, armed with sharp implements of my own, though I'm not sure which ones. I know for sure he had a box cutter, I suppose because memories involving pain are easier to remember. (THAT'S CALLED FORESHADOWING)

hhhehehehe so anyway I'm getting sweaty palms remembering this but let's see here.* There was some sort of room divider a short space away from the door, which forced me to go right. He was trying to take advantage of this somehow, I think by blocking my way into the open area of the room, and it became a struggle. This mainly consisted of me trying to stab/slice him, and him trying to stab/slice me (which was of much greater concern to me), and I ended up mostly on the defensive. There were a great deal of "too-close-for-comfort" moments. The only thing preventing the box cutter from box cutting me was my continuous and determined preventive efforts, so it was a largely bloodless struggle at first.

Then my determination finally failed, for a moment. We were locked up, both my implements blocked and me managing to block one of his, but the box cutter was free and I couldn't rally the mental strength to stop it from cutting into my left hand. I was simply mentally exhausted by all my previous efforts and how useless it felt. The pain was quite strong and highly unpleasant and all sorts of other descriptive adjectives, but I think on the whole it was a sort of relief to get it over with after a great deal of worry and anticipation. Which says a lot about my mindset in the dream at that point. Like it was a scripted event. Weird.

Anyway after that I pulled myself together and "defeated" him somehow, though not by severely injuring or killing him. I'm not sure what happened. But next thing we were simply talking, both still armed, and mom was in the room with us, almost as a sort of referee to keep us from fighting again, with her presence. At some point he admitted that his plan, had he been unable to find something sharp, had been to use an ultrafine point red sharpie and scribble madly on my skin, to try to give the impression (in the heat of the moment) that I was bleeding. Not the worst plan ever, I suppose. I said something like "Psychological warfare?" in response to this, and he was like yeah.

There was something else about a Metro train, potentially because those are rad. I don't remember anything else about it, though.

*not that this is a particularly "bad" or traumatizing memory. just quite intense I suppose. I don't know, I wouldn't call it bad.

back to sleeeeep~

didn't set an alarm but did decide to try to write down what dreams I might have, which is why I'm awake right noww~
low-level lucidity is the best yo
callin' it night 'cause I'm going back to sleep after this.

Dream - Bear Battle
So the dream started off with me and my sister and mom in a forest just walking down the forest path ... and then a bear started hunting us. Not a good feeling. We couldn't shake it, either, had to constantly keep moving. I think I may have done some flying at this point. I'm not sure how that helped though, since it would've left my family behind.

We came to a giant slide in the forest, like you'd see at a Renaissance festival, and Mom said something about how she couldn't believe a girl had died there. Apparently the (teenage) girl had been alone in the forest and been killed and eaten by the bear on or near the slide. Notwithstanding that we jumped on it and slid down, and I was in the front so when I reached the bottom and mom started to go past, I reached out and grabbed/saved her (with a bit of low-level lucidity trying to control my expectations so I wouldn't miss) and she grabbed Jess. Then we hopped off the slide and started heading back up the hill towards the path at an angle to it, presumably to throw the bear off when it went down the slide.

Next thing, we were in a convention center, which the bear was attacking. Ben and Dad were there, and people around us were fleeing in various directions. I had the thought that my family should be safe from the bear with so many other people around to get eaten by it.

But then, for whatever reason, we headed towards the back of the building, towards a more closed-off-from-the-public area. We came across an enterprising dude who was trying to rig the elevator shaft into a makeshift bear-killer using his electricity skills. I remember thick black wires going down this empty elevator shaft which had no doors of any kind, it just opened out onto each floor. Notwithstanding his intentions, the elevator shaft seemed like the safest place for my family to be, especially when it turned out that the bear was actually in THIS area, and part of the reason it was so empty was because everyone had fled. Apparently he'd broken through the wall somehow, from the more public area into here.

I sent my family to the bottom of the elevator shaft. At this point the main focus was protecting mom, so with that in mind I set off to fight the bear. My expectations were that it might not work but I didn't exactly have a choice; I'd have to do whatever it took to protect her.

At this point the bear had gradually gained sentience, and become something of a cyborg (white robotic add-ons, sort of Portal-esque), and was now treating killing my mother as the top item on his to-do list.

A lot of bear-fighting ensued! I had flying skills, and some level of invulnerability, as well as super strength, but the best I could do was hold him off, I think. I wish I could remember more about this part, although, maybe there wasn't more? Maybe it really was just a scant approximation of a bear fight. I do remember some parts, such as one time when I got Ben to tag in against the bear temporarily, and another where the bear got past me and dove down the elevator shaft, and I dove after him and caught up in midair (my brain was like "it's because I'm lighter, it makes sense! >8O", nice try brain), but he simply said something mocking (also he sort of was warping and changing shape, like the dream couldn't be bothered to have steady graphics), and I missed my chance to punch him in midair.

I'm pretty sure I punched him loads of other times though.

And I remember we had to keep shuffling mom around to keep her away from him. He was fricking persistent.

I think one of my favorite things about the dream was the feeling I got when I decided I was going to take a bear on to protect my mother. Protecting her with my life, y'know? And since I couldn't afford to lose, I got them dream powers. There was more to it, though. I wish I could remember moooreeee aaaaaa

Uhhh and the last phase of the dream was where we left the convention center, and the bear had evolved to a stronger form, aka Godzilla. He was towering over everything and STILL wanted to kill my mother, so we had to move her away/keep her hidden in the crowd. He was angrily demanding of me to give up already, and I was calculating how far up I would have to fly just to get by his face so I could punch it. At this point I didn't stand a chance (also, he had cheater bubble powers that could vaporize things).

WHICH IS WHYYYY the Justice League showed up. I prefer The Avengers, but oh well. Superman was very handy to have. They even had a bit of a dramatic reveal, where Godzilla flung something that had a person or two inside, and Superman caught it before it could hit the ground. Then it turned into a movie, with an off-screen crowd watching from some theater somewhere.

Godzilla became a bear again, I think, which retreated into an upper floor of some building. Superman challenged it and said he would take it on anytime, and the bear/Godzilla responded sort of sulkily, while I was thinking yes, please let Superman just kill this thing already. But he didn't. He got in an argument with another Justice League member and told them "You are not battery powered," and I was like "ah yes of course that makes sense." even though it did not, while the off-screen audience laughed. And then he argued with some super-speed lady, and more laughter ensued, and the bear may have left, and then I woke up.

Hehe I woke up like "aw I didn't dream anything" and then it all came back to me in a flash yo. Hmm I liked this oonee...
Let's see, I want another color for low-level lucidity, 'cause I do neato things when I'm like that and I wanna encourage it. Uhhmm.
Testing.

The Dream In Question (Lucid #2)
Yo okay this is gonna be loooooong. Also I know I'm forgetting some details but the durned things won't line up so screwit.

Basically I dreamed humanity was in some vast war with these frickin' space dinosaurs. The space dinosaurs also had those tan, humanoid Star Wars droids on their side, which they'd built and programmed. I was the son of the general who led the entire human resistance (though I think at the start of the dream I either was, or wanted to be, just another regular soldier). We were positioned behind two massive walls, with a fairly large gap between, occupied by shells of former buildings on either side of a vast street, very post-apocalyptic; the dinos would pour over the first wall and we'd light 'em up as best we could to prevent them from reaching the second wall. Directly behind that wall was the general's (and my) house, which also functioned as a sort of meeting place for the media and government. My dad kept them all close as a necessary part of the war effort. He had all his bases covered, it seemed.

So that day there were two waves of dinosaur attacks I think. Oh also I could fly, despite not being particularly lucid. I guess I was sort of lucid but not enough to plan anything or go for dream goals; just enough to try to manipulate the dream a bit and perform unrealistic shenanigans such as flight. Good times. (Flying wasn't a normal thing in the dream either, it was just how I chose to get around.)

So the first attack I remember flyin' my way towards the middle of the map, and oh man it was great flying. I remember drifting down like it was slow motion, skidding a few feet along the ground despite my light landing, and the physics just felt really really GOOD. I don't even know what the deal was but it was amazing. I'm gonna figure out how to fly like that it felt fantastic.

Then I presumably did some dinosaur fighting, though I can't recall the details, which is a real bummer. I DO remember the way the dinosaurs would approach: the frickin' pterodactyls gliding in ranks overhead, the brachiosauri looming in the distance with smaller dinos in the lead. Fairly picturesque, I just wish the quality had been a bit better. But a striking image all the same.

Hmmm we held off that attack fairly well. The next one though, I started behind the wall again, but this time I couldn't find a weapon. I made my way to the building on the far side of the first wall. There were media peeps in there I think, despite it being a shell, walls and windows blasted out; I guess that was where they shot footage from. Also had weapons right under 'em on a lower floor. I tried to get a sniper rifle from there (I remember another soldier making off with one) but I couldn't seem to get one. I thought it might've been because I was the general's son.

Notwithstanding this problem I headed out into the battle and probably accomplished just absolutely nothing at all. Absolute zip. Then the general noticed I was there (close by the first wall) and pointed out a droid that was about to cross the finish line tower-defense-style. I tried to sprint after the thing so I could take it out, I was gonna snap its skinny neck with one hand (dream powerrrzzzz) but I couldn't even catch up to the dang thing before it blooped through the finish line. Then the general pointed out ANOTHER one, a bit closer but still just a bit too far away (how had these singles droids gotten through everything?). I sprinted after it, and this time looked away from it so I could sort of catch up to it, like sneak up on it more quickly than I could if I were staring at it the whole time (dreeeaaam poweerrrzzz), but I still couldn't catch up. The general was equal parts angry and disappointed, but I was pretty mad at him myself. I told him if he'd let me have a gun, I would've been able to stop them easily. He didn't deny it, so mystery solved.

Then it was nighttime and we'd all retired to the house behind the wall. The general was keeping tabs on the media and strengthening his ties to the government, making sure he had their support and all that. Meanwhile I was wandering around, went into a bathroom and stumbled upon a girl taking a bubble bath. I didn't leave right away, 'cause I was looking for somethin' (and you'll never know what it was), and meanwhile she gave some speech about how our sense of privacy was, in these times, only an illusion. Something to do with the changes the general had put in place. I could sort of see her point but I didn't feel like dwelling on it too long.

I wandered into another bathroom, which looked like the one from my IWL house (2nd floor), except right by the lightswitch was a little screen, maybe 6 inches across, that was blaring some sort of propaganda. Not exactly the untruthful kind, though. It was showing footage of three unarmed soldiers being ripped apart, screaming, by a couple of the droids (who seemed to be having a good time). Lotta blood and guts. The lesson was "these dinosaur guys sure are the worst." I watched it rather morosely, though for me the main connection was "hm, that doesn't seem far removed from how humans used to treat each other back in the earlier wars." I was kinda cynical about that stuff. Part of it was probably just good ol' teenage rebellion against my parent (pretty sure I only had the one).

And speaking of that guy, he started makin' really awful coughing sounds and presumably dying right then and there. While a few people attended to him, I wandered outside (he was in good hands and I was a terrible person). Now I was in the front yard of the house I currently live in IWL, at night.

Just then my IWL parents pulled up in the street, lookin' a bit wild-eyed for some reason. By this time I had somehow grasped it was a dream (no reality check though) and had decided to forge my own path. Also said somethin' like "I'm dreaming" just to confirm.

I took off flying up to the roofs across the street (in the background my parents took off again) and explored a bit. Then I sensed that the house below me belonged to some meditation specialist, and I decided to try to dig my way through the roof to get inside. At my touch, the roof split into 2x1 giant foam lego blocks, which divided into even smaller blocks upon further handling. These shenanigans may have distracted me from my goal a little, as I found myself digging through several layers with no sign of getting through her presumably-3-foot-thick ceiling. I'm pretty sure I woke up soon after.

Not the most lucid I've ever been (it didn't occur to me to perform powers from the competition) but it still feels pretty good, yo. Hasn't even been two weeks since I started this journal and I'm well on my way, hohohoho *evil laughter*.