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I was in a dark corridor. A hospital? I felt afraid. I was becoming lucid but it's hard to maintain. I thought of a recently deceased person, a priest, and I saw an old man along the corridor. I think he was sitting down or standing by a door. He looked mild but I "rushed" (slowly) towards him and jumped-kicked. We both fell down. I lost lucidity.

I was in a school. USLS. I was walking down the corridors. I was looking for something. I was with a few people. They keep changing. I was looking for the library. I checked the map. There's one nearby, but then I had to go elsewhere.

I went up a small hill. I tried to slide through the roots of a tree but I got scared and went up the hill and walked down.

Ritual: WTB 3am, woke several times before and after dawn but didn't WBTB, woke around 9:30am and put vibrating alarm on wrist, set for 24 minutes. Woke up too soon, before it went off, reset it. Next cycle effective.

EILD: I feel the pulse of the alarm on my left wrist, waking me, but remember to lay very still and see if I can maintain dream state. I experimentally move my hands and arms and from the sinuous and unimpeded sense of motion I'm convinced this is working, that I'm moving the dream body and not the physical one. I know I have to be careful not to overdo it and actually engage real motor functions, so I spend some time almost "dancing" in place with my arms, writhing them bonelessly like a snake dance, until I have enough sense of engagement with the dream body that I risk rolling out of bed. I can't walk yet: I can barely crawl over the rug. I know I need to engage the environment, so I stare at the carpet, noticing the texture of the pile. I'm pleased when I spot a piece of random detritus under my dresser, because something unexpected means the dreamstate is gaining momentum. To gain traction I focus on physical sensations, running my hands over the carpet and even bending lower to rub my cheek against it. Even though I've done this many times before I'm still impressed with the vividness of the sensation, it feels so scratchy and real.

When I feel sufficiently engaged with my dream body, I manage to stand upright and walk. I easily recall my plan to work on memory—carefully though! I don't want to actually wake myself up. Trying to remember where I went to sleep seems unnecessary, as I still haven't left the bedroom. What about the date? I'm pretty sure it's February... I don't want to think harder to get the precise date lest that efffort wake me. (It's worth nothing that I usually have to think just as hard to remember the calendar date in WL. Usually I just look at my phone because it's easier.)

I start walking through the hall toward the kitchen. What other memory should I try to access? I know, what have I been reading lately? I'm pretty sure I came up with the correct general impression, but even as I write this, details of my waking life knowledge of this topic are corrupting and crowding out the dream recollections to the point where it is hard to be sure how specific my answer was. At any rate, in the dream I felt satisfied with my level of memory access and moved on.

As I entered the kitchen I noticed something peculiar: even though I was in a very accurate mental model of my house and had a strong access to waking recollection, and had even managed to access WL memory without disrupting the dream state, it had not in the least improved it either. I had a good sense of tactility (I find that the easiest sense to maintain), but as so often in early WILDs (which this effectively was though induced by EILD technique), my vision was still extremely poor. The haziness was mitigated by the fact that I was in a dream version of my house, as I almost am at the start of dreams of this type, so I "knew" what was around me and that knowledge could help make up for the lack of visual clarity. Perhaps that is partly why my mind instinctively frames such dreams in this way, in addition to the straightforward logical continuity of entering the dream from a mental model of the same place I went to sleep. It moreover suggests that from the start of WILDs I always instinctively remember where my WL body is sleeping, even if I am not paying deliberate attention to the fact.

I wondered if concentrating would clean up my vision but there was no improvement— it's too bad I didn't think of Fryingman's awesome technique, which I only read about last night, of "taking off the blurry glasses." I figured I should try to clean it up in the usual way, interacting with the dreamstate until it naturally clarified and brightened. Meanwhile, I thought about the other tasks I had been planning. Most important was the elusive forest. After many tries fruitlessly trying to reach it on foot, I decided that I need to stop chasing it, since I seem to be encountering a mental block, and instead will it to manifest around me. I also remembered another task that I've been wanting to try for ages but never managed to think of when dreaming (so maybe this memory trick is working after all?) My idea was to see if I could "play" my WoW character, a Forsaken, and explore the Undercity. I murmur her name aloud, but decide to save that for another time—right now my main goal is to work on the forest.

I stand squarely in my kitchen and start to visualize myself surrounded by trees. There is a tall houseplant to my right with feathery foliage: it must be the little potted tree I used for Christmas, a Norfolk pine. I reach out and grasp its soft needles with my right hand, thinking this will help focus my thoughts on the forest I am attempting to conjure. Intriguingly, I fail to notice the spatial discrepancy: although the real tree is only a few feet from where I dreamed it, in WL it is now outside on the patio rather than inside the house.

Unfortunately, this is as close as I get to manifesting anything like a forest before my husband comes into the room. I figure he'll just ignore me because I am dreaming—and oddly I make the assumption, as I seem so often to do in the dreamstate, that I am encountering the real-life version of him even though I know I am dreaming. Maybe it is this tendency that makes some people interpret dreams so closely modeled on RL spaces as "OBEs". But I am thrown into confusion when my husband looks right at me and starts talking. What does it mean? How can he possibly see me? Could I have been wrong in my conviction that so-called "OBEs" are a naive misinterpretation of certain kinds of LDs; might I really be "projecting" an image of myself into the waking world? This still doesn't seem plausible, but the only alternative I can think of is that I am actually awake. (Note the dream logic: despite the generally high level of memory access and mental function in this dream, I completely fail to consider the most likely— and as it turns out correct—alternative, that the encounter with my husband is nothing more than a projection of my dreaming imagination.)

So am I awake or dreaming? I'm not sure anymore. It feels like a dream, and I'm still not seeing my environment very clearly, but maybe I'm still groggy and bleary from having just gotten up. How could I be confused about this, though? Although there are plenty of times that I'm fully convinced I'm awake and turn out to have been dreaming, not once have I ever been fully convinced I was dreaming and turned to be awake. It doesn't occur to me to try any of the typical RCs, but I focus my attention inward, on my sense of bodily awareness, to try to figure this out. I've often noticed that my dream body is characterized by a peculiar kind of inward vibration radiating from the area of my solar plexus—this impression used to be very strong and distinct, especially when flying, but it has become much less noticeable as I've grown more experienced. I think I can sense it now but it is very faint.

My husband is still talking, and although I am too perplexed to follow what he is saying, he seems to be complaining about some bad habit of mine. "...twenty-one times a day," he concludes. Apparently that's how often I do the thing that has been annoying him. Does it have something to do with my dream practice?

The encounter has now totally disrupted my concentration on the forest task, so I turn around and approach the patio door, thinking I'll just go outside. The weather looks lovely, cloudy and wet. "Hey, it's raining," I comment aloud, and anticipate how nice it will be to feel the cool water on my skin. I start to take off my sweater so I'll have something dry to put on when I come back in (it doesn't occur to me how odd it is that I'm wearing a sweater if I supposedly just got out of bed) and pull open the door.

"Don't, we have to leave," warns my husband. I recall (correctly) that he wanted us to go out on an errand today, but even if I am somehow actually awake, it must still be mid-morning. I assumed we were going in the afternoon, why would he want to leave so early? With these thoughts the dream is finally disrupted and I wake up.

Note: On the way to my laptop to write things down, I remember the silent alarm still on my wrist and look at the time. It reads 20:42, and it was set for intervals of 24 minutes, which means the whole dream played out in just under three and a half minutes. Of course, then it took an hour and a half to fully record, which is maybe why it's a good thing I don't LD every night, lol.

>I was thinking of Mark Sandman and something else.

>I was in my town and heard of someone sort-of being in debt to another. I know his name, I'm just not posting it here.

>I then went down the street and then over a bridge, I think; I then (With at least one other person) somehow cut down a tree in an area that I didn't know was posted for no loggers, and then the action was known near immediately. I was then in some sort of debt and whoever it was considered me deaf and another person (Who I know the name of and know in waking life) was blind.

I was playing with legos. Somehow or other I had legend of Korra lego figures and I had made a spaceship that all of the main characters could ride around in. I was doing that thing that you always see kids doing with Lego spaceships where they spin in circles and run around making laser gun sounds for no other reason than it could be done. I was really enjoying myself as well.

I was playing outside at night for some reason. I believe it was summer.

Just then I stopped. I noticed that the moon seemed to look strange. It seemed like there were no craters and the whole thing was just flat gray maria. My view seemed to zoom in on the moon. It came back to me, and I thought of how strange it was. Then I noticed that there was a second larger moon right next to it.

I thought for a second about what that might mean and realized that extra celestial bodies was a common dream sign. I preformed the nose pinch. Dreamin', baby! I had good lucidity too.

I looked up at the night sky. It was a clear night with no clouds. I thought about the stars for a few moments. There was a very bright one (might have been a planet) right above me.

I realized that I might want to try and stabilize the dream, seeing as I've been losing my lucid dreams a lot this past week or so. So my first priority was to get daylight. I tried my old trick of swiping the sky like an Iphone screen, but it didn't work. I tried swiping it the other direction and it still didn't work. I tried swiping it north-south (though this makes no sense) the sun came up directly south relative to my house.

Just then the dream started to destabilize. I laid down on the grass and grabbed onto it with both hands. "I will not lose the dream, I will not lose the dream, I will not lose the dream, I will not lose the dream, I will not lose the dream!" I began to feel like I was spinning. A golden light passed over me, and I phased through a number of blurry environments but retained the grassy bed below me.

I got up and pulled up the grass. I put it in my mouth to try to stimulate taste or maybe hold onto the dream a little longer, but it tasted like having metal shards in my mouth. I spit it out to see that the grass was in fact a bunch of small X-acto blades.

I looked around. I was in a perfectly flat meadow. All around me were equally sized and spaced tombstones. They were huge, about ten or twelve feet tall, and they didn't have any writing on them. And they were all on forty-five degree angles leaning toward a huge tree that the sunlight shone through. There were a couple of clouds in the sky.

I began to feel Manei was somewhere in the dream. I felt like I should focus on her, bring her forward, but the dream was slipping quickly.

"I want to know why the dream is so unstable!"

I began to lose the dream again, and let it slide this time. There really was no point if it was going to fight me this hard. I did my best to hang on to staring at the huge tree.

My parents asked me to get a stick unjammed from the door of our family van. I went with a pair of pliers into... not our driveway. For some reason, in the dream we had this huge one story house made out of beige bricks on the next block over in our sub. We also had one of those circular drives.

I started pulling on the stick and saw that it went in pretty far. Once I got it out far enough that I could grab it with both hands, I tugged on it and was surprised to see that (somehow) an entire tree had grown inside the frame of the car between the inside and the outside.

At one point I tried to drive the van up and down the road. There were all of these traffic cones and this kid was yelling at me for some reason.

I went inside and told my parents what I had found, and that I needed a saw to cut the tree apart to get it out of the van. They didn't believe me at first, and I had to show them. They were very surprised too and took some pictures to put on their Facebook profiles. They then told me to hurry up and cut the tree apart because they had to take the van to the shop before we went on a trip.

I went into the garage of the big one story house and started looking for a saw. There was a workstation on this concrete terrace about four feet above the main floor. I was poking around when K and her friend walked in. I jumped down to say hello and noticed how floaty gravity seemed. I ran out into the drive and jumped a second time. I easily made four feet and landed softly. I jumped again, this time pushing as hard as I could. I easily made six feet.

I nose pinched and became lucid. I jumped and started to fly, but the dream wound up ending.


I was watching some very weird HTTYD rendition that took place in a modern city. There was something to do with an underground volcano and lava. I had all these questions about what was happening and why. Why were the vikings from the movie in a modern setting?

Something to do with being reincarnated as a stripey brown lemur in the jungle. I was really happy and swinging from branch to branch. It was supposed to be a downgrade from being a human, but this seemed like much more fun.

December 08, 2014

---

I was walking with my dad and brothers into a sort of huge playground on a river bordering a vast desert. There was an island in the river (it widened at this spot) that was tropical looking. My brothers and I went to a very large swing-set, and they both started swinging. Dad was going to snowboard down a sand dune, so I went back to the giant swing set, only to find that the only two available swings were just about to be taken by other people. I sighed, and went to find something else to do. I approached the island, and inspected it.

I had thought originally that it was just a bunch of tall trees, but as I got closer, I realized it was all one massive tree, and that there were some sort of structures in he branches. It looked like a huge, awesome jungle gym.

So naturally, I went to find a way onto the island. Before long, I found a large root from the tree that extended to just within jumping distance of the bank. I leapt on over, and made my way through the vines that hung down from the tree until I reached a ladder up to another branch. I looked up, and there was a whole series of rope ladders, bridges, and huts in the tree. I was so excited, and started my climb. At some point I spotted a red wallet with black dots. I picked it up, and someone nearby said it was theirs. I asked them to describe it if it was theirs, and they said it was all red. I narrowed my eyes, but when I looked back down at the wallet, it was indeed all red. (should have gotten lucid! But ah well). I habded them the wallet and continued upwards.

The further up I got, the more different plots I would encounter. It was like every hut was a story in itself. At some point there was a story about a king and queen who were going to leave to save the realm. They asked me if I would join them, but I woke up.

At some point I tried to manifest Dawn. He looks nothing like DawnEye11 showed me in her picture; he has white hair but it is medium length and curly. He has on a white sweater and a brown vest, and thick glasses. He smiles at me and I lose the dream.

I am on a beach somewhere, standing on a dock. Out at sea there is this huge waterspout churning in the water. It is being created by some manifestation of evil or something, and supposedly it is going to to continually chase me and try to drown me, like those big waves that I always see in my dreams.
I nose pinched and became lucid. I decided I would rather than run, face the fear of drowning and go into the spout intentionally. I jumped off the end of the dock and ran across the surface of the water directly into the waterspout. As I got close, some lightning struck nearby, as if to warn me.
I looked closely at the spout itself, and how water seemed to be streaming both up and down it simultaneously, and it also seemed to be rotating. I recall it having a very textured look almost having 'spikes' on it.
I ran in and let myself lose my balance. I just let it do its thing and, knowing that I was dreaming, I could take it. I mostly tumbled around in what felt like mostly water and little bit of wind. It spun me up and up a long ways. I had my eyes closed at first, but slowly I opened them. I felt less and less water and it felt colder. I could see how the waterspout was sucking water off of the ocean and depositing it in a storm cloud. (I'm sure that's not meteorologically accurate.)
When I got to the top, I could see down through the eye of the spout all the way to the bottom. For some reason this part of the cloud had an invisible floor and I could walk around and view the spout from different angles from above. I could also see the island that I had started on, and the beach with the dock. It was quite a veiw.
For some reason I thought the dream had ended. I manifested a computer and went on dreamviews to type about the dream that I had.
...
I was sitting atop a sand dune (same beach) The waterspout was gone. I was simply looking around, trying to wrap my head around lucidity.
"Okay, so this is a dream... This is all in my head... I am actually asleep."
I feel a warm breeze blowing and think that it feels too real to be a dream. But eventually I figure that it has to be a dream. I run down the sand dune to the coast and decide to fly.
"This is all a dream. It's all in your head. You can do anything!"
I get a running start and jump. It's floaty, but I'm coming back down. I jump off again and make my rockets. And we're off. I start saying thing because I want to go faster; I want to fly up in the clouds.
"Faster!"
I start to go a little faster.
"Fast as you can go!"
I see a large tree ahead. I roll and pass between the branches.
I start to go quite a bit faster, maybe 15 or 20 miles per hour.
"HYPERSONIC SPEED!!!"
I really get some speed. Maybe 40 or 50 miles per hour. I pull out over the water and start to go up. I want to fly through a cloud.
Then, my flying just cuts out. I find myself in my backyard. I get the dream ending feeling and all of my goals come crashing back to me. I quickly try to manifest Manei. Manei, Dawn and Eye all appear. This time they look like her picture, even down to the poses. I think that they were just cardboard cutouts that had been drawn on. Manei was real though. Then I wake up.

Black: Non-dream
Blue: Non-lucid
Red: Lucid

Day 7 SSILD - Pretty much nothing, was super tired and couldn't finish the cycles.

Dream 1 - Spider Bath
I'm at a my close friend Sam's house, me and him are talking about a game that reminds me of Tekken. I'm lying in a white bathtub as we talk, it has a slide window over the top with lots of cobwebs on the inside (so pretty much several inches from my face). I start noticing more and more that there seems to spiders of all sorts of colours, in retrospect they looked quite incredible and beautiful. In the conversation I'm having, we're talking about how I wreck at it, and the only way that my other friend Matt ever beats me is if he uses the spider character or something. I continue to keep noticing the presence of spiders until it starts making me a bit paranoid, I feel like maybe one of them will fall on me, 'what if they're poisonous' I think to myself. I feel like I absolutely have to get out now, I just felt that they were too close for comfort. At this point I get a bit frantic, reaching behind me for the edge of the window, trying to slide it open, I shimmy myself out through the small opening I've made in growing fear of the spiders. Once I'm up I give myself a shake and pat down, jumping up and kicking my legs. I feel a bit better now, and then wake up.

Note: This was probably caused by me opening my window at night because it's been too hot lately, and I always get a bit paranoid about spiders crawling over me, even though I don't usually mind them and there aren't any poisonous spiders where I live.

Dream Fragment: Prior to the next dream and possibly a part of it, I remember either dreaming or thinking about an anime show I've seen before where the main character is looking for a club to join. He goes around and trials them out, doing boxing, karate, etc.

Dream 2 - Tree School and School Fight
I decide to join a group which turns out to be a sort of school. This 'school' is inside a giant tree where students go to learn and take part in whatever it is that interests them (maybe 100-200 people). I seem to have joined really late into the year or something, and everyone already has cliques and groups, this makes me a bit of a social reject for some reason. Haziness ensues until I am in a queue, maybe in a cafeteria or dining hall, and the person in front of me is from my university class (he's got dreadlocks and is pretty much a tool), and in the dream he's like 7ft which is much bigger than he actually is IWL. We seem to talk a bit and everything is alright, he smiles and we're on good terms now, then he walks off. Haziness ensues again, and now it seems there's a school gathering outside on a deck built on one of the large trees branches. As I'm walking along a branch about half a metre wide, I glance back at the tree to see my old flat mate through a window in the tree, sitting at a desk in his room playing games. I continue until I reach the deck and sit on seat (like one of those ones in parks), there's a guy on the other side who smirks and says "oh god" as I sit down. I can tell that it's because of my 'social reject' status in the school at the moment. Next thing I know I notice three guys approaching behind me, they're looking to be bullies. The leader starts talking to me, trying to act really cool, he says something like "no one knows you or likes you" to which I respond "oh that's a shame, my name is A-A-Al-Alex". I seem to have formed a stutter. "A-A-Al-Alex" he repeats mockingly, "it's called a stutter, some people have them" I reply, I don't feel bothered by anything he's doing or saying yet, but I seem to think he's a bit stupid. We seem to be standing and facing each other a few metres apart now, there's a few people at the side too. He cracks a joke at me and everyone laughs. "FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT!" I shout at the top of my lungs, everyone is startled suddenly and the guy in front of me looks at me in confusion and fright. I dash towards him within a sec of shouting, I punch his throat, followed by two punches to his face. He's on the ground, I jump on him and start brutally beating him. I stop after about 10 seconds thinking that I don't want to go too far, I only wanted to teach him a lesson. Everyone else was too scared to step in and help him or break up the fight. Fast forwarding to the principals office, I make my excuse as "I don't take **** from bullies. It's better to take him down than let him torment me". I don't remember much after this but my feeling was that he let me off with a warning and the other guy had an insane black eye.

After reading about Tlaloc's homebrew EILD technique, I wanted to try something similar, so I compared the devices available on Amazon and settled on the "MotivAider." Although bulky and overpriced, I liked that the vibration length and intensity are fully customizable, and the fact that it has an option to go off at random intervals. It recently arrived in the mail, so I read the instructions before going to bed last night, but decided to wait until my WBTB to program it, since I figured the task would help reawaken my mind as well as focus my intention.

Went to bed at 1:30am, woke naturally at 5am. I realized my motivation wasn't as high as I had anticipated because I remembered how much work I needed to get done before the weekend was over, and reasoned that sleeping in after a long WBTB and writing a dream report if successful would really cut into my available time. However, the MotivAider beckoned, so I decided to do a very short WBTB, just long enough to program it and set it up before going back to sleep. I set the vibration to its minimal length (two seconds), programmed it to go off in random intervals up to 45 minutes, and placed it in the case of my leg pillow, where I should be able to feel it through the fabric. (I am a side sleeper and always use an extra pillow between my knees.) I thought the vibration would be too disruptive if it was near my head, so I wanted it somewhere closer to my feet. I returned to bed at 5:20am. I lay awake for a while with anticipation, and eventually decided I had better also put the vibration on its weakest setting, so I reprogrammed the device by the light of my phone.

At some point I must have drifted off to sleep, and then I felt the device go off. But something had gone wrong: the vibrations were pulsing repetitively without cease. I tried to ignore them, but they seemed to be going on for over a minute. I decided I must have programmed the device incorrectly, so I got up and took it out of the pillow, setting it aside. Tomorrow I could figure out what the problem was.

Shortly after that I was walking through the house, and I noticed something odd. Glancing through the sliding glass door in the kitchen, I saw that the water level of the river next to the house had risen way too high. In fact, the water was coming right up to the base of the door, like it was on the verge of flooding in. This observation was so startling that it made me realize I must be dreaming... maybe the EILD had worked after all! Had I ever really gotten up, or had it all been an FA?

In retrospect there was something very intriguingly incomplete about the observation that prompted me realize that I was dreaming. Through the door, I could see a vast sea of water that I interpreted as a wide river, with just a strip of land visible a mile or two distant on the other side. The water looked entirely natural, brownish-hued, its surface sleek and reflective of the warm pre-dawn light. At no point, even after I fully realized I was dreaming, did it occur to me that there is no such river next to the house, much less a broad vista of this kind... the only body of water visible in that direction is an in-ground pool of the conventional turquoise hue on a concrete patio bounded by thick trees that block any view further into the distance. Yet only thing that seemed odd to me in the dream, even after getting lucid, was the high level of the encroaching water, not the improbable existence of the vast river!

Probably because I have been thinking about dream music again, I was inspired to turn my observation into a song. "If there's water near the house, it's a dream," I sang, repeating the line several times to reinforce the association, just in case it came up again in the future. Then I wondered which tasks to work on. I decided to try StephL's lucid dare (enter an enchanted forest, look for an elven gathering and learn a new song from them), which I thought would pair well with the October bonus TOTM (create a song on a musical instrument that doesn't exist in waking life). No sooner did my thoughts turn to the bonus task than I could actually hear ambient music in the air around me, like notes plucked from a stringed instrument. Perhaps I should have paused and investigated—I could probably have found a suitable instrument to fulfill the task—but I already had a plan in mind for getting to the enchanted forest, so I walked out of the house through the front door.

Traveling to a forest on foot hasn't been working well for me in my TOTY attempts (I tried it in Hansel and Gretel a couple times), so I had been pondering alternate strategies. One possibility simply involved growing trees around me in the house until the environment around me transforms into a forest, but another approach I found appealing was to try to use the little fir tree growing outside the front door as a portal.

It was three or four years ago that I bought this little tree at the grocery store one December and that year used it as a miniature Christmas tree (at the time it was only about two feet tall). Afterwards I put it outside in the front yard. Improbably it thrived, more than doubling in size, and apparently seemed to be doing well with no care other than being watered by the automatic sprinklers that went on briefly every morning, so I left it alone. Then one day I went to move it and discovered the secret reason it was flourishing: its roots had apparently gone right through the bottom of the pot and grown directly into the ground! I am impressed by the resourcefulness of this sapling, so I had the idea of approaching it in a dream and asking it to transport me to the enchanted forest.

When I opened the front door, I was surprised to see snow on the ground. This is probably because last night I was looking up pictures based on the search term "winter forest" to incubate appropriate visual impressions. However, since I live in a climate where snow is impossible (it has been in the nineties the last couple days!), I immediately recognized that this was more evidence of the dream state, so I added a new line to my song: "If there's snow on the ground, it's a dream." Looking over at my little tree, I saw that it was also covered in snow, and added another line, "If there's snow in the branches, it's a dream." Since I was already singing, I saw no reason to stop. I walked over to the tree, grasped its narrow trunk, and requested in song, "Take me to the enchanted forest, the enchanted forest of dream!"

Unfortunately, I promptly woke up. Normally I might have been annoyed that the dream ended before I could accomplish anything, but this time I didn't mind because it was such an amusing first success for my new EILD device!

Sure enough, the whole experience turned out to be a false awakening: when I got up to start my report (at 6:10am), I discovered that I had never removed the device from the pillow like I remembered doing. And this indicates that it must not have malfunctioned after all, and that the extended sequence of vibrations I felt was most likely an experience of time dilation conditioned by the dream state.

August 24, 2014

---

I had a dream on Friday night and remembered it, but didn't write it down when I woke up in the night. I'd forgotten it by the time I woke up again for reals. There might have been something about Zukin (would make sense, we were cuddling after all) and the woods.



On Saturday, Zukin and I got up to some supernatural shenanigans and then she showed me something really thought provoking but creepy right before bed (And Salad Fingers.... nightmare fuel) so I had trouble falling asleep. When I did finally sleep, the only dream I remember having was this:

Find the Hick

All the dream was, was scenes flashing around. First, there was a corn field, and a man in jean overalls and a crooked straw hat (The Hick) was standing between the stalks, just staring at me. Then The Hick was in a grassy field, staring at me from behind a large tree. Then The Hick was on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere, still staring at me. There were other scenes, and they all had The Hick, just standing there, still and silent, staring at me. They were all dark, too. It must have been night time with a full moon because I could see him pretty clearly; but he was always too far away for me to see his features...

Lucid
Technique: WBTB, mantra

I am outside in a park. I am not present in the dream, however, just observing. I see a few kids running around and I have the awareness that they were just shoplifting. I see an old woman lurking in the trees. She seems curious about what the boys are doing, and I want to help her. I then become aware that I am dreaming, and watch my own body materialize into the dream. Once I am totally present in the dream, the dreamscape changes slightly (I can't really describe how…something to do with the texture or the light?????), and it feels like the old woman and I are in a separate layer of reality than the rest of the DC, yet we are still in the park.

I introduce myself to the woman and we walk together for awhile. I see a huge tree that I am compelled to show to the woman. We approach the tree and we are both impressed by how gigantic the trunk is. As I look more closely, I see strange faces carved into the bark. They remind me of shamanic masks. I decide it would be very interesting if the faces were lit up so we can see them better. I put my hands on the tree and focus on summoning light. The faces begin to light up but not as much as I would like, so I push my will even harder. I suddenly get the idea to use my voice to raise the vibration. I begin to "sing" the light. As I do this, the entire dream lights up, and then there is a violent explosion of light and the dream scene changes!

I am now in a house. It is very dark. I am aware that I am responsible for a baby, a little boy. I want to go explore. I decide I have to take the baby with me. I grab him in my arms then head for the door. I feel slightly afraid to go through the door for some reason, then remind myself that I don't want my fear to inadvertently summon something nasty behind the door. I go through the door safely. It is still night outside. I find a bicycle and get on, holding the baby very carefully in my arms. As I ride, I become aware of just how tiny the baby is. I can feel his warmth and heartbeat against my body, which is a very strange sensation. As I continue riding down the road, I turn a corner and see a breathtaking city view that I've seen in a previous dream. I stop to admire the view.

I dreamed about the largest shopping mall of all time. It was terrifyingly large. It was so huge it had to be built underground.

There were these three "people". I say people because that's the only way I can describe them. They were more like weird human-animal things. Anyway, these three people broke into the mall one night. There was no one there. It was creepy and huge and fancy. They split up because they wanted to see different things.

My dream mostly followed the female character. She was either part duck or part chicken. She wandered about aimlessly till she got to the end of a hallway. At the end there were several elevators and a door. She tried the door first. Inside it, there was a huge room, with the floor covered in expensive white marble tiles. But just as she was about to step out onto the floor, it disappeared, revealing a huge chasm that dropped down for miles. She gasped, ran away and closed the door behind her.

Then back in the corridor, she tried the elevators. But they kept doing weird things. Like the doors would only open part of the way. Finally she gave up, but thought she'd look into the huge chasm room once more. The floor was still gone, but she felt a strange urge to walk over the edge into the depths. She tentatively put a foot out, and her foot stepped on something solid. The floor was invisible! She could walk! She giddily ran out into the middle of them room, when suddenly an army of pea-green duck warriors came out of an invisible hole in the floor and hauled her under.

They chopped her and sliced her and sent her remains down a brass chute. The remains came out where her two companions were, and they promptly made the remains into crab cakes shaped with cookie cutters and dipped them in pea soup and ate her.

Then there were ghost hunters. One of them was explaining to me the functions of different flashlights they carried. He showed me a black light and turned it on. Suddenly, wherever they were, his companions turned towards the light and came to it. He explained that humans have an irresistible attraction to black lights, and they will come to it against all odds.

Then my grandfather was trying to cut down the largest tree in the world. It was like several miles high.

July 21, 2014

---

Nature Park

I was checking out at a convenience store or something, and the cashier was super friendly. She suggested a nature park for me to visit; it was about half an hour down the road from the store. I had nothing much to do, so I decided to visit. It was all on a mountain, and there were various themed paths up to the top. I passed a path that looked like it had been carved out of a rock-face. But it was closed for some reason; I assumed there was construction or something going on. I think it could have also been an avalanche. I went up the other way, and at the top was a courtyard and amphitheater-type-thing. There was also a beautiful view of the Big City.





Nature Park Again

(I woke up right after that dream, and checked the time; I still had a couple hours before my alarm would go off, so I smiled and fell back asleep while thinking about the dream I'd just had; When I fell asleep, I was abck in the nature park, but not lucid)

I was in front of the blocked off portion of the nature park again. But now it was opened again, and I took that way. I climbed up the switchbacks carved into the rock, admiring intricate patterns carved into the walls. At the top of the cliff, I could see the amphitheater not far away, and headed for it, but there was an animal in the way. I forgot what it was, because the dream didn't last much longer. Now that I think about it, I may have been half-lucid. But I'm not really sure.





Spirit of the Forest

I was with Zukin again, and we were walking around a national park. We found a path into a forest, which led to a scenic lookout of a famous tree. It was apparently the oldest free in the state (or country? I don't know. Maybe it was the last surviving tree of its species? Either way, it was a special tree), and as we walked, the path forked in four different directions. We looked for signs, and only found one that said "to Lookout" pointing all the way to the right. But we wanted to know where these other paths went, so we searched a little more for other signs. Eventually, we found a sign hidden underneath a bush and vines that said "to Caves."

That sounded fun. We took that path (it was the one furthest to the left) and after five minutes of walking, the path forked again, this time in five directions. There were no signs here, at least not at first. We figured there had to be a sign somewhere, so we looked hard again, and sure enough, there was another sign hidden under overgrown bushes and whatnot. We wondered how long it had been since anyone was on this path. Whereas the first main path to the lookout was well defined, this one was hard to see for the most part. We followed the path leading to "caves" and again came to a fork, this time with three choices. This time the sign was nowhere to be found, even after searching. We had to guess.

We took the path in the middle of the three, and after about half an hour, we came out of the forest and into an open area with scattered small trees in a field to our left, and a cliff to our right. There was a wall (about hip-high) with vines overgrown all over it. Across a canyon we could see the people at the lookout. We ducked behind the wall, just in case we weren't really supposed to be here. The path continued along the wall, and at the end, we could see the famous tree. We crawled behind the wall until we reached the tree; but before we got there, the path sloped down steeply while the wall continued at the same height. We were able to stand again as we descended, and then the path wrapped around the trunk of the tree and went underground, into the root system and winding around them. It was all rather magical.

But then we heard a rumbling, and I looked up. Dirt was falling from the ground above our heads, and we made our way out of the cave system below the tree. We hadn't gotten very far, so it was easy to get out. Once we were out, the rumbling stopped for a moment, but when I took another step away from the tree, it started again, and Zukin and I started running back up the path, away from the tree. It kept rumbling, louder and louder, and when we got around the winding path to the hill along the wall, we found that it was now almost perfectly vertical. There was no way to climb it...! But there was a vine.

"Climb up the vine!" Zukin called to me. She was already grabbing it and making her way up. I was a little scared, but I climbed nonetheless. We inched our way up the vine as the rumbling grew louder. We were behind the wall, so I wasn't worried about people seeing us now that they could probably hear the rumbling. When we reached the top, we sat against the wall along the cliff, looking to our right at the tree as it tipped away from us, and then the ground shook a little as the roots came out of the ground, destroying that series of tunnels we'd been in moments before.

"Oh SHIT..." I said. Now everyone would be looking over here, and we needed to get the fuck out of this place. We made our way along the wall, and about half-way to the forest, we met Harry Potter. He ran up to us and told us to run, because people were coming. He'd seen it all and wanted to help us escape. We ran behind him for a while, but then, around the corner where the wall turned, there was a Demonic Druid-type thing. It lunged after us, spitting toxic goo from it's eyes and mouth. Some of it hit Harry Potter, and he stumbled. Vines came out of the ground and wrapped around his legs and arms, pulling him all the way down to the ground.

"Harry!" I called, starting to run after him.

"Wait!" He yelled, and I stopped. Zukin ran up to me. "I can see it all now..." Harry continued. "They need a new guardian... that tree... it was the Forest's guardian, but now it's dead. It wasn't you, don't worry. It was just its time to go, and you happened to be there. They need a new guardian... I'll do it. I love this forest, so I'll be the new guardian. Soon a new tree will grow where I lay right now... It was be beautiful..." He had a warm smile on his face and his eyes were glossing over. We knew he was seeing something we never could. We nodded and bowed our heads, and the Demonic Druid thing stepped aside to let us pass.

We ran to the main trail and joined the crowd leaving.

Two years later, I was with Zukin in a bookstore, and we saw a new book about the "Tree Death and Harry Potter Disappearance" mystery. I chuckled a little and bought the book, and one for Zukin. We would have fun later reading all the conspiracy theories about the events of that day. I didn't know it then, but one of my classmates, T, was sitting in a corner of the bookstore, watching us. She was suspicious.

The next day, I was listening to Zukin playing the piano when T came up to me and started asking questions. I evaded them, and left to go on a walk. T and her partner (I think they were private investigators or something, hired to find Harry Potter) followed me, and when I went down the path to the lookout, they confronted me again.

"So you were there that day?" She said to me.

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"You know what happened to Harry, don't you?"

I shrugged. She came over to me and got all close and in my space. I used my forearm to shove her gently away. "If you really want to know what happened that day, why not just try exploring a bit? That's what I did that day."

I left, and they stood there. Now I was viewing the dream third person. I watched as T and her partner went down the same paths Zukin and I had gone down two years before. They came out of the forest and into the field with the wall and cliff to the right, and saw Harry Potter. His eyes were still in the same glossed-over position as they had been when Zukin and I left, but now they followed T and her partner as they approached. The vines which had pulled him down that day had grown thicker and woodier than they had been. They had fused together for the most part. All that was visible of Harry was his face and some of his left shoulder. He was pale blue.

T started to run toward Harry, but vines came up and grabbed her foot. She looked to her partner for help, but he also had vines crawling up his leg. Suddenly, he started to move forward, speaking in a strange language. When T didn't respond, he spoke again, in English. "Leave now. Do not ever come back."

T struggled to get free, but she couldn't. The Demonic Druid from before materialized from the ground, and spat goo at both T and her partner. Her partner was unaffected because he was under control, but T's skin started to burn, and she screamed.

The Druid looked at her partner, tilted its head, and raised its hand. The man was released from the control, and he looked around. "Hey, it's Harry!" He called, smiling bright. "T, look, it's Harry!" He looked around, saw T, but didn't see anything else, because he was shot in the face with toxic goo. He screamed and slowly fell to the ground as well, and then all was silent. The Druid sank back into the ground.





Sex On The Beach

(I woke up to my alarm at 6:30, but had a migraine :( After emailing my professors and the people I usually drive to school, I got back in bed and tried to fall back asleep before the pain got too bad)

I had a false awakening on a beach. I was on a beach towel, in my swimsuit. I sat up, looked around. The sky was blue, and the sand was warm underneath my towel. Behind me, grass-covered dunes rose along the shore. There wasn't a single person in sight, and I smiled, laying back down.

Spoiler for NSFW:

Then I heard the sound of footsteps, and looked up. A man was walking along the beach toward me. I don't really remember everything that led up to what happened next, but suddenly he was leaning over me and kissing my neck. He kissed all the way down my stomach, taking off my bikini top as he passed it. Then he was kissing my lips and his trunks were coming off. I slid out of my bikini bottom, too. He was strong; he lifted me up off the towel and sat up so he was kneeling, and he guided me down on top of his throbbing manhood. (like this, just he was on his knees instead of sitting on his butt)

It was... intense. Neither of us said a single thing through it all. He kissed (more like licked) like all over my body. He bit me playfully a few times, too. When we were done, he laid me back down on the beach towel and stood up, walking to the water and standing with his feet in the water for a while.

He looked back at me and grinned, said something in a singsong voice (I can't remember what it was; I was still a little dazed from the experience), and I realized: He was the Face, and that meant I must be dreaming. I looked down at my hands; two thumbs on my right hand. I was dreaming. I stared at the Face for a while, wondering what to ask him. I was oddly unshy about what had just happened, and neither was he. But I didn't expect he would be shy about something like that, considering he'd pretended to be about to rape me in another dream.

(I drew the Face, btw... this is about what he looks like, anime-fied: The Face ... Ignore my wonky hand-drawing skillz)

"You going to tell me your name yet?" I asked.

"Not this time, either~" He said, and looked back out over the water.

"So why are you here?" I stood up and walked to the water.

"Just came to see you." He said, smirking over at me.

"So sex but no answers for me?" I was a little annoyed. Not that I was complaining...

"I never said I wouldn't answer any of your questions. Ask away."

"Who are you?"

He grinned as if he had known I would ask that first. "I am what you make of me."

I rolled my eyes. "Why are you so unlike any of the other characters in my dreams?"

He looked me right in the eyes this time. "Why do you think?" Was all he would say, and then I felt the dream destabilizing. I reaching out to touch his arm to stabilize myself, but he backed away, grinning as he vanished with the rest of the dream, and I woke up.

July 10, 2014

---

I don't remember much about the plot of this dream, but I remember the setting pretty vividly. I was flying (I love flying dreams so much, but I don't have them very often at all), and I came to this large courtyard with a huuuuuge tree in the center. Not quite Home Tree sized, but much bigger than a normal tree. The building around the courtyard was old and made of red bricks, though I didn't look to see what the design was like.

I had the vague impression that I was supposed to be doing something at this tree, but I can't remember what it was. All I know is that I was flying through the branches and leaves, and it was beautiful :)

There was one other part of this same dream; I had landed, and was talking with the Backpacking Group, and I was trying to prove that I had flown through the tree. They didn't believe me, even though I demonstrated how I could fly right in front of them. Then Ivan asked if we all had the supplies we needed for our next trip. I hadn't gotten all my supplies yet, so we were all looking through a catalog to order what we needed. There were a lot of seemingly pointless things in the catalog, and the things we needed didn't seem to have a purpose.

Last few nights...

06/12/14:
I dreamed about a tree.

It was a huge tree with black bark and sprawling, twisted limbs... if anybody has seen a Live Oak, it was sort of like that, but much bigger. I know there is something wrong with it.

It is outside of the fence. The fence is wooden and rickety. It encloses something, but I'm not sure what. It's always dark, always night. The world feels very "small", like the entire world just surrounds the tree and the fence but doesn't spread very far beyond them. I am trying to somehow stop the evil I know is infecting the tree's roots.

Some sort of burrowing creature is inside of the fence, digging through the soft loamy earth. It's like a brown, short-haired dog sized ferret thing that can talk. Its tunnel reaches the "evil" roots. Once they are exposed, the evil is able to spread inside of the fence. It was an accident, the creature was just trying to create a "home" burrow. It apologizes and says it will make its home elsewhere.

I have to attend a class. My homework isn't done because I've been spending all of my time and energy trying to contain the evil. The teacher knows this, and fudges my grade. I feel like my classmates resent me because of it. I'm overstretched, though. The class is for a cello-like instrument. Not only is my instrument damaged, but in order to make a passing grade, I still have to play some songs for an exam, and they're too difficult for me because I haven't had time to practice. I feel overwhelmed and depressed.


06/14/14:
I have vague recollections of a nightmare. There is some sort of evil stitched-together zombie child. It's gray. It's stitched to a man's hip. I am trying to protect some other (living) children to it but it keeps "absorbing" large, bloody chunks of them and the whole situation is horrifying. I wake up but am still sort of half-asleep and the feeling of horror lingers until I fall back asleep.