Recent DJ Posts

Sep 3 2018

Woke 3:35. In a fight with parents and grandpa about cooking or setting up something (possibly speed-reading). Daylight outside, long tables (possibly crawfish boil).

Woke 5:05. Long fragment in a stadium, receiving some sort of business presentation from coworker. After it's over, I'm picking up my laptop bag and I stand out of the way for a coworker and an unnamed DC, who say that they have a "merge request in the morning". The presenter (another coworker) is kicking us out.

Awoke directly from FA nightmare. My dog barked and I could tell instantly that it was serious, not just him barking at another dog. The door to the bedroom is thrown open and the midget from Twin Peaks season 3 entered with a small gun. He approached the bed, not looking directly at me or anyone, just at the wall behind us. He said something vague and I tried to lean up in bed asking something to the extent of "What do you want?". As I tried to move, and in some sense solve the problem, my vision blurred and the dream started to fade. He was wearing a blue shirt with the pattern of "I (heart) N Y" but the letters were "? (eye symbol) T Y" in white. The room's layout was completely realistic and accurate unlike other false awakenings. I woke up and said "holy shit" aloud. Very scary experience, but very vivid -- would have been invaluable if I could have gotten lucid and converted it.

Before that, I was in my childhood home, on the phone with my manager about something that needed to get done. The screen was black with red nubmbers and dial-screen graphics, and an orbiting globe outline. The call got dropped. I was worrying about this with my parents but they seemed to think it would all work out (it was nighttime). My sister was in my room on my computer, looking for the first book in a series my fiance is currently reading. I suggested that she can just read my fiance's copy rather than buy it herself. I end up also giving her a japanese manga volume and another poorly translated japanese book, I remember the engrish being hilarious in-dream. After this, I went to the kitchen (all of the lights were out). I was trying to write down my dreams in ink on the wood floors. In the back of my mind I knew this was a terrible idea and that my dad would be furious, but in the moment I wasn't worried about it. There were some drops of water on the floor and it was smearing the ink, so I started wiping it up, making the smearing even worse. I was also worried about cockroaches.

After the ink, I found myself in a distinct dream scene. I was on the ground looking up at the side of a cliff maybe 4 or 5 stories high. There was a good bit of dirt caked on and I thought to myself how nice it would look if I could get the dirt off. I grabbed a wedge-shaped piece of reddish slate and scraped as much dirt as I could off and stepped back, and noticed how nice the geometric patterns were. I remember the thought-phrase "cliff face". When I looked again, one of the rock formations sort of looked like a nose, and the one below looked like a mouth! When I started examining the rest of the cliff, the whole thing was taken up by face structures (abstract and Easter Islandish). The ground went from being solid dirt and rock, to having some cracks in which curved red boards were shoved and prying the cracks apart. In the cracks were green cylindrical vegetables (I thought of okra or fat asparagus stalks). As I moved forward towards the cliff, I noticed a mesh oyster bag of sea urchins, which were moving around each other in the bag, sort of like you expect spike balls to in a metroidvania or platformer. This was a really vivid and overall nice and creative dream that's simple but feels profoundly peaceful, the kind of nonlucid you generally want to have. So of course this scene transitioned directly to the nightmare FA.

I woke again at 8:59. My fiance was in trouble. We were in some sort of college sign-up, car buying, or other related scenario. There were DCs everywhere, and specifically several DCs with deep blue eyes and short hair meant her harm in an insidious way (they were outwardly friendly). I became more and more adversarial over the course of the dream, eventually hitting them and throwing things at them. We moved from the student union/indoor car lot into a side hallway which transitions to a long house with lots of corridors and small rooms arranged in pretty much a straight-shot, but almost labyrinthine at the same time. I was thinking somehow they were hypnotizing her, and she was getting more and more bruises on her arms and abdomen. Eventually I get in exaggerated physical fights with them and I somehow manage to get 2-4 of them to defect to my side as allies and stow her away under a sliding hole in the kitchen (sort of a drain hole in the floor, like you see in restaurant kitchens). She escaped succesfully.

I'm unknowingly in an FA but think I'm fully awake. I am having the "transparent eyelids" effect, and I'm looking around my bedroom at the closet door, but it's the wooden closet door from my childhood home. I'm etching a human face in it with my mind.

After this, I'm in my childhood home and members of my family as well as random DCs are dressed in "starship troopers armor" -- white and blue, and white and red. It was a long and in-depth dream, but I don't remember much of it. I finally escaped the fray and sat back on my bed, but then my father entered my room with his gun held high, and I remember thinking "oh good, you'll just be my bodyguard". When I thought this (non-lucidly), he changed his course of action from running forward to attack me to climbing in bed next to me with his rifle held out (think Fullmetal Jacket "This is my rifle"). I got up from bed* and started walking towards the hallway. Almost instantly I became lucid! I didn't say "I'm dreaming!" or do any RCs or stabilization unfortunately. I walked down the hallway towards the bathroom, and it was daylight outside, maybe early morning. I walked into the bathroom and looked at the mirror, seeing a girl in a dress instead of myself. In this moment, I started to think of the "bad guys" in the starship troopers armor and then banished the thought from my mind, knowing that if I thought of them I would encounter or summon them. So instead I took advantage of the situation -- although I was seeing the girl in the mirror, I felt my dream body as my own physical body. So I turned away from the mirror and decided that I would become the girl in the mirror. I turned back around and I was!

Spoiler for nudity:

My body had changed competely and I was naked. Naturally, I touched my arms and chest to test sensation (it was dull, sort of semi-numb as my dream body sensation usually is). I did a little twirl and

inspected my face further in the mirror -- my face was sort of ugly and homely**, and as mirrors in dreams usually do, my face shifted quite a bit. I leaned in further to inspect myself and kissed the mirror (it was cold). I then leaned back out and decided to try my "Clear sight. Clear sound. Clear touch. Grounded. Calm, confident. I can stay here as long as I want." stabilization phrase. However, as soon as touched my thumb and forefinger, I accidentally said "Clear mind" first! It rejected me from the dream instantly. As I began to feel my waking body, I realized my thumb and forefinger were touching here too; maybe this triggered the waking?

I laid awake for quite a while after that, as I had already slept more than usual for the night, and for the whole weekend basically. I was also still excited about the lucid and hoping to drop back into it. Eventually I went back to sleep and had some more non lucids. In the first, I was with my fiance in a rest area/cabin in the woods. In the next, I felt as though I dropped into the dream as a visualization from waking, but it's possible I was only visualizing from an FA. I was imagining tall waves, and how my body bobbed up and down in them. It felt incredibly nice and peaceful. I was at a beach, and my sister was standing on a board of some kind zipping up a life jacket. I think my fiance was bobbing up and down in the water too. When I looked at the shore, I couldn't quite see the sand but I could see tall buildings above the waves, which I identified to be my apartment buildings from WL. A distinct black shape was swimming towards me, and I thought it might be a shoe or a fish (I thought it could be a dangerous fish but dismissed the thought instantly). After another waking, I had a final dream of being in a wood panneled shop with an old woman who was offering the shop to me (inheritance?). Her wares were laid out on a long wooden table, which after looking away and looking back turned out to be a giant Knorr pasta packet. I believe this all happened in 3rd person.



*I think getting out of beds in nonlucids is a lucidity/awareness trigger -- will have to investigate how to encourage this).
**This is actually the second time I've transformed my body into a woman's in a mirror while lucid, but for some reason I always turn into butterfaces. Also not sure why I keep doing this. Why, lucid mind, why?

A dream like this came as no surprise given my circumstances the previous evening. I dreamt that my good friend picked me up from a Campus Christian Fellowship event, which actually did happen the night before. Only in the dream, there occurred a disturbing turn of events. He exited his car and entered into the facility in which the occasion was being held. I had already left the building, but after he had been in there for a little while, I noticed several members of the fellowship program leaving with very sad and offended expressions. In my mind, I felt that he had spoken harsh and offensive words to them and greatly disturbed these people. I, in turn, was quite upset, and we proceeded to have a fairly significant argument over the matter. He did not drive me home, and I was stranded into the night.
Now, some things about this made sense, and other things did not. My friend does not consider himself a Christian, but he is not very critical of those who do profess to be, and he would certainly not intentionally carry out offensive and hurtful actions to strangers in the community, but this was the case in my dream. I was disturbed by this dream upon awakening, and I wondered what this was trying to tell me, if anything.
I cannot remember the circumstances surrounding this next dream, but I remember the feeling of it, and one image in particular. I’m staring at a face that bears a striking resemblance to that of my former lover. In the dream, I am experiencing the exact emotions I had when I was with her. It’s weird that I cannot recall these exact emotions now IRL, but in the dream, they were very real. It’s as if I can only recall my true emotions of the past in my dreams. The reasons behind this dream I could point to fairly easily. I introduced my friend (The same friend in the first dream) to the show Twin Peaks last night. We watched the pilot episode last night, and needless to say, he’s hooked. But there was an odd moment when we realized he looks quite a bit like the show’s unfortunate victim, Laura Palmer, to the point that it actually freaked us out a little. I have no doubt this instance is what influenced my dream, but I cannot explain how I was able to relive the exact emotional state in the dream as when I was with her.

As Homestuck's Dave, I've been teleported somewhere else, leveled up some insane amount due to timeline shenanigans, and then was teleported back home, to Bro's apartment, in the middle of the same game we were playing when I was yanked out. I'm really annoyed, because now I'm way beyond Bro's level and I'm not okay with that. I'm looking at some kind of selector switch, trying to figure out how to scale it back from a dealing-with-the-fate-of-humanity level to a hanging-around-the-apartment-with-Bro level.

I'm looking at six cards laid out in two rows. They show ravens and swords, black ones and white ones of each. One large white figure is flanked by two smaller black figures, and vice versa. They're labeled, and I hear the text out loud, "Light and Shadow, Occidanto et Icandis."

(Woke up. Noted that my subconscious Latin is terrible. Went back to sleep.)

A little after a scene in which L. appeared, I'm thinking to myself that I'm going to have to tell M. that she was here, when it occurs to me that that's impossible, I must have been dreaming.

Immediately after that thought, the sheriff from Twin Peaks walks in. He complains to me about this demon thing - all these people involved in recent suspicious events have been blaming it on demons, which is ridiculous, he can't figure out what's going on. He leaves the room, and I follow him. In the next room, there are two other people. One of them has something sticking out of the center of his forehead, like a horn, or like he's been stabbed with something, and I realize he's the source of this rotting smell. I also realize he's supposed to be dead, and the sheriff's been harboring him.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm reading a news article covering ongoing research on the inside of an ancient spaceship that's been unearthed. The scientist in this article says she's discovered that humanity developed on this planet based on the human image displayed inside this ship, not the other way around. I find it bizarre that this claim is being presented in a major credible news source, as opposed to tabloids and conspiracy theory type sources. Then it occurs to me that the presence of an ancient spaceship, which the article treats as an already-established, commonly-known fact, is also pretty bizarre. I start to look up more information from other sources online, but out loud, I talk about the article with someone else, who, without reading it, dismisses it all as nonsense. I try to stress to her that what's really bothering me as unusual here is its presence in a major newspaper.

There was a royal baby, Herbert, who was locked away with his mother and a small staff in an isolated section of the castle for 8 years, after some disaster with his father. Now they're allowing a few more people to enter, including myself. They're still referring to him as "the baby", although it's been eight years, and now I see why - he's sitting in a high chair, being fed by his nurse, treated as if he were an infant in every respect, and apparently he's never been taught to walk, talk, or feed himself. The queen, clearly mad, is referring to herself as Herbert - I think of this as reflecting a desire to take control of the late king's power.

Most of the small group allowed in behave like sycophants, fawning over them, but after we leave, I speak with two of the other people who were allowed inside, both of them as disturbed as I am: two cat-like creatures, brother and sister, one a doctor, the other a scholar or advisor of some kind. They're cat-sized and they walk on all fours, but they're different enough in the face that they're not quite capable of being confused for actual cats; they're striped black and brilliantly dark blue, and they come from a place called Cheshire. They're very kind, very intelligent, very soft-spoken. The brother says that he believes the child carries some infectious disease that affects the brain, and this is what must have caused the disaster with the king eight years ago. Now it's clearly infected the queen as well. He intends to return tonight to examine the boy more closely. I'm thinking no, he's wrong, it's not a disease that the boy carries but madness, and I have a clear mental image of madness as some kind of spirit attached to the boy. I have the impression that I already know how this will end, that this is the past, I'm seeing a tragedy play out and have been forbidden from doing anything to change it. Suddenly realizing, I exclaim out loud, "the Cheshire Cat!" I'm horrified by this revelation, the idea of the madness that will take over this kind and soft-spoken doctor, and I'm so disturbed that the doctor and his sister become concerned; although I try not to say anything more, my exclamation has surprised them, and it's clear that I know something.

I'm climbing a road up towards the mountains, through a landscape covered in snow, along with the two cats and several other people, heading away from the castle. There's an announcement over a system of loudspeakers, the queen's voice stating "We order you to the tower to be arrested." The announcement goes on to scold us, alternately addressing us as if we were children or saying we've dishonored our esteemed positions, and then says "Now place your life squarely in your master's hands!" Obviously we have no intention of turning ourselves over to be arrested, but the path to the mountains takes us right past that tower.

Fragment: "So the little girl had a last (something) request."

Buffy setting. Angel has a son (not Connor), and someone is threatening to turn that son into a vampire. The vampire's trying to convince Angel that this would be a good thing - not trying too hard, he intends to do this for Angel's own good whether Angel wants it or not - and Angel's trying to show him why it's a bad idea. He calls out a kid vampire he'd made himself, Angel's holding him by the shoulders and the kid says he died when he was 8, looks older but not by much, and then says "I'm good with math, but facial recognition..." The point is that the brain stops developing before its time.

There were some earlier fragments in that same setting - talking about once-in-a-lifetime perfect happiness vs. just plain everyday happiness, and watching Buffy walking down a sidewalk past a brick wall.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Reading about Josephine Baker, a sister who'd died and a mother she'd admired.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Forever Knight setting. As Nicolas, I'm with some humans in a public place, in a hurry, when just for a moment I spot LaCroix and Janette in the crowd with someone else, a woman either I or Janette turned relatively recently, within the past century or so - I desperately want to be with them. I'd been cut off from them. I can't just abandon my humans here, but I have to at least get a message to them. I make my excuses and head back to where I saw them. (I'd seen them dressed as they did in the 1940s - symbolic for happier times together. Also a connection to a kid vampire, so this dream was probably partially inspired by the Angel one.)

In a hallway. LaCroix was here a moment ago, sitting in a chair at the end of the hall, and I'm looking at a telegram that was on the table next to him. I wonder if that bit about text in dreams changing when you look away is true. I focus on an 8; I look again, and it's a 58; then 8 again, then a Cyrillic н. I guess it's true. (As I was expecting it to change, this seems a bit pointless.) I then resume looking for LaCroix.

I'm riding in a truck with a man who spots a pair of coyotes and stops the truck to shoot them. I knock the gun off target.

With that same man, I'm standing over a pair of bucks who are lying on the ground with several arrows in their sides, suffering because I knocked the killing shot off course.

I'm with someone else, a guy from the city, and watching that man pull into his driveway with the body of a horse in the back of his truck. We're standing in front of his neighbor's house, a chubby, long-haired, middle-aged hippie who is burning something that looks like a sphere of hay the size of a beach ball. The fire spreads to the ground, and then to his neighbor's yard, burning in strange geometric shapes, circles and lines. I start clapping, seeing that man's property on fire. The hippie tells me about a protest he's about to go to, a bunch of people are going to jump off a clocktower, do we want to come? The guy standing with me isn't interested, but I'm up for it.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

A man and a woman with accordions warming up for a show in front of a mirror, the man comments on how beautiful the red of his accordion is.

I'm playing a piano duet with that man, and while his part is beautiful to listen to, my part has so little to do that I lose track of where we are and come in late, I play slow and haltingly. I wonder why he doesn't just play the whole piece himself, he could easily play my part with his left hand.

A machete being given to someone as a gift.

My IRL sister S. calls me and describes a place she stopped at as "a Twin Peaks diner." The use of Twin Peaks as an adjective makes no sense to me - what, do they have great pie with a side of prophetic dreams?

Twin Peaks setting, 3rd person, as a disembodied observer I'm looking at the trees along a mountain road, bare of leaves, small and spindly trees, so close together that none of them really had a chance to grow. A jeep comes down the road, driven by the sheriff, with Cooper in the passenger seat. Cooper's talking about how cold it's gotten, and he's pleasantly nervous about his date tonight.

There's an accident of some kind, an earthquake or a landslide, and the jeep gets stuck; the sheriff gets out of the jeep to walk along a footpath into the mountains. Cooper wants to take care of something in the jeep before he follows, something to calm him down before his date. The landslide or whatever it was that trapped the jeep has opened up a second path next to the usual footpath, and as a disembodied observer I think 'You are obviously being invited on a personal quest. Take it.' The sheriff doesn't take it. However, the usual path crumbles beneath his feet, and he lands on the second path anyway. At the moment the footpath crumbles beneath him, so does the road holding up the jeep, and it falls into a crevice with Cooper still inside.

So, I tried taking 1500 mg of aniracetam at midnight to see the effect it would have on my dreams. My advice would be that if you are sensitive to hallucinogenic states of mind (like I am) and/or have a history of panic attacks and general anxiety (like I do), that you DO NOT try this. In my previous experiences using aniracetam as a nootropic, I had noticed that it seemed kind of like piracetam but a bit more trippy, it just has sort of a dissociative energy to it. Now I know that I shouldn't take more than a standard dose (750 mg) or possibly even that if I'm not willing to deal with that. :T

Basically, as it was setting in, my thoughts started racing. I also realized that it may not be good to take a good dose of something that pushes a lot of oxygen to the brain while trying to go to sleep, but that's my bad. I was zoned out and into a mild hypnagogic trance (I get very light, transparent hallucinations easily) when suddenly the weird patterns I was watching became really strong and pushed me into alertness. I sat up thinking "Okay, that was odd. >_>" After that there was an abrupt shift in consciousness, I honestly did a RC to make sure I wasn't dreaming. It didn't really feel like a dream though, more like a trip. In the same way that hypnagogia can involve things like loud noises or images that appear really quick and then vanish in a way that makes them immediately feel really distant, I started getting sensations of chest pains that would last barely a second, then feel like they almost never happened in the first place, and I started to hear my heart beating and it sounded somewhat erratic. Though I've never had it quite as fleeting as this before, I've been here a million times... the point where I have to suddenly get myself under control or I'm going to launch into a panic attack.

I forced myself to get a grip, and started doing some of my normal calming exercises. The anxiety and sensations didn't fully go away, but it didn't make me totally freak out or anything. I frequently was getting the unsettlingly strong dissociative feeling of having all of my senses pulled away from me, like I was about to snap into an anesthetic OBE, but this also came and went pretty quickly. It took me a long time to fall asleep after that, and I think I had one dream before the first one I logged but I can't really recall anything about it. However, all of my dreams after that were considerably more vivid than they had been the past few days, or even really more than any dreams I'd had in a while.

I'd always wondered about the supposed 5-HT2A and D2/D3 action of aniracetam. I'm still not sure if they've verified it yet, but I'm more willing to believe it interacts with those receptors in some way now. It was a lot crazier than I expected.... I know people take doses much higher than that normally and are fine, too. I guess I'm just really sensitive to its effects. If I try it again in the future, I'll probably stick to the 750 mg doses, and probably a couple hours before bed. It does seem to have an augmentative effect, but it needs to be used correctly.

Anyway....

#1 - Meeting Up With Laura [Non-Lucid]

I was hanging out with this guy J I met in high school but haven't seen much of since graduation, and I was supposed to be meeting up with some girl I don't know named Laura soon. I asked J if he wanted to go to her house with me and he said sure. This part of the dream is hazy, but we got in my car and I drove us there, and somewhere down the line J turned into D. We got to her house, but she wasn't there! Her parents and my parents were, though. They were having some kind of breakfast feast with a bunch of pans on the stove that included hash browns, eggs, and mini pancakes, possibly among other things. I went into Laura's room and gave her a call on my cell (I think) and it turned out she had actually gone to my house looking for me, so I felt bad about missing her. :T I told her we'd go bowling to make up for it when I got back. I saw her as I was talking to her, but she's hard to remember. At this point my mind started associating her with Laura Palmer, from Twin Peaks, and she was blonde like her but she didn't really look like her otherwise. I thought to myself maybe we can bring some drugs or alcohol to the bowling alley to surprise her, that'll make her happy. After I got off the phone I went back and saw D pigging out on all the breakfast food. I told him we needed to head out and that he should make those pancakes he was getting be his last plate, and he said "Even worse, I think they're Chinese." and laughed. At the time, I knew what this meant.... It was some reference to the way they were cooked. I have no idea what it means now, though. After that, we were getting ready to leave and I woke up.

#2 - Talking About Disgaea [Non-Lucid]

I spent the night at someone's house talking about drugs or something, then in the morning when I woke up and walked out the front door (into a big auditorium-like building, on the second floor ) there was a huge band/orchestra event going on, so I wanted to get out of there quickly. I distinctly remember walking past this chibified version of another J I knew in school, and he even had a squeaky voice to go along with his look. I ran into an old friend (some random DC?) and the scene changes to a huge department store, and she gets mad at me for not forcing her to play Disgaea before when she thought she wouldn't like it because she said she finally decided to try it after all these years and loves it. She asks for some teaser details about what she can expect out of the game, so I gave some vague information about the plot and some cool stuff you can do in the game, which were amazingly accurate considering I was saying this in a dream, but then the dream ended.

#3 - Glitchy New Pokémon Game [Non-Lucid]

Playing a copy of an unreleased Pokémon game that I somehow downloaded on to a flash cart. (Even in the dream I admit to not remembering how I got it.) I refer to the game as Black version, but I think I might have meant Black 2. It looks cool, but because it's a dream it's extremely glitchy and not consistent at all. Yet somehow, I managed to realize that if you keep going back and retrying the options you were pressing over and over again intending them to work, they eventually would. I don't remember much about the content, though I was actually able to read everything perfectly fine, and I remember seeing a picture of Link (in child form) from his art in Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Meanwhile, my parents are also walking around the house (I'm moving around while playing) and arguing about whether or not someone will be able to fix some issue if my dad contacts her, but I can't remember exactly what.