Way of the Lizard

While this series of dreams never reached a high level of lucidity, it did feature two odd and intense epiphanies, and much of the time I was aware that I was dreaming.

The first stage of the dream, I was playing with a pet, a small lizard that could sit in the palm of my hand, and liked to race around my forearms and take short, gliding flights from hand to hand or from me to its terrarium. It was familiar to me and I loved it as a pet. Someone, maybe someone at work, mentioned that the lizard wouldn't live that much longer, and the next time I was playing with her (I knew she was a her, probably having just asked myself the question and come up with an answer), I noticed she was slowing down, and there was a scare where she stopped moving, but revived, and I felt strong attachment and fear for her death. The dream progressed so that she had died, and I was feeling strong grief just as if a real pet had died. I remembered seeing and playing with the small creature over months, maybe more than a year, and considered how I would hold myself together at work. Then it struck me, the whole life I remembered for this creature was in dreams. I was able to search my memories and recall that I had no terrarium and no pets. I believed, and still think it may be the case, that the lizard had appeared in my dreams before. A couple times before, I've had the experience of grief in a dream, and then the realization that the events had not taken place, though this time may be the first that I was grieving a creature who only lived in dreams. It can be emotionally powerful, feeling relief but also feeling in a sense robbed of your grief, still feeling the echo of strong emotion while knowing you have no reason to feel it. Also, I suppose it illuminates mortality and impermanence in a strange light. It's not exactly an "Aha!" moment because of the sad, contemplative quality of the realization.

Here ends this dream, more or less. It's memorable in itself, though not singular. However, it probably set the tone for the experience which followed.

The initiating conditions of the next dream are hazy. Perhaps I set out with the intention to go out drinking, and several times throughout the dream I was convinced that I had drunk too much to drive or thought I might have been drugged. I can't say I've had many "drunk" dreams, and I wasn't drinking last night. I found myself in a crowd at some kind of play/concert/pageant - some elaborate group performance with a standing room only audience. It was quite impressive and immersive, but also blatant monotheistic allegory. At some point I found myself speaking to the producer/director (quite possibly a God stand-in, but a pudgy, red-bearded one) in a corner of the balcony. He said something to the effect that he tries to get everyone excited about putting on a good show, but those who refuse to participate certainly won't be invited to the after-party. Afterward, I found myself in the crowd again, and experienced a powerful sensation of epiphany. The content of the epiphany was very much in the "born again" narrative, that there is someone behind the curtain of our existence and he/it was reaching out to me personally to be accepted into my heart. The strength of the sensation was such that not accepting wasn't really an option. Indeed, for a time after the experience I was ready to buy whatever the man upstairs was selling.

I rather expected it was Christianity, but when I exited out the front, I found it was a Minecraft-themed mosque, with big creeper parapets and mineral blocks you could pluck off the front of the building. I had the feeling I had seen this place in dreams before, too, but like the lizard, it may just be dream time and deja vu at work. Out front there was a sermon with some fairly incendiary language, and then we newcomers were handed off, presumably, to recruiters. Mine was a hunched, bulgy old man with a thin beard and lopsided features. He didn't get very far in his spiel before coming right out and saying he was a demon. He said some demons would be more coy about it, but he was more the bind you in fire and pain variety, and the ground under me morphed into a lady demon face like something out of Diablo, with bone spikes growing up around me like a cage. My go-along-to-get-along had already been wearing thin, and I was able to break free of this attack.

The dream kind of wandered on and restarted several times from there, focusing on a "Dude, where's my car?" theme and leaving me with overall decidedly mixed feelings and no inclination to dump too much meaning into the events. Still, the two "revelations" taken on their own terms were unique experiences.

Well, that was a weird, dark dream. I was part of an intelligence unit raiding a Native American trailer park that housed a dope-growing operation. We went in there in suits, chucked bottles of accelerant at all the trailers except for two, the guy who tipped us off and the HQ, then lit it up and either rounded people up or gunned them down as they ran around in confusion. My boss in the operation was this 'spooky calm' kind of Tommy Lee Jones-ish guy, who gave a very rational defense of the whole operation when I declared it monstrous. He wandered around the trailer collecting tree branch specimens that were hanging around, and since we were doing it, I called dibs on an industrial juicer we found

I had a slew of dreams last night but don't remember a lot of details. The lucids were a couple sleep cycles back, so even they're a little hazy. Still, the dreams were pretty action-packed last night. The first one, I went lucid while flying some kind of open-air helicopter, and it was the biggest "A-ha! I'm dreaming" moment I've had in a while, with the landscape just slamming into vivid detail. I don't remember much beyond flying around. In another one, where I was still lucid, my sister gave me a little 'baby orange,' one of the tiny wedges from the inside of some oranges, for me to eat so I would remember what she'd told me when I woke up, but I woke up right after she handed it to me, before I could eat it. I did remember what she'd told me at the time, but don't anymore :/

My last dream wasn't lucid, but was pretty awesome. It started in this little hobbit-hole of a bar where people organized illegal road-races. I got into a race with two other vehicles and was in 2nd most of the time, behind this big pick-up truck, but then I drafted him and sling shot past, and left the other two in the dust (actually, the last leg of the race was curvy as hell and covered in snow) and beat them back to the bar.

So, for once "summon hottie" actually promoted some new lucid experiences, or at least interesting ones. I slept in quite a bit today, and so I was in and out of REM numerous times. What kicked off the lucid string was a dream set in a bizarro version of my old workplace. There was a new employee, this petit, dark-skinned Asian girl with a really loud, almost Jersey-accented voice. I woke from the dream and thought, "I'ma hit that," and dove right back in. I got back in pretty quickly, and this first time around the dream was pretty stable. I took her hand and we went upstairs to the guest rooms, all of which had been used the night before. We found some still in use and the rest all rumpled--it was kind of cool in that the rest of the dream seemed to be continuing around us, and we were dodging the guests and the boss to avoid getting sidetracked. After checking out all the guest rooms, we took the most serviceable one and got it on. As dream sex goes, it was good, not great.

I woke while I was still in bed with the girl, and tried for another re-entry(...). From here on, things were less stable and there was a lot of waking and re-entry, and attempts to stabilize and tweak the dream, but what sticks with me and fascinates me now are the transitions. Each time on the way in, and many times on the way out, I passed through a sort of limbo state that I've been familiar with since childhood. It's maybe a form of hypnagogic imagery, but mine is almost like the ant-fight static on a black-and-white TV, with forms precipitating out of it and gradually solidifying into the dream. What struck me on waking and re-entering in bed with the girl was how the dream sensations sort of shut off, replaced by the sensations of my bed, PJs and blankets, then I was in the ant-fights with a vague sense of the girl beside me, then there was a clear moment where we were spooning again, her body pressed against me and her breast cupped in my hand. I woke and re-entered at another point in the dream, and rinsed and repeated 4 or 5 times, summoning two more women but not getting far before waking or other DCs intervened, and experiencing the transition over and over again, from that limbo state to *BAM* I'm in, and then everything breaking up into static again and the sensations of reality returning. At a point where the dream-states were pretty short and unstable, I tried closing my eyes and spinning to stabilize the dream, which sharpened things up once, sent me back to ant-fights another time, but it was interesting that even in the spinning I could either spin in a disembodied way or use my feet, like spinning in your socks on a linoleum floor.

All in all, it was a pretty productive exploration of the dream-state and the states surrounding it, and I got laid

I just woke from a movie-like dream where I was sort-of-seeing and sort-of-being the main character. He was a less goofy-looking version of Ben Stiller, with dark hair down to his shoulders, but in a dramatic role. We were captive on a modern pirate ship, though all the pirates were basically grizzled white dudes. It was a giant, beat-up tanker of a ship, with its own machine shop and some pretty big smaller craft on board. One of the cooler visuals were these big fiberglass skiffs being hauled around on cranes and lifts while machinists worked on them. I/we made ourself useful so as not to get murdered and because being a pirate didn't sound so bad

There were no pirate battles or anything--mostly just cleaning up and doing maintenance around the ship. I/we was coming off a shift with the engineer/machinist captives, and one of them did this calculation counting rocks to figure out how much fuel we had, and we were running out.

At this point I became a separate, really vague character out on deck with the main character. We watched the exhaust ports sputter out, and he was spraying some weird vapor around from a big tank on his back. I discovered the pirates' sunglass graveyard--a weird corner near a rusted-shut door where broken sunglasses were tossed all over the place. The main character was talking about possibly venting our sewage as propulsion to reach a port, which sounded gross.

Another scene-shift, and the two of us are swimming into shore clinging to a piece of driftwood. Are we escaping? Looking for fuel? Who knows. Handsome Ben Stiller has shaved his head. We get ashore and pull some con at a resort hotel, where he's supposed to be a drunk rich guy who injured himself swimming in the ocean, and I found and rescued him. Somehow this plan gets us into the hotel, and end up meeting and hanging out with other vacationers. The next really cool visual, we are lounging around outside with other guests looking up at the stars in the sky, and for some reason the lights of all the continents are visible there in the sky, almost like a concave version of those shots of earth's nightside from space. I don't know if I was a pirate captive in a hollow earth or what.

Pretty much the last thing that happened was more bizarre and comical. A group of swimmers came out the hotel doors crab-walking on all fours, but turned over with their backs arched up. Apparently this was the way serious swimmers made their way to the water. My fellow ex-captive for some reason decides he's a gay rapist and assaults one of the swimmers. He manages to pants the guy, who then crab-walks away on just his hands with his butt sticking up in the air, which was equal parts funny and just weird, kind of like Borat.

That's about when I woke up.

Last night's dreams were all about wish fulfillment: found a job, had a car (in which my MIA glasses turned up), it wasn't snowing, and some random chick offered me blow on the street (not that I'd take her up on it, but it was nice of her to ask). The last thing that happened was I was walking home from work--imagine, working walking distance away!--and this young woman I vaguely remember from a cafe/bar where I used to hang out was on her way to buy some blow and offered me a bump, which I declined. As I cut across a bar parking lot, my cousin forcibly ejected two douchey-looking fellows and suggested I take their shit, which I also declined. I arrived home to find that my two roommates (fictional) had thrown a party without telling me, which was annoying because I had a double the next day at work, but I saw a rather random friend of mine there, and started talking to him.

All in all, a lot of odd supporting characters these days: people I never spent much time with and don't think about to my knowledge, just popping up.

Nothing lucid last night (I was lucid the night before, but just explored and didn't do much), but there was a pretty sweet fireworks show. It was one of those amalgams of a dozen different times and places and people who weren't exactly who they are in RL and probably wouldn't be in the same room together, but pretty much I was hanging out with family, and at one point we were outside and a fireworks show started one town over. Someone in our crew had some decent ones, too, and answered with a few bursts and bottle rockets. I remember one was kind of a dud and went into the lake/creek/whatever near us, and kept going off under the water. It was green and lit up the water in a cool way.

I also dreamed that I followed an old lady from my hometown down into a subway line hidden under one of the larger small towns around where I grew up. It was made of really old-looking, crumbling limestone. At the lowest level it was pitch black and there were--wait for it--vampire ghosts. I tried to get the old lady out of there, but I was basically manhandling her up the stairs, and she wasn't getting anywhere, so she decided to kick me down the stairs and run :/

Last night I dreamed that I read on Gawker about flatworms infecting people's brains in NYC subways. There was a picture of the back of some bald guy's head, and a reddened, irritated vein leading to a starburst of smaller reddened veins, like an infection site. There was also a diagram of how the worms travel through your brain, and the worms looked a lot like zerg drones in Starcraft 2.

Later, I was walking through old, dank subway tunnels, and sending out drones to harvest resources (which they basically did by eating poo). I remember saying to someone walking with me, "I guess it doesn't matter if my worms get worms."

I just remembered I had some really vivid, sweet dream sex with this petite Asian DC. Afterward, I'm not sure if she fell asleep or if I had a false awakening, but I was in a hotel room with several other people who were sleeping, and I was sticky, so I remember tiptoeing naked to the bathroom to clean up, and it was a large, gleaming bathroom with a couple stalls and multiple showers.

One recurring FA lately: I wake up and there's a fishtank next to my bed. One of the fish--a chubby, cartoony-looking orange thing--has escaped and is swimming in the air over my bed. I gently grab it (often taking several tries, since it's slick and I'm trying not to hurt it) and drop it back into the water.

Wow. Best dream sex ever. Raging 69 with someone I should pro'lly not be dream-banging....but what the hell, that was nice.

So I just had this long, strange dream. I was on some kind of Jane Leakey style mission to live amongst the animals in some kind of nature preserve (oddly enough, I think it was in Iraq, though the place itself had no connection to Iraq). There was lots of beautiful scenery with water running over colorful rocks and greenery spread around here and there. The thing is, though, the animals had developed this really involved culture within this nature preserve. The one thing I remember really clearly is this elaborate garden being built and maintained by squirrels, at squirrel-scale. None of them talked or anything, they were just engaged in this really complex group activity, like little squirrel-monks or something. The whole dream was really beautiful, while at the same time there was this sense that the place was endangered and I might be the last one to see it.

New LD!

It started as an anxiety dream at work, with people piling up in the restaurant and nothing ready. Then I realized it was a dream (this kind of anxiety is a dream sign for me). A DC of a guy I knew in college walked in, and I spent much of the rest of the dream telling him this was a dream. I did use a technique from the boards: at one point I insisted so excitedly that I was dreaming, I almost woke up, so I closed my eyes, spun around, and thought "Higher level lucidity," and when I opened my eyes, everything was more vivid and solid.

I also had a dream that I was sitting at a coffee shop having a live discussion of last night's "Nature of perception" thread

I had another weird, dark, plotted-out dream, where I was a young guy who had just bought a house. It was a quiet suburban neighborhood full of plastic-looking landscaping and identical houses, but the neighbors would babble nonsense and shoot at each other with shot-guns. Another neighbor just filmed everything with a big movie camera. I was outside snooping around, and the former owner of my house appears, ends up stabbing me in the shoulder with this huge knife, and him and the camera guy take me back to the house, where they keep me as a hostage/slave for the rest of the dream.

I also had a dream set in my hometown at some indeterminate time, maybe seven years ago. I ran into this girl I haven't thought of in ages. She's probably in pretty bad shape in waking life...last I knew she had a degenerative disease that required the periodic removal of chunks of her intestines.

(Update: thanks to Facebook, I now know this chick lives an awesome life driving race cars and jumping out of planes in Colorado )

Just 1 last night:

I was hanging out with my sister and my mom's ex was there. I remember at one point he was passing a bowl in the other room, and the cat carried it into the room where sis' and I were talking, and tapped it out neatly in the ashtray. My sister and I laughed. "Now if we could just teach him to pack it," one of us joked.

A lot of herb in the dreamworld lately...this usually happens when I quit smoking in waking life.

Oh, I forgot this dream from yesterday:

My bedroom window is right by my neighbors' backyard. Their autistic son, Larry, must have been out there shouting nonsense (as is his habit) while I was sleeping the afternoon away, cuz I had a couple FAs where I looked at the window and he had climbed up my building and was trying to get in the window. It was kind of funny when I remembered later.