memorable

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

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

1. This one was long and detailed, covering several days of dream-time, with some on-the-ground action, some movie-screen views of other characters, and even some back-story. It all took place in the little town in PA where I grew up. It started with the story of Altrip Jones, a man from my town who went out and made a fortune in the city, then came back and built this weird monument of a public building, with huge, white marble gargoyles jutting from the corners. It was some kind of culture/community center. So I saw this as if in a documentary, then I was back in my hometown, but a weirdly prosperous version where this guy had infused all this money into it.

2. I'm attending a funeral in my hometown, and it's a big family gathering, but it's a dream family, not my real family, and pretty much a dream-town, too. Mostly I'm interacting with two little brothers who have never met me before, because I've been away that long, and I"m working to protect my little uncle (real person) from professional assassins, including a 40-something Gene Hackman. These guys really like to rapel down buildings. I'm not resisting them violently, just tracking their movements and evading them.

3. At some point, I'm taking a walk with some dude I don't know, and he lights up a j. We turn a corner and here we are at a big, sandy beach (nothing like this in my real town). We pass it around and a few people join us, then security comes sniffing around, so I have to evade them and end up alone way down the beach. I start running back toward the crowd (now leaving--it's night-time, and they're closing down the beach), then realize it would be much faster to glide over the sand, then think "Well, why don't I just fly?" So I'm flying down the beach, and I stop and think, "Wait a sec, am I dreaming?" The dunes and everything look pretty real, but I do an RC (my first ever deliberate RC--thanks DV), which for me is kind of a karma-probe to see if objects around me have history and depth--dream objects are more transparent, have less presence than waking objects, even if visually identical. So anyway, I'm lucid, but everything stays pretty solid. I walk around and come to a pliant barrier where the beach just stops, but recalling some stuff from the forums, I try to dissolve or push through, and manage to get my hands through, like pushing through saran wrap. I didn't get to do much else before I woke up. Still, that's two LDs in a 10 days, after many months without any. Whoop!

Nightmare (1st vivid dream after I joined this forum)

This was last week, and I didn't dwell on it, so my recall is so-so. My nephew (he's 3) was kidnapped, and I was communicating with the kidnapper through this guy at a pharmacy-window. Dude let me know that my nephew was being held with a bunch of other kids by a pedophile ring with one guy in charge. Somehow, I managed to find the guy, and turned him over to the cops. I was feeling all frantic, like "How bad was this for my nephew, how are we all going to deal with this?" Then I was with my sister, and when I ask how my nephew is, she very calmly tells me that on the way back from the pedophile place he crawled out the car-window, and she tried to hold onto him, but he flew off and died. My sister was really calm, but I totally broke down, reviewing the situation and thinking maybe I should have killed the pedophile-guy when I had him, but that wouldn't have helped anything, and OMG my nephew's dead, his life got so bad that he killed himself at age 3...etc.

I woke up just numb, and it took a minute to realize that this world where my nephew was dead was not the world I was now in, and I wasn't even relieved, just numb. This is how nightmares are for me on those rare occasions I have them: here, have some intense emotional trauma, no wait, ha ha, it was just a dream.