ZAD's DJ

As of 11-15: 50 since August.

11-17 (+1)
I'm in a huge indoor-outdoor area. It's the size of a football field, and I'm on a mezzanine-like structure. It looks like rock shelf as floor for the mezzanine all around, but also kind of perfect like a shopping mall (hard to describe). The whole area is overgrown with plant life, dirt, and rocks, and there is junk (think American Pickers and/or a garage sale or old barn). It also sort of feels like a hill/cliff I climbed on during my last vacation. I don't know what's below on the "ground floor"--maybe a small body of water/pond? I climb around a corner and see a large twisted black metal wire structure which I understand to be a pulpit. The first 8-10 feet are twisted into a very small spiral staircase, and the rest is twisted into a rectangular pulpit face with a cross shape twisted on top. My cousin climbs up the staircase and pulls himself to the top, looking like he's about to preach. I become lucid and instantly lose eyesight. I sping to clear it up and begin to feel wakefulness pulling at me. I try to remember something I read hear once about "resisting the path to waking" and it works. I keep spinning and yell "lights!" and suddenly my vision comes back. All I can see past my small corner of the mezzanine is a huge sunset-colored mushroom cloud and sky going in all directions. I believe the lucid went on for a bit longer but I didn't write any more down in my DJ.

11-18 (+1)
At a wedding, lucid pretty briefly. Had some familiar faces show up.

11-21 (+3)
See post "Couple of Lucids - November 21"

11-22 (+2)
See post "Some Cool Lucids - November 22"

11-25 (+4)
4-lucid-long dream chain. Each time, I would "wake up" in the kitchen of 9 and become lucid almost instantly. Then I would exit out to the back porch and do a couple of things for 1-2 minutes, and then "wake up" into the next one. Things I did:
Flew to the top of a non-existant tree in the corner of the yard, then ran along an extremely long wooden structure, ninja-style. Again with these crazy disproportionately huge structures.
Walked outside again, saw my dad and passed him by since I was lucid. Decided to fly again and flew to the top of the tree again, but didn't go the same direction (the tree was in the same place, but the wooden structure wasn't) so instead I flew out towards my neighbors' houses and had a nice windy flight past some real life and dream memories (some of it was the way the neighbors (or previous neighbors) had their houses set up when I was a kid, some was from in-depth past dreams that I had forgotten all about*).
Walked out onto the porch and tried to spin-teleport to my incubated dream location, even closed my dream-eyes which usually dooms me if the teleport doesn't work, but this time simply nothing happened. I was able to salvage the lucid though, and did some summoning/object manipulation which was fun.
Had another brief one in which I lost it quite quickly and tried to do counting method to stabilize, but lost.

As of 11-26: 61 since August. I'm really excited to have gotten this far!

11-22
Note: Went to bed about 11pm or so.

Dream: Long one first. I was on some kind of job-related trip, which would last for (exactly) 21 hours. It was a serious task, perhaps a manhunt? I'm accompanied by others. There's a scene where I'm in an office late, and a sense of urgency throughout. The most iconic image from the dream is me getting in a taxi. The lighting reminds me of the final episode of The Bodyguard which F was watching on Netflix two nights ago.

Dream: There are two John Stamoses, each holding grey yorkies, in a kitchen I don't recognize (could have been from a medication commercial on TV; strange because I don't have TV, local or cable, nowadays). They're reading lines against each other. One of them looks like an impersonator, like a John Stamos-Nick Offerman lovechild.

Fragment: Third-person. A man is in love with his teacher who keeps "marrying Italian men". Most iconic image (will just call these MII's from now on): city street sidewalk, bright daylight.

WBTB: F got up for work at 5:30, I unfortunately awoke around 4:50 and figured there was no point going back to sleep until after she left since she comes in to say goodbye around 6:10. Also felt really lazy and didn't want to walk my dog though. Ended up having to get up to kill a roach (was afraid that would impact my remaining dreams at first, but I gave him a loving look as I flushed him down the toilet so as to emphasize to my subconscious that I don't have a deep sense of fear or disgust towards him and he shouldn't show up in my dreams; was actually a very empathetic moment for me, considering my deep-seated sense of fear and disgust for those bastards). Finally went back to bed, probably around 6-6:30.

Dream (WILD): I remembered as I was falling asleep that I've been wanting to do "WILD Wednesdays" and I missed my mark yesterday, so I reminded myself to do so. I also read an interesting article about AILD (reddit) (similar to self-help affirmations, but the main difference is phrasing your "afformation" in the form of "Why do I have 10-minute lucid dreams?" and letting your mind mull it over and find possibilities, instead of repeating "I have 10-minute lucid dreams" over and over with all the evidence pointing to the contrary). I did it a few times in the evening and a few times before bed.
I fell asleep with my arms in weird positions, so I had a few cycles of popping in and out of a dreams due to struggling against my inability to move and immediately waking up. I finally popped into a dream where I was in a black void and was struggling with this arm movement again, but I managed to wait long enough to let the dream materialize, and my arms started cooperating. My sense of the area came first and my vision came second. I floated down in slow motion towards a tub of water with a golden tile rim and red/blue/cream tiles on the sides and bottom. I landed and then was able to pick myself up from the pool.
I stepped out and surveyed the room; the tub was in the west corner, flush against the north, west, and south walls, meaning the room was only as wide as the tub. There was some sort of pump equipment on the south wall but I didn't examine it closely. There were some doors along the north and south walls as well, I remember reading a black and white sign on the north wall. There may have been a large green pipe with a patina against the north wall as well.
There were open reddish double doors to the east about 20-30 feet away from the tub. I went through them towards a door (the tiles on the floor and walls were all creamish colored by the way), I got the strange feeling this was a subway station. I approached the door, which had another black and white sign on it, and awoke abruptly.

Dream (DILD): I became lucid almost instantly after entering this dream scene. I found myself on a cement ramp between two tall redbrick buildings. The space was about 10-20 feet wide, split into two sections lengthwise by a black handrail, one surface being flat and the other being a ramp that rose from where I was up to the level of the flat side (the ramp side was on the right from my position). After the ramp ended, there was a continuation of the path between the buildings, which was covered with brick archways every 40 feet or so. I got the feeling it was a university, or city square.
As I was walking up the ramp, an old classmate I didn't know well (G) was walking in my direction. When I become lucid, sometimes DCs become hostile and approach me, facing me directly with an angry but somehow blank face. This happened in this case, but remembering how to deal with these, I embraced G. We talked for a second (don't remember exact dialogue) and I brought him to a corner where I transformed him into F. After she was there we talked for a second and I awoke.

Dream (DILD): I was in an unfamiliar classroom of young children, only many of them had faces resembling LOZ:Wind Waker characters (exaggerated nose represented by a pinkish ovoid shape). This was really strange to see on otherwise real children. Some of them also looked like skin-colored pikmin (instead of being green or red) with schoolclothes on. I walked out into the hallway and recognized the main kid from Stranger Things (with short hair). A male teacher was passing kidney stones in the hallway, only they were coming out as large diamond-shaped rocks/pebbles. Lots of screaming. I was only semi-lucid so I accepted the situation pretty much completely.

Note: Another brief waking for 5-10 minutes. Didn't note time.

Dream (WILD): This was the coolest WILD I've had yet, not for the content of the dream itself, but for the induction. I had woken from the past dream and been awake for only 5-10 minutes, and before I knew it I popped from 100% wakefulness to 100% sleep-awareness and lucidity. I found myself in a warmly lit cozy bedroom. The walls were woodpanneled or perhaps painted/wallpapered red. The bed was probably a queen or full, and was covered in an ornate crimson and gold comforter. The room was somewhat cluttered with bookshelves and stuff on the floor, and there were nightstands with antique lamps on either side of the bed. I walked to the door and something prevented me from opening it; fear? Instead I decided to push myself through a a mirror hanging on the wall. There was no resistance, I went straight through to another room in the house (memory of the other rooms is fuzzy now). I did this probably 3 or 4 times. I believe one of them was a bathroom, another a hallway, but the details are gone. Finally awoke.

Dream: Extremely long NL aboard a train. MII: Crawling through a kitchen section of the train which had open sections between cars; this was a combination kitchen-bar area, and above me was a plastic/rubber wine glass rack with holes for the base/stems to go in and be hung. Second-most iconic image: sitting in a large lobby area and conversing with victorian-era women and men. The whole dream had a faint blue light to it, like the RDJ Sherlock Holmes movies (that vibe). Wish I remembered more details, it was very in-depth.

Dream: Quick FA where I was looking out of the blinds next to my WL bed and it was bright blue outside. Heard F talking to me in a semi-demonic voice and awoke.

11-21
Frag: Woman in a long-sleeve yellow sweater, and another one in gray, standing next to each other.

Frag: Woman whose child is/is infected with a parasite. Quote something like "You would do it if it was your kid too".

Dream: In 9 kitchen, realize very quickly that I'm dreaming, finger through palm, "I'm dreaming". Walk out from behind kitchen counter and head out the back sliding glass door. On the way, grab a piece of toast remembering to try and taste things at every opportunity; it tasted good! Not too crunchy, not too soft.
It's daytime outside, and the only DC is my family's dog. I look around quickly and things are starting to lose visual stability. I fingerpalm and repeat "I'm dreaming" and things start to clear up. My family dog reminds me that I wanted to summon my own dog, so I do the turn around and expect method, as well as calling his name. It works! I pet him and he looks pretty much 100% accurate unlike I and other humans sometimes do (i.e. in mirrors).
I look around at the sky again and this enhances its visual clarity. I can see the moon up there, and a few clouds although it's mostly clear. While I was looking up, the yard and house below changed into a large field like the golf course behind my house.
I was near a tree so I decided to fly up. The process of flying itself actually stabilized the dream as I felt the sensation of wind in my hair and across my skin. I flew up, spinning lightly for fun (not rapidly so as to avoid changing scenes) until I was above all of the trees. I noticed an object that looked like pile, with a twig or branch and some other stuff, but was very low in detail, as were the trees now; their shapes were very basic geometrically as if I had gone too far away and their LOD was set to low, and when I approached them again, this didn't change back to high detail (for the trees). The stick was there and I picked it up and discarded it. I also saw a notable number of pieces of paper with writing on them, only one at first, but as I hovered around the tree, I saw three or four more. At first I had some kind of instinctive feeling that they were "real" and that their text wouldn't change, and actually believed and expected that, but ultimately each of them did. One of them looked like a movie ticket, another a restaurant receipt, and another maybe a government postcard (like voter registration).
After a bit up here I floated back to the ground and thought about who to summon. I picked up an advertisement postcard with a photo that reminded me of someone. I was going to try and summon them but while I was thinking I accidentally closed my dream eyes, and when I opened them again I was awake. Bummer.

Dream: Practicing with gun in yellow-lit hallway/range with unknown DC man. We each have both an M16 and a handgun. I'm playing with the sights (for some reason there's a telescoping sight? hard to explain). I feel a strong surge of hate/frustration/resentment towards the man for some reason. As he puts down the M16 and is drawing his handgun, I put down my handgun and grab the M16. We both start shooting at each other, but no sound or bullet wounds or feeling is accompanied, just our angry faces and the guns moving as if they're firing. I get frustrated that the gun won't shoot and am pressing the muzzle of the gun up against his face and deforming his face. This sight reminds me of something else and I wake up.

Dream: FA where I'm in bed. I feel intense vibrations and want to try and DEILD. I realize it's a dream quickly but don't do anything about it, and sort of DEILD into another FA. In this new FA, the TV is on and I think The Price Is Right or another game show is on. I pay attention to the feeling but ultimately don't do anything. F's voice starts to come from the next room and I wake up. Interesting lucid, just focusing on the sensations rather than doing crazy stuff the whole time.

Notes: Overall the first lucid lasted somewhere between 1-3 minutes I would say and was really enjoyable. Also, I hadn't really been practicing any day or night work, but have just been writing down dreams. I just woke up coincidentally early today (F got up to go to work) and I decided to tell myself 2-3 times "I will become lucid in my next dream". Very low-effort lucid!

Edit: Added second fragment.

11-15
Dream: F and I are somewhere, she's acting very strange -- she was told that she's going to die? We go to a circular hole in the ground that goes deep down and has catacomb-like levels in its sides. In the top layers, I can see birds. There was a lot more to this dream but it's gone now.
(...) I didn't write anything down for a few hours so I lost most of my dreams, initially I thought I remembered 2 other lucids/semi-lucids. It's a shame what a couple of hours can do to your dream recall.
Dream: HS friend R and I are in house, become lucid, go upstairs and look at his computer in his bedroom, wake up.

Notes: Attempted WILD a few times throughout the night, I don't think any of my lucids were achieved this way though. Will keep trying to WILD at least once a week for this new "WILD Wednesdays" habit I'm trying to make.

11-14
Dream: In courtyard in front of apartment. Out there with F. We have clothes, our keys, etc. all laid out over trees and tree branches. We just came back from somewhere/are going somehwere? ... I'm in the same place but farther back towards the parking lot (the dimensions have changed, there is a stone cove with a fire pit to the right of us, and we're facing a grassy field and our row of apartments ahead). F now looks like someone else, and a character representing her friend J is also present. We are folding up some (pool?) umbrellas, and as J folds the last umbrellas we can see through the mesh a family of bears right in front of us! Their ears are very strange, sort of like a cocker spaniel's ears but straight up and down. They look angry but we try to maneuver very slowly so that they don't attack -- very intense fear in the moment. They start to come forward then retreat back towards the apartment in the grass. I think at this point my character was dissolved and I was relegated to observer to the F and J avatars. I watched as they made a run for it, J started kicking one of them, who all of the sudden had those kickboxing targets strapped to his hands to catch her kicks? And then ran away leaving F standing there. In the dream, I was really anry at J for leaving F there with the bears. I think this expectation/intense emothion ocmbo made one of the bears strike out at F, and she dramatically fell down, which increased emotion. ... I'm on the sidewalk, my character has returned, I'm fighting with F (maybe J?) and she walks inside a sliding glass door (not ours) and I spit on a postcard (???)
Dream: High school band/in theatre/band parents watching as band, kids, dance team perform a really bad routine to a song -- what song?/we raise our hands in a temple shape on cue in waves/everyone does it very poorly, Mr. D walks out/outside in hall/stairs talk to L
Dream: White marble stairs/Din. Moby Dick and church discussion/T from loose drawing to rl/dom
Dream: Blue juice/dad presents/appliance(?)/leftovers(indian or bbq ramen rice)/dogs and stitch bunny w/ nose fur
Frag: Tubes challenge/tents?/fluid/miniature woman -- linked to above?
Dream: Had an FA, then woke for real. Almost DEILD'd but really wanted to remember the previous dreams.
Dream: (Conan) I'm in a squareish room with dim blue light. I'm naked and just received a large orange banner with some tribal-looking decorations and a bird design throughout. Had a conversation with myself about birds in designs (it's cheating?). The fabric is warm as I unfold it and inspect the design. I drape it around myself and feel it being very warm on my dream body (temperature in dreams - good development). There's a mirror across the way, so I drape the banner around me like a cape and start miming sword fighting like Conan the barbarian as depicted by Frank Frazetta. As I strike my arms out each time, I hit the fabric hard, because it's moving/flowing at a slower timescale than me. My stomach looked far too concave in the mirror, almost hollow, like a bad sculpture.


Notes: I'm putting ... just to indicate that there was either a scene transition, or something did happen here and I just forgot it.

11-12
Note: These are out of order and I'm missing a few, I didn't have amazing recall last night because of my dog moving me into strange positions and almost kicking me off the bed as the night went on. Another strange thing I noticed was no mention of 9 in any of the dreams I remembered, and instead the almost constant presence of this mountaintop room.
Dream: FA in dark room, extended version of my own, but it should have been obvious it wasn't. I was thinking about dreaming and even about what I wanted to do in my lucid dreams, but I was convinced I was awake and was trying to shut my eyes. I could see through them though (I convinced myself I was seeing through my eyelashes). Really should have caught this one
Dream: Longer dream in warmly lit orangish-yellow room, with windows all around the north and east walls. At first I'm sitting with my back against the south wall, sitting at a folding table. I see Gillum, he smiles and walks away -- feels malicious. Some time later I'm over at the east wall facing the corner, in a desk which I've "moved into" -- there's some weird system of school assigned seats + work + real estate going on here. Out of the window I can see a beautiful but vague mountain view all around -- blue skies and white snowcaps. I see the two younger indians from work (who were in the walking on water dream). They say that they're moving into a desk three away from mine. One of them has a broken arm. Later, the older indian man comes and says he wants to take that desk. I inform him they want it. He seems distressed and a negotiator (played by an actor whose name I can't think of -- but he always plays the shifty salesman/negotiator in movies). He says he'll offer them 300,000, or break their legs.
Frag: A woman is driving a car in an old-fashioned holiday movie version of NY at night. I know her from a previous dream or earlier scene in this dream, but I'm a camera, not a character. She crashes into another car or people off-screen, and the camera pans to an oddly dressed doorman/paperboy/announcer standing on a grate balcony over an inviting bar with flashing lights. He makes an announcement/proclamation in a grandiose but silly way.
Dream: In Walmart, I'm waiting in a line for self-checkout, but the lines are oriented in a strange way that I've never seen in any Walmart -- they're perpendicular to how they normally would be. I'm with F, but I see a few people passing, and casually examine them. Then I see one woman who eyes me suggestively, and I make a point of looking away and talking to F. I don't know what this dream means.
Dream: I enter the warmly lit mountaintop room from before, but from a darker hallway in the southwest corner. F is at a table facing away from me. I approach her and become lucid. [Censored for DV]
Dream: I'm not sure where I was looking back at it, it's highly probable I was in the warmly lit mountaintop room. I see an attractive girl and become lucid. [Censored for DV]
Frag: Vague memory about a house?

10-28
Fragment: I remember two men's faces, one of them being Jerry Seinfeld.
Dream: I'm at 9, some new neighbors have moved in to a house I used to petsit at; it's an odd couple, a young asian man and an older white lady. Someone is having their wedding there and F and I are attending. As we enter there's a "good" bottle of wine in a blue bottle which someone takes out of a lit china cabinet. I'm in a room with F and we're having dessert, I do some kind of unconscious dream control and transform a wine glass (like glassblowing, but just with fingertip gestures). My grandpa is calling me from the other room. He says something loudly and brashly which is confusing/embarrassing. Tony Soprano is there. Maybe it was Meadow's wedding.
Fragment: View of a street corner at my old college. It's morning, the light is tinted blue, there aren't many cars on the road.
Fragment: Brothers (that's all I wrote).

10-29
Dream: Long two-part dream with a painting/cooking competition (influenced by watching S1 of Skin Wars with F - I was competing against Mythica). I'm outside, in a grassy space near some bleachers, crowded with trees and some other metal/cinderblock structures. My painting is very saturated in its colors, it's of several columns with a vibrant sky behind them. The sky/weather around me is morning with tinted blue light -- from now on I'll just denote this as MB since it happens so often. I go to/under the bleachers to get a black plastic or metal barrel and start cooking, it's some kind of jambalaya or gumbo with sausage and potatoes. Later I'm in a bus with F's younger cousin, we're searching for ingredients. The bus is more like a warehouse, with a long table going down the length of it (maybe 2-3 times as long as a regular bus); I find what I need: potatoes and my pot of soup, which is smaller now than the barrel. I pull it from under the table, and notice some bugs crawling around some of the bags of ingredients. Transitions again and I'm at 9 having a crawfish boil and cooking hogs whole.
Dream: An old HS classmate who was a bit ditzy is asking for my work ID (the environment is a mix of HS and work) so that we can go on a date. I make an excuse that I have to go to my locker to find it.

10-30
Dream: I'm yelling angrily to my dad about my grandpa's medications. It starts in the backyard with my grandpa in a wheelchair near us, my dad is being to lax and not getting the prescriptions filled on time. I'm really yelling and beating on him, he's unfazed. We end up in the front yard, and a lot of family members and family friends are across the street in my neighbor P's driveway/front yard. They're all watching on as I yell and beat my dad. Eventually I walk over there and talk with them to calm down. Transitions and I'm in our driveway in our old van. My aunt is in the front with a baby, and she's holding it out so I can see it. It has a weird mouth -- it extends too far like a proboscis.
Notes: br stall; swing, flying bound?

Nothing down for 10-31 or 11-01

11-02
Dream: I'm standing next to a pool. Several of my indian coworkers are walking on water, and I ask them how to do it. An older one who sits near me explains about prana and breathing; a younger one who was on my first team makes an analogy that goes something like "A young man ...(insert foolish attempt); An old man ...(wiser, more effective method)". It was actually really good advice but I didn't write it down.
Fragment: Off of a country road, there's a suburban house with a staircase to a small loft right off the front door.
Dream: In 9, at night on the back porch. I'm with F and my dad, there are some ice chests lying around and a tablecloth on the table. It seems like a party is planned soon or just finished. F or I inquire about drinks and my dad says "MImosas" with an emphasis on the first part, making it sound like "My" -- this ties in with an in-joke F and I have about him and the way he says "My TV" or "My truck" in a specific way. There are also tall cans of bud light with weird plastic caps on them. I understand them to be bud light but they look like miller high life; strange. We're on our way to the pool, and I am trying to decide on shoes or flip flops.
Fragment: Something happened here but it's lost now.
Dream: F is in a room next to the bed. She stands up and walks to a door in the far left corner, and when she opens the door, a hand reaches out and grabs her. I can't move but I force the perpetrator to let go of her and approach me instead with dream control. I intrinsically understand that I have a certain energy or "light" that will dispel his darkness. I make him touch my arm and he goes blank-faced; this is similar to a past dream where I would reality check and engage with DCs, at which point they would go blank-faced and sort of become broken robots. He was kneeling down near the bed and had an Optimus Prime toy on his head.
The interesting part is how it started -- I wouldn't call it a WILD, I guess it was more like a DEILD but without the L. I had just gotten up for a bit and I lie down and immediately sort of popped into this one, I just didn't catch it and make it lucid.
Lucid: I decide to really try and get lucid after being teased by the last dream with awareness. I focus my efforts on it and very soon I'm hearing a radio drama in my head, although I still have full awareness of my body. It reminded me of HS and college when I was staying up late or close to sleep due to a project or homework I was working on, and I would get auditory hallucinations of voices/conversations with friends or family members, and or a loud bang or gunshot. Anyway, the radio drama sounded like It's a Wonderful Life, and one of the key characters was Uncle Billy, who was being forgetful about the night before of course. He remembered that he keyed a tree, scratched his name into it. Soon I can feel a sensation of moving back and forth, and I realize I'm on a swing. Once I realize it, the visualizations follow. I see myself in a wooden swing in a small yellowish room, with darkish blue light coming in from a window to the right. I say "I'm dreaming" as I swing, and imagine myself feeling the armrest, and I pop into the dream and lose most awareness of my physical body. I'm able to use pyromancy, and use my fingertip-flame-laser to carve shapes into the wood of the swing. I jump/get up from the swing and start interacting with a wooden desk with loose objects on its surface. I sweep them them off onto the floor, some wooden items, some glass beakers or bottles. I pick up a wooden item -- I forget what it was now -- and inscribe its surface. I remember the words "left" and "sou". The smoke effect from the pyromancy was vivid.