The Monkey Learns to Speak

Well after a bit of a reprieve I am back. Welcome to all of my friends and fellow competitors at the game of life. I hope when you win you are able to appreciate it or even know that you have won anything at all. Perhaps it does not matter. Can't win if you don't play as they say and what I see up for grabs is the future of humanity. Will we learn to live at peace in this century? Will we learn to respect the full diversity of human expression? I don't know, but I am starting this journal again to document at least for a time my continued persuit of the skill of lucid dreaming.

I will use the ranking system I always have for dreams only this time I will be keeping a database of the numbers to look at the trends and correlations

D- did I dream last night 0 or 1

L - lucidity 0 or 1 did I know I was dreaming, 2 would be successful control

V - vividness, How much like the physical experience was it? 1 - 10

R - realism, how much like the natural world was it, did it obey the laws of physics 1 - 10

A short discription.

I may try to implement certain inducements and will document that as well. The RILD technique I mentioned last time seemed to work well for dream recall. Definitely I believe most of us have to work at developing LD skills and th demands of waking life can impinge on that from time to time.

I am really not here to socialize this time as much as to be among other LDers but I'll stop in to chat once in a while. Next semester is my thesis which is the biggest challenge of my academic career so any major involvement here will have to wait until summer.

Cheers,

EJ

L0
V5
R8

An odd dream about working in some scientific group where I was the chief opponent of the ideas of Bill Paxon. I was coming downstairs in a place that was almost uniformly old but of the style of a modern school building. The wall were concrete with peeling paint. I was trying to speak german, several languages were written on papers on the wall and some school girls were standing by and watching me. One of them gave me money, I forget what I said to her. I went home at the end of the day to what looked like an observation room at a decaying insane asylum, my mother was in the control booth. The surrounding in the entire dream were of something old and decaying, like civilization went on without noticing that everything was falling apart, it was a rather cold atmosphere except for the people.

Then I was in a diner your stereotypical diner with a glass counter and I believe brown paneling the kind of thing you would find at an off the main route truck stop. A girl I know form school was the waitressa nd her boyfrined was sitting next to me. As we talked I slowly realized that he was Billy Bob Thornton and I was like dude I heard that Bad Santa was a hoot or some such thing and he was just starting to tell me when this new alarm clock we have woke we up with a jolt. Before that he told me that some guy had come in and robbed him of his wallet and his shotgun.

I will refrain from interpreting this for now. I have a hypothesis that our conscious minds may interfere with dream intepretation. I want to think about it for a little while longer before I try to test it though. If my alarm had not gone off I may have been able to go lucid it was heading that way, especially with the Bad Santa thing. The setting made it so cliche I am sure I would have picked up on it.

L0
V5
R5

I was living a house with my wife and it was a strange place, like the center of it was an old mobile home we used to live in when I was in high school but around this were all kinds of extending rooms. It ws a papered on the outside with deep bluish tar paper and the porch extension leaked very bad. I thought to myself how I wanted to redesign this house and when I went out back I found a bustling 1880's street. I had piles and piles of resrouces sitting behind the house there waitintg to be used to rennovation, but no time to actually do it. Several of the people in the street seemed to be watching me closely like I was going to do some great thing, in fact one of the men who was going somewhere with a wheel barrel I recognized. He was a man I recently worked on an important project with at school. I saw in his eyes that he was waiting for me to do something with the old house and all those raw materials.

The next part of the dream was quite surreal. I was at a small ranch home in a typical neighborhood that belonged to my father-in-law. The only thing is they live in a two story house. So, we were walking around outside and he was telling me about the lawn, which was emaculate and how much hard work it had taken him.

Interpretation - Its rather plain when I consider the things going on in my life and both scenes were informative about people I know and at least what I think they are thinking about me. The question is still with me though. If I am the only one who can interpret my dreams how can I be sure that I am being honest? If my subconscious and conscious minds are at odds, then when I sleep I try to tell myself something that when I wake I will completely deny. Perhaps reconciling these two minds is the key to enlightenment.

L0 but almost dream sign in a few places
V4
R2 telletubbies don't usually inhabit Chicago

An interesting night's dreaming. Some of the wierdness no doubt due to the low ball of white tequila on the rocks I had before bed.

I was in the navy and stationed in a very large city. We were living in boarding houses though not military dorms, nice old homes. There was an issue in which many of us knew how to fly and the overall feel of the dream was that at the beginning we were like a high school class. I remember asking about certain girls I saw and there was that whole, who likes who and who wants to marry who thing. By the end it was just a couple people living in the boarding house. The other men who lived in the boarding house were ex mafioso, interesting fellows. Many of the scenes were shallow paste overs of ideas and experiences that have shaped my life. In one little incident I was talking to someone about flying and then when I demonstrated how to fly I became a super ball and bounced very high into the sky. When I came down it was in a teletubbies version of Chicago and they were looking into me and seeing kaliedascope colors. The dream ended with me sitting on a bed naked with a girl from school that has always had a problem with me and gossips about me constantly. It seemed somehow that we understood each other now. It then occured to me that even though I was in the navy I had no uniforms in my closet and this made me anxious, you are supposed to show up for duty in your whites or khakis or blues. Suddenly a package came from my parents that contained a bunch of my clothes and all of my uniforms. I looked at the postage and it had cost them over $80 to send it, this would be considered a lot of money just to send a package.

Interpretation- Well I am hoping to go to the Univ. of Chicago to work on my Phd in applied Statistics and Math Modeling. The box from my family I hope is prophetic but probably represents my belief that my mother will not let me down on a financial matter that we are currently dealing with and that they care about the success of my career. The girl on the bed from school is very complicated and the scene has shadows of my early childhood, my marriage and what I think about the girl in question and what I think she thinks of me, its a multilayered symbol, glass onion for sure. The postage part actually invoked alot of different feelings about the fact that we grew up poor, feeling sorry somehow that $80 would seem like alot of money, feeling bad that my irresponsibility meant I could not reimburse them for the amount (This one I am sure will come up again it is the first time I have really acknowledged that feeling in a long time). The flying part, I almost wish I had noticed how odd that was. That should have been a dream sign. But I am starting to wonder if the vividness of the dream is correlated to lucidity. I may try to do a survey here on some of those parameters just to see if it appears that lucid dreams are generally more vivid than others.

L0
V4
R5

It was a mixed dream, I was in an about different facilities at school but it was in my old home ton and neighborhood. Many of the things that are going on at school were going on there, certain people not understanding the things I said to them, pasting their own agenda over my words. I was trying to get a band together and also doing an astronomy project where I was looking for a prticular star but kept sort of randomly adjusting the telescope (which was more like a microscope) and seeing very interesting shapes like pictures from thte Hubble Space Telescope. The whole dream had an underlying theme of girls everywhere, a plethora of girls with different personalities. The only way I could describe it is 'girls just wanna have fun'.

Interpretation - The only clear message to me seems to be that school is alot like the old neigborhood and I have women on my mind. Nothing too surprising. The HST pictures could have become dream sign I was just looking at some about an hour beofre bed. The dream was hard to remember but I did strain myself by being out in subzero weather and carrying my daughter around on my shoulders. People don't usually realize it but extreme heat and extreme cold are both the same in that way, it strains you to be out in them for very long.

Dreams of a highly personal nature

L0
R2
V4

There were several dreams I recalled upon waking but this one remained with me. I was out with a friend or relative looking at a trout stream I was familiar with. As I walked up from a bridge I came to a pool that should be there but had recently dried up. There were several tributaries to the pool, the main one was dry so I followed that and came upon a channel that led up to a very nice house on the peak of a hill. The house had deep brown cedar shingles and a stone porch with nice landscaping. A girl on the porch seemed to know me and was playing around with the water fountain. As I looked I noticed it was a spring that had fed the stream I used to fish in. The girl informed me that the spring had started flowing over the other side of the hill. She could not fix it.
Then from the direction I had come an old enemy came. It was sort of like the character in the Mummie with two sidekicks. Myself and the friend who had been with me pulled out some magic and were able to send them fleeing. The mummie went for the girl and you were not supposed to look in his eyes or lose your soul, or some such thing.
Another portion of the dream had me sitting around in a gathering area of the school with a bunch of young ladies. One of them had a crush on me but would not acknowledge it to me. Several important professors were also sitting around watching me. I noticed that one of the chairs was quite dirty so I began cleaning it. Then a mechanic who used to work with my father came around (he really did not work with my father but in the dream he did). He wanted to learn some math but he kept trying to read books that were beyond him. I recommended a book that fit his level well and he seemed encouraged that I would help him.

Interpretation - not sure at this time

L0
R5
V5

A slightly more vivid and realistic dream. I started out in a small park in my home town and ended up with a large group of people sort of bunched together on the sidewalk of the gas station next store. At the beginning several of the older kids thought I was someone to be played with and laughed when I could not figure out why the drinking fountain was so had to drink from (they had turned it around backwards). There were Purple Martins in the neighborhood that could aim there crap at you in little jets. So if you walked by their bird house it would suddenly start raining purple martin poop. The group hug at the end was interesting because I made a strong connection to a girl in school. In fact I sort of suddenly realized that she was sitting very close to me and that my hands were on her things. That was exciting for that moment when one realizes that someone has let you into their private space. But then I noticed that we were both sitting on the arms and legs of a very big man with a scruffy face. So it dampened my willingness to try anything.

Interpretation - I am often tempted to think that my upbringing was of little value. We grew up poor and in a neighborhood were there was little incentive to get an education. But my dreams often compare and contrast those early days with the times I am living in now. In some way I think this dream is about my entire time at graduate school in fact the flow of the story is right on and the girl at the end reflects my sense that that particular young woman has been quite affected by my determination to overcome and my persona. I'm not sure if she knows me beyond that because we have rarely talked.