Thread: Asymptote's Dreams

If there had been any lucid bits, they would have been in blue.

July 5, 2007

Fluttering on the Boundary

NOTE: This morning, I kept waking up and falling back asleep, so these dreams turned out to be quite fragmented.

I'm on the Dreamviews forums, looking through the profiles. I run across one that has a picture of some strange pink-skinned anime girl in a jumpsuit. She's very attractive. I keep scrolling back to that profile.

I'm going out with a Czech girl.

I have an appointment for today, and I had a dream that I missed it. Even though I was something like an hour late, I just hung around the house, fiddling about on the Dreamviews forums and making only weak attempts to contact the person with which I have the appointment.

Somewhere in here, I had a dream that I was writing all this down in my dream journal, and when I woke up and realized I hadn't written a thing, I was quite cross.

There's a UFO flying around. I'm suddenly some sort of UFO expert. I say something about "it flies through gamma-wave travel. It all gets converted to [something] and [something]." My vision keeps going peculiar, like my field of view is narrowing and I can't see very well. This makes me angry, since I am witnessing a UFO flying around [the bad-vision dream seems to recur fairly regularly].

I have a book with me, and somebody mentions the chapter called "Planetary Strokes." I look that up in the index, and turn to the page on Planetary Strokes. Instead of reading text, it's more like a multimedia presentation. "A planetary stroke," says the presenter, with a weather map behind him [he kind of reminds me of Carl Sagan], "is just like a stroke in the human brain: a large-scale disturbance [something]. In planetary terms, however, a stroke occurs when a tornado or other disturbance alters the global weather pattern [that's not verbatim, but I couldn't remember most of it.]"

Note: Note the mention of a tornado, yet again.

If there had been any lucid bits, they would have been in blue.

July 6, 2007

It's a Mess

I'm in my house, which is in a terrible state of disrepair. My parents are scolding me about it, for some reason. I go upstairs, and step on one part of the floor, which nearly caves in. I hurry back downstairs. Suddenly, the ceiling gives way, and I leap out of the way just as rotten wood collapses onto me.

Someone's making espresso. My mother is angry, and yelling about the state of the espresso machine.

I'm in a feud with some guy over what seemed like a trivial matter. I punch him in the face several times. He cowers, bruised, as I yell "You were trying to kill me! You were trying to end my life!"

I'm standing in front of my father's truck. I somehow start it by mistake, and I keep trying to turn it off before he finds out. Instead of shutting it off, I make it roll backwards.

If there had been any lucid bits, they would have been in blue.

NOTE: I didn't actually write this down after I dreamed it, so I don't know how accurate a recording it is.

July 13, 2007

Logging Giant Trees

In a forest. Somebody has chopped down an enormous tree (perhaps ten feet wide or more), though it looks more like a beaver chewed up the tree's base. I see something that looks like people around the tree, trying to drag it away.

I'm in a car riding by all this, and then I stop in a place that vaguely resembles the porch of my house. The people working with the trees are powerful somehow, and I'm convinced that they're not human. I'm afraid of them. I go out to help them, and it starts to rain. Suddenly, the temperature drops off severely, and the rain turns to snow. For some reason, I desperately want to get out of the snow, but I can't. It's like I'm stuck.

The only really significant things I remember about the dream are the distinct nonhuman presence and the logs being dragged.

Note: I've noticed that odd weather occurs in many of my dreams. I suppose I should add that to my list of dreamsigns.

If there had been any lucid bits, they would have been in blue.

July 14th, 2007

Escape from the Garden and other Adventures

My friend, his sister, and I are hanging around in my yard, which seems to have gotten quite a lot larger. We're just hanging out for a while, but then some guy (for some reason, I got the impression he was from Texas), arrives and takes us hostage. He forces us to work for him. The friend's sister and I are assigned to the forklift.

At first, we make the mistake of both trying to sit on the same seat. Then, I start operating it by myself, and I get quite proficient at it. Before long, I'm speeding about, lifting boxes, and loading them into a trailer.

Suddenly, I'm standing by the fence next to my friend. He presses a button on one of the fenceposts, and two of the fence sections slide to the side, revealing a much shorter fence made of old rails of some sort. We hop over the fence.

We find ourselves in a well-groomed yard. A two- or three-story house sits to our right. In front of us is a short white picket fence, which we crouch behind. A car pulls up, and a Mexican man gets out. My friend listens to something he says, and somehow uses that to discern some personal information about him. The man catches us, and, angry that my friend discovered whatever information he did, drags us into the house.

He deposits us on the second-floor patio/balcony. There is some furniture up there, but none of it is well-assembled, and whoever put it together didn't use any nails, so it's all very rickety. My friend and I are quite worried about being held prisoner in the man's house, so we begin to craft an escape plan. I look through the windows that look out onto the patio. Through one of them, I see the Mexican man's mother and some of his children. Through the other, I see a grimy, poorly-kept hallway with a bare bulb dangling from the ceiling. Somehow I know that I won't be able to get out either of these ways.

Then, my friend and I come up with a better idea. We leap from the patio into the man's garden, which abuts the street. We then run into the man's greenhouse, which is constructed somewhat like a large tent. As we're bolting through the rows of plants, my friend picks up some sort of oblong object. He wants to throw it down, but I tell him not to, since if he does, he might hurt the planter full of Venus Flytraps in front of him.

I finally make my way to the back of the greenhouse, and I can see through a little plastic window in the cloth wall that I'm almost to the street, and to freedom. I find a little Velcro seam in the wall, and pull it open. I stick my head through the slit, but I can't get out the rest of the way. I feel trapped and confined. I push the seam the rest of the way open and walk out onto the sidewalk.

Before me is a cul-de-sac-style neighborhood. All the houses are clean, with white picket fences and very beautiful green grass. It's raining, and the grass is frosted with dew. There's a rainbow hanging overhead, and the sun is setting, casting a beautiful orange glow over everything. I feel a profound sense of freedom and liberation.

Any lucid or semi-lucid bits are in blue.

September 18th, 2007

Family Trip

I'm standing in the yard of my old house, when it suddenly gets cold, and begins snowing gently. I peek over the fence to get a look at the rest of the neighborhood, which is very lovely and snow-covered. My father talks about how nice everything looks when it snows.

[transition]

I'm at some sort of family gathering. We're eating dinner. People arrive. One of the guests suddenly announces that she's Muslim. I get very paranoid about offending her religion, and so I begin eating very slowly and carefully, as not to make a mess.

Suddenly, I realize that I'm naked. I go upstairs and get a towel from the bathroom, but it's too small.

[transition]

We drive to Chicago [I've never actually been there], and I get stuck in the kids' section of the airport. Someone demonstrates how my "electronic paper money" can be used to scam the airport. (The electronic paper money is just like regular paper money, except each bill has a little computer chip attached to it). I wait around for a while, then try to pay again.

Any lucid or semi-lucid bits are in blue.

October 23rd, 2007

The Emu Guitar

My mother and I are staying in a place that looks like a cross between a castle and and some kind of street fair. My family reunion is going on [it was planned for the weekend after the dream, actually].

Someone gives me what they call an "Emu guitar." It looks a lot like a regular guitar, but it's odd-shaped, parts of it look like they're made of bone, and other parts have that furry look that emu feathers have. I really want to play my emu guitar, but people keep coming up to talk to me.

When I finally do get a chance to play it, it sounds really good. I'm immediately proficient at playing it, even though it has an abnormally large number of strings.

Later, after the place has filled up with people, I finally get another chance to play my emu guitar again, but it's now out of tune. Somehow I know that, in order to tune it, I have to place one thousand paper cards in each of a bunch of slots, one slot corresponding to each string. Someone is rambling on about their biology class, and I steal their biology study cards, which are just the right size to fit the slots. I know that if I don't put exactly one thousand cards into each slot, the tuning will be off, so I devise a "clever" way to get one thousand: since the cards are numbered, I simply take cards 175 through 1175. Then, I realize that this will only work once, because, somehow, counting out the cards like I did put them all out of order.

Any lucid or semi-lucid bits are in blue.

October 24th, 2007

Quantum Calculations

NOTE: I had been attempting to have a dream based on the game "Portal." This is the result. It is very fragmented, though, so it probably won't make sense.

Some scientists are doing quantum calculations while talking about portals.

"You start out with [some number] and very easily there become 100 to the 100,240,033 perturbations." [this is not verbatim, I couldn't remember what was actually said]

"Greta [her real name is "Berta", the character from the show "Two and a Half Men"] was the only one for whom the test had to be aborted."

[The test had something to do with empathic/telepathic strippers]

A Japanese man is eating sushi and looking up at the strippers. "They're too naked for me," he says.

[transition]

My friend Charlie and I are playing a racing game on the computer. He's complaining about how unfair the game is. As he says this, his car hits another car and gets stuck.

Any lucid or semi-lucid bits are in blue.

October 29th, 2007

The Restricted Areas of the Grocery Store

I'm in a grocery store. Someone is with me. We're "casing the joint." I start nudging a bank of coolers aside to get behind them, and waiting to see what part of the grocery store loses power first as a result. The "Evil Side" of the person with me is coming out, and I'm trying to encourage it, perhaps to get them to help me do whatever it is I'm trying to do to the store. But, when it comes out, it's not "Evil Alan." It's me.

Any lucid or semi-lucid bits are in blue.

November 1st, 2007

I Invented This

I'm standing on a rugby pitch [odd, since I've never seen a game of rugby in my life]. As I walk through it, I have to push my way around and through crowds of people moving about. I get hit by a hacky-sack, which I skillfully deflect in the direction from which it came. I get hit again, and return it again. I end up joining the group that's playing hacky-sack. I'm talking with the leader. He's talking about the putty that the hacky-sack ball is filled with. It's orange.

I'm at home now [my old home, rather] with my parents. I'm talking about the hacky-sack putty. My cousin Jerry is there. He starts talking about how he remembers that I discovered a kind of orange putty much like the one used in the hacky-sack. My friend Charlie and I are talking, while my mother fries some chicken strips, which smell really good.

The O2 High

For some reason, I want to get high. My mother hands me a little miniature oxygen cylinder, about the size of a two-liter bottle of cola [it's the kind that one often sees slung over the shoulder in a little bag]. She gives one to Charlie as well. I put my mouth on the nozzle and inhale, and the cylinder collapses like an aluminum can. My mother, teasing me, tries to light the pure oxygen with a lighter as it comes out. I get high.

"Ooh! Your gums are red!" someone says to me. "Ooh! Now your face is red." I get very silly, and start dancing around. I fall down, get up, and toss the crushed cylinder away. I start to get concerned that I took too much oxygen. I bumble over to Charlie, and ask him how much of his cylinder he inhaled.

"Oh, about nineteen quarters," he replies.

Any lucid or semi-lucid bits are in blue.

November 4th, 2007

Anfangen

Some sort of unethical science experiment is going on. It puts me in mind of the Stanford Prison Experiment or the Milgram Obedience Experiment [if you don't know what those are, look them up. They're quite fascinating. And horrifying.] It's some kind of experiment about behavior modification.

That was many years ago. Now, the girls who took part in the experiment are mentally disabled somehow, and badly socially-regressed. One of the girls tries to have sex with another of the girls.

I go on a crusade to punish the unethical scientists who perpetrated the experiment. I find one of them at UNCC [my University], in a huge, high-ceilinged, glass-walled building with a grand staircase. When I try to take him to task about the experiment, he runs up the stairs.

As I chase him, I start yelling at him. "Do you know what anfangen means?" I scream [anfangen is a German word]. "It means 'to begin'!" [yes, this is its actual meaning, as far as I know].

I finally corner the scientist on top of a fire escape outside the building. The weather is very cold and cloudy, and it's raining. I notice the puddles pooling on the fire escape's surface. Somehow, I end up killing the scientist [I think I may have pushed him off the fire escape, since we were several stories above a parking lot].

All lucid or semi-lucid bits are in blue.

November 5th, 2007

The Tiny Town

A bunch of members of the Black Panther Party are moving along the banks of a river. The soil is mostly clay. They begin to build "nests" in the riverbanks (little hollowed-out caves) and impregnate their wives. I was with them, but I go on ahead of them. I start climbing the side of a mountain, which has a concrete path winding up it. I don't take the path, however, I just step from one outcropping of rock to another, as though I was climbing stairs. My climbing really impresses some of the tourists who are walking up the path.

[sudden transition]

I'm in a little town in the country. There's only one bookstore in town. I want to write down the name of the place, but there's no paper anywhere, so I write it on my hand.

[sudden transition]

I'm standing outside. It's nighttime. The weather is terrible. Rain pounds down out of a pitch-black sky as lightning flashes and thunder roars all around. The lightning frightens me terribly, and I don't want to take shelter in any of the corrugated-aluminum sheds that are standing around the field, because aluminum conducts electricity.

Suddenly, I'm standing on a window ledge outside of a house, looking in. Inside the house are a bunch of women made of black clay, doing peculiar and often violent sex acts.

A man is standing across from me, on the opposite side of the ledge. He pulls something off the window and drops it. It falls two stories to the ground and smashes the basement doors. He flies into a panic, and desperately tries to mend the doors before someone finds out.

Any lucid or semi-lucid bits are in blue.

November 9th, 2007

Shari'a Law

I'm in some sort of building in the Middle East. There's a room with showers in it. There's a row of mens' bathrooms, but no womens'. I know that this has something to do with Islamic Shari'a law. [NOTE: I don't actually know a single thing about Shari'a law. This dream was probably the result of leaving the news on the radio as I fell asleep.]

The Article

I'm working in my job [at the University newspaper]. I've been doing a lot of pencil drawings. Mr. Clements [my astronomy teacher from high school] is doing an NPR-type report about me, and it's very flattering. I'm enjoying it immensely, but suddenly some people enter for a "legal meeting." Mr. Clements is apparently the "barrister" that presides over the meeting. I try to make sure my cell phone is off, but when I reach into my pocket, the phone doesn't feel right. I take it out and look at it. It's not my phone. It belongs to some guy named Chris [I have no idea who this is, but in the dream, I knew exactly who it was]. For a second, I try to find him to give his phone back, but I soon give up, and reach into my pocket again, where I find my phone.

Help(less) Desk

An office worker is sitting at his desk, which is sitting in a covered raft. The raft is bobbing in a rainy ocean.

All lucid or semi-lucid bits are in blue.

November 12th, 2007

Teacher's Assistant

My life is going well. I'm feeling very optimistic. I'm about to go out to buy groceries, when suddenly, my high-school physics teacher informs me that she signed me up to be some kind of teacher's assistant. I follow her into her office to make copies of her schedule, but the printer is out of paper and toner. I remember that I need to buy paper and toner in real life, and shout something about being old.

Winging the Moon

My relatives are hanging about. One of them (he looks like my uncle Bobby) is working on an under-construction skyscraper, sitting on one of the i-beams like those steelworkers of the '40s. The sky is incredibly beautiful: it's filled with feathery clouds and graceful contrails, all lit to a golden fire by the light of the setting sun. I can see the moon rising through the clouds. It's huge and beautiful as well. I'm really enjoying the view, but my uncle Bobby is complaining that he'd like to "shoot its [the moon's] wings off."

Dakurana

I'm sitting down, having dinner with some people. Evan [someone I once knew] is supposed to show up to eat with us. A guy sits down. His name is displayed [either on his nametag or on words that simply float over his head] as "Daku [something]" or "Dakurana [something]." He sits down.

"Ah, the world-famous Daku!" I say. He's someone famous from the Internet. I keep smiling at him. He was involved with some kind of website that was strangely and unintentionally erotic.

I'm eating corn chips and reading the back of the package they came in. The package says that the chips are safe, but may have some dangerous ingredients. The table on the back lists the ingredients and their potential side-effects. Some of the ingredients are illegal drugs. Then, the table changes to allergy information. Still, I eat the whole bag. Then, I get nervous about the side-effects.

Any lucid or semi-lucid bits are in blue.

November 13th, 2007

Dante's Scheme

I'm walking around in a big food court-like place. Dante [someone from my German class] greets me. He hands me a roll of dirty money [dirty, I'm sure, in both senses of the word].

"Here's what I need you to do," he says. "Go to the Sykes Auditorium between the hours of seven and eight, and make a deposit, then call [some telephone number]." [NOTE: On the campus of UNCC, where the dream took place, there is no such building as the Sykes Auditorium. I have no idea where that came from] As I try to write the number down, I can't get it right. I keep writing the wrong digits. I get very nervous; I don't want to do this. I'm afraid I'll get in trouble.

Any lucid or semi-lucid bits are in blue.

November 16th, 2007

An End, Not a Means

My friend Charlie and I are walking around a very poor neighborhood with a mentally-retarded man. We find a garage with a rusted-out hulk of a car in front of it. We break into the garage and start stealing bundles of money in plastic bags, and putting them into another container. My mother appears. She admonishes me never to use the retarded man for evil purposes. To be nice, I tell the man what a good job he did finding the money. Charlie asks me what I'm going to do with my share. I tell him I'm thinking about buying a cigar. In my mind though, I'm thinking about a dream about a malevolent Artificial Intelligence. We go back outside, close the garage, and since it's a rough neighborhood, I decide to lock up my car. However, I keep turning the key the wrong way and unlocking it again. As I'm doing so, I look up and see a man from the neighborhood. He looks quite angry, as though I'm expecting him to automatically be a criminal because of the neighborhood he's from. I start to feel really guilty.

Sick People

I'm walking around a little British village (very similar to the one from the television show "Last of the Summer Wine") Compo (from the show) is talking about how his friend had a cough for a week, then died. Our wandering looks aimless, but feels very purposeful.

People with heart conditions are hanging about. One man has a wire inserted through his chest into his heart, which he needs in order to live. I keep telling the man not to tell me about his condition, since I'm a hypochondriac.

The Malevolent Computer
Charlie and I are standing in a room on the top floor of my house. I have my mother come in and install a circuit-breaker system so that I can shut something down at the flip of a switch. Odd things happen [that's what I wrote in my dream journal. I know it doesn't make sense, but it seemed too important to leave out]. The wood paneling on the wall nearby rises up, revealing a gray concrete wall behind it. We discover a hidden alcove with a computer in it. As we get close to the computer, it speaks in an eerie, electronic voice (it's actually the voice of GLaDOS, from the game "Portal").

The computer asks what we think of an image. In the image, there are blue-skinned women with no features (no faces, no marks on their skin, or anything like that) laying around in clusters, with yellow lines representing electrodes attached to them. They jerk and writhe, but they don't look like they're in pleasure or in pain. The view zooms out, and reveals that the image shows an enormous number of these people. The image makes me very uneasy, but at the same time, I'm quite enjoying the dream.

Suddenly, I find the computer's "minion" (a cyborg with paper-white, unhealthy-looking skin), and the computer says something to the minion about protocol. The minion, quite offended, responds "Yes, that's right...I am sexually inhibited." I find a vital part of the computer. It looks like a female cyborg. I decide that the computer must be destroyed, so I pull the cyborg's head off, but it remains connected to the body by cables, and keeps talking. It says something chillingly threatening, but I'm not satisfied with the dream.

Another image, like the one of the blue people with the electrodes. This one is of some strange card game. Some cards explode and release "virus" cards, which replace "healthy" cards. Totally dissatisfied with the dream at this point, and with sensory information starting to leak in from the real world, I wake myself up.

Any lucid or semi-lucid bits would be in blue.

November 18th, 2007

An Unnecessary Hospitalization

I'm going to visit my parents. The day is cold and gray and rainy. Just as I pull into the driveway, I look out the window of my car and an ambulance passes me, heading for their house. I get worried and stop the car. As I get out, I see my father walking towards the car. For some reason, I assume that he's the one the ambulance is here for.

"Are you having heart palpitations?" I ask. He nods, and gets in the ambulance. They take him to the hospital, and he lays in the hospital bed for quite a while before a doctor comes in to see him. The doctor performs an EKG (actually, it looks more like he just waves something near my father's chest), then wanders off. It's a long time before I can get anybody to tell me how my father is. Eventually, I corner a doctor, who tells me my father's perfectly fine. Absolutely nothing was wrong with him.

Any lucid or semi-lucid bits are in blue.

November 19th, 2007

The Game

I'm playing a game on the computer. In the game, you enter a taxi, and somehow get locked in. Then, you have to solve a lot of puzzles in order to unlock a phone in the taxi so that you can call 911 and get help. The puzzles are quite complicated, involving a lot of codes and things. At one point, I think I'm being clever and try to skip one step by entering a code I found earlier into the "phone unlock" keypad, but I'm rewarded with an alarm and a blinking light.

Fake Tornadoes

I'm watching some kind of documentary about tornadoes. I'm watching a video taken from inside a car driving by one of the tornadoes. It's raining very hard, and it looks like the tornado is partly wrapped in fog. Debris flies everywhere. A house comes rolling down the hill. Text appears at the bottom of the screen, saying something like "Some people believe that part of this video may be fake." The house rolling down the hill does look rather fake, suddenly.

The filmmakers are interviewing a teenage boy who lived somewhere in Hawaii or some similar place. The documentary cuts to video of a small island with a house and a swimming pool on it. A tornado appears to be passing by on the water, but as the camera view draws closer to the island and drops lower, it's revealed that the tornado's base isn't actually attached to the ground, it's just sort of hovering above it. The tornado approaches the island. As it does, the boy is standing out in the yard. The tornado passes right above him, and stops, hovering there. Then, suddenly, it touches the ground, enveloping him. It looks almost like the boy is suddenly enveloped in a tornado-colored spandex tube.

The Balloon-Ships Aren't Working

Someone is testing strangely-built spacecraft. The spacecraft consist of capsules (where the astronauts sit) connected to large clusters of huge reinforced balloons. In order to provide thrust, the balloons all deflate simultaneously, and send the spacecraft shooting around. The only problem is that it doesn't work in the atmosphere, because the ships end up doing the same thing as a balloon that you inflate and let go: they just squirt around in random directions until they fall.

As I watch the ships fail time and time again, I begin hoping that they work better in outer space.

NOTE: Tornadoes again. I'm pretty much positive that they're a dreamsign now.

Lucid bits are in blue.
Semi-lucid bits are in green.

November 20th, 2007

Dreaming of Dreaming of Angelina Jolie

In my dream, I'm writing about dreaming about the following scene in my dream journal:

There's a famous actor wearing some kind of deodorant or cologne in an advertisement. He's swimming around in the ocean. A shark does something to him. Angelina Jolie leaps in the water to save him. The shark is attracted to her and saves her. Julia Roberts (?) jumps in to save Jolie. The shark now likes Julia Roberts instead.

The Professor's Speech

A professor is retiring from UNCC (my college). He's giving speeches to all the people at the college who have changed his life. I stare at him. I've admired this professor immensely, and I'm offended that he hasn't mentioned me at all in any of his speeches.

Then he turns to me. "And finally, to my major fetish," he says to me. (Somehow, I know that "fetish" in this context means something like "stalker".)

[He says something derogatory about how often I check my watch]

[He mentions some of my other personal details]

Suddenly, the professor is replaced by Barack Obama (the American presidential candidate). I realize, though, that this man is not actually Barack Obama. In fact, it's a person who doesn't even look like him. Obama has been replaced by another politician in order to confuse people and make Obama look bad. I seem to be the only one who realizes this.

"Obama" is making speeches from a concrete bridge overlooking a river. He walks along the bridge followed by an enormous marathon-like crowd of people.

Suddenly, "Obama" is replaced by comedian Demetri Martin. He keeps walking while he tells jokes. Then, he passes a line on the bridge past which -- for some reason -- the fans cannot go. As the separation between them grows, the fans start to steel some of Martin's material.

Volcanic Ash and Volcanic Snow

I'm standing in the front hall of my apartment looking out over the parking lot. The front door -- suddenly replaced by a sliding-glass door -- is open, and bright specks of dust are blowing in. The windows are much larger than they are in real life.

I look out at the sky. Large, ominous thunderclouds are rolling in from the left. Suddenly, the clouds swell and start boiling. They turn into a volcanic pyroclastic cloud -- one of those deadly blasts of super-heated gas, ash, and rocks that sometimes streams down the side of a volcano during an eruption. I'm very worried about the oncoming cloud. I push the sliding-glass door shut, but I get the feeling that the blast will blow the windows out when it arrives. But, as it begins to envelop the houses on the far end of the parking lot, I realize that it's not going to be terribly powerful. Still, I worry that the heat might kill me. I lay down below the kitchen window. The blast hits silently.

I stand up. The dust is clearing. The parking lot is covered in thick drifts of iridescent gray ash that suddenly turns to snow. Suddenly, the scene is much more winter-like.

Then, I make the cloud return, and turns once again into a blast. It passes through the apartment complex again, shattering cars and throwing them about. I get down in front of the window again. This time, the blast is audible, but the windows are fine. But I want the windows to break, so I force another blast to pass over my apartment complex. This time, the windows shatter, but the flow is not as violent as I would have liked.

Lucid bits are in blue.
Semi-lucid bits are in green.

November 21st, 2007

Time is Like a Donut

I'm in a high-school class working on some project. We have to pick partners, and I pick a guy named Warren that I knew in high school. We're doing the work, but I feel like I've got more important things that I should be doing. I'm also hungry. I find the teacher and ask him if I can go get some water. He agrees, but I know that if I take too long, he'll be cross with me, since he's very strict about that sort of thing. I hurry out of the room, down a hallway, and down a flight of stairs to a donut shop on the first floor. My plan is to get a donut and eat it in the same amount of time it would take me to get a drink of water, thus fooling the teacher.

I step up to the counter and try to see what kind of donuts they have, but most of the trays are filled with either uncooked batter or some kind of syrupy slop that looks like apple pie filling. The lady behind the counter keeps getting in my way, too, so I can't see what few kinds of donuts they actually have. Eventually, I spot one, and ask for a plain chocolate donut. She gets it for me, and I tell her not to bother putting it in a box, a paper towel is all that I need. She seems very pleased with me for saying this. I pay her too much, and she keeps the change. Smiling at me, she hands me my donut (which doesn't have a hole, for some reason) as well as a glass of chocolate milk and a chocolate milkshake.

I take these and try to consume them before getting back to the classroom. I chug the milkshake, but it's very thick (and surprisingly, quite warm). On the stairs, I see someone who looks like the teacher coming, so I tilt my head back to drink from the milkshake again, hiding my face with the glass. Then, I get back to the second floor and head out onto a deck on the outside of the building. It overlooks a pine forest. I finally finish the milkshake and start eating the donut.

Just then, someone appears on the deck. Terrified, I pray that this is only a future version of me (?). That's exactly who it turns out to be. Future Me crosses the deck and sits down in front of me. As I'm eating, he starts talking to me.

"Time is like a donut," he explains, "Your ancestors are born at the tip here [he points to a spot on the edge of the donut], and as time passes, that side of the donut gets eaten away as your ancestors die. Then, sometimes, people get sick and die young, and a bite gets taken out of the middle." I look down at the donut, and a bite has been taken out of the middle. I begin imagining this. I start to think about how the donut represents the possible paths that each life can take, and the paths that fall into a hole in the donut are no longer possible. I imagine someone having cancer, and the hole in the donut gets larger and larger, until they have no possibilities left, and they die.

LUCID DREAMING GOALS

They say that goals are the best motivators, so I thought that listing my goals for all the forum to see might keep me encouraged. So, here they are, my current lucid goals. I'll be updating them whenever a new one comes to mind:

[ ] Have a (coherent) lucid dream.
[ ] Have a real conversation in a lucid dream.
[ ] Meet a DC. (I can't believe I haven't managed this yet)
[ ] Meet Stephen Hawking.
[ ] Find my Dream Guide (if I've got one).
[ ] Manifest my subconscious and ask it some questions.
[ ] Get in a fistfight with Denzel Washington...and win.
[ ] Fly.
[ ] Survive a global apocalypse...
[ ] ...and roam the post-apocalyptic Earth as a nomad.
[ ] Try lucid sex. (As a primate of the male persuasion, this one is pretty much obligatory).
[ ] Have a cinematic battle reminiscent of the Final Battle between Agent Smith and Neo at the end of the Matrix trilogy.
[ ] Have a conversation with a sentient computer.
[ ] Spend some time on a space station. (Maybe I could contrive to combine this goal with the above)
[ ] Drive the Autobahn.
[ ] Break the sound barrier. (Airplane optional)
[ ] Hold back the zombie invasion.
[ ] Hold back the alien invasion.
[ ] Meet an alien. (Okay, this one should probably be before the above...)
[ ] Talk mathematics with Paul Erdös.
[ ] Outwit a vastly superior opponent.
[ ] Pilot a tank.

Originally Posted by Asymptote

My plan is to get a donut and eat it in the same amount of time it would take me to get a drink of water, thus fooling the teacher.

You sneaky devil!

Time may very well be like a donut, or more specifically a torus.

(sorry about the image)

Oddly enough, I was dreaming about future selves last night as well.

Originally Posted by The Cusp

You sneaky devil!

Time may very well be like a donut, or more specifically a torus.

(sorry about the image)

Oddly enough, I was dreaming about future selves last night as well.

Heh...I'd love to be able to say my subconscious was thinking about high-minded physical theories of the universe, but I somehow doubt it...

Any lucid bits are in blue.
Any semi-lucid bits are in green.

November 25th, 2007
NOTE: I was quite tired when I had this dream, and I didn't sleep terribly long, so my memories of it are rather fragmented and nonsensical.

The Peanut Butter and Jelly King

A family is staying in a house.

One of the children has odd psychic-like powers of perception.

Things are happening. People are dying and lives are changing.

The psychic child is a prophet of sorts.

He is tested and questioned.

An outsider gains the same powers as the child, but doesn't know what they are, what to do with them, or how to describe what he's seeing.

A fearsome and powerful entity is menacing the child. He's called something like "Cap'n Crunch", "French Toast Crunch", or "The Peanut Butter and Jelly King."

Lucid bits are in blue.
Semi-lucid bits are in green.

November 26th, 2007

The Stove Caught Fire

I'm in my house. I turn on my stove, and the burner lights (which is odd, considering I now have an electric stove...). I leave it lit for a while, then turn it off. I turn my back for a moment, but when I look at the stove again, I see that the burner has lit itself. I turn the stove off, but sure enough, it's re-lit a moment later. I turn the knob to the "off" position as hard as I can, and the flame finally goes out.

As I watch the burner, though, I begin to realize that the self-lighting was part of a safety mechanism to keep unignited gas from leaking into the air. I begin to panic, because this means that there's some sort of gas leak. I try fiddling with the knob to get it to stop, but instead, a vent in the center of the stove catches fire. My panic worsens as the flames grow larger. I grab the fire extinguisher which sits in my kitchen, and get ready to use it. But it won't work, because that little safety pin is still stuck in the handle. I pull it out (it takes a few tries), then heft the heavy extinguisher, point the hose at the flames, and pull the handle.

But, instead of a spray of foam or that white fire-extinguisher gas, what comes out of the nozzle is water. It looks exactly like I'm spraying the stove with a garden hose. Then, I realize that, in order to get the right kind of spray, you have to pull the handle all the way. I do, but the spray is still water, but now it comes out as a fine mist. This seems to work, and the fire is extinguished. Now I begin to worry. I already told my father I need a new refrigerator. How will he react when I tell him I need a new stove, too?