MrDoom's Tome of Doom

[MrDoom]

First, some general characteristics of my dreams. I rarely ever get "surreal" imagery in my dreams, i.e. flying cats, fire-breathing dogs, magical abilities, etc. Only once in a great while do I get something like flying (only once that I can remember), uuber-jumping, hovering (by great concentration), and other minor impossibilities in my dreams. Incongruous context (such as being back in high school even though I am one year graduated, for example), and sometimes strange machinery and gadgets, are more the norm. On occasion I will get a completely abstract dream, in which I do not appear to be myself, or anyone else for that matter; no "narrative" or comprehensible "plot" exists. Rather recently, for example, I had a dream completely about chess pieces moving around. All that existed was the board and pieces, my awareness could not be trained to anything else. I believe when I was 9 or 10 I had a similar "Game Boy" dream (I have a vague feeling the game was Tetris ). Somewhat more rare is a pseudo-anime dream, where reality itself takes on some anime tropes, or an anime character appears in the dream, in a visual state that reminds me of 3D cell-shaded animation. The moon is a recurring image in my dreams. I have seen the moon being blown up, used as a giant projection screen, distorted through peculiar atmospheric phenomena, fought over by space battle (with a human colony visible on its surface), near-instantly terraformed into an earth-like body a la Genesis Device, as well as colonized into a single planet-city similar to the Star Wars planet of Coruscant. These last three were actually all part of the same dream, and I actually got to go into the moon-city and work with a team of bounty hunters, after being turned into an 8-foot tall robot and shut down for a few hundred years, left on the moon as scrap. This was arguably my favorite and most vivid dream that I have had and remember so far. I had it not more than a couple of months ago, well before I started writing down my dreams. I shall relate it eventually. Now, to business. Dream commentary is marked in red. Lucidity, if it ever occurs, is marked in blue. May 8 2008 "Anthology II"* *I name any dream which has no central focus "Anthology". I am with my mother and brother in a restaurant of some sort. As with my real-life mother, my dream-mother is a petty, vain, argumentive bitch who will develop a feud with someone over whose shadow is larger. She begins to chide me about something which I do not remember. I do my best to ignore her, but eventually I begin to quarrel back in my usual manner: quietly, sequentially, allowing each point to flow from the previous and lead into the next. However, my mother's style of rhetoric is such that by the time one idea is completed and logic is set up to fall into place, she has (loudly, as if it makes her point more true) shifted the discussion to something completely unrelated, like a set of nested parentheses that open and never close. It is as if I am playing Chess with someone who thinks the game is Checkers. My brother seems to be passively supportive of her (Commentary: In real life my mother is a generic Protestant Christian of some sort, and my grandmother was a Jehova's Witness. My brother is also a JW. I myself am a card-carrying atheo-nihilist. The argument may have been over religion, literally or symbolically. As a rule I do not enter such discussions unless my manner of debating is respected and interruptions are not made.). Eventually I look around and the people around us are beginning to stare at the debacle. I have had enough of this pointless time-waste, so I get up and leave the resturant. Walking down the sidewalk (it is afternoon), I try to forget about the discussion and my mother altogether. Suddenly, I hear a voice in my head, addressing me: "Get in the car, now." This strikes me as odd (Commentary: This should have been a lucidity trigger. How unfortunate.), and I think for a moment trying to figure out what's going on and why there's a voice in my head, when a car pulls up aside the street. I decide against obeying the voice, peering at the person inside trying to figure out who it is. It is a girl from my old high school class, who belonged to a social circle I mostly kept away from, the preps and bimbos. She gets out of the car, and I walk over to her and say hello, just for the idle opportunity to catch up with someone a year after graduating from school. She returns the greeting in recognition, and we begin walking. I ask her about her college, and we talk for a bit. Eventually we reach a large house, and she opens the door, goes in, and closes it, cutting off the conversation mid-sentence. This strikes me as a little odd as well, and somewhat rude, to say the least. I knock on the door again. Another girl from my old class, also of the same group, answers; a third stands in the hallway behind, whom I had a mild dislike for. I begin to ask if I can come in, as I was talking to the first girl and she just walked inside without ending the conversation. Before my question is expressed, the third girl says "No", and the door is closed. I am irritated at being marginalized and having more time wasted. I walk away (Commentary: This could have been a lucid trigger as well, but I would not put it above such snobbish brats as I knew in school to act spontaneously rude.). Discontinuity. I eventually find myself in a courtyard of some kind of resort. There are tables and ornate folding chairs placed around the central patio. I look around and see the President of the United States, George W. Bush off a short distance, getting out of a limo. I wonder what's going on, when I notice an older man in a suit by a pillar a few feet from where I am standing. I approach him and ask him what's happening. He looks at me with a condescending scowl and tells me that I shouldn't be here, this is a formal occaision and I should not be seen. I tell him that I did not know that, and he responds again with the suggestion to hide. There will be a photo shoot soon, and I will ruin the picture if I am seen near the President. I try to move quickly, but I do not move the speed that my leg movements warrant. I duck behind a pair of pillars as a formal fanfare is played (the end of the Star Spangled Banner, I believe), and I see the flashes of cameras. Still behind the pillars, I hop down from a short wall that raises the patio, hoping that I did not ruin the photoshoot. A man and woman peer down over the wall and laugh, saying that I just barely got out of the photo. They show me a black-and-white lineart picture, and the barest sliver of my head is visible near where the wall drops off from view. Dream ends. "Communication" Somewhat fragmented. I am in a house which has a tall upper-story balcony. Across from the balcony a very long ways is another similar balcony. A high-school friend of mine is there. The dream mostly consists of us attempting to use binoculars and sign language to communicate. I think to use walkie talkies, morse code, and even semaphore (Commentary: I do not know semaphore in real life nor in the dream), but we use sign language instead (Commentary: I also do not understand sign language in real life. This dream is likely due to my interest in constructed languages and my recent aspirations to formally construct one.). "Tribal Grounds" Fragment. Discontinuity. I am in some sort of residence resembling my paternal grandparents' summer trailer up in Wisconsin, on an expansive sunlit field of grass with bizarre, dome-shaped huts in the distance. I have the binoculars from the previous dream with me. I look around at the huts through the binoculars, and spot a few people walking around. Discontinuity. "Nomic" I am at my paternal grandparents' house, their kitchen specifically, with my father and uncle. I hold in my hand a device resembling a fusion between a PDA and an electronic game. I understand the device to be used in the game of nomic (Commentary: my favorite game, even though a device such as that should not be possible due to nature of the game: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/nomic). I hear from someone whom I do not remember that amy uncle likes the game of Skip Bo but would like to modify the rules of the game. I take this as an opportunity to introduce nomic to him. We begin playing, adding a few nonsensical rules (entering into the device via keypad) which I do not clearly remember. I wake up eventually.

[MrDoom]

Well, I can't for the life of me remember what I dreamt last night (trying to LD by not trying, wrecks recall :s), so I may as well talk about my favorite dream that I ever had. "Moon World" The first thing I remember is being outside near my house with a bunch of people, in a late part of the day where the sun was still up (but setting) yet the moon was visible in the sky. A metallic grey patch was visible on the moon's lower section, snaking into the surrounding terrain, indicating human settlement. There was some kind of space battle going on, and I heard a lot of explosions. I remember feeling a bit of anxiety. Discontinuity. Eventually the space battle was resolved, and the moon somehow was terraformed instantly into an earth-like body. I believe that was the cause of the battle's resolution. I then found myself standing in some sort of command center, with the new moon world on either a display screen (meaning the command center was planetbound), or perhaps it was a window (placing the CC on a space-born vessel or orbital platform. There were a few uniformed officers standing around, so gaudy you'd think you were watching an episode of Gundam. I volunteered to help explore this new moon world. Next thing I know I'm seeing myself in third person on a medical platform that my subconscious ripped out of the movie "Akira", about to undergo some operation required for such an undertaking. Discontinuity. I "wake up" in some sort of storage room filled with other kinds of gadgets and gizmos. I say "other", because it seems I have been transformed into an 8-foot tall robotic hulk. I spontaneously realize that I had been betrayed for whatever reason by the paramilitary organization I was working with and left deactivated for centuries. I knew where I was was actually the moon world, now completely covered by one gigantic city. The architecture looks like a cross between Coruscant and Bespin from Star Wars. The sky is a beautiful pink-orange color. I think I remember seeing some vehicles buzzing about above and below (I never saw the ground of this city) I find some people near me, who seem to be the ones who have reactivated me, and they appear to be bounty hunters (besides Gundam, Cowboy Bebop infiltrated my dreams too, it seems :\ ). We walk around the city catching criminals with my newfound brute strength. It was awesome. And that was my favorite dream ever.

[MrDoom]

This entry is a bit late, but maybe it will help me LD or at least increase vividness or recall, hopefully. May 10 2009 "Strategy" I have two unidentifiable friends (a guy and a girl) over at my house (Commentary: the house appears nothing like where I really live.). We play some kind of complex board game involving a large, floor-spanning world map and lots of infantry and tank-shaped pieces. I do not remember the rules of the game, or if there even were any in particular. We spend quite a while playing. Eventually we stop and go down to the kitchen to find something to eat. Along the way one of my friends say to me from a ways that "some of the fish are dead". I go to see what he's talking about. Several aquariums in one room hold fish in them, quite peculiar-looking, because they have eyelids, and they're all lying on the bottoms of their aquariums, eyes closed. I tell my friend that they're simply asleep and tap on the glass to prove it, waking the fish up. We go into a kitchen and get some food. I eat some Honeycomb cereal (I think), I do not know what my friends get, if anything. Discontinuity. I do not remember if this was another dream fragment or a part of the same dream, but I remember seeing several "doppelgangers" of my cats, playing around with my actual cats. Dream ends. "Lunch" I am in the house of another friend of mine I knew from high school. We go to some sort of diner for lunch. I have a sandwich of some sort, I believe it was roast beef or ham with cheese. My friend's family eats with us. An older lady (my friend's grandmother? Aunt?) pokes fun of my long hair. I get somewhat irritated (Commentary: What people I have to put up with in my dreams! ). Dream ends. "Train" Somewhat fragmented. I am on a train, eating a kind of candy resembling Fruit Rollups or Fruit-By-the-Foot, but printed in small circles on a roll like candy dots. Eating the candy makes me feel the movement of the train more acutely. Dream ends.

[MrDoom]

May 11 2008 "Store" Fragment. Went to a mall with family members. I bought something, though I can't remember what (likely a computer game, as I remember being in that part of the store). May 12 2008 "Phonetic Game" Fragment. I was playing some kind of game that involved phonetics, doubtless from my fascination with developing Doomspeak.