Thread: [INTRO/DC-1] St. Jimmy's workbook

Dream journal for the night of August 18-19

Statements in [brackets] are my commentary for the dream.

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I'm at a toy store looking at soccer jerseys [I know soccer jerseys aren't sold at toy stores, but this didn't strike me as odd at the moment]. I pick up a jersey from my favorite team and begin examining it, thinking if I want to buy it or not. I turn it around and see that it has a number "47" on the back. This is not the number of my favorite player, he uses the number 8 [the number 8 is one of my suspected dream signs]. I decide to go to the counter and ask the person there if they have that jersey with an “8”.

When I approach the counter, I see it is being attended by a beautiful blonde girl about my age. I ask her about the jersey but now I am much more interested in her than the jersey. After asking her about the jersey [I can’t really remember what she said] I continue chatting with her about random stuff and she tells me it’s time for her break.

We walk outside of the store and sit on some benches [none of the scenery from inside or outside the store exists in real life, although the store does exist, only visually different]. We start talking and every moment I feel more and more mesmerized by this girl [I can’t remember her name, but she did tell it to me].

All of a sudden, several boys about our age as well, riding on bicycles, approach us and begin to insult and taunt us. I am not too prone to violence [nor am I in real life] so somehow I talk my way out of the conflict, and they leave. The girl tells me these boys like her but she won’t pay any attention to them, which causes them to harass her frequently. This upsets me, but we continue our talk. She tells me she’s going partying to a nightclub later and we agree to meet up again there.

The scene changes and I’m arriving to the club [I’m not sure if other things happened in between, I may have forgotten some parts]. I enter the club and before I can find the girl I see that the boys from earlier are at the club as well. So, [despite me being a non-violent person] I begin searching for my friends in order to round up enough people to approach and fight the boys.

While I’m searching, I run into the girl from the store. She’s dressed in a baby blue dress and she looks more beautiful than ever, but I’m on a mission now and I just greet her and leave her behind.

I find several of my friends and talk them into fighting with me. We all go together and approach the boys. After some arguments and pushing each other around we all decide that 1 vs 1 face-offs between us and them are the most convenient way to settle our dispute. It’s my turn first.

The people at the club clear a circle for us in the middle and I enter the circle to meet my opponent. He enters the circle as well, and he is dressed in a large foam suit shaped like a beer bottle [which didn’t strike me as odd at all]. I then fight him and I win the fight.

[The rest of this dream involves sexual content and may not be suitable for the younger members]

As I am leaving the fight, I run into M [a girl from real life with whom I’ve been intimate in several occasions, in real life; at this point I’ve completely forgotten about the girl from the store]. We greet each other and then sneak into the men’s room, into one of the stalls, and begin having sex.

Suddenly, I can see someone dressed in red [the color red is another suspected dream sign] is peaking through the slit between the walls of the bathroom stall. As I’m sitting on the toilet, I begin kicking the door of the stall and yelling for the intruder to GT*O, all the time continuing my “business” with M.

But instead of leaving, the intruder kicks open the stall. The intruder is a stunningly beautiful blonde, about 35 years old, dressed in a super-sexy red dress and holding a pistol. She aims the pistol at us and tells M to leave. M immediately gets up and runs away, leaving me pants down on the toilet. Then the lady in red pulls the trigger on her pistol, revealing it to be simply a cigarette lighter. I ask what is going on and she tells me she just wanted to get rid of M to be with me. She enters the stall and closes the door behind her while putting her “pistol” away into a small handbag. Her intentions become clear to me as she comes closer and mounts me. I have sex with her for what seems like a lengthy period of time.

[My alarm goes off and I hit snooze]

I’m in a room talking on the phone with a friend [this friend may or may not be one of the South Park characters, I’m not sure but I have that impression]. The room is large and the walls white. It’s empty except for a small wooden table in the middle and a rusty metal trapdoor leading to a trash duct.

[like this: ]

The trapdoor has a message on it that reads “eyes closed, go all the way” [or something along those lines]. I realize this door actually leads to the house of my friend who is on the phone with me. I hang up the call [I don’t really remember what we were saying]. I look over to the wooden table and there is a bottle of pills on it. I have to take these pills with me to my friend’s house. I grab the bottle and open the trapdoor. I’m not too sure about going in. I look inside the duct and it’s all dark and creepy. I feel afraid. I read the sign on the door and then think “OK, here goes”. I throw the bottle of pills into the duct and then jump into it myself. However, as I’m sliding down the duct I begin to freak out, thinking about what will happen if I get stuck in it. Does anyone know where I am? Will anyone come looking for me if I don’t come out? Does this place even exist? Then I think, screw this, this is a dream and I don’t need to be here if I don’t want to, and I vanish from the duct, although I can still see the empty duct I left behind.

[I wake up before the second alarm goes off.]
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This dream and the fragment coming after it is all I remember from the night.

Another relevant thing to mention about last night is that I have the habit of immediately writing in my DJ when I wake up from a dream in the middle of the night, so as to not forget it by morning. This habit allowed me to realize that I experienced a false awakening last night, because I have a clear memory of waking up from a dream, reaching for my DJ and writing notes about my dream. However, my DJ was empty in the morning.

In the dreams I described, I notice the following occurrences that I find relevant:

-The number “8” and the color red, two suspected dream signs, were both in the first dream. The suspicion grows larger every time!

-The first dream was full of very strong emotions. First off, there was immense sexual energy. Also, when I was at the club, I remember feeling truly angry at the boys I was about to fight. Also, when I was with the younger blonde, form the store, I felt like I had never wanted a girl like that before and I was very, very mesmerized by her beauty.

-The first dream had several odd things, including the guy in a foam beer costume and me starting a group fight, which is not something I would do in RL. I probably should have recognized this.

-In the second dream, I was clearly lucid or at least aware that I was dreaming. Then I was able to exercise some degree of control, i.e. vanishing myself from the scary trash duct. Too bad the event startled me enough to wake me.

-I also found it strange that, after I disappeared from the duct in the second dream, my “dream cam” stayed in the duct. That means I was viewing the dream from a third-person perspective, something I had never noticed before.

Class 1 assignment: Go through your dream journal and analyze where the content of your dreams comes from. Is it mostly day residue? Do you notice a lot of false memories or faulty logic in them?
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Even though my dreams are relatively realistic, I don't find them to be composed of much day residue. That is, I usually don't dream in fantasy settings, most of the settings in my dreams resemble real life. Nonetheless, I don't see a strong tendency in me towards dreaming about things that happen during the day, although the things I dream of seem quite mundane. In any case, I will pay more attention in future dreams to try to identify occurrences that might be day residue.

Faulty logic is a whole other story, in my case. It's always there. Even if my dreams are realistic, there always seem to be some details that are so obviously out of place that I can't believe I'm not noticing them. The same goes for false remembrances. For example, a common occurrence in my dreams is dreaming that I'm traveling to places but when I get there they are completely different from what they're like in real life. Of course, I only notice this once I'm awake and recalling, never in a dream.

Id is quite common in my dreams. I tend to act on impulses and I've noticed very strong emotions in my dreams.

Attention is also common. I tend to dream with a lot of detail and vividness. For example, one time I was dreaming of riding in a car down a mountain road. The mountains had snow on them and it was amazing how detailed the looked, with the sun reflecting off the snow and with pine trees on which I could distinguish the pine needles. The fact that I can remember all this stuff after I'm awake means that I was obviously paying attention in the dream.

I don't find schemas to appear very often in my dreams, or maybe I'm not identifying them properly yet.

I think there are schemas, but They're based on real life.

Keep it up, stjimmy!

Dry spell: August 19-24

Dream journal Aug 24-25

I'm at a restaurant eating with my mom and brother. People at tables around us have strange rasher all over their faces and forearms. My mom asks the waitress about this and she tells us that they are all suffering a disease from lack of sun. I look around and I see the sun pouring into the restaurant in "slices" through the closed shades of the restaurant's windows. I must go get the sun and bring it in here to help these people. I get up and start walking down the restaurant towards the window where the sine is shining through. On my way, I can see that the people dining at tables by the windows are not suffering from the strange disease. I brake into a run. Suddenly, my path is blocked by some railing. I jump over the railing without slowing down. But the jump has lasted more than usual, I'm flying, this must be a dream!

I wake up immediately.

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I arrive at the police station looking for C. He's been injured but is also in trouble with the police. I enter the building and wander around, looking for him. I find him in a hospital bed. The dream becomes fuzzy after that.

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I'm driving along in my car with two friends. We're on the way to the convenience store. Suddenly, I remember I haven't written down my last dream in my journal and I'm worried I'll forget it at any moment. I stop the car and produce my journal to take some quick notes in it. The dream is fuzzy after that, I don't remember what I wrote down in the journal.

Dream Journal Aug 25-26

I'm playing soccer with F, V, R, C and M. We are at a public park, surrounded by grass and trees. Can't remember much more.

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I'm at my school, in the office of my art teacher [neither the teacher nor the office we were in exist in RL, I've never taken art courses]. We are discussing about the art of Jacques Miller [I've no idea where I got the name from]. My teacher is French and I want to impress her, so I make an effort to pronounce Jacques' name correctly. She opens a book and shows me a picture of a painting of a woman in a blue dress holding a bouquet with red flowers [I can't remember what we said about it]. Another teacher walks in. He's holding a pair of spectacles and a photo camera, both made of solid gold. He wants the teacher's opinion on these items. The rest of the dream is too fuzzy to remember.

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I'm at the flea market looking for hair wax. Can't remember anything more.

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[My first lucid dream since joining!]

I was in my high school (I actually left high school years ago in RL) and I was in the principal’s office. She was explaining to me that I was not going to be graduating from high school because I had failed a course in my final semester. I could not believe that was happening and while I sat there in awe listening to the principal, realization started dawning on me. “Wait a minute, this isn’t possible, I don’t fail courses…” Then I looked around me and more realization came. “This doesn’t even look like my highschool, what the f*** is going on?” And then, BAM! It hit me. “I’m dreaming!”

I was so sure I didn’t even do RC’s. I just stood up and ran out of the principal’s office in ecstasy. I ran through the halls of the school, laughing and screaming, knocking people over, until I finally found an exit and ran onto the grounds. The first person I saw outside was ‘A’. ‘A’ was the typical geeky kid who nobody paid any attention to because he was always hidden in the library. In RL, this guy, several years later, is now a computer genius and works for Microsoft. When I saw ‘A’, he was walking along with his shoulders hung down and the usual droopy look on his face. I saw him and grabbed him by the shoulders, shaking him. “Hey! Cheer up! You’re going to end up working for Microsoft! You’re going to make a lot of money!” And he was like “Wait, what?” And I just said “Trust me, I know, by the year 2012 (yeah, I got the year wrong, oops) you’re going to be a Microsoft big shot, so cheer up!” And I left him there with a stunned look on his face and kept running to find my friends.

Once I did find them, the rumor apparently had started spreading, because I was met with “Dude, is it true? Are you really from the future?” And I actually told everyone I was from the future and they were all buying it and it was so funny. I kept going around the school greeting old friends until I found ‘R’, who confronted me for hooking up with his girlfriend (which, sadly, actually did happen back in high school, I’m not proud of it). At this point the dream started dissolving and for some reason I didn’t try to stop it, so I just woke up.

Commentary:

As I will comment below in my post with assignment 2, school is one of my dream signs. Nevertheless, I didn't catch it until I was stirred by the fact of having failed a course, which never happened to me in my entire school career. I think it was more the stress of hearing I wouldn't be able to go to collage that made something click in my mind.

This was, I think, a level 4 on Kelog's lucidity/control scale. I was able to exercise free will completely in this dream and I also remembered things from RL, such as A's job and the fact that the dream was set in a different time than reality. I suppose I should have attempted some technique to prolong the dream, but I think my subconscious didn't feel like dealing with R's confrontations. This, I think, was the only thing keeping this from being a level 5 lucid dream, because I may have decided to make R vanish or something instead of settling fro leaving the dream.

Also, this dream was clearly influenced by day residue, as I had exchanged facebook messages with A during the day and we talked about his new job at Microsoft.

Dream journal, Aug 26-27

I'm at school to take an exam with J. I have already passed this exam but I'm here to help J cheat and pass, I'm going to let him copy off my test, But, as we begin taking our seats, Ms. P [my math teacher from grade school] spots me. She says something like "Jimmy, do you think I was born yesterday? I know you too well for this. Come sit over here please" and she gestures for me to sit far away from J. I comply, and, since the test hasn't started, I excuse myself to go to the restroom. I signal for J to come along. The restroom is a fusion between a restroom and a convenience store. The urinals are along the isles of products. This doesn't seem strange to me [how could I have not caught this!!!!]. J and me come up with a method. Since it is a multiple choice test, J will tap on the desk with his pencil to signal the number of the question he needs the answer for and I will tap signaling the letter for the correct answer.

I wake up.

Assignment: Go through your dream journal and see if you can notice any reoccurring signs that are popping up. Make a list!

List of (confirmed and suspected) DS's:

The color red
The number 8
The herb (MJ)
My friends and family (does this count?)
Situations involving school
Strong sexual impulses
Writing in my DJ (mostly during false awakenings)
Cars
Traveling

Assignment: Review your current sleep schedule. Taking what you know about DILDs and WILDs, which technique would best work for you for inducing lucid dreams?

I usually have enough time to sleep 7-9 hours per day. Based on this, while WBTB is out of the question because I'm not willing to sacrifice significant amounts of sleep time, I think I could effectively try a combination of DILD and WILD each night. For DILD, in the time I sleep I think I have ample chances to catch myself dreaming once I successfully get the hang of recognizing DS's and doing RC's. For WILD, I have found that since I became actively interested in dreaming, I normally catch myself waking up naturally during the night several times, usually after a dream. This opens the potential for trying WILD during those occasions. I will also consider gaining some insight into DEILD once I become more advanced.

Assignment: Think of 2-3 goals that you would like to accomplish. They could be anything! If you need some inspiration, check out some tasks from the Task of the Month forum. How would you attempt each goal?

List of goals:
Fly
Wander along a beautiful scenery while "What a Wonderful World" sounds around me
Hook up with Megan Fox