Well, this morning was a weird one! As usual, I got up to take my roommate to work after 5-6 hours of sleep and went back to bed after 45-60 minutes of being awake. I had two dreams that I could recall (the melatonin is definitely helping my dream recall) with a very brief few minutes of awakeness between them, and they were very odd.

Dream #1: This involved me and my Dad (who may be a dreamsign, he lives in Florida but keeps popping up in my dreams lately) as witnesses to a trial, somewhere in the South (I live in Los Angeles). We were searching for the jury, which was meeting at a restaurant. Our trip utilized many modes of transportation - car, foot, and even a wheeled electric shoe I balanced on while propped up against my Dad as he walked (WTF?). While driving, I pulled a "Grand Theft Auto" move, driving the car off a flat surface (parking structure, I think) onto the lot below, light as a feather. I sideswiped a car (oops!) and kept going. The rest of this dream is hazy, but I remember being in a good mood.

Dream #2: Much more vivid (this was after the brief time of being awake after the first dream) and, in my opinion, far cooler dream. It also screamed "Hello! Abnormality here! Maybe this isn't real!" - which I somehow did not pick up on.

The dream began at a large house (reminded me somewhat of the scholarship house I lived in at FSU years ago) with me trying to flag down a ride to class (I am no longer in college, graduated in '97). A guy from work was also looking for a ride. An ex-friend of mine who I call 'Alcoholic Dave' in real life and his buddy offered me a ride. I rode shotgun.

On the way to school, I changed from my jeans into raver pants with horizontal 'road reflection'-style stripes on the thighs. I was changing in the front seat, and just managed to change fully by the time we got to my class. This is where it got really interesting...

My class was, apparently, a Japanese class of some kind. Not a language class, I guess, because the Saudi Arabian teacher (in stereotypical Bedouin dress) was busy teaching us Arabic using these incredibly cool wafer-thin computer screens that popped up in mid-air before my eyes. Our textbooks were a slew of translated manga (Japanese animated books, for those who don't know). There were a lot of cute girls who would giggle every time I made a 'happy noise' while reading something touching in the manga. At one point I looked up from my reading to see three little kids laughing as the class' teacher's aide tickled them.

At no point in these dreams did I realize I was dreaming, and I never did a RC, even with all these obvious signs that I was NOT in Kansas anymore.

I'm not discouraged, though - three LDs in a week (would have been four, had the alarm not woken me up yesterday as I was asking myself if I was dreaming) and improving dream recall are very good signs! - but a wacky morning nonetheless.

By the way, is it a good exercise to discover where elements of your dream came from? I can pretty much point out why I dreamed about 95% of the things I dreamed about in these two dreams (talking about my dad this morning, playing GTA:SA these past few days, reading about racism against Saudis yesterday, etc).