LeaningKarst
Member

I am on an unspecified Greek island with people I know to be my classmates. We are outside, in a rocky area - the context is rather vague. We talk. There are also some third-person views of the landscape at some point, which prominently features a volcano.

My father has just invited me to go visit him on Corfu for the week, which is something out of the ordinary. My mother is apparently on a different island. It occurs to me that there’s something symbolic to this - to all of us being so far apart, on separate islands….

At some point, the volcano starts to show some alarming signs of activity. People close to it are running. I’m afraid for them, and hope they make it far away in time - they need to make it past the water separating them from the rest of the island before it gets too hot to pass. But I should be getting as far away as I can too, just in case.

The landscape has a number of small canyons threading through it - the only real paths we can take, which is definitely kind of unfortunate since that’s where the lava is bound to be channeled as well. I can already see it, not far behind a group of people running past where their path intersects with mine. For some reason, I’m sure it’ll only follow one path, so I wait at an intersection, ready to go down the path it doesn’t take.

The group approaches, now followed by a big wheel of flame - just a large circle made of fire, rolling along on its rim after them. But it doesn’t follow the group, doesn’t go down either one of the paths: it stays at the intersection where I am. Not only that: it actually seems to be shadowing my movements. Something clicks. This clearly isn’t the situation I had first thought it was. What now?

I do what feels right: I hook the wheel around my right leg and spin it around. It turns blue when I make contact with it, and as it spins faster, it contracts from being a bit larger than a hula hoop to being around the size of a tire. After some time, I switch it to my left leg and spin it the other direction, and finally, I set it back down. It stays blue and small, and sits there looking slightly wobbly and indistinct for a few seconds before dissipating.

My father has picked this moment to arrive. I start to tell him about what just happened, but he interrupts and doesn’t really give me a chance to talk. It occurs to me - maybe it would be better just not to mention the whole fire wheel thing. He probably wouldn’t get it anyway. I wonder what my classmates must be thinking now - there’s a whole group of them nearby, their attention still focused on me.

I kind of wish he’d just stop talking and at least let me take care of the burns, though. I was doing that with bare legs, and yeah, I can see marks there, even though the burns don’t look too serious, and I’m not feeling any pain from them.

A false awakening after that, in which I make notes about the dream and then various other things happen.

There were so many dreams after that, many of them full of conversations, and without awakenings in between - at least that I can remember - I just didn’t have time to write them down after having already woken up around 5 to record that one. But the last dream of the night involved being in (probably) a gym, where I was doing an exercise that involved jumping over a yoga mat and then jumping backwards to the starting position in a certain posture. NR came over and set a timer down on the floor set for half an hour - an analog device, kind of like a big egg timer. The implication is clear. I don’t think I’ll have trouble keeping this up or half an hour, but there is another problem: I seriously doubt that I’m going to be asleep for another half hour to keep doing it.

Actually, I only stayed asleep for another minute or so. You have no idea how much I’m looking forward to a time when I can devote more attention to dreaming and get back to moments like that actually resulting in full lucidity.

(Additional note: this was not my first volcano dream, but this one was almost certainly triggered by having seen video on the news of the port explosion in Iran the previous day, since that’s what my aunt had going on the TV in her hospital room when I went to visit.)

28.4.25

Together, Y and I emerge from what seems to be a metro station. We are in the Netherlands – apparently, because this is the only place where I am going to be able to have a fully fledged music career. I know this somehow. She seems to be the one taking the lead, though.

I’m going to enroll in a university here, and it seems as if the staircase leads directly into one of the buildings. I examine my surroundings – white tiled walls with mosaic patterns as the staircase ends, leading into a hallway. This building is where art classes are held. The two of us walk into a large studio classroom that’s filling up with students as if the class is about to begin. She takes a seat, and I take one next to her. After a few minutes, the professor begins speaking – English seems to be the language of instruction here – and students go to a series of large wooden bins along one wall, pulling out various kinds of bones. They take the bones back to the tables and begin to sketch them. I go over, grab what looks like it might be a vertebra, and also begin to draw.

Later, a lot of time seems to have passed – maybe a year. I’m checking an electronic billboard in a campus building.

13.4.25


The dream started as a sort of school/workplace dream, I think, but shifted at some point to a setting like an abandoned barn. I’m here with a man who seems familiar, as if maybe he’s based on people I actually know, and we’re talking. A black cat with a red collar that I recognize as L is also here: he comes over to sit next to me, and I pet him.

Planes are passing by overhead. I can see them through a hole in the roof – too close, it seems to me, and very loud. I don’t like it. I don’t like the look of the sky, either. It’s too dark for this time of day. A storm is brewing.

The wind picks up, and keeps picking up. I can feel the building beginning to be pulled up into the air. So it is here, about to upend my life the way it has so many others. I’m not afraid. I knew it would only be a matter of time. I just have to stay calm and focused.

I am up in the air now, which is full of debris spun by the winds in the strange light of the storm. As I’m blown by the winds, I let the world spin, as if I’m the point of stability, and it’s only everything else that’s moving around relative to me.

Unsurprisingly, this level of focus is pulling me into latent lucidity. I am flying now, making a beeline for the source of all this trouble. I don’t know how exactly to describe it – it must be a bit like it would be for a dog or something following a scent trail, but more abstract than that – some kind of recognizable trace left behind in the mindscape, becoming stronger as I approach.

I land in a neighborhood – not an especially nice one. Small, prefabricated houses jumbled too close together, a few completely inadequate attempts at greenery. Barely a step above a trailer park, really. It is now late out. I walk to the house the trail leads to, stepping straight through the door. I’ve never been here before, but I can see it all in my mind. The trace leads into a sort of narrow office past the kitchen – a closed-off, unpleasant, musty, crawly kind of mental signature that the whole place figuratively reeks of. It’s strongest around the computer, which has a big, boxy kind of monitor of a sort that probably went extinct years ago.

But in the kitchen, I run into A and C, an older couple I’ve known for a number of years. This is their house. Suddenly, it’s as if the scenario not only is different, but has been different the entire time. I have come here to warn them about what is going to happen. And so the question of what exactly would have happened to that computer will forever remain a mystery....

17.4.25

A classroom - another person and I are teachers there, but I’m aware the situation isn’t real without having identified it as a dream. Rather, I think of it as a story we’re making together. After some time eliciting answers from students on a certain topic, I think that we’ll need to pause and discuss making notes for each of them and their backstories as they become established.

There are some third-person scenes featuring the main character of possibly the same story. It’s like the beginning of a new plot arc. The dream shows an older mentor character with the two protagonists on a hill, a place they often go. Some kind of shadowy, inky blackness comes out of him and into them, and it’s shown heading from them onto a world map on a bulletin board. The blackness covers the entire map before gathering in a single spot that seems to be located approximately in the center of Texas. A pin moves to mark it, going all the way through the board. The protagonist girls are puzzled when they return and see it there. The board seems to be in one of their rooms.

1.3.25


I am in a large building with an industrial vibe, alone. I’m exploring this place in a deliberate way, almost as if it were a video game. There’s no sense of any immediate threat, or anybody or anything else around, but I’m still keeping a close eye on my surroundings.

At the end of a hallway, I find a sort of utility room behind a door, and a staircase to the right takes me upstairs, where there’s an electrical panel in a location directly above it. I examine the panel. I know I have to disarm the security system to get any further in, but it’s going to be tricky. Once I get started, I’ll only have a limited time to finish, and I’ll have to be going back and forth between here and the room downstairs. It’s already getting late, so I figure it'll be better to come back here tomorrow instead of trying to do it now.

5.3.25


A place similar to the one in yesterday’s dream - speaking with a man, something about him going to retrieve my body if I die there.

6.3.25


It is a foggy day, and I’m going to use it as an opportunity to sneak into the yard of the neighbor across the street and see what’s there. I’ve heard all kinds of weird rumors about it, and the area back there looks very interesting on my maps. (Why do I have maps, you might ask? That’s a very good question….)

It is a unique-to-dream setting, and I start by flying to the top of an extremely tall tree in the front yard. The branches are bare, as if it’s still early spring. I figure they’re less likely to see me if I enter like this, from above. I fly across and land in back of the house. From there, things get a little unclear - lots of conversations with strange beings that are back there. But there’s definitely something off about the whole place.

—

I’m on board a ship. I start out on the deck - I think there may also have been some parts before this - and go inside, where I almost immediately find the person I’m looking for, who seems to be loosely based on a musician I know but haven’t seen for more than a year now, J. We go back out, and I ask him about routes that we can take to our destination. We actually seem to be in a city waterway, so there are buildings and other ships visible around us.

J tells me about the first route, which seems to be through some kind of a narrow pass. He indicates the direction it’s in. Even before he starts describing the other, I know that’s the one we’ll be taking, even if it is almost certainly the more dangerous of the two. We’d have a tailwind all the way there - it’s too good to pass up.

14.3.25


I am in a grocery store - yet another one, with another unfamiliar layout. It isn’t all that familiar to me in the dream, either. I’m looking for some crumbled pecans for a recipe but am having trouble finding any. I check back again in the aisle that the entrance of the store led directly into, since that seems like the most likely place, but still no luck.

While this is going on, some employees of the store are trying to get everyone there to join them in singing sea shanties, apparently as some kind of obligatory fun somebody somewhere thought up. And they really seem to be enforcing participation, so I join in, but it’s distracting me from the pecan search, so I stop again to focus on that.

Eventually, I figure that they must just not have any pecans, so I get a bag of almonds instead, figuring those will also work.

21.3.25

Part of a longer dream. This last and most memorable part seems to have taken place in something like a campsite restroom, a long wooden building with an entrance on one end. Inside, I see NR standing by the row of sinks, washing his hands and clearly with his good cheer not the least bit dampened by having just reached into one of the toilets to retrieve somebody’s smartwatch. It’s not like it was even his - probably one of his students’. The man must really be some kind of goddamn saint or something.

“Weren’t you reaching into a toilet the last time I saw you too?” I ask. This memory was almost certainly from a “draft” of the same dream earlier in the night, which I get sometimes, only in that one, it was someone’s phone that had fallen in.

16.2.25


In a room reminiscent of the living area in the basement of childhood home #5. In the dream, it seems to be somebody else’s house. That person is telling me about the folklore surrounding creatures called pultecs that preside over memories, apparently. A long time ago, people would hollow out acorns and leave them out for the pultecs so that they could carry memories around in those and hopefully drop a few less of them than they would otherwise.

(Note: This may reflect concerns involving a relative dealing with some memory issues, or possibly a shift of focus on my part from just trying to incubate good, restful sleep back to dream recall, now that the former seems to be less of an issue. Additional note: Pultec is actually the name of a line of vintage EQs, and I have no idea why my dreaming mind decided to call the creatures that unless it was because the sound of the word just seemed right for the little guys.)

—

I’m in an arcade with an unfamiliar layout, at the Dance Dance Revolution machine. A couple people are there with me - it isn’t clear whether they’re people I know or who just happened to be there as well. I see on the menu that there’s some kind of story mode option, which I’ve never tried before, so I decide to give it a shot. Might make a nice warm-up. There’s a character selection screen, and then something like a one-player racing game begins. Stepping on the arrows moves the character in different directions, but there also seems to be some kind of motion tracking as well, since leaning to one side or the other also moves the character. No rhythm component, though.

I’m talking to the people there as I play, but returning my full attention to the screen, I notice the character isn’t moving. What happened? Did I run out of something I was supposed to be collecting and die? I open a menu which has two columns of entries giving various information, including one that confirms my suspicions. It says, Status: Died. Right below it is another that says, Reason: Bored.

I woke up right after that. I guess the game was just that boring….

17.2.25

A canyon-like setting, rocky with little vegetation. I’m seeing events play out in third person. A man called Xeno lives in a house there with his wife, and others live there as well. It seems as if they’re his students or something of the sort. He knows that the area is about to flood and that there aren’t enough people there to do the necessary work to keep the house safe, and so he raises a man from the dead to make a zombie to help. He talks with the man, who doesn’t look visibly dead and seems rather like a sleepwalker. At one point, the man says, “I like unimaginative nightmares.” I’m not sure if there was a context for this or not….

—

I’m standing in a long line outside of a restaurant, waiting to get in. For a long time, the line doesn’t move, and I’m just about ready to leave and go somewhere else, but then it does start moving - and pretty fast at that - and doesn’t stop, so that I’m inside just about as fast as I can walk.

Once inside, somebody I know calls me over to her table, and I sit down across from her. She indicates the table next to us, on the left - nobody is there now, but there are a couple shopping bags on the booth seating. She says that my Aunt O is sitting at that table, and they were talking earlier. She obviously has no idea that this is not something I’d be all that happy about. I wonder - should I warn her about some of the things she’s done to me and said about me to others? That doesn’t seem right, though - like I wouldn’t be giving my friend the chance to make her own first impression.

The dream changes to a view of a line drawing, kind of like a manga page but not really in the right kind of art style, showing a full-body picture of smiling woman. The title of the book was: Love Brings Us Home.


22.1.25

I’m in a school, waiting for a colleague to arrive. He’s supposed to be here subbing for the person I’d usually be working with. I’ve never met him before, and all I know about him is that his name is Rishab.

Through the end-of-school-day crowds, I see a dark-skinned young man wearing what I can tell even from a distance is one of the bright green company t-shirts. I wave at him, trying to get his attention. He sees and comes over to me, and I tell him to follow me to the room where we need to set up.

I realize that we’re going to go right past where my Aunt B is, so I stop to check on her. She’s been here for a while - I couldn’t get her to go lie down. I say something to her, but she just sits there staring and doesn’t answer. I am concerned - so is Rishab, and a couple others who are in the room.

1.2.25


Part of a longer dream. I’m in a school, walking students to the door to meet their parents alongside someone else. Mostly notable in that, at one point, the perspective switches to that other person, so I can briefly see myself from behind. I’m wearing black cotton trousers, a pink tank top, and a black cap - all modeled off of clothing I actually have, although I wouldn’t ordinarily be wearing it to work - and my hair is in a braid down my back. It switches back and stays that way for the rest of the dream, as far as I remember. A student’s mother is already there at the door waiting for her. One of them is called Britney, although I can’t remember now whether it was the mother or the student….

—

I’m in a grocery store, or something that’s supposed to be one. It really seems more like an outdoor market that just happens to be inside, if that makes sense. Various things happen which may or may not have been interesting, but at some point I become aware that I’m dreaming. Possibly before I get into a conversation with a man there, although I think this is one of those cases where the realization didn’t happen all at once.

He was the one who started the conversation with me, I’m pretty sure. A heavyset man, maybe in his 40s or 50s, with dark skin - so black it’s almost bluish. I don’t remember exactly what he was wearing - just an impression of bright colors and complexity.

He expresses concern about me. (This may have had some connection to the dream, but definitely had a foundation in waking life, as I’d probably spent most of the night trying to find a sleeping position that didn’t hurt to lie in. Kind of a long story, but it boils down to a bad reaction to a food additive combining with chronic back issues and developing into neck and shoulder pain. So no, it hasn’t been a good week.) I tell him it’s no big deal. I’m not going to let it get to me, and I know I’ll be feeling a lot better if I can just get out to dance this weekend. He seems skeptical that it could really be that significant, saying something about people just going out now and then for a night dancing to top-40 stuff. I reply that maybe that’s how it is some places, for some people - maybe even the way it is for most people, for all I know - but that’s a totally different world from the one I’m familiar with. And I have no idea what’s even in the top 40 now, and I bet that’s probably true for most people over 30. He laughs, as if to say that, yeah, I’ve got him there.

From there, the conversation turns to the Grammys, and in an oblique dream logic move to award shows in general, which I profess to be meaningless. He agrees overall, but adds that there are exceptions - he mentions actors who fit their roles so well that from that point on, people don’t think about them apart from the role. This strikes the by now definitely lucid me as having some special significance that I ought to make a point of remembering.

At some point we get up from where we’re sitting and part ways. I walk around, just looking at my surroundings, and I soon find myself in a relatively open area, where I spend a couple minutes just messing around, running and jumping higher and longer than a person could do outside of a dream. But then I decide I’d really rather go somewhere else and walk through a wall. Usually I just go straight through them, but this one turns out to have kind of a gooey texture, a little like raw bread dough, and so I have to push my way through.

I find myself in utter darkness on the other side. But I know what to do in a situation like this: just keep on going, and keep my other senses as engaged as possible. I walk. The air is a little cold here, and I feel cold water around my feet, which becomes deeper as I go. I sing the first thing that comes to mind, which happens to be:


Hello darkness, my old friend,
I’ve come to talk with you again.


Lyrics appear out of the darkness - not in space, but in my mind’s eye, which just happens to be indistinguishable from it right now. They appear one line at a time, spelled out in large letters in a vivid orange, and I treat them kind of as a karaoke prompt - although I only realized after waking up that what appeared weren’t the actual lyrics, and by then I could no longer remember anything specific about them. Waking up to a body in pain definitely does not help with dream recall.

Eventually, I can see my surroundings again. I’m now in a corridor with an industrial back area feel to it. No windows - only metal doors in metal walls. I walk along and push open a door that’s already ajar. The room inside has tables set up in a horseshoe shape like an office boardroom, although it looks like some kind of storage room otherwise, and isn’t quite big enough to fit the tables comfortably. A couple people are sitting there. One of them tells me that I’m not allowed in there. Fair enough - I continue down the hallway and try another door.

This one appears to be a classroom - there’s a long whiteboard along one wall with writing and drawings in black marker all over it, although, similar to the other room, it looks more like some kind of storage space that just happens to be set up as a classroom. Students are seated on the floor facing the board, and there are a number of free-standing shelves on the other side of the room, which is much larger than the first one. I notice a drawing on the board showing an octave’s worth of piano keys. Maybe this is some kind of music class - this could be interesting. I ask one of the men who seem to be teachers there if I can sit in on it, and he says yes, so I go in.

I take a closer look at the shelves, as it looks like they’re not quite ready to start the lesson just yet. It occurs to me that it could be a good idea to have something to make notes with, so I make a pencil materialize, but before I can do a notebook as well, the lecture begins, so I go over to where the students are to sit down. I wake up soon after that, though.

6.2.24