The dream: In the first dream, I remember being in a classroom with a dozen or so younger students, many of them my cousins and other relatives. After a while I realized that I was dreaming, so I used the opportunity to explain to the students in attendance that this was a dream and what lucid dreaming entailed. I proceeded to demonstrate by walking through a nearby wall and back, showing that waking rules could be bent or broken in the dream. After a while of this "training," we all departed the classroom and began to explore a large abandoned building, for what I don't recall. The dream ended soon after that.
In the second dream, I was staying the night in a toy store with a boy and girl in their late teens (sleeping bags and everything). We were staying in an aisle full of action figures, including Star Wars toys, etc. After a few minutes of dialogue that I don't quite remember, I pointed out that one of the action figures resembled the girl in an attempt at humor. She didn't see the resemblance; I looked down at the toy in my hand and realized that it was a chrome-colored robot that didn't look remotely human, let alone like the girl. My remedy for this solution was to bend the figure's arms slightly; I then showed the girl that now the figure resembled her. She realized that I was teasing her and laughed as she walked off. I woke up shortly thereafter.
My thoughts: I don't know why I find it necessary to explain lucid dreaming or the fact that we're all in a dream to constructs of my subconscious. It's like I think that my friends or family are sharing a communal dream with me, and I'm the only one who realizes it.
Don't know what to make of the second one, although I do often have dreams about sleeping in strange places such as stores.
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
August 30: Alaska!
The dream: A friend and I took a trip to Alaska. I'm not sure by what means we traveled there, but I remember stepping onto the shore and looking at the majestic mountains towering in the distance and the land all around covered by lush pinewood forests. We were there in a season where the sun never set; as is the way in dreams, this was highly exaggerated by the fact that throughout the dream, the sun only moved in a small circular pattern high in the sky, never veering far from a noonday position.
My friend and I made our way to where we were staying: a quaint bed and breakfast that was actually a houseboat - and I mean literally a house that was also a boat: constructed like a boxy, two-story cabin with windows, a porch, and slanted roof, the house was docked on the edge of a large lake. We entered the house, made introductions, and checked in.
Shortly after check-in, the houseboat disembarked and began cruising across the lake and then up a wide river at motorboat speeds. While we were racing up the river, my friend and I sat on the back porch and began fishing, our lines trailing out into the rapid wake of our large water vessel. Almost immediately we began catching fish, struggling to reel them in against not only their own fight but the strength of the water rapidly receding behind us as well.
After a while, the river passed through the middle of a small town, houses and roads lining either side of the river and family yards running right to the shore. My friend's fishing line snagged suddenly on something large and threatened to pull her in. Together we reeled in what turned out to be a child's Big Wheels tricycle that she had somehow caught from the yard of a nearby residence. I quickly released the plastic bike and tossed it back into the river, hoping we weren't so far upstream that the owners couldn't eventually find it.
After a while of traveling, I found myself suddenly no longer in the houseboat and on the water, but standing on a small hill far up from the river. I was looking about for pieces of paper that were scattered about what was essentially a landfill of tires and other large garbage. The last thing I remember is knowing that I was a middle-aged businessman looking for important documents that had been lost, while my family waited for me down the hill in a station wagon.
***
My thoughts: Um... I'm not sure what to say about this dream. The glaring discrepancies of Alaska's geography and basic Earth science notwithstanding... that was literally just a house -- not simply floating on the water, but cruising across it! And I'm no fishing expert, but I can't imagine that our method would work so well...
My friend and I made our way to where we were staying: a quaint bed and breakfast that was actually a houseboat - and I mean literally a house that was also a boat: constructed like a boxy, two-story cabin with windows, a porch, and slanted roof, the house was docked on the edge of a large lake. We entered the house, made introductions, and checked in.
Shortly after check-in, the houseboat disembarked and began cruising across the lake and then up a wide river at motorboat speeds. While we were racing up the river, my friend and I sat on the back porch and began fishing, our lines trailing out into the rapid wake of our large water vessel. Almost immediately we began catching fish, struggling to reel them in against not only their own fight but the strength of the water rapidly receding behind us as well.
After a while, the river passed through the middle of a small town, houses and roads lining either side of the river and family yards running right to the shore. My friend's fishing line snagged suddenly on something large and threatened to pull her in. Together we reeled in what turned out to be a child's Big Wheels tricycle that she had somehow caught from the yard of a nearby residence. I quickly released the plastic bike and tossed it back into the river, hoping we weren't so far upstream that the owners couldn't eventually find it.
After a while of traveling, I found myself suddenly no longer in the houseboat and on the water, but standing on a small hill far up from the river. I was looking about for pieces of paper that were scattered about what was essentially a landfill of tires and other large garbage. The last thing I remember is knowing that I was a middle-aged businessman looking for important documents that had been lost, while my family waited for me down the hill in a station wagon.
***
My thoughts: Um... I'm not sure what to say about this dream. The glaring discrepancies of Alaska's geography and basic Earth science notwithstanding... that was literally just a house -- not simply floating on the water, but cruising across it! And I'm no fishing expert, but I can't imagine that our method would work so well...
Monday, August 29, 2011
August 29: Lucid Dream Time Travel!
I had a few random dreams last night, including the first lucid one in a while. It's interesting that the day after I resume my dream journal, I go back to having more frequent lucid dreams.
The dream(s): The first dream I remember was rather short. I was playing some sort of space horror video game which was very similar to Dead Space, only this one was evidently so scary that I didn't want to finish it. As is often the case, it wasn't long until I was actually in some sort of space horror scenario as opposed to just seeing on a screen. I remember fending off waves of alien zombie things, their bodies mutating and swelling as they leaped out of dark corridors. And, as always in dreams where I shoot things, I remember feeling frustrated that my guns didn't seem to do much good against the creatures. After a while the dream changed.
In the next dream that I remember clearly enough, I was in the dorms of my university, talking with one of the International Peer Advisers for the same exchange program that I've been working with. Through dialogue I realized that I was somehow seven years in the past - the staff were the same for the most part, but they had no idea who I was. It wasn't long until I realized that I was dreaming, and that in my dream I had traveled back in time (for some reason). I spent the rest of the short lucid dream explaining to the IPA that this was all a dream, and that I would end up working for his program seven years later.
A while later I was aware of a new dream taking place. In this dream I was in a familiar church in my home town. After a while I began to wander around the halls and into various rooms as I usually do when I realize I'm dreaming and want to explore. Finding nothing of interest, I left the church and found my car in the parking lot. I drove off, intending to head to my old house. I remember something about Captain America, but the dream began to shift and change again.
In the final dream I was in an office building, taking a clerical test as part of a job interview process. Although in the waking world I've taken these tests before and excelled, in this dream I was struggling and making amateur mistakes, such as neglecting the use of the calculator in a timed number-crunching test and generally wasting time. After quite a while of my confused stalling and backtracking to previous problems, the supervisor came in to check and see what was taking so long. She told me there was no reason for it to take this long. She also pointed out that I had misplaced one of the nickels I was apparently supposed to use for a cash-counting test (which, up until this point of the dream, I wasn't aware of); I realized I would have to redo all of the previous arithmetic problems by adding 5 to them to account for the missing nickel. Right when I realized how that made no sense outside of the cash-counting problems, I woke up.
***
My thoughts: My "scary" dreams tend to be scarier than anything I experience in the waking world (or at least feel scarier at the time due to a heightened emotional state in the subconscious), so the first one isn't out of the ordinary. Also, whenever I watch a movie or play a game in a dream, it isn't long until I end up in said game or movie.
I may have mentioned this before, but in my dreams, guns are frustratingly worthless: firing them usually doesn't do anything to the intended target. This usually results in the realization that I'm dreaming, followed by a somewhat childish argument with my subconscious that I "shot him/her/it," and that the dream should therefore logically follow suit by at least removing the shot character from playing active roles if killing them is too much to ask. I also realize the potential for Freudians to have a field day with over-analyzing the import of impotent firearms in, as Nobokov put it, their "crankish quest for sexual symbols." Moving on....
Whenever I have dreams about time travel, I'm always going back in time to some fairly recent period and to a familiar place - never to the far-distant or exotic. Either my subconscious wants to keep it easy and familiar, or I feel the need to change something from my own recent past.
And why am I not surprised that a dream about taking a test or having a job interview goes horribly awry?
The dream(s): The first dream I remember was rather short. I was playing some sort of space horror video game which was very similar to Dead Space, only this one was evidently so scary that I didn't want to finish it. As is often the case, it wasn't long until I was actually in some sort of space horror scenario as opposed to just seeing on a screen. I remember fending off waves of alien zombie things, their bodies mutating and swelling as they leaped out of dark corridors. And, as always in dreams where I shoot things, I remember feeling frustrated that my guns didn't seem to do much good against the creatures. After a while the dream changed.
In the next dream that I remember clearly enough, I was in the dorms of my university, talking with one of the International Peer Advisers for the same exchange program that I've been working with. Through dialogue I realized that I was somehow seven years in the past - the staff were the same for the most part, but they had no idea who I was. It wasn't long until I realized that I was dreaming, and that in my dream I had traveled back in time (for some reason). I spent the rest of the short lucid dream explaining to the IPA that this was all a dream, and that I would end up working for his program seven years later.
A while later I was aware of a new dream taking place. In this dream I was in a familiar church in my home town. After a while I began to wander around the halls and into various rooms as I usually do when I realize I'm dreaming and want to explore. Finding nothing of interest, I left the church and found my car in the parking lot. I drove off, intending to head to my old house. I remember something about Captain America, but the dream began to shift and change again.
In the final dream I was in an office building, taking a clerical test as part of a job interview process. Although in the waking world I've taken these tests before and excelled, in this dream I was struggling and making amateur mistakes, such as neglecting the use of the calculator in a timed number-crunching test and generally wasting time. After quite a while of my confused stalling and backtracking to previous problems, the supervisor came in to check and see what was taking so long. She told me there was no reason for it to take this long. She also pointed out that I had misplaced one of the nickels I was apparently supposed to use for a cash-counting test (which, up until this point of the dream, I wasn't aware of); I realized I would have to redo all of the previous arithmetic problems by adding 5 to them to account for the missing nickel. Right when I realized how that made no sense outside of the cash-counting problems, I woke up.
***
My thoughts: My "scary" dreams tend to be scarier than anything I experience in the waking world (or at least feel scarier at the time due to a heightened emotional state in the subconscious), so the first one isn't out of the ordinary. Also, whenever I watch a movie or play a game in a dream, it isn't long until I end up in said game or movie.
I may have mentioned this before, but in my dreams, guns are frustratingly worthless: firing them usually doesn't do anything to the intended target. This usually results in the realization that I'm dreaming, followed by a somewhat childish argument with my subconscious that I "shot him/her/it," and that the dream should therefore logically follow suit by at least removing the shot character from playing active roles if killing them is too much to ask. I also realize the potential for Freudians to have a field day with over-analyzing the import of impotent firearms in, as Nobokov put it, their "crankish quest for sexual symbols." Moving on....
Whenever I have dreams about time travel, I'm always going back in time to some fairly recent period and to a familiar place - never to the far-distant or exotic. Either my subconscious wants to keep it easy and familiar, or I feel the need to change something from my own recent past.
And why am I not surprised that a dream about taking a test or having a job interview goes horribly awry?
Sunday, August 28, 2011
August 28: Short Military Dream
The dream: While I don't remember much of what came before this point, what I do remember started with me being in the military and part of some sort of training exercise. I had no idea where I was, why I was part of the military, or what exactly I was training for, but as is the case in dreams so often, I attempted to go with the flow. I was marching around when I was approached by a commanding officer. I didn't know who the officer was or even his rank, so I hesitated before addressing him and stumbled over my words. He berated me for my performance and then sent me off to another room for my training.
I entered a large indoor gym and approached a man who was handing out life vests; he instructed me to find one in my size. I was curious as to what my mission would entail if it required life vests, but I found one and put it on. After a while, I was approached by another commanding officer, who told me I would receive training on how to withhold information during interrogation. I was then escorted with other participants out of the gym. On our way, I was very quickly briefed on what we would be doing: we were to follow a script closely during a staged sequence, and if, during the sequence, we were chosen for the mock interrogation, we were to do our best not to reveal key information. I thought about how I would handle this scenario as we walked down a series of hallways.
We soon entered a small meeting room where many people were gathering around a large conference table. At the head of the table sat a large, gruesome-looking man; somehow I knew he was the actor portraying the leader of a group of thugs. For some reason the "boss" of the thugs had lost his nose; in its place was a fake nose made out of cake. As we were sitting, he started pulling pieces from his nose and eating them. Pacing about the room were other "thugs" playing their parts; meanwhile, the participants took their seats around the table.
As the act commenced, I realized that I didn't have a script. I looked nervously about at the other participants and tried simply to mimic their behaviors and responses. Soon, the act came to the point where the "thugs" began choosing participants to interrogate. First approached was a woman on the other side of the table from me. As they began, the woman immediately said something that was apparently so far from the script that everything had to stop, and some of the actors broke character to show her that, according to the script, she shouldn't say that. I thought it odd that we were being trained to withstand interrogation techniques, but forced to follow a script: how would that prove anything?
Eventually I was chosen to be interrogated, but I still didn't have a script. I asked the person sitting next to me if I could borrow his since he hadn't been chosen. He gave me his copy, and I hastily scanned through the script as I walked with the interrogator to a chair across the room. As I sat down, I realized that everyone was quiet, and all eyes were on me. I quickly looked down at the paper booklet in my hands, and I saw my name there, but nothing written for me to do or say. And this is when the dream ended completely and I woke up.
***
My thoughts: These dreams of being completely clueless as to where I am and what I'm doing are fairly common, though usually related to school (being in a class and having no idea what the subject is, etc). Other than that, it was a rather short dream, and I don't remember much before or after it.
I entered a large indoor gym and approached a man who was handing out life vests; he instructed me to find one in my size. I was curious as to what my mission would entail if it required life vests, but I found one and put it on. After a while, I was approached by another commanding officer, who told me I would receive training on how to withhold information during interrogation. I was then escorted with other participants out of the gym. On our way, I was very quickly briefed on what we would be doing: we were to follow a script closely during a staged sequence, and if, during the sequence, we were chosen for the mock interrogation, we were to do our best not to reveal key information. I thought about how I would handle this scenario as we walked down a series of hallways.
We soon entered a small meeting room where many people were gathering around a large conference table. At the head of the table sat a large, gruesome-looking man; somehow I knew he was the actor portraying the leader of a group of thugs. For some reason the "boss" of the thugs had lost his nose; in its place was a fake nose made out of cake. As we were sitting, he started pulling pieces from his nose and eating them. Pacing about the room were other "thugs" playing their parts; meanwhile, the participants took their seats around the table.
As the act commenced, I realized that I didn't have a script. I looked nervously about at the other participants and tried simply to mimic their behaviors and responses. Soon, the act came to the point where the "thugs" began choosing participants to interrogate. First approached was a woman on the other side of the table from me. As they began, the woman immediately said something that was apparently so far from the script that everything had to stop, and some of the actors broke character to show her that, according to the script, she shouldn't say that. I thought it odd that we were being trained to withstand interrogation techniques, but forced to follow a script: how would that prove anything?
Eventually I was chosen to be interrogated, but I still didn't have a script. I asked the person sitting next to me if I could borrow his since he hadn't been chosen. He gave me his copy, and I hastily scanned through the script as I walked with the interrogator to a chair across the room. As I sat down, I realized that everyone was quiet, and all eyes were on me. I quickly looked down at the paper booklet in my hands, and I saw my name there, but nothing written for me to do or say. And this is when the dream ended completely and I woke up.
***
My thoughts: These dreams of being completely clueless as to where I am and what I'm doing are fairly common, though usually related to school (being in a class and having no idea what the subject is, etc). Other than that, it was a rather short dream, and I don't remember much before or after it.
Saturday, August 27, 2011
August 27: Persistant Scammers and the Big Bang
I've resumed keeping a dream journal after a two-year hiatus. Let's see how long I keep at it this time....
The dream: At the beginning of this dream I was working in an arcade, helping kids turn in tickets for prizes and keeping an eye on the games and patrons. After a while, a woman and her teenage daughter approached me. The girl was participating in a fund raiser and trying to raise money by selling flowers; the person who purchased a flower would get to go on a date with the girl. I assume the mother was there as a chaperone and officiator of the whole process. It seemed strange, so I asked a series of questions to figure out what was really going on.
Ultimately, I uncovered that they were using the information they gathered to sign the unwitting participants up for some sort of contract, which required the dupes to pay a significant amount of money every month (for what I’m not sure); the mother and daughter were at the mall, targeting single males in the hopes of swaying them with the hope of a date. Strangely enough, even though I uncovered their scam and avoided it, the two acted as if they had duped me already and were laughing and mocking me as if I were a desperate chump who fell for their ruse. It was frustrating, but the dream soon changed.
The dream: At the beginning of this dream I was working in an arcade, helping kids turn in tickets for prizes and keeping an eye on the games and patrons. After a while, a woman and her teenage daughter approached me. The girl was participating in a fund raiser and trying to raise money by selling flowers; the person who purchased a flower would get to go on a date with the girl. I assume the mother was there as a chaperone and officiator of the whole process. It seemed strange, so I asked a series of questions to figure out what was really going on.
Ultimately, I uncovered that they were using the information they gathered to sign the unwitting participants up for some sort of contract, which required the dupes to pay a significant amount of money every month (for what I’m not sure); the mother and daughter were at the mall, targeting single males in the hopes of swaying them with the hope of a date. Strangely enough, even though I uncovered their scam and avoided it, the two acted as if they had duped me already and were laughing and mocking me as if I were a desperate chump who fell for their ruse. It was frustrating, but the dream soon changed.
Next, I was at a zoo with a group of friends. It was a strange place where the animals were all free to roam about in one giant building as opposed to individual pens or fenced-off areas. Patrons boarded a small train that ran leisurely along a track through the various zones in the zoo. We rode by a large group of apes standing dangerously close to the tracks, and later through a bird area, where a duck jumped into my car and settled on my lap. At the end of the train ride, I noticed the same girl and mother duo from earlier in the dream, still pointing and laughing. I angrily approached the girl and informed her that I hadn’t fallen for her scam, and began arguing with her. Eventually she realized this, and responded with hostility as opposed to derision. After the brief argument, I left.
The dream changed again, and I was getting ready for bed in a large abandoned dining hall in some unknown building. The room was filthy and infested with rodents: underneath my blanket I found a dead mouse. I realized I wouldn’t be able to sleep here, so I left.
After a while, I again ran into the girl in the hallway of an unknown residence. Unlike before, she seemed now to be at odds with her mother. Apparently our argument made her realize that her mother’s plan wasn’t a good one, and now she wanted out. She befriended me, and we ventured off together.
At some point in the dream we stumbled upon a strange device. Apparently it was a recording that an advanced alien race had made that, when activated, flooded the user’s mind with images of the history of the universe as seen from this civilization, from the big bang to the end of their race. We watched, entranced, the creation of the universe, the expansion of countless galaxies, and the rise and fall of this alien race as if watching the seasons of their civilization from spring to winter. By the end of the overwhelming stimuli, having all of the intense information compressed and distilled into such a short burst, we were emotionally exhausted, left incapable of anything but tears for the loss.
The dream changed again, and either I was watching some sort of new Star Wars movie or I was in it: I saw Han Solo, Chewbacca, and some unknown Wookie who was fixing some sort of machine.
After the short Star Wars tangent, I was back with the girl from earlier; she was telling me about all of the dresses she owned and how they were great because they allowed her to holster a variety of weapons at her hip. This is about where I woke up.
****
My thoughts: Well, the girl and her mother were rather persistent characters, appearing in almost every facet of this strange hodgepodge of dreams. I guess they represent my distrust of people and my paranoia about being taken advantage of or scammed. Other than that, it was an extremely long dream - or rather, a series of dreams wherein the beginnings and endings fuzed with those before and after.
The scene with the alien devise was so intense in my dream. I remember seeing things that would be impossible to see; it was interesting how my subconscious portrayed the Big Bang, etc. It really felt overstimulating.
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