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.
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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?
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