The Kestrel's Dreams

August 26, 2014

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I was with my parents at a fancy restaurant, and we were eating the appetizer course. But there was a very long wait until the main course, and so I left the restaurant for a bit to walk around the town. The restaurant was underground, sort of. I think it may have been in one of the malls I've dreamt about before. I went down a few streets and came up to a fairly steep hill lined with houses. I was walking along a street that ran along the hill, and saw one of my cohortmates. She was looking to buy one of the houses on that street, and offered to show it to me. I readily agreed!

She took me to a curious house. It was maybe five floors tall, but fairly small ground-area-wise. Each floor had maybe two total small rooms?

As she was taking me through the house (I think we were on the 3rd or 4th floor) I thought, Wow, this house would be PERFECT for parties...! There was a room with a sign on the door: "Drunk Room." I opened the door and the whole room was covered in beds and mattresses. Like every inch of floor space had a bad on it. The window was barred shut so nobody could accidentally fall out, and there were no sharp objects or anything in the room, and a trash can for puking by each bed.

My friend told me there was an elevator to the roof from the top floor bathroom, and I was so excited to try using it. I got to the top floor bathroom, which was really large but also so damn compact in a way. Now that I think about it, the whole top floor of the building reminds me a lot of the suite Zukin lived in while we were in Germany... The bathroom had the same layout as that bathroom, but flipped, sorta. Anyways, the shower converted into an elevator, and I pushed a button, and it took me up. I stood on the roof, looking out over the city, when I heard my little brother calling my name from the road. He said it was time for the main course at dinner. I looked down at my phone, and realized I had missed two calls from my mom.

June 10, 2014

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After having mostly fragmented memories of dreams and waking at 5:30 am, I fell back asleep and had this dream:


I was visiting some other country with my family (immediate and most of the grandparents/aunts/cousins, as well as the Stanleys, who are the family of my mom's old high school friend). At first, we were in a city, wandering around and exploring new places. We were in a Hotel there, and my mom had come back with a bicycle she'd just bought. We all wondered how practical this was, since we were going to have to fly back, just like we'd had to fly there. We all got in multiple cars and headed for the house we were renting for the next week and a half of the trip; apparently Bob had built it.

I decided to do some exploring of the house. There was a main section of the house, with the living spaces, and three of the bedrooms, and then there was a separate space connected by a partially underground hallway (there were windows at the top of the walls, and these windows were just above ground level outside). The second space was a garden/master bedroom. There were flowers in pots everywhere and when I looked out the window, I saw that the whole top of that hallway was also planted. There were lots of windows, and the bed was in a section that was sunk down a few steps. I went outside the building and saw a door, but didn't think much of it, assuming it was just leading off from one of the bedrooms.

Then, mom got back. She'd decided to come on her bike, so it took her a lot longer to get there. Except she came on a motor scooter. We asked her why she had it, and she said that she'd traded the bike for the scooter. She had apparently also picked up groceries on the way there; they were in bags behind her.

I asked it I could ride the scooter (I only call it a scooter because I can't think of any better word... It was basically a box with wheels and no right-side wall, so that you could get in and out. I guess it was more of a cockpit?), and mom said sure, why not? She proceeded to show my family the snake she'd gotten on a whim at the grocery store.

So I get in through the absent right-hand wall, and sit/squat in this awkward little seat that was slanted forwards. The steering mechanism was a simple floppy paddle handle (like the locks on some bathroom stalls). At first, I thought that it was also the way to accelerate (kind of how in bumper cars, often times to reverse, you need to turn so far you go backwards), so I turned it really far and ended up just spinning really fast and getting dizzy (it spun without pressing the gas, apparently). I found the actual gas and break pedals and got on my way, taking it out for a spin.

I first went up the road to the left (as you face the house), which was up. The house was on a hill, so to the left it went uphill, and to the right it went downhill on a curve to the right. We were on a mountain or something, I think. I got bored going uphill, so I turned around (the turning was like in some video games, where when you rotate the handle to the left for the camera view, it turns right, and vise versa. I hate that, it confuses me so much) and went downhill. I passed the house and went along the curve to the right, and then it was straight and steep, and there was a jeep (this jeep, to be precise; I should clarify that I am in no way a conservative. One of my friends posted this on FB) coming at me really fast with their brights on even though the sun was just starting to set, and the road was narrow, so I pulled over to the right side, which was nearly a cliff, and waited for it to pass. I got freaked out by the jeep and turned back to go home.

When I got back, the snake my mom had bought with the groceries was chilling on the front porch, but then a large red snake with yellow spots outlined in black came out of the ground (like, it came out of the GROUND, not out of a hole in the ground) and attacked mom's snake. It was crazy. They were vicious and kept going in and out of the ground, and I was freaked out because I was almost positive this other snake was venomous and they kept coming up at random spots, so I hopped back inside where I would be safe. I told my mom, but she didn't seem too worried about her snake. "She's a tough cookie, that one," she said with a thumbs up.

I went off to find my brothers and ended up finding them in the main living room. Bob said he'd included a secret space when he built the house. I looked over and found a room I had missed before; it was long and narrow, with bunk beds built into the wall on the right-hand side. There were four bunks, then one twin, and then one queen/double. The last thing built into that wall was a sort of reading nook with a table and booth-benches around it. Bob and Erik said they would be sleeping in this room with the Stanley boys and our uncles.

On the left at the end of the room was an open space, and a door was at the very end. I opened it, and found out it was the door I'd seen earlier.

When I closed the door, everything went all Minecraft on me. I accidentally deleted a block from the wall, and I rotated through my inventory to replace it with a stone block, but then I realized the walls were made of leaf-blocks. I didn't have any of those in my inventory, so I left it as it was. I looked over to the area to the left and noticed something strange; it looked like there was something behind the leaf-blocks making up the wall, so I broke one of them with my sheers (so I could replace it if there wasn't actually anything there) and found a tunnel with a pitfall at the end. I looked down the hole, and found out there was water running below. A tetris-ish shaped lily-pad floated past, and I jumped down and landed on it.

I was in this GORGEOUS underground jungle-temple-like space. The river was artificial, it seemed, made out of cobblestone blocks, suspended a few blocks from the ground and winding and going up and down. There were vines hanging down over everything and dappled light coming in through little holes in the ground (the ceiling above me, since I was underground now). Roots intertwined and connected with the cobblestone river. It was at the same time minecraft blocky and real-world smooth. It was so surreal and so beautiful! There were lily-pads on the water, and chests full of treasure scattered throughout the river; some in the water, some above the water, some on the cobblestone at the edge of the water.

I let myself be carried by the river until it came into open daylight (the sun still had not set, but was very close to the horizon now) and found myself above the house. Instead of the road there had been before, it was all a river now. Wait a minute, this was a road before... Am I dreaming? Sure enough, for the first time ever, I did a reality check in my dream, and found I was dreaming. I was so excited that it started to destabilize, but I ran as fast as I could to the house to tell everyone we were in a dream.

I woke up before I could reach the house.
I gained lucidity (and remember it) for the first time!


Update: That day I spent way more time than I should have building the house in Minecraft. lol