false awakening

A fantastically strange dream I had this morning, 19 August 2012. We begin at a Level Two dream, a dream-within-a-dream.

The time is approximately 4:30 am. I have been unable to sleep all night, and we are all partying in the French room. I feel the beginning of a depressive episode, or more accurately, a disrupted-sleep cycle episode.

I talk to random people about even more random stuff. This one guy sits in the corner, brown hair and blue eyes, looking positively stoned. I try to talk to him by waving my T-shirt in front of his face. Nothing.

Finally, I get him to speak. He asks me a bunch of game show-style questions, and says a series of long words, with each one supposed to be longer than the last:

1. pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis
2. supercalifragilisticexpialidocious
3. antidisestablishmentarianism

Clearly, those are in the wrong order. He then asks me some questions about golf. I know nothing about golf - have never played.

I wave my shirt in front of his face again in the shape of an Ouroboros. Nothing.

I then sit down at a table with some classmates. A girl is reading this book about careers and life decisions, and a guy she's friends with is talking with us about it. She seems to have the wrong assessment of it, though, by giving a bunch of false analogies about how your decisions are like making a cake or something, about how important it is not to mix certain ingredients together. The basic premise is that once you set off on one path, you can't set off onto another. The guy said that this is not true.

With her permission, I begin to write down some of what she says in my all-purpose notebook, which becomes a fury of words and doodles. There is more than one path to reach any goal, I think.

Suddenly, the teacher, who reminds me of my Cantonese French teacher from grade seven, terminates the "Party" in a military-style manner. I pray--I know, that I won't be included in this disciplinary action. I go to the front of the room to dispose a water bottle into a recycling bin, as it has been done since the dawn of time. She yells and says it was the water SHE bought, but dumps it away anyway. I begin to wake up from this second dream.

An anti-depression group on Facebook sends me a huge message in which the entire group of more than 1,000 people are included. The leader of the group asks me to "get help" for my actions at the party. What?

It is OK to take a winding path.

LEVEL 1.5 DREAM - TIME SCALE: NONE.

A book lays out four points. Yes, this is the same book that the girl was reading. Point one: STDs are bad.

"Internships are also bad, and you'll be frustrated with them for the rest of your university career. Just kidding! Teen life after graduation isnt that bad".

It goes on a bit about the importance of sleep, or rather, why sleep is something to be taken advantage of even when you can get none of it...

LEVEL ONE DREAM - BEFORE THE INCEPTION

I go to bed at 11 pm, but I continue not sleeping. Was that anti-stigma depression group on Facebook involved to a certain extent? I draw conclusions and make recommendations about a certain university in the vicinity of Cambridge, Ontario, noting five: Waterloo, if not Waterloo then Wilfred Laurier; McMaster, Guelph and Western, maybe Queens...

I drift off to "sleep", which isn't really sleep at all.

One inception later...

LEVEL ONE DREAM - AFTER THE INCEPTION

It's almost 8 am, and the building I'm in looks like a mix of all the styles of buildings I'd stayed in during my visit to China three years ago. It has the appearance of a hotel, my bedroom to the left and back of a bathroom, the door near the front, my parents' room to my left.

My mom questions me about that online chat I had with three different guys that appeared on the room in different colours, red, green and blue, or maybe mauve. It's Monday. For some reason, the chat takes place at about the same time as that "Party" in the French room, and it continues until about 4 am, when I "fell asleep" but drifted into that other dimension.

Suddenly, I'm back in my normal house again, but there has been no discrepancy in surroundings. It's dark outside, despite the time of day. I check the weather forecast: the fourteen-day trend shows today below normal, about 9C (about 48F), and Tuesday is above normal. Wednesday is below normal, and Thursday's temperature is actually unknown after the thunderstorms, but it turns out to be about 12C (54F). Friday...snow?! At first, first glance, the first three days are unknown in temperature.

LEVEL 0.5 DREAM - TIME FRAME: NONE, NOWHERE, literally "no WHERE"

I'm tracking my depressive episodes on a spreadsheet, as the yellow lines jot up and down. I think about how my earliest episodes had negative healing energy, and how my late grandmother suffered from it. This time, I had better consult positive healing.

I'm reading a book, or maybe an Internet page similar to Dream Views, on a guide for lucid dreaming. The page is attached to the main server like a paper clip, like a yellow banana-type paper clip!

The columnist's name is Heather, or maybe Courtney, or maybe Stephanie. She comments on a method, and asks, "will your gin/ be like that"? I think that's a typographical error on my part, sorry, cheri-o.

Back to the method granted during the 1.5 dream level: does that mean they're saying you should avoid STDs as much as possible, and reach for your career goals as much as possible? In other words, are they telling you to be a virgin, and stay a virgin?

Which university should I pick?

Of course, I am advised, to take home foods, and not drugs! Consult my spiritual 'minister' instead, who is along for the journey this wjole time. I pray--I know--that your dream will awaken.

Before the military-style party-coup takes me away for the excecution, I announce to a TV-style audience interview that I discovered THIS part of the brain, as I point to the area above my ear, whisking my hands in a scalpel-like motion, the temporal lobe...

The manifestation of spiritual ecstasy...

We must always question reality, even when it seems we are not dreaming, in order to lucid dream. I try to do a reality check, but I am actually aware that I am NOT dreaming...

I awaken for real this time. It's 4:30 am, and I have a cold, which is not apparent in my dream.

Moribund. I see Orion rising in the east. It it a winter constellation. Soon it will be back to slow yet. There are two very bright "stars" in the sky, one atop Orion over eastern Taurus at about magnitude -1, which is Jupiter. The other is barely visible behind some tree, near Gemini, about magnitude -4, quite obviously Venus.

A'ho Calalami - a sacred chant (an even more sacred ritual by sacred beings on this sacred Earth). The ramble, the ramble, the ramble. Timetable of an elongated executive quasi-quarter century.

PART II

I think, in fact, that there is no recollection between my first falling asleep and my first memory of being in my dark bedroom. Maybe this is actually a WILD experience.

I check the time, and it appears to be consistent. Around 5 am. Yet, I look at it again, and it flashes all over the place, and I realize I don't need to do my second check, of reading what I had just written.

I am in a dark room. The mirrors scare me greatly, yet I look into them with interest. I realize that it is a dream and I begin to be lucid, and I walking into the mirror, apparently stuck there for just a moment, entangled, before I emerge into another universe...

LEVEL TWO DREAM

I walk out into the living room, trying to smash through the front windows. It stops me, yet darkness has turned to daylight, about 7:30 pm, near sunset. I walk into a mirror again, when it was dark, and I return to my bed, I return to the mirror...

I walk toward the front door, opening it. I see the reflection of a woman in the mirror, who looks like my mom's face merged into somebody else's. She apparently beckons me not to go outside, but I do so anyway, and walk out onto the street.

The theme of today's mission is nutshot.

I walk into my street, turning left, but 100 metres in, I stop. I decide that my mom was right after all, and I turn back. When I check the mirror again, there is no more reflection. The mirror no longer scares me. I am no longer afraid. I walk to my bedroom.

The sun has almost set now.

LEVEL THREE DREAM

Without any discrepancy, not even for a moment, I fall into another dream, perhaps through sleep, and awaken as I climb down a set of stairs. It does not scare me, as huge stairs did in the past.

I'm walking down into the depression group's cavern. There are literally hundreds--maybe thousands--of people here, each one applauding as I walk down. It resembles a set of circular stairs more than it does a Maya temple, but it is easily 500 metres en plus from top to bottom.

A frail-looking elderly woman in a wheelchair is pulled up as I step aside to let her pass. I walk to the right, and to my left stand thousands of people, each with a different face, applauding, just applauding.

Finally, I reach the bottom. The lights are on and it looks like one of my friends' basements, only MUCH larger, but just as low-hanging with the ceiling. I ask one person as soldiers stand by. "Why", I ask, are there more people down there?

"They're probably just reproducing. Ha, I'm kiddding. Say, Junior, know any grade 12s who can handle a rifle?"

This is a real program. In room 1, I find strangers talking.

I then step into Room 2. Here are four people I recognize sitting on a sofa, along with more people I recognize sitting all around. This includes one guy who said I'd helped save him from a life of suicide.

I ask them where I might find the bathroom. I was also going to ask me whether they saw my crazy moves at that party in the French room, because at least one of them was here, but I didn't have the time, I needed to pee. They all point me to the girl's bathroom.

"What! Dude, that's the female bathroom!"

They all laugh.

You idiot. You know if you pee in a dream, you'll wake up and actually have to pee in waking life. Have you lost your mind, or more accurately, your lucidity?

I then walk into room 1 again, speaking in an Indian accent, "do yoo know vherre dee bathroom is?"

Some guys are sitting there talking, "he didn't have a rifle". I shrug and then smirk incredulously. Where they looking for me?

I wake up. It is around 6:40 am, and I go to the bathroom. The golden sunlight pours in but I manage to drift back to sleep.

PART III

I'm in a backyard garden of some sort. Somebody's kid might get charged for violence, because the school's charter expressedly prohibits violence against another student's "dick", "nuts" or "ballsack".

I read a hithertofore-yet-unknown chapter of the Bible. It's called Hittites, and near the end, a voice that seems to be God asks a man to renounce everything he's known to date about religion. It has an Egyptian air to it. With much haste and hesitation, he does. "Let ye forget all you have learned, and seek God's salvation from here anew. Replace all your man's word with my word. A new pearl will appear in your forehead".

The Bible I'm reading has excluded a certain chapter beginnign with the letter L. It's certainly not Luciferians.

It then goes onto the New Testament. I begin to close the book.

Should I go to church today?

Now, I'm on a boat of some sort, without any discrepancy. The founder of a project, who is female, talks about the benefits of getting dolphins and humans to play together in this lake. First, she says, the dolphin feeding will attract phytoplankton, causing a bloom. This will then stretch out, and bring gold nanoparticles to the surface, as well as lower global carbon dioxide levels, in a method not yet unexplained. I thought they'd tried iron fertilization for algae blooms and that failed to lower carbon in the atmosphere by any significant amount?

This is the same method, she continued, of bringing gold to the face using algae, and creating a gold mask and a gold leaf that one will now wear on the face.

When I wake up again, it is 8:20 am.

This is again a daily entry of what I dreamt this morning, 13 August 2012.

Somehow, somewhere, Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead was very real. I sat observing the scene unfolding around me. I fully expected Howard Roark, the renegade architect, to rape Dominique Francon. It was expected. Really, it was just that.

I awaken sometime around 8:10 am. Falling back asleep for a brief period of only about 30 minutes.

A former friend of mine was angry with me for some reason. It seemed that he didn't want me talking about his ex-girlfriend.

I discover this apartment building on a quiet busy intersection, somehow reminiscent of basketball and laundry. I'm at the basement of what looks like my house, trying to connect to the Internet, and it was late morning.

Now I'm in my geography class again, expected to complete about three assignments, and after asking around apparently one of them was due yesterday. Gasp! The latest one, somehow, is due July 19th, which is apparently in the future.

I sit down to talk to this girl, who seemed to enjoy talking to me all year, and we were discussing something other than all these overburdening assignments.

Suddenly, something makes me realize this is all a dream. People around me continue to walk about, producing a strange and loud din.

I try to close my eyes and change the scenery. It doesn't work, as the talking is too loud. So I close my eyes even harder shut, and plug my ears in attempt to drown out all awareness of the surroundings.

Immediately, I'm rushed into this big portal, finding it hard to open my eyes again, not because it's too bright out here or anything. I "see", or visualize, swarms of a tunnel or whirlpool escorting me at a sudden speed.

What I see next disappoints me. I have awoken in my room, and it's morning.

Something is a bit strange here. The blinds are fully closed, but golden sunlight is pouring into the room, as though it's about 7 am or earlier. A plaque on my wall is directly ahead of me, instead of slightly to the right.

A book appears in my hand, and I'm turned to one of the first few pages, around page six, or maybe nine. It quotes page 1212 of the Qu'ran, possibly suras 7-12, emphasizing 8-9. It talks about relationships, but the large block of text near the bottom of the page on the right is rather condensed and uncited. It's highly reminiscent of something. I decide to record all this down before I forget.

I rush to the cupboard and shelf, eager to write things down on paper in my physical dream journal, under August 13. I know what date it is. Suddenly...

I wake up. My lucid dream had partially succeeded, only I had forgotten to do any reality checks and thus was fooled into thinking a dream was waking life. I rise to go to the bathroom, go to sleep without remembering much of a dream, and then wake up around 11 am, after which I go back to sleep, have a 10 minute dream, and then awaken again to begin my day.

This dream occurred just this morning. I'll only remember certain parts of it, and as for the other past dreams, I will post some of those shortly too.

We were on a trip to another school. Walking into the hallways, I thought about, or perhaps discussed, how science accepts some concepts while ignoring others. If religion wants to ignore gravity, thought someone, wouldn't that make their belief still true because they have faith?

Actually, I thought. We only perceive something as real if it is separate from the rest. What about the theory of changing gravitational constant over eons - also similar to the Variable Speed of Light Hypothesis - why does science ignore that? Why is evolution accepted but not the evolution of gravity? What about the reports of spiritual experiences? What was objective and what was qualia?

There was some kind of Super-ego theory, too.

Somewhere hours later, there was a thunderstorm. I woke up in my old bedroom, talking with my "biological mother", who supposedly was different from my mom in real life. It was 12:23 pm, time to get up.

We went on another tour of a school, sometime later in the day at 7:50 am, as the buses were leaving early. We walked inside with a bunch of high school students, me reflecting on the "dreams" I'd just had, writing them down in my all-purpose notebook.

A female friend of mine gave me a piece of cake on a plate. I tried cutting it a few times, but it was silicone, and seemed to disappear a little each time I cut it. I promised to get the cake repaired, but said, "this would be appetizing if it weren't silicone".

I woke up. It was 8:41 am. The previous day, I'd indeed talked to this female friend about shellac, and how it was secreted from the female lac bug, even in candy.

In this dream, I took note of what I remember each time I woke up. Thus it is far more detailed than most other dreams, even though the memories faded pretty quickly.

Watching a video, or maybe being part of one, on Youtube. This Asian girl with long hair was talking about "How not to get kicked in the balls", or rather WHY. However, at the 4 min 26 second mark, she says "how not to get kicked in the budget".

My old bedroom, chart paper at the side, window at the back, cupboard at the right. I see a white poodle trying to get into the video scene. It gets stopped every time, getting mad, but I grab it, apparently unafraid.

The dog tries to enter the scene from a pile of paper, first from the side, and then diagonally. Unsuccessful after the third or fourth time, it runs out the door. Somehow, this dog rather resembles a human character.

In fact, this Dog, or whatever it was, was to be charged with a repeated drunk driving offense. Later, it runs, or rides, up a sheet of white furled paper.

There's an announcement from the blue. Somebody has a love problem. No idea where those details went, but now, they're gone.

A random part of my journal: "consp. causes". No idea what it indicates.

Flashback: March 16, 2009. Security camera video shows terrorists plotting to bomb a concrete pillar, somewhere in southwestern central Ontario. Maybe it was near Alliston, we'll never know.

I'm sitting at the site of a swing, or some-other place. This sandfly, part wasp, part fly, tries to fly into my nose. I ward it off, but at the last minute, it stings me, there is a feeling of spray being injected into me...

I wake up, and go on Dream Views.com. Writing about my dreams, my thoughts are rather clear, the transitions vivid, the meaning intact. Yet soon I realize this is not to be.

Waking up for real this time, it's about 3:45 am. Take some notes, go right back to sleep.

I'm in a music room. Some girl takes my flute, initials AR, and throws it toward the percussion area. It's broken, and I say "FUCK". This flute cost $70, or maybe $430. I'm afraid to tell my dad, because he bought it for me.

Sometime later down the line, there's an engine. Perhaps I'm examining how it works - I don't know.

I'm reading this book about the physics of weather, a possible flashback to my poorly-done presentation about the physics of artificial trees that absorb carbon dioxide. As usual, the book goes into a computer model simulation.

This time, there's talk about global warming not being real. Of course, I strongly disagree with that position. I see Greenland melting, refreezing, melting, refreezing again, rising and sinking above and below the waves. There are vivid colours here: sky blue, navy blue, orange, red, green, tan, yellow-green, yellow with a tinge of green, and brown. Near the Gulf Stream area, enveloping both Greenland and Iceland, a supervolcano destroys the land there in a big oval fashion. Iceland is first to melt, its people unaware, or possibly no people there at all. It's a Supervolcano, much like the Siberian Traps during the Permian-Triassic extinction era.

I wake up. It's 6:45.

There's a vivid drawing of some sort, the details now gone. Examining currency, bills, coins and American $1 bills. They're everywhere.

At my house, time is frozen, and my mom is here. Suddenly, somebody knocks on the door, and gives her two white pills that smell very industrial. She takes them, and weird effects happen. We try to lower the dose, so that days two to five will require one pill a day only. No idea what it's for. She bikes outside, and I see some guy skateboarding outside my window, and they go down the street and it's a sunny day.

Talking to my teacher now about French. Apparently one of the old teachers came back, and nothing happens. Or rather, there is not much to talk about, or maybe, there is.

Waking up again, and it's 8:20.

At some kind of zoo, or maybe it's a video game facade. I'm on the side of the lizards, but there are also mammals, lions and penguins. For some reason, the lizards decide to hide out on the near-vertical wall, bathing, possibly reminiscent of the sphenodontians, the last remaining species being the tuatara of New Zealand. Am I responsible? 30-40 % go extinct in a few hours. A travesty.

Later, some kind of land mammal, forget the name. Every day, the lions jump over them, and a few of them get injured and die. We try closing the door, we try negotiating with Atlan, and nothing happens. Later, we storm the beach, and head outside. Success.

I'm here at a beach party, outside now, warm weather. I ask this girl whether she's still interested in going to prom with me in a few months. Yet I get completely tongue-tied, and she ditches me, preferring instead to go with somebody else. Maybe those promises weren't meant to be kept that long. For a year.

Waking up again, but forget to check the time. Guessing it's around 9:30.

Something happens prior, no recollection. An old acquaintance of mine is standing in front of me, making me read some stuff that I find objectionable. Yet I read another text, this time in faux Greek, meaning the letters are greek, but the words English. I read this with no difficulty. Yet I leave out a compound word. The text turns out then, to be about spicy food. Oh no!

Wake up for the final time now - it's 11:00 am. This dream had had at least twenty-five parts, none equal.

An unusual spattering of dreams from this morning.

Somebody was stepping on my crotch. It hurt.

Later, there was an Occupy protest in my town. Somewhere in the world, 4 more people were killed, and Wikipedia was going to mention the fact. This brought the worldwide toll from 96 to 100, quite remarkable considering this was supposed to be a revolution - but mostly, of the mind.

I'm suffering from sleep paralysis, unable to turn my head more than 10 degrees, or was it 25? I'm apparently facing up, grabbing my laptop and going on Twitter, tweeting about the fact I have "testicular" sleep paralysis. Well, my fingers still can move, but when I try to turn my head, I start shaking like a wildman.

Shaking. Just shaking.

Facade - a giant room, chandelier on the top, wooden with big gates at the sides. Some kind of medieval fortres or university.

I go on my computer again, this time on the website Weather Underground. I see that there are two tropical systems: one near Australia, and another over western Lake Michigan. How unusual for this time of year. The Great Lakes storm's name is Isabel, retired in 2003. Here it is a tropical storm, about to do an outside loop, and track into my area in four days. By then, it will have weakened.

That's odd - it actually is expected to rain Sunday.

Later, or possibly earlier. I'm reading some source material about Asperger's, and hypermasculine disorders. Where have I encountered this before?

I awake to the sound of my alarm.

I'm sitting in an airplane, heading to another country. We approach the airport, and there seem to be some clouds and trees. Suddenly, I feel the plane lurching downward, thinking we're going to crash. Yet the plane manages to escape within a few metres of the ground. We land slowly, and prepare to get out of the plane.

Flashback. Here, I'm drinking hawthorn nectar, but it's a facade.

Suddenly, I'm back home. It's as if I never boarded the plane.

Another one of my nine-day dreams. This particular one occurred much earlier in the morning than usual, perhaps 3 - 6 am.

I'm sitting down in a wooden room. Beside me is an eleven-year-old girl, who needs to learn math. I begin showing her some things I know about math, including graphs and equations.

Half an hour into the study session, I think to myself: maybe it isn't a good idea to be showing an 11-year-old quadratic and cubic functions. She probably doesn't even know what a function IS.

Surprisingly, she actually gets most of what I teach her. I sit around looking at a parabola superimposed on quadrant grids. Interesting.

A bit later, I or some other "thing", is drowning as it, or I, oscillate in a continuous sinusoidal pattern. The facade is a jungle. Below the water, I think something is not enough, and above the water, something else is not enough and another thing is too much. Why didn't I rescue them? Those disparate thoughts, coming straight out of nowhere.

Shortly afterward, there's this flat thing rising, sinking, rising again. I hear the sound of my alarm.

Just after 6 am now. I wake up, soon to get dressed, because actually I have a math exam today.

This dream appeared to be a compilation of random memories. Yet, it seemed to fit together well.

At a hotel, the scene appeared rather sepia. I was standing atop something, dropping aerodynamic paper helicopters as part of some experiement.

Later, I was applying bug spray to myself, at a cave park that I previously visited in Eastern Ontario. The spray then became lotion, and it smelled of DEET, mixed with mint, which someone noticed. Perhaps the smell was another facade.

Soon, the scene merged somehow smoothly so that I was at my computer screen, which had an odd colour, resembling jelly in another facade. I soon wake up to the sound of my 8:15 alarm.

I get up, and turn off the alarm, heading back to sleep on this early morning day. A notable lack of woman, my dream had.

After some dream, I wake up - this would have been a WILD if not for the dream in between. At my cupboard of computer stuff in my computer bedroom, the digital clock was on the left side, when it was usually on the right. My computer was on the right side rather than the left, and for some reason it had a computer tower at the corner instead of being a rull laptop. I press the button, and turn off the computer. The tables start shaking, but it doesn't seem to be an earthquake.

Suddenly, the digital clock slides off the cupboard, although there seem to be no papers nearby, and falls onto the table below - SPLAT. I then ask my dad what that shaking might be.

Waking up for real again, I notice the shaking comes from a washing machine downstairs. So then, I fall asleep.

Somehow, I am still at my computer, browsing Facebook. A close friend of mine uploaded a song onto my Wall, which had not yet become a Timeline, as requested by January 31. A blurry, beige, bluish sepia scene was the thumbnail music video.

This was apparently a heavy metal rock song, created by my friends' basement band a few days ago. Its title was "i'm not gay". The subtitle: Few talk about the title. Another friend who I recently added and was a guitarist, liked the video.

Surely there would be comments on a video of this sort on a site like youtube, but there were none confronting the title, only one congratulating the uploader. The green like bar reached 1 like on the video itself.

Another friend had posted a status, initials RM, in the ticker tape on the right-top of the screen. His profile picture was someone drumming, but it was actually a close-up of the socks on top of the bass kickpedal, which was weird. Even weirder, the status said: It always rains when I'm looking at the screen.

Even weirder still, I woke up. Looking outside, the roof was white, and it was snowing, not raining, which was a pleasant thing to see.

Logic does not begin or end with fag - logic begins at hello.

There was a previous dream before 8 am that I couldn't remember. Anyway, this one occurred between 9 and 11 am this morning.

I was sitting there, reading a book. Yet the history of this very book is something unusual, for someone I had met on Facebook had written its contents. I knew that for a fact, yet when I picked up this book, the hardcover with a beige background, large-letter font and a plastic jacket, nothing else about it seemed unusual.

Still can't remember whether I was just reading the book, or whether the events inside were actually happening to me, or whether in fact I was experiencing the book's contents while reading it. The only chapter title I remember is 13. Darriel. Why that name, I will never know. Yet in it, a mother had scribed in pen, telling her son, who was likely failing subjects in school, to "read this chapter". The chapter went on to discuss what written submissions had earned a failing mark, and whatnot. I, too, had written on the book's pages in pen, even though others would soon be reading the same book.

On chapter 19, there was a bit about camping, and sure enough, I was sitting under the stars, with the author of the book, at a campfire in the woodlands. Somehow, the author "knew" that because there were thunderstorms in the east, those would drift off and there would be no rain for 24 hours. Not sure if any of that were true. Just as I prepared to comment, I was whisked to a road in a nearby town...or maybe I just woke up, and was wondering about emailing a different author I knew. A flashback to a different forest, east of town, that I had visited before. Later, my father quipped that the author would have to be even stronger than him to accomplish some of the book's tasks, which was impossible.

From there, I was running south on a main street, very wide, and the sun was out, but no idea what season it was. I ran across intersections, bus stops and trees, seemingly never getting tired after about 10 kilometres. Running up to another bus stop advertisement, there was writing in a non-English language of a person who had an unusual expression on his face, reminding me of yet another person I'd met on Facebook. It roughly said, "every person, we serve equally, everyday". Maybe this was a utopian world that catered to disabilities. Just maybe. I kept running.

Waking up, the clouds were very bright, just after 11 am, and the Sun was about to shine through the blinds, signalling that I was to wake up, to do what I needed to do. In case you're wondering why none of my dreams are lucid, well, I hadn't had such a dream for years, except for that one in November. The lucid part of that dream lasted maybe three minutes, yet I had no control over any part of it, in stark contrast to the dreams I'd experienced before.

Dream: January 21, 2012

In the dream, this occurred between 1 am and 3 am. It was probably a bit later in waking life, though, as my dreams always occur in the morning hours.

It ended with sleep paralysis, or maybe it began.

Either way, this was my first episode of paralysis since November. It was night in my dream, morning in waking life, and I felt smothered by my sinus infection and the pillow. Lying down, as I was the previous time. Maybe this time I woke up, or went back to sleep, or woke up. I guess I will never know. Tried to move some of my appendages, but it was late.

At my house, my parents were preparing to leave. Yet I was out of bed, wide awake, past midnight. One of them would accompany the other to another country, as they loaded and packed up the car to go to Detroit (facade?). Something earlier happened too, but the details of that were now missing. I had a cell phone, and they had a cell phone.

About an hour passed, then half an hour. I took some baking soda, and did a line in the fridge, preserving something that would otherwise rot if the power went out. No idea why I did that, but it was suiting.

Picked up my cell phone, either to make a call or receieve one. My mom was on the phone, though it was difficult to hear, probably because of the great distance. The voice was becoming more static, and fading.

Just staring at the wall, none of it made any sense.

I looked at the time. 2:32, 2:34, 2:38. How much more time would pass, me sitting here, alone?

I knocked on my parents' door, as it was closed. They opened it, and were still inside the room. "But weren't you just driving to the airport?"

"No".

"But what about the cell phone?!"

That was weird. They were also disappointed about the baking soda, as I headed to bed, and they began to argue.

Outside, the sky had a purple glow, and the streetlights were orange. I had tried to close my eyes, run into the window, because I knew it was a dream at that point. Yet however close I was to pronouncing it a dream, I just couldn't convince myself, for I was unable to escape through that window. There was an extra tree in the street, too, a sure sign that it was a dream.

I ran again, and they just kept arguing. Waking up, they were still arguing about some of the same things as during my dream, as I drited in and out of sleep on a weekend morning.

I'll share the second part of my dream last night. This is my first journal.

I was on an expedition or something. I walk onto this marshy land, where these cliffs and exposed tree roots surround me. It's some form of tundra but there are tall pine trees everywhere. A few rivers beneath the cliffs. There are also these white bears foraging for food.

Suddenly, one of the white bears runs across a cliff gap, lurching directly at me. I close my eyes, and the bear attacks. I experience a false awakening-that's all I remember.