dream fragment

in the first dream i was sitting on a non-moving escalator in a mall. the floors and walls were white, there was a lot of brushed metal, and the mall seemed very spacious. as i sat on the escalator, i was eating bbq chicken wings. i said "i love to eat chicken wings and stare at people on the escalator". i thought this was the most hilarious thing ever.

then i was in a conference room. the colour scheme, again, was brushed metal and white. some college students were watching a powerpoint presentation and working on their laptops. very boring dream.

i woke up around 5 am and went back to sleep. i had this dream during that time:

i was in a large grocery store. i wanted to steal some pop but i kept seeing security guards walking around. at one point i wandered into another area of the store and began reciting a poem. i then listened to a recording of my own voice and was embarrassed by how awful it sounded. i returned to the area where i was before and i saw a crowd of people in the other aisle. there were some security guards in the group. i tried to figure out what was going on but i couldn't see anything.

in the first dream i was in a kind of forest area with a river (i think)? i was reading a poem that was accompanied by victorian-style engravings. i felt that this poem/drawing was incredibly significant. a sense of nostalgia pervaded this segment.

in the second dream i was on a beach bordered by a forest. it was sunny and bright. i was recording a wildlife video with my phone. i recall swimming in the water while two swans followed me. later i was editing the video to add a title and credits. the graphic design was kind of 70s-esque.

when i had finished recording my boyfriend showed up and i showed him the video. soon we were inside of the video. we were both swimming with the swans when my boyfriend noted two penguins in the water. we were surprised that there were penguins here. these penguins had a large yellow crest and a dolphin-like beak. we decided they were emperor penguins. my boyfriend wanted to go closer but i was afraid they would attack us. i had a vision of large, fanglike spines on their undersides, which were arranged in concentric circles. this prompted me to leave the water and watch them from the edge of the beach.

i had a dream early in the night but i don't remember it at all. i will edit this if i recall any details.

later i am in the dining room of the townhouse. various people are here. i have gotten 7 or 8 identical tattoos on my hip. they are tiny outlines of men. i colour them in with a pink marker to make it look like they're naked. a girl laughs and asks me if it's my halloween costume. suddenly i realize that it is halloween. i want candy but i do not have a costume so i go to my room and find a pair of bunny ears. i put them on and leave the house (it is night) but i only get a few steps before realizing i've forgotten to get something to hold the candy. i go back inside the house. there's a long segment here that i don't remember much of. all i remember is that i was carrying a purple nightgown with bleach stains and i saw an identical nightgown on a shelf, which creeped me out a little, and people were discussing times? i went upstairs to get a pillowcase but for some reason went into the bathroom instead. i heard someone talking about slenderman downstairs. then i entered my room. i grabbed a pillowcase and put on a glove shaped like a bunny's paw. the dream ends here.

around 9 am i had the following dream: i am visiting my mother in an unfamiliar house. we get into an argument, the details of which are a little personal and so won't be posted here. i end up screaming at her, throwing a stack of paper in her face and leaving.

edit: remembered another part of the last dream. this occurred prior to the argument. my father and i were in an apartment with white walls; a lot of stuff was made of wood. the room was filled with blue light. there were parts coming out of the walls that created steep hills and inclines and we were trying to climb on top of them. at the same time that these represented parts of the room they also represented a landscape and at times they would become much larger in scale and look, for lack of a better description, like real-life video game platforms; at one point there was an elaborate gothic church on top of one. yet they were still components of the apartment.

comment: these simultaneous perceptions feature commonly in my dreams and often make it difficult to write down an accurate description. the best way i can describe it is that they add layers of depth to the dream world.. that is to say a table in a dream is not just a table; it may occasionally be perceived as an object that is functionally or structurally related (eg a chair because it's used for dining, a dog because it has four legs and is brown) or, if not fully perceived this way these sorts of associations will persist at a subconscious level and colour the dream experience. the mechanism behind this, i think, is an intensification of associative thought. i have experienced similar perceptions in waking life w/ the use of marijuana.

decided to start keeping a dream journal again because my recall has been abysmal the past few months.

i do not recall much of the first dream. i remember that the scene was dark and there were several men around. at one point (i do not know if i was awake or still dreaming) i thought to myself that i should try to remember this dream.

later in the night i believe i had a false awakening. i dreamt that i was laying in my bed, and i decided to go back to sleep. my dream began on the bottom floor of a house. i was sort of aware that i was dreaming, and i decided to go up the stairs because it would turn this house into a cool house from one of my favourite dreams (which i had before i started keeping a journal on DV). the house was large and airy with many floors; the top floor was a white gazebo several hundred feet above the ground. i was sitting on a chair in the gazebo and gazing out at the sky. i was still faintly aware that i was dreaming. i tried to give myself a feeling of happiness/euphoria but it did not really work. i became aware of my real-life body and my dream imagery began to fade.

after that i slept fitfully. i would wake up once every half hour or so and return to sleep almost immediately. i had a dream about being at some kind of camp. there was a lot to this dream but i do not recall much. the part i remember took place in a large outdoor pool. it was sunny and warm outside. i asked a man what the temperature was and he said '42 degrees'. i decided to go for a swim but by the time i reached the pool it had been drained. it was full of wet leaves and detritus.

edit: remembered another part of the camp/pool dream. i was with some teenage girls who had some pills that they said were MDMA. most of the pills were pink tablets with imprints but two of them were large black "bars" with white text and hearts on them. i told them i had to analyze the pills before i took them. i recall that i found out the 'bars' were some kind of herbal supplement.

i had earned some "points" on a website which could be redeemed for real life goods. i went to a department store and found a pair of Yelle-themed footie pyjamas that i wanted (why?!?)

later i was at an outdoor pavilion with my boyfriend. the pavilion was apparently a kfc restaurant. we wanted to order sweet and sour chicken but then the guy showed us how they made the sweet and sour sauce: they mixed together ketchup and ranch dressing. we felt sick and ordered something else.

very mundane dreams

i am outside the mall with my boyfriend. the sky is overcast. later we are inside the mall, in a banana republic store. i want to buy some clothes for him but they are too expensive.

later i am tattooing a tall, thin japanese man with long hair. now that i think about it he kind of seems like a young version of merzbow? i am using a strange looking pen to tattoo him. i tattoo a strange grid pattern on his chest and some other small designs on his arms and torso. i keep asking him if he really wants this, if he thinks it looks ok, etc. his answers are generally affirmative. he is very hard to understand -- sounds more like someone with a severe speech impediment than a guy with an accent.

then the sprinklers in the "tattoo shop" go off. there is water everywhere. i leave.

outside the shop there are various fast food kiosks. one of them has a rack of 'sushi burritos' on the counter. i grab one and walk off without paying. it tastes quite savoury and delicious. someone behind me calls me a "fast food slut". i turn around and it is a guy and girl that i recognize to be my friend. we talk about various inconsequential things.

slept from about 9pm - 6:30 am, longer than usual

i have created a picture of a landscape. it is idyllic: soft rolling hills and cliffs covered in green grass and criscrossed by wide blue rivers. the sky is black. i decide to post it on my tumblr. someone on tumblr whom i admire is with me and she encourages me to submit it to a popular art tumblr (god, this dream is embarassing). the picture i have made merges with other similar pictures to form a vast landscape. suddenly i enter into the landscape. it's very beautiful. the green land slopes down to an open sea, with cliffs and high hills far behind and many small rivers and lakes. the area is populated with thousands of teenagers. one of them comes up to me and informs me that this is "teen world". the teens are now deciding on how to govern their country. a guy goes around asking different teens their opinion. they all give noncommittal answers: "uh, can't we just do regular stuff? lets just chill."

then i am in the townhouse kitchen. i open the fridge and there are many different types of popsicles: cyclones, chocolate ones, and creamsicles. i decide to eat a chocolate popsicle even though they are my least favourite popsicle in real life. it tastes delicious.

1am-6am

this dream takes place in the apartment. i have just bought a new pair of jeans. buying these jeans enters you into a contest: the contest details are written on a pink leather square on the back of the jeans. i show the jeans to my mother and she becomes incredibly angry, screaming at me that the jeans are awful and i am stupid for wasting my money on them. i try to reason with her but she continues to furiously berate me.

i later had a lucid dream in which i was able to exert control over the environment -- although i have lucid dreams quite regularly they are typically very short & i am not able to control anything... this dream was different. sadly, i don't recall it too well.
i was inside of a house. something about the environment tipped me off that it could be a dream, so i performed a reality check. it was successful, so i ran outside of the house (rubbing my hands to stabilize the dream -- i remember i looked at my hands once and they looked normal, which i've never experienced dream before) into an autumnal forest area with many elaborate fountains scattered around. the fountains were all turned off but i was able to will them to begin flowing. i felt an invigorating rush of power. this is the first time i've been able to change the environment in a LD and makes me optimistic for my dream control in the future.

7am-9:30 am

i am in an unfamiliar house with three teenage boys and an older woman. at one point i ask the woman what the boys think of me. she tells me i disgust them with my insecurity. i have a breakdown and begin crying. i think i might have to go to the mental hospital.

later i dream that i am playing sims 3. there is a new item, a box that your sim can crawl into. when you click on it there is an option to "enter the dread cave". i choose this option: my sim enters and does not come back. the scene then switches from observing a video game to being inside of a real life scene. the box has turned into a kennel and there is a small black dog here. i put the dog into the kennel but it escapes somehow. i talk with someone about this and we somehow make the dog want to be locked in the kennel.

in the first dream i am logging back into the neopets account i had when i was like, 8.

in the second dream i am taking a bath, but the bathroom and the adjacent hallway soon fill with several inches of water. on the floor of the hallway is writing in finnish.

fell asleep around 12, woke up around 3, went back to bed, finally woke up around 7

12am - 3am
a long and complicated dream about a tall girl with red hair. in the dream we were good friends. there was a very jovial atmosphere, unlike most of my dreams.

then a dream where i discussed lucid dreaming at length -- without actually becoming lucid.

3am-7am

i am at a strange clothes store with my boyfriend. the store mainly sells lolita dresses but contains a large variety of different clothing items as well as miscellaneous objects. at the far end of the room there is a passage to a second room which is brightly lit with many large windows. the store owners, a middle-aged asian woman and her teenage daughter, work here, making all the clothes from scratch. we talk to the two women for a while. there are many items of clothing hanging on racks here and i discover a finely crafted leather jacket with luxurious fur trim; i ask the younger woman how much it would cost and she tells me "about a month's salary". we leave this room and return to the main part of the store. there is a dress i would like to buy here, but it is too expensive. instead, my boyfriend and i decide to buy two dvds. these "dvds" come in vhs cases with elaborate box art; the one my boyfriend buys has art that's a slightly altered version of the dark side of the moon cover, and mine is a complex pattern of organic plantlike shapes. we understand that these movies are beautiful works of art and that watching them will change our lives. we trade the shop owners a large pyramidal prism for the dvds.

then i leave the store and enter into a shady urban area at night. i am now running away from three young white men who want to mug me. i see my dad's car parked on the side of the street: i get in and we drive away.

terrible recall tonight

1. i am working on a group project with unfamiliar people. we are in the auditorium of my elementary school. we are on laptops and we are running a program with a neon green and red on black colour scheme. there is some anxiety associated with this dream.

2. i am waiting for the bus in the snow with an unfamiliar girl. the atmosphere is very bleak.

3. i cannot remember anything about this dream except that i became lucid at one point! i simply realized that the circumstances of the situation were unrealistic and deduced that it was a dream. sadly my lucidity faded very quickly -- before i could do anything of interest.

4. false awakening. i am in bed in my room: very tired and disoriented. windows 7 error messages pop up and disappear constantly, obstructing my vision. i wonder if i am dreaming but decide that i am not. i am afraid that i am going insane.

i was watching a scene from a movie where a female version of batman was fighting a redheaded woman in a red superhero suit. the dream would alternate between movie scenes and visions of two iphones, one with a grey back and one with a red back, moving around and colliding with each other.

there was another dream where i found a beautiful fur-trimmed leather coat at a thrift store. a strange woman invited me to her house because she had clothes she wanted to give to me. the dream faded before anything else happened.

i am at the "doctor's office" for a checkup. the doctor's office is a large circular mezzanine located in a tall cylindrical structure. everything is made of brushed metal and creates a sort of sci-fi atmosphere. a red and yellow cylindrical tower rises from the centre of the structure. my father is here also. i am naked. the doctor says that i am very underweight and my father is greatly concerned by this. to demonstrate how thin i am the doctor picks me up and begins shaking me around.

then i am in a house. there is a dog here, a small cream-coloured husky. i understand that i will soon have to leave here forever. there is a feeling of great sadness.

next i am "downtown" with a chubby teenage girl. we wander into an alleyway and open a door to a dilapidated corridor. there are three doors here, each with windows; from what i can see through the windows, this appears to be some sort of child sex ring. the rooms house a number of female children, ages 8-12; they are all naked. the girl and i enter one of the rooms and we're relieved to discover (by looking at a framed poster on a wall) that in fact, this is not a child prostitution operation: the children are just working for a cereal company! this makes complete sense to us.

we enter another room. this room is white and contains several young girls who are all clothed in 50s style blue-white dresses. they have various deformities; it soon dawns on me that this is an institution for the mentally disabled. one of the girls tries to bite me. we leave.

next, my boyfriend and i are attending a music performance at a coffee shop. we arrive after the performance has finished, so we offer to put a tv show on to entertain the others. i want to put on a show about a frog without a tongue, but my boyfriend is intensely disgusted by this. i decide to put on a show about dolphins instead. however, all the dolphin shows i can find are crappy cgi videos; we want to look at real dolphins. the song vox humana - deerhunter is involved somehow. (absolutely amazing song, listen to it).

i am with my boyfriend and some other people in a deserted warehouse. the room is vast and light is streaming through windows far above us.
there are various items scattered around and we are browsing for things of interest. i find a strange object with rounded corners, shaped like a laptop, with a dim LED screen: i understand that this is a PDA from the late 90s. i find this interesting but my discovery is quickly overshadowed when my boyfriend finds an intact vintage arcade cabinet. he calls this a commodore 64 although it clearly is nothing of the sort.

the setting switches to a dark room. we are all seated around a table. the arcade cabinet has changed to a small laptop and i am still holding my laptop/pda thing. my boyfriend starts playing on the "commodore 64" and as usual my viewpoint switches so that i am in the game, observing. he is playing some kind of shitty mario romhack. the background is all black, the characters are neon and they appear to be wearing strange masks. then i begin playing a game on my laptop.
in this game i am an angel flying above an amusement park (very bright, green grass -- looks a lot like rollercoaster tycoon). there are brown platforms in the air. at first i can't figure out how to control my character properly: but then four white rings appear around my character signifying the vectors in which i can move, and i am then able to control it.

there is another dream that involved a country backyard and dogs? i do not remember anything else. i recall that at one point i approached lucidity, but i did not fully realize that i was dreaming.

first i am trying to sneak in to a children's arcade. i don't remember anything else about this dream.

then i am on a hilly cliff-edge with a woman who seems vaguely familiar. the ground is blanketed with snow. there are several white and orange cats roaming around. we realize the cats are coming from an area further ahead so we follow the path to there, but we find that it is blocked by thick shrubs. the woman remarks she hopes to get into that area someday. the ground slopes softly to the right and we walk down there, but as we continue down the slope we gain momentum and lose control. the woman slips and accidentally touches a snake. there are 3 snakes here: one with yellow and black stripes, which she touched; one tawny brown coloured; and one whose pattern i don't remember. the woman is afraid the snake is venomous and she wants to get medical attention. i follow her to a building that resembles my school; it is night now. i have brought the snake corpses with me. at some point they turn to globs of pink flesh. i enter the school and the woman is gone. there are two boys at the top of a stairway with a metal bucket. they instruct me to put the flesh in the bucket and i do so.

then i am outside the school again with a girl. we see a dead man's body and i remove another glob of flesh from it. this one is lighter pink and fat-streaked. as we reenter the school the girl remarks that i should hide it, so they don't know i'm adding human flesh to the bucket. i try to throw it into the bucket when the boys aren't looking, but i miss. they don't seem put off by the fact that it's human flesh, however.

i wake up with severe abdominal pain.
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short analysis:
in the dream i considered the snowy landscape to be part of the dominican republic. this explains the presence of snakes and is attributable to the fact that a friend who had visited gave me a ring from there the day previous.

the brown snake looked and moved exactly like a large snake i saw in a forest a year or so ago (i live in ontario-- generally the only snakes you encounter here are tiny green garter snakes - this one was brown, 5 or 6 inches around and quite long... unusual sight to see on a walk in the forest. it didn't scare me at all, in fact i was curious -- and in this dream i adopted the same attitude towards the snakes, although the woman was terrified).

the dead body and the globs of flesh didn't disturb me in the dream; it was all very matter-of-fact. i wonder, upon waking, if these images of bodily mutilation can be explained by the severe pain i was experiencing. although i did not feel any pain in the dream, the body-horror type images could have been a sort of alternate perception of it -- a symbol of pain, so to speak.