non-lucid

A classroom - another person and I are teachers there, but I’m aware the situation isn’t real without having identified it as a dream. Rather, I think of it as a story we’re making together. After some time eliciting answers from students on a certain topic, I think that we’ll need to pause and discuss making notes for each of them and their backstories as they become established.

There are some third-person scenes featuring the main character of possibly the same story. It’s like the beginning of a new plot arc. The dream shows an older mentor character with the two protagonists on a hill, a place they often go. Some kind of shadowy, inky blackness comes out of him and into them, and it’s shown heading from them onto a world map on a bulletin board. The blackness covers the entire map before gathering in a single spot that seems to be located approximately in the center of Texas. A pin moves to mark it, going all the way through the board. The protagonist girls are puzzled when they return and see it there. The board seems to be in one of their rooms.

1.3.25


I am in a large building with an industrial vibe, alone. I’m exploring this place in a deliberate way, almost as if it were a video game. There’s no sense of any immediate threat, or anybody or anything else around, but I’m still keeping a close eye on my surroundings.

At the end of a hallway, I find a sort of utility room behind a door, and a staircase to the right takes me upstairs, where there’s an electrical panel in a location directly above it. I examine the panel. I know I have to disarm the security system to get any further in, but it’s going to be tricky. Once I get started, I’ll only have a limited time to finish, and I’ll have to be going back and forth between here and the room downstairs. It’s already getting late, so I figure it'll be better to come back here tomorrow instead of trying to do it now.

5.3.25


A place similar to the one in yesterday’s dream - speaking with a man, something about him going to retrieve my body if I die there.

6.3.25


It is a foggy day, and I’m going to use it as an opportunity to sneak into the yard of the neighbor across the street and see what’s there. I’ve heard all kinds of weird rumors about it, and the area back there looks very interesting on my maps. (Why do I have maps, you might ask? That’s a very good question….)

It is a unique-to-dream setting, and I start by flying to the top of an extremely tall tree in the front yard. The branches are bare, as if it’s still early spring. I figure they’re less likely to see me if I enter like this, from above. I fly across and land in back of the house. From there, things get a little unclear - lots of conversations with strange beings that are back there. But there’s definitely something off about the whole place.

—

I’m on board a ship. I start out on the deck - I think there may also have been some parts before this - and go inside, where I almost immediately find the person I’m looking for, who seems to be loosely based on a musician I know but haven’t seen for more than a year now, J. We go back out, and I ask him about routes that we can take to our destination. We actually seem to be in a city waterway, so there are buildings and other ships visible around us.

J tells me about the first route, which seems to be through some kind of a narrow pass. He indicates the direction it’s in. Even before he starts describing the other, I know that’s the one we’ll be taking, even if it is almost certainly the more dangerous of the two. We’d have a tailwind all the way there - it’s too good to pass up.

14.3.25


I am in a grocery store - yet another one, with another unfamiliar layout. It isn’t all that familiar to me in the dream, either. I’m looking for some crumbled pecans for a recipe but am having trouble finding any. I check back again in the aisle that the entrance of the store led directly into, since that seems like the most likely place, but still no luck.

While this is going on, some employees of the store are trying to get everyone there to join them in singing sea shanties, apparently as some kind of obligatory fun somebody somewhere thought up. And they really seem to be enforcing participation, so I join in, but it’s distracting me from the pecan search, so I stop again to focus on that.

Eventually, I figure that they must just not have any pecans, so I get a bag of almonds instead, figuring those will also work.

21.3.25

Part of a longer dream. This last and most memorable part seems to have taken place in something like a campsite restroom, a long wooden building with an entrance on one end. Inside, I see NR standing by the row of sinks, washing his hands and clearly with his good cheer not the least bit dampened by having just reached into one of the toilets to retrieve somebody’s smartwatch. It’s not like it was even his - probably one of his students’. The man must really be some kind of goddamn saint or something.

“Weren’t you reaching into a toilet the last time I saw you too?” I ask. This memory was almost certainly from a “draft” of the same dream earlier in the night, which I get sometimes, only in that one, it was someone’s phone that had fallen in.

16.2.25


In a room reminiscent of the living area in the basement of childhood home #5. In the dream, it seems to be somebody else’s house. That person is telling me about the folklore surrounding creatures called pultecs that preside over memories, apparently. A long time ago, people would hollow out acorns and leave them out for the pultecs so that they could carry memories around in those and hopefully drop a few less of them than they would otherwise.

(Note: This may reflect concerns involving a relative dealing with some memory issues, or possibly a shift of focus on my part from just trying to incubate good, restful sleep back to dream recall, now that the former seems to be less of an issue. Additional note: Pultec is actually the name of a line of vintage EQs, and I have no idea why my dreaming mind decided to call the creatures that unless it was because the sound of the word just seemed right for the little guys.)

—

I’m in an arcade with an unfamiliar layout, at the Dance Dance Revolution machine. A couple people are there with me - it isn’t clear whether they’re people I know or who just happened to be there as well. I see on the menu that there’s some kind of story mode option, which I’ve never tried before, so I decide to give it a shot. Might make a nice warm-up. There’s a character selection screen, and then something like a one-player racing game begins. Stepping on the arrows moves the character in different directions, but there also seems to be some kind of motion tracking as well, since leaning to one side or the other also moves the character. No rhythm component, though.

I’m talking to the people there as I play, but returning my full attention to the screen, I notice the character isn’t moving. What happened? Did I run out of something I was supposed to be collecting and die? I open a menu which has two columns of entries giving various information, including one that confirms my suspicions. It says, Status: Died. Right below it is another that says, Reason: Bored.

I woke up right after that. I guess the game was just that boring….

17.2.25

A canyon-like setting, rocky with little vegetation. I’m seeing events play out in third person. A man called Xeno lives in a house there with his wife, and others live there as well. It seems as if they’re his students or something of the sort. He knows that the area is about to flood and that there aren’t enough people there to do the necessary work to keep the house safe, and so he raises a man from the dead to make a zombie to help. He talks with the man, who doesn’t look visibly dead and seems rather like a sleepwalker. At one point, the man says, “I like unimaginative nightmares.” I’m not sure if there was a context for this or not….

—

I’m standing in a long line outside of a restaurant, waiting to get in. For a long time, the line doesn’t move, and I’m just about ready to leave and go somewhere else, but then it does start moving - and pretty fast at that - and doesn’t stop, so that I’m inside just about as fast as I can walk.

Once inside, somebody I know calls me over to her table, and I sit down across from her. She indicates the table next to us, on the left - nobody is there now, but there are a couple shopping bags on the booth seating. She says that my Aunt O is sitting at that table, and they were talking earlier. She obviously has no idea that this is not something I’d be all that happy about. I wonder - should I warn her about some of the things she’s done to me and said about me to others? That doesn’t seem right, though - like I wouldn’t be giving my friend the chance to make her own first impression.

The dream changes to a view of a line drawing, kind of like a manga page but not really in the right kind of art style, showing a full-body picture of smiling woman. The title of the book was: Love Brings Us Home.


22.1.25

I’m in a school, waiting for a colleague to arrive. He’s supposed to be here subbing for the person I’d usually be working with. I’ve never met him before, and all I know about him is that his name is Rishab.

Through the end-of-school-day crowds, I see a dark-skinned young man wearing what I can tell even from a distance is one of the bright green company t-shirts. I wave at him, trying to get his attention. He sees and comes over to me, and I tell him to follow me to the room where we need to set up.

I realize that we’re going to go right past where my Aunt B is, so I stop to check on her. She’s been here for a while - I couldn’t get her to go lie down. I say something to her, but she just sits there staring and doesn’t answer. I am concerned - so is Rishab, and a couple others who are in the room.

1.2.25


Part of a longer dream. I’m in a school, walking students to the door to meet their parents alongside someone else. Mostly notable in that, at one point, the perspective switches to that other person, so I can briefly see myself from behind. I’m wearing black cotton trousers, a pink tank top, and a black cap - all modeled off of clothing I actually have, although I wouldn’t ordinarily be wearing it to work - and my hair is in a braid down my back. It switches back and stays that way for the rest of the dream, as far as I remember. A student’s mother is already there at the door waiting for her. One of them is called Britney, although I can’t remember now whether it was the mother or the student….

—

I’m in a grocery store, or something that’s supposed to be one. It really seems more like an outdoor market that just happens to be inside, if that makes sense. Various things happen which may or may not have been interesting, but at some point I become aware that I’m dreaming. Possibly before I get into a conversation with a man there, although I think this is one of those cases where the realization didn’t happen all at once.

He was the one who started the conversation with me, I’m pretty sure. A heavyset man, maybe in his 40s or 50s, with dark skin - so black it’s almost bluish. I don’t remember exactly what he was wearing - just an impression of bright colors and complexity.

He expresses concern about me. (This may have had some connection to the dream, but definitely had a foundation in waking life, as I’d probably spent most of the night trying to find a sleeping position that didn’t hurt to lie in. Kind of a long story, but it boils down to a bad reaction to a food additive combining with chronic back issues and developing into neck and shoulder pain. So no, it hasn’t been a good week.) I tell him it’s no big deal. I’m not going to let it get to me, and I know I’ll be feeling a lot better if I can just get out to dance this weekend. He seems skeptical that it could really be that significant, saying something about people just going out now and then for a night dancing to top-40 stuff. I reply that maybe that’s how it is some places, for some people - maybe even the way it is for most people, for all I know - but that’s a totally different world from the one I’m familiar with. And I have no idea what’s even in the top 40 now, and I bet that’s probably true for most people over 30. He laughs, as if to say that, yeah, I’ve got him there.

From there, the conversation turns to the Grammys, and in an oblique dream logic move to award shows in general, which I profess to be meaningless. He agrees overall, but adds that there are exceptions - he mentions actors who fit their roles so well that from that point on, people don’t think about them apart from the role. This strikes the by now definitely lucid me as having some special significance that I ought to make a point of remembering.

At some point we get up from where we’re sitting and part ways. I walk around, just looking at my surroundings, and I soon find myself in a relatively open area, where I spend a couple minutes just messing around, running and jumping higher and longer than a person could do outside of a dream. But then I decide I’d really rather go somewhere else and walk through a wall. Usually I just go straight through them, but this one turns out to have kind of a gooey texture, a little like raw bread dough, and so I have to push my way through.

I find myself in utter darkness on the other side. But I know what to do in a situation like this: just keep on going, and keep my other senses as engaged as possible. I walk. The air is a little cold here, and I feel cold water around my feet, which becomes deeper as I go. I sing the first thing that comes to mind, which happens to be:


Hello darkness, my old friend,
I’ve come to talk with you again.


Lyrics appear out of the darkness - not in space, but in my mind’s eye, which just happens to be indistinguishable from it right now. They appear one line at a time, spelled out in large letters in a vivid orange, and I treat them kind of as a karaoke prompt - although I only realized after waking up that what appeared weren’t the actual lyrics, and by then I could no longer remember anything specific about them. Waking up to a body in pain definitely does not help with dream recall.

Eventually, I can see my surroundings again. I’m now in a corridor with an industrial back area feel to it. No windows - only metal doors in metal walls. I walk along and push open a door that’s already ajar. The room inside has tables set up in a horseshoe shape like an office boardroom, although it looks like some kind of storage room otherwise, and isn’t quite big enough to fit the tables comfortably. A couple people are sitting there. One of them tells me that I’m not allowed in there. Fair enough - I continue down the hallway and try another door.

This one appears to be a classroom - there’s a long whiteboard along one wall with writing and drawings in black marker all over it, although, similar to the other room, it looks more like some kind of storage space that just happens to be set up as a classroom. Students are seated on the floor facing the board, and there are a number of free-standing shelves on the other side of the room, which is much larger than the first one. I notice a drawing on the board showing an octave’s worth of piano keys. Maybe this is some kind of music class - this could be interesting. I ask one of the men who seem to be teachers there if I can sit in on it, and he says yes, so I go in.

I take a closer look at the shelves, as it looks like they’re not quite ready to start the lesson just yet. It occurs to me that it could be a good idea to have something to make notes with, so I make a pencil materialize, but before I can do a notebook as well, the lecture begins, so I go over to where the students are to sit down. I wake up soon after that, though.

6.2.24

I seem to be staying in an apartment, apparently some kind of temporary accommodation, with a woman and a third person I can remember even less clearly. Something strange is going on, but it isn’t clear what. At some point, we go out and are on a sidewalk going past a number of similar apartment-style buildings. But we’ve barely left when I realize that leaving was a bad idea - we’re playing into their hands. (Whose? Can’t remember now….) And it’s already too late. Two figures are rapidly approaching me. One is an enormous, threatening dog, controlled by the other, although there’s something human about it too. It’s clearly too tight a spot to get out of, and so I successfully manage to negotiate instead. In return for not giving them a fight, they’ll come by the apartment for me later instead.

After that, we’re back in the apartment, or at least some version of it, trying to figure out what to do. But I’ve realized something: this whole thing is about the woman, not me, and so there may not be much I can do. (I haven’t explicitly realized that I’m dreaming, but it’s pretty clear that I’m operating on the assumption.) It’s as if there’s some mystery we don’t fully understand, but we’ll have to solve it, or rather she will, to achieve a good outcome.

I’m suddenly struck with a realization. The biggest problem here is that this experience-space is being conditioned by the expectation that only things that make real-world sense can happen. Other possibilities are being excluded, and I can see that if that logic is allowed to dictate what happens next, failure is practically guaranteed. But if I can manage to de-condition this space, then - well, it might not solve the problem. That’s out of my hands. But it will at least make the problem solvable.

And so I begin to talk. Not to anyone in particular - the woman is within earshot, but I’m keeping out of her way otherwise, as this seems to be the extent to which I can help, and anything further is probably just going to interfere. I say whatever weird, off-the-wall non sequiturs without the slightest connection to the present situation happen to pop into my head. I am always happy to help, especially if it’s by doing something that under ordinary circumstances would just be obnoxious.

I can feel it working. Little by little, the space is becoming less rigidly structured and predictable; dream logic is reestablishing itself here. I can hear, in another room, new characters, having arisen out of nothing, are speaking with the woman. Previously intangible aspects of the situation are beginning to manifest, and accordingly, she now seems to be making actual progress.

(This was another entirely-over-by-2-am dream, for the record)

2.1.24

…or at least the parts of it I can still sort of remember.

I am with a group of people in a large space. There seem to be many small groups here, spread out in a number of seating areas, I guess you’d call them, except it’s more along the lines of cushions on the floor. The best comparison I can make would be an evacuation shelter in terms of the scale of the space and how it’s configured - although that isn’t what it is. There’s no sense of danger or conflict or anything outside of the ordinary.

The people with me, all women, I think, are DJs, and at some point, I take out my field recorder and offer to make a recording of some strange sound they’ve discovered and are messing around with making and send them a file of it later. (Because everybody likes to collect sounds, right?) But first, I check the settings to make sure I’ll be making a high-quality recording in the correct format. The interface is an unfamiliar one, which I rationalize by thinking that this isn’t the recorder I normally use. I also lose another chance at recognizing that this is a dream because, in spite of the fact that I’m looking at text on an electronic display, my recorder does not seem to be suffering from dodgy dream device syndrome. Far from it. Everything looks stable, and quite detailed - it’s actually the part of the dream I have the most precise memory of - and I don’t have a hard time adjusting the settings.

1.1.25

Part of a longer dream - I can only remember fragments of the earlier parts. It seems to be some kind of a school setting where I’m a student, and everybody is going to watch a play in the auditorium. I head there, with some people from the earlier part of the dream not far behind me. Not many others have arrived yet, so there are plenty of places where we can find seats together.

I find an empty row and sit down. On the stage below, I can see that there are a couple large wooden shelves set up on the right (relative to my position) and a larger set piece on the left with a very large fan in front, blowing onto it. But the fan is clearly causing some problems. The shelves don’t seem to be secured very well, and they start rocking back and forth. As I watch, they both fall over forward. Since everything on them is just fastened-down props, it doesn’t look like any real damage has been done. However, they seem to have been attached to the structure on the left, and having broken loose from it, it now looks to be in immanent danger of being blown backstage by the high-powered air, where it could cause some serious damage.

A friend of mine is in the play - his first time doing this - and I’m concerned for him, and for the situation in general, so I hurry down to the stage. The structure is being braced in front by a long, flat metal strip attached to it by metal pieces on either side, so I stand on that. It’s holding steady so far, but I was kind of hoping other people would also come down to help once I made the initiative, and while a few have made it as far as the stage, they don’t seem inclined to get any closer. More people weighing it down would be better - but if I pressure them to help and things end up going badly anyway, that would just make for a complicated situation. I’d rather not do that. It’s better that they freely decide to take on the risk themselves.

That’s where the situation stands when the dream shifts into some video game-like situation where some others and I are tasked with going around a massive backstage area and solving puzzles to collect everything that was blown back there so that the play can begin.

25.12.24

The basic scenario of the dream seems to be that because one of the classes that JT and I are responsible for is on a trip to a nearby city for a week - one about an hour's drive away - we have to go there as well. There are some scenes of travel, with last part of the journey seemingly being via helicopter. There are some interactions with the guy piloting it that I can no longer recall.

While there, we meet up with a number of other people who belong to our organization - not based on real people, but in the context of the dream, they are supposed to be people I usually only see a couple times a year, for training and such, since they’re based in a different region. One of these is a young man with blond, spiky hair and tattoos all over his arms, including some that depict Baby Mario’s origin story (making this the third inexplicable Mario reference in not very long, especially inexplicable in this case since I don’t actually know the story, and it was probably just something my dreaming mind invented). We've apparently gotten along well on the occasions we’ve met previously, and at some point, he says that if I’d like, I can stay over at his place for evolution sometime.

I am initially confused by this and run through a couple possibilities of what he could mean until I “remember” that Evolution is the name of a party with a somewhat notorious reputation that happens around here. “Let’s talk about it later,” I say. (In the dream, there are clearly no romantic implications to this exchange.)

The classroom where JT’s and my students are is in a large building, on an upper floor. It seems to have been made to be difficult to find, with a number of entrances camouflaged into an ornate wall. Inside, it looks almost like some kind of laboratory. The students are already there - mine, anyway. JT and his are in an adjoining room. There are a number of scenes here where nothing very definite or memorable happens, although at some point, JT comes by in a wheelchair. I’m concerned and ask him what happened, but he seems brusque and doesn’t acknowledge that anything is wrong. OK, so he doesn’t want to talk about it. I won’t push it.

21.12.24

I’m walking down a dirt road at night in some rural-looking, semi-wooded place. It’s very dark, maybe lit only by the moonlight. A car is coming down the road, from the direction I’m headed. It stops nearby, and a woman opens the driver’s side door slightly and asks me whether I need a ride. I tell her no, I’m just out for a walk. She drives off, and I keep going.

I’m only going as far as the end of the fence before I turn back - a wooden one on my right - and I’m almost there now. Actually, I’m not surprised the woman stopped, since I’m carrying some pillows with me, and that probably made it seem like I wasn’t just out here because I want to be. Why am I carrying these things anyway? I’ve been doing it for a while this way, and it’s not like I’ve ever done anything with them. Maybe I should just leave them behind next time.

Then it’s as if the scenario repeats itself, but with changes. This was a dream from early in the night: I went to bed a little after midnight, and woke up to record everything around 2. Perhaps because of this, even though the setting seems fully realized, the dream is unusually full of sudden shifts - or else I’m unusually aware of them - and I’m also aware at times of other less imagistic mental content taking place simultaneously, influencing the dream from without. This time, there’s a restaurant by the side of the road that I walk past - one that’s clearly still open, as I can see and hear people out on the terraces. As I turn around, I see a man a little ways behind me. He explains that he just happened to be walking the same way, as if he’s reassuring me that he’s not actually some kind of creeper.

The scene shifts. I’m in a hallway full of closed doorways where moving shadows pass by me on their way from one end to the other. A sense of unease. Major liminal space vibes here.

After what feels like a short time, though, the setting changes again. I’m once again outside on a moonlit night, but this place has a different feel to it. Also, I’m now aware that I’m dreaming, although it isn’t clear what led to this realization. There’s still a sense at times of parallel mental content happening, including awareness of a dream plot being imposed, but there are also some short segments where I seem to be imagining how things play out before they actually do.

I walk. It feels somehow more like reality than like a lucid dream - that's how it strikes me at the time, anyway - and I’m fascinated by how detailed the mist looks - little swirls of it are constantly catching the moonlight, especially over a stream I pass by, where it’s thickest. After what feels like a few minutes, I reach a house - my destination. I knock loudly on the garage door, and there’s another sudden change of scene, to where I’m now inside the garage.

Until now, I’ve been following the “plot”. It just feels as if I should somehow. But the setting here has felt so unaccountably somber. There’s a heaviness to the atmosphere that’s getting to be a little oppressive, and by now it’s starting to bug me a little, so I yell out: “It’s-a me, Mario!” As loud as I can.

“Don’t say that,” a voice says from right next to me. “It makes me heartbroken.” I turn to my left and see a man standing beside me.

“Why?” I ask. His answer didn’t quite make sense to me. “Is your name Mario?” But he doesn’t answer me. He is completely absorbed in pouring himself a glass of amber-colored liquid from a bottle into a glass and then drinking it. I take a closer look at him. He’s a fairly young man, white with short, dark-colored hair and wearing a black leather jacket. I briefly wonder whether I modeled him after a character in a gangster movie or something.

The man is on his second glass when the door leading into the house opens. A woman is there, having heard me. She’s been expecting me and beckons for me to come in. I go, inviting the man to follow along as well.

Another sudden shift of scene. We’re sitting in a room, at a square table. Across from me is the woman: we’re talking about something, although I can’t remember any of the details now. Meanwhile the man, seated on the side to my left, seems oblivious to our conversation. His attention is focused on what looks like a primitive electronic toy of a sort that was around in the ‘90s, and maybe later too, but I really have no idea. It’s pastel blue, and it emits all kinds of little bleeps and blips as he presses buttons. He’s apparently trying to type something out but finding it rather hard going. I hear an awful lot of the two-quick-blips sound (I recognize the interval they make as a descending tritone) that indicates he’s using the backspace key.

And then I wake up.


19.12.24

I’m driving to a grocery store with my mother. Not clear what the context is, as the environment seems entirely unfamiliar. I park the car, and in response to something my mother said, I get her a black cardigan (maybe the wrong name for it - I never know what to call articles of clothing….) that just seems to be kicking around somewhere in the backseat so that she won’t be cold inside. We go in.

We are immediately confronted by almost bare shelves. Uh-oh. Maybe this wasn’t the best day to come here. We might have trouble finding what we’re looking for today. But most of the store isn’t quite that bad.

At some point, we split up. The store seems to be divided into distinct sections, with different kinds of food in each, and I walk through a couple of them before I hear something strange. There’s music playing, but the melody is just one note, played in a rhythm over the changing chords. I see where it’s coming from: it’s something like an arcade game, although it seems to be specifically set up for music creation. Beside it are two women. One is a frail-looking older woman, who I think was in a wheelchair, and the other looks like she may be some kind of medical attendant. She’s the one who’s tapping out the single note over what I gather the older woman has made on the machine, apparently to help out in some way.

How I can tactfully step in and take over, since the attendant obviously has no idea what she’s doing? I can already imagine the melody I’d improvise - a simple one that keeps the rhythm she’s tapping out, but with a better fitting, musical shape. I wake up and immediately record what I remember:



(I put chord indications in, but I’m actually not 100% sure of anything except the cadence. For the rest, I just picked out the simplest chords that would match what I remember of where the repeated note was clashing and what I intended to do to fix it. It’s not all that interesting of a musical fragment, but the simplicity did make it relatively easy to transcribe after awakening.)

16.12.24

I seem to be visiting my parents - maybe over the holidays or something like that. The dream is set late at night, in what is maybe supposed to be their house. It’s a condo that seems very beige and nondescript to the point of not really looking like a place where people live. More like a hotel room or something.

On this day every year, on which everything always happens exactly the same, I can see into the future. It’s all just there for me - the memories of how things will go. I try talking to them about it, my mother in particular, but although it doesn’t seem as if she actively disbelieves what I’m saying, it’s clear that she hasn’t really absorbed it, or considered the implications in any depth. I was talking to my father at some point, too - about being able to see the bad things that will happen to him, and to me as well, but already knowing saying it isn’t actually going to lead to anything. This apparently relates to dreams in a way that’s no longer clear - I actually use the phrase, “this dream I’m having right now” - although, somehow, I manage to do so without it triggering lucidity.

Later in the night, in another dream, I’m in what’s supposed to be my room. I’m digitizing a record - “Tomorrow Never Knows,” by the Beatles. The screen is on some kind of high shelf - too high up for me to be able to read it easily, which I find kind of annoying.

Partway through, my uncle comes in - maybe my uncle. It kind of seems like he’s my father in the dream, or some kind of half-invented composite figure. A number of people follow him in - seven or eight of them. They are apparently family, but also people I haven’t known for long, as if they’re in-laws or something of the sort. They are mostly male, and younger - the exception being the eldest of them, a teenage girl who comes in holding a small child.

My uncle apparently had something to tell me, and leaves after saying it. I’m surprised he didn’t take any notice of the device I have set up. It was his, after all - he just gave it to me because he wasn’t doing anything with it. The others all stick around, though, as if they’re curious and just don’t have anything better to do than watch what I’m doing.

9.12.24

I’m staying in a house with a group of people. It’s late at night, and the host tells me a person we’re all here to meet will be here at 5am, which isn’t far off. I get ready - or try to, anyway. I can’t find the clothing I’m looking for. The clothing I brought along seems to have gotten mixed up with everyone else’s clothing and piled indiscriminately on the floor. Eventually, I stop trying to find the specific shirt I had in mind and just look for something that will work, but nothing seems right. In the meantime, it seems that everyone else has gone out already to meet the person we’re waiting for.

Then, out the window, I see a commotion outside, and people running - something is happening out there, something unexpected and possibly dangerous. I decide to go down to the basement, where I won’t be visible to anyone out there, but someone is already inside the house. He’s an Asian man, maybe in his 40s, wearing a martial arts uniform - white, I think. He heads for me, and I prepare to meet him.

As soon as we make physical contact, though, I can tell I don’t have a chance. I can feel it in his hands. I know enough myself to be sure I’m dealing with someone who’s achieved complete mastery. I stop and back off. Naturally, he can also tell where the situation stands and feel that I’ve sensed this. He smiles and beckons me to keep going, as if we were just sparring. But while he doesn’t actually seem aggressive, as if he’d hurt me just because he could, under the circumstances, I still don’t trust him enough to want to use force on him that I know he’d be able to turn back against me more effectively.

“I’m a musician,” I say. There is no point getting in a useless fight that could result in getting my hands messed up. I repeat it to make sure he understands, as I have the impression that English probably isn’t his first language.

But something is happening outside requiring his attention, and he leaves me to go deal with that, so I take the chance to go down to the basement.

27.10.24


A group of people are standing in a room. I’m identified with a young woman there, but seeing things play out in 3rd person. They seem to be an extended family with an upper-class vibe, in a large, old-fashioned house, and everybody is wearing elaborate clothing reminiscent of Japanese traditional dress. I can’t remember what the conversation taking place there was about, but it was fraught and unpleasant.

In the next scene, I’m experiencing things in 1st person as the woman. I’m in the kitchen as the back door opens, and in walks the ghost of Madame Mambeau, muttering to herself in French. There is nothing particularly ghostly-looking about her, but I recognize her clearly from stories others have told, from when she was alive. She’s a short, sturdily built middle-age woman with wild grey hair, and wearing a black T-shirt and shorts. She’s closely followed by a man who seems to be some kind of attendant. He’s very tall and fat, with thinning hair pulled back in a short ponytail. They ignore us completely - my father is in the room as well - and walk past us to the table in the dining area, where the man proceeds to serve up the contents of the compost bowl for the two of them.

I watch as they eat - at first in horror, but it is already starting to turn into curiosity. My father also stands and watches. My brothers’ voices and the sounds of Super Mario Bros drift in from a neighboring room. I’m sure this situation represents some kind of calamity that has befallen us, but at the same time, the damage is already done, and there’s probably no further harm in playing host to the two of them and seeing what will happen next. Knowing my father, I’m sure it won’t be long before curiosity gets the better of him too.

5.11.24


In a city, probably in the afternoon. I’ve arrived with a group of people onto a bustling street where a lot of preparations seem to be taking place. We enter a building - it mostly seems to be row houses here - and enter a large, undifferentiated space with a raised area like a stage in back. While they get things ready, I go out to explore the city.

I’ve been here before, maybe just once, to go to a restaurant with others. I recognize it as I walk past it on a nearby street. This seems to be a hilly, well-kept area with a view of the sea, but oddly deserted other than the street from the beginning. At some point, though, I realize I need to be getting back, and I have no idea where I am. I stop in the middle of a broad stone staircase to get my phone out and pull up a map. But nearby, I can hear a police officer telling somebody else on the other end of a walky-talky that I’m here, as I guess this counts as loitering. Yeah, I don’t want to draw too much attention to myself, so I just move on.

But it turns out I was just around the corner from the street I started out on anyway. A couple of the people from before are standing just inside the doorway and beckon me to come in. They close the door behind us. It looks like everything is ready to start now: people are sitting on the floor, with someone standing in the middle about to speak to them. I sit down as well.

A lot happened after that, but I don’t remember much of the details, except that at one point, the dream’s entire visual field is white and filled with colorful geometric shapes reminiscent of confetti moving past. I’m not present in the scene, but am aware of my right hand near the arrow keys of a keyboard, which I can use to have some control of the sequence of events I’m in the middle of, which is part of what the people from before have prepared.

20.11.24


Some other people and I have moved into a house in the fairly recent past. From an upper story balcony overlooking the city street below, I watch as a group of people sets up what appears to be a spontaneous picnic on the roof of their car. Then NS drives up and parks behind them. I call down to her. She was taking the household laundry out to be cleaned and has been gone an unexpectedly long time. She tells me there was an unfortunate incident involving a robin right as she was exiting the laundromat. “I hope it wasn’t my laundry,” I say. She says it wasn’t.

In what was probably a distinct dream later in the night, I’m in a school. I’m in the office, waiting for one of my students to arrive. It seems he accidentally left on the bus when school ended but soon realized his mistake and is on his way back.

When he arrives, he immediately runs off to where the others are. I start to follow. A woman is standing nearby - someone who seems to be a well-known figure in some way. There’s a whole lot of unspoken subtext as we exchange glances. Aren’t you going to ask me, the way so many people do? No? Well, this is interesting enough to where I’m just going to tell you anyway.

She says that I have a fire inside of me, and that it needs to be concentrated and refined before I can bring it out into the world.

I wake up.

(After thinking the dream over, I remembered that I’d been looking through the first couple lucid dreams included in the appendix of Charlie Morley’s Dreams of Awakening a couple days previously, and one of those had probably inspired the turn this one took. That dream was also set in an office, although a different kind of office. The woman is a representative of my subconscious mind, like the figure he summoned once he’d remembered what he’d planned to do in the dream. That explains some of those otherwise puzzling details.)

26.11.24

In a forested area by a wide, shallow river with a large group of people. I’m not sure exactly what’s supposed to be going on, but at some point, it looks as if there’s some kind of attack on us. People are gathering at a couple of large pavilions nearby, so I go there as well. It’s now dark out, lit only by a couple of large bonfires.

Someone is heading towards me. They lunge, and I see that they have a knife. Reflexes take over, and after a brief struggle I’m standing behind her, pinning her to the ground with the knife at her throat. I can see it’s a woman now - physically larger than I am, but younger, maybe early 20s, with sandy blonde wavy hair down to her shoulders. I really don’t want to do this. But if I let her go, will she just go and attack someone else? No. I don’t think she will. She looks terrified.

“Are you scared?” I ask her. She says yes. I let her go, and she runs off, past the groups of indeterminate fire-lit people. I continue towards the pavilions.

—

I’m moving into a new flat - possibly at the beginning of a new university semester. I look around at everything: there seems to be a main area, with kitchen, dining room, and a living room area in an open-floor arrangement, then a bedroom/office separate from that. Someone else, a woman, seems to be there with me. I’m thinking about how I want to arrange the furniture here - everything seems to have come with the space.

At some point, it looks like a new room has appeared, so we go in to check it out. This appears to be a dedicated bedroom, meaning I can make the other one into just a study space. Apparently, we can’t leave again until I’ve checked out this new space and made sure that everything is in order here. But even though I can’t find anything that looks off about it, I seem to have gotten hold of the wrong end of the lucidity stick or something because I can’t shake the feeling that new rooms aren’t supposed to appear out of nowhere, and I should not be taking this in stride. Possibly I’m also still a little on edge from the whole someone trying to kill me thing from earlier in the night. No matter how many times I check the room and find nothing wrong, I just can’t convince myself that everything is OK, and so the whole thing just keeps dragging on.

At some point, though, I wake up in the bed there from what feels like a long and deep sleep. No one else seems to be around. What ended up happening? I try to remember, but the impressions are too confused. Some other people were here at one point, I guess? And I feel as if I should at least remember falling asleep here if that was what happened, which I don’t.

I get up and go into the main area. Maybe now I can move that table somewhere else. I’m sure I’ll never use it for anything there if I have an actual study. But it’s such a weird shape - where else would I even put it?

I wake up.

8.9.24

I am in a large room where many people are gathered, where the wall I’m facing is almost entirely windows, and a forested area is visible beyond. A woman sits in a chair in the middle of the room. She is in bad health, and seems to be the center of attention. I have the impression that everyone here is family.

Through the glass of the windows, I see a shadowy figure appear. I shout at it and make gestures, trying to “catch” it. I can’t allow it to come any closer to her - although I’m quite aware that nobody else here can see it, and this probably looks pretty weird right now. Not that it’s there, in any kind of objective sense. But I can only perceive using the senses I have, and so it’s got to “be” somewhere. But whatever. I’ve just got to make it go away - that’s what’s important. I finally manage it, at which point the thing splits into two and vanishes.

It isn’t over yet, though. I see a disembodied arm very close to the glass, grabbing for a necklace. I run over and grab the arm, which is extremely hairy, and pull. I tell the others that they need to pull too, holding onto me, for it to work. I’m not sure if they’ll believe me and do it, but they do. One woman reaches out to try to feel the arm. She can touch it, as I thought she'd probably be able to, although it still isn’t visible to her. It actually seems to be working.

7.7.24


I’m in a museum with my aunt and uncle. It seems to be a museum of techno. Various displays are set up in a large, open space, but the different music playing at each one seems to be the focus rather than anything visual. The default language here seems to be German. I want to go off to explore on my own, but if my uncle also decides to go off alone, I’m not sure how my aunt will do by herself.

Later, I’m on a train. I didn’t manage to find a free seat, but I really don’t mind too much. In another part, Nina approaches me, holding a bottle of hand soap she found in the bathroom, showing me that it has some kind of punny train-related name.

—

In another dream later in the night, I seem to be a university student. A group of students approaches me, having discovered that I’ve taken classes in “the French room”. They have apparently heard stories about this place and want to see it for themselves. I say I’ll take them there, although it isn’t clear to me what’s supposed to be so special about it.

I ask one young woman why everyone is so intent on going there. She gives a couple reasons, one about it being where somebody’s finger was pricked. I don’t outright realize I’m dreaming, but the fairy tale reference still makes me take notice. I realize that I need to understand what she’s saying in a symbolic way. She seems upset - so much that I ask her if she really wants to go there, when just talking about it is that bad.

28.7.24


I’m lying on a couch, reading a book. From where I am, I can hear my aunt and uncle talking downstairs. My aunt says that she’s going to drive herself to an appointment she’s made with a doctor. I don’t think she’ll follow through or get far enough to put herself in danger, but my uncle should probably hide the keys anyway. (I’m probably thinking of my grandmother and her car crash on some level.) Sure enough, I can hear him going over to the cabinet by the door and getting them out. The keys fly up over the half-wall and land somewhere soft. I get up and go find them.

In the next part I remember, I’m somewhere else - a landing, apparently in the same house. I set the keys by the top step of the stairs, where my uncle can get them again if he needs them. He’s just downstairs, and I tell him as much, then go to get changed. I’m still wearing the shirt I’ve been sleeping in. I take it off as I head back. It seems to be the only thing I’m wearing.

The setting is once again different - it seems to be a school gym. The gym leads into an enormous cavern. I recognize the cavern as mine somehow - it belongs to me, it’s my home - and just being there makes me feel more clear-headed and spacious. I can recall previous times I’ve been to this place, and I’m already acting as if I’m aware I’m dreaming, although the realization hasn’t explicitly dawned yet.

The entrance is very wide and tall, and the area inside is vast - like an entire city with a nocturnal atmosphere. In the entry area, I see a group of people, two women with a group of teenagers. They all look a little lost. I figure I should offer to help them out - although maybe I should put on some clothes first? Then again, this is a dream - I realize - and does that really matter? I decide that I’ll offer to help, and also say I’ll put on clothes if they’d prefer - and proceed to do so.

They react as if I’ve just confirmed something they suspected, and one tells me that they can get out on their own, so I go further into the cave, going over the dream-familiar areas as I pass, now flying. There are six or seven in the front area I have memories of, which I revisit mentally, one by one. But I’ve only explored a small part of what’s here.

At some point, my parents seem to be there as well, also flying. I don’t have a strong visual impression of them. There is a fire burning here - I can see more fiery areas as we go upward, through what now seems to be an unrealistically large space for an underground area. It doesn’t spread, but it’s still not safe to get too close. They now take the lead, flying ahead, further in. More memories arise of a location supposedly from an early dream of the night, also with fire - but we’re going to put that out, and that will also make one of the larger ones in the area we passed go out. This is how it has to be, I recall - they need to be the ones to do it. By the time I land, they’ve already put it out. The air is smoky now, and I’m concerned for one of the cats, T, who is now there as well.

20.8.24


I’m walking along the streets of a city at night. My long-haired Manx cat, C, is with me, keeping pace but exploring on her own as well. There are other cats around, and even a dog, so I’m keeping a close eye on her as we go.

Inside the building that’s my destination, I start to realize I’m dreaming, and I can do whatever I want (continuing from a dream even earlier in the night where I became aware but awoke soon after.) I head back out, going through a hallway. At a doorway, I pass a large Black man in a suit - he registers to me as some kind of security guard. We non-verbally acknowledge each other as I pass. Another guard stands by the door leading outside - but I decide to go up instead. It occurs to me - not fully consciously, probably at least partly because this is still a dream from early in the night - that I’m in a state of natural creativity, and so I start to hum/sing, letting the music spontaneously take shape. It’s partway between imagining it and hearing it performed - although it’s mostly instrumental, and I’m aware of the filter automation and gating that are expressed symbolically in my inflections.

Outside, it’s dark, as before, but well-lit. I’m in a plaza with a fountain in the center, and nobody else seems to be around. Where to go? Maybe to the top of the clock tower some distance away. I fly upwards, but gaining height feels too slow. I experiment with pushing off with one leg at a time as if there was something solid under me to “jump” upwards. It seems to work well.

As I rise, I notice a tall, narrow cliff ahead of me, going up even higher. Where is it leading? It seems to be narrowing out to a point towards the direction I came from. I change my mind - I’ll go there instead. I’m curious to see what might be at the very top. I turn around and rise still further until I’m hovering a little above it, almost climbing it, and then I’m at the summit. There’s nothing there, actually. How anticlimactic. The dream seems to be unstable now, and I know I have to keep moving, so I fly away, towards other spaces, but it still turns into another nonlucid dream not long afterwards.

1.9.24

Melody Fragment (with lyrics)

I awoke around 4 am from a rather confusing dream in which I may have been singing this, although the conscious ‘me’ seemed distinct from the dream ‘me’, and I have the impression that I woke myself up intentionally at this point since I always try to be on the lookout for dream music.

This is what I can remember of the melody, with the approximate tempo:



The accompanying lyrics were: ‘Sam, you are lucky. Sam, you are empty,’ with the first three words corresponding to the initial three notes of each phrase. As a note, it’s fairly normal for me to listen to, play or write things in 7/8, but I can’t say the same about Eb major.

15.8.23

Attached Thumbnails

 

All the most interesting dreams from this week involved music in some way. These included:

-Applying a temporary tattoo of the notation for the amen break to my face, apparently for some event I was going to attend.

-Working on a piece of music. As the dream progresses, the different parts become associated with characters, and a story plays out among them. The characters all travel somewhere special, like the moon, a number of times. I think it ended with everything being absorbed back into the composition again. Unfortunately, I can’t remember many of the details as I woke up to one of the cats getting ready to cough up a hairball and had to immediately turn on the lights and make sure she didn’t do it on my bouzouki.

-Programming a couple weather patterns on something that looked suspiciously like a groovebox. I’m doing this at somebody’s request, at the shop he owns. There’s a sense of the machine making the process much simpler than it would be otherwise, just a matter of pressing a few buttons. When I’m done, I make a mental projection of the future to check that my proposed patterns won’t screw up the weather in other places, and since everything looks OK, I confirm them.

At some later point in the dream, I gain lucidity flying over a place that’s a cross between a highway and a waterway, with cars going one way and ships going the other. I decide to go back to the scene from the earlier dream, and I speak with the man to find out if he has anything else I can do there. It strikes me as an interesting thing to do while focusing on maintaining lucidity. I woke up not long after, though, which wasn’t surprising as it was actually getting rather late into the morning.

27.6.23-3.7.23