side notes

To me Ryuuko is a major part of what motivates me to pursue lucid dreaming nowadays. She's a character I created for a shared dreaming RPG way back in early 2014, it's called Dreamsphere chronicles. I even made a forum for it but it just never really took off. Kinda bad, but it was a good and valuable experience anyways.
This journal is both a place for me to keep notes on her development, and to give context to my dreams involving her when I post them here.

The concept of Ryuuko has stuck with me through all the years though, up to this day, and will probably stick for many years to come. So I started working on her and establishing her in my dreams outside of said dream RPG.
When I created her I came up with a couple of requirements after which I designed her:
1. A very different personality from mine. From the beginning I wanted a character that had a substantially different way of living and looking at anything than I do, so it would give me a truly fresh perspective.
2. A very complex body. Rather than having a body that is simply humanoid (2 arms, 2 legs, 1 torso, 1 head) and thus easy to use I wanted something that would pose a serious challenge to control in it's entirety.
3. In accordance with the game I needed many different skills I could learn as time passes.
4. And obviously I wanted a body and person that would be pleasing to my personal aesthetic standards. Who wouldn't want that when designing a Dream-Alter-Ego?

In order to get something that was truly different from me, I first gave her the opposite gender of mine (so she's female), and then created her background and story in such a way to make her a 'blank slate'. In short for her story this means she's been created, was never meant to develop her own personality, but eventually did so anyway due to flaws in the experiment. At some point she develops a taste for freedom, escapes her birth place and that's when I would start seeing things from her perspective. Since it'd be considered amoral by the creators to restrain her, and since she'd be useless for her original purpose anyway they just let her go and started over.
The point of this weird story is to let her experience the world with an adult body, an adult set of predefined knowledge, but no actual experience and no real personality, so that I could witness the forming of her personality firsthand. And I'm doing my best not to set a direction myself.

Next was her body. Since I wanted something that would be truly interesting to use in a dream, a simple human body wasn't an option for me. So I designed her as a Dragongirl/Ryumimi, which adds 1 tail and 2 wings to the equation. Since that didn't seem enough I also threw in 6 auxiliary limbs, which roughly look like tentacles, which then again brings her total amount of controllable extremities from 4 all the way up to 13 (2 arms, 2 legs, 1 tail, 2 wings, 6 'tentacles').
Also she hears with her horns as opposed to hearing the way humans do, because I wonder how a notion like that might affect the senses in dreams.
As for her skin, her entire body is actually covered in thick armor-like scales, which in turn are covered by skin or even thicker exo-scales, so she has some decent protection even without separate armor (I tend to be invincible without any intervention in dreams anyway, so it makes sense to come up with a concept that explains the sturdiness to some degree).
All those features give her a whopping mass of around 185kg. In reality mass generally equals weight but since it's not about reality I placed her weight at around 30kg.
If you're not aware what such a sharp difference in mass and weight would cause, it allows her to fly and keep her altitude much easier as she would only need 30kg of lift, but she still needs to put in the effort of getting 185kg moving in the first place. She can reach high top speeds, and she can turn around on the spot quickly, but she's neither going to make sudden dashes, sudden breaks or U-turns.

Her abilities involve all sorts of things that are fun to do in a dream, flying, fire-breathing, exploding fireballs... stuff like that.
So yeah, the concept is probably kind of over-the-top but in order to make her the most interesting to implement in dreams that's exactly what I was going for.

As implied she's my Dream-Alter-Ego. That means that when I have (lucid) dreams I try to turn into her, experiencing the world around me not with my body, my thoughts and my perspective, but hers instead. So far I had some limited success in doing so, but typically there are many months in between any Ryuuko dreams, so I have a lot of work in the dream realm ahead of me.

So this will be my entry for all or most Dream Cartography related things. Right now I have to figure out my personal way to do this so for now I will put some personal notes here, which are to be expanded upon later:

Frequent Occuring places:
Buildings
Talenta (My first boarding school)
Space (Isn't as frequent as I'd like it to be, but it gets better)

Buildings:
Weird, huge and complex buildings appear frequently in my dreams, it is safe to say that 75% of my dreams at least involve one building and at least 30% of my dreams involve huge or really special buildings.

Space:
ISIM: This is a system I was headed for in one of my recent space dreams. I was getting there through hyperspace by entering a wormhole. I don't know from where I started. Since this one of the few places with a specific name I suppose it might become an important location, otherwise I will try to make it one.

Other Dimensions/Exceptional Places:
Most notable here would be the place of #3 in this post: My craziest night yet

Coon City: Coon city is a forest where people with a few raccoon features live, it seems to be a dangerous place for normal humans. Coon City

Lower levels of consciousness:
Most notable here is this dream: Post apocalypse building with several different high ground floors

A certain city:
This is a place I don't know much about but I feel it popped up more than once. Most recently when I went to a BDSM sex shop due to some absolutely unknown reason (06.06.14). The city looks largely normal but the streets are exceptionally big, creating wide open spaces between buildings. As might be expected the amount of people and cars is really low here.

Update: 06.04.2013
Well the recent months were really bad and essentially nothing now on the field happened, just felt like noting that down because Im still up on this project, I don't get any input.

Update: 06.06.2014
14 months later and nothing much more happened, thanks to my working place, or rather the insane time consumption of work and everyone just generally helping themselves on my reserve of time. Only added the certain city section.

So given this is my 30th entry and my DJ has now at least a decent size I guess it's time for some general details about my dreams as well as the tags I use. Should anyone happen to care to ask a question in the comments I'll include the answer per edit in this post.

Recurring themes:
Boarding schools: During my life I went to 2 boarding schools (I usually refer to as first and second in my DJ). The first one which was called Talenta was one of my favorite places and I have a lot of good memories about this place, I met all the friends I really care about there. The school was located in a beautiful huge landscape, and the fact I spent 5 years there makes Talenta one of the commonly recurring themes in my dreams.
The second boarding school I was at was actually a really crappy place and nothing particularly special, which is why the second one barely appears in my dreams.
Swimming Baths: Why these keep occurring in my dreams is unknown to me, it might be due to my second boarding school where I went to a swimming bath each week and the fact I enjoy swimming.
Buildings: Most of my dreams include at least one special building, mostly huge complexes with normally impossible twists. I have absolutely no clue why this is a recurring theme.

Fragment Collections:
All posts labeled as Fragment Collection [Number] include 3 small dreams and are also in the dream fragment category, but they are only fragments in my own definition. By strict definition most of the dreams in there are still full dreams I can remember, which are however to short and/or uninteresting to deserve their own entry. Since I usually am able to recall all dreams fully by just a few tags or the fragments I decided to go with my own definition of dream fragment within my DJ.

Tags:
Here I will give some details about all tags which aren't self-explanatory.

Ryuuko: She is my Dream-Alter-Ego, if you're interested in details or want some context for dreams where she appears follow the link
Building: This tag is given to all dreams that involve the rather typical abnormal buildings occurring in my dreams. Usually these are abnormally huge or complex buildings. This tag isn't given to dreams which include only normal buildings.
1st person/3rd person: It is what it says, whether the dreams involved my doing stuff out of my own perspective or just observing.
Mission: Given to all dreams where I have an objective of sorts, which also involve me doing stuff to achieve that objective.
Exploration: Given to dreams where I actively explore unknown things.
Sex: Given to all dreams with sexual content of any kind, doesn't make a statement about the level of explicitness.
Street/City: Like building these aren't just given to any dream involving a street/city but rather only to those where the location does also play a role.
Apocalypse: Given to all dreams involving the end of the world, the aftermath or an exceptionally dark feeling of ending.
WSS: Given to all dreams where I'm lucid and try to stabilize with my own technique.
Lucidity Visor: Is an experimental device I want to use in future dreams.
Distorted Laws: Only given to dreams with obviously heavy distorted laws like antigravity, floating water or anything even worse [or better for that matter].
Other Planet: Denotes that the dream isn't playing on earth but rather a totally different location. Only given when explicitly known.
Dark: Given to dreams with a generally dark feeling. Usually not negative
Death & Resurrection: Only given to dreams where a person dies and resurrects during the same dream.
Special Person: Denotes the existence of a person that doesn't quite feel like other DCs.
Anime: When things don't look like IRL but rather animated.
Rejection: Given to dreams with situations where someone is being rejected or mistreated.
Forsaken: Given to dreams with a distinct and likely positive feeling of solitude.
Unknown Voice: Whenever there's a voice without anyone talking around.
Danger: Given to dreams with an explicit or implicit feeling of danger, whether the source is known or not is irrelevant.
Bedroom: Isn't given to any dreams involving a bed in a room, but rather to all dreams were I appear in the room I sleep in currently.
Flying: Given only to dreams were I somehow fly myself without using a vessel of any kind.
Weapon: Given to dreams which include somehow unusual/special weapons.
Extreme Weather: Given to dreams with tornadoes, thunderstorms, meteor-storms, etc...

I was dreaming that I was in a big complex, much like my old favorite boarding school (Talenta). It seems I was doing some sort of missions there, after one was finished I have been assigned to the next one together with a bunch of other people. I was apparently searching for something; I know that some sort of voice explained to me that in this mission, unlike before, everyone could stray through the complex at will to search. At the start of this mission it was day, I saw the complex from the outside a moment, it looked a lot more like my most recent school though.

Some info: My old boarding school consisted of 2 Buildings which each were constructed out of 2 long blocks, connected through a thinner strand of building. Each of the blocks has one quadratic staircase, where 3 of the 4 sides had a stairway, and the last side was connected to the hallway that led to the rooms.

I was in the second floor of this connection (unlike in reality, in the dream there were three floors in this connection). I walked around a bit and ended in the top of the stairway of one of the buildings. I went down the complete staircase without touching the stairs, only using the handrail and centrifugal force (I think somewhere at this point my awareness slowly started to rise). I went down a bit too far and nearly went into the basement, which was pretty dark; it also was night after that. I stopped, placed my feet on the floor again and normally walked up the few steps, turned left and went into the connection again. Somewhere at this point I looked out of a window, the scene I saw was a real place of my old boarding school (I think I kind of know what window I looked out of). At that part I also remembered that there should be new educators in this complex and that I should meet the new ones. In the night scene I saw an odd moving Zeppelin, that also looked pretty crazy, it had four arrays of strange constructions, and they were slightly glowing (I can’t describe that thing so I’m not going to try further). I finally came to the thought something was off and did the nose-pinch RC.
I could breathe through my nose so I became aware that I was in a dream. However upon realizing, the scene drastically changed and I was in a big room with a green, grass like floor. There were a bunch of tables and chairs, and also a bar; however it didn’t resemble a pub at all (as far as I can tell it also was day again). On the green floor was a bunch of different Pokémon (pretty odd because I played some of the games but couldn’t consider myself a fan; I remember I first saw an Eevee and Lugia/Ho-Oh later). I remembered the TotM but there was nothing in my surroundings that I could use. Somehow my vision turned black, I still primarily felt like watching a movie, even though I was pretty much completely aware, “and now someone turned off the screen”. I did a reality check again and tried to get the scene back as I remember it, and the “screen was on” again (it was after that that small forms of Lugia and Ho-Oh appeared to be chased or followed by the others). I got to see a little bit more of the odd scene but woke up very soon after.