Recent DJ Posts

This dream was interesting: it was like I was playing out a role in a story, aware that it was a story (but not aware that it was a dream). It was being narrated—not by anybody present, but a voice that I could talk to and that seemed to be indicating what I should be doing as much as describing it.

The setting was a building like an airport - at least, in the only part I can remember. But it only appeared that way from the standpoint of the people there: it was really two separate buildings, split by a wall they couldn’t see. Inside the wall were rooms where there were people—people who could see through the wall and observe what was happening on both sides, and people in offices who were presumably working to keep the place going. The camera—for lack of a better word—seemed to make a point of showing this area, even though nothing much was happening there. At one point, it slowly panned across it so that you could see all the people as well as a window showing an entire world outside that didn’t exist from the standpoint of the people in the building where I was.

Right now, I’m concerned with getting into a special event that’s being held by people whose land borders mine. I approach a man I know—maybe in his late 30s, wearing some kind of complex, vaguely tribal outfit—and ask him if he can take me along. He’s happy to accept. He just seems to be a good-natured person who likes helping people get what they want. He probably thinks I just want to get in with a certain crowd, but I have other reasons for needing to be there (unfortunately, not ones I can remember after waking up).

He’s going there now, and I’ll be coming along on a – well, I’m not entirely sure what it is. It has a special name (that I forgot) and seems to be a bit like a jet ski, but attached to a helicopter and with things like leather shields I’m supposed to hold onto. As I look it over, I’m glad this is going to be broadcast over the radio because that gives everyone in the audience a chance to imagine something less stupid-looking. But I get on it, and we head off.

24.4.18

Nine whole months since I joined this forum and I'm still a terrible procrastinator. Now you see why my User Title is the "Master Procrastinator?" So, to all future dream journal bingers out there, PLEASE don't miss more than three days of consecutive dream journalling. It really does do a number on your recall and motivation in general.


Day 26:

Fell asleep at: 2:30 AM

Woke up at: 9:15 AM


Dream 26: Pizza House Party

Going over to the counter (Which has been removed in real life but not in the dream), I pick up four slices of pizza. They have a store-bought cardboard tray, but the pizza itself is restaurant-tier. I go back to the couch along with my dad, and it seems like the couches and coffee table are arranged correctly. I didn't make the connection between the two (The counter being in the wrong place but the furniture in the correct order), which no doubt would've made a solid LD.

I'm not quite satisfied yet. I decide to go get some of the last pizza before everybody else does. Now there's even more pizza on the counter. Everybody else goes to get some more pizza, and I end up only getting about two slices. I think to myself, "Well, I already ate four slices, so..." and just accept it.

I briefly chow down on my second helping. I go over to throw my plate away when I bump into a little white machine with a GPS monitor on it, which is situated in front of my mom's room. My dad tells me to be careful. Guy's got foot problems, and I figured whatever it was, he didn't want me touching. I walk away from it so that I wouldn't be held responsible for it.


Day 27:

Fell asleep at: 1:00 AM

Woke up at: 8:00 AM


Dream 27: Jostled by the Mob

Exiting out of the hallways, I make my way into a little outdoor area within my school. An influx of students exit from all sides, all 600+ of them. All of us are headed straight for the staircase outside of the band hall.

Once we get there, I begin to get jostled by a whole bunch of M's friends. I even see the girl who looks an awful lot like my friend's sister, who's the only face I can remember. We all sit down on the stairs that somehow stretch all the way across the building. Some guy is singing an overly emotional song about...something I can't quite remember.

He starts picking out people from the audience to sing along, meanwhile I bust out a calculator that can somehow run GBA-era Pokemon games. Nice. The guy next to me sees what I'm doing, and motions the singer to point at me. He then stares at me playing Pokemon on my calculator and stares at it instead. He then pulls out a calculator and I begin to tink he wants to know how I got it done. Jokes on him, I ain't telling.


Day 28:

Fell asleep at: 4:00 AM

Woke up at: 11:00 AM


Dream 28: Uh...Pups?

A short one. I dreamt that Nemo and Cleo took the forms of two overly large bugs, both yellow in color. I still tried to put them in their cage though.


Dream 29: HANDS OFF, MAN.

I'm in an unknown house. My brother is lying on the floor, minding his own business. The both of us are talking about joining a club or something when he does the unthinkable. The guy gets up, walks over to me, and crushes my babymaker something fierce. You can tell how much I wanted to kill my DC brother after that...

Dream 30: AGAIN?!

I was on the couch, just barely waking up from a dream. My dad and my brother are pacing around the couch, wondering who's gonna take out the pups. My dad elects my brother, who then elects me. I have this stupid half-smiling, half asleep look on my face, trying to convince them that I'm still asleep. I pull out my phone, confident that they'd be none of the wiser. Then my brother kicks me hard, again, in the one bone that matters. You can tell how much I REALLY wanted to kill him after that... Thankfully it was just a dream, so no harm done.


Day 29 & 30:

Fell asleep at: 1:00 AM

Woke up at: 9:00 AM


Dreams 31 & 32: Nothing

Fragments again.


Day 31:

Fell asleep at: 4:00 AM

Woke up at: 1:00 AM


Dream 33: The Rich Get Asylum

Another narration dream, this time starring the voice of DiGi Valentine. In a corrupt, poverty-stricken city, the ones raking in the dome are the owners of an insane asylum. Extortion, money laundering, and exploitation are their main methods of making money.


Dream 34: T'was A Mirage

I look at the TV, astounded by the fact. My 5-6 year old copy of Super Mario Galaxy 2, scratched to hell and back, is finally functional! Everything is just how I remember it. I grab the controller, but I don't like how loud it is. I lower the volume on my TV using the buttons installed on the TV itself, and then immediately, the game crashes. And then I crash, emotionally. I hate this.


Dream 35: Shirtless and Witless

I start off in a computer lab, the room darkened accompanied with the busying sound of keyboards clacking. The dismissal bell signals the end of the school day. I get up and go through the hallway to the school parking lot. But then I realize something, both my pants and my shirt are missing, leaving me with semi-translucent red underwear.

It was bitterly cold, and I rushed back to class, using my backpack to cover up my half-naked self. Unfortunately for me, the teacher was still in the class. I went to my desk and grabbed my shirt and pants and put them on before she noticed. I waved a polite goodbye and left in relief.

Ritual: wtb 3am, around 9am set vibrating alarm for 36 minutes. The first time it went off, I felt like I was already awake, that I had been lying awake for several minutes before I felt the vibration. In retrospect I was quickly suspicious that this was a false memory, but the consequence was that I woke up for real. I reset the alarm to go off in 28 minutes, and went back to sleep.

EILD: I felt the vibration again, and at first I thought it was another failed attempt, that I was wide awake again. But this time I convince myself not to give up so easily, to lay still and explore it. I wiggle my fingers. Actually... that feels right, like dream movement. I wiggle the fingers of the other hand and gradually start to engage my whole body, but soon, no, I can still sense the dream body but I'm convinced that I'm accidentally moving my real body too. (In retrospect, it seems likely that my impressions of moving the physical body were false, as this surely would have broken aphasia.) It feels like the two kinds of sensory awareness are layered together. My dream sense is not broken but I need to find some way to desynch from the physical, to move unnaturally in a way the real body can't follow. I try to bend my arm the wrong way at the elbow, down into the mattress. I find this a bit difficult for some reason, but something else happens: I start to understand that I am creating all this difficulty in my own mind, that it really doesn't have to be this complicated. Upon this realization I simply find myself standing next to the bed, fully in dream. That certainly makes things easier!

My WL awareness was somewhat confused throughout this whole process, since during the whole time I was lying in bed I had the impression that I could overhear a colleague from work talking to her daughter (who I have never met). They were discussing a humanitarian volunteer program that the colleague was doing in another country, maybe Africa. I listened with interest since I had not been aware that she was involved with anything like this (there is no RL basis), but it made sense since she is a very kind and generous person. She was talking about some kind of environmental crisis and said that the local people trusted the "agents," that is, the field workers of this organization, like her, but not the administration or the experts that were sent in to instruct them. The challenge was teaching the locals new ways of environmental management so they were no longer unsustainably exploiting their natural resources. I think it was targeting water usage.

After I was fully transitioned into the dream, I remembered that I had reset my vibrating alarm to an interval of only seven minutes, so I would have to work quickly before it went off again, waking me up. Curiously, now I'm not sure if I really did reset it, and suspect I dreamed that part too. The nice thing about a device like this is that it actually provides hard evidence against which to check my unreliable memories. Nope! It's still set to 28 minutes. So there was one point this morning where I definitely did reset it from 36 to 28, but the later memory of resetting it to 7 minutes—for some reason convinced that I would be able to fall asleep within that time frame—turns out to have been an FFA (false falling asleep), evidence that I was already asleep.

With (so I mistakenly thought) only seven minutes to work in, minus whatever time I had already spent transitioning, I walk quickly through the house and toward the front door, ready to plunge into deeper dreamspace. As I pass through the living room, something bumps into my leg from the pile of wood stacked near the fireplace. At first I plan to ignore it but then I wonder if the dream is trying to get my attention, so I glance down and see a pair of scissors. I'm not sure what to make of this but I grab them and take them with me. I go outside, where the sky is cloudy and half-lit as though it were dawn or dusk. I realize that this is wrong, and recall that it must already be after 9am in WL.

What was my task? I have difficulty remembering, so while I'm thinking about it, I decide to do something spontaneous. I'm still holding the scissors... I know! I'll cut off my hair. As I walk I reach awkwardly behind my head and randomly lift locks of hair with my left hand, cutting them near the scalp with the scissors held in my right. This all feels surprisingly lifelike, which makes me think momentarily: I had better be right that I am dreaming! But then I figure, what's the worst thing that could happen if I accidentally cut off my real hair? I'd have to shave my head? Not a big deal, I even did that once in college.

All this time I'm still trying to think of the tasks I had planned—why is it sometimes so hard to remember? Finally it comes to me. Right! I was going to try to roleplay a familiar character. I decide on Shriven, my WoW character, since I've played her the longest and also the most recently. My tabletop characters are much more psychologically complex, but I think I should probably start with something simpler. Okay, how do to this? I remember that I was going to try the narration technique. I start with something really basic: "Shriven is running," I murmur. My stride changes as I think I remember what her run looks like, becoming more mechanical. That part makes sense, given that she's digitally rendered. I don't have the impression that I look or feel any different, though. I keep trying, and although I don't recall my narrations in detail, I have the impression that they were extremely bland.

I'm running through city streets now. At one point I notice that the buildings all seem older, eighteenth-century maybe, though this still just looks like one of my typical dream cities rather than a more appropriate setting for what I'm trying to accomplish. I'm still cutting my hair as I go—having started, I feel like I should finish the job. When I finally slice through the last tress, I stop and gaze at my reflection in a store window. Not bad! Although short hair never really suits my features, the haircut itself turned out alright, kind of punk/pixieish. In fact, it even reminds me of Shriven's hair, which is short and spiky and irregular. However, there is no real resemblance, and in all other respects my reflection looks unusually like my WL appearance: same eyes, same face, same hair color. Usually in dreams I see a lot more distortion.

I use the scissors to make a few finishing touches to the haircut before realizing that it is pointless to be so finicky in a dream. In fact, I'm done with the scissors now... I'm just going to drop them on the ground! This always feels so liberating, since I would never do that in WL. I continue running effortlessly down the street and when I come to the end there is a ten foot gap to cross to reach a platform or walkway. Jump—you can do this! I clear the gap, just barely, and feel proud of myself as I land.

Still, I don't feel like I'm making much progress on my task so I try to figure out how to improve my approach. What does Shriven do? Well, she often summons her mount, an undead warhorse. I narrate this to myself, but nothing happens. Every time I do this in game the horse makes a distinctive shrill whinny, so I try to use the sound as a focal point. I find it becomes ambiguous whether I can hear the sound in the dream or if I'm just remembering it.

As I pass through a T-intersection, a blinding light directly ahead causes me to swerve. It is so bright that I assume it must be bleedthrough from RL. I remember the conversation between my colleague and her daughter that I overheard during my transition; with true dream logic I never questioned the impossibility of that taking place in my bedroom, and so now I assume that one of them must still be there, taking flash pictures. Instead of going straight into the light, my initial direction, I turn and take the street on the left, even turning my face away so to diminish the brightness. I can hear a voice from the direction of the light saying, "Don't shoot! Don't shoot!" So I was right about the camera, I conclude. At no point do I recognize the absurdity and error in my thought processes, but I do reflect that it is interesting that the environment made me change the direction I was going—is the dream trying to control my movement?

After this interruption, I go back to trying to summon the undead warhorse. It's still not working, but then I notice that the shop just ahead of me seems to have horse skulls hanging on the back wall. That's an improvement! I go into the shop, which is now a tiny space almost completely filled by a large bunkbed. A bearded man is lounging on the lower bunk, eating a meal and watching TV, while the upper bunk is shacked with sheepskins. I ask the man about the horse skulls.

"That's not a horse skull," he responds.

I realize he must be referring to the giant animal skull on the floor at my feet. It must be about three feet long. "What is it?"

"That's an academic-size magic detector," he answers, hardly taking his eyes off his TV program. Not sure what to make of his words, I look at the skull again. I realize it must have come from some kind of giant lizard, like a crocodile, but it has a small horn at the snout like a rhinocerous. As I study it, I see that it is now green and sparkling, the color offset with pale stripes. I am tempted to compare it to an Elvis suit, but fear that the proprietor might be offended.

FA: I wake up and start taking notes right away, starting from the last scene and moving backward. Fortunately I don't get very far before I realize I am writing on dream paper. I wake up for real and record my notes on my laptop.

I realized I am condensing my DJ entries down too much recently making them a bad read so going back to a more free flowing entry here. ~610am Wake from longish LD string. Work meeting scene. The board member shouldn't need to take video. CW there. I have a headache (bleeding through from IWL?) and massage my temples. Next memory is FA caught by "record skipping" FA. I am arriving to the wake up sensation at least 3 times in quick succession each lasting about the amount of time it takes for a vinyl record to rotate once...and repeating like a skipping record! I get up out of bed happy to have received this gift in this FA. As I make my way through the house with visuals not perfect I get the partial visual of my sleep mask covering my face as I walk, and I rip it off and throw it behind me. As I get to the front door I see there is a note on an index card by the door. I pause for a moment thinking if I'm awake I don't want to open the store and leave it open or unlocked putting my family security at risk so I better RC. I start to do the finger through palm and as it shows I'm awake I realize how inconsistent that one is and just look at both my hands but focus on my left one where one of my middle two fingers was noticeably longer than IWL . I grabbed the note by the door and start to read it but then look down what looks like an apartment building hall and the note is narrated to me in what is supposed to be my wife's voice saying "today is the day to bring out the garbage."(which it is!) I float fly through multiple halls and it is completely barren so far. I quickly peek over an overlook down to the floor below me hoping to catch a DC down there but it is also barren. I fly down to the lower floor and explore a little bit finding what looks like a door to the outside and when I open it it is a bright sunny summer day. I look across a big grassy open park-like area and see a building on the other side of it with lots of DC's gathered inside but starting to come out. I dump off all my clothes feeling free and fly their way thinking about what kind of reactions I might get. I approach a couple of young women and start to interact with them telling them it's time to remove their dresses but I seem to be too much inside my head thinking about something and the visuals fade but I do not fear waking up but rather hang on for the visuals to come back. (Something I am getting better and better at and following Sageous' suggestion to avoid following the more common path back to your sleeping body-NREM thread, possibly NREM reality check thread). During this quiet time in a void I reflect on the fact that I didn't get to any competition goals. The visuals eventually come back and I soon have a vivid sunny summertime scene again but this time it seems like I'm at of family reunion. I'm looking around at all of the DC's enjoying this vivid beautiful world and I look over to my right and see my grandmother who passed away several years ago sitting down and I go to greet her. It is so wonderful to see you I tell her as we each clasped the others hands facing each other. It's so feels like her hands warm and wrinkly! (I am choking up while reliving this lucid moment while transcribing this dream!) I asked her to hold on a moment and I release her hands since I use a certain motion of my hands as part of my recall of goals. I think of my mnemonic (memory) pegs and peg number 1 brings me to time control, stopping time. I know my trusty pocket watch with amazing time control is in my right hand and I start clicking it while looking around. At first it is not doing anything very much like the very first time I used this. I eventually get the DC's to freeze in time!..and they unfreeze as I release the "clicker." I play around with it a little bit more and then think about peg number 2 and decide to skip it and go to peg number 3. Neither 2 nor 3 are part of my 3 step task anyway only peg 1 then peg 6 and 8. I grabbed a football that is being thrown around and say check this out. I punt the ball with super strength way up into the sky and out of sight! Cool! I look back over at my grandmother and just behind her and to the right is my grandfather who passed away quite a number of years ago and who I thought about last time I thought about my grandmother and how I haven't been seeing him in my dreams. This time he is there!..but he starts morphing a little bit maybe looking more like his younger self when he was a teenager and then a boy! I grasp my grandmother's hands again realizing I should have spent more time in the dream with her asking her questions I'm saying what kind of responses I might get. The dream starts to fade. I hold on again and I arrive outside of a room indoors it's a little bit dark, dimly lit. There is a young black boy in the room and I walk in there and ask him what does he represent? He only says there's someone over here and I follow him around and out of the room and sitting on the bench is a short humanoid creature that looks like a weird boy, a little bit stocky with a large-ish head with dark short thick hair and black eyes. I asked him what it represents and try not to get freaked out by his unusual appearance and I realize I can wake up if I want to but I don't remember making the decision to. Either way I wake up for good this time. I think reading a couple of dream journals of other competition participants may have helped me recognize the false awakening at the beginning. One person, I forget who, was talking about some kind of incongruity being a common dream sign as a dream tries to adjust and readjust to fit the situation. Also maybe the same person or someone else mentioned how they handled a false awakening by quickly getting up and doing an RC when normally I would try to do a motionless RC but maybe I need to be more aggressive like I was when I noticed my FA and immediately took off.

21.11.2013 1/2

NON-DREAM DREAM LUCID

Eu não estava no sonho.
A única coisa que eu via era um tabuleiro com vários símbolos e desenhos.
Havia alguém narrando histórias/mitologias usando as imagens do tabuleiro.
Eu/alguém pedia pra esse narrador contar a história do Brasil usando o tabuleiro.
Numa determinada parte da narração aparecia um desenho era uma lula cinza/bege num círculo azul claro.

[This is a catch-up post. These dreams are from the night of November 18-19, 2010.]

Awake, Non-lucid, Lucid, [Commentary made while awake]

I'm in a theater, watching a film that turns out to be really scary and disturbing. The film begins with one Congressman sitting behind his desk in his office, while another is standing in front of his desk, calling him out on his shenanigans. The one behind the desk dies of a heart attack a few seconds after the one standing up finishes ranting. The ranter then starts an investigation of the one who died.

At this point, the film's narrator says, "The more he found, the more he refused to see." The Congressman performing the investigation stays in one place [I think it may have been the dead one's office, but I'm not positive] for such a long time that he eventually survives by cannibalism. One of the things he finds while investigating is a bag of marijuana, which he goes through, looking for cigarette butts. At the end of the film, there is a message from his family, left in vinyl-cling letters on the window: he got out and is now getting help.

The film ends, and I exit the theater and walk down the long flight of wide steps leading up to it. The theater is located inside Disneyland. [I've been having dreams featuring bizarre versions of Disneyland since I was a child, but this one really takes bizarre to a new level.] It's a beautiful, sunny afternoon. I walk through Fantasyland and into Toontown; the two share a long, open border with each other, with no transition point or hard line of demarcation between them. Riding on a moving walkway, I go past a turnaround mechanism for the Skyway - the big wheel that keeps the cable with all the buckets attached to it moving and allows the buckets to turn around and go back the other way. It is at ground level. The cable is there, has buckets attached to it, and is moving, but there's no loading/unloading station there, just the turnaround mechanism, all by itself.

I walk past Mickey's house. The path through Toontown dead-ends into a section of the queue for the Roger Rabbit ride. I decide I might as well stay there and get in line, now that I'm there; it was only about 4:00 P.M. the last time I looked at the time, so I have plenty of time to enjoy myself. [D'oh! Should have RCed.] I get in line, walking through an opening into the enclosed, indoor space where the queue is. I walk past a group of Cast Members who are singing a barbershop-quartet rendition of "Stray Cat Strut." I wait for them to finish, then tell them that I know where I'm supposed to go to get to the back of the line, and I'm not taking cuts in the line. They understand and let me pass. One of the Cast Members lets me get in line in front of him. This puts me in line directly behind Gary Coleman and some other little people. We introduce ourselves to each other politely; he goes first. I realize that I'm dreaming just as it's ending, when it's too late to do anything; I can already feel my real body.

I'm at a high school, in a room that has chairs in it, but no desks (possibly the drama classroom). One DC is talking at great length to a group of other DCs on the subject of her facial reconstruction surgery. I pull up a chair, joining the group, and listen. I introduce myself to the DC who has been talking. As we're shaking hands, she introduces herself to me as Anne-Marie. She says that she's ugly, and I automatically answer, "No, you're not." [She reminds me a little bit of real-life friend Dawn B. from college, now that I think of it.] She has dirty-blond hair in a ponytail, pale skin, and sunken, brown eyes. She has a black eye on one of them. I know nothing about her appearance is her fault, though, and I like people to be happy with themselves, so that's why I told her she wasn't ugly. In reply to my denial that she's ugly, she says, "Oh, are you another furry?" I answer, "No, but I am an anime fan." I know that she's an anime fan, too. We chat a bit more, and the conversation ends with our agreeing to eat lunch together.

At the end of the conversation, I have another “Oh, yeah, I'm dreaming” moment. The realization comes easily and naturally, the only specific trigger being that I'm in an unfamiliar place. [I had been MILDing again, so when I found myself lucid dreaming, I accepted and realized it readily because it was what I was expecting.] I take a look around. The classroom is irregularly-shaped, high-ceilinged, and sunlit from skylights. Visual clarity is good. I get down on the floor to feel the carpet, which is short, institutional, and gray. I start crawling on the carpet through the room, remarking to myself aloud: “I don't have any energy today. It's my own fault; I should have gone to bed earlier.” My dream body feels just as tired and sluggish as I know my real one does at this early hour of the morning. I've never experienced this in a lucid dream before, so I find it strange, so I comment on it and come up with a logical explanation for it.

“Why am I wearing this heavy backpack, anyway?” I say to myself, because, I realize, I am wearing one. It feels just like the ones I carried in junior high and high school, so it must be full of textbooks. I take it off, one strap at a time, and let it roll off my back and onto the floor. “That's better... a little,” I say. I can feel the absence of its weight, and I feel a little less tired, but not totally back to normal.

There is a full-length mirror on one side of the room. I stand up and go to look at myself in it. My hair is wavy again, and this time, it reaches all the way to my waist. “Oh, cool!” I say. “That's so pretty! I've always wanted it to be like this!” [While it certainly was pretty, I know very well that actually having hair that long would be really impractical... but, yeah, there evidently is a part of my mind that misses having long hair.] I'm wearing a bright sky-blue T-shirt with pink hearts and gold and silver swirls and sparkles on it, and a long, blue denim wraparound skirt. While looking at my reflection in the mirror, I reach for the outer flap of my skirt with my hands and try to touch it, but I can't feel anything there. When I look down at the skirt itself and try again, though, I can feel it. [That's a pretty cool and interesting difference between dreams and reality, and more (anecdotal) evidence that whatever you concentrate your direct perception on, your mind works harder to create.] I woke up after that.

There has been a contest to choose the guests who will attend a dinner party with a friendly, very easy-going, gray-haired woman who makes letters out of soft wax. I am at this dinner. There is another woman there who collects little figurines, including one that looks like a classic Hollywood actress. I mess up the top bar of the wax “E” that the first woman has made, making it all bent and chewed up so that she has to redo that part, but she doesn't mind because she loves doing her art. [It wasn't until I woke up and was writing down this dream that I recognized this woman as former Survivor contestant Gillian Larson, who was the guest speaker at a lunch seminar I went to last week.]

Third-person perspective. I'm watching a teenage girl walk around in a mall or a department store. She rides up an escalator, and I can see the bright-green lights glowing from the spaces between the steps. All the time she's walking around, I can hear a voice narrating her story. The words of the story are written in the first person with the teenage girl as the point-of-view character, but the voice reading them is Scott Sigler's. [Not surprisingly, as I just finished getting caught up on the latest episode of the Ancestor podcast an hour before I went to bed.] According to the narration, this girl “eats, sleeps, and breathes TV:” she has a name very similar to that of a specific, well-known TV character, she watches a lot of TV shows, and other aspects of her life are very similar to the situation on various TV shows. I'm aware that what Scott is reading is the first chapter of Ancestor. [The actual first chapter of Ancestor is absolutely nothing like this.]