A Sinister DJ, Helplessness, and a Giant Hand

Note: All normal dreams.

Before I get started, I want to mention that I tried something new last night after having recent problems with dream recall. I ate a couple slices of american cheese before I hit the sack. I read on LD4all, that this could help. I've tried bananas and chocolate as well, but neither has worked to this extent (in fact, bananas seem to be counter-productive). I have also been taking a Ginkgo supplement twice a day for about three days now.

I think I missed a large part of my first dream due to something kind of comical. I wrote all about it in my dream journal. Lots of detail - the works!

Turns out; I had a dream about writing in my dream journal as well :D Needless to say, 90% of the first dream is lost to me now. Here is what I remember (only a fragment):

There is a Rocky Horror Picture Show type guy standing on a first floor balcony on the corner of a narrow European small town street. The balcony is large, and has no railing. He is making a crazy face, and begins to put on a blonde, long haired wig (it was 80s hair band style). Once he gets the wig on it morphs into an Egyptian style head dress. The type you see on King Tut, etc.

JUMP

As for the dream journal, it is apparently my online blog, but it isn't formatted like this. It looks more like the admin page where you can edit posts and whatnot. The posts all have arrow heads next to them that you can click on to rearrange the order. I am having a hard time deciding what order to place tonights dreams into.

JUMP

I think that I am a female. I am being held hostage in a basement by a woman in a red dress. Eventually, she has to make her way upstairs for something, and commands me to follow her. She tells me that if I say anything to anyone, I will pay dearly.

On the ground level there is a big square counter in the middle of the room, and many people standing around it. I recognize these people as law enforcement officers and detectives. Knowing this, I begin to say something, but one glance from the woman shuts me up. Once she has done what she needs to do we make our way back through the crowd towards the stairs. I know it's now or never, so I work up the courage to speak to the first person I see. It is a detective wearing a black sports coat. I spill the beans, but he just stares at me blankly. Oh no! This can't be happening! I try another and another, but I get the same response.

Finally I talk to a security guard (mall security or something), who hears what I am saying, and we dash off towards the stairs down. Apparently the woman has run down the stairs again.

We reach the stairs and the lights are not on. I ask the guard if he has a flashlight, and he says that he does. Luckily, I have one too (go figure), and I take it out and switch it on.

By now, the guard has moved out of my range of sight, so I hurry down the dark stairs.

JUMP

I find myself in a dark sewer tunnel, reminiscent of the Imperial City sewers of Oblivion. I am no longer a woman, it seems. The walls are yellow/brown sandstone blocks, and there is rubble strewn about. It doesn't strike me as odd that the stairs leading to the room I was held captive in, now lead to an ancient sewer tunnel...

I look around for the security guard; swinging the thin beam of my flashlight back and forth, into the oppressive darkness further down the tunnel. I see blood splatters on the floor, and notice a pair of black boots being drug behind a crumbling pillar.

Oh no! I have a very bad feeling of impending doom. I have to get out! I swing the flashlight around, looking for the exit, and briefly worry about it drawing attention to myself. I see a stone staircase leading up, against the wall to my left. I run for it.

JUMP

The staircase winds up, and up. I remember having come this way many times before, but it all seemed very safe then. I am still being chased by something or someone. The horrible monster that I could have envisioned before, seems to have been replaced by a man (a man wearing red and black for some reason). The chase seems to be more of a high stakes competition to reach the top now, than a run for my life. I am in the lead, but I feel him closing in. Strangely, I fear him closing in. Not like I am scared to lose the competition, but some sort of fear of harm.

As I run, I begin to notice tiny chunks of glass (the way safety glass looks when you shatter it) littering the floor. I stop for a second to look around, and see that the walls and most of the architecture has changed to an iron and glass mixture. There are bridges spanning the room from side to side that seem to be made from thin, intricately woven bands of iron or lead, and all the gaps are filled with clear glass. Much like a stained glass window, if you were to use clear glass instead. There is a bit of light filtering down from tall windows far above.

As I look around, a humongous hand hurdles towards me from above and tries to snatch me up. The hand is attached to a long scaly arm, fading away into the darkness above. I dodge, and take cover under an iron and glass bridge. The hand begins to slam the top of the bridge, and the whole thing start to collapse. I quickly search for another overhang of some sort to take refuge under. This goes on for long minutes, as the entire room is made of crumbling glass structures that are broken by the hand as fast as i can dive under them. I am terribly frightened, and cry out "Why?, I have come this way before!" a deep voice calls back "You are brown. It is Tuesday." This is confusing, and I wonder if it is referring to the color of my skin, or something else all together (I am Caucasian, so this furthers my confusion). I ask what it means. The voice tells me that it is referring to the brown squadron. On Tuesdays the brown squadron is forbidden, and will be eaten. Apparently I am a member of the brown squadron.

I run towards a stairwell that leads up. The creature is frantically smashing iron and glass to reach me, but I manage to narrowly avoid it's grasp. My opponent has caught up to me now as well, and as a last resort, we hurdle through a broken window in the side of the stairwell and out of the building.

We are many stories up, and begin to plummet to the earth below. The two of us grab for what look like black rubber chords strapped all up and down the building, apparently holding it together. We get our grip, and begin rappelling down.

The walls of the building seem to be made from large red vinyl balloons. The type that firemen use in rescues, when someone has to jump from a great height. The balloons are held in place by the black chords.

We slide effortlessly down, and at some point I begin to slide between the bands and the vinyl like a snake. This is odd, but a very smooth feeling. It is hard to explain. It is a bit like flying, because gravity has no effect and I am able to just slide along the curves of the balloons.

JUMP

We reach the ground, and suddenly we are both rather chummy. I guess the situation has forced us to cooperate and forget about the competition. For a moment, the man felt like Arnold Schwarzenegger, but he did not look the same. I think I was just supposed to get the action hero vibe from him.

I look around and it appears that we are on the shore of a small river in the Amazon rain forest. There is smooth sand under our feet, like a beach. I have no shoes on, and it feels great. I am very relaxed, and look around in comfort, enjoying the scenery.

There were two women with us now as well. One is Latino, and I recognize her from the show Lost, when she smiles at me (although she didn't look like any of the characters from Lost). I turn to the man and say something about how nice it is to be the best two male actors on Lost. He laughs and agrees with me. I say "Well Ok, so I'm not on the show, but..." My brain begins to churn through that statement, and logical thinking floods in.

AWAKENING

I drift back to sleep after using the bathroom. This dream is very short, due to the fact that I am in that hazy half-sleep just before morning.

I am apparently the Master of Half-empty and Half-full. I have an innate ability to distinguish between a half empty glass of water and a half full glass of water. Apparently, I can also tell you how many dice are in a row (don't ask me).

Near the end of the dream I have a sheet of black and white stickers with half-empty and half-full glasses of water and columns of four dice on them. I am peeling the stickers off and arranging them in a row around my wife's midriff.

AWAKENING

----------------

So, I have concluded, that I will eat cheese again tonight :)

Tanks on the Beach

I was really angry when I woke up this morning, because once again I remembered nothing of my dreams.

I was making pancakes for the fam, when something came back to me:

I was on some type of open-air tank with my Father and my Mother. The tank had two giant launchers mounted behind the cab. We were driving over a flat area of beach, but it seemed to be in the middle of a city, with tall apartment style buildings rising up all around us.

I was trying to load a munition into the launcher. The bomb had a bulbous front end that tapered into an X shaped fin. It was black, and about two feet long. I had to shove the munition back into the barrel of the cannon until it clicked in (like some suction cup guns, etc). I tried and tried to click it in, but it just wouldn't stick. This was very, very nerve racking, because the bomb had an impact fuse in the front, and that is where I had to shove on it to slide it in again and again.



Finally, I couldn't take it anymore, grabbed the bomb by the tail fins and heaved it out in front of our vehicle. It made a nice little explosion that I really didn't pay much attention to.

My father told me to load the next one. When I pick it up, I find that it is mangled and bent in different directions. I know I have to load it, so I try and get it down the barrel. It's not fitting. I try to bend it back into position, and even use my teeth to yank at the fins. Finally I manage to twist it enough to slide it into the barrel.

As soon as it is in, my Father launches it. I cower in a corner, as I am sure the thing can't possibly work as advertised. I could have sworn that it went off right behind me, catching me in it's blast. The feeling was really kind of frightening. I look around to survey the damage, and find that it didn't explode behind me after all. My Father points out behind the vehicle, and I see a mound of interestingly shaped shrapnel embedded in the ground (which looks like smooth, wet sand).

I remember wanting to gather the mound of shrapnel up in order to use it as an example for something.

AWAKENING

Just Words

Two word stuck in my head when I awoke today:

"Conscious Overload"

I don't know what I was dreaming about, but it certainly didn't ring true :( Not even a Conscious Trickle, here. I am having a real dry spell.

I did wake up briefly in the middle of the night, and remember two other words. I tried to commit them to memory before I fell back asleep, but they were gone when I woke up this morning. They both began with the letter "C", though.

I tried out the FILD technique when I drifted back to sleep, but I fell out before I remembered to RC...

I ate a couple Hersey's kisses before I went to bed last night, in hopes that my seratonin would have a boost. No luck.

Seems like my dream video camera is broken or something... I'm only getting audio (and very little at that)!

Wish me luck over the weekend!!

Nephilim

Another night without dream recall... Although I did remember a single word upon waking:

Nephilim.

Since I cannot remember anything else about the dream, here is what Wikipedia has to say about the Nephilim:


"In the Torah and several non-canonical Jewish and early Christian writings, nephilim (Hebrew, הנּפלים, those causing others to fall) are a people created by the crossbreeding of the sons of God (b'nei elohim, בני האלהים) and the "daughters of men"^[1]. The word nephilim is loosely translated as giants or titans in some translations of the Bible, and is left as nephilim in others:

When man began to multiply on the face of the land and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of man were attractive. And they took as their wives any they chose. Then the LORD said, "My Spirit shall not abide in man forever, for he is flesh: his days shall be 120 years." The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of man and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown."

Oh, and I tried the earplugs out last night. It was infinitely easier to get to sleep, but I woke up before my alarm went off feeling uncomfortable. My ear canals were sweating and irritated.

Maybe it just takes some getting used to...

Frustration

No dream recall last night, so I thought I would take the opportunity to talk about how frustrating it is to have so little control.

I might just be a little more flustered than usual, since I went from my first fully lucid dream a couple nights ago, to not remembering a single dream last night. What could be more frustrating? I wouldn't classify myself as a control freak, but to have almost NO control over how often, and how well I remember my dreams is irritating to say the least. I wake up and know that I just had a dream, but cannot even come up with a theme!

What if I have been having lucid dreams, one after the other, but have simply forgotten? Knowing that this is a real possibility is also frustrating.

I woke up after about five hours of sleep last night and performed the same activities as I did the night of my last real LD. I used the bathroom, got a small drink and lay back down to attempt a WILD. I remember NOTHING when I wake up in the morning. You would think that I would at least have some recall considering I had an entire LD and full recall last time. Then again, my wife was making more noise than usual last night. Maybe that has some influence, too.

There was one thing that I did differently, though: I ate a banana. I have heard that this is supposed to heighten awareness in dreams, but the last two times that I have tried it as an aid, my recall has been nil the following morning.

I think I might try a Ginkgo supplement, as it is supposed to help with memory. I am thinking about giving ear plugs a shot as well... I have a fitted pair from work. I will just have to tell my wife to kick me if I don't hear the alarm.

Must just be tough, trying to teach this old dog new tricks. Too bad I didn't hear about this while I was still a little more impressionable.

Too Much FFXII

Note: This is a very vague normal dream.

I am in a town that must be nestled in the mountains somewhere. Valleys intersect at the town from all eight compass directions.

A weather report warns that a huge coldfront will be blowing in from the North West. The report says that it is due to Shiva. I have to assume that this is referring to the Final Fantasy Shiva, and not the Demigod, due to the fact that it apparently controls the cold weather, and that I have been playing way too much FFXII lately. Not to mention the fact that as soon as the weather report ended, some text flashed over my dream reading "SHIVA - The hunt is on", making me assume that in order to save the town from the weather, someone had to go out NW and vanquish her.

Eventually, though, the dream degrades into one of those half waking daydreams. It seems that the weather is influenced by what I type out in my dream journal, although I can't seem to get it right, and all sorts of weather I do not desire keeps popping up, prompting me to make another entry in the journal.

AWAKENING

Weird, eh? Too bad this wouldn't work in real life. I command the weather to SNOW!!

Nothing? Ah, well...

Keep the Guns, Dumby!

Note: Normal dream.

There is much more to this dream, but I fell back asleep before writing it down.

A friend and I are clearing out a small village of ogres in true RPG fashion, while working our way toward the main building.

I think we are using guns. We are entering every house so as to kill every ogre and not miss a single treasure.

We switch weapons to swords. I pull out a huge rough-edged blade. The whole thing looks very heavy, but is actually quite light.

We backtrack two houses to one that we apparently missed. The door swings open, and an ogre inside points his sword at us (it looks a lot like mine. Maybe I picked mine up from an earlier kill). We prepare to attack when one of the ogres points a gun at us and fires. I am hit! I don't know where, and it doesn't physically hurt, but I spin around like one would expect to when hit by a bullet.

The ogre laughs and steps out of the house, firing again. This time I feel the bullet pass though my cheek and out the other. It is not painful, but definitely disturbing to be shot in the face.

I feel things going downhill, and wonder what my friend is doing. We should not have switched to swords...

AWAKENING