Date of dream: Thursday, November 24, 2011
Level of Lucidity:
Level of Cohesiveness:
Rating:
Lucid Intent?
Yes
Lucid Technique: WILD
This dream has been viewed 176 times.
At the start of the dream, I was a female police officer. I was in prison, which was a large cage with iron bars in the middle of a dark library at night. I was lying on the floor of the cage.
...
I had a (possibly false) awakening from a dream I can't remember. Immediately I tried to go back into the dream while holding the knowledge that it was a dream. When I was back in, I found myself sitting on the grass with a pad of paper and a pencil in my hands. It was a form with blanks to be filled in. I was still vaguely aware of my body lying in bed and didn't want to do anything that might wake me up (afraid that if I stood or jumped, my body might do the same) so I decided to seek guidance from the dream. I wrote on the paper in clear text "What is my dream job?" Then I watched my hand write "SLIDESHOW SCREEN FILM DIRECTOR." I read this and repeated it aloud a few times, then woke myself up to record it so I wouldn't forget. (This, however, was a false awakening.) I told my wife about the dream and wrote it down.
...
When I went "back" to sleep, I was with my family in the small town where my dad grew up with his 2 dads. (Not so in reality.) It started as the library from the first dream, but the rows of books became rows of houses and the aisles became streets, and the ground sloped downward and ended with a synagogue at the back wall. The town looked fake, with a wrap-around background on which the sky was painted. It reminded me of the view of San Francisco from Alcatraz island. (He lived in San Francisco for a few years before meeting my mom in Texas.)
All the shops were closed. My grandfathers announced that they were going to get a divorce. Then the town was being torn apart, and we were trying to save important relics from their past. I was gathering religious items. (My grandparents are Holocaust survivors.) I was looking for cards from a half-finished Tarot deck. The rows of houses alternately looked like rows of books from the library and rows of benches in a synagogue. Nazis and police were brutalizing people all over, locking them in cages and tearing their skin off. I met a woman who'd welded her earrings and necklace together and screwed it into her jaw so that they couldn't be taken away from her.
Additional Comments:
I think I was sitting on the grass in front of a large drive-in theater movie screen when I asked about my dream job, which would explain the answer. I've never had any desire to be any kind of director.
Date of dream: Saturday, November 19, 2011
Level of Lucidity:
Level of Cohesiveness:
Rating:
Lucid Intent?
No
Lucid Technique: WBTB
This dream has been viewed 198 times.
I slept from 10 AM to 12:15 (midnight) after taking half of an extended-release cyclobenzaprine. (A non-narcotic muscle relaxer I got as a sample from my doctor but didn't like because it was so sedating... apparently it works great as a sleeping pill!) Dreamed I was in New York visiting my sister and met with a lot of religious leaders who were professors at the college she was attending. These dreams felt very significant but my memories are too hazy to record anything that makes sense.
...
I went back to sleep around 4:45 and slept until 8:45. These dreams are from when I went back to sleep.
I was in a grocery store with my wife. We were fugitives (from what had happened in the last dream, but I didn't remember that yet). We were approached by the store manager who said the police were on the way. I grabbed a package of fancy cheese and ran across the store where I found a display of wine bottles. At this point, I remembered that I'd done this before and knew which wines I needed to take. Then my wife and I split up. (We now looked like Peter and Lois from Family Guy.)
My memory gets vague here but at some point I was standing in a courtroom in front of a judge, and I ran into a room across the hall where I set one of the wine bottles down and picked up a set of keys from the table. Then I was running down a spiral staircase. Now I realized that I was repeating a dream I'd just had hours earlier, and realized that I knew what to do because I'd done it before. I threw the cheese on the stairs and stepped on it, which somehow made me run faster. Then I got into the elevator at the bottom of the stairs. I had two bottles of red wine and one bottle of white wine, and I pushed the elevator button quickly (with one of the bottles), knowing it was a short matter of time before the elevator attendant recognized me. He did by the time we got to the bottom but my wife was there and we started running again.
I knew that this was a dream, because I remembered that I had just dreamed the same thing, but was focused on finishing it, like playing a video game again to get a higher score. It didn't occur to me to do anything else.
...
Next, I dreamed that I was standing by the backyard sliding glass door, looking through the blinds at the back fence. There was a second fence right behind it leading to the neighbor's yard (in reality there's a funeral home there) and both mine and his gates were open, and his dogs had gotten into our backyard. He was there, trying to get them out. He looked like Chuck Norris. He looked up and I thought he saw me at the window, but then I turned my head and saw that I was actually in my bedroom, in bed. (This wasn't a false awakening, as I thought I was already awake the whole time.)
...
My house looked very much like it does in waking life, but where I live with my wife, in this dream I was living with my brother and sister. It was still my house, though. The backyard was overgrown and I had that piece of cheese from the earlier dream, which I'd wrapped in a few dead spiky leaves from a palm tree and planted in the garden. I was showing him which areas needed special attention when mowing the lawn and weeding and trimming, so we wouldn't get another overgrowth violation from the city.
The neighbors were playing VERY loud music. Both my brother and sister were yelling at them to turn it off, and he went up to the fence and yelled something rude. I said (projecting but not yelling, as I was on the other side of the yard) "Could you just turn it down a little, please?" I was hoping to compensate for their rude approach, and felt like if I apologized for their behavior right in front of them I would be offending them.
A few of the neighbors jumped over the fence and got into an argument with my brother and sister, and I said "I'm sorry, it shouldn't have been addressed that way. But would you turn the volume down, please?" They went back over the fence and they did turn it down, and I thanked them.
Then my mom and dad came into the backyard, lugging a large fishtank which she intended to use as some kind of sensory deprivation tank for therapy. They also had the base of a carousel, and it was large and pink, with shallow indentations like where paint would go on a palette. Suddenly, a SWAT team of 15 men and 5 police officers with dogs ran into the yard. I hoped they wouldn't search the house and find a massive stash of hallucinogens in my room. Instead, they dug up a gigantic plastic mushroom which was painted in shades of purple, pink, and white. This piece screwed into the base of the carousel. The police left.
Everyone cleared out of the backyard. I walked up to a shed along the side of the house near the fence (not there in reality) and was messing with the lightswitches. I realized that the one I'd assumed didn't work actually turned on the light in the shed. The lights were very faint, and I looked closely to see the type of bulb so that I could replace them with brighter ones. I saw a "red/green" switch at the base of each and realized that this was a darkroom! I ran out to tell someone that I'd discovered a darkroom and ran into a group of elderly people at the gate. One of them asked the time, and I said, "I'm sorry, I don't have a watch," but suddenly there WAS a watch on my wrist. It said 1:45. Then it said 2:45. Then it said 2:52. (I didn't recognize that this indicated a dream and thought that my watch might be broken.)
I walked with them for a while, talking with the old lady who'd asked the time. She said she used to work 3 days a week, and I told her I did as well (12-hour shifts x 3 shifts a week is full time.) I asked what she used to do, wondering if she'd been a nurse as well. She handed me a brochure which told her autobiography in short paragraphs. (The text did not change, and it was easy to read.) She had been raised Christian, but then went to India and became involved in the Hindu religion. We talked about religion for a while.
When I went back to the house, I saw that the congregation from my synagogue had set up rows of chairs in front of the house and were holding their Shabbat services there. I sat down next to my wife and sister and we all prayed. Near the end of the service, they started passing bibles around and I wondered if this was actually a Messianic group trying to convert us. One of my neighbors sat in the row in front of us. He turned and asked, "Did you really believe the shit they're feeding you?" I said I do believe there is a Gd in some form. (My beliefs about Gd aren't the ones I was raised with.)
Additional Comments:
Strange that the switch turned on the lights in the shed, because light switches have always been a reliable symbol for me. They never work in my dreams. Strange that the elevator worked, as well. Also very frustrated that I missed the sign when the watch displayed different times.
When I woke up, I was very relieved when I realized that the argument with the neighbors had been a dream, and we were still on good terms. I'd dreamed at some point that I cut Molly's tail off because she'd stuck it in the garbage can and I didn't want to wash it. I was also very relieved to find that I hadn't actually done that.
I'm sure the cyclobenzaprine had an effect on my dreams, as it has anticholinergic properties and works something like TCAs.
Date of dream: Sunday, October 16, 2011
Level of Lucidity:
N/A
Level of Cohesiveness:
Rating:
Lucid Intent?
Yes
Lucid Technique: WBTB
This dream has been viewed 231 times.
I was at work. A patient who looked about my age (mid-20s) came up from the ER, sinus tachycardia in the 120s to 140s. Someone had put an IV in a vein in the lower abdominal area and I flushed it with saline. He was talking nonsense, seemed like an anticholinergic delirium, and first he was saying he was 22, then 102, then 24, then 104. The temperature was elevated. I was taking notes in both English and Hebrew. I don't remember my English notes but then my dad was in the room, reading my Hebrew notes, and the text did not change, but there was one word I didn't know that I'd written down and my dad translated it as "freedom", but I don't think that's really what it meant. I'd also mis-spelled some words so they looked like different words to him.
...
I was looking at my teeth in the mirror. They were very yellow and the surfaces were uneven, so I went to see a dentist. He said something simple and dismissive (told me to take my vitamins or something). Later (I was nowhere in this scene), a health inspector came by his office and killed him, smeared the blood all over the door.
...
There was a human pony contest. Three people in fetish gear were standing next to a fence, hands cuffed to it, each with a sparkly pole of a different color beside them. I watched the judges come and award first and second prize. Then Amberly came and stood next to me. The winner's Master came to uncuff and congratulate her. They were friends of ours so we talked with them.
...
I was back at the dentist's office, but this time I was investigatiing the crime. I was in a room that looked like one of the patients' rooms on my floor, a double room, and it was crowded with beds because my family and two neighbors were living in it temporarily. I was sitting on a chair between two beds and taking notes, and accidentally turned on the shower (which was in the middle of the room and sprayed my sister, waking her up).
Then I was getting the stuff set up for an IV and we were the vampire and the girl from Twilight (???) and I was starting an IV on her. We were having this dramatic and ridiculous movie dialogue as I started a 22g IV in the right forearm. It was a quick, easy start with no blood dripping between withdrawing the needle and attaching the tubing. I removed the old IV, which was more like a PICC in the other forearm, and suddenly I was the investigator again. Even though the dressing had just come off of my sister's arm, I saved it as evidence because I had a feeling that the blood on it was actually either the victim's or the murderer's blood.
...
I was at a friend's house in Texas. Every wall in every room was covered with pictures, art, and clocks from floor to ceiling. I noticed that the clocks were set to different hours. The first two I saw read 1:45 and 2:45, and they were each off by increments of an hour (X:45). At this time, it might've actually been 2:45 PM.
...
I was watching a job interview for a very high-paying position. 10 to 15 applicants were lined up with shovels and were told to dig their own grave. Ultimately, the last one still digging was the one who got the job because she was the only one who thought getting the job was worth digging the grave. (It was deep and took a lot of time and effort.)
This woman owned a number of post offices in rural areas. 12 of her postal trucks were being converted to armored cars and staffed with Red Cross and Magen David Adom volunteers to act as ambulances that did only blood transfusions. I went inside one of them (I was a volunteer and her apprentice) and saw a few chairs where the transfusions were given, and above the windows, lots of racks filled with bottles and jars of salt.
There was a press event one night and I presented my badge, then asked the guy at the desk (and asked that this be off camera) if they give transfusions of human blood to animals, too. He said that they did. The strange thing is that as I was asking this, another part of my mind was also watching this on TV (which is why I asked that it not be recorded, but obviously it was recorded anyway). The camera was recording from a point a few feet behind me on my right.
Additional Comments:
I went to sleep around 4 AM, after taking half a sleeping pill, then another half 30 minutes later with some wine. Over the next 12 hours, I woke up 5 or 6 times and went to get some water or check my e-mail, then went back to sleep each time. (The half-life of the sleeping pill is shorter than 3 hours.)
Most of the dreams that I remembered and recorded happened in the last 1 or 2 sleep periods.
The clocks and writing have been showing up in my dream a lot more since I've been focusing again on lucid dreaming, but they don't *change* even though there's always something a little weird about them, so as dream symbols, they haven't triggered lucid dreams yet.
I'm marking it as a recurring dream because much of it took place at work, and a third to half of my dreams take place at work.
