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Tag: dreams

Storytelling while asleep

About a billion years ago in college, I used experience every dream trope (false awakening, lucid dreaming, and just extremely vivid, movie-like dreams), along with sleep paralysis (which is kind of like dreaming, but you’re awake). Now I mostly have somewhat vivid dreams if I’m lucky, and the most I can lucid dream is detect that I’m in a dream or wake up on command, but can’t control it or stay asleep.

Dream Terminology

False awakening— A dream where you wake up…but you’re not actually awake. You’re still dreaming and you dreamed you woke up. Bonus if you’re stuck in a false awakening loop. 😑

Lucid dreaming— The ability to control your dreams and be aware that you’re dreaming. When I had this, I basically stopped having nightmares because I could control the outcome.

Sleep paralysis— Not really dream-related, but you feel like you’re dreaming. Sometimes you might wake up and realize you can’t move or open your eyes. And YMMV on this, but a lot of people sense an evil or malevolent entity nearby. IIRC, this really isn’t paranormal, but more psychological.

  • Dream: That’s a Lotta Bathroom Stalls!

    Dream: That’s a Lotta Bathroom Stalls!

    First of All, About This House…

    In addition to the big house trope that seems to run rampant in my dreams, there is one house in particular that would appear in a lot of my dreams. It looked more like a Portal level designer came up with the architecture of the house. The house was mostly white and gray on the inside. The front door was centered right in the middle of the wall of the front room. Two (handrailess) staircases both started at the door and immediately split away from each other, each running alongside the walls, around the room and toward the back, which lead to more hallways. One of these back hallways lead to my room, and another staircase that led to the back door.

    So while you don’t have to parkour or shoot portals to walk across the room, it looks like a Portal level designer was told to make the interior of a house and just let loose his inner, nerdish desires.

    On With the Dream!

    In this dream, we moved into this house as usual. And while wandering through the house, I was starting to become aware that I’ve been in this dream before. And got really excited and went looking for the back staircase, because that was always my favorite part about this house.

    I didn’t find the staircase. What I found instead was a huge public bathroom. It looked like a school locker room, but not very well lit. And yeah, all the lockers were bathroom stalls.

    Yeah, like this, but with bathroom stalls instead of lockers. | Photo by Liz Weddon on Unsplash

    I was able to find the exit and found the “backroom” of a Disney Store, which was on the second level of a three level shopping mall (that btw, looked more like a cave than a shopping mall).

    (And btw, this part with my house being attached to a Disney Store was another recurring dream arc. Just not from the same one as the one with the Portal house.)

    I thought this was cool, but not as cool as the dreams where I end up at an abandoned version of Downtown Disney (more like Disneypolis, since it’s huge compared to Downtown Disney), and have to trek through Abandoned!Disneyland only to find myself at Abandoned!CSUCI. And decided to go back inside.

    Except when I went back to the bathroom area, I couldn’t find the entrance to the house. I went through aisles and aisles of bathroom stalls only to find more aisles of bathroom stalls. I probably made about 20 turns through the area, but it was like a giant grid of aisles that kept endlessly generating more aisles as I ran through.

    Eventually, I found an intersection with a pool table in the middle. A well-dressed gentleman approached me and threw some brochures on the pool table. He could help me find my way, he said, if I was willing to pay for some insurance. I thought about it. I didn’t want to have to pay to find my way back to my own house, but I did spend about what seemed like half an hour, traversing an abnormally large bathroom.

    Then my alarm woke me up. The end.

    (And here, I would’ve liked to have known: did I take up his offer?? Was he legit?? Etc. But work calls.)

  • Dream: A Modern Oregon Trail

    Dream: A Modern Oregon Trail

    Written May 3, 2018

    Had a dream where I was Sakura (from Card Captor Sakura) and just led a whole bunch of people on a long exodus to safety. We stopped at a relative’s house in Sacramento for rest. Then no one wanted to move on because everyone decided that THIS house was their promised land (relative was ok with this).

    But I still needed to go back rescue my teacher/mentor type person, who was trapped a bad guy’s lair. Shaoran was pissed and refused to say goodbye, so I went ahead to gather up supplies on my own (insert emotional anime-esque scene while Sakura experiences self-doubt over leaving Shaoran but knew she had to save her teacher). I asked my mom for a horse and wagon (my own mom, not Sakura’s mom). She went to the yard to find a possibly covered wagon for me, while I looked at the horses (there was an orange filly playing in the sprinklers).

    Like this, but it had a raft instead of the green metal part.

    Eventually my mom found a wagon for me…which looked like a huge wagon you’d find at a hardware store but instead of the metal wagon part, there was an inflatable raft. And yeah, it had tires. I knew that this wagon would be helpful in crossing rivers, and wondered if we could’ve missed the promised land, because none of us wanted to figure out how to caulk a wagon and didn’t bother with trying to cross. Then I wondered how the Oregon Trail would’ve been if they used inflatable rafts when crossing. When I woke up, I knew that ‘oh wait, all it takes is for a rock to hit it and the wagon is gone.’ The end

  • Dream: When WordPress Gets Spoopy

    I was editing a client’s site with WordPress, when a trackpad glitch made the word I was trying to link to become split into 2 links (so one half of the link was pointing to one URL and the other to another URL). Because of that, it screamed in pain.

    👻

  • A Time Traveler’s Dream (Two Parts)

    This entire dream had some form of time travel as a theme, broken up into a couple smaller dreams.

    Dream #1

    I found an article online that supposedly came from the far future, claiming that there was a conspiracy that the US president (in the future) had somehow manipulated asteroids into hitting Earth to test our planetary defenses. I then wondered if a super mystical warrior type (like a Jedi, one of the guys from Dragonball Z or someone like an Earthbender from Avatar) could reflect the rocks back into space or at least destroy them to keep them from hitting the ground and causing damage (and imagined an action sequence where the scenes involving the Jedi/Z Warrior/Earthbender using super reflexes to catch the rocks, sped up and when it got to the more suspenseful parts, slowed down like a lot of action movies).

    I feel like Obama actually did send for some Z Warrior-type guys to deflect the rocks.

    Dream #2

    (This was a very animeish-looking dream, in art style, music, pacing, story, etc.)

    There was a secret order dedicated to maintaining the balance of the Earth. The ones who had the power to maintain it were called the Guardians (a group of girls, which I was a part of). Everyone else protected the Guardians and were basically people like scientists, engineers, boss people, guards or assistants. Despite their status, the Guardians were actually subordinates of the boss people and had strict rules laid down for them.

    There was one moment where the scientists were trying out time travel and managed to open a portal into the very far future. We only saw a giant redwood tree in a forest, and realized that there was an apocalypse, which had wiped out most of mankind. While one of the scientists tried climbing the tree to leave a marker there (so when our time caught up with this future, we would be able to find the marker on the tree to tell if this really was the future we were seeing). He ended up falling and was greeted by a post-apocalyptic survivor, a plucky 12 year old girl. Upon finding out that they were from the past, she explained that  after the apocalypse, the surviving humans wound up living in trees, since all the buildings had been destroyed.  When the scientist tried climbing the tree again, I noticed the girl staring into the stream, with an almost sad look on her face.

    Later on, one of the Guardians (who looked a little like Tieve in her oracle outfit) noticed her cat wasn’t feeling well. The head guard, a young 20ish to early 30s sighed and ordered two of his guards to follow him, so they could escort the Guardian to the vet. When they got back, the other Guardians could tell that the cat was feeling a little better, but his owner was looking a little depressed.