A Nice Place

I was sitting on a large, rounded platform carved out of polished red granite that floated  in a clear blue sky. I was high above an empty sea with not a speck of land in sight; I was totally isolated on my granite platform, and I loved it. 

There was no sound save for the faint traces of churning water below and the hum of a soft but constant breeze. Maybe I was moving, maybe I wasn’t; there weren’t any real landmarks to be able to say for sure.  After enjoying the seclusion for a while I decided to test my personal limits of lucid dreaming. Starting small, I brought out a wooden stool to sit on and a beat-up guitar to play. 

The guitar wasn’t supposed to be old and worn down, so that’s probably something I need to work on. When I actually got around to playing it, the sound was off and I realized that the strings weren’t even in the positions that an actual guitar would place them in. It still sounded nice, however, so I left it as is and tooled around playing some tunes for a good long while.

Sleepover

The dream started with some friends of mine coming over to spend the night watching movies. Five people showed up, and we put on a cheesy-looking old horror movie. Most of the time was spent talking and poking fun at the quality of the movie we were watching and eventually I felt like taking a quick walk to get some fresh air. I got up and walked out onto the porch and noticed that I wasn’t even at my own house. The overhang to the porch was almost like a patio and the grass in the yard was more like dark green leaves; instead of houses, the neighborhood was a road passing between fenced-away fields of tall grass. As I walked I felt and heard it rain, but I didn’t get a sense of where I was going. For that moment I was just moving through the rain.

When I got back home, a few of my friends were already sleeping, and the ones who weren’t asked me where I had wandered off to. Apparently I had been gone for over thirty minutes, not just one or two. The movie was over and it was getting late. The dream segued into the morning. My friends were still present and accounted for and we were still in the same house with the small patio out front. However, we were all in the backyard. I wanted for our group to explore by hopping some fences and checking out what was past a line of trees but nobody else wanted to go along with me. So I settled for just walking up to the fence and checking out as much as I could from there.

To the right of the house was a massive lot filled with tall and faded yellow grass and spindly white trees, one of which branched off so many times from its trunk that it looked almost like a blossom of bones rising out of the dead grass. This was the field I wanted to pass through, but quickly I noticed several objects showing just over the top of the swaying grass. 

Gravestones.

The yard next to us was a massive and degrading cemetery. While I felt that would only make exploring more fun, my friends disagreed and I moved on to check out the yard on the other side. To the left of the house was a small pond, filled with algae. A dream character (I want to say it was a man in a wading suit, but I can't picture him clearly) appeared and started to explain to me that the lake we saw was the only natural lake in the state. He motioned me towards the boat, telling me that it was a swamp boat designed for easy travel in shallow water. It was at this point that I realized that somebody was watching TV in the house and the sounds of what they were watching were bleeding into my dream. I got in and paddled around for a bit and as I was doing laps around the small “lake” I noticed two things; there were no fish in the water and the pond was actually cut off from the main lake by a fence. Every so often I would see a ray nonchalantly swim past the fence. What really got me, however, was that the fence was an ordinary chain-link fence. What kept the lake from flowing into the pond was some kind of clear plastic that coated the fence and extended out over the surface of the lake for a few feet. It was flexible and bulged up with the tide.

Suddenly I found myself in a stone auditorium that was lit by a glowing fungus that was dotted all over the ceiling and on a few rocks around the edges of the room. There were other people seated in there with me but I could not recognize them and my friends were nowhere to be found. There was an exit to my right but I was a bit reluctant to take it. I had no idea where I was, where this tunnel led, or what could possibly lay waiting inside. So I sat in the pale glow of the fungus and peered into the tunnel. I could not see anything but I could hear small rocks clattering. The way they sounded was like somebody rolling stones around as if they were dice; they’d quietly echo off through the tunnel for a few seconds before dying down and resuming a few moments later. They didn’t really sound like they were getting closer, either.

Soon enough I mustered the will to go into the tunnel and was cut short; the feeling of blackness surrounded me and I woke up. Afterwards, I tried using a DEILD to get back into the dream in a completely lucid state but I didn’t have any luck.

Naptime Adventures

I was watching a concert on television. There was a man playing a cello on stage, before a large crowd of people in formal suits. As the man played, blurred shadows resembling people began to appear and sway about between him and the crowd. The music grew more intense and the figures grew more defined, turning solid black. Shadows swirled around the cellist and through his microphone he spoke.

                 

“It was a good life while it lasted.”

The shadows surrounded him and whirled around the stage; the cellist slowly vanished and his cello dropped to the floor with a resounding thud. Applause erupted from the then silent crowd and I left to the next room, feeling confused and a bit sick. The next room was another stage with teenagers everywhere. A girl was singing a song in a foreign language that sounded like it would be called psychopop. Lots of screaming but still bubbly at the same time. Her song finished and she walked off-stage and sat at a table for a short Q&A session. She signed autographs, took pictures with her fans, all the stuff you would expect a musical artist on concert would do on concert. I walked up to her to get an autograph but instead of an autograph, she slipped me a small piece of paper with the numbers 21025 on it.

I woke up to get a glass of water, stayed up for a bit to note what I just wrote down, and went back to sleep. I dreamt that I was in the courtyard of an old mansion. A group of shadow people stood around a broken fountain and they all turned their “heads” towards me as quickly as I noticed them. I say “heads” because they weren’t very solid and looked more like human-shaped clouds of smoke. I tried running away, but they managed to get me into a corner. Even though they were made of smoke, I couldn’t pass through them for some reason. Out of nowhere, three men in strange clothing appeared and fought away the shadows. One of the men had a sword, which surprised me a bit more than it should have. They were wearing something that looked like a business suit without a jacket and a beanie with earflaps, a red silk shirt with black slacks, and a biker outfit and cowboy hat. Very random. I don’t remember much after that, except for the man in the red silk shirt dancing around the courtyard while the other two stood around awkwardly watching him.

The detail of this dream was pretty good. It makes me glad that my dream recall is beginning to improve.

Current Situations

The sky was dark and I was sitting in the driver's seat of a truck. With me was a small, portable television, some kind of smart phone, and an assault rifle that was propped up in the passenger seat. 

I was IMing somebody named Ryan on the phone, talking about “current situations” and otherwise just keeping each other company. I know a guy named Ryan in real life, but I highly doubt that this was the same person. We spoke like didn’t really know each other. Every so often the silence would be broken by gunfire echoing from off in the distance. 

The television, which was playing what looked like a daytime talk show, suddenly cut to black and displayed a no signal message. The phone started to buzz and I answered it; Ryan said that “they” had finally gotten to the TV station, and that it would be smart of me to get moving. He then told me to fire three times into the air. 

So I took the assault rifle, aimed it up out of the window, and fired a quick spray of shots. When I did, I woke up.

I think I may have had this dream, or one related to it, before. A few months ago I was woken up early and I couldn't remember what I had dreamed about. All I could remember was a very fuzzy monochrome image of people shooting at something in a ditch. There was a lot of static, like it was being played on an analog television set.

Making the Grade

Tonight my dream had me walking down the length of a very long building which seemed to stretch on forever. 

With me was a group of about ten or so people that looked about my age; one of them had a bike. Nobody really said anything, and soon we came upon a door that we stood around. One at a time, the students went inside and went up the flight of stairs that landed next to the door. Each one would come out after a minute or so and declare a grade. I don’t remember many of them, but the highest was a 94 and the lowest was something like 86. Eventually it was my turn, so I went up. 

The building looked and sounded like it was totally empty, but at the top of the stairs I could see that one classroom was open. In it was a large group of students, each one of them writing studiously into notebooks or onto loose-leaf papers. A man was sitting at the desk at the front of the room, reading a book. He hardly seemed to notice me come in. As I walked up to him, the teacher set down his book and said just one thing to me.

“What are you willing to give up to make the grade?”

Without really thinking about it I said that I would give up my drawing talent (of which I have little to start with).

He picked up a pen and jotted this down onto a ledger and said to me, “You get a 97. Come back on the next X.” This confused me, but he wouldn’t elaborate about what, when, or where the next X was. Leaving the classroom I noticed that the building was now full of people. I slid down the stairs and almost knocked a few people over on my ride down and went back outside where the group of students was waiting. Upon hearing my grade they slowly started to clap.