Part of my research has shown that forcing yourself to remember dreams and writing them down right after waking up helps you to become more aware of your dream states and to improve your chances of lucid dreaming in the long run.
Tonight I had another intensely vivid dream that I was able to remember very well. I guess it’s too soon to tell if the Proteus is helping with this in any way, but it sure seems like it since I haven’t had intense, memorable dreams in months and now I’ve had two in a row…
Anyway, on to the dream:
Unlike most of the time when I remember my dreaming state and it seems like lots of different dreams over one night, this seemed like one fluid experience, though the “rules” and environment and characters kept changing.
I started with my little brother and a bunch of other people — I think we were running a business and/or in college, it had that kind of “we’re all working but we’re also all playing” vibe that my business and college both shared. We were in a huge house in one of those weird, vegetative suburbs you find in South Carolina where there’s kudzu everywhere and all the houses are sort of in disrepair. There was stuff EVERYWHERE. In hindsight we were clearly horders and we were worried about it. The police or protective services came and I kept trying to hide stuff from them as we were walking through… I had a big cabinet with computer parts (just like I do in my “real” office) and I kept fearing it would fall over. This fear was distracting me while I was giving the agents this tour. I was afraid they were going to take my brother.
After they finally left I went grocery shopping at this huuuuge Wal-Mart. It was more like a mega Sam’s Club. I actually think I’ve dreamt of this huge warehouse Wal-Mart before, by the way. I bought TON of groceries (for my standard) and filled the entire cart. I haven’t participated in a cart-filling experience with groceries since I was a child and went shopping with my mother. I remember buying a bunch of alternative milk products which were scattered all over the place. Soy milk, rice milk. It was confusing because they also had soy and milk alfredo sauces, nutmeg glazes and the like and they were all in the same basic kinds of containers. They also had alfredo and nutmeg and cinnamon flavored soy and rice milk, which sounded really good and which I wanted, which added to the confusion. I also bought some clothes.
When I came home (which was, this time, my childhood home — most of the time, in my dreams, my home is my childhood home) I went upstairs to my room and found that my groceries were already there, still in the cart, which I didn’t find strange. But most of the groceries were missing, they were rifled through, and my clothes were already packed in a suitcase. I thought (what I believed to be) very logically about the situation and determined that they “couldn’t have been stolen by someone else, because I wouldn’t have been able to bring them home without paying for them at the store.” Don’t ask me… but it made perfect sense in the dream.
So I went grocery shopping again. I think it was the same huge store but this time most of the warehouse was grayed out. There was one department off to the side where the groceries were very orderly laid out so that you were supposed to walk down each row, making your way towards the checkout area. I was looking for a part to my electric sink (instead of pipes it seemed to have several electrical wires, and there were basically three kinds of sink in this world, but they were otherwise universal). My friend Trevor, who has the same kind of Russian motorcycle/sidecar outfit as me in real life, was my uncle, and his son was my cousin Jamie, who was with him. They helped me pick out he right part. The very last two or three rows were fruit snacks and toys. I find this interesting because, in waking, I understand that these are the only two rows I was interested in when I was a child. All the fruit snacks and all the toys were thirty dollars. There was an insane variety of fruit snacks but all the toys were little toy helicopters, just in different packaging. I kept thinking how ridiculous overpriced everything was.
When I was driving home this time my brain turned it into an episode of Squidbillies (from Adult Swim). I was Early Cuyler all of a sudden. I was running for mayor (just like in real life), but driving home I hit someone and killed them. In Early Cuyler fashion, I decided this was a good opportunity. So I moved the body to the side of a busy road, maybe an interstate, and put up a big sign that said “Detective and Future Mayor of Columbia will Crack This Case Tonight.” And my address was on the sign.
So we went home and decided we had to cancel the event for some reason or another. Now it was a normal dream. I had someone go change the sign to read “postponed until further notice.”
I went about doing some kind of chore and became aware that there were two teenaged guys sitting at our table. It was the glass/bamboo table with bamboo chairs we had when I was a child. I asked them what was going on and they said, “We were just hoping to play a gig tonight.” Apparently they had been hired to play music at the crime-solving event. I apologized and they said “nah, it’s cool man.” I asked them if they wanted to go ahead and have a little campaign meeting and learn what my candidacy was all about and they said sure. Suddenly there were more and more of them until there were at least fifty of them, mostly girls, now, and they filled the entire living area of my old house.
I talked to some of them for a while. They seemed to be high school kids. They asked if I was cool with teens and I said I was “hip with the teens” in a funny way and they all laughed. I also used the expression “IMHO” and explained to them that it was my generation that began the use of acronyms and emoticons in popular culture. I noticed how huge the band was and asked if they were a symphony. No was the answer… “Well, what do you play?” “Guitars. Rock. Rock and roll music.” One of the girls, who seemed to be the leader, plugged in a microphone into an amp and was trying to get their attention. She finally began interviewing me through the mic but I could tell that the audio was really muffled and nobody could understand me. I wanted to just give up and use my speaking voice because I have a loud speaking voice and I thought that would be better…
Then my alarm went off.
The first part, about hoarding, is actually kind of fuzzy in my head but everything about the shopping and on from there I remember very clearly.
