Images: Serith's Dreams

[Serith]

I had another lucid dream last night.  I'm doing much better at lucid dreaming than I did last school year; back then I hardly ever had lucid dreams on school nights.

I was in the upper level of my house, and most of the lights were out.  I was completely certain I was awake, but something about the way everything seemed made me do a reality check, which proved to me that I was dreaming. 

I went up to a candle, and tried to see if I could light it with my mind.  While I was trying, a plant on the wall brushed against me, moving slightly on it's own, but I ignored it.  Then, it reached out, and tried to grab me, but I hit it away.  Suddenly, it grew ten feet long, grabbed me around the waist, and lifted me into the air!.  Quickly, I broke it at the place where it reached the wall, and it stopped moving.  I headed downstairs, towards a brighter room.

While I was walking, a strange hooded figure grabbed me.  He resembled a nightmare figure that I remember encountering, many years ago.  His robes were dark, and completely hid his true form.  He was much shorter than the nightmare I had encountered, but I was very young then, so it makes sense he'd seem less tall now.  Instead of just fighting his grip, I threw back his hood, to see his true form.  I was slightly surprised to see he looked human.

With his disguise thrown off, he began to talk to me.  He told me that he was bothering me because he enjoyed making things difficult for lucid dreamers.  At that, we were suddenly outside. He still had a grip on me, and suddenly, he threw me, fifty feet up, and far away.



As I stopped gaining altitude, I began to glide.  The hooded figure was far behind me, and I was examining something painted onto the ground.  The painting was of many large, similar maps.  I thought of them as maps of the internet, but actually, they looked more like maps of South America.  As I began losing altitude, I tried switching to true flight, but it didn't work, and I landed safely in what was either a mall, or a large airport.

I went into what looked like a Tex-Mex restaurant, and decided to order a churro.  Suddenly, I remembered that I wanted to visit the Mortal Mist Dreamscape, but when I checked my pockets, I couldn't find my tablet stylus, so I went back to what I had been doing.  The restaurant only had three churros left, and other people got them first.  I took one, and left my wallet as payment.  However, even though I know I wasn't inconveniencing any real people, I still felt guilty, and gave it back.  I saw some sort of dessert pizza, and took that.  It seemed like a very strange food at the time, although things like that do exist in real life.  It was divided into four pieces.  One was delicious, but the other four weren't, because they contained things like hamburger, and rocks.

Fragment:  At school, end of the day.  My painting II teacher is teaching a class that isn't an art class, and the class is being run in the north commons, instead of in a classroom.

[Serith]

There was someone important, I could somehow find him or his younger self just by concentrating.  A store, I came in with a cart half full of stuff I owned, and was worried they'd think I stole it.  Another store, selling fake magic things, and other things I disapproved of.

[Serith]

I remember one dream, following a hero figure.  Who he was changed drastically over time, and he even had a shark's head once, but the whole time he was the same generic superman type hero, who escaped the destruction of his people.

For a while I saw things through his perspective, then I was traveling in a small group including him.  We had to escape a space station before it blew up, but right before we escaped, I found I was unable to continue because I couldn't fit through some small passage I needed to get through.  Then, I woke up.


With this drawing, I'm switching from using Painter to using Photoshop.  It'll probably take me at least a year to really learn it, but once I do, I should be able to do a lot more than I ever could with Painter.

[maniakalBycikle]

Haha, his head looks funny sideways like that. 

For what your doing, photoshop isn't all that difficult.  Just focus on learning how to make and use custom brushes.  If you have any questions, please ask, there's a good group of people here that are very knowledgeable about photoshop. 

Good luck!   

[Serith]

I remembered a lot of dreams, but not very clearly, and none of them made much sense.  Some of them made sense for a while, but I think I re-entered dreams several times while trying to make sure I remembered what happened, and when I re-entered the dreams, the new dream was not quite the same dream as the previous one..

Swimming between islands.  One island has only one person living on it, a kid.  I meet some strange other person there, who I don't think is a normal person. He's death, or maybe something else.  I remembered that dream as being lucid, although I have no idea why.   Then I re-entered the dream, and the guy who was death or something now has a painting for a head like the drawing in my signature, only his painting is more abstract.  It's night, and he's trying to gain entry to some area.


Then there was some sort of zombie epidemic, but everyone got better.  We played this weird game that was vaguely like baseball, and a character from Heroes was invisibly making sure no one left.

Traveling along the rails, then a man in a van kidnaps a cartoon character.  A strange computer interface in a darkened room.

[Serith]

I was playing a video game on the GP2X.  I was amazed at the realistic 3D graphics, because the GP2X is a handheld gaming system with very limited graphical capabilities, and these graphics far exceeded those capabilities.  The game was set at a dark, empty town, beside the ocean.  I was collecting various items laying around, hoping I'd find uses for them. 

I didn't see any signs of life in the game until the dream was almost over.  I was heading for the docks, when out of a strange door, an angry dog started running towards me.



I panicked, and the dog got me, and the screen went blank.  Fortunately, the game resumed, back at the point when I first saw the dog.  I soon learned that if I ran straight at the dog, I'd jump over it, giving me some time to do something before the dog could turn around.  I tried going through the door, but that shut just before I reached it, and the dog reached me, and the game ended again.  I tried escaping by sea, but the tides were too strong to survive that, and that restarted the game too.  The dream ended before I could find a way to get past that part of the game.

[Serith]

I remembered something unusual last night; the beginning of a dream.  It was not a WILD, and I don't think I was awake when it started.  I think what it was was the transition into REM sleep. 

It started as one of the illogical chains of thought that I sometimes find myself drifting into just before sleeping or just after waking.  Sometimes, when I'm suddenly awoken at odd times in the middle of the night, I find that I was in the middle of one of those chains of thought, so I think that's what non-REM dreams consist of, at least for me.

Anyway, I was experiencing this, and the thoughts gradually became more orderly, and soon images faded in. I found I was in a gigantic garage, the kind of place where they'd keep airplanes.  There was a vehicle, it was strange, then it was an ordinary truck.  There was a story, but it was just a continuation of the chain of thoughts from before, so it didn't make much sense.  I remembered the transition into visual dreaming, and vaguely realized that it meant I was dreaming, but my mind was still following illogical thinking patterns, so I ignored this.

--
I was on some Star Wars desert planet.  All the food was free, and all of it was awful.  I was at a bar, and I was supposed to protect someone from something.  The lights went out, and those little desert creatures with the robes and the glowing eyes began to appear.

--
I had to get to school, but I was miles and miles southeast of where I needed to be.  It's an amazing area to drive through, but I was in a hurry, so I was trying to get through it as fast as possible.


I checked my speed, and I was going at least ninety miles an hour.  I knew this was extremely unsafe on that road, but I couldn't slow down fast enough.  Suddenly, all across the roads were people, bicyclists, strange creatures, and other things that I didn't want to hit.  I had to go off the road a little, but I just managed to avoid hitting anything.

[mu]

The beginning of the dream stuff is interesting. I've noticed that sometimes if I'm really tired during the day. It's pretty similar to image streaming too, when the images form, and thoughts become more orderly. Wasn't there something about a giant airplane type garage in another one of your dreams?

[Serith]

The beginning of the dream stuff is interesting. I've noticed that sometimes if I'm really tired during the day. It's pretty similar to image streaming too, when the images form, and thoughts become more orderly. Wasn't there something about a giant airplane type garage in another one of your dreams?

Yes, there was, that was the dream where I tried eating light.  Both structures are obviously based on the SAC museum in Omaha, Nebraska, where my uncle used to work restoring old military aircraft for display, which I had visited not long before the first dream.

Maybe image streaming works because of that similarity between it and these chains of illogical thought.   I should try it again; if I combine it with WBTB it should be much more successful, and I might even be able to use it to WILD.

[Serith]

Many hazy, possibly N-REM dreams of posting on MM.  The clearest of them was of suggesting to someone that they should try doing math in their dreams, then of trying it myself.  The most complicated thing I tried was something like 4x3, and even that took a while.  I woke up immediately after grasping the solution.
----
I tried WILD, but I just fell asleep normally.
----
I was in a shifting, unstable setting that I thought was like the movie Waking Life, without realizing that that meant that I was dreaming.  One segment kept repeating where I encountered a criminal with a knife, and I got stabbed several times.  It was very unpleasant, but not really painful.  Then  I had to find some special tool  for something, that was supposed to not disappear, but it did. 

Then I went walking.  At one point in a library someone refused to let me move on, but someone else convinced them to do otherwise.  I reached the entrance of something that looked like a mausoleum, a gryphon-like creature attacked me, and everything turned into a video game.

[Serith]

Last night's dreams were completely boring and uninteresting, and I was not looking forward to trying to figure out how to draw them, so this is one of the few times that I'm glad I forgot them all within an hour of waking.

[Serith]

Since I only remembered one fragment, instead of taking the time to make something in photoshop, I just painted this quickly in my painting class.



I had a new gaming system.  It reminded me a little of the Pandora, and also of the GBA SP, and it's screen could swivel like a tablet PC monitor.  I had difficulty getting it to turn on, but eventually it worked.

[Serith]

I can make comics much faster in photoshop, so I think I might do this more often.  This still took much longer than I'd normally want to spend on dream journaling, but I think I'll get faster over time, and most dreams won't require quite as many panels.

[mu]

I really like the comic format. The images have such a dream-like quality, you capture that very well. The `someplace safe' panel is particularly interesting, I'm not sure why. It looks like there is a ghostly face on the right, that's pretty weird. The guardian sure is creepy. You have some strange looking characters in your dreams.

[Serith]

I'm glad you liked it.  Really, the "somewhere safe" panel didn't turn out like I wanted it to at all, but I didn't want to redraw it.  The guardian was very creepy, fortunately it didn't get any closer to me than the other side of that fence in the last panel.

I had planned to do another comic for today, and got very far on it, but it wasn't turning out like I wanted it to at all, and I had already finished everything but the color and the words before I realized that the problem was that Photoshop wasn't detecting pressure sensitivity from my tablet.  Restarting the computer fixed that, but I don't have nearly enough time to redraw it like it really needs, so text only today.


My brother had learned lucid dreaming.  We were in our school's library, and he realized he was dreaming, and began to fly.  "You're not dreaming", I said to him, and he began to fall.  "Just kidding", I said, and he managed to land safely.  Other people in the school had also realized that they were dreaming, and were flying around.  I was lucid, but nothing interesting happened.

I got a job at Burger King, and it was really easy.  No one ever really required me to work.  Then my dad showed up and he wanted me to leave, but I didn't think my shift was up.  Then I realized I didn't know the hours or even the pay, and the dream ended as I tried to learn this.

I had a tiled ceiling, and the tiles could lift up to reveal a large space above, which held a large number of interesting things, including a large collection of books.  I wanted to see what was up there, but it was all covered with lots of dust, which I was allergic to, and I knew if I tried to get in there it would get in my eyes and be really unpleasant.