I had a dream that I was playing N64 with my brother. We were playing Mario Kart, and ended up goofing off around the castle area in Royal Raceway. I realized something was off though, when I noticed that we were racing in the Mario 64 version of the castle, and that my brother was driving around in the moat.

Something clicked at this point, and it was as if time stopped.
I knew I was in a dream, and had full control over it.

I got up, and went outside, where I decided to try some things.
I started off with altering our car.
Like clicking in a computer program (literally) I was able to change the paint job, and even what it actually was. until looking away and then back at it anyway. for some reason after looking away from something it would reset it back to what I remembered it was.

I decided to try some Magic, like in The Elder Scrolls.
This was interesting, I could do it, but it had no effect on the world. Any structure of immune to even the most powerful I could think of. I never tried it on any people or animals.

After I was done experimenting, I re-entered our house, to continue the game I was playing with my brother.
There was the game, still paused and my brother holding the controller.
I sat down picked up my controller, then looked over at my brother, to realize that his eyes were black voids, his nose looked like it had been cut off, and his mouth was sewn shut.
I jolted awake at this point.

Oh wow, quite the mood whiplash at the end there.

My own experience with managing to stay asleep when I realize I'm dreaming is a bit similar. I can sort of do a few things if I will them, but not necessarily everything I want to do. This is something I really want to explore further, though the chance doesn't come often.

I can confirm that you can learn to do this, but in the process it is very easy to deprive yourself of sleep.

So, bit of a short one here. I successfully induced a lucid dream.. I walked by someone (My sister) holding a kitten. I decided to turn around to look at it, and saw it staring directly at me... This startled me awake. It wasn't so much scary, as it caught me by surprise, and left me thinking: "DAMMIT!"

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Edited by: The_Shadow , Jun 5th, 2019 @ 12:49 am

Okay, after various attempts to intentionally lucid dream, I've come to the realization that my brain runs at about a million miles per hour.
Any little stray thought or distraction changes things, and I loose focus real quick.

In the end... I really cannot describe some of the results... It's been full-on random.

Two nights ago I dreamed that I became an Indian.

Not someone from India, or a Native American, but a Cleveland Indian!

I was checking my personal Gmail account and noticed an interesting e-mail. Supposedly it was from the Cleveland Indians baseball team. Out of curiosity, I opened it. To my shock, it informed me that I had been drafted by the Indians organization in the 18th round of the Major League Baseball draft. The communication was quite polished - it had a dark blue "letterhead" with the Indians' modern 'C' logo (no Chief Wahoo here). The text of the e-mail said something similar to the following:



I was initially skeptical of this communication, since I haven't exactly been a baseball superstar at the college or high school levels! However, I logged on to MLB.com and saw that someone with my name and college (the one I went to for grad school) had indeed been selected by the Indians in the 18th round of the MLB draft.

Now I was trying to figure out what to do next. I'm not really qualified to be a professional baseball player, but ever since I was a little kid, I thought it would be awesome to become one. I thought maybe I should reach out to a coach and do a cram course in baseball fundamentals so I could try to fake my way through the rookie leagues (which might make for a great baseball comedy movie!). It would've been better to get picked by the Cubs, of course, but it's hard for me to be too picky when I hadn't even been trying to get drafted!

However, I also began to weigh the downsides of this. I'd have to quit my current job and turn my life upside-down, and I knew my odds of reaching the big leagues are really, really low. I also knew there was a good chance that I was taking away an opportunity from someone who'd attended the same school who had a realistic chance of turning his love of the game into a career. (I suspected that this draft choice stemmed from a case of mistaken identity - they somehow thought I was someone else who actually was a baseball player from my college).

Sadly, the dream ended before it could reach a resolution, but this was quite an interesting one!

Also, I haven't had much experience with lucid dreaming before. This is about as close as I've ever gotten.
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Edited by: Bibby , Aug 24th, 2019 @ 7:34 pm

Something odd I've noticed about lucid dreams. Trying to read text, it appears as a mess of jumbled letters and numbers, in varying size. This isn't the case when I'm not in full control of the dream, text seems to be perfectly legible.

Such was the case of a recent dream. It started off I was a McDonalds ordering a burger...or something...
I ordered the 1/2lb grillburger. (Yeah, I know. That's a DQ item. I never said my dreams made much sense.)

I had the realization that something was out of place, in this case the order system. they had long since phased out the person at the till, in favor of an automated system.

At this point I had the realization: "Wait... I'm dreaming!? Darn... that sounds d*** tasty too!"

Things didn't last much past this as after looking at the items available to order, it was suddenly a bunch of illegible randomized text, and seemed to be moving, and floating as well.

With a "Wait, what the hell!?" I woke up...and had to eat something.

My dreams tend to be very, very abstract. Settings can change in an instant. There will be no logic or cohesion to any of the following, so add "for some reason" to basically every statement ahead.

Anyway...

At the start, I'm following the perspective (in first person) of a nurse who has very mild suspicions that brain control technology was being worked on in her hospital. She asks a coworker about it and gets rather rudely shot down about it, then when said coworker storms off she spots something on the wall down the hall the other way that was labelled like it was meant for her. She goes and grabs a thick tube-looking thing off the wall above the weirdly targeted label and then some voice message plays in her head (which as a side note was somehow more audible on the... right side... of the back of her head... yeah, I don't know how to adequately explain this bit) while she falls on the floor and convulses and has a headache in the upper leftward region but is still completely aware of everything no differently than before. Also her left leg turned green for the duration of this. The voice in the voice message sounded like your average TV or movie flavor of psycho, and he was putting on a show in said hospital meant to slowly show the people within it that brain control was a real thing and they needed to "open their eyes" or something. The grab-tube-and-get-message thing happened two more times with different messages and leg colors (red, then blue), and each time there were additional labels showing up where they were before underneath the thing holding the mysterious tubes.

A lot happened between then and the next bits, but sadly I've forgotten most of it.

There was a part where I was with my best friend who was temporarily back from Colorado, and his dad was somehow alive again. His dad notices me eyeballing an interesting looking small CRT TV with a very weird layout on it, and asks me what I want to give for it. For whatever reason, the thing I was interested in on that TV was the fact that it looked ancient (think wooden furniture and brown coloring, but somehow in small form) but had S-Video proudly on it.

At some point this segment just switched into part of some cartoon that looked like it was drawn in the Justice League style, but I remember next to none of this part of the dream. ;-; There was some kind of invasion of little robots, but it was quickly contained and sent away from the Earth. When the Earth itself was shown, it was a low poly imperfectly-shaped sphere with rather low resolution textures. And said textures were not linearly blended or anything - they were raw and pixelly.

After that the setting completely changed again. Instead I was now following the perspective of some Indian looking teenager who was now walking out of a huge-normous grocery store. He walks out the door, and gets into the back of some box truck with the back of said box open. He sits down and looks out the back, and is then confronted by some police investigator that had just walked up. Apparently he was a witness for something, but the police dude didn't actually want him involved, so after they talked the cop gave him a very sad look and didn't try to get him back off the truck. The truck then slowly takes off, all the while the cop is just standing there watching him with a very sad look on his face.

Suddenly things switch up again, but the setting doesn't change much. The person in the back of the box truck is now me. I'm riding without any kind of seatbelt or things to hold on to - it's just a flat rubber bed. (I'm not sure that's even a real thing in real box trucks.) Eventually as we go down the road, I somehow climb up on top and move up to the cab (still on top) and try to hold on for dear life that way. At that point I realize that the driver is my dad. For the duration of this trip, my dad talks to me about memories of stuff that happened on the street we were riding down. Eventually we reach a point where the truck can't make clearance (there was an entrance it needed to get through but it was too tall to make it), so we stop and I climb down.

There was yet another completely different section of dream here but I've forgotten it pretty much entirely.

Suddenly I'm inside a huge house with lots of stairways, and I'm just running up and down some of those stairs for my own amusement. A lady walks up from a sideways hallway and sees me, and kindly asks what I'm up to. I let her know that I'm procrastinating (which I was doing, actually, I went to sleep out of stress because I can't figure out some work thing that's due Monday - but I just left it at "I'm procrastinating" in the dream.) She says, "Procrastinating, huh? Hey, how old are you?" "26." "Can you help me with something?" "I guess, sure." "Are you familiar with housewife shopping?" I give her a weird look, then through dream magic we're instantly in a different room but yet I knew I had followed her there. There's a small muted "flatscreen" CRT TV mounted in the wall with various ads being cycled through on some nondescript shopping channel, and there's a big bearded fellow sitting on a plastic chair in front of it and to my left. The lady explains that it's simple, it's nothing, I just choose a product and call up a publisher (???), which she then assures me that they somehow know less about this process than I do, and I'm to let the round fellow in front of me do most of the talking. She then takes off with no more to go on than that. I look at the TV again, and it's showing a lady's hand slowly shaving the side of some beach-browned white guy's leg. I then woke up extremely confused.

I have no idea if "housewife shopping" is actually a thing but if it is it's probably nothing like... uh, whatever that was!

Edit 10/12/2019: I should clarify that in the hospital part of the dream, where I said that the lady's leg changed colors, I don't at all mean in a gross or realistic way. I really truly meant that they, for whatever dream magic reason, turned entirely (no skin texture or anything) solid colors, like the first one was even greener than Piccolo from Dragon Ball green.
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Edited by: Miles , Oct 12th, 2019 @ 8:25 pm

Miles dreams are always interesting indeed. The latest one is particularly interesting because many of the details bear an uncanny similarity to the medical adventure a certain friend of mine had been through just a few days before your dream. I'm pretty sure that Miles has never met this friend in real life, but the dream actually sounds like something she could've had!

For those worried about my friend, she's all right - they just ran some special tests to get to the bottom of some health problems she'd been wrestling with for a long time. I am also fairly confident that she was not a test subject for the latest innovations in mind control.

It's interesting that the sounds seem to be more audible on the right side of the nurse's head. Perhaps the Brain Control Technology folks are focusing their efforts on certain regions of the brain responsible for different tasks. For example, the right parietal lobe plays a key role in language processing, and if you're trying to control someone's mind, it would be useful to be able to transmit messages directly to the brain (or perhaps block stimuli that you didn't want the subject to receive). I am no neuroscientist, but those are my random comments on the latest Zany Miles Dream.

I've had a couple of entertaining dreams lately.

A few weeks ago, I dreamed that I attended a wedding in a church I'd never seen before. The groom was apparently the pastor of said church. The groom resembles the younger version of a gentleman I knew years ago - he was the son of my late next-door neighbors. Like the dream world person, he was a pastor. The bride looked a little like the older version of the new girlfriend of one of my friends. After the wedding ceremony was over, all the guests were going to surprise this pastor with a surprise reception (he spent so much time working that he hadn't even planned a party for the wedding!). However, the pastor had already retreated to his study in the church basement. There was a "normal" way to access this study through a staircase somewhere in the church, but we didn't know how to get there. So instead we took the alternate entrance - a long, narrow slide on the outside of the building. I am not chubby in real life, but apparently I got stuck near the bottom of the slide, and the dream ended. (Freud would probably have a field day with this.)

Yes, I have a lot of dreams about weddings, even though I've never really attended a wedding before!

I had another dream while I was on vacation (possibly the same night Miles had his dream). My company's IT department recently held a bowling tournament - it took place a few days after my dream. I dreamed that I went to this bowling tournament but was very surprised to see what I saw! We weren't expecting this, but assorted corporate VIPs had suddenly informed us of their plans to attend. The co-chair of the committee I'm on (the group that plans these events) was very dressed up - she wore a red dress shirt and a kind of fancy black skirt. I saw my department head, and he was also dressed more formally than usual (especially considering the invitation specifically asks attendees to dress casually). At the bowling tournament, people typically help themselves and sit where they want, but some of us were preparing plates full of food and assigning seats for the executive folks who were rumored to be coming. The dream ended before I got a chance to find out whether the VIP-y folks were actually going to visit.

Weird Vacation Dreams strike again. A few nights ago, I dreamed that I hung out with three incredibly random people:

1. A very good friend of mine who was my successor as president of my college's defunct IT club. I talk to him just about every day.
2. A girl that my mom taught 15 years ago. We talk every blue moon.*
3. Some random guy on another team at work. I barely know him, but I pass him in the hallways from time to time.

We went to Wendy's. Exciting.

Also, the girl's dreamy counterpart decided to dye her hair black and cut it shorter than usual. I have no idea why (it could have something to do with her Pokemon Go persona).

Later in the dream, we all went to a church service on a Thursday morning. I don't know why. Maybe it's because my department at work tries to discourage working from home, but if we convinced them that we were expected to go to church at this odd hour, we could convince the IT executive folks that some people needed to work from home and take an hour break during the morning for religious reasons.

And no, this doesn't make sense. At all.

* Coincidentally, this girl is the inspiration for one of the four default characters in my Bibby RPG Engine. The groom in my previous dream is also a member of this party.