First, I accidentally saw some Russian TV series (of the usual variety with boring camera shots and wooden acting) that used the opening music from Stargate Atlantis overlaid onto an original video sequence. Needless to say, I was enraged.

Later, I was wandering around the microdistrict looking for a place where I could buy the European WOTLK. (Because—and that’s a real life fact here—only the Russian version is present in retail stores. Mind you—now this is from the dream once again—I checked an Internet shop before, but its delivery time was listed as one to two weeks, and I was understandably unimpressed.) I found it in a fictional location that has already been present in one dream before that—in that one, it was the site of a WoW-ish battle between some dwarves and… a different clan of dwarves, I think, although I don’t remember.

In both dreams, that fictional building displaced the square with my former school and the nearby hospital and kindergarten. This may be another emerging stock location. Its distinctive feature is a white hallway with windows at one side and doors at the other, resembling the school and hospital from Evangelion, as well as the actual school that the building replaces.

In this particular dream, one of the rooms behind the doors was a medical-looking office, in which I bought a WOTLK box using my Visa Electron. Incidentally, along with it, I also took another card out of my pocket: the white keycard I use to open the door at work. They commented on that.

And once again, I found myself unwilling to wake up because it would mean losing the newly-acquired game. In all seriousness, this has to stop. Today I’ll go to the nearest academ.org office, buy a WebMoney card, and just buy the bloody key online. Screw the box, and screw Blizzard retailers.

Added: While I could find neither the means to buy WebMoney cards nor the means to transfer from a Visa to a WebMoney account, amazingly enough, Blizzard made it possible to upgrade the account online. At long last… Now I’m looking at the download screen instead of playing the game for the 3 hours remaining before I sleep because I can’t play the TBC client with a WOTLK account. “Thanks”, Blizzard.

And once again it’s related to my activities in WoW just before going to sleep. It’s seriously getting irritating.

Helik (I think it was Helik) wanted to hold this week’s guild meeting in Un’Goro instead of the traditional Forest Song, so, while hopping through Un’Goro, I pointed out that many guild members will be too low-level to get there safely.

As usual, there was something related to WoW—but the details escape me.

What imprinted in my mind was a navy-related scene, which occurred in a place resembling the coast of the Ob Sea, but with a steep slope resembling those I saw on the banks of the river Katun. A brand new vessel with newest technologies, painted white and red, specifically built for a captain who was an acquaintance of mine (in real life, I don’t know any captains), was being ceremonially put into the water. However, it fell on one side and nearly drowned, and it had to be taken out of the water and modified to remedy an unforeseen design flaw.

When it was launched the second time, it got out of control, and its weapons (what were they doing on a civilian vessel?) promptly started firing on battleships in the bay, sinking a few of them.

Apparently, this particular scene was invoked by my attempt to get onto The Kraken (brand new by WoW standards) from Stormwind Harbor just to see what would happen to me if I tried to sail to Northrend without the expansion. In the game, it teleported me back to the pier.

It’s interesting to note that so far, my dreams that I’ve written about here have been directly influenced by what I was doing just before falling asleep. Three years ago, I successfully induced a particular occurrence in a dream, although not quite the way I expected. Perhaps it’s time to repeat the experiment?

It’s also interesting to note that I hardly remembered anything about the dream at all immediately after getting up, and it “clicked” in my memory when I was viewing a completely unrelated picture about an hour later.

Occurred almost entirely in WoW, in my traditional deep immersion gaming fashion.

Erales lamented my inability to follow him to Northrend, so, eventually, I gave up and upgraded my account to WOTLK just to be able to visit Northrend, even though I was too low-level for it. After that, as we were standing in Stormwind Harbor, it turned out he didn’t like the zone where the ship went—so I teleported us both to Menethil (simply by thinking about it!) to board the ship bound for the other zone.

However, before we could, I noticed that my character was somehow level 64 (so far, only 48 in reality), which meant I was eligible for a death knight. I went to the character creation screen and started creating a draenei DK—fortunately, the random appearance that was there from the start more or less matched the one I wanted to play.

As I was waking up, I found myself unwilling to, on the grounds that all that would cease to exist and I would find myself once again with a TBC account and no death knight.

Way too chaotic. I woke up three times, I think, and I hardly remember what happened between the awakenings. I don’t have a habit of getting up and reaching for the pen and notebook to write the keywords, although I do have them lying on my table specifically for that.

However, I remember that they were centered around Atlantis from Stargate Atlantis, which makes sense because I was reading episode summaries before I went to sleep. Also, in the dream, I mused how expensive the computer books I was interested in were, which also makes sense because I went to a bookstore on the way home yesterday and irritatedly noted the same thing.

Written in Russian. I’m posting this mostly for myself, so I can one day rewrite the descriptions in English.

• Post 1
• Post 2
• Post 3

I was at the Ring, going downstairs in the direction of the post office with someone and discussing a famous person, possibly a writer, who apparently lived in my neighborhood. We were discussing why anyone like that would live in such a mudhole.

I think my grandmother also made a brief appearance, possibly at the bus stop.

Later on, I was at a lecture in a hall resembling the one in the new sports complex, except it was a separate building in a fictitious location that nevertheless appeared in one of my earlier dreams. Suddenly, my father barged in and started arguing with the teacher, saying that his discipline (something math-related, possibly related to the theory of probability) had no practical applications.

Also, in the dream, someone on linux.org.ru found one of the websites made with our predecessors’ system, and people laughed at it.

Two parts.

In the first part, the annoying relatives were back, and we had another collective meal, during which some strange dot-like object started floating through the room, bouncing off walls. I thought that it could be a black hole, and that there could be ugly consequences for me if it touched me, so I went out of the room, and everyone else soon followed.

Later, they all went into the car, and I didn’t fit, much to my delight—so I used the excuse to remain outside.

I then went to the “pirated CD and DVD shop” from the video. They were showing a movie for passers-by—an Indiana Jones movie other than the real four. I noted this fact, but decided it could be some kind of Expanded Universe movie.

Later still, I was in a routed taxi, and for some reason, it was passing by our house (they don’t actually). I missed the stop, so I asked the driver to stop “somewhere close to it”. It stopped near a mini-shop, where I went to buy a two-liter bottle of Coca-Cola (never minding the fact that I was already carrying three one-liter ones), and I was immensely frustrated that only the vanilla version was available.

The second part of the dream was about France in the time of the musketeers, as depicted in Dumas novels. I find it interesting that this was the second time in a row when I dreamed of a pseudo-historical period after thinking about it that evening.

…involved Sephi introducing me to the mythical ancient Egypt, in particular the gods, while we literally were there.

Needless to say, it felt quite Stargatish.

Yesterday, after coming home from work, I took a three-hour nap, from 20:00 to 23:00. I honestly don’t remember what I dreamt about, only that there was a dream, and there was a dog in it. When I woke up, I tried to stand up, but my body didn’t move at first—and the apparent dissonance between the command to the muscles and its non-execution made me feel a bit dizzy for a few seconds.

When I stood up, I still was a little sleepy, and I felt I wasn’t completely in control of my movements. As I went to the kitchen, I involuntarily swung my hips so wide that even a night elf would probably find it obscene. I immediately went to Dreamviews and started reading about WBTB in haste—not that I was really in the state to effectively process information, but I was worried that the feeling would go away. I did reality checks as well.

Furthermore, I wanted to write everything down just to activate my motor memory. First I did that on #wookieepedia, much to the confusion of its users (duh), and then on #ld4all after some activity actually appeared on that channel. It turned out that the fact my eyes pulsated when I closed them meant I wasn’t getting enough sleep, so I was advised to simply fall asleep at 0:00 instead of trying to WILD.

This was probably right because I really don’t get enough sleep: I play WoW at evening until 1:00, then probably spend another 30 minutes falling asleep, and get up at 8:00. Could it be that it was the reason I hardly ever saw any dreams, let alone lucid ones?

However, when I went to sleep one hour earlier than normal (and actually at the time that would be healthy for me), I found out that I couldn’t fall asleep—I couldn’t stop thinking about lucid dreams. Moreover, even though I wasn’t deliberately trying to WILD (I wasn’t even lying on my back, I assumed the position I usually fall asleep in), I started feeling WILD-like sensations, such as full-body relaxation, numbness, and brain-generated imagery. Following the advice of Dreamviews, I didn’t try to force the images, but instead gently guided them in the general direction I wanted, while letting the brain draw the rest.

A few times, my arms and legs got tired of being in the same position for a long time, so I rolled to one side and the other interchangeably, and always, in about a minute, the sensations came back. I looked at the alarm clock, and it was showing 1:08. Apparently the quest to fall asleep quickly failed, so instead I embraced the sensations. Eventually, the “realism” of the visions increased; they were still rather fragmentary (blurriness is a concept that doesn’t really apply to this kind of imagery), but now it felt less like images painted in front of my eyelids and more like something I was looking at through my closed eyelids. Before the transition, I primarily saw the road from the bus stop to our house blocks, with the surrounding scenery. Now it was Stormwind City. As I let the imagery flow, I felt my body becoming even more numb and relaxed, and finally, as I stopped concentrating on it at all, the all too familiar sensation of falling into a dream.

Only whenever I feel that, I don’t actually fall into a dream. I know that it’s what it is—I almost don’t feel my body, and what I do feel seems like floating or falling through a void—and I know people can do that and discard real-life stimuli completely, switching entirely to imaginary feelings and thus completing the transition. But there was nothing in front of my eyes, even those images disappeared; there was only whiteness, suspiciously resembling static noise. However, after that, when the sensations passed and I returned to the very real stimuli of lying in my room (mind you, I did do reality checks, but I might as well not have), I fell asleep very quickly after that.

That time, I woke up two or three times in the night, each time for a trip to the toilet and back. There was a dream with two distinct parts.
* One involved my father, his car, some of our acquaintances, and a trip from the bookstore-near-a-kindergarten to the town of Berdsk. There was something more—something significant. I don’t remember what.
* The other part involved bad memories I’d rather not elaborate on.

Today, I had another Stargate dream. In it, I was Daniel, among the original SG-1 from seasons 1–5 and 7. We were going through the Forest That Leads Anywhere (we have one around where I live) to a metal building behind the Institute of Mathematics.

O’Neill has left for a few minutes for some reason. In his absence, I said something about him that Teal’c found amusing, and in response, he hit me in the chest and back at once in such a way that I flipped in the air fell on my back. It wasn’t really painful, and I realized that it was a friendly gesture of approval, just weird in a Jaffa way.

In addition, there was a brief moment of lucidity (nothing significant) when I “slipped out of character” for a moment and thought, “What, am I Daniel in a Stargate dream again? This is getting old.”

I think the reason for this is that he’s the Stargate character I identify the most with, and for good reasons.

I’ve started a dreams page, where I’ll start gradually summarizing what I know about my dreams and the patterns that occur in them.

[This dream record intentionally left blank. Except for this message claiming blankness.]

Broken bridge.

Forest entrance.

(More about this later)

A long road, with a 90 degree turn that is above the surrounding ground. In today’s dream, I was in a car on the backseat. The car must have been Japanese, as the wheel’s on the right — not surprising given my parents’ car is a Toyota. I won’t elaborate on who the driver was, though. Let’s just say he was a fictional character.

In fact, I’m sure the road stretches farther; while that particular segment with the turn is based on a real road near my home, but the dream one goes all the way through the city and out. The two dreams with this road involved me and other passengers getting out on the edge of the city and then entering a shop to buy something.

This time, the shop was weird, though… With a lot of hidden and not-so-hidden rooms; there was also a corridor going by one of the building’s outside walls, and at least one shower.

The whole scenery resembled my old school’s gymnasium a bit; it tends to pop in my dreams quite often.

In fact, there was one dream where just after leaving a seaside beach with unknown dangers in the sea itself — also a recurring setting, and also based on a real one — I went skiing with the French Girl (who’s not French in real life, just a dream codename), and, after several turns in an outdoor-turning-indoor setting, we ended up in a room with lots of lockers and closets, somewhat resembling the scenery from the current dream; back then, she was skiing in the red outfit that she wears on the best photo of her I still have left. And she hid in one of them, which was supposedly her dressing room.

Yet another setting is the channel that runs through my microdistrict, with a dock on one end, hence the microdistrict’s colloquial name, “The Dock”. Often, I try to move from one bank to the other (in both directions), which often involves either bizarre and seemingly endless bridges, or trying to avoid the dock’s even more bizarre machinery.

(Dream keyword: exhaustion)

Oh, how I hate false awakenings.

Sure, they’re good to brag about, but incredibly disturbing after you wake up for real. Not to mention that you usually accept everything for granted, even more easily than in a normal dream.

Last time I had one, I got stuck in the large room and realized something that seemed very stupid when I woke up: “I shouldn’t move, otherwise I will be teleported back to bed!”

This time, after a false awakening, I was dressing in my bedroom, and decided to test if I can make myself look completely different by putting on different clothes and a different pair of glasses. I do have a second pair of glasses, but they’re for backup only, and they look nothing like the thin gold-plated oval glasses I used in the dream. Not to mention that I seemingly took them out of nowhere: they just appeared in my hand.

And I know where this delusion was from. It’s from the Mythbusters episode with the chicken gun, where Adam broke his glasses and put on a different pair, similar to the one I used.

Damn. I don’t watch TV, and on those rare occasions when I watch something on DVDs, that “something” always intrudes my dreams.

I noticed that many of my dreams take place in similar settings.

I can remember six:

1. The street with a bus stop, two shops and a car service center, not far from my home
2. Another street in my microdistrict
3. My home (obviously)
4. My paternal grandparents’ home
5. My maternal grandfather’s home in a village far away
6. And Turkey.

Today I had a dream that included settings 1, 2 and 5, and it allowed me to remember, at least partially, at least three other dreams.

A personal dream sign appears to be the presence of that girl, my ex-classmate, who went to France this summer. Interestingly, before she went, the dreams involving her revolved around a single scenario: I tried to make her hug or kiss me, and she always refused. Now, she’s less reluctant, and I even had sex with her in a dream once, let alone kisses. Strangely, I always question her how and why she returned from France, and she always mumbles something unintelligible, and I accept it. Of course, it never works as a way to attain lucidity, which is somewhat frustrating.

Another dream sign: controlling myself as a video game character. Really weird and hard to describe. It switches from first-person to third-person view at random, or often I don’t even know what view it is. The HUD also appears and disappears at random.

Also, I seem prone to repeating the same scene several times, with different circumstances each time. I retain some knowledge from the previous iteration (although not the full memories), which I use to my advantage to “do things right this time”. Somewhat similar to the effects of the Chalk of Fate from the Russian movie Day Watch.

Twice, including this dream, I was running through a Soviet-style city, only to encounter the street (setting 1) and make some realization, which usually had nothing to do with dreaming. For example, this time, after running through the same scene twice, I thought: “Wow! This must be a Half-Life 2 sequel taking place in my neighborhood!” Not quite what I was hoping for – when awake, anyway.

Also, stairs and elevators. I have mild acrophobia, you see: I’m afraid to look down when crossing bridges, when taking off and landing while onboard a plane, I’m afraid to use elevators with any floor higher than 4 (I live on the 4th floor, using the American notation in which the ground floor is the 1st, and which is also used in Russia; also, I twice got stuck in an elevator in my childhood), so I use stairs. And even then I’m somewhat afraid of staying for long on floors > 4. So in dreams, I often experience unreasonable fear when the stairs end abruptly, and I often get stuck in elevators. In this dream, I nearly fell down stairs, but managed to avoid it when, hanging from the fence on the highest floor, I was simply teleported to a safer location.

The weirdest, and most out of context part of the dream was the belief that a human can fold themself in such a way that they will fit into a ball only slightly bigger than their head, somewhat resembling a bowling ball, without experiencing any discomfort. I saw a living example in the dream and attempted to do it myself, although I only partially managed it (only the lower half of my body fit in). I have some ideas about where it originates from, but this dates all the way to my childhood and is better left out of a public blog.

(Earlier dream keywords for self: GF home; 9; long trip; desolace. 1000th floor)

(From now on, premoderation is disabled. Comments, if any, should appear instantly.)

I never imagined I would ever use a stupid 4chan meme in a dream, but it sort of happened.

The dream was essentially a scene from Heroes of Might and Magic V, or at least it pretended to. After all, there was no scene in the game or the expansion where a bunch of heroes storm a Haven town with Markal inside – defended by Red Haven units, no less.

And how a laser cannon ended up just outside the town walls is beyond me. But in the dream, I didn’t bother. I ran to the cannon (I was in the assault force) and, charging it, barely breathing, shouted as loudly as I could (but it was still not that loud):

Imma… chargin… mah… lazer!!!

When the assault began, the cannon somehow transformed into an ordinary cannon. I shot some enemy troops out of it (swordsmen and archers). We made it past the Red Haven units, but then a horde of undead appeared. Realizing that defeat was imminent, I screamed… then our angels, having defeated the red angels, came and started pwning them, and I was teleported to safety.

In the end, I had a touching philosophical discussion with Markal, who was without his necromancer robe. Walking through a white hallway, hand in hand with me, he explained that he wasn’t that bad a guy after all, and that he had his own reasons for taking over the Griffin Empire. In the end, he departed, and I was left to look after the castle, alone, albeit with loyal angels waiting outside.