Brain Regurgitations

Yep. Had two slices of pizza, dozed off reading TV Tropes, and suddenly an Implacable Man (think Terminator, complete with leather jacket and big, scary physique) was quietly stalking around.

With sick, twisted murder on his mind.

Apparently targeting one of the few people whom I intensely dislike.

And I had to save her.

AFTER getting into a huge fight - that nearly got physical, and actually involved me breaking his glasses - with the one person who could help me.

And my heroic plan, as far as the moment at which I woke up, was ask her for a ride, then pack my shit and leave the building with her, developing a  new strategy at a new location.

And packing my shit meant hastily stuffing my pants and some weird gourd thing into a bag with a laptop.

Now I’m just annoyed I didn’t sleep until daylight. Fuck it, I’m out.

Remember the post on lucid dreaming? I found my old dream journal from high school. I’m reading through it for the first time in years, and I find it interesting and weird how much we had to personalize this for the assignment. Or maybe I just went a little overboard…

Front cover:
An anime-like self-portrait.
A Sharpie rainbow in the 7 of “70 sheets”.
A random sticker that says “omG!”
One of my bead lizards woven into the spine.
Duct tape covering up the name of the previous class that notebook had been used for.

Inside front cover:
My four favorite colors at the time done in Sharpie: red, orange, blue, black.
A photo of Gerard Way (this was about a month after “The Black Parade” came out, I think, so he had white hair) followed by “= <3”.
Photos of my two best friends at the time, each with half of a “best friends” sticker next to them, and the note, “We are the Three Musketeers.”
A list of my family members with a little note saying, “family pic?” (I guess I forgot one of my pictures. Oops. That must be the entirety of the reason why I only got a 93 on the assignment.)
A sad vampire smiley in lime green Sharpie that says “you make vamp smiley SAD.”
A very bad drawing of the logo I designed for a band in a fiction novel I had started writing in February of that year (2006).
Two photos of my room, followed by a caption saying, “Yeah, my room is orange. Wanna fight about it?”
The saying, “Silence is golden, but duct tape is silver,” written in fuchsia Sharpie.
An emotionless :-P smiley. (Not emoticon, but actual smiley.)
A happy vampire smiley.
A fortune cookie reading “Only you can decide what is important to you.” Next to it is written, “I’ve had this fortune saved for over 2 years. I don’t know why.”
A photo of me and three friends who were all in History Club plays together before they graduated (a year ahead of me).
For some reason, the chorus of ABBA’s “Waterloo” is in the corner.

Inside back cover:
All of these are various quotes. I even cited my sources, for most of them. I’m leaving in any bad grammar, spelling mistakes, notes and censoring.
~”I reject your reality and substitute my own.” - Adam Savage (“Mythbusters” host)
~”Look at me with my pretty bracelet and tiara… I’m a f—-in’ princess!” - Gerard Way (My Chemical Romance’s lead singer)
~”We are The Black Parade, and so are you.” - Mikey Way, My Chemical Romance
~”I am not afraid to keep on living. I am not afraid to walk this world alone. Honey if you stay, I’ll be forgiven. Nothing you can say can stop me going home.” - “Famous Last Words”, My Chemical Romance
~”They say all teenagers scare the living s—- outta me. They could care less as long as someone will bleed. So darken your clothes or strike a violent pose. Maybe they’ll leave you alone, but not me.” - “Teenagers”, My Chemical Romance
~ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US.
~”Cool, we get to torture yogurt.” - Terry, “Mythbusters”
~”The world is a less violent place when people are using Hula Hoops.” - Mikey Way (My Chemical Romance’s bass player)
~”All my philosophies on life are things said by rockstars.” - Me (joking when I said this)
~”Lady, when you lose your ability to laugh, you lose your ability to think straight.” - Henry Drummond, Inherit the Wind
~”You’ve only had to run so far, so good. But you will come to a place where the only thing you feel are loaded guns in your face, and you’ll have to deal with pressure.” - “Pressure”, Billy Joel
~”I wouldn’t say Jamie’s an evil genius. I’m not sure he’s evil, and I don’t think he’s a genius.” - Adam Savage, “Mythbusters”
~”A light to burn all the empires, so bright the sun is ashamed to rise and be. In love with all of these vampires so you can leave like the sane, abandoned me.” - “The Sharpest Lives”, My Chemical Romance
~”I will avenge my ghost with every breath I take. I’m coming back from the dead. And I’ll take you home with me. I’m taking back the life you stole.” - “It’s Not A Fashion Statement, It’s A F—-ing Deathwish”, My Chemical Romance
~”Do or die, you’ll never make me, because the world will never take my heart. Go and try, you’ll never break me. We want it all, we wanna play this part. I won’t explain or say I’m sorry. I’m unashamed: I’m gonna show my scar. Give a cheer for all the broken. Listen here, because it’s who we are. I’m just a man, I’m not a hero. I’m just a boy who had to sing this song. I’m just a man, I’m not a hero. I - - DON’T - - CARE!” - “Welcome to the Black Parade”, My Chemical Romance
~”There is nothing more important than monkeys.” - Me
~”you’re just a sad song, with nothing to say, about a lifelong wait for a hospital stay. And if you think that I’m wrong, this never meant nothing to you.” - “Disenchanted,” My Chemical Romance
~”I see you lying next to me, with words I thought I’d never speak. Awake and unafraid. Asleep or dead…” - “Famous Last Words”, My Chemical Romance

Back cover:
My Chemical Romance’s name/logo around the time “The Black Parade” came out, done by me in red and black Sharpie.
Photo of all of My Chemical Romance.
An arrow pointing to the lizard on the spine, and a note saying “check out this lizard I made. Making stuff from beads calms me.”

(I may post photos of the front and back covers later. I will not be posting the inside front cover, as it has photographs of myself and people who would probably not want their photos on the internet. And the two best friends at the time are not people I want to be associated with, on the internet or otherwise.)

Looking back, there is no use denying it: everyone is fucking weird at the age of sixteen, no matter how cool or interesting we thought we were. (Or are, for those of you who are still sixteen.) For a certain period of our teenagers years, we all think duct tape and Sharpies are the coolest invention since the electric guitar, our favorite musicians are living gods, and anything that makes us sound like we’re cool or different is our personal philosophy for the day.

Lord, am I glad THAT phase is over… 

When I was in eleventh grade, I took a very basic Psychology course for one semester. We didn’t delve deeply into any subject, or even into the works of famous psychologists. (Although memorizing Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and Pavlov’s experiments early on helped me ace my first two years of Psych courses in college.) Most of the time, we would end up watching movies. However, there was one assignment and course of study that lasted the entire semester.

We were told to keep a dream journal. That is, we would wake up, and immediately write down all the details from our dreams that we could remember. As the weeks went by, all of us improved our memories and analysis of our dreams quite a bit.

The only problem with dream analysis is that the subconscious is a really fucked up place to be. So despite having tons of books that explained the meanings behind symbols in dreams, as well as the hundreds of websites that are available on the subject, you always have to use your own judgment to decide whether the giant spider in your dream really does represent your relationship with your mother, or if it simply there because you are terrified of one day finding a three-foot spider in your house. (Yes, one of the sources I checked said that spiders in dreams represent the dreamer’s relationship with his/her mother or another strong female presence in their life.)

While dream analysis is tricky, and does require a little bit of knowledge about the person dreaming the dream and the symbolism, lucid dreaming is something that everyone can do with practice.

How to Lucid Dream
Before you start trying to lucid dream, it’s important that you at least know what it is. Have you ever, while still sleeping and dreaming, become aware that everything around you is in a dream? Keeping in mind that everything was in your mind, did you then start to control the actions and/or environments in the dream? If so, you have had lucid dreams before.

Lucid dreaming is not something that we tend to do every night. Before I took this class, I can remember a very small handful of lucid dreams in my entire life. But by following these steps that worked for me and nearly everyone I have talked to on the subject, I believe anyone can lucid dream.

Step One: Keep a Dream Journal
This can be any kind of notebook or pad of paper that you can keep beside your bed or wherever you sleep. (My eleventh grade teacher made us decorate ours, but that’s not a requirement. Just make sure to keep the same journal with you until it’s full and needs to be replaced.) When you wake up, make sure that the first thing you do is grab the journal and start writing down all the details you can remember from the dream. This step is hard and takes some getting used to, as most of us don’t remember our dreams after we wake up. Don’t force it, and don’t start making up details. You will just end up tricking yourself. Remember that this takes patience and practice.
Your first few days are likely to have little to no detail, which is typical. Over time, you will be able to remember more detail.

Step Two: Become Aware of the Dream
Once you’ve recorded a number of your dreams, and have gotten a lot of details down, it is easier to notice that you are dreaming and not stuck in the real world facing a horde of real zombies. You will probably notice patterns in the environment and among the behavior of the people around you. Here are a few of my “this is definitely a dream” signs:

1. The sun is in the east even though it is supposed to be well into the afternoon.
2. I am very familiar with a city or building I have never been in.
3. I am very familiar with people I have never met, or have never seen before.
4. I do not remember how I got from one location to another. (I once was in an attic that looked more like a cave, after just recently being in a house.)
5. The people I know in real life behave in ways they have never behaved in real life. (I had a dream in which my mother would not stop screaming at me for no reason, something she has not done before in reality.)
6. People have impossible abilities or technologies. (E. g. flying at will; sci-fi movie laser guns; a technophobe hacking into a highly secure government database; etc.)
7. Clothes and objects appearing out of nowhere.
8. I tend never to be hungry in dreams. (However, sometimes I DO need to use the bathroom in dreams. This can be a problem for some, as I’m sure some people have relieved themselves in dreams and quite literally shit the bed.)

These are my signs, and some of them may be good signs for everyone to keep an eye out for. When you record your dream journal, take note of any bizarre things or behaviors, particularly those that are recurring from dream to dream.

Step Three: Taking Action
Once you start noticing the bizarre objects and behaviors while you are still dreaming, you can take action. For a lot of people (myself included), this can be the most difficult part. It requires a sturdy belief that everything you’re seeing and interacting with really is all in your subconscious, and then confidence that it is under your control. It cannot hurt you. No, it is not true that “if you die in a dream, you die in real life.” This isn’t the Matrix. I have died in many of my dreams, and I’m still here. I’ve sustained horrifically painful injuries in dreams, and I don’t wake up with a leg full of compound fractures. You MUST believe that what is trying to kill you, what is chasing you, what you are faced with, cannot hurt you.

Make sure, first, that you have noticed multiple signs that this is a dream! You don’t want to wake up and see that your clock says it’s six in the morning, while the sun is high in the sky, and automatically assume it’s a dream. Look for more than one sign. This example - if there are NO OTHER SIGNS THAT THIS IS A DREAM - could be explained by a power outage in the night and a clock resetting. Pay close attention to details, especially when it comes to how you get from room to room and the every day things you do. If you go through the tedious, everyday actions of a Monday in your dream, it probably is a normal, waking Monday. You don’t want to assume it’s a dream based on one sign and then go to work in your underwear with a loaded Super Soaker under one arm, and get fired.

I have had a number of dreams in which I have taken control. When I take control of a dream, I mime an object that I want to have, and it actually seems to be there. Here are two examples:

1. In this dream, I had been kidnapped from in front of my house, from my car. (This was the first sign that this was a dream, because I did not drive or even have a learner’s permit when I dreamed this.) I was taken across town, expecting to be raped and murdered. I was taken to my old elementary school (which had an interior exactly like my old middle school, sign numero dos that this was a dream), and took my first opportunity to escape. I started running all the way through town, through neighborhoods I had never been in (sign number three). It was suddenly sunny, with the sky in the east despite it being sometime in the evening, based on how much time had passed (sign number four). I was exhausted from running and my legs were like lead. Annoyed, I sat back on my legs, mimed starting a car, stomped the invisible gas pedal, and drove home. I spent the rest of the dream drinking coffee in a fluffy robe and watching the birds in the feeder.
2. This dream was somewhat more urgent. I was in an apartment building I had never been in (sign number one) but that I was very familiar with (sign number two), and all the apartments were identical including the wall colors and furniture (sign number three). Zombies were breaking down the doors, but seemed more like regular people acting like zombies than like movie zombies. I knew I had nowhere to run, so I needed to start gunning down zombies. But I had no weapons. I don’t remember when I realized this was a dream, but I do remember that I cocked an invisible shotgun and started pointing it at the zombies. I even made the firing noises with my mouth, and watched the zombies go down with my unlimited ammo. When zombies stopped falling at the imaginary shotgun blasts, I developed Star Wars force powers and just knocked them down with my mind.

Step Four: Staying Asleep
Perhaps this should have been listed earlier, but this isn’t always a problem for everyone, especially once you get used to lucid dreaming. Once you realize you are dreaming, you may immediately wake up. This will happen less and less often as you will yourself to stay asleep. It does take practice, but you will most likely reach a point in which you can first tell yourself that you are dreaming, and from there decide whether you’ll wake up and end the dream, or take over the dream and make it take the course you would prefer.

In my personal experience, this can be tiring. When you sleep, you recharge your body’s batteries and give your mind a chance to sort out all the crazy bullshit you deal with every day. When you start to take control, you’re not giving your mind a rest. Often, I will wake up after a lucid dream feeling less rested than I would after even a frightening dream in which I took no control.

In general, however, lucid dreaming can be a fun and helpful experience. When you can control your dreams, you give yourself the chance to face your greatest fears without letting any harm come to you. For example, the first time I saw John Carpenter’s Halloween when I was a kid, I had a nightmare in which Michael Myers was stalking me. I was able to overcome that fear by taking control in the dream and believing that nothing could harm me. Michael Myers has never been in my dreams again, and I never found the movies truly frightening again.

Many of us have probably inadvertently had lucid dreams without even realizing, and if we remember the dreams it tends to be a memorable experience. I don’t recommend, however, attempting to lucid dream every night. Like I said, it gets tiring, and you need to give your subconscious a chance to deal with things without your conscious mind taking over, as it does in our everyday lives. Personally, when I can choose to take control of the dream, to only lucid dream when I am in a frightening or seemingly hopeless situation. I have turned many a traumatizing nightmare into a funny story by lucid dreaming.

Enjoy this educational brain regurgitation.