My Dream Diary

Decided to keep track of what I am dreaming about, as it could be of some interest.

Getting to sleep

• I still don't know how to actually trigger sleep. I just lay in wait until the exhaustion builds up, after which my memory abruptly cuts off at uncertain point. If I'm not tired prior, I have an urge to move regardless of how the head feels.
• Possibly due to accumulation of certain regulatory hormones, when exhausted the imagination becomes more livid and randomized, the vision darkens and senses are suppressed. The dream likely is a state after some cutoff point of this.
• Any stimuli interrupts going to sleep, like it not being dark enough, too cold, too hot, a singing bird, a passing car, a cough downstairs, an itch on the back, a nasal congestion.
• I can't memorize the pose I end up with, but they have to be gravitationally balanced, like on the left side with an arm under the neck, or flat on the back.

Waking up

• If a Scenario concludes naturally, I wake up energized. If I'm woken up, like by the clock or by a Collapse, I feel as if I didn't get any sleep at all, though at least I don't feel like passing out. If I'm killed, I wake up with actual pain.
• I generally don't remember dreams, they dissolve like a tablet in water almost immediately.
• Due to reintegration of identity, it takes about a minute for the brain on its own to recall which world is real and which isn't. It never caused problems, must often makes me as angry as if my friends were actually murdered. I feel some compulsion to Google up unique names from a dream hoping it was actually real.
• I don't believe there's a point in dream interpretation and think it's simply the brain picking random memory pieces and trying to connect them to avoid having no work.

General structure and rules

• I have no agency. It's as if I'm watching through the eyes of a character in a scripted movie. I doubt even my internal monologues are my own.
• I have no memory from the real world. As far as I'm made aware, the Scenario is my entire life. If I'm to retain some memory from the outside, then it's still in service of the Scenario.
• Scenarios generally have some minimal plot and can be described as a slice of life or a mundane adventure. Generally, there's some persistent motivation to keep moving from one location to another, like checking all rooms because of an errand, going through little random events as if it was a daily life, or traveling between buildings due to a quest. Staying in one place would probably lead to the Collapse.
• Scenarios have characters who act like game NPCs. They just idle around waiting to be interacted with, and there's only a couple of them active at most.
• Some locations and Scenarios can return and retain previous memory. There's an implication all locations are geographically connected. There may be a common overarching plotline of the cats preventing me from achieving lucid dreaming, but dreams are not normally related.
• For long dreams, a Scenario can seamlessly drift to an entirely different one with no relation to prior events. This can keep on going until errors become hard to ignore or the hormones keeping the dream going are exhausted.
• All details are nondescript unless otherwise useful. Text is readable quite well when needed, up to there being own functional websites.
• All locations are realistic and are loosely based on places I've been in. However, they are nearly always distorted in size and moving around just keeps adding more areas as if procedurally generated.
• It's rare for a Scenario to be related to any recent events in the real world, so anxiety is rarely a factor. Though it can happen.
• If I look at a poster or a monitor, the perspective changes to a full 2D mode as if I don't have a body. A third-person perspective is also not unusual.
• Senses are well-defined, as I can taste food or touch own face, though there is rarely a case when it happens as it's not important.
• Moving around is a bit vague. Legs exist mainly for climbing, otherwise I just zoom to the visible destination.
• There's some kind of prevention of NSFW or gory content from ever occurring. Nudity is only allowed to occur where it'd make sense, like sauna or changing room.

End of a dream

• Noticing a logic error or an inconsistency results in a Collapse, as if it's a programming exception.
• A Collapse stops everything for a moment shortly before the dream ends.
• Trying to act with any agency results in a Collapse. Lucid dreams grant full control and feel like the ultimate achievement, but are exceptionally rare and result in a Collapse anyway in about a minute.
• Being in a state of a free fall for more than two seconds results in a Collapse.
• Screaming results in a Collapse.
• Using toilets is sometimes dangerous due to the risk of the muscles still being linked.
• If no Collapse was triggered and if not woken up, the Scenario reaches some kind of narrative conclusion, before the Collapse is caused anyway due to there being nothing to do. Against all odds, this often happens a few minutes before the intended time to wake up, so I cn just turn off the alarm before it rings.

Nightmare Scenarios

• A Scenario may naturally include some paranoia factors. Focusing on them for too long ends the normal Scenario and creates a Chaser.
• Once triggered, a Nightmare is irreversible.
• The Chaser can be anything that can "approach": a maniac, an animal, an angered relative, a car, a rolling boulder, a computer virus's progress.
• The dream ends immediately upon any contact with the Chaser.
• I can sense the exact distance to the Chaser at all times as if I have to be aware how much time I have left at most.
• All obstacles I create are bypassed through whatever abnormal means. If the obstacle is not observed it functionally doesn't exist. In large rooms, the location itself can stretch to prevent me from running away.
• Nightmares have higher degree of lucidity as if I have to deal with them myself. This also provides some of the external memory, so I can cause a Collapse to end the dream preemptively to avoid being hurt.

Examples

• (recurring) Leaving the civilization to an opening in the forest near the countryhouse, which leads to a safe haven of a large underground elven hotel. At some point a common plot became bypassing the guards through a large field, and after adolescence the entire forest may have disappeared.
• (recurring) Being led to believe a character is someone else dreaming and I'm trying to establish contact in the real world. If I give them my details, I don't get to see what those details are. If I get to know something about them, I seemingly wake up in a rather realistic scenario and try to look something up about them, manage to find something, but sike this was a dream within a dream and I wake up for real quite disappointed.
• (at least three times) Trying to run away from a car, suddenly shrinking to a size where I have to try and fail to climb onto the tall sidewalk and getting run over.
• Just walking around then "sensing" there's a car a few blocks away. Enabled flight and simply flew away, but it just launched directly at me on a straight line.
• Looking into the oven part of the oven bed (in Soviet cottages there weren't uncommon), seeing a rising inferno zoomed in, then hiding in the next room, and being found by an imp.
• (at least two times) The PC/laptop acts up and I try to shut down the OS. It doesn't work and I immediately recognize it as an enemy. I pull the power cord, but it doesn't work. I get out, but some creature jumps out of the monitor and attacks me.
• (at least seven times) Just trying to collect items for someone in a familiar area like at home, preschool, or a factory, and noticing a cat just hanging around. I can sense that I shouldn't look at it. I look anyway, the cat starts circling around me, before giving me a countdown to hide and sometimes pressing on me not understanding something greater, after which it leaps onto my face. One time I've managed to punch one, after which they're not as easily provoked, but still instinctively give the idea to not stare at them.
• Just minding own business in my enlarged apartment and meeting relatives who inexplicably are just there, and trying to do fetch quests for them or trying to tell them what's going on.
• Trying to fix all broken CRTs in my countryhouse that has three more floors than normal.
• (At least three times) Trying to find someone specific in a indoor public pool that was used by USSR to train for Olympic, and having to go through an absolute maze of changing rooms, showers, and corridors of toilers. (I wasn't actually aware until recently the swimming school it's based on was indeed built in the post-WWII times, but it's rather small and used by the local college and kids)
• Trying to find someone at my university, which is... actually as large as in the real life, but the style of the rooms is wrong.
• (at least four times) Traveling to somewhere on a subway, except the all stations are suspended over a void, and even getting to the train sometimes requires jumping.
• (At least two times) Trying to finds some items in a mix between a museum and a mansion, which is also has too many rooms.
• (At least two times) My house for some reason being 144 floors tall and only a couple of rooms wide, making it an extremely absurd apartment complex, that is nonetheless comfortable. And the elevator broke, so I had to to take the emergency stairs that transformed into a platforming challenge inside a mill.
• Exploring a giant dungeon that feels like a mix of the Labyrinth by Ravensburger, Pac-Man, and Dungeon Keeper. You have to get to the four corners of the map while dealing with enemies and get the loot back to the center.
• (At least two times) Trying to live in a multiplayer Minecraft server.
• Trying to get employed and posting as a singing fairy minigame for an interview, with three strikes max. The neighborhood was also filming some kind of love show and tried to take photos of it in the phone as proof of it existing.
• (At least four times) Hanging out in the neighborhood of a house in Spain, with one section having many short houses and me having an flyby view as if I'm Google Earth, one section having a giant indoors market where there's everything, a way too populated beach, and a nearby city that is pretty much filled with fast-food joints.
• Infiltrating a casino which morphs into a traveling agency.
• (At least four times) Checking out a loose tooth and it falls out as if they are all baby teeth. My teeth aren't good, but not at a risk of getting lose.
• Checking shops in a medieval-themed european alleyway. May have been inspired by the Diagon Alley in London.
• (At least two times) Exploring an abandoned shopping mall with too many floors, but at least they have a shop for everything despite being understaffed.
• Exploring a large flea market near the countryside with too many tents.
• Recovering lost footage from the supposed second MLP movie from online sources, where there are two villainesses but one of them is a pawn of the other. The world turned out to be an enforced medieval stasis and is actually Europe. The insert song felt plagiarized form Disney movie that real Disney never made.
• Checking the road signs and failing to memorize the street names.
• Solving some puzzle on a phone like trying to delete an app that keeps moving around or filling the wallpaper with actual water.
• Assorted notes that I have no context for: animated corpses. pacman-like. riding at winter village. forest roadway on a bike.

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