Crater village, Utica, and lucid superhopping

I can't remember how it started, but I had an explanatory monologue going about legal distinctions in the word "island", showing a bunch of places on the globe that were called "island", but were actually craters or other land depressions.

The view soared over a vast semi-wilderness in a dry western area (brush and scrub, not many trees, lots of open sandy dirt). The land was pock-marked with depressions with sandstone walls, apparently formed by ancient water erosion; each was big enough for maybe 3-6 houses, and each little pocket was vaguely connected to the rest to form a network/town.

I went down into one of these depressions, where there were three or four houses. The rightmost house had a fancy exterior, so I decided to take some pictures. With my camera, I took three or four pictures starting from the left house and panning over to the right one, to make a panoramic picture out of later.

I then walked over to the pretty house, around to its right side, and found a staircase leading up along the side of the house. I walked up and ended up in a covered balcony/veranda area. From there I walked inside the house, noticing that there weren't any particular doors or locks preventing me from doing so.

I wondered if maybe a police officer lived here, reasoning that his very presence would justify an unsecured house. I cautiously continued through the house, going downstairs, but never did run into anyone.

Around now, the house had transformed into the first floor of Aunt Mildred's house in Utica. I wandered back towards the kitchen. Around this point I started to feel an anomalous sensation, and had an inkling that I was more in control of the dream than usual.

This influenced my behavior now; I was wondering whether to go upstairs or downstairs. I glanced up the stairs from the kitchen on the right, and noticed Greg's cat Jori walking down; but despite this distraction, I made up my mind to go down the stairs on the left, because I wanted to test walking into a space I couldn't remember well (i.e. the basement).

Almost immediately after getting down the stairs and turning left, what would have been the basement became the empty lobby of a city building; I was facing the exit, located on the outer corner, all glass doors and windows.

I walked out onto the sidewalk, then straight toward a grassy area with a tallish deciduous tree in the corner near the street. When I had approached the tree, I decided to try seeing how high I could hop (to test whether I was able to control the dream). First hop, I didn't quite reach the lowest branches. Next hop I did, and then I hopped a few more times, at least once hopping higher than the whole tree. Strangely, even on the high hops, I seemed to fall quite a bit faster than gravity should allow (maybe close to landing on the same time scale as a normal human hop), and when I landed on the ground, I felt no impact.

(I started to have the repeating phrase "Ich kann huggenen buschen [something something]" running through my head.)

As I walked to the right, toward a large bush, I started to pay attention to my breathing (which presumably was my actual, non-dream breathing). I started to think I don't really need to be breathing hard, or at all, if this is a dream (and other elements of reality, such as impact force, were missing anyhow).

I also tried to quiet my inner monologue, which was, as usual, quite saturated. But as soon as I did, I started to wake up.

So, this was the longest I've ever dreamed lucidly, and the most stable I've felt in light of realizing I was dreaming. However, it was interesting that there were things missing relative to reality: no people, no tactile sensations, not much going on auditorily, except my inner monologue. Upon successfully warping reality (by jumping really high), gravity did not act normally; not sure what the basis was for that -- lack of experience? video games? Drawing attention to, or altering, my breathing and inner monologue seemed to have triggered the exit. Will have to be more careful next time.

Friendly biker and snakes of unusual size

I was walking/jogging along the median side of a two-lane road (reminded me of Old Bridge Rd near Smoketown Rd in Lake Ridge), when a woman, perhaps in her sixties or seventies, came up behind me on a bicycle. Instead of cutting around and passing me, or at the very least signaling her presence, she instead crept up next to me, between me and the median, until we were side by side, and she kept pace with me.

I was annoyed, and I asked her why she hadn't just gone by on the other side. She seemed a little annoyed too, but she was really trying to engage in conversation with me while riding along -- probably just trying to be social, whereas I don't go out walking or jogging or biking expecting to end up in a social encounter with a stranger.

We had turned left into a sparsely built, hilly housing area with plenty of trees around. We ended up chit-chatting a little bit, as we went down the sidewalk alongside the winding street/hill. I had already had one or two songs (sung by John Flansburgh) running through my head before we met, and then something she said made me think of yet another Flansburgh song, and I had to force myself not to break into song (figuring it would be kind of antisocial to do so).

We came to a bend in the street (the sidewalk had now ended, and the street was unpainted asphalt), where the street hooked almost 90° to the left, passed alongside the front yard of a single family home, then hooked around 180° and continued down the hill.

Standing at the end of the driveway to the house was a young, vaguely punky woman in her twenties, with brown hair. We both seemed to recognize each other, though neither of us seemed really sure where we could have known each other from. So we said "hi" to each other and looked at each other for a moment before I continued on. Besides the initial confusion, she seemed to have a bemused and self-satisfied expression on her face.

In the stretch of grass delimited by the curved street, there was a single round deciduous tree with a small animal standing on one of its lower branches. Below the tree, a giant snake (at least ten feet long, and perhaps six inches in diameter) came creeping up, and then suddenly sprang up from the ground and swallowed the animal in what seemed to be slow motion. I was pretty sure the snake belonged to the girl living here.

The last thing I recall before waking up was that I had gone a little further down the street/hill, and was now either floating or being held up by a burly man, three or four feet off the ground, and a different snake of identical proportions was lurking on the ground below. I had every suspicion that it was going to go for my foot.

Dad's reunion with The Monkees

Dad, in order to protest "the war" in the 70's, joined The Monkees. In the Wikipedia article, he is mentioned together with some other guy who was also only a minor member of the six-man band. I was naturally surprised that dad had managed to keep this from us for all these years.

All six of them, along with some family, were sitting around outdoors in chairs, which were arranged in an L-shaped pattern around/under a large oakish tree, at some kind of banquet event. I went and loaded up on stuff out of the buffet.