I felt like I barely rested last night. I had a series of CRAZY long vivid dreams.

I have been having some strong hypnopompic experiences (post-dream waking-life hallucinations) lately. At least twice in recent weeks I have woken up in the middle of the night after having a particularly vivid dream. After waking up I still see elements of my dream overlayed in my real-life vision, kind of like the latent patterns seen while tripping. One night it was so intense I had to get up and turn on a light and stand around for a minute before the images dissipated and I could convince myself I was not still dreaming. In that experience I saw a pattern of mirrored silver balls zooming towards me from a rolling sea of the same balls. This was a holdover from a dream where I was seeing the same thing, but coming from being shot by shotguns and being blown apart. I was being shot so much that I knew I was either dreaming or dead and I had the words “Am I dead or am I dreaming” running through my head. I knew the situation was impossible so I knew I was either dead or in a dream. I tried to wake myself up but it was like a great barrier was preventing me from changing states. I finally forced my eyes open and woke up. When I woke I was looking at the ceiling and I could still see this pattern of mirrored metal balls coming at me, like the continued expanding blast of the guns. The hallucination was transparent over everything I looked at.

Another night I woke to see a bar of yellow light, but in refracted double-exposure like from a mirror for a second or two on my covers.

Last night’s dream synopsis:

Dream 1:

Me and some strange doll-like creatures kind out of Winnie the poo or the Wizard of Oz were being attacked by a giant bear that was trying to break into a cabin. We were trying to use a door, and then a giant pendulum to block the bear and move it out of the way. It was night outside and the cabin was surrounded by forest and swamp land with old plastic animatronic McDonald’s playground equipment. There were fake track houses and trees which had strings of LEDs running throughout. You could push a button and light-up the trees. There was something like a nursery-rhyme conclusion near the end, where the whole thing fit into a lesson or story we were supposed to learn (but I don’t remember what it was).

Dream 2:

Me and a large group of people (mostly strangers) met-up in a mall that was converted into an 80’s “adventure” park where you you went through a series of rooms each with their own weird theme, like a room full of video games with fake money blowing around, a room with real race cars flying by, a room with a plastic slide, a room that looked like a pastel pink roman temple with dancers dressed in weird Boy-George garb with pink Mohawks and giant shoulder pads, and another room that had half gravity so you could bounce around like on the moon. Michael Jackson, Cindy Lauper and other 80s music was playing. The ambiance of the place was like a darkened sci-fi 80s Disney ride with laser lights and twilight backdrops. They filled the place with a strange smoke. While we were leaving they made everyone sign non-disclosure agreements that the smoke was fine, but me and another guy were like high off the smoke and could not drive home, everything seemed tilted and we could not turn properly and we ended up getting in a fight with the security guards before getting a ride home with other people.

Dream 3:

Somehow I injured my face and arm. My face was so disfigured I wanted to have it reconstructed. I never saw the damage in my dream, like I never looked into a mirror. I was in some house with a man and a woman. The woman was helping me try to reconstruct my face using a paper mask and staples and makeup. I was a woman and did look in a mirror post-mask to see that it looked pretty fake, except for my lips. I was trying to convince the woman I needed to call a doctor to get a 3D laser scanner to map my face so I could print a more realistic face prosthetic.

Dream 4:

I was dating this super rich Japanese girl, like here two dads owned a skyscraper and some giant corporation rich. There was an ongoing theme of me trying to convince her dads I was a worthy partner and artist, as well as trying to sneak their old Japanese books out of rooms in the skyscraper. Also some theme about trying to convince my mom that the book sneaking was part of some made-up scenario concocted by my girlfriend’s dads, but really it was some mental game made just to toy with my mom, who wasn’t buying it. My girlfriend was really into collecting these ancient Japanese artifacts. One of them was an overly giant sword, manga style, and I spent part of the dream wandering the streets with it over my shoulder. Our apartment was basically empty except for these artifacts so I was just playing around with them trying to see what the deal was. I somehow figured out that if all the artifacts were collected they could be combined into an ultimate magical doomsday weapon of some sort. I arranged them in such a way that they physically merged together and I was worried my girlfriend might discover their true purpose. We were invited to dinner by my mom and other family for this little girls two-year old birthday. As we walked to the place I carried a leather bag full of small animals in compartments. They were rare “royal” things and meant as gifts. One orange colored mouse-type thing kept escaping because it was too big for its compartment, so I finally let it loose on the street. Dinner was at this Japanese restaurant where no one was allowed to speak until you arrived in your private dining room. The room was a giant white room like a rock garden with tables that were two-stories off the ground and you had to reach them with steps. The table tops themselves were made of a black mesh that extruded and transformed into a black-metallic artificial person that looked and acted like the best determined personality to serve the table. Our table turned into a bald man who was very rude and insulting.

Dream 5 (from an intense dream the other night the spawned the hypnopompic ball hallucinations):

There was conflict happening on the second or third floor of an apartment that had large balconies wrapping around each level. There was some kind of argument going on in an apartment, I could see it through the window. A number of people were yelling at each other. I was walking up the stairs to the door of the apartment when it opened and a man stepped out with a shotgun and shot the person in front of me. I tried to say something about how I was not involved with this but the man shot me as well. The shot was composed of lots of marble-sized mirrored silver balls that tore through my flesh. The blast didn’t kill me. I spent most of the dream running through back allies and hallways trying to hide and avoid the hunters, while watching many other people get shot and killed in gruesome ways.

It got to a point where I was being shot so many times I couldn’t do anything but take the hits. Blood and flesh sprayed everywhere, and it seemed to repeat over and over, the same shots happening again and again. I started to think to myself, am I dead? Is this like a hell where I just repeat this horror over and over. Then I started getting the words “Am I dead or am I dreaming” running through my head over and over and I finally managed to wake myself up.