Beginning of September, 2007 - Free Will

My dad was on a quest to find the "most hugged" object or place. One would expect it to be a tree or something. But my dad announced that it was a Duncan Donuts. Then I watched a video clip about this, which was clearly a form of publicity. There was a guy talking about how this particular shop had been remodeled and designed. I entered the Duncan Donuts building and looked around. It had the occasional colored floor or ceiling tile that made the whole room look like Wonder bread. I mentally scoffed at how they called that design. The host person tried to convince me to eat some "wonderfully greasy" french fries. I looked at the french fries sitting there in their basket of oil and decided against it.

I sat down at one of the tables and began working at a computer. The computer was instructing me on how to do something. It was for my dad and his coworker. I entered in the information the computer asked for. The program automatically sorted people by their phone numbers. I thought this was strange. Especially since it only showed the first three or four digits, so how could this ordering system be useful to anyone? There was a stamp that I was supposed to use on a print-out so that my dad would get paid. I wondered what would happen if I stamped it twice, so I tried. The stamps cancelled each other out. I had to wipe them off and stamp it again.

***

My mom and I were in a somewhat dark building. I was supposed to clip a dog's nails (it had been human at first), but I was having a hard time. I gave up and began studying the dog's hands. I was looking at my own hands and even toes, trying to figure out what it was that was different. I moved into the next room over to take a closer look at the dog's hands while my mom stayed in the previous room. All of a sudden, I realized what it was. The thumbs were on the outside!!! This shocked me much more than the fact that the dog had hands in the first place. I kept telling my mom that the thumbs were on the outside, trying to get her to understand the importance of this discovery. There was something about the thumbs being on the outside that felt deeply wrong.

I looked back at my own hands, and on an impulse I did a reality check and counted them. I had the wrong number of fingers. I now knew I was dreaming. I informed my mom, then I started to go out the door. I didn't know where I was going, but I wanted to go somewhere else. To fly off somewhere. I hesitated, wondering if my mom was coming, or if I should just go on my own. Then a voice said, "Why are you resisting?" I was confused for a moment, then interpreted this to mean that I should just let the dream go it's own course. But why would I let the dream continue normally when I was lucid? As I nervously wandered back into the room, it occured to me that maybe this could be interesting. In a normal dream, the subconscious is mostly in control, showing messages that I may not be aware of at the time. In a lucid dream, the conscious is mostly in control, and I basically do whatever I feel like. So what if I were to be aware that it was a dream, and listened to the messages instead of ignoring them? A direct connection to my sub-c. This was the first time that I interpreted the voice as being my subconscious.

Even after these thoughts, I was still uneasy. It was a combination of confused guilt, that maybe I'd been frivolous with my previous lucid dreams, and fear that whatever lessons my sub-c wanted me to learn would be hard to bear. There was a shelf full of books. As my mom pulled one out, I thought suddenly, "I can learn in my sleep everything I want to learn while I'm awake!" I (or possibly my mom) began reading from the book. It was titled, "How to control people's will." It reminded me of corporations. And then the meaning of those words sank in like never before. I became very upset, to the point of crying even, saying that the concept shouldn't even exist. I heard my dad's voice, going into rant/lecture mode, "That dog would never survive in the wild." He said something about how the dog's nails would not function properly. "Constantly clinking on glass, arowroro, scratch scratch scratch, aarowowrororo..." I woke up.

Note: The last statement, about clinking on glass didn't make sense right away. I think what it means is that the dog's hands were genetically modified so that it could do something trivial and unimportant. Clinking on a wine glass, like a posh person at a party. But because of the modification to make this relatively unimportant thing possible, the dog didn't have the claws needed to survive on it's own. There are other possible symbols in this dream. The connection between controlling someone's will and the corporations. The metaphor of a person being represented as a dog, who follows orders. Changed so they can do things that are nothing but the whim of another, and which limits their own ability to accomplish what's important to them. Domestication taken to an extreme.