Life's so different than it is in your dreams

Inception wasn't as much of a mindfuck as I would have liked it to be--it was a heist movie first and foremost with some great sci-fi elements--but ever since I've seen it I've been paying a lot more attention to whether I'm dreaming or not, in my dreams. I've had five lucid dreams in the past month, compared to maybe one per every 2-3 years before that. It's such a weird feeling--I'll be lying on my couch while dabbling my toes in the warm sand and lapping blue water of a beach in space, and suddenly I'll realize, "Wait, my living room doesn't have a beach in it. Shit, I'm dreaming." Or I'll be breaking into a liquor store at midnight and shoving bottles of rare, hallucinogenic liquors with centipedes preserved inside into my backpack, and I'll think, "You know what would make this dream more exciting? Summoning the cops." And when the cops get there, they just stand around in the parking lot looking confused, because even in my dreams I don't want to get arrested.

It takes the fun out of dreaming, a little. After I've realized it's a dream and I can do anything...well, why bother? It's about as vivid as my most vivid daydreams anyway, and I still can't taste or touch much in a dream, which are the few things that I really want to do. In fact, forget looking at a digital clock or the light levels in a room, and especially forget the totem thing (as far as I could tell, totems in the movie were primarily useful for determining whose dream you're in, which makes sense in a world where people can actually invade your dreams, but not necessarily in a world where that doesn't happen...and despite what my subconscious promised me, my dream monkey never showed up again). The best way I've found to determine whether I'm in a dream or not is whether I can taste something--I can buy bizarre societal laws or physical cause-and-effect screwing up, or strange dreamscapes, but my mind knows that food is supposed to have a taste, and it's so ingrained into me that I know something is wrong if it doesn't.

Like today, I spent my entire dream searching for cake. I REALLY wanted cake. And when I finally found cake (it was in the middle of a kitchen inside of an abandoned toy factory), it was tasteless like stale bread. The weird thing was that I'd just spent another dream in a cake-decorating class with drworm, in the middle of a competition where we were giggling and decorating a party cake with stupid Spider-Man cartoons. I'd "woken up" and realized that I wanted cake, but hadn't realized that the second dream I was in was a dream until I took a bite of the non-cake cake. So when the toys came to get me, I realized that the lack of chocolatey goodness signified UNREALITY and woke up.

nyghtshayde's theory, however, is that the cake signifies the fact that I'm pre-emptively disappointed over my birthday, which is on Monday. Internally, I turn into a little bit of a drama queen if my birthday isn't fussed over a little. Our family is full of August birthdays, but we're celebrating my mom's this weekend (hers was actually last week), and nobody at all has mentioned doing anything for mine. Pout, whine, first world problems. I would at least like to be consulted on what kind of cake I prefer, as questions about cake imply a celebration of sorts at which the cake will be consumed. You can't have cake in a vacuum, after all.

Anyway, after I finish my homework for Wednesday, I'm leaving for Mom's--we're going to spend all day at the Dream Cruise tomorrow, and I can't exactly drive up and meet them there because Woodward is just going to be a huge clusterfuck. So I'll talk to people on Sunday night, I guess!