Lately, my dreams have been worrying me. Normally, I retain some lucidity when dreaming (I have written about this topic twice before, here and here), which I think allows me a slightly greater margin of subconscious control over them. For example, I rarely have nightmares anymore. When I was little, my only recourse during nightmares was to squeeze my eyes together and attempt to wake up. Now, my nightmares have the tendency to self-destruct. This often occurs through the favorable placement of an object that allows to me frustrate my dream enemies, or a desperate sucidal charge into danger that succeeds.
Of course, the main advantage of lucidity is the few occurences when I get direct control over the dream. It is the ultimate feeling of power, as your thoughts are instantly transformed into concrete actions and objects. I am never sure when it will happen, but in-dream references to dreaming seem to often trigger it (once, a girl I was conversing with in a dream said, "You would not say that to me in real life, you know? You are only flirting with me because this is a dream.").
This has not been happening lately. Three days ago, I had a dream about watching an passenger airplane fall out of the sky. Waking up from that dream, I realized that the Japanese was invading Cambridge. Waking up from that dream, I went to an English class taught by Mr. Myslik (who is dead). After we went outside, we saw a passenger airplane fall out of the sky. "I had a dream about that this morning," I said. Nobody seemed interested in my newfound oneiromantic abilities.
Two days ago, I dreamt that there was a Black Widow spider in my bed. Despite the fact that I survived the dream with no ill effects, and the spider itself was killed, I did especially feel like sleeping further when I woke up, despite the fact it was 1am in the morning.
Last night, I had a reasonably long dream about Christian evangelicals. It ended when a modified X-plane (it looked like the X-37 or X-40, but with larger wings) buzzed the courtyard where I was sitting. On the second pass, it slammed into the ground, crushing me beneath it. There was no pain, only a brief moment of darkness.
I woke up from this dream to find myself driving a Honda Element down I-95, somewhere in Massachusetts. It was afternoon (now that I think of it, I rarely find myself driving at night during my dreams), so the road was reasonably busy. I managed to remain calm, did not over-accelerate enough to crash into the car in front of me (a perennial problem when I am driving in dreams and playing video games involving driving), and drove the car into a parking lot at a rest stop (it was not a perfect parking job, but it was good enough).
After parking, I interacted with two characters, a middle-aged woman and a girl of high-school age. Both of them looked familiar to me, but I could not quite place them. After the woman drove off, I realized where I had seen both her and the girl before. I turned to the girl and remarked, "I remember her now. She was in a dream I previously had." The girl (also from a previous dream) just nodded and smiled.
After I woke up (for real this time), I realized that I was not even sure that the previous dreams that I remembered the woman and girl from actually happened. If I am constructing "meta-dreams" that only exist while I am dreaming to explain the existence of strangers who recognize me, dreaming is going to be a lot more confusing in the future.