Total insomnia last night. Not bad, almost two weeks without reportable insomnia. Sleep hasn't always been great; there have been frequent incidents of fragile sleeplessness on both front or back-end, but not rising to insomnia. Even though that kind of sleep meant not getting a good rest and fatigue usually in the evening.

Last night, already exhausted and nodding off all night, I put on a CD with the timer set, as usual, extended the time as I continued to remain awake, and when the entire CD played, that's when it's officially insomnia. So then I put on one of my yearly mix CDs, which at least makes sleeplessness enjoyable as those songs include songs I love and never get sick of.

I might have been able to fall asleep during that CD and slept the rest of the way, making it only front-end insomnia. Except for the dream.

Upon reviewing the tracks later, I found that I did fall asleep for 2 tracks, but I remember the tracks that were playing when I went into the dream, so I was in a twilight state at that time.

There's a bit of insignificant precursor before it became The Dream. A portion that looked like a gas filling station before dawn. A portion there where I was wondering if my music was playing too loud and disturbing my non-dream neighbors here, being concerned because it looked in the dream like I was blasting the music.

Then I was in a suburban house, an offshoot or morph of the gas station, during daytime in a sparsely furnished den or family room. I was making a round of the room when I ran into some spider webs. There was a large pillow on the floor so I dropped down on it to wipe off the webs.

When I got up, I realized the pillow was quite dirty and I had all these specks in front of my face and thought I might need to jump into the shower. But I soon realized a bunch of the specks were baby spiders and looking closely at the pillow, it was covered with baby spiders.

That's when things quickly escalated and the spiders started growing in number until they were a seething swarm of frenzied spiders of all different sorts carpeting the floor. Then there were other people who I don't know, but it felt like we were renting the house together.

Someone got the idea to burn the furniture that the spiders were on and a fire was started and I yelled at them to do it outside, especially when I noticed a bunch of car tires on the pyre that was quickly becoming an inferno.

I stepped out of the room just as another housemate was arriving wondering what was going on and I encouraged him to tell the others to put the fire out and to take the fire extinguisher with him. I was pro-put out the fire, but in retrospect I realize the ONLY solution to the problem was to burn down the house. Burn it. Burn it down.

When I stepped back into the room, the fire had been extinguished but the spider problem remained. They weren't crawling over us, but they were still a seething mass and any object that had been on the floor were now riding on top of the mass as if on waves.

The spiders were aware of us, and when someone poked a stick at the mass, they reacted. There were so many it was impossible to move anything without killing them. The dream ended with me asking one of the housemates, "You know I'm afraid of spiders, right?", and him almost sarcastically answering, "Yes, I know. If there's anything I know about you, it's that".

Upon waking, my thought was, "I'll take the insomnia".

So I lay awake for several more hours, first listening to another mix CD and then a lecture on Tibetan Buddhism by Robert Thurman. Then same as last time, instead of getting up close to 9 o'clock, I tried to drift into twilight sleep and see if I could investigate dreams in that state.

At one point, I do remember in a dream thinking that I was in a dream, so that was successful from a lucid dream perspective, but the nature of the dreams became totally bizarre and hostile. It was almost as if my unconscious was testing me after realizing I was in my own dream.

I don't remember them clearly enough to relate, but enough impressions to recall that scene after scene, I found myself amidst hostile people, trying to maintain calm. Actually, as I just wrote "amidst hostile people", I remembered that is a projected experience in the Tibetan-described bardo death experience.

Not suggesting it's objective, as my subconscious could be projecting what I'd read in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. I do know that in the dream I never reminded myself that this was all projections from my own mind of reality, as the book suggests training towards.