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We Don't Have The Correct Dress Code (23.8.15)
I'm out the front of a bungalow that has no blinds. It's my cousin Rach's place that she stays. I think that she doesn't have any privacy, and what if she wanted to have sex.

I'm out the front of a night club, waiting in line. I realize I don't have the right pants on to be able to enter the club. I was wearing tracksuit pants. My brother gets knocked back due to his shoes. We walk into a near by toilet where he changes them. The shoes he is now wearing were going to be tight putting on, but he had some spray which must make his foot slide into his shoes much better.

I get a taxi back to my old house with lee and my brother. I feel a nice confidence about myself when talking to Lee. I run inside and get what I needed. Now that I think about it, I thought I had spare pants that I could change into when I was out front of the club. So I could have changed in toilets with brother.

A woman and I are running from a pursuer, another woman. "Faster, faster!" the first woman urges me. "Don't look back, it will slow you down." I don't see why I have to run away, but fine, I'll play along... I do look back, however, and I'm surprised how close the pursuer is. This motivates me to try to put some distance between me and her, so I run harder... and yet I can't seem to make much gain on her. I'm perplexed: I know I should be able to do this, I'm dreaming, it's not like I have to rely on my physical stamina. I wonder if the answer is in running with more short strides rather than trying to cover more distance with each step, much as one is advised to run in WL, so I try out variations. I'm making progress, but concentrating so hard on my running form is becoming tedious. "Imagining running is almost as hard as the real thing!" I comment to the woman fleeing with me. Getting bored with this situation I decide to put an end to it, and succeed in sprinting ahead to the point where I can turn a corner and leave the pursuer's field of vision, at which point I figure I've made a fair escape.

However, it turns out that my pursuer had an accomplice: I now find myself in a struggle with a huge brawny man with a shaggy brown beard. I perceive him as a Viking, and I'm aware that his name is Torvald. He is connected somehow with the woman who was chasing me earlier, and is likewise an antagonist. Our struggle manifests partially as a kind of combat, but it feels as much like a battle of dream control as a physical battle.

I easily resist Torvald's initial attempts to subdue me, but his immense confidence makes me wonder if I should doubt my own. I go on the offensive and try to put him out of action more permanently, trying various tactics to destroy his body. For instance, at one point I imagine his body being crushed by a great weight from above, and although this has him stretched out supine on the ground for as long as I'm actively thinking it, he is soon back on his feet. I try crushing his heart and throat from inside his body, but he is only briefly inconvenienced.

I wonder if fire would do the trick, and visualize Torvald's body burning to ash. Though I've said nothing aloud, he appears to understand my intentions, and rather than actively resisting like he did with my other attacks, he simply denies the efficacy of this approach. "Fire won't work," he tells me flatly. I refuse to acknowledge this and continue contentrating on the image of fire consuming him. "Fire won't work," Torvald tells me again. I'm thinking: how could this be? It's my dream, isn't it? Fire should work if I say it should work. So I redouble my focus on the fire. With patient indifference, Torvald insists: "Fire won't work." I find this disconcerting, because apparently my confidence is unable to overcome his. Aren't I the dreamer? But there is no time for philosophical questions; we are still in combat. I switch tactics: if he is resistant to fire, how about ice? I start to try to freeze him—even if it doesn't destroy him it might at least slow him down temporarily—but Torvald has found the opening he needed and pins me to the ground.

Torvald's inexplicable ability to ignore my attempts to burn him makes me wonder if I should worry that he could actually harm me. But I have a superpower too: as the dreamer, I am invulnerable... aren't I? I decide to play it safe, and secretly project my "real" identity to the roof of a nearby building. It is a large square brick structure about 8–10 stories high, and I crouch behind the low brick railing that surrounds the flat roof, tempted to peek out at the combat occurring down below but not wanting to let Torvald see me and discover the trick. So I transfer my perceptions back to my body on the ground, which I now regard as a mere DC, and thus disposable. If my attacker succeeds in destroying this body, it won't matter: I've secured my identity elsewhere. Torvald actually glances up toward the roof when I think this, and I quickly realize that I need to guard my thoughts as well.

"Do you have someone watching me?" Torvald asks. I am relieved, because although he suspects that there is an observer on the roof, he hasn't seen through my whole trick—he doesn't seem to recognize that the person up there is actually me. I project a new thought toward him, gleefully: I recall how undercover police have been tracking him, and that I've been using our encounter to distract and delay him until they were in position. Maybe none of this was true earlier, but it doesn't matter: this is a dream battle, so it is true now! When Torvald looks back down at me, I grin mockingly and deliberately call him by the wrong name, "Harald," just to annoy him further. The game is up, and my undercover officers move in and force Torvald to release me. I'm not sure what happens to him after that... pleased with having solved the dilemma, I simply walk away.

What's next? The last incident was not one that I had intended, but now I'm free to work on tasks. I enter a wide clearing and wonder if I should try the Dragon Age task again. I've always liked the idea of aligning dream space with fictional environments from books, films, or games, but I'm still trying to figure out how to do it. I suppose the first step would be to remember a concrete environment from the game and try to insert aspects of it here. I played DA:I just last night, so I should be able to access those memories... but as I seek them out I feel a tremor of dream instability, and decide not to push it. If there's a risk of waking, I should put that task off until later. For now, there are still a few TOTMs I haven't tried this month, and I decide to work on those.

"Taste a rainbow." That one is easy to remember. I imagine a rainbow in the sky, and produce something very faint and not at all rainbow-colored. The colors are largely ochres and earthtones, and not even in proper lines but arranged in a more tesselated pattern over the arch. I'm not being a perfectionist at this point, so I accept this as a "rainbow" and shrink it into a stick of candy in my hand. The colors have changed in the process, and for some reason the candy stick is white with swirls of red and blue. Still not rainbow-colored! But I take a bite. The texture is interesting, lots of little pieces that crunch between my teeth, but the flavor is a real disappointment: vague, muted, and blandly sweet. Apart from "sweet," no other descriptors really present themselves. This won't do. A rainbow should taste more unusual than this! I decide to start over.

This time I put more work into the rainbow itself. I first visualize it, then focus on the faint transparent arch until it becomes more clearly visible, but this also has the consequence of making it more material. Now it appears like a physical object, a two-dimensional vertical banner in an arch about ten feet high and twenty feet long, right in front of me. I work on correcting the pattern so that it has rainbow colors in properly aligned stripes... I see some improvement, although it is a C+ effort at best. It looks better than my last attempt, anyway, so I approach the "rainbow" and try to take a bite directly out of it. The experience is like... chewing on a shower curtain. It really feels like I've put a sheet of plastic in my mouth, although the material is soft enough to crush between my teeth. Again the texture is more prominent than the taste. I put all my attention on the flavor, trying to detect anything describable, and think maybe I get some underlying fruity notes, but again it remains vague and uninteresting. Taste and smell are the least developed of my dream senses... I wonder if I could improve them if I worked at it?

I feel like I have adequately completed the task, anyway, and wonder what to try next. In all my efforts with the rainbows I had hardly paused to note all the people sitting at various tables around this clearing, like picnickers, but observing them now, I figure it might be fun to try the magic show. What would a stage magician do? I guess the most basic tricks involve having something up one's hat or one's sleeve? I notice that I am completely naked, which has long since ceased to embarrass me in dreams, but gives me a mischievous idea.

"What's up my sleeve?" I start circling among the various tables, challenging the audience members to come up with a response. One of the first responses is: "Following a guy from Eton to [...]?" (I forgot the second place name.) This answer reminds me of the earlier scene, and how I resolved the conflict with Torvald. This DC must have been one of my officers! "Are you an undercover cop?" I ask him in reply. He grudgingly nods. "Not anymore!" I'm joking about how he has just blown his cover, but it also feels like an appropriate analogy to my own lack of sleeves... I'm not "undercover" either.

I continue asking, "What's up my sleeve?" and collect various other responses from the audience, all of which were non-sequiturs... but I reasoned that the illogic of the question itself (since there was no sleeve) invited such creative responses. After hearing from seven different people, I realized that I might have trouble remembering all this when I woke up, so I stopped and went over their answers again, one by one, to help fix them in memory. Already I had trouble recalling two of the answers, but one of the DCs helpfully reminded me, additionally pointing out that the answers varied between the metaphorical (things that never could go up a sleeve) and the literal ("Three shekels" was one of these answers, I think). Meanwhile I was getting ready for the grand finale to my show, when I would reveal my own answer to the question. I had been planning on the groaningly obvious "Nothing!" and was ready for the big reveal when I noticed that something had changed... now I was wearing clothes, including a short-sleeved shirt. I realized that if I was going to go for the groaningly obvious at this point, I would have to answer "My arm!"

I felt myself start waking up, and I already had a lot to remember and report so I didn't resist the process. I woke up slowly enough that I was able to concentrate on those seven answers from the DCs and hold them in mind, with what felt like excellent clarity and accuracy. And then something happened... as I crossed the threshold, despite all my care and preparation, the memories abruptly tattered, the details dissolving. The only one of the seven answers I could still remember, and that incompletely, was the first—and that I suspect only because it was anchored by its reference to the earlier scene.

I've posted the lucid dream at the bottom of this entry but I'm going to start with some non-lucids. I don't usually post my non-lucids in the Dream Journal, but this was a cool series of four NLDs all from the same night as the lucid. All of the NLDs featured Dreamer as well as some other DV folks. The first dream about the magical fox was probably one of the funniest I've ever had.

NLD#1: The Magical Fox

Lots of people on DreamViews are in a big, active study group on advanced dream control. There are 40 or 50 of on this subforum and everyone’s got workbooks that they update regularly. Definite participants include me, Dreamer, Xanous, sivason, NyxCC, and Sensei.

There’s tons of excitement and everyone’s improving rapidly. At some point, we come up with a strange plan to capture a rare, magical animal to use as a class pet. This will somehow improve everyone’s dream control even more. We come up with this awful plan to cut down all of these ancient trees in an old growth forest to drive the creature out of its habitat so that we can more easily capture it.

I’m embarrassed to say that I and nearly everyone else in the class was totally for this plan, but Dreamer is dead-set against it. She objects, begging the study group not to do this and not to destroy this creature’s way of life just to improve our skills a little bit. But everybody’s too excited about the plan to listen.

Dreamer puts a desperate plan into motion. She announces in her workbook that, “I just GASSED!” (Meaning “passed gas”.) And somehow this amazingly strong, room-clearing stench hits the nose of every DV member at same time that she makes this announcement. Everyone stops what they’re doing, horrified.

Now that she has farted her way into everyone’s attention, Dreamer gives a rousing, moving speech about how what we’re about to do is wrong and that we have to change out ways. She says that this magical creature should be free and that it should serve as an inspiration for us out there in its natural home. We shouldn’t be destroying the place that it loves.

She convinces everyone and we halt our plans to deforest the fox's home. Instead, the study group travels out to the forest to commune with the creature and learn advanced dream control this way. The dream ends with a scene of several people sitting down meditating and several others talking about how inspired we all were by Dreamer’s speech.

NLD #2: The Dreamsign
After Dreamer and I exchanged Skype messages during WBTB, I had the following dream (and a huge missed dreamsign):

I look over to see that I’ve received a skype message from Dreamer. It says, “You did wind up falling asleep, right?” I feel guilty for still being “awake” and looking at the clock instead of trying harder to get into a dream. I fret about this for a bit before finally replying with something jokey.

It never occurs to me that she was basically trying to tell me that I’m dreaming right now.

NLD #3: The Watch
This one’s a little hazy, but Dreamer and I have come into possession of a complex, advanced wristwatch that an elderly black woman constructed by hand.

From the top of a parking garage, we get into a car and ride around in the back seat, me watching as Dreamer disassembles the watch into all of these tiny pieces. I worry a bit about how to keep the pieces from getting lost in the car.

We go to some other building to do something important and possibly dangerous, but I can’t recall what was involved.

NLD #4: Hot Street Fighter II
This dream was a cross between skyping and exchanging DV forum posts, the conversation taking place entirely between me and Dreamer.

Dreamer: “I had a dream where you had these super HOT scenes with ladies from Street Fighter II.”

She goes on to mention that she was telling a couple of other DV friends (including KristaNicole07) about the dream. She asks, “I wanted to know if it was okay to tell them you don’t have a beard.”

I ask why they’d need to know that and Dreamer responds: “It’s really relevant to what happened in this dream.” Whatever the reason is that this is relevant, it appears to be highly amusing to her.

After I woke up from this one it occurred to me that there is only one female character in the original Street Fighter II. Maybe we can count Cammy of Super Street Fighter II. Because otherwise, the dream implied that I had a “hot” scene with Blanka or Ken or one of the rest of the crew.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #230: Bold Talk

I’m at home, walking through the master bathroom toward the gym. I’m clumsy, staggering around like I’m dizzy or drunk. Out of nowhere there’s a buzzing noise, electric and unbearably loud. It reminds me of the transition into a dream and I realize that I’m dreaming right now.

I don’t feel stable right away but I furiously rub my hands together, immediately remembering my goal to try to gain total control and confidence in this dream.

“This is my lucid dream!” I bark. “I can do anything!” The gym looks dark and I don’t want to double back. It doesn’t matter, I remember right away that the next thing I want to do is phase outside. I phase through an external wall, expecting to end up outdoors but end up in some new, relatively empty room. It looks like it belongs in my house but it’s not a room that I recognize. Fine. Again! I try another phase through the outer wall…

And wind up in a larger, more bare version of my master bathroom. I’m a little annoyed but I figure that confidence will carry me through this in the end. I hit a nose pinch reality check, breathing in and out a couple of times to cement in my mind that this is a dream.

There’s a mirror and I look over at it to see a more hulking, slightly angrier-looking version of myself. I decide to try to summon Dreamer. I say, “There’s a woman here, right behind!” There’s an uncertain stir in the mirror’s image. I remember to hurriedly add, “And it’s gonna be Dreamer!”

This isn’t working and I don’t have a DC to repurpose as Dreamer. I turn away from the mirror, intending to switch to a handshake summon, but the dream ends.

I stand before a mighty king, surrounded by his advisers. We are all in front of a small wooden building, surrounded by strong stone walls, all sitting atop a tall plateau in the middle of a desert. There is a woman next to him who appears to be some sort of necromancer. I talk to her, and am able to receive visions of exactly what the surrounding area looks like. It seems to work by flying my field of view radially outward in a straight line at any angle I wish. I spy to the West, and see not much but sand. Snapping back to myself, I do it again, but a little South-West this time, and see a giant cave, with a huge demon beast guarding it, and some sort of portal inside. There are smaller demons surrounding him, and the whole area sits in a large crater with a tall ridge around it.

Suddenly, I am teleported to the edge of the sandy crater. Terrified of these demons, they are much stronger than I am, and I have no ability right now to fight them, I try not to get too close. Still curious about what else is around here, I look around, and peer over the top of the crater's edge. A giant half boar, half human creature wielding an axe spots me, and starts jogging in my direction. I turn to run, and see the woman who summoned me here just floating ahead of me, about 10 ft above the hot sand, smiling with a mischievous grin as she watches me run for my life. She gets the attention of a few giant animated skeletons, and sends them to attack me as well.

"Clearly, we have been deceived by her, as she is helping these demon creatures more than us." I think, as I run for my life back toward the stronghold. She morphs me into a wolf so I can run faster, but then casts a spell on me, that slows me down even more so than I was going before. Cackling with her head back as she does so, she slowly floats behind me, amused by my struggle. Still determined to make it to safety, I push on, and will myself to still be faster than my pursuers.

It works, and I manage to climb up a rocky cliff next to a waterfall, out of reach of the skeletons and boar thing. They don't seem to want to climb at all. The waterfall is coming from a river that flows through the stronghold, so this is a potential entry point to a safer location. I sense that my mom would want me to just climb back down, and use the side entrance gate, but that seems too risky with those beasts down there. Plus, this looks like an easy climb. I see that there is a 2 ft wide ridge, one side - a raging waterfall, the other side - a steep plummet to death. Stakes being a little high, I play it safe, and crawl forward on all fours, hugging the ridge as I make my way up.

The going gets much steeper, and I have to climb more than crawl. Still pretty easy though. Then, without warning, the waterfall surges strongly, overflowing the side of the cliff bank that I'm climbing on - nearly knocking me off. I pull a few boulders loose as I struggle to hang on, and hear them crash down the cliff, breaking other rocks away as they fall. The surge dies down, and I climb onward. One hand in front of the other, I pull myself up the edge. The incline lessens to about 60 degrees from horizontal as I near the summit. Right when I feel like I've made it, another massive surge comes out of no where, stronger than the last. I hold on to what seem like strong hand holds, but they pull loose from the ground. My footing also breaks loose as the water pushes me back. Determined to make it, I push my hands deep into the sand, up to my forearms, and hold myself in place.

The water, now covering me up to my shoulders, I feel very precariously stuck in this spot. Barely able to keep from being pushed down to my death, if I life a hand or a foot to make any forward motion, I will not have enough traction to keep myself in place against the force of the water. A woman in the stronghold sees me, and runs to get help. Two young kids walk up to me. They look like they're between 4 and 6 years old. The girl is dressed in a red dress, and the boy is wearing all blue. They just look at me calmly and smile from the grassy flat plateau just above me.

I feel my grip start to move in the sand, and know that help won't be here in time. I kick myself forward, using just my calves, and claw by just flexing my fingers, and in this way, painfully make slow forward progress. But it works! Another big wave of water hits me, but I continue to crawl forward and make it, cresting the ledge to safety.

The kids immediately take the form of West Highlander White Terrier dogs. They wear vests of the same color they had on before: the girl in red, the boy in blue. I recognize them now as enlightened beings, and thank them for helping me find the strength to survive and make it to safety. I hug the boy, and he bites me in the face, one of his teeth pulling at my right eyelid! I recoil, turning away and stepping back. I hug the girl dog, and she is much nicer, wags her tail, and licks me. I pet the boy dog, and he tries to bite me again. I don't understand why yet, but I still know they're enlightened beings and are helping me in some way, even if I can't understand it yet.

I walk up to the main stronghold area to where the king was before, and find him talking to the woman from earlier. He seems to now be aware that she is a spy, but is planning to use her for scouting the nearby terrain anyway. He tells her that she must explore the Southern and South-Eastern coasts of the huge island we are on. I watch as he gestures to the particular areas on an animal skin map, that is divided into named zones. As he gestures to it, new zones appear. He tells her, "Also, make sure you go South, to Dakota. Not South-Dakota, but New-Dakota, which is just North of Dakota." On the map, a glowing green line of light appears, outlining two new Dakota areas, one of which is then labeled as "New Dakota".

I thought I posted this already in my DJ but I don't see it... From Christmas Morning!

12/25/13 quick excerpt: I was driving down the street and I saw my friend M from A outside his garage. I stop to say hi and he is telling me about something he invited me to recently. I look around I notice there are a lot of people there and it is a party. I don't think much of this at first but then I see my aunt L and D and at first I think he must've met them before but wait a minute what are they doing here they are hundreds of miles away I am dreaming! Almost immediately I think of my goal, the next task for the competition, mass telekinesis and I teleport out of there thinking about a cityscape. I am fairly sure I closed my eyes Boss style. Either way I went from a day time scene in a town a good ways away from the city over to a moonlight scene and some version of a city. There were only two large skyscrapers at first and a green patch of grass in between & in front of them. It all seems a little fuzzy or cloudy so I get down on my hands and knees and feel the grass to stabilize it feels so nice and cool that I almost was tempted to lay n roll around in it but no I got back up and proceeded with my task I used to telekinesis to pick up one skyscraper and throw it into the other. Awesome!!! I fly over to another group of buildings and I see quite a few more I threw a couple of them together with telekinesis. I stop and think about my next goal, Scionox would like it and it was starting to work but then I started fading back to bed. Felt I could definitely re-enter a dream but I feel my wife next to me and switch priorities which turned out nice. Also had to get going with Christmas activities.

Major rise in confidence during this dream! Got an animal transformation, Advanced TotM, and was getting there on a Task of the Year, too. Thanks to NewArtemis for the dream control suggestions!

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #171: I Am the Wolf

I have a false awakening that places me in my bed at home next to Wife. All of the lights are on and she's fiddling around with some papers in bed, something to do with my new business. "Oh good, you're awake," she says. I grumble about how unhappy I am that this is the case.

"Sorry," she responds, "but we really need to work on this." I whine that it should be able to wait until the morning and that I was trying to have a lucid dream. She turns back to the papers, not bothering me any further. I'm a little worried that I was rude and have maybe pissed her off, but I decide to just take my chance while I can. I roll onto my side and begin my mantra of "The world is yours". I'm shocked to find that almost immediately I start a WILD transition. (Obviously just an in-dream WILD, but I didn't realize it at the time.)

In the transition state, my dream hands are grasping at something rough that's rolling by beneath me. I grasp at it and start clawing my way along. A gravel surface comes into view. It seems like I'm floating while climbing a ladder made out of gravel that's been crudely mortared together. After a bit, the scene solidifies and the gravel becomes a path. There's one more odd little jump as gravity takes hold and now I'm walking along the path in a full-formed scene.

It's dawn and I'm on a path that cuts through a park, not far from a street. Most of the DCs are dressed like it's chilly but it feels mild to me. I remember my intention to be extra confident in this dream and I start shouting my intentions at the passerby. "I can do anything I want! This is all mine!" I shout, interspersing lots of profanity and generally sounding like a total nutjob.

I remember Task of the Month to turn into a white wolf, hide in the snow, and hunt down a meal. I still feel all crazy from my mantra and the insane confidence I had at the start of this dream. I shout in a booming voice that's not my own that "I AM THE WOLF!" Immediately my hands curl into white paws. I practice running a bit on all fours and it's not bad! I kind of get the sense that I'm sort of bent over like a loping hunchback / werewolf thing but hey, close enough!

I go on a brief, profanity-laced tirade about how there's a bunch of snow to my right, and yep there it is. I hop my little wolf-feet into it and crouch down, looking to my left for some prey. Immediately I spy two potential targets: the closest is a large skunk and the other is an orange, semi-spherical alien thing with tentacles. The skunk's closer and the alien makes me a bit nervous, so I pounce on the skunk.

My teeth rip into him and I tear a big chunk away. Fortunately none of this is bloody but the skunk stares at me in shock. The skunk meat tastes atrocious. It's like chewing on a fart. I can't remember whether I'm supposed to eat the whole animal so I take another bite. This time it's more gummy and tasteless at first but after a bit of chewing, nope, this bite's all farty-tasting too. I hope this is good enough because I've had enough of being a carnivore.

I allow myself to change back into a human and walk further into the park. I come to three identical stone buildings with opaque green windows, standing side by side. I think of the Colosseum Task of the Year and shout that the building which leads to the Colosseum needs to light up. No immediate result, so another attempt, more yelly and with more profanity does the trick and the middle building's door lights up.

I move through a series of three automatic glass doors where a steady stream of children is walking in the opposite direction. I say that the kids need to get out of the way and DC parents appear from out of nowhere to pull them to the side as I pass. I emerge in a restaurant area filled with DCs enjoying a meal. An Indian man in his early 40s is playing on a slot machine against the left wall and he turns to look at me with an expression of surprise.

I push through the back door out into the early morning next to a crumbling sports arena. It's huge and looks a lot like the Colosseum apart from some weird details like the rebar that's sticking out of the top of it. I fly up toward the top and as a gust of wind carries me sideways away from where I want to be, I shout and mutter that "this is my world", and things get back on track.

I come over the top of the stadium to see that inside it looks like a grassy version of the Circus Maximus! There's even a little chariot racing by itself around the track. I know I can make this work, so I fly down toward the field, shouting that down there will be someone for me to fight. Before I'm even halfway down, though, the dream ends.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #100: The World Is Yours

I'm flying high in the sky around what looks to be a computer-generated globe that's populated with little dots. I feel like I'm on a plane with Wife but I don't see a plane. It's just me and my floating perspective as we circle slowly and gracefully around this globe.

I tell Wife, "This is a music video for a Phil Collins' song called 'Julia' from 1980." (Not true.) The song immediately starts playing. In it, Collins sings of how this globe is "not CGI" and that the dots represent people around the world. He sings that the dot he remembers best ("the one I best recall") was one of him over the ocean, flying on a plane to be reunited with his beloved Julia.

As the song ends, I suddenly find myself falling downward out of the sky. I hope that this is a dream, I think, and of course it is.

I immediately halt my fall and find myself hovering over a huge, vivid cityscape -- highways, skyscrapers, cranes, bridges, traffic jams, all arrayed for me down below. I want to fly around and explore this city, but when I attempt to fly, I'm unable to move. For some reason, I feel totally confident that I'll come unstuck. Stop asking, I think.

I ignore what the dream is telling me and I imagine that I'm already flying Iron Man-style around the city. A second later, I'm flying effortlessly, cruising anywhere I like. I get briefly stuck a time or two, but I just ignore it, imagine that I'm succeeding, and immediately start flying again. Eventually, the little glitches stop.

I see a tower that I remember from waking life -- it's one that I pass during my commute. I fly up to the top and circle around it. I glide low over roadways and high above a cluster of skyscrapers, then descend back to one of the bridges that spans a piece of some unfamiliar bay.

My confidence is soaring, and I decide try some large-scale dream control. I put my hands out in front of me and then bring them apart like I'm performing the breaststroke. As I do, I rake cars off of the bridge in either direction and dozens of them go plummeting toward the water. I bring my hands back together and I watch as time rewinds and they return to the bridge, unharmed. I fly back toward the skyscrapers, select a pair of them, and then begin moving them up and down, one for my left hand and one for my right.

I look to my left and see an enormous fire ogre (a la "Orcs Must Die") stomping toward me down one of the city streets. He towers over most of the nearby buildings, at least 100 feet tall. I wonder whether maybe I'll be fighting him later. I feel no fear at all. I reflect for a moment about what it would be like to have this much control and confidence in every LD. Nothing could stop me. What sort of things would I do if I had years of this kind of power?

Leaving the fire ogre behind for now, I fly over my city for a while and just let my dreaming brain show me what it can do. I look out at the waters of the nearby bay and think about using all of this overflowing confidence for some Task of the Month parasailing, but the dream soon ends.

Sparring

I meet up with an old friend from high school for the first time in a while. I pretend to do some Tae Kwon Do moves at him, and suddenly he counterattacks while saying some words that I recognize from the dojang. "Where did you get those words??" I ask incredulously. He must have taken up TKD! We continue sparring for a little while. I am reminded of something my instructor once said: "Think of sparring as a way of saying hi to your partner."

Confidence

Someone is supposedly fated to slay a terrible dragon. But the person is a staunch supporter of free will, and hence has trouble believing in something like fate. So ze is very unconfident about the prospect of fighting this dragon, which clearly hurts zir chances of succeeding. [I don't recall whether this person was me, or somebody else.]

I finally did it.

Basically, I was in school, which seems to recur in my dreams, and as I was walking between to lessons, I thought, "it's the holidays, there is no school" my dream self performed an RC and I could breath through my blocked nose. I then thought, I'm dreaming. at first I had little control and kept walking to my next lesson, then I kept repeating, I am dreaming, I am in control, and I eventually gained total control. I couldn't teleport, but I wondered around the school, and because I had no urgency to get to lessons, nor did the others.
I discussed with one of my teachers about the fact that I was dreaming, and then he pointed out the floating island directly above us. I explored the school and even spoke to some friends, but I can't remember what I said, nor what they said.
The dream ended when I saw the floating island flicker, disappear, then reappear until I woke up.

A very strange, yet rather fun experience.

26-07-11 I am standing in the backyard of a building complex. The grass looks dried out and has white tips but otherwise a spectrum of colours ranging through black, green, yellow and ofcourse white. The buildings are grey and massive and there doesn't seem to be an immidiate way out of the yard.

I am lucid from the start, I know this from the qualitative difference in the imagery I am experiencing. I have had 4 dreams of poor quality with the knowledge of dreaming, but the visual product has been awful, sort of like having 1 eye in the dream world and the other awake.

I start by commanding the dream to stabilise and I look around the buildings that look rather gloom. I contemplate increasing the vividness of the dream, but the quality seems good. I try taking off in flight, but struggle severely. After this realisation I decide it is irrelevant after all, could probably overcome it, but it is not my goal with this lucid.

I call out for the dream if it can help me. I send a brief thought to my goal of overcoming confidence issues, but don't as such engage en deep mentation over it.

Quickly there is a call from behind me and I start making my way there. I am aware that this is my first REM phase seeing as I haven't actually ”slept” yet, so I want to make quick progress. However as I am making my way towards the woman that has called me, several times I have to engage my senses as the scenery starts to blur.

The woman calls me from a plateau above me. The place has taken on a look of a mixture of ruins and incompleted housing, though the entire area is connected completely. I know I can get up to her, but she makes her way down to me.

I ask her name and she replies that it is Mie. I unfortunately don'w remember the rest of the conversation, for a couple of reasons. First of all I recall appologising to her that I have to shift my attention away from her words and her in general as the dream keeps on fading at an increasing frequency. Secondly we didn't really manage to get past the introductory phases, though I have one word summarising the content ”construction”.

I wake up.

Notes: I was unable to actually sleep much this night. The first 4 dreams mentioned can best be described as non-REM or partially wakeful dreams. They lack the complete dream scenery relying only limited on visual product and mainly audio. They all were false awakenings as well. Had some pretty scary HHs as well one being a high sound and another the sensation of being tugged in, though I countered this by hugging back the ”entity” and actually that gave the experience a warm feeling to it. Though my control seemed somewhat diminished in the actual dream, my access to waking memory and intentions and goals, where solid and clear. So paradoxially my lucidity was high, though my control was limited. Unfortunately I didn't get as much time or could afford as much attention to the girl as I would have like to, but it is a start and this theme will get more attention!
…

I am in a kitchen making pancakes. I am pouring the milk directly in the bag of flour. There are various pieces of fruit in the bag, which I am anoyed about. Some of these fruits are green tomatoes. Thure comes into the kitchen and asks what I am up to. I tell him I am making pancakes, but that I can't really get the mixture right, well, to mix at all. I then complain about the fruit in the bag and ofcourse he can see that as being a problem, but I have a feeling that I am really just using it as an excuse.