Recent DJ Posts

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #254: Adobe

I’m driving through a city, looking for some place to park. My dream family is here with me -- a dark-haired woman is my wife, my young daughter is in a car seat in the back, and there’s maybe a 2nd child (a son?) as well. We’re exhausted and homeless, living out of our car. I pull into a parking space next to a hill and sleep for a while. A cop car pulls up soon, though, and we have to move on.

Now we’re driving down a dusty freeway that’s under construction. Workers wander back and forth, while a thick cloud of tan dust obscures my vision. I can barely see 30 feet in front of me and I’m really scared that I’m going to hit someone. A worker walks right in front of the car and I swerve, barely missing him. I’m so afraid that I’m going to kill somebody and I panic myself into…

… a false awakening. I believe that I’m anotherdreamer and that I need to write this dream down before I forget it. My surroundings are alien to me, though, and I’m feeling super lazy, way too tired to get out of bed to journal. Something seems odd, though, and I flow into…

… another false awakening as myself! :canislucidus: I still feel really tired and lazy, but this time since I’ve “really woken up”, I decide to do the right thing and journal. I grab my DJ and walk into the bathroom, but as I’m holding the DJ I notice that the journal isn’t as thick as it usually is. (I keep a pen jammed in it.) I try the nose pinch, blow through, and now I’m lucid. I walk back into the bedroom and my vision dims until I’m in the void.

I rub my hands together, recalling the idea to try a little singing the next time I’m in the void. I sing a line about how “this is a lucid dreeeeeeam” and my voice comes out like half-badass/half-joke rock like Tenacious D. After some more singing and hand-rubbing, my vision comes back and I’m in my bedroom closet. I walk back out to the window and try some air guitar. It’s lame at first, but after a few tries, I hear some distant chords of electric guitar that actually sound pretty good.

I look out through the bedroom window onto a nighttime desert scene. As far as I can see there are rows of adobe buildings lit by neon signs. It looks like fun, so I phase through the window and hulk-jump off the side of the house toward the buildings. I do some mid-air guitar playing during this jump, too, and kind of flail my legs around like I’m trying to do some kind of rock star jump thing. I land between one set of restaurants and buildings on a dusty street, then hop into the air again.

While I’m up in the air, I decide that I want to try summoning Dreamer to hang out at one of these places to talk and pig out on a bunch of dream food. Out loud I say, “Okay, I know we’re supposed to meet here…” and then “Don’t be late!” I nag. When I land, though, the DC waiting there is a woman I don’t recognize, tall and pale with short brown hair, a pierced nose, and multiple piercings on each ear. She starts speaking to me in this really caustic, unpleasant American accent, berating me about my guitar playing.

“Your guitar playing was all bullshit,” says the woman. “That wasn’t even you!” She walks up to me, continuing to scold and complain about my guitar playing, telling me that my playing sucked, etc. I find this pretty annoying but for some reason I don’t think to just leave.

I don’t find this DC appealing, but I decide to turn things around by saying, “There’s no need to be so weird about it. If you wanted to have sex with me, you should have just asked.” As I say this, she takes on a different countenance, her hair darkening, her body growing a little shorter, a little more athletic-looking, and a softer, more attractive face, probably mixed-race. She approaches me and we kiss. We awkwardly lose our balance and do this not-at-all sexy fall onto the road. I make an attempt at escalating things to sexytime, but my vision has faded out. There are a few more seconds of void-kissing before the dream ends.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #234: Tavern

Wife and I are standing across the table from another couple, a guy with brown hair and a lady with blond hair. The table is covered with a messy array of partially consumed peanut butter jars and jelly jars, which we’re examining in order to do some kind of inventory.

The guy and I are talking about how hard it is to find time for important non-work related activities like this jar thing. He says how impressed he is with his wife for finding time to run and that she wears “SXN 400 running shorts”. He says something about how hot Wife probably looks in those.

For some reason, I don’t find this impolite. Instead, I turn to Wife and tell her she’s beautiful, and compliment her for staying in such good shape even with the challenges of having and raising two kids. She accepts the compliment without awkwardness (tough for her in front of people), scooches closer to me and begins a long monologue. She’s switching rapidly from subject to subject and I’m having a hard time understanding her. I realize that I must be dreaming.

I grab on for a nose pinch, remembering to calm myself and just breathe in and out. Wife’s speech becomes even more rapid and confusing. I tell her that I’m having a lucid dream, but she’s talking over me. I walk around the room, continuing to calm myself and breathe through the nose pinch, but my vision goes dark, like the void. Wife’s voice is still there, though, and I just keep walking, having faith that the scene will right itself.

Now a doorway with a stairwell appears in my vision. Good. I walk forward, enter the stairwell, and walk down to a nearby window. I phase through the window and lower wall, my foot getting slightly stuck on the way out, but no problem. I’m outside on a street again, and now I attempt to fly. I have some trouble with this, so I do a quick Hulk-jump to regain some confidence.

I remember my intent to summon Dreamer and take her… somewhere. I’ll have to figure that part out later I guess. “Dreamer, youuuuu… are right around the corner!” I say, just before turning the corner.

When I turn the corner, there is a young woman there! She doesn’t look all that much like Dreamer. Hair is blond rather purple, and her overall appearance is different. She's plainer, younger, shorter than Dreamer, but I don’t worry about that. I figure that she'll become herself after I just spend some time walking around with her for a while.

“Dreamer!” I say. “It’s you! Hey, purple up for me!” (meaning “change your hair to purple.”)

“Hey!” she says. Her voice is completely wrong, and she even has an American accent. I don’t worry about it though. “Normally I would, but I’m just not feeling it today!” Her blond hair instantly disappears and now she’s bald as a cueball.

With this, she races off in a run, and I run behind her to keep up. She’s really fast and I’m having a little trouble keeping up. I encounter the sign from the previous dream that reads “←Tavern→” and remember it from before.

We run down a few streets before entering what looks like a train station. I know there’s something specific place I’d planned to take her, but I’ve forgotten it. “I think I’m supposed to take you to a tavern for Task of the Month.” (wrong!)

She seems to consider this. “Whatever it is, I’ll think of it soon.” With this, she twirls once and runs up a set of stairs.

I run after her, thinking that my plan was to go to a tavern with her and do some lucid drinking. I’m not completely confident that this is right (it’s not!) but I go with it for now. As I’m partway up the steps, the dream ends.

This was the first of two lucid dreams from last night, and my first serious Great Barrier Reef attempt.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #130: The Turtle

I'm swimming in a shallow cove with my 4-year-old son "E". I tell him that he's helping me practice for a planned dream about the Great Barrier Reef and he seems excited to help. We come across a cave just under the waterline, swim into it, and emerge in a cavern where all these other kids are hanging around. I wonder whether all these kids are helping their moms and dads prepare for a Great Barrier Reef dream. This feels strange to me and I become lucid.

There's either a scene change or a memory gap at this point, because my next memory is of walking by myself through the grounds of a university. I pass two men who stare silently at me as I walk by. They're both in their late 20s and look almost like identical twins, except that one is dressed in a suit while the other wears glasses and a flannel shirt. I think that there's something I need to ask them, but I can't remember what it is. (I think I'd meant to ask them the meaning of life for Task of the Month.)

Nearby is a plaza with a tall stone column at each of its four corners. Perhaps a dozen DCs are walking around this plaza, looking happy but aimless. I exchange a glance with one tough-looking DC as I walk across the plaza, and something about him just rubs me the wrong way. I take a half-hearted swing at him, as if I'm trying to slap him upside the head. He ducks out of the way, and immediately I wonder why I would do something like that.

The DC moves aggressively toward me and I move to dissolve this problem that I've caused. I hold up my right hand to the DC and walk casually away, saying, "It's cool." The tension abates and he walks away. Whew.

I remember my intention to get to the Great Barrier Reef. I hulk-jump high above the Earth, knowing that I'll see water nearby. Sure enough, there's a sparkling blue ocean to my right. As I descend, I notice a cute DC standing in the water, waving at me as she watches me come back down to Earth. As I near the water, I realize that she's Wife!

Before I can say anything, I plunge into the water. This is one of only a handful of times that I've been underwater in an LD, and I'm pleased to see that I can breathe normally. I try my voice, and it's perfectly clear: "[Wife]! Can you hear me?" There's no reply and I don't see any sign of her. Okay, focus. I need to ride a sea turtle, find a great white shark, and bite it. Without dying. The task feels really intimidating to me but I start searching.

I swim in random directions for a while until I finally catch sight of a turtle. The turtle has no interest in my company, though, and speeds away from me underwater. I don't have any plan as to how I'm going to catch him, so I just try to swim faster. He kites me along like this for quite a while until I have a false awakening in some kind of hospital.

Wife and I are here trying to improve our dreaming abilities. I'm astounded but pleased that she's interested in dream work now. She tells me that she's trying to hit her REM cycles by setting alarms that correspond with the take-off times for airplanes. Skyler White (from Breaking Bad) walks into our room and starts speaking to Wife in a husky, almost male voice. She's apparently a researcher at this hospital. This all seems strange to me and I briefly become lucid before the dream ends.

I wish that I'd asked this character what he represented rather than falling back so readily to fight or flight! My emotional control wasn't great in this LD but at least I guided myself toward a Task of the Year goal.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #70: The Celebrity

I WILD into a wooded campground. There's a crowd of excited DCs nearby, all waiting to meet this one guy who seems to be some kind of celebrity. The "celebrity" is an uncharismatic, mid-40s, somewhat ugly guy with a dark mustache. In spite of this, all of the women in the crowd are swooning and the men are excitedly pushing past one another for a chance to shake his hand.

In between handshakes, the celebrity keeps doing these loud, visibly moist sneezes directly into his hand... just before using it to shake the hand of the next starstruck DC. I find the whole scene repulsive, so I decide to hurry past.

As I pass by the crowd, the celebrity turns to me and offers me a handshake. I think that I'm supposed to be honored, but I have no interest in touching his sneeze-hand. I politely pat his shoulder and turn to leave, refusing the handshake.

There's a murmur of surprise from the crowd, but I try to ignore them, thinking instead of the tasks that I have in mind. The celebrity charges toward me and thrusts his hand in my face, insistent that I pay my respects. No, thanks. I turn away again, but when I do, the celebrity disrespectfully slaps me on the butt! I'm unbelievably offended at being treated this way in my own dream. My first thought is to turn around and just wreck this dude.

I decide that escape's the better move, though, so I Hulk-jump away. Somehow the celebrity grabs onto my leg as I go, though, and ends up flying with me. We land in another part of the campground and again he wordlessly extends his sneeze-hand toward me for a handshake. I try another jump, but he keeps hanging on.

I'm really angry that he's interfering with my LD and I think of the Colosseum Task of the Year ('Have a "fight to the death" with a DC in the Colosseum.') Yes, I think that I've found just the DC for killing. "I'm taking you to the Colosseum," I tell him, and grab him by the throat. His expression never changes, but his neck, arms and torso start rapidly expanding as if he were packing on slabs of muscle right before my eyes. Within a few seconds, he's transformed into a hulking, dangerous-looking gladiator.

Still holding him by the throat, I jump again. The celebrity looks like he weighs about 260 now, but fortunately I can move him easily when I jump. I have a gladius in my hand, but I hold back on using it until the time is right. My enemy is wearing some kind of armor now, and he's no longer looking for a handshake. I give my gladius some practice swings and mutter some threats that I can no longer remember. The celebrity doesn't respond.

Now we crash down on a floor of sand. I think that this is it! I can see a low stone wall all around us but above that it's just darkness where the crowd should be. I will the scene to come into focus, but the darkness just descends heavier and heavier until the dream ends...

Lost Lucid Dreams and Fragments
I also had a number of longer lucid dreams last night that were mostly wiped from my memory! My guess is that these were very low-level lucids where I lost lucidity. I'm a bit distressed to know that I am capable of losing LDs like that. I'm pondering what I should do to address this.

Lost Lucid #1 - I'm flying high over a huge canyon near sundown, aware that I'm dreaming and holding a pile of dog poo in my bare hands. I am in a hurry to get somewhere.
Lost Lucid #2 - An old man is in my kitchen showing me how to make gold out of simple household ingredients (including mud.) I know that I'm dreaming, but I watch in fascination.

Also, one lucid fragment:

Lucid Fragment #1 - I'm looking at a DJ entry on DreamViews. It has a single comment with a very long first paragraph. I become lucid when I see that the comment is from "BadArtemis" rather than "NewArtemis". Quickly wake up.

Lucid again! I smoked a couple bowls of calea right before going to bed so that may have contributed a bit, at least in the vividness and detail of the dream. Actually, I know it did, I'm familiar with calea and for me it always creates what I'm now calling the "crowd effect", where my dreams tend to have at least some part that includes huge amounts of people for whatever reason. I'm not sure why that effect specifically happens, I guess it's just an easy way to add more detail to a situation lol.

#1 - Tiny Girl

There was something going on in the dream already before this, but I come in when I'm at my friend M's house (it's not actually her house, though) and I'm waiting for her to finish something so I decide to go swimming. Apparently, I'm a shapeshifter (still non-lucid at this point) and I turn myself into a little girl (not myself) for some reason. I already had my bathing suit on so I jumped in the pool and swam around briefly, but then it started raining so I got out and went inside the house, perfectly dry. I went down a staircase (apparently I was on the second floor despite having just come in from the back yard ) and walked past anderj101. And as I did he started chanting "tiny girl, tiny girl...." in a trance-like voice. After that I turned back into myself, and at the bottom of the stairs I found myself at some kind of party that took place in this huge building and spanned several floors. The building had one of the openings in the center where you can look over the railing and see the other floors above and below it, and there didn't seem to a end to either direction. I walked around and just talked to people for a bit, but I kept hearing people doing the "tiny girl" chant but each time I did that person would add an extra line to the end of whatever the previous person said. Eventually I found my cousin P and told him that G (his little brother) was crazy (he was one of the people chanting) and that I was afraid I might have accidentally started some cult or something.

After that there was a total change in subject and I said to P "I bet I can jump over this railing and land two or three floors down and be perfectly fine." to which he disagreed, so I got ready to do it. I had a brief moment of "what the hell am I doing " but then I became lucid! I got an adrenaline rush and laughed to myself and ran forward and jumped. It was a long fall down the few floors, but I landed on one below and the impact felt like nothing at all, as if I had just jumped in place and was landing back on the ground, and everyone cheered when I made it. I walked off and noticed a cute girl standing there and made a move to kiss her, but she backed away and some people started laughing, so I shrugged it off and kept walking. I saw a counter with people behind it and immediately knew that they were selling movie tickets. I thought that might be an interesting avenue to explore so I walked up there and asked for two tickets for Pokémon. There were no movie names listed, I just chose that by default, and I'm not totally sure why I asked for two. Maybe I was losing lucidity lol. I was a little nervous that there wasn't enough keeping me lucid, so I told her to hurry up and got the tickets and kept walking. She told me to go "where the TVs are", but I walked around and didn't see any. I found a bunch of people standing around doors that looked like they led to lounge rooms where the movies were probably being held, but when I opened one and started walking through it the dream become extremely dim and fuzzy, so I backed out and abandoned that idea. The dream picked back up briefly, but as I was walking down a hallway trying to figure out what else to do, it fully faded and I woke up. Oh well, at least that's another lucid in a really short amount of time.

#2 - Shifting Stairs

I'm in school and after class gets out I end up talking to this girl I used to see from time to time named M (different from the previous dream). Eventually I ask her if she needs a ride home and she says yes, but then her little sister shows up, along with an enormous crowd of students. I go to get something out of my locker (a couple folders or something, once I pull them out and they drop out of my line of sight they're never seen again ) and get stuck in the crowd. One short girl is trying to reach above the lockers for something, and I stand on my toes to look up there and tell her there's nothing there but she keeps reaching. Another girl keeps opening my locker for some reason and looking in it all confused, until finally she says "Ooooh, that's YOUR locker!" and looks at me with an embarrassed smile. I smile back and walk off to catch up with M and her sister again. We're on the second floor so we walk to the staircase which is divided into two sections with a small median in between. We get there and turn around and I notice that the second set of steps actually leads back up to where we just were, they both lead to the same place. M's sister just walks up them like it's the normal thing to do, and I'm seriously perplexed. I turn to M to say something about it but hesitate, then look back and the stairs have corrected themselves. M walks down to meet up with her sister who's already down there now, and I go too but then they just leave without saying anything, and I feel kind of lonely. The next part of the dream I don't really want to say but it involves me thinking about some old friends that I don't really get to talk to anymore because of some stuff that made us not really friends anymore.... And then I even saw one of them walk by and it was really awkward. >_< I finally made it to my car and started driving off, then the dream ended.

So the second one was kind of a downer. :T The first one was fun, though!