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Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #201: Copilot

I’m standing in a brightly lit cafe near the serving counter. There’s a row of three toilets placed directly next to a huge window that looks out onto a shopping mall. In spite of the people passing by just a couple feet away from the window, I decide that I need to sit down on one of these toilets.

As I’m sitting there I realize that I don’t really need to go after all. I wonder why I am even sitting on this toilet publicly embarrassing myself. Some kid, a boy of about 9 or 10, sits on the toilet next to me and starts talking to me about something. I don’t relish the idea of having a conversation while seated this way so I get up to leave (not having “accomplished” anything.) The kid gets up as well and I see that he’s left a horrible, putrid mess in his toilet.

He points to the awfulness he left in the toilet and tells me, “Eww, you did that!” I sputter with indignation and outrage until it occurs to me that this has to be a dream.

The kid disappears and I spend a moment taking in the scene. From behind the cafe’s counter, a guy in a paper chef hat stares back at me. I look to the left and see a staircase leading down, with a man in his early 40s standing at the bottom.

I decide to try teleporting by taking over the man’s perspective and it works almost instantly! Now I’m viewing the same scene from the bottom of the stairs. I run up, wondering if I’ll see another version of myself or the man I switched with, but there’s nobody there now.

I see my 4-year-old son E standing nearby at a table and walk up to him. “Hey, buddy!” I say, and walk with him out into the mall. We’re on the second floor walkway and across a sort of interior courtyard I see an atrium with a beautiful skylight. Daylight pours in through the glass and I think it looks like a great flying spot.

I scoop E up in my arms and he feels realistically heavy. He drapes his hands around my neck more lightly than he would in waking life but the grip seems firm enough to get started. I take to the air, flying with him over the balcony railing. The flight feels very floaty, like something that’d happen in zero gravity. E’s legs float out to the side and I realize that I’ve lost the feeling of his weight.

For some reason we’re drifting away from the skylight toward another section of the mall. I make a hard right turn, dragging E behind me, and we begin to travel down a darker, previously unseen corridor. Before we make it very far this way, the dream ends.

On the day prior to this dream, I'd been on a bus and noticed an angry looking wasp in the window, which is my ultimate terror. Usually you can run away like a bitch hoping the wasp doesn't sting you, but on a 50 minute bus ride you just have to chill and fight the urge to scream like a little girl and hope the wasp doesn't put you on its shit-list.

So after a night of drinking I should have forgotten all about the wasp, but my dream went like this:
I woke up in my bed (like most of my other dreams have started lately) and behold, the area around my bed is full of wasps. Crawling on the walls, on the pillows, on the blankets, on my face, even on my lips. I wanted to die. I had a slight notion that I was dreaming, but I never have control until I perform my reality check, and with a wasp crawling around on my face, I'd rather try to wake myself up. I attempted forcing my real eyes open, which is like a layer outside of my dream eyes - not sure how to explain it, I'm not even sure I understand it.
So I woke up, and again I was in my bed with wasps around me. At this point I was fully convinced the wasps were actually there and it wasn't a dream, but for good measure I decided to perform a quick reality check. Clenched my nose and tried to breathe, and to my surprise, it actually was a dream. I threw my covers off of me and stormed out of the room. I tried to open the skylight window on the hallway, but it was stuck. I gave it a good punch that pushed it open. I crawled out and flew away to explore.

This was the second of two lucid dreams that came out of an experiment with green tea during WBTB. In retrospect, I might have liked to take more time talking to this angry dream character to see whether I could learn more about what he was about. These sorts of things can be hard to remember in the moment, but I'll keep trying.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #45: Crowbar Clint

I'm in a mall clothing store and a crazed young man in a baseball cap is wrecking the place with a crowbar. Frightened dream characters give him a wide berth as he screams, curses, and knocks over racks of clothing. He shouts threats and abusive profanity, swinging that crowbar like a baseball bat. I'm frantically planning the best way to get out of here without taking a crowbar to the face when I realize that I'm dreaming. Somehow I also know that the young man's name is Clint.

I get a rush of positive emotion once I realize that I'm perfectly safe. I notice that I know one DC in the store -- T, a coworker of mine, is standing by the cash register making his purchases.

I speak urgently to Clint, like he's neglected some important task: "Clint! Buddy, you've got to get going. T is over there waiting for you to help him change out his hubcaps with that crowbar of yours." Clint looks at me, his anger turning into confusion. I keep repeating this new story to him over and over, placing a hand on his shoulder and leading him toward T. Clint, now docile, walks silently beside me.

Clint appears to be the only person who believes this story. Other DCs shuffle away nervously as we walk by. T seems to get what's going on as well but he plays along, saying, "Yeah, Clint, let's go have a look at my truck." They walk off into the mall and I follow a few feet behind them.

I step outside to find myself on a second story walkway near an escalator. T and Clint have disappeared into the crowds of shoppers. The sun shines through a large, arching skylight that spans most of the mall's ceiling.



It looks like a beautiful day outside, so I decide that I'll fly to the top and phase through the skylight. The sunlight becomes brighter and brighter as I ascend, but before I reach the ceiling, I wake up.