Snacks From the Butler's Pantry

No story is new. No great work of art is an original. Recurring themes in Literature and Art are constantly being recycled through ancestral knowledge. This knowledge is passed through ages, heedless of the constraints of time or space. This is what my Father taught me. My friend and mentor. I miss him terribly. I miss him now, as I hold this pillow to his withered face. As I listen to his dying breaths, and feel him struggle feebly under the white linen.

Long ago, before my Father adopted me as his apprentice and son, he had a wife named Margaret. He would talk of her often. A brilliant woman with a natural talent for storytelling, art, and all things creative. She was a student of my Father, much like myself. My Father told me in secret one day that he never truly had to teach her anything. Her work was inspired by a relentless muse. She would spend days on end locked in her room working on a painting. When it was completed, she would bring it out to display with pride.

The only problem was, each work she would produce would turn out to be a duplicate. A duplicate of a work she had never seen before. My Father, knowing much about art history, would hang her fresh painting on the wall, then bring out a dusty piece of artwork hundreds of years old that matched it exactly. The details would be different, but the forgery was clear. The only problem was, Margaret had never seen it before that moment.

Ashamed and confused about her gift for forgery, Margaret became a recluse. She left my Father to live on a small island in a lake. My Father corresponded with her through letters. Recently, the letters had stopped coming. My Father started to worry, and decided we would take a journey to check up on her. He thought it was time I was introduced to her, and perhaps inspired by her.

Our journey took us through landscapes that all looked familiar to me. I remember them as all famous paintings. Turners, Corots, landscapes from the Hudson River School. Arriving at her island (which looked suspiciously like a Turner), we were greeted roughly by her manservant. I could tell something was upsetting him, and he rudely kept trying to send us away. Upon closer inspection, we noticed that the house looked run down. The servant would not send down a ladder, and scuttled away to hide from us. After much difficulty, we made our way on shore, and docked our small boat.

We were greeted with violence. Out of nowhere, the servant lunged at my Father with a knife. His eyes were wild, and he was babbling nonstop about old stories and mythology. In a panic, I tried to pull the man off of my Father, and wrestle the knife from his hands. He turned his violent attention on me, and we toppled backwards onto the boat. He loomed over me, and I reached behind me to grab something to defend myself with. I grabbed the boat hook, and swung it in his direction right as he fell on me. I felt the hook sink into him, and heard him scream in pain. He stood up, looked at the gore falling out of his belly, and stumbled away. As my Father lifted me out of the boat, we watched the servant helplessly crawl back into the cottage with his entrails dragging behind him. My Father set off for shore to get help while I followed the servant into the dilapidated cottage.

The cottage was worse on the inside. The stench of old decaying death was the first thing I noticed. The stench that could only mean one thing. My fears were answered when I entered the bedroom and found the servant crying over Margaret's bed. In the bed, wrapped in Margaret's night gown, were the remains of what must have once been the poor woman. They were in a badly decomposed state. The servant was clinging to one skeletal hand, and weeping madly. I could tell he was dying fast, and as soon as he began talking, I realized the extent of his senility. While I stayed with him, trying to staunch the bleeding, He told me a fantastic tale. The story of the ghost of Nicholas Twist.

Nicholas Twist is a Muse. He is the messenger who brings ideas to those in need. He is the ghost of the world's oldest ideas and stories. The keeper of all ancestral knowledge and mythology. But he is also a businessman. He does not give ideas away for free. For each new story he brings to you, he takes one of your memories in exchange. For each inspired image he brings you, he takes your memory of a place you have been. This is the way he has been gathering ancestral knowledge throughout history. This is how he collects and transmits stories across continents and across generations.

The man was clearly mad, but this is how he explained his senility. As you grow old, your memories are taken one by one by the ghost of Nicholas Twist. The world grows rich with your inspired work, Nicholas Twist grows fat with your memories, and you are left with nothing. Margaret's servant had felt the touch of Nicholas Twist for too many years. He knew the pain and confusion of senility, and could not bear to see Margaret go through the same thing. So he killed her before Nicholas Twist could get to her. Margaret's life of limitless inspiration would be too much to repay to Nicholas Twist. Killing her was the only way her servant could save her.

I remember this story now, as I stand in my Father's bedroom. I remember all the greatness he gave to me, to Margaret, to the world. It was too much for him too. Nicholas Twist started to make off with his memories long ago. Now, there was nothing left but an empty husk. A vegetable that could not even recognize his own son. I remember the story as I lift the pillow from his slack and lifeless face. As I switch off the light and go downstairs to call the doctor.

I am not so young as I used to be. I make my living selling my ideas to the world, selling my memories to Nicholas Twist. As I lean against the phone trying to remember the doctor's phone number, I wonder how long it will be before Nicholas Twist takes his next victim.

I got the opportunity to design a beach house in an incredible location. The lot fronted on the pacific ocean, and sloped steeply up a hillside. I began by building a low sea wall at the front of the property that contained a private courtyard. I then created a series of small, connected buildings that climbed up the hillside, alternating with shady courtyards. I built the houses island style, with high ceilings, wide shady overhangs, and glass wherever possible.

As I finished landscaping and terracing the remaining hillside into a private garden, I noticed something strange. The hill behind the house had only a thin layer of sandy dirt. Beneath the silt were massive angular stone blocks. They looked ancient, and were covered in carved glyphs and runes. They looked pitted and worn by sea water with a thin fresh layer of sediment deposited on top. I thought about the meaning of this, and realized the only explanation was that the whole hillside must be in the intertidal zone.

Right as I had this thought, a change in the light made me turn around and face the ocean. I looked down on the ocean far below me, and saw the sun reflecting off the water in beautiful hues of gold and purple. It was the start of an incredible sunset, but that was not what caught my attention. The moon was huge. In the sky, it looked 10 times the size of the sun. And it was moving fast. It was rising up from the horizon, and giving off a warm purple glow. It lit up the sky and cast a hazy purple light on the landscape around me.

I realized the moon was not the only thing moving. The ocean was swelling against the horizon, and rising along the seawall. I watched as it overtook the seawall, and poured over the top. The house I had just built was swallowed in a matter of seconds, and the water was coming at me too quickly to avoid. I climbed to the top of a trellis, and looked down to see hundreds of creatures swarming in the water below me. There were sharks the size of whales with jet black skin. Giant squid and octopus tentacles whipping around madly. The head of a sea serpent the size of a city bus shot out of the water, with its long body trailing behind it.

Behind me, water started pouring down the cliffs like a waterfall. It washed the sediment off the stones to reveal their hieroglyphs and runes. The writing started to glow brightly in the moon's light. I had a second to stare in wonder before a gigantic wave crashed over the mountain top. I dove off my perch towards the monster filled ocean below me. The wave caught me from behind, and lifted me even higher into the air. I rode on the crest of the wave as it sped down the mountainside. I saw the monsters in the water far below me twisting and squirming hungrily. I crashed into the mess of tentacles and teeth, knowing I would be ripped apart. The open mouth of a huge black shark sped towards me, and I swam to meet it. I wanted to be swallowed whole, but the rows and rows of twisted teeth frightened me into waking up.

I don't remember the first half of the dream, or how I became lucid. The furthest back I can remember is walking on a sidewalk in a residential suburban neighborhood, and coming across a group of people sitting on a low stone wall. As I passed, one of them called my name to get my attention. I stopped to say hi, and recognized him as an old friend from 20 years ago. He was thrilled to see me, and shook my hand vigorously. I then recognized the other people with him. They too were long lost acquaintances.

The house down the street was having a great party, so I walked over to check it out. One of my best friends from high school was on the lawn to greet me. We embraced, and he invited me inside. The whole house was filled with people I haven't even thought about in 10 years, 20 years, or more. There were some friends who I knew are now dead, and some friends whose names I couldn't even remember. It was some sort of surprise party just for me.

I was lucid, and felt very sad that this all was not real. It was so emotional to see all these old people again. All these people that used to be meaningful in my life, but are now lost to me. The feelings of loss and regret made me so depressed, I started to cry. Everyone was having such a good time, and I was having such a terrible time. I didn't want to be at this party. I was in the garage, and everyone was yelling greetings to me, hugging me, patting me on the back, and shaking my hand. All I could do was cry, knowing none of this was real.

I wanted to escape, so I pushed everyone away, and flew up to a large storage shelf hanging from the roof. It was full of all my old toys from when I was a kid. This made me even more sad, and I started to become angry at myself for creating all this. Just as my sadness began to turn to anger, I heard my mother's voice in the crowd below. By now, the garage had grown to the size of an airplane hanger. I was a hundred feet or more above the ground.

My mother's voice floated up to me. She was saying, "He's always been like this. Always over-thinks everything. He can't just have fun. What mother could be proud of a child like that? We've only recently felt any love for him at all. You should have seen him when he was a kid...."

I was really angry now, and decided I was through with this dream. I looked down to see water trickling under the closed door below. Just as the crowd started to notice, the door blew off its hinges in a forceful jet of water. High pressure water began spraying into the room from the doorway. People started screaming and pushing to get away. I heard a horrible moaning coming from the wall, then the entire wall gave away, like a dam, to the flood of water. From my vantage point above, I watched the whole building get washed away in a violent flood with everyone in it.

The water level quickly rose to my height, and I felt the strong current pulling at my feet as I struggled to hold on. I heard a roar, and looked up to see a wall of water a hundred feet high rushing towards me. I only now remembered that this was the task of the month. I laughed at the thrilling feeling, and let go of the platform as the wave approached. I felt the swell as I was pulled up to the crest of the tsunami. It was an incredible rush, but I timed it wrong. The wave curled and crashed down on me. I felt my spine snap, and was whipped around under the water, totally disoriented.

I was not afraid, and I did not wake up right away. I laughed in excitement as I was thrown around like a rag doll.

My brother, Patrick recently committed suicide. His depression was too much, so he swallowed his pet beta fish and then drowned himself in the bathtub. After his funeral, I spent the night at his fiancee's house to comfort her. She was totally devastated. We sat around the dinner table reminiscing and telling stories about him. In the smoke coming off the cooking fire, the stories began to come alive. It was as if my memories of my brother were being projected into the smoky air. The more we talked, the more substantial these images became. Soon, I could see the ghostly outline of my brother sitting at the table laughing with us as we exchanged stories. As I ended my tale, he picked up the conversation. He told us the story of what became of souls as they entered the underworld.

Each person's life on Earth is mortgaged against their soul. As you live your life, you slowly repay your loan. A complete life will win you ownership of your soul. A life cut short, or left unfulfilled, will return your soul to the king of the underworld. Suicide is the quickest way to default on your loan. It wins you eternal slavery to the Underworld King.

My brother needed my help. He needed me to make the journey to the underworld, and rescue his soul from captivity.

As he finished his story, I reached across the fire to embrace his smoky reflection. As soon as I touched his shade, I felt myself pulled into the underworld. I instantly recognized the feeling as that of falling through the void into the dream world.

I fell into a room in an old abandoned castle. Waiting for me was my Dream Guide, a short, disfigured man dressed in rags. He was 2 feet tall, and was gruesome to look at. He had won his dream guide powers by defeating lesser demons and implanting them into his body. He had countless lumps under his clothing where he had grafted the creatures into himself. His brain was half exposed, and he had a small demon crudely sewn into the slimy tissue. It was a sex demon, and it was furiously fucking his brain. Every time it climaxed, it would impart to him knowledge of the underworld. He had a second demon head protruding from his shoulder. It's mouth was stitched in a way so it was always open, waiting to devour any soul that got too close.

We were immediately attacked by the underworld king's armies. They shot us with arrows that would turn us to stone. Several of my Dream Guide's demons were killed in the fight, but I managed to escape by jumping out the window into a courtyard pool. I met two other ghosts. They were the spirits of virgins sacrificed to the demons. I freed them by having sex with them so they were no longer virgins. Together we hid in the catacombs under the castle. I discovered that my lucid dreaming tricks worked in the underworld. I hid us from a hideous demon called "The Janitor" by creating a screen of light that would make us invisible.

The Underworld King sent his armies to find us, but my lucid powers were too much for them. They each returned without success. He would not accept failure, so each army that returned would be immediately destroyed. This caused many of his armies to abandon him instead of returning empty handed. I gathered up his scattered forces, and convinced them to help me overthrow the tyrant.

We had an epic battle as we laid siege to his castle. My dream guide led an army of demons, and I led an army of ghosts. We took the castle, and freed all the enslaved souls. I decided to stay as the new king. Seeing the similarities, I decided to remove the boundaries between the dream world and the world of the undead. This way, the souls could communicate to their loved ones through dreams.

We just got a contract at work that we were not at all prepared for. We were supposed to be directing a short film sequel set in the Star Wars universe. I don't know anything about Star Wars. I've never even seen the movie. I haven't done any 3D animation in 4-5 years. Our office is not at all set up for a film with a budget of this size.

I was running around the office in a panic trying to clean up. If George Lucas is going to meet in our conference room, I better make it presentable. I found a gallon size Ziplock bag filled with old Nintendo Entertainment System controllers. They looked very valuable because they were miniature sized. Something I've never seen before. I thought to myself, "Why the hell do we have mini NES controllers in an Architecture office? In fact, why are we directing films in an Architecture office? Oh, shit, dummy. This is a dream."

Next thing I know, the guy I work with walks in and tells me that his mother who lives in the nursing home next door has passed away. What a great opportunity. I call all my friends. We are going to use the rift caused by this woman's death as a way to enter the underworld. The back stage to the dream world. We will enter the door left open by her spirit's passing. You can do things like this in dreams.

As I'm running down the stairs, my friends are all fighting to decide who will ride "shotgun" in the front seat of the car. I don't have any shoes on, so I know I'll never get there in time. I say out loud, "This is where dream control really comes in handy." I summon my shoes to my feet. As they fly by, I jump onto them like a skateboard. I then think, "Lets just teleport to the front seat, while all these assholes argue about it." I warp the world around me to be the passenger seat of Gary Coleman's yellow hummer. A suitable ride.

We arrive at the dead woman's house. It is abandoned, and I can feel the residue of her spirit like an opening in the fabric of reality. I step through into the backstage. It looks like a screening room, or an arena. I hook myself up to the equipment, and start broadcasting my thoughts directly into reality. I create three short dream sequences.

The first dreamlet is the one we got the contract for. It is about a Star Wars pilot who has to break into a space station to win his freedom from an evil emperor. He flies a small spaceship against thousands of bounty hunters there to destroy him. There is a cloud of millions of missiles he must navigate through. It is so dense it looks like a swarm of bees. Each missile is a different color to designate which bounty hunter it belongs to.

The second dreamlet is about several elemental monsters who battle. I control them like action figures. They are filled with slime of a color that matches their element. I push this slime out from the bottom of the action figure when I want to activate them.

The third dreamlet is a documentary about how I was able to model a giant Chinese Dragon for a cheesy B-movie. I started using a geometric mesh with control points. I then decided to abandon this strategy in favor of a series of organic shaped bones jointed realistically with a skin stretched over them. This way, I could use the interior of the model, the skeleton of the dragon, as a cavern I could enter.

When I enter the body of the dragon, something goes wrong. I somehow give it life, and lose control. I find myself in an ancient tomb that is lit with a green ambient glow. I see the monster I just created in the center of the tomb. There is a beautiful woman holding his huge head in her hands. She looks like she is made completely of smooth metal. Her skin is liquid quicksilver, and her hair looks like finely worked silver rope chains. I realize the green glow is coming from the dragon. It pulses in time with his heartbeat.

The silver woman lifts his enormous head easily with one hand, and places the other palm on his snout. The dragon starts to warp, and is drawn into the woman's palm like he is made of liquid. The light starts to dim, and when the dragon disappears into the woman's hand, I am left in total darkness. I think the dream is about to end, then I suddenly see the woman's face appear out of the blackness in front of me. She is inches from my face, and I feel completely intimidated by her beauty. She places a metal sphere in my hand, then backs away into the darkness.

I can feel the sphere pulsing in my hand with the dragon's heartbeat. I've done something terribly wrong. Something I'm not supposed to have done. As my eyes adjust to the darkness, I see a faint green glow coming from the sphere. I feel that the monster I created is trying to break free of its prison. I must maintain perfect focus, holding the image of a perfect sphere in my mind. If I let my concentration slip for a second, the sphere starts to stretch, warp, and grow back to a living creature.

The glow from the sphere is enough for me to explore the small cell I am in. It has walls made of green oxidized copper panels. There are no openings. I get the feeling that the sphere is a key. I press it against a wall panel, and the panel tilts backwards and falls loosely to the ground. I use the fallen panel as a shaky bridge to cross a void of total blackness to a platform made of the same green copper. The platform has hinges built into it, so it folds and tilts as I shift my weight. To maintain its stability, I must hold its image in my mind perfectly. I know that the dream is fading, and that I must maintain perfect focus of everything to finish my task before time runs out. There is nothing but a black void as far as I can see, with a maze made of these shaky floating platforms. I jump from platform to platform, making my way to the center of the maze. The degree of concentration needed to keep the platforms stable, and the dragon from escaping its prison makes my head spin.

I try to maintain focus as I pass several more silver women like the first. These women appear to be sick. Their silver paint is peeling off, their hair is sparse, and they look fat and unkempt. Somehow my tampering with the dream world has made them sick and lazy.

I finally come to the middle of the maze. Three matronly old women sit around a wooden table. They are looking through old dogeared catalogs that are yellowed with age. They are searching for a certain pair of antique designer glasses that are priceless and powerful. They laugh at me as I approach, drained of energy and confused.

The world is shaking, and I can start to feel my body back in bed.

"You think you can find them, when we have been searching for an eternity?" One of them asks. "You wouldn't know where to begin."

"Fou de chocolat!" Another replies. "Can't you see the poor dear is lost?"

And I find myself back in my bed.

Alien beings have traveled from a far away planet to invade the earth. They are here to harvest humans as food. To do this, they have converted their spaceships into giant meat processing plants that grind humans down to pulp.

I find myself a prisoner in one of these huge meat processing concentration camps. I am there with several other people waiting in line to get shredded alive by a giant spherical meat grinder. Everyone except for me seems to be in a drugged trance. Like zombies walking to their horribly painful deaths. I am horrified, but somehow realize that this is a dream. I reason that I am lucid, but everyone else is still dreaming. This is why they are all zombified.

I start yelling at people, shaking them, trying to get them to realize that this is a dream, and they don't have to be killed. I try to save them. No one will listen to me. I watch helplessly as they are ripped apart one by one and ground down in giant pencil sharpeners. I remember the task of the month as a way to wake people up. I get up on a platform and yell to the crowd, "This is a dream! If you become Lucid like me, we can escape! I will prove it by jumping into this grinder, and coming out unharmed."

I lower myself into the top, and feel the wind from the spinning blades blow against my feet. I lower myself further down, and my foot gets ripped off in a spray of blood. I feel the pain, but it feels distant, so I am reassured this is a dream. I jump in all the way, and feel a thousand blades close in around me. They close in from the bottom up, and the outside in, like a giant pencil sharpener. My legs and arms are torn off first, then my entire body is ripped and sliced into a thousand pieces.

My consciousness remains, and I feel myself pass through the machine, and slop out the bottom in a pile of gore. I form the puddle of my remains back into a body, like the Terminator or Alex Mack. Somehow my survival has destroyed the machine. I see them failing all over the factory. The lights shut off, and alarms start to sound.

Everyone runs from the building, and I meet up with a group of survivors in a burned out house. I recognize several of the survivors as DV members. I recognize Adam, Burns, Twoshadows, and Aquanina We discuss our plans to retake the earth from the aliens, and save all the people who are still not Lucid. It appears that my lucidity destroyed all the meat plants all over the world, and the alien Alien spaceships. The aliens were planning on harvesting us as food and then returning to their home planets. Now that we destroyed their spaceships, they can not go home. They have given up on killing humans, and are now gathering all the world's energy and fuel to create portals home.

We scramble to pack our things. I run through the house gathering everything valuable to me. As I pass by a copy of Exploring the World of Lucid Dreams by Stephen Laberge, I am reminded that this is a dream. I look at the bag of dirty socks I am trying to stuff into my suitcase. I think of the other task of the month, and dump the socks out on the ground. As they fall, I will them to life. They turn into mice that still look like socks. They start squirming and inching all over the floor. Burns laughs, and pulls two kittens out of her suitcase. They chase the sock mice, and disappear under the furniture.

As I gather my things, I feel the dream slipping. I try to imagine what the outcome of this dream will be. How the story will end. I get brief flashes of the future, like a movie preview. Myself, Adam, Burns, Twoshadows, and Aquanina piled into a car on a road trip for the rest of our lives. We run from town to town in a post apocalyptic wasteland trying to find enough gasoline to keep driving. At one point, stuffed in the back seat with all our suitcases and pillows, I reach over and take Aquanina's hand. I know that we will have a love story that is crucial to the plot of the dream. I think how great this will be that we will all become such great friends.

I see a view of the closing credits. It's Burns's kitten walking to the car with my dirty sock in its mouth.

I was able to string together around 10-15 brief lucid dreams early saturday morning. They were all very unstable which made them unpredictable and crazy fun. I was able to change the scene dramatically by just casually thinking about where I wanted to be or what I wanted to do.

I'm in my bed after just waking from a LD. I don't move, but imagine myself getting out of bed and running out of my house, out my front yard, out the gate, down the street running as fast as I can. By the time I reach the street corner, I am completely in the dream and lucid. I think about the lucid task of changing genders, and I am suddenly snapped into a richly decorated hotel lobby. I am a little surprised at the abruptness of the scene change, and I wonder why the hell my subconscious chose a hotel lobby.

I see the walls are mirrored floor to ceiling, so I walk over to one of the mirrors. My reflection looks normal, and I start to think about how to turn into a woman. I see, reflected in the mirror, a long line of travelers waiting to check in at the front desk. There is an attractive blond woman in a business suit who makes eye contact with me in the mirror. I smile at her and think about maybe swapping bodies with her somehow.

By the time I look away from her and back at my own reflection, My reflection has completely changed into a middle aged woman with dry frizzy black hair. I look a little like a haloween witch without the hat. I am a bit surprised at how easy that was. I look down at my body to make sure It's not just my reflection that changed. I run my hands down my body, feeling my new womanly curves through my clothes. I am amazed by how convincing the change was.

I look back up to the mirror, and notice that I have now turned into my girlfriend. I look exactly like her when we first met, 10 years ago. I'm a little creeped out and upset by this change, especially since I was just feeling myself up. I notice the line of people has all stopped what they are doing, and they are now staring at me in a horrified way. I turn around and yell "Hey! Mind your own business. Nosy dream characters. Nothing going on here!"

I am very uncomfortable being in my girlfriend's body, and having all these people staring at me, like they're about to cause some trouble, so I wake myself up.

I always get the feeling there is someone in the room when I'm in SP, but this time it was strange because I was positive that David Hasslehoff was right behind me. I'm not a 'Hoff fan at all, and sort of forgot he even existed until he appeared in my room last night.

I step out of my bed (and out of my body), and walk out to the living room. It's too dark to see anything, and I can tell the dream is very unstable. I try to 'will' the lights to turn on, but I can feel the world slipping away when I focus too hard. In the darkness, I have this feeling like there is someone next to me who is about to attack me, and I'm worried this is about to become a nightmare. I run into the bathroom, hit the light switch, it doesn't work, but the lights are on anyways for some reason.

I keep worrying that there is someone next to me, just outside my vision, with a knife, and I know that the more I worry about it, the more it's going to come true. I turn quickly and turn him into someone non-threatening... My brother. When I see the mirror, I remember the task of the month, and decide to give it a try.

I lean across the counter toward the mirror, and inspect my reflection. It looks perfectly like me. I start to wonder if this is really a dream. It's so convincing, almost too detailed. Just then, my reflection winks at me, and I say out loud "Tight!". As I open my mouth to say it, I notice that my reflection has messed up Hillbilly teeth. I then also notice that he's wearing a white softball tee, with black 3/4 length sleeves.

I put my hand on the mirror to try to reach in, but the surface feels way too solid. I decide to try to pretend the mirror is not there, and try to reach through like it's a window. I put my had down, and then quickly reach up and right through the mirror to grab my reflection's shirt. When I hit the surface of the mirror, I get the most intense pain in my hand and arm. It feels like peeling off a really bad scab, or what I would imagine peeling the skin off your hand would feel like.

I pull my reflection forward, and he doesn't resist at all. He floats out of the mirror, and it seems like he's just a head and shoulders. I ask him "Why do we dream?". He smiles his hillbilly smile and says "I guess, at a certain point, we just need something to keep things interesting".

I let go of him, and he sort of refocuses back into the background of the mirror without moving. I sort of wonder if I hurt him pulling him out, since my hand hurt so bad going in.

I spend a bit more time flying around outside on the lawn, changing my size so I can fly between the blades of grass. Things go downhill from there. I find my dream journal to write the dream down. It's sitting in a sheep pasture, it's about 2"x2" in size, and is filled with mini travel photos. I end up having a picnic on the lawn where I argue about whiskey vs bourbon with some really bossy lady.

This was an extremely long lucid. It was very strange. It was like I was aware of my body in bed from start to finish, but that did not at all interfere with the dream's stability or length. The dream appeared from me imagining the scene in HI, and never really felt like it evolved to a full dream. I was on a bunch of cold medicine, so maybe that has something to do with it.

I am at my old house from college, hanging out with my old roommates. We are getting ready to go to a party. For some reason we are all drinking in the laundry room. I realize I am still wearing my work / office clothes, and that this will not do at all. I strip down to my boxers, and all the girls start making cat calls. I joke around with them, then head upstairs to get dressed. 'E' yells to me to wear a suit as a joke. It will be highly inappropriate for the party we are going to. I agree that that would be a funny joke, and put on a 1970s brown Double Cleaveland with a bolo tie. The room I change in is my old bedroom from my childhood home. I notice its all screwed up, with furniture in the wrong places and the room is covered in green and red picture frames with gold bows on them. I am reminded that this is a dream, although I never really forgot. I can barely move, like I am so sore from weightlifting that none of my muscles work anymore. While getting dressed, 'E' is telling me how hes bringing cherry bombs, so when we go to Roys (a very nice restaurant in Hawaii) after the party, we can flush them down the toilets as a joke. I agree that this will be a riot!

I wrongly remember that the task of the month was to go to a DV party, so I am excited that this is going to work out so well. As I walk out of the room, I notice that everyone from DV is in my living room. They are all played by actors, so I figure I will have to ask them who they all are.

I talk to a couple people, but they are all very cold and mean towards me. I wonder if its because I wore the suit. Suddenly I feel like an ass hole. I walk up to Steve Buschemi in the kitchen, and ask him who he's playing. He is in the middle of a conversation with someone about how he hates Architects because they don't know anything about construction. I feel a little akward, because I'm an Architect. I try to defend myself, but I soon realize he is only saying all this to piss me off & provoke me. I don't want to ruin this fun dream with violence, so I move on to the next person.

As I approach Claire Daynes, I remember the real task of the month, and feel like an idiot. Maybe this is why everyone was being cold to me. I ask her, "Can you tell me something about myself that I don't already know?" She thinks I am hitting on her, and makes a comment about what a bad pickup line that was. I tell her this is all a dream, and to prove it to her, I jump off the top of the stairs. Right before I hit the ground, I do a little float-bounce so I am lying horizontally on my belly, floating inches from the ground. I reach out and touch the ground, walking along on my hands with my feet in the air at a 45 degree angle. Like swimming along the bottom of a pool. I float up to the ceiling, back down again, then back to where Claire Daynes was standing. I ask her again, and she replies, "I will tell you something you already do know. You're an ass-hole!"

I think there must be some confusion. What did I do? I turn to another girl at the party to ask her, "Can you please tell me something about myself that I don't already know?" As I'm talking to her, her fat girl friend is telling me to get lost because she has a boyfriend. I turn to tell her friend that I'm not trying to hit on her. I'm very frustrated now. When I turn back to the gal I was talking to, she is gone, and her boyfriend is there in her place. He looks aweful, like a corpse. He is wearing a hooded sweat shirt, and his face is yellow, and covered in pockmarks or real bad acne scars. As I am looking at him, I realize he is made of Malt-O-Meal (that terrible Cream of Wheat/porridge stuff). He suddenly explodes / melts into a puddle of porridge and clothes. This is so unexpected for such a normal dream, that I decide I better leave. People are too hostile, and this is getting weird.

I figure I'll go see whats going on upstairs. When I get there, All my old roommates are hanging out. Its like a dance club, with people partying in the middle of the room, and a few people asleep/ passed out in the corners. I decide I am done with this dream, and want to try to have another one. I reason, that if I go to sleep, I can have another dream. I lie down next to my old roommate 'V', put my arms around her, and spoon her. I fall asleep thinking of how much I miss all these old friends.

I transition directly into another lucid dream that was even more vivid and longer than this one. I would post it here, since it's technically part of this dream, with many similarities and synergies. It is very long and sexually explicit, so I think I will spare you. All together, these two back to back lucids lasted over 2 hours! I wonder if the cold medicine screwed up my REM cycles or something.

4:00 AM I got up and ate a banana and some B6. I went back to bed and did a VILD for an hour and a half. I was visualizing three scenes. My front yard sculpture garden, my favorite beach in Hawaii, and a Monteverde jungle in Costa Rica. Around 5:45, I finally felt some vibrations, and started seeing some HI. I grabbed onto one of the images of waves crashing on a beach, and started imagining bodysurfing. It became very tactile, and then I suddenly found myself crashing into a family making sandcastles on the beach.

I stood up, apologized to the DCs, and then had a look around. The beach was a great combination of the three scenes I had imagined. Rocky jungle cliffs terminated into a white sand bay. The beach disappeared around a corner with an interesting rock formation - like one of those natural sandstone bridges that form along the coast of northern california.

I remembered the task of the month, but was disappointed to leave this beautiful place after I worked so hard to create it. The idea came to me to see what this same beach would look like on an alien planet. I raised my hand and snapped my finger. The world flattened out into a 2D image, rotated to be seen on it's edge as a single line, then rotated back to form another scene (My girlfriend was playing paper mario last night). Now I found myself on the same beach, only everything was slightly different. I felt strangely disembodied and floating, like I was a camera transmitting images back to myself in bed.

The sand was a dirty brown color. The light was a very strange color and sparkled in a hazy way. I looked up to the cliffs, and saw that they were all carved into crazy geometric shapes. The family that had been with me a minute ago was now a single old man with pale blue skin. Instead of a sand castle, he had a giant green marble slab. He was planing it and polishing it with a flat metal bar. It reminded me of an old man waxing his surfboard.

I looked to where the natural bridge previously was, and saw a huge temple or palace built of cyclopean masonry. It looked like something out of an HP Lovecraft novel, or a Myan temple on a giant scale. I felt as though I was being controlled remotely, and I shot off towards this temple. It was built on a carved stone bridge that projected from the cliff face to be supported by a carved mountain jutting up from the surf. I orbited the building like a camera in a 3D modeling program. As I passed below the bridge, I looked upward to see all kinds of pictograms and hieroglyphs carved under the bridge. I wanted to move closer to try to read them, but I woke up to my alarm.

I was having breakfast with my girlfriend this morning, trying to explain to her that I just figured out how to time travel. I was telling her that all I had to do was imagine a memory from a few minutes ago, and hold it in my mind like I do when I VILD. That visualization of the past would then become reality, and I could enter it like I enter a LD.

I demonstrated it to her a few times. She dropped the cap for the soymilk, so I picked it up and time traveled to 2 minutes ago, caught the cap when she dropped it, so now I had two caps in my hand. I was a little weirded out by this, but she seemed fine with it.

The only thing that bothered her about it, was that she kept looking at the clock to time my experiments. She was commenting on how the clock kept changing, and was showing unrealistic times. I told her the clock does the same thing in my lucid dreams, so maybe there is more of a connection between time travel and dreaming than just a similar induction technique.

Of course, it never occurred to me that MAYBE I WAS DREAMING! Freaking Idiot.

I was on my back imagining my body falling backwards, and that my bedsheets were like a parachute that the wind was pressing against me as I fell. Like I was falling through space while wrapped in a bedsheet.

I hit sleep paralysis and started feeling my body humming and vibrating like mad. My girlfriend kept kicking me, so I kept popping out of SP. Once I was in, it was pretty easy to return, so after about an hour of trying not to get mad at the lady, I finally hit a great bout of SP.

I decided it was time to finally enter a dream, so I started imagining the feeling of floating upwards. I was trying to make it as vivid as possible, and next think I knew, I slammed against my ceiling. I reached out my hands and felt the texture of the ceiling for a minute or two to make sure I was 100% locked in the dream, then I opened my eyes. I then started climbing around on the ceiling like spiderman.

This whole time, I was listening to a man and a woman discussing Tax Law. They were talking about the alternative minimum tax and how it didn't allow for the deduction of wholesale grocery purchases at your farmer's market.

I was crawling on the ceiling trying to figure out what the hell they were talking about. As I turned the corner to climb down my bedroom wall, I felt a huge gust of wind, and looked down to find myself outside, on the side of a tall building above an outdoor farmers market. The two people talking were walking along the street far below me.

I woke to a FA in my bedroom, and immediately recognized that I was still dreaming. As soon as I realized it, I felt myself waking up for real. My bedroom began fading to black, with everything turning to shadows and silhouettes. I struggled to hang onto the dream. The walls of my bedroom melted away into blackness, and my bed beneath me began to disappear. I watched as my bedroom disappeared around me, and transformed into a beautiful black night sky lit by millions of stars. It was like the kind of sky you see when you are far from the lights of civilization, only much clearer. It was as if I could see forever, into layers upon layers of stars. It was not a void. I could feel the ground beneath me, and could see the silhouettes of mountains on a distant horizon line. I was sitting on a high ridge, looking across to the opposite side of a dark valley.

After a moment just staring at how beautiful everything looked, I realized I needed to move if I wanted to hold onto the dream. My peripheral vision felt limited, but I could barely make out the shadowy forms of a person on one side of me, and a seated chimpanzee on the other side. I was still halfway aware of my body lying in bed, so I reached out to shake the hand of the person next to me. I introduced myself, "Hi, its nice to meet you, whats your story?" My voice sounded strange. My voice was loud and more powerful than normal, but I could hear a faint echo, like a mumbling coming from my real body (my girlfriend later told me that I was talking in my sleep).

As soon as I spoke, the darkness disappeared. A room snapped sharply into being around me. I saw that the person shaking my hand was a well dressed man, and the chimpanzee next to me was now an older woman who looked like an aging supermodel. The room was very small and Gothic looking. Old wood furniture was crammed into the space and lit with several small candles. I stayed in the dream for several more minutes, conversing at length with the two people about the nature of free will, and what the future will hold.

I hope none of their predictions come true.

I was at a party at a house that seemed strangely familiar. I was talking to a man who was explaining that when we die, our spirit is sent to a dream world for 300 years. At the end of the 300 years, we die in the dream world, and are reborn to the 'real' world again. The man was very excited, because he was at the end of his 300 years, and was about to be reborn.

I knew this was a dream. I was totally lucid. The problem was, I believed 100% that dreams were where we went when we died. Using this confused logic, I believed that I was in the afterlife. My own personal dream heaven.

It was night time, and I was in a beautiful beach house with its own private beach. Looking out across the water, I could see the lights of several other beach houses on the other side of the cove. Each beach house was reserved for a group of friends. Everyone who knew each other during their lifetime was sent to a beach house. In this way, your afterlife was only populated by the people you had met and loved during your life.

There was a huge party going on, and I had memories of this party going on for dozens of years. All of my friends were there. Occasionally I would see a friend that just arrived at the party. I would feel sadness that this friend just died in the waking world. At the same time I felt joy that they we were now reunited in the afterlife. There were thousands of people at this party. Everyone I've ever been friends with.

I was completely lucid. At one point, I decided that since it was a dream, I should just do whatever I wanted. I took off all my clothes, and was walking around naked. I reasoned, Who needs clothes when you're dead?. There was a room in the house that had a floor covered in a giant trampoline. Me and my buddy were jumping on this trampoline, when I remembered that we were naked. I looked at him and said, "You know, if this wasn't a dream, and we were alive, this would be real gay. Two naked dudes jumping on a trampoline?" We laughed as more people joined us.

I saw a girl I used to know, and felt incredibly sad that she was dead now too. I gave her my condolences for being dead, but told her how great this was that we could now be together again. She seemed very sad, and had tears in her eyes. "This is my dream," I said. "We can do whatever we want. We can go wherever we want. I'm so glad you're finally here." I morphed the scene around us to the top deck of a cruise ship, then to the streets of Paris, then the jungles of South America. She started to cry, and told me, "You act like I just got here. I have been at this party for 100 years, and you have ignored me the whole time. Its too late to make up for lost time now. You had your chance."

I later walked into a bar area of the house, and saw my girlfriend. I hadn't seen her since I died, and she looked so beautiful. I was so happy that we could now be together. A sleazy looking man was hitting on her at the bar. I walked up to send the guy away politely. I had so much catching up to do. As I went to put my arm around her, I noticed that the two of them were holding hands. I started yelling at the guy for hitting on my girlfriend. He tried to punch me, and it escalated into a full scale fight. I destroyed him completely with my god-like dream powers.

In the fighting, I accidentally injured my girlfriend. She was dying. As I went to heal her, she had the most horrible look on her face. She was furious with me. As she was dying, she told me that that man was her husband. When I died and left her in the waking world, they met and were married. Before she could finish her story, she died in my arms. I knew I could not bring her back to life.

I carried her outside to the beach. Her body looked like it was scaled in jewels, and she had wings made of gold leaf. As I walked along the beach, she started to disintegrate. Flecks of gold and jewels started lifting off her body, where they rose into the night sky and became stars. By the time I got to the water, all that was left of her was a handful of gemstones that were filled with liquid like batteries. I laid these stones on the sand, and with a wave of my hand I lit the entire beach on fire. Green flames spread to cover the sand and fuse it to glass. As the gemstones were consumed by the flames, they exploded one by one into clouds of multicolored light. I knew she would be reborn into a new life.

I was sort of half-heartedly WILDing, and got stuck in sleep paralysis. I felt my body go completely numb, and started to see the darkness at the foot of my bed get denser and form into the hazy shape of a monsterously disfigured person. I started to get absolutely terrified, and feel the most terrible sensation of cold and evil. The thing climbed onto my bed and onto my paralyzed body. It grabbed my wrists to hold me down, and stared directly into my face. It's face was that of a woman, but constantly changing. It looked like it kept changing in age - from a young attractive girl to an old mummified corpse and back again.

By this time, I was completely out of my mind terrified, but in the back of my mind I had this nagging thought that this felt familiar. I was wracking my brain trying to remember what to do to get out of this situation. I remembered that if I could get through this, I could make it to a lucid dream, but I couldn't think of what to do. For some reason, as soon as I thought the word "lucid dream", I remembered the task of the month. I somehow reasoned that if I could complete the task of the month, I could get away from this disgusting mummy lady dripping puss on my face.

I fixed my eyes on hers (the only part of my body I could still move), and yelled at her with my thoughts, "What's my new years resolution?". Her face turned to an unattractive middle aged woman, and she leaned back and smiled in a sinister way. "My new years resolution is to harvest your semen, and devour your soul," she replied.

I was now completely lucid, and no longer afraid. I asked again, "But, what's MY resolution?" She looked a little confused, and turned her head to look behind her. I noticed there was a horrible looking man standing behind her this whole time. He looked like a pale, ghostly translucent clown illuminated from within. Sort of like a combination between the albino dread locked guys from that Matrix movie, and a rotting zombie in a clown suit.

He walked towards me, and sat on the edge of my bed right beside me. "You are going to discover the ability to open portals to other dimensions. When you do, the offspring we have sired from your sperm will become all powerful and invade the planet. We will start with Hawaii, since the people there are superstitious."

I was totally lucid now, and thought this quite rediculous. "So, my new years resolution is to open a portal for some sort of demon clown invasion?" I laughed, "That doesn't sound very fun to me. I don't think I'll keep that one."

I decided I had had enough of this, and woke myself up to write it down. The weird thing is, I had a dream about that same clown guy earlier in the night before this dream.

So, if a bunch of my demon clown children warp to earth to devour Hawaii, I apologize ahead of time, guys.