Bubble

Another lucid last night. Went in and out of full and semi lucidity, but maintained a thread of awareness throughout.

I became lucid while looking in a mirror in a hallway. That is a common thing for me. Mirrors always induce lucidity. They're one of the absolutely fool-proof things for me. The mirror turned out to be in the hallway of one of my home bases, so I started off with the advantage that I was already at least partially anchored. I don't really remember, I think the mirror was near the door to the outside, because I believe that's the door that I opened later on. I should have paid more attention.

Anyway, I immediately tested my suspicion that I was dreaming by attempting to push my arm through the surface of the mirror. There was slight resistance on the surface, and then my arm sank in. The mirror looked like quicksilver as I pushed my arm through it.

Satisfied with the knowledge that I was dreaming, I spent a while playing with my appearance and examining myself in the mirror. I eventually managed to turn myself into more of a caricature of myself than my actual appearance, which I found very entertaining. While I was playing around with my eyes - moving them around, changing the size and shape, etc - I could hear my brother's voice narrating in the background that he at least liked this current character design better than the last (implying that he really didn't like either). I waved it off and kept playing around.

I was really satisfied by my handiwork because I had trouble with this before. I then spent a little bit more time dressing myself up as a sort of elven-looking sorcerer. Just as fun as cosplay, and several hundred dollars cheaper!

After spending some time tweaking my heroic cloak/cape thing (I settled on something asymmetrical and held up on one side by a nice brooch that I own in real life), I decided to meet up with some friends at a tavern.

I opened the door to go outside, and The Blackness happened. Some people call it The Void. Instead of the outdoors or the tavern that I wanted, everything beyond the door was pitch black. I stepped through the door into The Blackness, hoping it would dissipate. Instead, it enveloped me, and everything went dark. I tried vividly imagining my hands and moving them around in front of me. I briefly saw them appear before they faded back into the darkness. Waving them around some more didn't make them reappear.

I decided to try something I have never tried before. Instead of trying to make it go away, I would condense The Darkness into a form where it could no longer impede me.

I held out my hands and tried drawing it into a form in my hands. It didn't work, possibly because I was unable to see my hands.

I then put my hands behind my back and focused on trying to summon it that way. I felt fur and a small warm body. The Darkness disappeared as it was channeled into the form of a cat.

I brought the cat around to the front. It was skinny, with soft shiny black fur and gold eyes. I petted it and set it on the ground, and it ran off.

Now I could see, through the open door, not blackness but the brightly lit inside of the tavern. It had polished wooden floors and brightly burning candles and torches.

I rushed to the booth everybody was sitting in and scooted in. The booths were tall, made of dark stained wood, and seats were made of leather. While we were waiting for our server, I lost the thread of lucidity and the dream faded.

I don't really remember the rest of what I dreamed about that night.

____

I'm pleased that I finally solved a long-standing problem and completed a successful completely-controlled scene change. I've felt so stupid about struggling with these basic things after even several years and the ability to WILD with regular success. I'm looking forward to honing my skills further, as this has been a serious road-block for me.

One thing I can say is that my ability to maintain dream stability and my thread of awareness has gotten SIGNIFICANTLY better.

Prior to bed, I had 2 margaritas and a daiquiri... I'm not shocked that my attempts last night were unsuccessful and my dream recall was terrible.

I went to bed focusing on the idea of awareness and lucidity. I focused specifically on the goal of meeting some friends for lunch at an inn in a fairly stable setting I visit (it is often where I wind up when I succeed at a WILD attempt). One of my other lucid goals was to go to a concert with a different friend of mine.

I did not go lucid, but focusing on my goals was not entirely fruitless.

In the non-lucid dream that followed, I DID meet up with some family friends for lunch. Lunch was in some sort of fast-food restaurant. For some reason, I couldn't stand the idea of ordering food; normally, I love french fries but for some reason in this dream, the thought of eating one made my stomach turn! I think that while I was asleep, I may have actually felt ill from the alcohol I ingested and reacted to the in-dream (very vivid) smell of french fries with actual nausea. Instead, I went and got a slushie from the slushie machine... a blue raspberry slushie. The whole restaurant had kind of an "outer space" theme to it.

I woke up briefly. I had set my intention to not move between dreams but EVERY TIME I woke up last night, I moved and then thought "d'oh!". I attempted a WILD but without success and lapsed into non-lucidity.

I was in a car with a friend and her teenaged daughter. We were driving down a highway in Nebraska, trying to find a restaurant... so we could go to lunch. Haha. The dream got a little blurry. We stopped at a truck stop that turned out to be kind of like a... club? My friend and the daughter disappeared once I went into the club. Instead, they were replaced by my friends A_ and two other "friends" I have never met in real life. All of us were wearing baggy, colorful animal-themed footie pajamas that looked kind of like animal costumes. The darker-skinned guy was wearing a costume that looked like a blue alligator... I don't remember what A_ was wearing... and I was wearing a big fuzzy rabbit costume or something. The whole environment felt like a combination of a comic book convention and a rave.

We went to the roof of the club, which had become kind of a skyscraper thing. To get up there you rode an escalator but it had been designed by a crazy artist so that it became so steep that everybody going up to the top had to support each other so they could even stay on the thing. Then you were supposed to get back to the ground floor on a giant slide. At the top there were several bands playing in kind of a "battle of the bands", including 3 identical-looking guys with acoustic guitars and huge puffy hairdos who were playing some stuff that sounded kind of like... I dunno... acoustic Linkin Park? Anyway, they lost the battle and their reaction was to start sobbing and then jump over the railing of the roof and fall to their deaths (they were 5 stories up). I saw this in slow motion from outside of the club. For some reason, at the time I thought the whole thing was hilarious.