CanisLucidus

Another fun effort at Task of the Year. I just need to wind up in the right stadium next time. Again, with the gladius-waving DEILD tech that Xanous and I worked out. What a breakthrough that's been!

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #61: It Has to Be the Colosseum!

I'm standing in front of a hotel, holding my 3-year-old son E. A van pulls up nearby and a gang of suspicious-looking men pours out. It looks to me like they're planning a robbery and I wonder what to do.

E points at the men and bleats, "Want to know what they are doing!" The men turn toward us, eyes narrowed. I feel like they're thinking, "Witnesses." I'm scared. I feel like they'll see us as loose ends to tie off, and I hustle back into the hotel lobby with E in my arms.

As I'm casting about for some place to hide, I realize that it's all a dream. I head toward a huge window at the back of the lobby, planning to phase out of the lobby and get into the air for a task. Everything has started to feel unstable and low-fidelity. The sunlight pouring in through the lobby window has started to look like one big blur. E no longer feels heavy and squirmy like a toddler. It feels more like I'm holding a backpack.

I relax and prepare myself for DEILD, and the dream soon goes black. Like I've done so often recently, I imagine that I'm holding a gladius in my right hand and start madly swinging it around. It takes a few tries to convince myself, but the feeling soon takes hold.

In a few more seconds, I hear a roaring crowd of spectators all around me. I know that I'm already out in the middle of the arena. Some people in the crowd seem to be counting -- don't know what to make of that.

All at once, the whole scene falls into place visually. I'm in a completely cel-shaded, cartoony world, and standing in the middle of an enormous football stadium, right on the 50-yard line. An Asian lady in a business suit walks hurriedly toward me saying, "Great, you're here. Let's get going."

My new handler looks in every way like a cartoon character, as does the crowd, the field, the stadium, and everyone in it. Some sort of production crew is wandering around on the field setting up camera and lighting equipment. This is so close to being what I need, but for Task of the Year, I need to be in the Colosseum.

I plead with her that, "It has to be the Colosseum!" but she doesn't seem to hear me. I repeat myself, "I know you're trying, but this isn't quite right. It has to be the Colosseum! Nothing else will work!"

Nobody hears me, though. Everyone seems to be too busy getting this cel-shaded sporting event ready and can't pay me any mind. I'm thinking about how I can change things in my favor, but I'm not far into this when I wake up.

This lucid was long enough that I became legitimately concerned about remembering it. This worry wound up being a bit of a downfall, but it still took me in interesting directions.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #57: Gladius and Darkness

I'm experiencing deja vu as I walk through an airport terminal, sure that I've dreamed of this place before. I note all of these little details that I believe my mind left out of the dream version of this place -- the color of the carpeting, the man arguing at the ticket counter, the way that the ceiling curves into a dome in this room. Then I hear the sound of hurried little footsteps. Someone tells me "E is looking for you!" (E is my oldest son.) Now I'm lucid.

I hear E shout playfully from somewhere further down the terminal: "Looking for Daaaaddy!" I know that we're playing hide and seek. I eagerly set off, loving the idea of playing like this in an LD. I move through the terminal and wind up in a series of twisting, narrow office hallways. Other children run by me, possibly engaged in their own games of hide and seek.

As I'm moving through these hallways, a little hand swipes the back of my leg and E declares, "I got Daaaaddy!" I move toward E to scoop him up but he laughs and runs in the opposite direction. I follow but almost immediately I've lost him in the hallways.

I wind up back in the airport terminal and wander through there a while longer before coming to a craft table. Wife is standing at this table wearing a smock and molding some sort of clay. I walk up to the table but she doesn't acknowledge me. I grab a piece of clay and tell her, "I'm having a lucid dream." She responds in essence that I should "show her" what that means. (I don't remember her exact words.)

As I begin molding the clay, it starts foaming and fizzing until the entire surface is covered in a layer of foam. I wipe the foam away bit by bit and underneath is a carved image of a human face. Wife looks astonished. I tell her, "I'm telling you, being lucid is the way to go."

She hands me a round piece of glass. "Make me a picture of a Christmas tree." I nod, take the glass from her, and rub my hand across it once. Instead of a Christmas tree, I produce a little stained glass picture of an eye.

Wife looks at it. "Nice. But that's not a Christmas tree. I thought you said you were having a lucid dream."

A bit baffled, I shrug and say, "I don't know what to tell you." She goes back to her crafts and I walk further along in the airport terminal. I'm loving the experience of being lucid again and I suddenly fret that I'll forget everything that's happened. I try to recall everything that's happened up to this point, but this destabilizes the scene. Everything collapses into darkness.

I remember that Xanous had talked about handling "dark scenes" by acting out some action like riding a bike or running. I want to perform a Task of the Year, so I will myself to have a gladius in my hand. (The gladius is a sword of ancient Rome.) I swing the sword back and forth in the darkness, imagining that I'm locked in a dark tunnel underneath the Colosseum. I can hear the crowd now, and I know that the gates will open any moment to let me out for my match. I'm nervous with anticipation. I try to remember whether I have to kill for this task, and think that I do.



I see a blob of light forming in the corner of my vision. I'm filled with fear and nervous tension. But just as I'm bursting with anticipation, the crowd noise dies down and the blob of light forms into a high window in the hallway of a university. My vision is badly distorted around the edges, almost as if I'm wearing a shredded contact lens.

The window is about 15 feet above me, and I float up to it to start phasing through the glass. The phasing is difficult and awkward. It feels like I'm dragging my body through thick plastic wrap. I finally make it through and then I'm flying over a park in the mid-afternoon. The dream feels thin now, and I fly only a short distance before waking up.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #30: Fire Escape

I'm leading a group of perhaps a dozen small children down a fire escape. We're on the third floor, there's no railing (!), and the kids are wandering everywhere. I'm holding hands with two of them and trying desperately to corral the others with my feet. My anxiety level is out of sight and I don't know how to get them down safely. To my horror, a pair of the kids wander off of the unrailed fire escape, falling to the ground below. One of the fallen kids seems to hurt his ankle and the other gets a huge gash on his arm. I scoop the rest of the kids up under my arms and run down to the bottom, grateful that they're not more badly hurt.

Later, Wife and I are standing on a viewing platform at the top of a skyscraper. It's night and I'm leaning against the railing, recounting to her what happened, still feeling really rotten. I tell her, "It was like some kind of nightmare..." I get suspicious, perform a nose pinch RC and now I have it all figured out.

I'm overjoyed not only to be lucid but also that nobody actually got hurt and none of that earlier stuff even happened. I float up and then fly off into the night, forgetting entirely to say goodbye to Wife. I fly over the city, circling around another skyscraper before banking left. Ahead of me is an empty bridge that crosses a bay. I fly under it, performing a high-speed barrel roll as I go. It feels amazing, but as I emerge from under the bridge, my vision goes completely dark.

I'm still flying, though. I can feel cool air rushing past my body, so I just go with it, flying blind for a while. I don't want to lose my lucidity so I start belting out songs that talk about flying. I think that I may have mostly performed Foo Fighters' "Learn to Fly" but I sometimes suffer from musical confusion in lucid dreams. Whatever song it was, I was really going for it and I became vaguely worried that my sleeping body might be singing too.

I suddenly find myself standing in our master bedroom, no longer in flight. The room's dark and Wife is asleep on her side of the bed, but I'm not fooled. Still dreaming. For some reason, I drag our bookcase out into the middle of the room to see how realistic it feels. (Very.) But then I worry that Wife will get up to go the bathroom and run into it, so I shove it back into place.

I float downstairs and head to the back door. I know that it's deadbolted shut, so I phase through, the glass pane chilling my skin like cool water. I remember that I want to find Purgatory for the Task of the Month. I imagine as Dante described it -- as a terraced mountain located somewhere in the seas of the southern hemisphere. I take flight again and start looking for it. I realize now that I flew north instead of south... oops! Somehow I wind up flying into a huge cavern that takes me downward into a sewer, where I'm soon lost.

Rather than flowing with things, I become alarmed and want to find my way out of this "mess" to get back on track. The ceilings are low so I'm forced to run through the (fortunately quite pristine) sewer water. There's daylight somewhere up ahead and I race through twisting, turning passageways to find it.

I finally spot a hole in the ceiling up ahead with daylight streaming through it (is it daytime now?) Unfortunately, along with the daylight, a steady stream of enormous, squealing rats is pouring in through the hole as well. They come right for me, and I'm not thinking clearly enough to come up with a clever plan. I punch the rats in the head or their potato-like bodies when they draw near, and each time I do the rat flops limply onto its back, not moving.

I'm almost to the hole when Erik Estrada himself steps in front of me, telling me to stop. I've unfortunately gotten swept up into caveman mode and I summon a weapon with which to fight Erik Estrada. Fortunately, I look at my right hand and discover that the "weapon" I summoned is just a modest zucchini squash. As the dream fades, I tell Erik Estrada that I am "really sorry about that", but he doesn't seem to hear.

This was easily my wildest, trippiest lucid dream of all time. A big first from this one was meeting my doppelganger. Confusion, chaos and questions of identity reigned in this LD and what little control I had amounted to very little in the end. Very different from my usual LD fare but fun nonetheless.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #21: Technicolor Thomas Jefferson

It's nighttime and I'm standing in the shadow of a deserted overpass, talking on a cellphone. I'm some sort of drug dealer or smuggler, talking to one of my scumbag smuggling associates about when and where our next deal will go down. The conversation ends, and I start walking back across a parking lot to my car, a silver Mercedes Benz.

As I'm walking, I get that familiar feeling of recognition and think, "This isn't me. I'm not a criminal. Am I just dreaming this?" I become lucid and look for the nearest piece of usable scenery. Before I can get anywhere, though, darkness begins pressing down on me and I feel the dream fading. I look at my hands but they're vague and insubstantial, with wispy ribbons of skin hanging off of them.

My vision goes completely black but I keep repeating, "I'm still dreaming" and refuse to wake up. Jumbles of random letters fall slowly from the top to the bottom of my field of vision. I reach for the letters, trying to feel them, turn them into some kind of new dream scene. Even though I can't see my hands, I finally manage to grab a letter and squeeze it. It feels like a squishy piece of felt. The letter suddenly squirts out of my hands and floats away. I flail for a new letter.

Now I'm back in bed and my hands are thrashing in front of me. Out loud, I'm saying "I'm still dreaming", although I no longer believe it. Wife rolls over and says, "What are you doing?" I look over at the alarm clock and see that the numbers are flashing at random. Still dreaming, indeed. "It's okay," I tell her. "Go back to sleep." I get out of bed and walk toward the bathroom, planning to go for the "pumpkinhead" Task of the Month using the bathroom mirror.

Before I make it to the bathroom, the image of a huge, hissing black cat is stamped across my vision. Behind this cat I still see my first-person perspective but much of it is now obscured. Then another stamped image over that, this time of a woodworking bench covered with tools. Then an old woman pushing a cart. Then another, and another, and another each new image papering over the last.

Finally, things settle onto an image of Thomas Jefferson reading in a comfortable-looking chair. He's super-saturated with color, just like the boldest Technicolor films. Think Wizard of Oz but with the saturation even more intense. I remind myself, "I'm dreaming" and a banner reading "I'M DREAMING!!!" appears over Thomas Jefferson's head. He glances up from his book, sees the banner, then stares straight at me in surprise.

Suddenly, I'm in the passenger seat of a car, heading west on a road near my office. It feels strange, so I try to remember how I got there. I remember Technicolor Thomas Jefferson and I'm immediately lucid again. I look over at the driver of the car and I realize that the driver is me. Only it's not really me but a Dream Character version of myself. I can hear my double's thoughts but I can't influence him and I see that I'm a disembodied observer with no dream body of my own.

I hear my double think, "I've got to go back to where it started. Back to where I became lucid. I have to make it happen again." My double pulls into a parking garage and we're soon wandering the halls of an office building. My double visits each office that he finds, and in every one we see friends and old coworkers. Finally, my doppelganger steps into an office shared by two female twins (IWL friends of mine) and a woman who calls herself Susan.

The twins greet my double and welcome him to their office but Susan isn't buying it. She shakes her head and says, "That isn't your friend. I don't know what that is, but your friend is there." Susan points, not at my double but at me, the spot from which I am observing with no dream body. The twins turn to look, not comprehending and I wake up.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #16: Alone in the Dark

A friend is showing me around some mansion, delivering this nonstop harangue about the lack of baby proofing. I'm surprised by how angry she is until we reach a second floor balcony that overlooks a huge courtyard with a fountain. Next to the railing is a strange device that invites a baby to crawl onto it and then extends over the edge of the railing to "give the baby a better view" by dangling them hazardously over the side.

Now that I've seen this dangerous contraption, I get why she's so mad. Now I'm fuming too. But when I'm done whining and stop to study my surroundings again, I notice that I'm no longer in a mansion. I'm now alone on the second floor of a shopping mall. I don't understand how I got there. Everything looks very real, though, so I decide I'm probably not dreaming. I reality check "just in case" and I'm astonished when it fails. I hit a second nose pinch. This also fails and I think, "No way. I just did it wrong." Third try fails and now I'm finally lucid.

I'm shocked that this is a dream and my vision immediately goes black. I start rubbing my hands together, determined not to let this go. I test my dream body in a variety of ways to keep myself tethered to the dream: I rub my hands over my elbows, flick my teeth with my fingernail, lick my arm, flex and prod at my muscles, slap myself in the face. Everything works and I feel solidly locked in -- I just can't see anything. This goes on for quite some time and I'm having trouble staying calm.

Unsure what to do, I extend my right hand and plead for help. "I can't see. Please, somebody help me." Seconds later, someone grabs my hand, gives it a hard yank, and I stumble forward, my vision fully restored.

Of all people, my rescuer is Julia Roberts (an actress that I do not particularly like and haven't thought of in years.) I suddenly feel like a jerk for not really liking her work.

We're on a dilapidated pier by the seaside. I demand "Super high-def!" from the dream scene and everything sharpens nicely. I hear the creak of beams and the slap of seawater against the piers, as well as the distant cry of gulls. I know that I'm right on the water and think of getting to the Cretaceous seas!

Julia Roberts shouts at me that "You're almost out of time!" and runs off down the pier. I run after her, searching for some way to get to the open water. Dream characters peer at me from stalls on the sides of the pier, murmuring incomprehensibly to one another as I pass. I keep running, wondering whether I need to try something drastic to change things in my favor. Soon the dream fades to black, this time for good.

My heart rate's noticeably elevated and I can feel blood pumping through my carotid arteries. I'm too amped to go back to sleep. I wonder: why'd I lose this one? Simple excitement? Succumbing to a false sense of urgency? Or is this all just Julia Roberts' fault? Advice welcome!