CanisLucidus

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #170: Spellcasting 101

I'm standing in what looks like a hotel room with a spellcaster, a brown-haired girl in her late teens or early twenties. She's holding her palms out in front of her, and a miniature tornado whirls and dances in each of her hands. Each cyclone is about a foot high and spins rapidly but quietly, the tip of the funnel stuck to the same spot on her palms. This trick is new to her and she darts her eyes at me as if to say, "Did I get it right?" I nod approvingly.

For some reason, a flame catches around the upper rim of each tornado and she starts to lose her calm. "Why's it doing that?" The flame begins to spread down the funnel and she starts to panic. I become lucid as the fire spreads down the tornado and wraps ribbons of flame around her arms. I can see that the flames are just wrapping around her, though, and she's not actually catching on fire. It looks like some kind of fire spell is building up that she doesn't understand how to operate or control.

There's a door just behind me that looks like it leads down to a basement. I usher her toward the basement, saying, "Let's go downstairs to practice that. It'll be safer there." She's starting to panic but she starts moving toward the basement as the dream ends.

I hold on for DEILD, imagining myself running down a dark flight of stairs. It takes a moment for the imagery to coalesce again, and when I emerge back in a dream, I'm alone in a different hotel room, running around the room. I'm sort of prancing around on the carpet using just the balls of my feet. It's very dainty-looking and super un-macho but the sensation on my feet's very vivid and is helping me keep fears of an unstable dream at bay. (I know to ignore these, but there they were anyway!)

I run around the room like this for a bit more and then switch to rubbing my hands together. I continue this pretty much throughout the rest of the dream.

I walk out through the hotel room door into a darkly-carpeted hallway and walk for a long way. On my right I see a door that looks just like the one that led to the basement in the previous dream, so I follow it, expecting to find the young spellcaster again. I tromp down a flight of wooden stairs into a well-lit anteroom where an Hispanic woman in her late 30s is sitting behind an old-style cash register. She gives me a friendly smile and I remember the Task of the month to ask a DC for a gift.

"Hey!" I say. "Go ahead and give me my gift now." She nods, reaches under her desk, and pulls out a greeting card in an envelope. I will the greeting card to be open and the envelope just sort of vanishes. The cover of the card is some kind of abstract painting and the inside just has some simple handwriting in pen that read: "THANK YOU FOR THE CARD!" I'm trying to process what this means when the dream ends.

Interesting little converted nightmare. Producing the .44 out of thin air seems sort of like lucid dreaming techniques bleeding over into my non-lucid dreams, which is interesting.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #27: Paranoia

I'm in a false awakening where I'm a kid living in my old room at my parents' house. I sense some terrifying presence in my room so I jump out of bed, crouching down in fear. I reach under the bed and pull out a long-barreled, Dirty Harry-style .44 Magnum and hold it in front of me, searching wildly for whatever is after me.



I suddenly have no idea what I'm doing holding this gun and I'm afraid that I'll wind up shooting myself or my parents with it. I duck into the bathroom and close the door behind me, trying to figure out what to do. I try the light switch but it doesn't work. Something reaches out in the darkness and starts wrestling with me for the gun. My fear combined with the craziness of the scene is enough to make me lucid.

I gently pull the .44 back toward me, no longer believing that there's any lurking presence trying to pull it away from me. I try the light switch again but it doesn't do anything. I'm trying to think of some way out of here when the scene suddenly shifts to a cluttered basement. The basement is a roughly ten-foot cube and walls are gray concrete. There are no doors or windows but benches, tables, tools, and other assorted pieces of junk litter the room.

Seeing no way out, I float up and try to phase through the ceiling but the concrete stops me cold. I shut my eyes and imagine the Great Pyramid, but nothing has changed when I open them again. Next, I try some Stephen Laberge-style spinning but I move with an odd slowness when I spin and the scene won't change.

Just then I notice a tiny surveillance camera attached to the ceiling and I feel like the presence that I sensed earlier is watching me through the camera. I float to the camera, determined to phase through it and see who (or what) is watching me. I push myself through the lens but immediately find myself awake in bed.