CanisLucidus

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #264: The Lone and Level Sands

I’m walking near the corner of our house with my 5-year-old son E, inspecting some kind of odd, muddy buildup that’s caked all along the side of the house. It looks like it was sprayed there. For some reason I think that my next door neighbor sprayed this mud from his yard onto the side of my house. I become fretful that our relationship has soured somehow and wonder whether there was some conflict that I’ve forgotten about. As I think more about all of this, I realized that I have to be dreaming.

I turn to the east, looking toward my neighbor’s house. But everything to the east is a vast, quiet desert. Where my neighbor’s house would be is just the skeletal frame of a house, long abandoned. And now when I turn back to where my house was moments ago, there’s nothing but a ruined frame.



E is still beside me. The desert sun is bearing down on us now. I feel like we’ve just witnessed the passing of centuries, and that everything we know is long gone. I want to be someplace else, so I take a step forward and suddenly we’re in a stone chamber looking out through a long, horizontal window at the desert scene.

“Daddy, what happened to the house?” asks E. I don’t answer, but just tell him (and myself) that this is a dream.

The view through the window grows brighter and brighter, and I’m drawn into and through it, back outside, but this time into a quiet, unspoiled grassland. I sense that this is my neighborhood again, but now centuries before humans arrived in North America. I expect to see bison, and of course I see a lone bison off in the distance.



I walk with E through this quiet paradise for just a moment before the dream ends.