CanisLucidus

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #166: The Melatonin Tunnels

I'm walking along an underground tunnel that looks a bit like a subway station. For some reason, melatonin is tightly and suspiciously regulated in this world and I've just gotten the license to take some. I'm vaguely aware that I hope this will make me have a lucid dream.

I'm passing by a bunch of ticket windows where old, serious-looking men stare out at me. I'm nervous that I've done something wrong, but I'm so excited about my melatonin privileges that I don't worry too much about it.

I see Wife up ahead and I wave hugely to her. She looks a little embarrassed by how excited I am. "I took some melatonin!" I shout to her.

"Very good, sweetie," she says in a much quieter voice, cutting her eyes from side to side in embarrassment. I'm very excited about the possibility of a lucid, which makes me realize that I'm having one right now.

I say something to Wife indicating that it worked and she nods, smiling slightly. She leads me down the tunnel through a door into what looks like a cafeteria with folding tables laid out. Wife's extremely purposeful and is taking me through what seems to be a mandatory process, so I go with it. We stop at a table and there's some kind of form we're supposed to fill out. But Wife just briefly lays her hand down on the form, leaving a little Wife hand-print on there and she's apparently all done. I do the same and we move past the table.

We pass through a doorway into a room that looks a little like my new office. Waiting to greet us near a desk is an attractive woman in her late 20s, Asian, with glasses and a vaguely librarian sort of look. She says a few things about melatonin, showing us a piece of metal pipe where melatonin apparently grows naturally and can be harvested from. She's very friendly and cute and I begin vaguely wondering whether she and Wife would be interested in any sexytime.

The line moves on before I can figure this out, though, and we proceed into a tunnel of stone blocks. As we're walking along, the tunnel becomes crowded with a flood of running girls and young women, all chattering excitedly and moving toward a huge wicker basket that's sitting in the center of a nearby room. The girls elbow roughly past me as they move toward whatever's in that basket, and I become incredibly curious about what's in there.

By the time I get to the basket, Wife has disappeared into the crowd. The basket is filled with little handheld video game consoles, so I grab one. I work my way out through the crowd of girls as they continue pulling these little handhelds out of this apparently-bottomless basket, each of them running off excitedly as they grab one.

I stare at my little handheld and it comes on. There's a picture of a cartoonish lizard with its tongue sticking out. The text on the screen keeps shifting, but it seems to be accusing me of breaking some kind of game rule. The word choice is so strange and keeps shifting so much that it's hard to be sure. I assume that the problem is that this handheld is for girls and dudes are not supposed to use it. But too bad, I got one, it's my dream, and I'm playing it.

The screen shifts to the image of a handful of deer playing in a gently-flowing stream. It looks like a beautiful scene and I get the sense that it's taking place somewhere high in the hills. I remember Nyx and Xanous talking about moving into the image of a television so I bring the handheld super close to my face and try to make myself a part of the scene.

No matter what I do, though, I can't seem to get rid of the border that defines the edge of the screen. The image is up close and very vivid but that border starts driving me nuts. I really try this for a while. I feel like I'm close but know that I'm not getting some part of what I ought to be doing and the dream ends before I can figure it out.