CanisLucidus

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #241: Not Quite Movie Night

I wander into a still-lit movie theater and see my cousin “SU” sitting next to one of his close college friends on his right, his two children on the left. How cool that they’re here! I’m looking forward to joining them for the movie, and the positive emotions remind me of dreaming, making me lucid.

Even though I’m lucid, I still want to walk down and join them for the movie just the same. As I’m about to head down, though, I realize that I’m not wearing a shirt. This bothers me, so I turn around, expecting to find a shirt on the seats behind me.

And there it is, a black polo shirt! Unfortunately, there’s also a discarded condom lying next to it. It doesn’t look obviously “used” but still, eww. I force-push it away with a wave of my hand and it sails out of sight. Unfortunately, even though I don’t physically touch it, I still feel it slap the back of my hand. Gross, glad that’s over!

I grab the shirt and put it on over my head. It’s getting hung up on my big head and just generally twisting around and seeming to go on forever no matter how much I pull it down. I remember my intent to perform a Task of the Month with Dreamer and start getting really antsy that I’m stuck doing this silly errand instead.

I address Dreamer, saying something like, “I can’t believe this! I’m really trying to find you!”

I flail around in the shirt and Dreamer’s voice responds: “Relax, stop struggling…” Yeah, she’s right… I relax my mind and put my arms up in a confident show-off pose and the shirt slips right on! The theater is still the same, but feels a little less stable now. I lunge for the back of someone’s seat, feeling a little worried about how stable the scene is, and the dream darkens into the void.

I open my eyes and see a dresser with a strange shape on it. Even closer to me is Wife, the two of us lying on our stomachs, facing one another during the nap. (I’m still dreaming, but this is precisely how we fell asleep together for this nap.) Wife looks completely lifelike, but I know I’m still dreaming and that this is a false awakening. I try to move my left arm, but I can’t... my mind has even simulated REM atonia! I marvel for a moment at the deadened feeling of my left arm before attempting an OBE-style roll out of my body. The dream doesn’t hold together through this, though, and I wake up.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #202: Hoodie

I’m crossing a dark street, wearing a hoodie, sneaking around, and trying to keep a low profile. Three tough-looking young thugs seem to notice me and start walking in my direction. I turn away, not sure that I’ve been spotted, and draw my hoodie further over my head. As I’m doing this, I realize that this has to be a dream.

Somehow the hoodie is badly constricting my vision to the point where I’m now just looking out through a tiny little tunnel. I look behind me and only one of the thugs is still there, but now he’s really coming for me. I start walking away, trying to gather my wits well enough to ignore him.

My vision keeps getting smaller and smaller, which annoys me and stresses me out. To my surprise, the thug starts singing, and his voice is deep, rich, and melodious. He repeatedly sings: “This ain’t the way my game goes…”

He’s right up on me now, so I turn toward him and force-push him off. He makes a sound like “Whuf!” and seems to fly backward just as the last of my vision shrinks to the void. I feel myself falling forward to where the street should be, but I go through, and after a moment of strange acceleration downward, I’m awake.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #149: Chicken Fight

I'm working as a consigliere and fixer for a 20-year-old Filipino billionaire. He's a natural genius, a derivatives trader that controls a global financial/oil and gas empire. He relies on me and a talented, resourceful woman named Rachel as his on-the-ground "problem solvers".

I'm in a dark room watching a movie projection on a wall. The presentation is talking about some aspect of derivatives trading. I get some kind of message or phone call with a new assignment, and I hurry out of the room. There's somebody that I need to apprehend and speak to that's a spectator at a nearby cockfight. I know that both my boss and Rachel are counting on me to handle this and I feel a tremendous sense of responsibility to get it done right.

It's night, and I take a set of metal stairs down to a dusty street, hanging a right into an alleyway. I see a metal door to my right and hear some faint crowd noise -- that's where the cockfight is being held. I detect movement to my left and I sense that a huge man is lunging toward me to tackle me. I twist my body around and throw a right-handed haymaker that catches the man right in the mouth, stopping him short. I knee him underneath the short ribs and he staggers back. Something tips me off that this is a dream and I become lucid.

The man comes stalking back toward me, as fat and muscular as a bear. I'm struggling with what to do next. I have a strong urge to get right to lucid goals but I'm trying to process in my mind what will become of my boss and Rachel if I fail this task. I slowly retreat from my assailant, not ready to act until I'm sure that I'm not letting down real people who depend on me.

I finally convince myself that Rachel and my boss are just dream characters. My attacker is about four feet away when I wind up and hit him with a two-handed force push that sends him flying violently back, where he lands in a heap. His body has gouged a nearly foot-deep furrow in the dusty ground and, more surprisingly, has turned into a huge roasted chicken!



I walk onward as calmly as I can. I hear a few DCs chattering in surprise behind me but I try to put it out of my mind. They don't care. They're just looking.

Walking between two compact cars and onto an empty paved road, I look up at the sky. The stars are out tonight and I can see far more of them out here than I can with all of the city lights that are near my home IWL. I jump up, getting a good fifty feet into the air. I'm on the edge of a much larger city, one where I'm sure that I can find the means to accomplish my Task of the Month and Task of the Year goals.

I hit a second jump, this one slightly higher than the first, but start to sink down again. No, now I'm flying. I imagine myself catching an updraft the way a hawk would catch a thermal. I shoot upward, high above the city. The sky becomes thick and bright with stars and I know that I can go anywhere that I want. I decide that the Colosseum is just a little ways off in a darkened portion of the city. I begin flying that direction when I suddenly feel Wife's hand slam into my pillow in waking life. She rolls over a couple more times. I try to go in for DEILD but I'm a bit too adrenalized to make it back under.

Long dream! I think that in all this dream may have gone for about 30 minutes. It's got me excited about the Great Pyramid Task of the Year again!

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #139: Kunoichi

I have a false awakening in some kind of luxury hotel suite, feeling frustrated that I failed to have a lucid dream. All of the lights are on, and a digital clock on the kitchen counter tells me that it's 4:45 AM. Okay, I still have a little time left to have a lucid dream.

Suddenly I realize that Wife isn't here and I panic. I have a false memory that she went out just as I was going to sleep and I start freaking out that something has happened to her. Two men walk into the suite from the adjoining balcony and I run at them, demanding that they tell me where she is. They look bemused by the intensity of my reaction and I wonder whether this could all be a dream. I try the nose pinch reality check and become lucid.

Ignoring these two random guys, I phase through a glass door out to the balcony. Rather than go leaping off, I float up a few feet first (just to be safe) before flying out into the early morning sky. I'm about 80 feet up, and I swoop down toward a park that I see below me, landing near a tree. I notice that the tree looks amusingly pixellated and I remember my goal of trying to maximize dream vividness. I focus on drawing out the detail of the tree, feeling its bark and studying its needles until it becomes extremely vivid.

I follow a dirt path toward a mall, scooping up a handful of reddish dirt and (for some reason) popping it into my mouth. (It tastes about like you'd expect.) At this point, there's a long segment of the dream where my memory gets a little hazy, but I recall that it was fairly long, involved me travelling through a shopping mall and flying around a bit between levels. I remember flying close by a harried-looking mom struggling to manage a pair of kids and a pair of shopping bags, a bright central area, and at one point a black guy in a purple dress shirt gives me a thumbs up when I fly by.

Finally I leave the mall through an emergency exit and emerge in an alley. A man slouches lazily against the wall and farther away a dark-haired teenage girl is sitting on a stack of shipping palettes. I look at each of them in turn and they immediately return my gaze. I'm struck by the subtlety in the way their faces move, blink, and shift so realistically.

As I'm deciding which way to go down this alley, I remember the Africa Task of the year (fix the Great Sphinx then ride her to the top of the Great Pyramid.) I decide that the Great Pyramid is just at the end of the alley, imagine it in detail, then turn around with the image still firmly in my end.

I'm shocked by how well this works. I walk out of the alley onto a windy landscape of sand dunes. In the distance I see an enormous version of the Great Pyramid dominating the horizon, probably four times larger than the real thing. Dark storm clouds roll violently above the Pyramid. At the top of the Pyramid, the wind is so strong that I see stones rolling off of the top and tumbling down the side.



I run over the dunes toward the Pyramid and as I get closer I see not just one Great Sphinx but probably a dozen of them scattered near the Pyramid's base. Some of them are in a horrible state of disrepair, but this doesn't worry me. If I can fix her nose, I can fix everything else too.

As I'm approaching the top of one dune, a pair of female ninja dressed in red appear and come racing toward me, each wielding a pair of sai. The first one leaps at me and I force-push her to the side so that she flies past me. The second I force-push directly forward and she flops onto her back on the dune. I walk past her and I watch over my shoulder as the two of them regroup for another attack. I hold out my hands toward them and jokingly say "Now kiss!" They glare at me like I'm a huge pervert and I feel a little embarrassed. (This is a nerdy reference to this meme.) One ninja gives the other a quick peck on the cheek and then they return to glaring at me.

I say something about how I was only joking and that I drank a lot of peppermint tea before bed, and as I'm going on and on explaining myself, the two ninja start making out. I realize that all my blah blah blah is only making things worse and I'm feeling sexy and distracted. I turn back toward the Pyramid but the landscape doesn't seem stable anymore. I wind up in the void.

I rub my hands together to stay locked in and start feeling the floor, trying to turn the ground back into sand so I can return to the Pyramid. I go at this for a good while. After roughly a full minute, the floor starts feeling like carpeting and I emerge in what looks like a dormitory. I walk out into a nearby hall and run into a college friend that I've lost touch with (and is notorious for being hard to reach.) I ask him how he's been and he gives me an email address (!) and promises to respond if I email him at that address. I make him repeat the promise (which amuses him) and bid him goodbye before phasing through a glass door to a second-floor walkway.

My father-in-law is standing nearby with a few elderly Asian men and women. I jump onto the railing and start pulling myself onto the awning when I feel hands grasping at my legs and shouts of "You'll hurt yourself!" and "Are you crazy?" They pull me back down to the balcony and my father-in-law starts explaining to the other DCs that I'm "special". I fly down the walkway to provide a visual aid and the DCs react by speaking in astonished Mandarin. I think about how amazingly realistic this Mandarin sounds but then think, oh yeah... of course it sounds realistic to me. It's what I think Mandarin sounds like.

I fly off of the walkway, landing in front of an entrance to the same mall I was at earlier. I decide to retrace my steps through the mall, and I pass through a store that sells little pet sweaters for tiny dogs. Little sweater-clad dogs roam everywhere. I exit the store and it isn't long before I have a false awakening back in the same dorm room, no longer lucid.

I walk outside to find that it's daylight out. NewArtemis and her husband are standing nearby. We say hey, not at all surprised to see one another. Art lays down on the sidewalk, still participating in the conversation but also trying to sleep by curling up with this big canvas bookbag she's holding. I tell Art and her husband about the dream I just had, mentioning that I went through a store "that sells sweaters for those little yappy dogs". Immediately a little white yappy dog comes crawling out of Art's book bag, dressed in a green sweater. "Seriously?" I say, feeling like a jerk. "I'm sorry." She laughs and says it's cool.

Art seems to kind of fall asleep and I talk with her husband for a while about dogs, telling him they did the right thing by not getting huge, crazy dogs like us. I look down and notice that Art's hair has changed and become really curly and sort of red. It seems weird to me but since her husband doesn't say anything, I figure this is normal. He and I talk about other random stuff for a while until the dream ends.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #125: He Had It Coming

I'm working with Wife, Mom, and Dad on a project where we're trying to restore a 30-foot replica of the Great Pyramid. The pyramid's sitting right on the edge of a neighborhood street where a house would normally be. We work on the interior for a while but it feels stuffy in there, so Wife and I go outside to do some work on the exterior.

It's nice outside, so Wife and I stand there for a bit enjoying the sun and the cool breeze. We're standing on something that looks like a driveway and about fifteen feet to our left is an elegant wooden side table with Wife's purse sitting on it. As we're standing there, a pair of tall, brutish-looking teenage boys approaches us. One starts rifling through Wife's purse and the other surrounds us from the other side. I'm angry and fearful, running through our "fight or flight" options when I realize that it's all a dream.

The guy who had been looking through Wife's purse is gone now. But when I turn back, the other kid has Wife by the forearm and she's cowering in pain. I'm overcome with a killing rage, the kind of anger you (hopefully) only feel in dreams. I'm aware that the thug is just a DC, but I want to stop him and I want to hurt him.

I hurry toward him, shouting a bunch of angry threats (including lots of profanity), and kick him squarely in the balls. The strike is perfect -- bone of the lower shin right into the "target".

As I deliver the kick, I'm amazed to see that I'm wearing white high-top sneakers like I did back in middle school. The combination of noticing this weird detail and the satisfaction of hitting the hated DC softens my anger a little.

Rather than double over, the DC stands rigidly straight, his feet lifting a few inches off of the ground and coming back down. His body is completely stiff and his face is frozen statue-like in agony. I get a hold of my temper enough to realize that if I keep fighting with him I might turn him into a real opponent. I really just want him gone from my dream scene. I force-push him high into the air and his paralyzed body flies toward a distant set of hills, quickly fading from sight.

When I look back at Wife, she's standing nearby, unhurt but nervously looking around. The place feels unsafe and I want to leave. There's no way that I can leave her behind after what happened, though, so I scoop her up in my arms. "We're going to the Colosseum," I tell her, and try to start flying. I can get about 3 feet off of the ground but after that I feel like I can't move both of us. Even though she's pretty tiny IWL, her weight feels "real" while my dream body feels almost totally weightless. It seems to be getting in the way of flying.

"Am I too heavy?" she asks. I show remarkably good dream judgment by ignoring this question. I try flying a few more times, each time with the same result. I know that I should come up with some creative solution to this but it's not coming to me. I think about throwing her over my shoulder or imagining her floating like a balloon but before I can do any of this, the dream ends.