CanisLucidus

This was a great LD for breaking a dry spell! No progress on tasks, but some fun action, a DV member cameo, and what feels like progress on keeping caffeine dreams stable. As usual, the last thing that I read during WBTB (in this case, a Visitor Message from NewArtemis) has a significant impact on my dream content.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #79: The Hall of Letters

I'm sitting on the side of the mountain, looking across a green valley at another mountain that's dotted with caves. A person sits in each of these distant caves. I recognize my college friend RS and somehow I can talk to him even across this huge distance. The weather is sunny, clear, and beautiful, so I casually say to RS, "Isn't the day amazing?"

"It is!" he says, and suddenly blankets and rugs come pouring out of the mouths of these faraway caves. The blankets and rugs go tumbling and sliding down the side of the mountain to the valley below. Fascinated, I wander into the valley, not sure what to make of what I'm seeing.

Now the valley is teeming with hundreds of people. Each of them spreads out a picnic blanket, removes their shirt, and flops down onto their stomachs to sun themselves. I see RS take a spot of his own ahead of me and to the left and I realize that I am now holding a blanket as well. I start scoping out a spot of my own.

As I'm looking around, I see AA, a mutual summer crush from high school. I want to say hi but when she removes her shirt I see that unlike the rest of the female DCs, she's not wearing a bikini top underneath. I turn away, not wanting to get caught staring. I lay out my blanket and remove my shirt, looking forward to feeling the sun on my skin. But when I check, I find that I have another shirt on underneath my original. "This is a dream..." I tell myself, and almost immediately Hulk-jump out of the valley, thinking of the Great Wall of China.

As I'm soaring through the air, the scene quickly darkens and soon I'm in the void. "This is fine," I tell myself, "I can do this all night." I rub my hands together and feel my forearms, drawing myself into my dream body. With my left hand I reach down and massage my knee cap, extending my right hand for aid. I beg for help, saying, "Bail me out. Pull me into a new scene."

A smallish hand, seemingly female, grips mine and yanks me forward. A voice says, "Hey! It's [NewArtemis]! I know you can't see yet, but we need to keep running!" I obey, and I sense that we're running through the hallways of some building.

I start getting flashes of imagery -- signs with arrows and strange, all-caps letter patterns like "ABCD ->" and "<- PQDELJH ->" (the first one was definitely in the dream, but the second is a reconstruction/guess.) Seconds later, I'm in the halls running, my vision restored. Art says something along the lines of, "Okay, you're good now," and drops my hand.

I hear the running footsteps of pursuers, so I begin floating so that I can get a look behind us. I move a few feet ahead of Art, turn around, and start floating backward. A squad of frightening-looking Enclave Soldiers (from Fallout 3) is pursuing us, perhaps 50 feet behind. "It's those guys from Fallout," I say, not able to remember what they're called. Art doesn't appear particularly concerned about this, so I figure this isn't as big of a deal as I'm making it out to be.



At the end of the hall, we take a right turn into a circulator elevator with a bumpy, cylindrical metal pole in the middle of it. I feel the bumps with both hands, and the texture is like that of a cheese grater. "You should do this," I tell Art. "It really helps with stabilization." Feeling confident, I boastfully add, "This is making my dream so stable. Try it." She laughs and shakes her head like I'm really failing to grasp something basic.

Art shifts to where she's out of sight behind the pole, and when I look around the other side to find her, she has completely vanished. The elevator doors have shut now and I'm on my own. There are buttons with weird symbols on them and I start pressing them at random. Each one lights up as I touch it and soon I feel a faint vibration from the elevator like it's moving.

I wait a long time, hoping that the elevator doors will open, but nothing seems to be happening. I begin to fret that I'm in a bad situation now -- stuck in a small room, inactive and waiting for something to happen. The dream begins to feel thin, goes dark, and my half-hearted DEILD attempt fails. I'm awake now.