CanisLucidus

This dream is from the morning of October 24th, 2014.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #251: Let Them Eat Cake

I’m in a big kitchen with lots of family and a few friends, including Wife, my kids E and R, and my brother-in-law Muppet, and several others. As I’m looking around this huge kitchen, my mantra to “look for the dream” returns to me, and as I consider my situation, I become lucid.

I announce to the room that I’m dreaming. Muppet responds with some skepticism, so I say, “No, it’s true!” and levitate him up to the kitchen ceiling. This makes him become skinny like a piece of paper, which disturbs me enough that I reverse the levitation. He laughs and seems to accept that this is a dream.

“Oh hey, [Wife]!” I say. “You’re going to love this!” And I summon this buttery, bready, poofy baked good for her on a small saucer. I hand it to her, but I’m unable to resist rudely tearing off a piece and stuffing it in my mouth. So delicious! I mean, it’s just ridiculous how good this thing is. Wife chows down, too, and for a moment I can taste this awesome bread thing through her mouth as well.

I’m having an incredibly good time with all of this eating, so I decide that I want to make something for Muppet as well. I wonder whether it’s his birthday IWL but can’t remember. As I think this, everyone in the big kitchen starts singing “Happy birthday” to Muppet. I produce a huge birthday cake slathered in buttercream icing and now Muppet’s carrying it in his hands. “Thanks, man!” he says.

Family members start taking slices of the cake, and I scoop out a big handful of it like a barbarian and start eating it. It’s really good, although the icing is almost disgustingly creamy and decadent. I shove it down my pie-hole as fast as I can.

Wife says, “Hey, is this vegan?”

“This is a dream! Everything in here is vegan!” I happily enjoy several more huge bites of cake, stuffing icing in my face in a way that I haven’t done since I was a little kid. I’m munching away happily as the dream ends.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #223: Final Heart

I have a false awakening in my childhood bedroom and as I’m contemplating going back to sleep, I realize that no way am I really sleeping in my old room. I become lucid and attempt to get out of bed, which fails. I try rolling out OBE-style and after some clumsy attempts, I’m finally on my feet.

I walk out to the living room, looking at my hands. They’re darker and more grayish than they’d be in waking life, but other than that they look pretty much just as they should. The dream’s feeling a bit dark, so I shout, “Let there be light!” Embarrassingly, nothing much happens, so I just wander around in the den some more, trying not to focus too much on this.

I look to my left to find my doppelganger (a lookalike or double of me) standing at the door I emerged from. He’s dressed like I do to sleep and he’s sort of got bed head. He smirks sleepily at me and I walk toward him, but as soon as we get close to each other, I snap suddenly to his perspective (more or less) and find myself alone again. I drift toward an external wall and phase outside onto the street.

Outside it feels like early morning. In the neighbor’s yard I find a woman in her late 40s standing around as 4 small dogs scamper happily at her feet. She nods a casual greeting. I remember my goal of summoning Dreamer, so I say to the woman, “Ahh, you’re Dreamer.” She seems confused at first, but even as I watch I see her becoming friendlier, younger and more familiar. She’s starting to look like Dreamer, but the transformation’s not complete.

“I will be soon,” she says, smiling. I smile back and we walk through the yard together. I drape an arm over her shoulder as I explain (to her and to myself) the plans for this dream. I lose the dream, though, and wake up.

I sit tight for DEILD and wind up back in the kitchen of my childhood home. A couple of Brazilian men are sitting at the dining room table saying unkind things about my brother-in-law “Muppet”. One sarcastically calls him a “phenomenon.” I feel myself becoming invested in this plotline, but no, let it go, it’s a distraction.

I phase back outside and it’s nighttime now. I want to find Dreamer again and for some reason decide that a playground or dog park is the way to go. I fly up high into the air at high speed, piercing the cloud cover. When I look back down, I expect to see a park but nothing is showing up. I try to pretend that I already see it but when I pierce back through the clouds back to Earth, I’m half a block away from where I started.

There’s a badass three-wheeled police car here that looks a little like The Dark Knight Batmobile. It appears to be stuck because it hit another car and the officer seated inside is berating a teenage girl, blaming her for what happened. I just want the car, though, so I open the top of the car and boot the cop out of the driver’s seat with my left foot and drive off down the street.



I have a fun time driving for a couple of blocks until I come to an intersection where a cement truck is gushing this huge, oozing wave of wet cement everywhere. I avoid it by driving up onto someone’s yard and going around, but all the bumping seems to make the car sort of disappear within a half block or so.

I walk out onto DA street to see this amazing parade of armored elephants going by. There must be dozens of them, marching slowly and regally in single file. There’s something sad about their demeanor and from out of nowhere Wife is standing next to me, saying, “This last march they do is called their ‘Final Heart.’” She’s moved by what she’s seeing and I am too in spite of not really understanding it.



Further down the road I encounter a vertical sandstone wall with small outcroppings that could be used as handholds. When I look across the street to my left, I see my doppelganger already climbing up an identical wall! He looks over at me and grins. I decide that this is a great opportunity to practice my dream climbing, so I make my way up about twenty feet or so. I keep looking over at my double as I go, a little envious of how quickly and confidently he can make the climb. As I’m climbing, the dream ends.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #196: Wonderful Distractions

I’m lying on my side anticipating a lucid dream. I sense the transition into a dream, but my dream body is lying on its side in the same position as my waking life body. I approach this in an OBE style and will myself to roll out of bed onto the floor. I ooze off of the edge of the bed and drift gently to the floor.

My vision is dark at this point, so I spend a moment chilling out and digging my hands into the carpet to build up my physical sensations of the scene. After everything feels right, I stand up and look out over the bed. Wife has completely buried herself under the comforter. I throw the covers back and she sits up, blinking in the daylight which streams in through the window.

I’m struck by the clarity of the scene. There’s a slight haze at the edges of my vision, but even though there’s a dreaminess to everything I see, it all looks incredibly realistic. She gets out of bed and I follow her toward our walk-in closet while I try to remember my goals.

The structure of our closet looks the same as waking life except for the fact that it’s grown much larger. There are two attractive women standing there, an Asian woman and a shorter lady with brown hair, just sort of hanging around and talking to each other. Hanging around three cute DCs makes me forget all other goals and (somewhat complex) sexytime commences.

After a few moments Wife says, “We forgot to close the bedroom door!” as if she’s afraid that the kids will barge in. I reluctantly leave the closet to go check on this, but find that the door’s already shut tight.

“Everything’s fine,” I say, and when I turn back to the closet, the other two women have vanished. I’m also surprised to see that it’s night outside now. I look out through the window and see that there’s a tow truck out front hauling off a cute little car that’s shaped like a phone booth. “Hey check this out!” I tell Wife.

“That’s a shame,” she says. We watch as the tow truck drives off.

When I turn back toward the bed, I see a freckled woman in her early 20s laying on our bed. She’s wearing shorts and flopped on her stomach, reading some kind of pamphlet. I’m too far gone to think of goals at this point, so this leads to some additional sexytime with Wife and this newest DC.

Afterward, I get up from the bed and feel the scene darkening. I look at my hands and I can see the light fading from the dream fast. I dig my hands into the carpet, but before long I have a false awakening where I hear my father-in-law shout, “3 AM faaaaail!” I'm confused for a moment and then “remember” that a bunch of us are staying at some vacation house and needed to wake up at 3 AM for some reason.

I walk out of the room, feeling sleepy, and see my cousin SU. “Hey, did you hear? JP Morgan is going under.” I’m astonished to hear this.

My brother-in-law Muppet says, “This pisses me off so much.”

“That we’ll wind up bailing out a huge bank?” I ask.

“No,” Muppet says, and launches into a long, disjointed speech about finance. After a while I realize that this person isn’t even Muppet anymore but some guy I don’t recognize. I wonder how I got so confused and eventually pull myself away from the conversation shortly before the dream ends.

Asia Task of the Year! (Vandalize the Great Wall of China and battle the authorities with kung-fu.) This was the second of two lucids from last night and the level of vividness in this one was incredible. It was literally more vivid than waking life, which is such a difficult experience to describe or recapture. Pretty amazing stuff.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #137: The Great Wall of China

I have a false awakening in my childhood home, wandering into the dining room to find that my parents are hosting a breakfast. Wife is walking beside me, my folks and brother-in-law "Muppet" are seated at the table, along with Mom and Dad and a few other strangers standing around nearby. As I approach the table, I realize that I am not wearing a shirt and feel embarrassed. Then I see myself in the mirror and I look really in-shape. Now I feel better. Still seems a little inappropriate but I sit down, hoping nobody will make a big deal out of anything.

I'm waiting for the food to arrive when something tips me off that this might all be a dream. I nose pinch and breathe in and out 2-3 times. I announce to everyone that I'm having a lucid dream, get up from the table, and phase through the window to the street outside. I hear Mom and Dad telling me to wait, that I'll miss the breakfast, asking me whether I'm sure that I'm dreaming. But yeah, after phasing through the window, pretty sure.

I take a moment to make the scene as vivid as possible, looking over all of the detail that I see around me, the sound of my voice, the way that the morning air feels (chill and humid.) Thick, spiral-shaped clouds hang in the street, totally immobile and so thick that you can't see through them. When I touch them they literally feel like cotton balls pushed together and just floating in mid-air.

I walk down the street for a while, checking out my hands for inconsistencies. They look completely lifelike, with the one exception being that I can't extend my left ring finger. Every time I try, it resists me and just winds up bending again. The street is still foggy but it's a more natural-looking fog now. The other strange thing is that every tree on the street is decorated with dozens of dreamcatchers that sway in a gentle breeze. The vividness is stunning.

At the end of the street is a house with a huge wall safe mounted above its front door. The safe keeps blowing apart in an explosion, reforming, and then blowing apart again, over and over. I pass by my college friend "Bear" as I turn the corner and then come to a roughly ten-foot stone wall that blocks me from going any further. I try to fly over it but end up just doing a weak jump and having to scramble over like this was waking life. From there I enter a mall area where I announce to the passerby that "I'm having a lucid dream." Some of them look at me with some interest, but nobody verbally responds. I find an exit and imagine that the Great Wall of China is right outisde.

I exit the mall and find myself in front of a six-foot tall replica of the Great Wall of China. Now we're getting somewhere! I walk a little further down a covered walkway and see a sign that reads "Joy's Toys" and under that "Great Wall". DCs are walking into a brick building near the sign that looks like a gift shop. I decide that this is a souvenir shop that's located right by the Great Wall, meaning that the real thing is... right behind me.



I turn around and there it is! It's much taller, easily 50 feet, imposing, and really ancient-looking. I vault over a random pile of building materials to get closer. There's a small crowd of DCs gathered near the base watching as three terra cotta warriors perform some kind of odd, stilted dance performance. The terra cotta warriors take no notice of me but I figure they'll be the ones coming after me when I vandalize the Great Wall for Task of the Year.

Advancing right to the wall, I haul back and punch it once, hoping that this will break a piece off. Nothing much happens. I grab at the wall with my fingers and manage to break a tiny piece off, but this doesn't feel like the serious vandalism I was going for. I decide to go with my premeditated plan of tagging up the Great Wall with spray paint. I summon an aerosol can into my hand and start spraying out some letters:

"DV 4 LIFE"

The paint runs and blurs a lot and generally looks like a mess, but I'm still incredibly pleased. Okay, the final piece of this dream is to defend myself against the authorities with kung-fu. I turn around, expecting an enemy... and find myself face to face with a pale, doughy guy in his 40s. He's wearing glasses and is dressed in brown slacks and a rather tight white cardigan that emphasizes his belly and spindly arms.

"So you're 'the authorities'?" I ask, trying to lead him to say yes.

"Certainly," he says curtly in a British accent. He stares proudly back at me.

Immediately I try to do some "kung-fu" on him. I do this atrocious little low kick that clips the side of his left knee. Then I throw another little kick that misses entirely. This time I scream something like, "A-GOCK!!" to make it seem more like I'm doing kung-fu. It comes out really shrieky but the effect is kung-fuey. My opponent does an awkward little hopping kick that misses by a mile. We both kick at the same time and kind of clash feet. We keep throwing these terrible little kicks at each other and I keep shrieking "A-GOCK!!" Finally my awful little kicks get the better of his awful little kicks and he seems to lose interest, and after a moment wanders away entirely.

I take another self-congratulatory look back at the Great Wall and then let myself wake up before I forget anything.

This was a very vivid, DC-heavy lucid from this morning. I finally remembered to do the "ask a DC about the meaning of life" Basic Task of the Month.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #134: The Dream Fairgrounds

I'm driving on a freeway with Wife and my 4-year-old son "E". Traffic's heavy and I'm in the middle of making a difficult merge but Wife is insisting that I adjust the air conditioning while I'm in the middle of this. I look down, quickly fiddle with a knob, then look back up to find that we're now driving backward down the freeway!

I gibber some kind of complaint about how this is why she shouldn't bother me when I'm driving, and the car turns back in the right direction again. This has to be a dream. Now that I'm lucid, I want to get up in the air and start figuring out how to accomlpish my goals. I feel weird abandoning Wife and E, though. I think about grabbing onto them and kind of phasing through the car with them, but it sounds intimidating. I wonder whether I could just fly the car itself around, and as soon as I think about this, it works -- our SUV is flying high above the freeway!

The city looks vivid and enormously detailed. Most of it is dominated by a huge fairground that stretches off as far as I can see. The fairground is a mixture of tents, stadiums, amusement park rides, golden domes, and even out-of-place landmarks like the Hagia Sophia. Scattered among these are more mundane buildings like banks. One of the rides is a looping starship ride that I remember from my childhood.

Everywhere I look there's something new. I'm overwhelmed and pleased by all of the detail and I laugh at the sheer quantity of images being thrown at me. The car flies quietly over the fairground for a while before I decide that we should land and look around. I look down at one of the rides and my perspective "zooms" down to that level.

The car is gone now and Wife and E are walking beside me. I feel excited as a little kid by this fair, and I'm amused (and dismayed) to see that every adult DC is a bored, miserable-looking parent with their face buried in a smartphone. I work my ass off at lucid dreaming to spend a few minutes a night in a place like this and you DCs couldn't care less!

We walk past the rides and attractions for a while and I see a lot of familiar people from my life, including my little nephew, my sister-in-law Sissy, brother-in-law Muppet, as well as The Schwartz and his wife and kids. Eventually it occurs to me that I need to get moving if I'm going to accomplish one of my goals, and I think of the Australia Task of the Year. I'm just about to jump up to fly off for a new scene, but luckily I remember the "ask a DC about the meaning of life" task.

I walk back over to E and say, "Hey, buddy. What's the meaning of life?"

He lays the side of his head down on a nearby crate and says, "To not die..." I'm not sure that I heard him right so I ask him to repeat that. He says, "Not dying." (He's been having anxiety about death lately, which is probably where this comes from.)

Wife's nearby, so I ask her too. She looks pensive for a moment. "To see the best of living."

Satisfied, I turn my attention back to my other goals. There's not much left of this dream, though, and before I can do much else it ends.

I took a pass at Advanced Task of the Month (turn a lump of coal into a diamond) but was running into all kinds of cognitive and dream control problems. My brain seemed to be a little zonked. This was my first lucid where I'd taken Valerian Root for sleep, so it's something to consider. Still, a nice long dream, even just counting the lucid part! If I'd managed to get lucid earlier I might have even had more time (and avoided that chaotic freeway scene.)

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #84: Vehicle Fire

Everything in the house is breaking at once. The plumbing is leaking all over the place, the dogs have destroyed a bunch of stuff, and I hear some kind of weird crunching noise from outside. To top it off, we're late picking up the kids from something.

I head outside to find my brother-in-law Muppet swinging around like a monkey on one of the external brick columns that supports our house. Each time he swings around, a couple of bricks fall off of the house and land nearby. Plus, the pillar is actually moving a little bit each time he goes around it. "What the hell are you doing?" I say to him. "You're gonna break our house!" I perform some half-assed reality check and it succeeds.

"What did you do just now?" asks Muppet.

"That was a reality check," I explain. "Everything is such a mess that I hoped I was just dreaming."

"Ah," he says, not especially interested. He points at our roof. Three objects that look like wooden shipping pallets are sticking out of it. "Hey, what are those?" asks Muppet. I grimace, thinking that they must have fallen out of a plane or something and wound up embedded in our roof. Muppet gets distracted, makes some remark about the flowers on the banana plants in our back yard, and then hops away over the top of our house. (Yes, over the top of our two-story house.)

Wife and I get in the car to go pick up the kids. We drive around the city for a long time but every road seems to be closed. Finally we take a tollway but traffic suddenly gets really heavy. I lightly bump some car as I'm driving around but nobody makes a big deal about it. Looking up ahead, we see the reason for the delay: ahead of us a disabled car is engulfed in flames. Black smoke billows up to the sky.



"We've gotta get off this road," I tell Wife, and steer the car toward a left exit. Just as I do that, though, a fire engine comes racing toward me, going the wrong way up the exit. I throw the car in reverse to try to get out of the way. I have to bump a lot of cars to clear a path, but I figure that's okay.

Finally, our car gets totally stuck, so I hop out and start pushing it sideways, kind of lifting it each time. I realize that I'm way too strong and become lucid. Wife has vanished, which is probably for the best -- the scene has grown totally chaotic, with cars driving around everywhere bumping into each other and the siren from the fire truck wailing in my ear. I pick up the car over my head and throw it across the road. In mid-air it changes from an SUV into a yellow Volkswagen Beetle. Then it becomes just the front half of a VW Beetle.

The license plate looks like a bar of soap with words carved into it in cartoony handwriting. I get closer so that I can study it. There are four words, but I only remember "ship" and "check".

Now I remember Task of the Month -- turn a lump of coal into a diamond. Unfortunately, I start trying to conjure a diamond at first. I'm very aware of my hands for some reason, and even when I put them behind my back I can't seem to make myself buy into the conjuration. I bring my hands back to the front of my body and see that now I'm wearing these black, rather lady-like leather driving gloves. Annoyed, I take them off and pitch them away. I try the conjuration again -- again, more lady-gloves. Then I remember that I wasn't even supposed to be conjuring a diamond in the first place but a lump of coal. I start working on that, wind up with lady-gloves again, and start getting frustrated. A car clips me as it goes by, I start getting agitated, and darkness comes over me, pitching me into the void.

I feel relaxed, and start probing at my dream body. It's only a few seconds before I find myself standing in my own bedroom, walking toward the door. I say something encouraging to myself like, "Hell yeah, sexy new dream body!" For a moment I contemplate turning around to see whether Wife is in bed and might be down for doing something sexy but I get scared that approaching the bed I'm actually occupying IWL would be destabilizing.

I head to the top of the stairs. The baby gate's blocking me but I just power through it and it sort of snaps open. I get nearly to the bottom of the stairs when everything stretches way, way out and takes on that stereotypical "endless hallway" look. I keep moving but no matter how far I go everything seems to stay in the same place. Then the entire room suddenly rotates 90 degrees, floor becoming wall, and I slide down the rest of the way to the first floor.

Our coat closet has been replaced with what looks like a giant iPhone. The screen is displaying a game with a 5x5 array of tiles. When you touch various tiles, you receive prizes in the form of troops for Clash of Clans. I earn 4 Minions and a Hog Rider just pushing tiles at random, but now I'm interested in learning what the rules of the game are. I'm trying to figure this out when the dream ends.