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.

I'm recovering from an illness so it was a coughing, uncomfortable, rough night. I finally had to take 1.5 mg of melatonin to tip myself into sleep at around 4 am to get this LD (which explains the melatonin reference in the dream.) Given all that, I'm really pleased to have gotten lucid. I just wish I'd gotten more than 4 hours of sleep!

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #75: Floodlights

Wife and I are staying in a hotel room and having some disagreement about the use of melatonin in cooking and laundry. She tells me that she will never bake melatonin into bread or use it to wash our towels. Peeved, I hide around the corner out of sight, and sulk about how unreasonable this ban on melatonin baking is.

Then we're in bed trying to fall asleep. I roll over to my right side and find that there's a hammer in bed with us! I think about how horrible it would be if REM atonia malfunctioned and one of us had some kind of combat dream. (I've had a vague but long-standing fear of REM behavior disorder since I was pretty young.) I'm pissed that the hotel staff has left this in our bed and I get up, deciding that I have to get rid of this hammer.

I slide the hammer flat along the floor and throw it into the hallway through the gap under the door. It spins round and round then clonks into the wall on the opposite end of the hall. It suddenly seems ludicrous to me that the hammer would fit under the door like that and I become lucid.

Vividness looks good, so I'm excited. I head for the window of the hotel room, passing two more double beds on the way out. (It occurs to me that the bed I was just in was crammed into the kitchen nook.) As I approach the window, I notice that a four-foot metallic cube is shoved against the wall. It's vibrating ever-so-slightly and there's a strange voice coming out of it saying something about "Orcs Must Die!" (I played this game before going to bed.) I think that the voice is telling me to "insert a coin". I'm really interested in this but I start feeling confused. Worried for my stability, I turn away from the cube and turn my attention back to the window and my goals.

I want to make my way to Angel Falls for Task of the Year, so I plan to phase through the glass. I halfheartedly try to push through it, but I know that I'm doing it wrong and my hand is stopped at the window. I struggle to remember what I'm supposed to do. Oh right -- the glass isn't even there. Just do what you want. I simply walk outside into the night, paying no attention to the glass, and find myself standing on a ledge looking out over a nighttime city scene, many stories off of the ground.

I don't feel like I can Hulk-jump from this tiny ledge, so I allow myself to rise up to get a better look at the city. I'm high up now, and I see a distant tower topped by a turning searchlight, clearly visible in the night sky. It intrigues me, but I decide to stick with Task of the Year. After floating upward for a while, I land on the hotel roof. I look to the sky above me and see a strange array of floodlights shining down on me like I'm in the middle of a sports arena. The lights are blindingly bright and my vision first goes completely white, then fades to black.

For some reason, I don't think of readying myself for DEILD but instead become fixated on asking the dream scene a question. While I'm fiddling around, everything collapses around me.