CanisLucidus

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #100: The World Is Yours

I'm flying high in the sky around what looks to be a computer-generated globe that's populated with little dots. I feel like I'm on a plane with Wife but I don't see a plane. It's just me and my floating perspective as we circle slowly and gracefully around this globe.

I tell Wife, "This is a music video for a Phil Collins' song called 'Julia' from 1980." (Not true.) The song immediately starts playing. In it, Collins sings of how this globe is "not CGI" and that the dots represent people around the world. He sings that the dot he remembers best ("the one I best recall") was one of him over the ocean, flying on a plane to be reunited with his beloved Julia.

As the song ends, I suddenly find myself falling downward out of the sky. I hope that this is a dream, I think, and of course it is.

I immediately halt my fall and find myself hovering over a huge, vivid cityscape -- highways, skyscrapers, cranes, bridges, traffic jams, all arrayed for me down below. I want to fly around and explore this city, but when I attempt to fly, I'm unable to move. For some reason, I feel totally confident that I'll come unstuck. Stop asking, I think.

I ignore what the dream is telling me and I imagine that I'm already flying Iron Man-style around the city. A second later, I'm flying effortlessly, cruising anywhere I like. I get briefly stuck a time or two, but I just ignore it, imagine that I'm succeeding, and immediately start flying again. Eventually, the little glitches stop.

I see a tower that I remember from waking life -- it's one that I pass during my commute. I fly up to the top and circle around it. I glide low over roadways and high above a cluster of skyscrapers, then descend back to one of the bridges that spans a piece of some unfamiliar bay.

My confidence is soaring, and I decide try some large-scale dream control. I put my hands out in front of me and then bring them apart like I'm performing the breaststroke. As I do, I rake cars off of the bridge in either direction and dozens of them go plummeting toward the water. I bring my hands back together and I watch as time rewinds and they return to the bridge, unharmed. I fly back toward the skyscrapers, select a pair of them, and then begin moving them up and down, one for my left hand and one for my right.

I look to my left and see an enormous fire ogre (a la "Orcs Must Die") stomping toward me down one of the city streets. He towers over most of the nearby buildings, at least 100 feet tall. I wonder whether maybe I'll be fighting him later. I feel no fear at all. I reflect for a moment about what it would be like to have this much control and confidence in every LD. Nothing could stop me. What sort of things would I do if I had years of this kind of power?

Leaving the fire ogre behind for now, I fly over my city for a while and just let my dreaming brain show me what it can do. I look out at the waters of the nearby bay and think about using all of this overflowing confidence for some Task of the Month parasailing, but the dream soon ends.

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.