CanisLucidus

This dream is from the morning of 12/15/2013.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #173: Luxor

I’m in a hotel room bedroom talking with Wife. She has the lights off like we’re getting ready for bed but there's an errand to take care of. We need an access card for the pool and she’s sending me out to get it.

When I get to the main room of the suite, rather than our kids I encounter a guy that looks like Henry Rollins. I think he’s some kind of celebrity, although I’m not sure who I really think this is. We talk for a little bit and he tells some kinda funny but off-color joke. He motions toward our room and says, “Sorry, forgot about the wife.”

I decide that I’d better not leave Wife alone with a stranger in our hotel room so I decide not to leave. As I’m thinking through this, I become lucid and walk back into the bedroom. I crawl into bed next to Wife, planning on performing a WILD. Wait, no, I’m already having a lucid dream. I get out of bed, walk to the end of the room and phase out through the window into the void.

I rub my hands together as I fall through the void. The descent slows until I can no longer feel it and I give myself a bit of a pep talk about how “all of this is mine”, hoping to be ready for some dream control when I emerge from the void. I’m thinking of Task of the Year, and imagine that I’ll see the Great Pyramid when I emerge.

After a bit, the void gives way to a dusky desert scene. And about 70 or so feet away is the base of an Egyptian pyramid! There are a lot of smaller pyramids around the in the area as well, most of them only ten feet high or so. Everything’s covered in billboard and neon signs that say things like “Clearance!” and “For Sale!”

I make my way toward the main pyramid when I encounter an attractive brunette in her late 20s. “Can we help you?” she asks. Just as she says this, she’s joined by an identical twin. The idea of an attempt at sexytime sounds appealing, but no, the Pyramid is right here. Stay focused.

Confused about what the Pyramid task is (repair/reanimate the Sphinx and ride her to the top), I respond, “Can you show me the way inside the Pyramid?" Then I add: "By the way, you two are really cute.” (I think I was trying to impress them/myself for staying on track or something, I don’t know. )

They pose and raise their arms over their head in a “We know!” kind of gesture. One of them (the first one I met) says, “Sure, I’ll show you.” She heads off around the side of the Pyramid and I follow. As we’re walking she narrates like a tour guide, gesturing at some wares as we pass by some stalls in a market area. “Here’s where they sell Khuddush and vials.” (I’m spelling “Khuddush” the way it sounded to me, but it’s a guess since I don’t know this word.)

“What’s Khuddush?” I ask.

“You don’t know? This is supposed to be your dream. If I know something that you don’t, does that mean…?” Her voice trails off. I have kind of a “whoa” moment. (I looked up “Khuddush” and couldn’t find anything. The closest match was the kiddush, a Jewish Sabbath ritual. Kiddush - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

I follow her into a high stone chamber where a few other DCs are wandering around. We walk toward a staircase leading down and the dream falls into the void. I can’t rescue it, but before I emerge, I hear an unfamiliar female voice say, “Don’t get too attached.” The dream ends.

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.

After trying and failing so much in the last several weeks, I finally made it to the Great Pyramid! I didn't complete the Task of the Year, but I had one fantastic lucid dream.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #59: On the Back of the Sphinx

I'm standing by a hedgerow on a suburban street, waiting for the hedges to part and let me in. Through these hedges is the party I'm supposed to attend. The hedges part for me, then close as I move toward them. "No problem," I say, covering up a sting of rejection. "I'll come back when you're ready for me."

I wander across the street to wait. I wonder whether I'm dreaming. I decide that I'll reality check "in a few minutes". (You slacker!) No -- I don't need to reality check. This is a dream! I look at my hands. No distortion, waviness, extra fingers, or discoloration. Still, I'm sure that I'm dreaming.

The dream feels sharp, vivid, and stable. I feel like I have tons of time and potential. I sprint across the street, leap over the hedgerow, and with a shout I soar into the sky. I'm flying over a rain forest now and my skyrocketing confidence level makes me shout, "L-dopa!!!" (Although I was displaying behavior in line with high dopamine levels, I've never taken L-dopa. Don't know what got into me.) After flying over the rain forest for a while, I wind up in a cloud bank and lose my bearings. Afraid of getting stuck here, I turn back toward the neighborhood, content to take a different direction.

I fly back out of the cloud bank, but a fierce gust of wind kicks up from the other direction and pushes me back toward the clouds. "Okay," I say. "You're taking me to the Pyramid." I relax as I pass back through the cloud bank, emerging over an ocean. I let the wind push me further on and soon I'm flying thousands of feet over a desert dotted with stones. It's dark, and the sand looks as gray as a moonscape. I descend headfirst toward the sand, sure that I'm going to find what I'm looking for.

It's nighttime when I land. I look to my right, and there's the Pyramid, illuminated by artificial light! I'm no more than twenty feet from it. The sphinx lies directly at the base of the Pyramid. I note that in the physical world she'd be further east toward Cairo, but the inconsistency doesn't bother me. Instead it reminds me even more strongly that this is my world.

The sphinx's stony skin is white like alabaster and she has Asian characters tattooed along all four legs and in a single stripe along each side of her body. She's far smaller than I'd expected, no more than thirty feet long. Her entire face has crumbled away (not just her nose.) I'm overcome with this urge to help her. Even setting aside Task of the Year, this is now something I badly want to do.

I press my palms against her face and say, "I'm going to fix you." I feel the stone first roiling then smoothing out against my hands. In a few seconds her face is repaired and her head starts to move. Her face looks mostly feline but there's still a vaguely humanoid quality to it. She licks my hand once and her tongue is the fleshy, rough tongue of a cat. Her head turns vaguely toward my face but her eyes are pupil-less, blank alabaster so I can't tell whether she's looking straight at me.

I swing my leg across her back and ask her to "Take me to the top of the Pyramid." She gets to her feet and starts walking around to the other side of the Pyramid. Her route takes us through a restaurant and bar where a number of women are dancing to this really amazing piece of world music. The melody is from some sort of brass instrument and it's backed by the mouth harp. (I had to google to even figure out what this instrument is called -- here's a good example of the mouth harp in action. I think it was in my memory banks from a video game I played about 15 years ago.)

As I ride through the dance floor, the music and dancing begin to draw me in. One particularly stunning dancer, an ebony-skinned young woman of about 25, is driving me to distraction. I feel the sphinx slowing down and things start to feel unstable. I try to refocus on the task at hand, but the dream falls apart.

This was the second of the three LDs I had early Christmas morning.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #49: Turtles All the Way Down

I'm sitting in a large classroom with a bunch of friends and coworkers. The teacher hasn't arrived, but it's all right -- we're seated at long desks that are covered with candy like turtles, caramels, M&M cookies, miniature pecan pies, Reese's... all kinds of goodies. Everyone is stuffing their face and having a great time.

I suddenly have a false awakening into a small dormitory room with a cot. I feel like I'm late for something so I spring right up and walk out the door, emerging in the same classroom that I just left. Everyone is still feasting.

I sit down next to my friend "Leroy" and tell him and several other friends and coworkers nearby that "You're not going to believe this, but I had a dream that this would happen. The classroom, the candy... everything!" Everyone seems happy to hear this and they plow into the turtles, caramels, and other goodies with even greater abandon. It suddenly occurs to me that this is also a dream, and I could keep "waking up" into this room of candy forever.

I turn to Leroy and tell him that this is a lucid dream, inviting him to follow along. He eagerly hops up and we stride out into the hallway. I hesitate for a moment when I realize that I forgot to try any of the food, but decide to focus on getting outside.

We get to a set of automatic doors and I imagine that outside these doors is the Great Pyramid. As I approach the doors, I catch sight of the Pyramid... it's just through the door, stretching so high that I can't see the top. But as the doors slide open, the Pyramid suddenly changes into just another generic city building. I feel a little surge of emotion but it dies out quickly. We keep going.

Leroy and I turn right and continue down the street past some food carts. I see people from my past and I explain to M who they are and why they're appearing in the dream. "That girl across the street? That's JG. I went to middle school and high school with her but haven't seen her since graduation. I still run into her brother sometimes." Now JG's brother appears. "Oop, there he is."

There's a stadium up ahead and to our left. I tell Leroy, "That's the stadium from when we were in school but it looks like I've placed it next to a side street like the one by my high school stadium." I turn to look at Leroy and see that he's trailing far behind, looking lost and unfocused. I realize that I'm not giving him much attention and it's probably time to cut him loose. It isn't long before he fades entirely from the scene.

I reach a parking lot from which I think that I see the Pyramid on the far horizon. I leap up into the air and start floating but can't seem to get any forward momentum for flight. As I will myself to fly forward, a counterwind blows against me, and I totally lose my cool. It's only seconds before the dream collapses.

A short lucid, but it featured some of the most arresting visual imagery I've encountered so far. I'd wanted to see the Great Pyramid, but this was well beyond what I'd had in mind.

I like to think of my conscious mind as the "coauthor" of my dreams, but sometimes I have to wonder if it's anything more than a proofreader.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #33: The Poolside Pyramid

I'm swimming at a pool party. Rather than relaxing and enjoying the moment, I'm scrubbing furiously at algae blooms along the pool walls while trying to make sure that my two kids are keeping their heads above water. A tall, gray-haired man swims up and makes some unflattering remark about my scrubbing technique. First a flicker of annoyance ("this isn't even my job!"), then one of realization. He stops talking as soon as I'm lucid.

I want to go but I can't make myself leave until I'm sure my kids are safely out of the pool. Fortunately, when I check for them, I see that they've already disappeared. I tell the guy I've got lucid stuff to do and he responds, "Oh sure, man. Go for it."

I fly up out of the pool, thinking vaguely about my goal of reaching the top of the Great Pyramid. I'm shocked when on the horizon I see an entire pyramid complex, fully formed. In front of the Pyramid, in even more vivid detail is the sphinx and a towering statue of an Egyptian Pharaoh. Incredibly, the statue stands even taller than the Pyramid.

Rather than the dull sand-colored stone that I imagine when thinking of the Pyramid today, it's clad in brilliant white. The sphinx's face and body is either painted or perhaps decorated from top to bottom with colored stones, the eyes specifically ringed in deep blue, like lapis lazuli. The statue of the pharaoh is gold, similar in style to King Tut's burial mask.



Everything that I see ahead of me is far, far beyond what I'd incubated (or even imagined) for the Great Pyramid, and I'm thrilled with the idea of exploring it further. A little too thrilled, it seems, because not long after I start flying toward the pyramid complex, I'm awake. My heart rate is elevated (though not quite racing) and I can't seem to settle back in for a DEILD.

Ayiee! Let me back in!