CanisLucidus

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #220: Purple Haze

I’m walking through a hallway in an art school, getting ready to attend a class. I recall a previous dream where a lot of money had been stolen from my wallet and I dig for my wallet in a panic. I recall my intent to LD, get suspicious and nose pinch RC my way into lucidity.

I remember my intent to summon Dreamer for the challenge as I walk into one of the classrooms, but as I walk in a cluster of art students engage me in conversation. Before I know it, I’m blabbing about lucid dreaming until I’m only semi-lucid. Something prompts me to take out my iPod and check it. It acts just like waking life, but one of the words on-screen is “Kentucky”. Look away, look back, the letters are now a jumble, and I’m lucid again.

Wary of being distracted again, I duck back out into the hallway, which is now empty. I walk along for a while, thinking about how I’ll do my summon. I want to try rolling with what the dream gives me and using an existing DC. I step into an atrium where I see a handful of DCs walking around. I point at the closest one and say, “You’re Dreamer!” Immediately I notice that her hair is purple and she’s walking toward me. I lean in to make sure and it’s a perfect match!

“Yeah it’s me!” she says, as if nothing could be more obvious.

We hug and I start describing my plans for the dream. I tell her that I’m planning for us to do something together but that I’m having some trouble remembering Task of the Month. “That is Task of the Month!” she says, laughing. (Good call!)

“Oh right,” I say, “that’s Basic. [Note: Wrong, that’s Bonus!] But what’s advanced?”

She furrows her brow and then shrugs. We walk down the hall together and I tell her that I have an idea for something cool to do outside. We talk a bit more but I’m feeling like all this walking is compromising my lucidity, so I say, “Hey, let’s just fly, okay?” I turn my back toward her because for some reason I think she needs to ride around on my back. (How insulting!)

“Okay!” she says, and hops onto my back, “seatbelting” herself on by reaching her right arm over my right shoulder and her left hand under my left arm, then clasping her hands together. I hop up into the air and fortunately the flying feels effortless. We go soaring through the atrium into an area that looks like a shopping mall. There are a number of DCs milling about below and I’m surprised to see that a few of them also have purple hair!

We swoop low past a bench of DCs and a few of them run. I laugh at this, and Dreamer does too (though a little less maniacally than me.) We’re heading toward a low wall and I have a little trouble pulling up, my dream body kind of “oozing” awkwardly over the top. Made it, though! I see a set of doors off in the distance, so I set us down and head for them, determined to get outside. All the while I keep talking about how all of this is a lucid dream.

As I’m talking Dreamer starts taking over more and more of the conversation. I keep my left hand on her right shoulder as I walk in order to keep her “stuck” as part of the scene. But after a bit I notice that her accent, perfect at first, sounds all wrong and she’s changed the subject from dreaming to how I really should go back to art school. I nearly lose lucidity, but look over in time to see that Dreamer has been replaced by a young, dark-haired woman who looks Thai. “You never go to your art classes!” she says. “How can you expect to succeed if you don't go to your art classes?”

“You are not Dreamer!” I declare, pointing a dorky finger in the air and running for the exit.

“Wait!” says the woman, and I feel her grab onto my ankle. I ignore the sensation, though, and fly out through the door, phasing outside to a parking lot. There are a number of DCs milling about, mostly women, and all of them have purple hair!

I swoop toward the closest DC, a stout, middle-aged woman with glasses. “You’re Dreamer!” I say, pointing dramatically at her and kind of dropping into a goofy lunge. She says something noncommittal so I follow up with, “Don’t worry, you will be,” which she seems to accept with some surprise.

I tell her that my Task is to eat a huge dessert (somehow I’ve finally remembered) and she tells me that there is a “Chili’s” nearby. I point to a building and leadingly say, “You mean there, right?” She agrees and somehow I wind up inside of this restaurant, the purple-haired woman no longer around.

I’m walking forward in a huge line in order to enter the restaurant, which winds through some kind of indoor forest. I zoom in close to the tree’s detail and see ants crawling along the bark. I study the way that the lighting and shadows play off of the trees in real-time and I brag about all of this detail to the DCs, gushing that “This is all inside my head!” They nod politely and look a little uncomfortable.

We come to a long spiral staircase downward that leads to a cavern floor blanketed in mist. I don’t want to wait so I leap over the side, floating down to the floor and then moving into a dark tunnel. I remember how Dreamer had good luck producing a flame from her finger and how Xanous had focused on the pain of the experience to create fire in his hands. I hold up my thumb and expect this to happen for me as well but there’s nothing.

Now I expect pain and heat. There’s a slight tingling ache, but it’s little more than a nuisance. “The big fire!” I say. Nothing. I exit the tunnel into a large, darkened movie theater. I try to shout “The big fire!” but I get the sensation of my waking life voice croaking out the words and I’m startled awake.

Yet another near miss on Task of the Year! I really need to work on learning to close these. Lots of fun though!

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #193: Magic Carpet School

I’m part of a large parenting group that’s exploring a gloomy cavern illuminated by translucent pools of water. After quietly exploring this place for a while, we all wind up back at one of the mom’s houses. Somebody suggests that we do a group hug, and we all awkwardly move toward the middle of the room.

I notice that Andy Bernard from The Office is part of the group. He looks sweaty and awkward and I think, “Hey that guy who plays Andy Bernard sure looks sweaty and awkward in person.” I do a quick mental check to see whether this is a dream and decide that yes, it definitely is.

I walk out of this living room into an elementary school classroom that’s in the middle of some kind of lesson. I pass through without interacting with any of the dream characters, wanting to get outside for a Task of the Year attempt. (The Aladdin’s lamp task with a magic carpet and three wishes.)

Leaving this classroom takes me to a second classroom and I start worrying that I’ll spend this whole lucid wandering through an endless series of grade school classes. I head for a wall, announcing that “This is a phase outside,” before plunging right through. I wind up in the void, but my hands and forearms are still brightly illuminated and clearly visible.

I rub my hands together and slowly the void becomes filled with a swirling field of stars. This fades into a scene from the Matrix that has the Youtube logo and controls underneath it, and I see that I am watching a video whose length is “0:98”. I briefly wonder if I went to bed wearing VR goggles or something and that the images are penetrating my eyelids. Scenes from The Matrix flash by and the image slowly rotates.

Now there’s a crackling sound and my vision fills with a series of strange characters that I can’t identify. I feel a sharp tug backward and I wait for the new scene to form. My vision reforms into… another elementary school classroom, this one a little bigger with an adjacent windowed playroom. I head immediately for the exit and I’m pleased to find myself in an entrance area. I bolt through a set of glass doors and now I’m outside.

Immediately I start attempting the lamp summon by “finding” it behind my back, but my hand just keeps coming back empty. After three failures, I’m really frustrated by this. On the last attempt my hand comes back with some little piece of dirty, wooden-looking junk about the size of a sugar cube. This time I pretend that this is the lamp but it’s just way too small. “Bigger… bigger…” and do a little magician-esque gesture. It plumps up nicely into a real magic lamp! It’s way too light to be realistic, but who cares, next step!

I rub the lamp, wishing for the magic carpet. I decide to be really specific, saying, “A magic carpet. Make it rolled up.” A simple little rolled-up rug appears on the ground. I immediately think, Why’d you ask for it rolled up? That’s just a pain in the ass. I expect the magic carpet to unroll and it does, so I quickly sit down. As I do, it lifts me up into the air and starts flying leisurely forward.

For my second wish, I quickly say “Delicious cookie!” and a tiny little sliver of cookie appears in my hand, like someone had already eaten most of it. I find this awfully stingy for a magic lamp but I stuff it in my mouth. It’s chocolate chip, not bad at all.

I think about how close I am to completing the task and the excitement gets the best of me. I get one last look at the roof of a one-story building as I float over it before the dream ends.

This LD was from the morning of 9/13/2013.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #146: Midway

I'm a high school student walking around near an open field where a girl is practicing her triple jump. She has an odd technique where she bounces up to the line before taking her first jump, so I copy her. It's amazing! Each jump goes for about 10 feet and I go flying along the field this way. I had no idea technique mattered so much.

I walk toward the school, entering a classroom where students are working on art projects. I fall in with a group of people I think that I know and work on cutting cloth into interesting shapes. At the end, I wrap a golden key in cloth and throw it in the garbage, expecting the other students to somehow understand that they're supposed to fish it out. Nobody gets it, though, and suddenly we're all hustled out of the classroom, the golden key still in the garbage. I'm filled with teen angst, upset that nobody understands me.

The dream jumps to me outside of the school at night, ready to sneak in and rescue the golden key from the trash. There's some kind of huge event going on, though, and everywhere people are walking freely in and out of the school's front door. I pass by other kids that I (falsely) think I know, as well as lots of well-dressed adults I'm unfamiliar with. As I walk through the school, it becomes a stadium. There's something extremely loud going on in there now and I think that it's a stock car race.

I'm thinking this is odd when the scene changes and I find myself outside near the coast. I have to be dreaming. I'm walking with a group of 3-4 other people, at least 2 other teenage boys and at least 1 teenage girl. I recall that I'm not actually a teenager anymore IWL but I feel like I'm still inhabiting the body of my younger self.

Off to the right I see a faraway fairground and wonder if it's the same fairgrounds I saw several dreams back. Ahead in the distance I see an aircraft carrier that looks like USS Midway. One of the guys in the group says, "Is that the USS [some word, maybe gallant?]"

I correct him: "No, that's the Midway." As we walk toward it, the edges of Midway rock up and down as if she were traveling through very rough seas. I look over to the left and see a hilly landscape dotted with houses. As the houses fall into my peripheral vision, they start turning and rocking as well. I experiment with this by staring at several different houses, as well as turning my eyes back to Midway. Whatever I stare directly at stays still but objects toward the edge of my vision rock gently back and forth.

"Do you see that? Do you see the way that everything's rocking, or am I the only one that sees it?" The DCs mutter noncommitally. "What's this like for you?" I ask. I'm planning to question them further about whether they truly "see" things, but the dream fades before I can really get these questions out.

This was the first of two LDs from last night. My primary goal was to focus on vividness and I really think it helped. Great vividness on this one!

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #136: Neon

I'm walking along a road at night, going over a (mostly) false memory that I just had a shared dream with my son "E". I wonder whether I'm dreaming right now, too, and with a nose pinch reality check, I confirm that I am.

Immediately I remember my goal of trying to make the dream as vivid as possible before doing anything else. To my left is a strange, 20-foot high stack of flattened stones sandwiching layers of damp newspaper over and over. I run my fingers over the stone and the paper, noting the detail and the way that my hands look as they pass over them. As I listen, I hear the sound of people talking and celebrating, and I think it's coming from just over the other side of this stack.

By now the dream feels really vivid and I begin to climb the stack of rocks. To climb, I squelch my fingers into the soft layers of damp newspaper between the stones and work my way up. My body feels light, so the climb is natural and easy. I climb up to the top, stand on the top of the stack, and look out on a lively scene. It's like an old west town that's just drenched in neon lights. DCs dressed in western wear are walking happily back and forth between wooden buildings covered with neon signs. A young couple shares a laugh, and she leans her head against his shoulder as they walk across the dusty street to what looks like a bar.

The scene is so vivid that I become overwhelmed. I've got this huge grin and I feel like I'm crying with emotion. I wonder whether it's possible to cry in a dream, and laugh a little at the thought.

I jump down to the ground and walk slowly through the dusty street, enjoying the sight of the DCs passing by around me. At the end of the street is a building without any neon lights. It looks like a schoolhouse and I walk up to the door before turning around to look back toward the stack of stone. Behind the stack I see hills lining the horizon. The shape and height remind me of the Hollywood Hills. Dozens of green signs float over the hills, each with the name of a town or city and the city's population painted on it. I try to remember some of the names but it feels like they're changing. I let it go and turn back to the schoolhouse.

I'm in a classroom now that's filled with other parents watching their kids play. There's a fascinating array of toys like train sets that encircle the room, some kind of clunky robot that walks around, and lots of other cool stuff. I see my son "E" playing here as well, kind of jumping around watching the train go.

I glance back up at the other parents, then back down at the room -- and the kids and toys have vanished! Everyone is milling around and talking about what a great time the kids had. I tell them something to indicate that I'm dreaming and walk back out through the door.

The neon wild west town is gone now, and I step directly out onto a street that's busy with pedestrian traffic. Across the street I see an Olympic swimming pool built into what looks like a big basketball court. I think that I'll use it for the "Great Barrier Reef" Task of the Year.

I start toward the street. Two young women are talking as they walk past me. I notice that one of them is really cute, mid-20s, dark hair, and very short (maybe 5 feet tall!) I have an impulse to kiss her and as soon as I think this, she turns toward me, smiling. Her friend walk off without her, oblivious and now treating her like a stranger. At first I think this is cool but then I think better of spending my time kissing DCs. Need to focus!

I will the DC to stop crushing on me but something goes wrong with the dream control... and now she seems to actually hate me.

She bares her teeth angrily and walks toward me, her hands clenched into fists. I can tell that she clearly intends to kick my ass. I want no part of any of this and try to scurry across the street but she jogs after me, still looking like she wants to flatten me. I hurry away and kind of wave her off, saying, "Just leave me alone!" Then I turn completely away and ignore her, hoping that she'll disappear on her own. I make it across the street without being mauled, but as I'm getting close to the pool, the dream ends.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #127: Hagia Sophia

I'm touring a new school for my son "E" that's exclusively available to children who lucid dream. E is in his "level 2" class, and his teacher, a short, friendly, gray-haired lady is showing me around the room. It's a large classroom with basic carpeting and lots of little beds and sleeping nooks everywhere. All of the kids are running around, and I remark that if I had the opportunity to just sleep all the time for school, I'd definitely do it. It occurs to me that I might be dreaming right now... and it turns out that I am.

"I'm having a lucid dream right now," I tell the lady, and head for the exit door without waiting for a reply. I phase through the glass to find myself standing by a harbor in the early morning. There are two amphibious helicopters floating idly in the water, pontoons on their skids. I wonder whether this kind of helicopter really exists.

I remember that I want to find the Colosseum, so I start flying to get high above the water. I emerge from a light covering of fog that I hadn't even noticed, finding myself in a landscape of gently rolling hills that are covered with tightly packed buildings. I tell myself that the Colosseum is one of these buildings and that all I have to do is find it. I see a building that catches my eye, but instead of the Colosseum, it's Hagia Sophia.



"I know the Colosseum is here," I say, expecting it to glow (a trick I've used in the past.) "Show me where it is." A small site off to the side of Hagia Sophia starts to glow. It looks too small, but I fly toward it anyway. A sudden gust of wind starts pushing me in the opposite direction and turning me away from the glowing site. I decide that this wind is trying to carry me to the Colosseum so I won't get lost. It turns me all the way around so that I'm looking out over the endless ocean. I'm worried for a second that it's going to leave me facing out to sea, but it dutifully turns me around and starts moving me back toward Hagia Sophia and the glowing spot nearby.

The wind carries me all the way to the spot, and it's nothing more than a tiny plaza with a small raised platform of stone. I land, and when I examine the platform I find a small button with what looks like a glowing, golden bear's paw on it. Okay, hopefully this button will take me there. I press the button, and my vision is covered by a pop-up message like something from a video game.

The message contains two lines of text and I feel really intimidated at the thought of having to remember it. I try to lock the words in place but I feel like every word I'm not looking at is trying to change. Keeping them all steady feels like playing Whac-A-Mole and it's dawning on me that I should stop obsessing about this. As best I can remember the message says: "Use 4 parts of Vendarite to increase strength"

I'm not sure what this means, but I figure that in a lucid dream I can be as strong as I want to be (and have as much "Vendarite" as I like, for that matter), and will the message to close. I feel like something is happening to the plaza and that it's shifting in some way, but the dream soon ends.

I finally made it into space! Even though I had no idea how to handle myself once I got there, the fact that I flew up there was a huge milestone. Before this, stable flight had been a bit elusive for me. Big step forward!

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #20: The Unprepared Astronaut

I'm a graduating senior in college, following around a guy who seems to think we're close friends. I feel pretty guilty because I have no memory of him at all. I'm accompanying him so he can say his post-college goodbyes to his girlfriend. We meet her outside of a dormitory, and I recognize her as a girl that I know from high school. I recognize how weird this is and quickly find myself lucid.

Both of the dream characters freeze in place, looking into one another's eyes. I decide to leave the love birds alone while I take another pass at Task of the Month. (In this case, I'm going to be trying to remove my head and replace it with a pumpkin.) I try to will a mirror onto the outer dormitory wall but nothing appears.

I remember how much more dream control success I have when I'm detailed and thorough. I try again, this time imagining an ornate mirror that's been worn by time, the paint on its frame beginning to chip and flake off. This time I get my mirror!

I look into the mirror but it's dirty and cloudy-looking. The reflection looks like a shirtless me but it's very hard to make out any detail. I wipe at the mirror but it just doesn't make any difference. Rather than get hung up here and waste a lucid dream doing glass-cleaning, I decide to spend my time trying out other things.

I leave the grounds of the dormitory and head out onto a quiet, empty street. The morning feels chilly and the city is covered with a blanket of fog. I wonder what this fog looks like from above, so I decide to try flying above it. This time, I focus on the little details. The chill of humid air against my fingertips. The breeze flowing past my hair and tickling my scalp. Concentrating on these sensations leaves me no time for doubt and I smoothly rise up into the fog.

The fog swallows me whole as I rise. I wonder how long it will take me to pierce it. I feel myself going faster and faster and soon I'm rocketing up through the atmosphere. The fog never seems to end and I feel like I must be high above the Earth.

Suddenly I break through into blackness. I stop rising, my momentum suddenly gone. I'm in the blackness of space and the fog is now a floor below me. I realize that it isn't just the city that was covered in fog -- it's the entire planet. I am able to breathe but I somehow can't keep myself from doing so in these desperate, shallow gasps.

My flight abilities have stopped working and my arms and legs flail helplessly. I will myself a pair of rocket shoes but I get confused trying to work the lever that turns them on. I start losing my cool and my breathing becomes even gaspier until I wake up.