task of the month

OK, so, this dream is pretty interesting. Or rather, "dreams". I'd had several lucids in a week while not actively practicing which sparked me to start posting on DV a bit, see if I could get those back to a decent consistency. That was a couple weeks ago and I had nothing between then and now. Luckily, after snoozing my alarm for what seems like ages (I think I just turned it off, actually), I got lucid... somehow. I'm not 100% sure, but I think it was a weird DEILD/MILD combo thingy. Either way, enjoy:

I was in some sort of old town, early 1900s, similar to New York City. I was in a large courtyard with a small fountain in the middle and only a few DCs sitting against on of the buildings of the courtyard doing god knows what. I was with a girl of some sort running through the courtyard essentially dragging her by her hand (she was still running). IDK what we were running for or from, but we headed out of the courtyard and into an alley. This is were it gets a little hazy. I remember spinning around as if I was trying to save a lucid dream, but I don't remember being lucid. The spinning wasn't very effective, because I woke up, still motionless and eyes closed, mind you, but awake. The thing is, normally I'll spin if I can tell a dream is fading (basically a small spark of lucidity at the last second of a dream) and can then prepare myself for a DEILD, otherwise it's a bit sketchy whether I'll stay still/keep my eyes closed. In either case, I laid still, kept imagining myself spinning just like I was when I woke up. Same area, same person I was with, same dizziness from spinning. After a surprisingly short time, I found the dream to feel a bit more real, tentatively tried to move around, and continued on like normal.

So DEILD? DILD? MILD? (I did use a mantra when I went to bed) No matter, we're lucid but, being a bit brash, I didn't bother to stabilize or really do much of anything besides continue the dream. I wasn't 100% lucid, but I did have control over everything and could think, mostly. So continuing the dream, we ran into a random door that seemed good at the time and ended up in a large stage theater right by the stage. No one was in here so I figured this was a great place to run through because, hey, we were running from something... I think. Anyway, we head up and out the theater door, when the dream starts to fade again. I try spinning like before to salvage it, but end up waking up again. Damn, I just new remembered that I had to program something! Either way, the same thing earlier happened. I envisioned myself still spinning, and after what seemed like only 30 seconds, I was able to keep going in the dream.

At this point we had accomplices, apparently. I remember them, somehow, so they were probably from earlier in the dream (the non-lucid part of which I don't remember well); two guys, around age 20, and another, still around that age that I don't recognize. We were on a very wide street, probably 100 feet wide so I'm not sure where we were anymore, but we continued walking down it because hey, if I want to code something I have to find a computer... I think. It's a dream, anything goes. I walked into the next building that caught my eye, thinking there would be a computer of some sort in there. When I got in all I saw was a very large staircase, one out of a foyer of a castle, so obviously we went up it. We had to go up a couple floors but at the top I saw it: a random table with a laptop on it. Perfect! So, I rush over to it and start looking for something to code in. The thing itself had soooo many programs open. Multiple word, powerpoint, excel files, multiple internet tabs (can't remember which browser) and plenty of other random things, so much like my computer. I decide to head to codecademy, since that's where I started and knew they had an editor and some way to run it. Unfortunately I kept mistyping the name. Either I was pressing the wrong keys or my dream was playing a trick on me.

After several failed attempts I just said screw it, clicked through everything, closed almost everything (this laptop was surprisingly fast) and opened up powerpoint. I didn't really open it, just opened one file (which had 80 something slides in it) and began deleting slides to make room. Could've just started a new file, but like I said, the dream was a little unstable. A couple people sitting on a bench nearby (may have been those younger guys) call over and ask what I'm doing. "Gotta code in a dream!" I told them. They just scoffed at me, kind of annoying but hey, they aren't interfering so I don't care. So finally, I have an empty powerpoint and no idea what to code. Well, lets make something that tells me if I'm lucid because, hey, it should return true, right?... RIGHT? So I typed in (to my recall) the following code:

Code:

def lucdity():
      if lucidity == True:
            print "YES!"
      else:
            print "no"
print lucidity()

So yeah, that's how I remember it. It may have been worse, may have made no sense at all. That probably doesn't actually do anything and would just error, but either way it was a code in a dream. And, as is typical for this dream, right as I'm about to run it -- or rather, as I'm looking for a way to run it in powerpoint, the dream fades. Quickly, too. So I start to spin, but of course I end up waking up. Well shit, guess we gotta DEILD one more time so I can finish the damn thing. So we repeat what we did earlier, really focusing at this point since I don't want all this work to go to waste. After what seems like forever, though I'm sure it was no more than a minute or to, I feel like I'm back in that building (it reminded me of some of the older buildings at Syracuse University, if any of you have been there before). Tentatively, I try moving around a little, open my eyes, and yes! We made it. I look back at the laptop to run my code, but it's already run. A big "True" is sitting in the comments section of powerpoint. OK, well, that's good. The dream confirming you're lucid is definitely a good thing. So we did it

Well, now we should continue the dream, right? I very vaguely remember tidbits on the dream before I got lucid originally, but I know we were heading somewhere. So I start to walk off with the girl I was originally with (no idea where those two guys went) but the third one steps in front of us. He threatens us with a pen, for some reason, and tells us we're not going anywhere (cliche ). For some reason I remember the pen so vividly, it was weird. The tip of it, the ballpoint with ink on most of it, but not all of it. It was one of those thick, purple ones where you twist half of the pen to write with it. I focused so intently on it, of course it means I didn't catch the dream fading. Before I know it I'm feeling my body in my bed and barely have any grasp on the dream at all. I try to imagine my dream self spinning, seeing if I could get another DEILD. And then it happens. Those damn birds outside start singing and it's all I could focus on. It probably doesn't help that I had a pretty poor grasp on the dream at hand, but I always get annoyed whenever something external stops a DEILD train. But hey, we barely got a task done, had some fun (I think the dream beforehand involved me and the girl ) and broke a small dry spell.

I was on some large street intersection in a coastal city, it seemed like California. I was with a group of people who were apparently my friends standing on one side of the intersection and there was another large group of people, around their low 20s, standing on the other side next to some sort of toll booth. There were about 5 people on my side 10 on the other side. We walked towards the other group a little bit until we were about 25 feet away from them and then stopped to listen to a new person who was standing next to the toll booth. "Good luck!" he yelled, "GO!"

At this point we all dashed to the side and started running around. The other group of people starting throwing things ad us. One person and I locked eyes right before he threw something at me. It hit my side and then I ended up catching it in my elbow. "You're out!" I yelled. It must've been some sort of dodge ball game only instead of dodge balls we were using quarters. He looked at me with a smirk, laughed, and then threw another quarter at me though completely missed. For some reason, as he was laughing, I started to think this was a dream. I started to question things and looked around, paying a bit more attention. Then somebody threw a quarter at me and the guy sitting by the toll booth yelled, "You're out!"

I walked over to the curb, a bit annoyed at what just happened, but as I was walking I did a quick reality check, plugging my nose. Ah, that feeling of being able to breathe with your mouth and nose closed, awesome . I sat down on the curb, looked around and stabilized a little bit, rubbing my hands ad then observing the area. There was a large city behind my with skyscrapers and other large buildings with a rather decrepit building directly behind me, some sort of old warehouse. Out to my front there was a beach and then the ocean with a boardwalk not too far up the coast.

I thought of what to do, maybe flying, maybe get into a big fight with all these guys, but I decided to do the TotM since I had only done one last month. Both came to mind, the surgery and the dream journal, so I just looked around for ample opportunity to do one of them. Much to my delight there was a notebook lying on the sidewalk, one much like my waking life DJ. I grabbed it and opened up to a page in the middle only to find a pen! Thanks subconscious . Most of the pages in the book were blank except for a few in the beginning which seemed to have little doodles on them. Nothing really jumped out on me, it just looks like somebody got bored in math class.

I thought of what to write and kept thinking of my MILD mantra (did a WBTB/MILD last night) but I wanted to do a real waking life thing. Then I remembered that we had had a marching band practice that night and did a run-through of our show for our parents, the "parent preview." Once I thought of marching band all the details came to me and I just quickly wrote down something along the lines of, "Went to marching band practice, did parent preview, woodwinds rushed and got off the beat in the first song, rest went smoothly." Thinking back about it now that's actually pretty accurate. There, one down, lets see if I can get two! The dream still felt well stabilized and fairly vivid so I just went for it.

I looked around only to realize that while I had been writing in my notebook I had moved to the high school where our practice took place. I was sitting on the curb looking out at our parking lot where we did out run-through. Nobody was there, not even a car. I got up and figured the best place to preform a surgery was at a hospital so I walked towards the main set of doors and imagined a hospital on the other side. The fact that these were glass doors (i.e. transparent) made the whole thing a little interesting. I stopped the door while it was only half opened and saw the school through the glass but through the part that was open I saw what looked like the ER of a hospital. I closed the door a little and it was just school. I opened it a bit more and it was hospital. It was pretty cool seeing the whole dreamscape change right in front of me like that but I knew that I should finish the TotM before I lose lucidity/wake up.

I walked in through the door and noticed a bunch of nurses running around. One of them stopped in front of me, looked at what I was wearing and said, "good enough," in a very rushed and hurried voice. She grabbed my arm and dragged me through the hospital to a sink, "come on, wash up!" she said, "Hurry!." I washed my hands and put on a pair of gloves that were right next to me. They were rather large, reaching up past my elbow but before I could really take anything in the nurse grabbed me again and dragged me into a little room and closed a curtain. I looked around a little bit and noticed that it was an emergency operating room with a table in the middle. Lucky for me there was a patient on it. Oh boy, I am not looking forward to this .

I looked at the patient and he was already unconscious, whether it was from anesthesia or passing out I didn't know, but he was out cold. The nurse who had dragged me through the hospital told me he had been shot twice with a 22 caliber pistol in the thigh but luckily it missed the femoral artery. I looked at his legs and noticed two small holes in the right thigh (he was laying on his back). I looked around the room and saw a pair of tongs, perfect! I grabbed them and went over to the patient. When I got a closer look at his leg I could see the bullet just about an inch under the skin and spread the whole a little bit with my fingers giving me enough room to fit the tongs in. Thank god I had gloves. There wasn't a lot of blood, however, at least not the amount I had expected. There was some but it wasn't all rushing out. It was like if you prick your finger to test your blood sugar or something, one drop every few seconds.

I reached in with the tongs which were more like what I had used in chemistry class than any surgical tongs I've ever seen. It was quite easy to grab the bullet, just like picking something out of jell-o, but the bullet wasn't deformed or anything. It was still perfectly intact, as if it had never been shot from a gun and just broken off of the cartridge. I dropped it in a little tin the nurse had been holding next to me and grabbed the other one which was a few inches below the first one. This came out just as nicely and in perfect shape as well. Having no clue how to stitch a wound I asked the nurse if she could. She nodded and grabbed a needle and this weird thread. She sewed up the wound in just a couple seconds and did so just like one would to a blanket.

Being finished with both TotM's I wondered what to do next. I didn't have any specific goals or anything and was out of ideas. I decided I would just walk around the hospital a little bit. I walked through the ER which still had a bunch of nurses running around as fast as they could in it, and headed towards the waiting room to see what the DCs in there were doing. The waiting room was just outside the ER and there were only a couple people in there, an elderly woman to looked a bit crazy, and kid about 12 years old with a pickaxe stuck in his shoulder. Yes, he had a full sized pickaxe stuck several inches into his shoulder. The woman pulled out a mouse from her pocket and started feeding it a little square of cheese that she now had. Wtf, my DCs are freaking weird!

I walked over to the person sitting behind the desk and asked what I should do next. "Well doctor," she said a little smugly. I guess I was the normal ER doctor there, "I think you should wake up." At first I was a bit confused, but then I started getting angry because my DCs and dream objects always did this to me. "Oh what the hell!?" I yelled at here, though the dream was fading. I tried spinning and spinning but I could hear her say, "Sorry, spinning doesn't work in times like this." Damn it, she was right. I woke up. I did a quick RC to be sure this wasn't just a FA but I was indeed awake.

Jeez, my DCs are not only weirdos but also jerks!

I was in the back seat of our car with my mom and dad who was driving. It was about dusk and we were driving alone a desolate road with nothing around it and it was completely flat. Up ahead I saw a hill and a dead tree on top of the hill off to the left. Right at the crest of the hill there was a car parked in the right hand lane of the road (the one we were driving in) and was facing towards us. It's lights were on but I couldn't see anyone inside it. We just passed it .

We continued driving along this road for another couple minutes in complete silence, nobody was talking. We eventually ended up stuck behind a tractor trailer going very slowly, about 20 mph. We moved into the other lane to pass him and started speeding up. When we were about halfway past the truck it moved over the left lane where we were and continued driving directly on top of us. The truck was high enough, however, that it never hit our car, despite it being a fairly large SUV. We continued driving beneath the truck as if nothing was strange or out of the ordinary and we eventually came up to a town. When we were about a half mile away from the town the truck disappeared

We entered the town and it was all on a hill going down into a river. The street we were on was winding a lot, like Lombard Street in San Francisco. We slowly wound down the hill and when we were only a short ways from the bottom of the hill and the shore of the river I had somehow appeared in my bathroom . I was just stepping out of the shower but I had all my clothes on. I walked over to the mirror and looked in it. I noticed the right eye in the mirror (my left eye in reality) started to drift off to the right, towards my nose. It was like I had a lazy eye that was growing progressively worse and worse by the second. It started turning very bloodshot and it really freaked me out.

I looked to my left so that the eye would go back to normal but it didn't work. I then used my finger and just pushed it back. This worked well but then a third eye appeared right over the bridge of my nose, but below my forehead. I noticed this was really strange and started questioning reality. I looked at my hands and noticed that each one had an extra finger. I immediately became lucid and was pretty happy at my recent success. I quickly rubbed my hands to stabilize the dream and while doing so looked down at the sink/counter. I saw a bottle of Listerine and the TotM to drink a potion immediately popped into my head.

I turned around and expected the bottle to turn into a magical potion. When I looked back the bottle looked the same but the liquid inside turned form a reddish-purple to bright green. I picked it up and smelled it and it still smelled like Listerine and when I took a sip it tasted like it too. I took a fairly large gulp and waited for something to happen, not sure what would. Only a second after I drank the potion the dream started to fade. I immediately tried spinning but it didn't seem to work. After only a few seconds I woke up

Every time I do something which I don't know what the effects will be I end up waking up

Black = AwakeBlue = LucidRed = Dream

Location: Northern Mexico

I was at a campsite in northern Mexico. After starting to walk out of the camp, i found my view completely covered by a map of where i was in northern Mexico. I was right next to a river, which i noticed after i stopped seeing the map. I saw a horse hitched to a post next to me, and decided I would try to ride it. Right was i got on the horse, a fit, tired looking Mexican man came over to me and told me to follow him. I continued to follow him for a few minutes along an old dirt path which led to an old, western style town with large cement walls all around it.

We started riding through the town, and it seems deserted. As we exited, i got off my horse and started following the man on foot. I then looked at my hand, and there were all 5 fingers on each hand, but my right index finger was half gone, down to a little stub. I quesitoned this and yelled, "Am I dreaming? Is this a dream!? I am dreaming!"

"Sweet!", i thought to myself. "What should i do?" I started thinking. I the decided to stabalize the dream by rubbing my hands, even though there was nothing really wrong with it in the first place. It was then that the horses started going crazy and the Mexican man yelled, "Look out!" I turned around, and there was a zombie running towards me, with a pale, white face and eyes as dark as could be. He stopped about 5 feet away from me and started screaming in a low, ghost like shriek that hurt my ears. It was then that the Lucid TotM popped into my mind, use pyrokinesis, so i yelled, "FIRE!" and pushed my arms out, trying to "push" the fire at the zombie, but nothing came out.

I was starting to think, "how can i get fire to come out?" It was then that i noticed the zombie screaming in agony, not trying to intimidate me this time. I tried to use fire again, and yelled as loud as i cou;d, "Burn Zombie!! FIRE!!!" This time i held my arms out in a Dragon Ball Z type thing, and noticed a large light spot on the zombie, as if somebody was shining a spotlight where i was trying to burn him. I was a little confused by this, but i just went with it and the zombie started slowly falling to the ground, singed as if there really were fire. It was once he was dead that suddenly, fire appeared! And i could control it!

I could feel no pain, only a soothing warmness where the fire was. I played around a little bit, amazed that i wasn't getting burned, even though i knew it was a dream. I started walking along the path again juggling fire balls, which I definitely can't do in real life. That goes for the Fire conjuring/controling as well as juggling. After about 2 minutes of amusing myself with the fire, i noticed somebody having trouble at his campsite. I walked over and noticed a campfire going, a tent, a picnic table, and a Coleman Grill. He was having toruble lighting it, even though there was a campfire behind him, and the fact that he had a lighter in his hands. I walked over, asked him if he needed any help, and he replied, "Yea man, i need to heat up these beans I got here." I then noticed a can of beans next to his stove. I said, "Stand back," and lit the gril for him. He proceeded to thank me and asked if I wanted anything in return, But before i could think of anything, I woke up.


(I miss Avatar: The Last Airbender0