CanisLucidus

A wild chain of false awakenings and DEILDs finally led me to a most interesting encounter with Wife's DC, who was even more irrepressible than usual. This was the first of two lucid dreams from last night's session with galantamine.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #46: The Blind Man, the Bully, and the Nerd

I'm in the kitchen with Wife. I'm talking to her but I'm almost completely blind. I'm embarrassed by my blindness, convinced that it's some side effect of the galantamine that I just took. Rather than seek medical attention, I try to slink up to bed so Wife won't know. Unfortunately, she keeps asking me to hand her things, and I flail around the kitchen knocking things over. "What's wrong with you?" she asks. I have a false awakening into...

...sitting on the floor of our living room as my 1-year-old son "R" runs around me. My vision is dim but I can see better than before. I'm still convinced that I'm suffering from some kind of bizarre galantamine side effect. R is sprinting around the room, pulling objects off of tables, knocking stuff over, and tossing various knickknacks into the recycling bin. I try to stop him, but he just laughs, squirting right through my arms when I try to grab him. He says, "This is so fun, Daddy!" and I briefly become lucid, remembering that he's way too young to speak like that.

I quickly wake up but keep my eyes shut and hold still for a DEILD... and I find myself lying in a bed in a room I don't know. I get up, ready to explore. A strange, gnome-like creature with a hooked nose hops off of the floor and gets in my face, waving his arms wildly about. He's about three feet tall, covered with warts, extremely agile, and very annoying. He brags to some unseen listener: "See? I can stop him from doing what he wants in this dream!"

I try to leave the room but the little gnome keeps hopping up in my face, cackling and poking at me. He jabs me in the eyeball and I get incredibly angry. I grab the gnome by the throat, push him to the floor and hold him there. He growls and kicks his legs, but he isn't able to move. Even though he's immobilized, I'm so out of control that I still punch him once, hard right under his left eye. I immediately feel terrible about this and release my grip, allowing him to scamper away.

I stand there brooding about this for a moment before the gnome walks back in. He no longer looks disgusting and infuriating, but just like a small little man. I tell him, "I'm sorry that I hit you. I didn't need to do that." He walks up to me, points at his blackened left eye and softly says, "Fix." I nod, touching his bruised skin, and the black eye immediately heals. "All right, hug it out," I say and I kneel down to hug the little dude. The dream fades...

I buckle down for another DEILD and in a few seconds I'm back in another bed room, although it's different from the last. I'm standing and Wife is here making the bed. "Hey!" I say. "This is a lucid dream. Quit making that bed and let's go play."

She keeps making the bed. "You can go do what you like, but this work still needs to get done."

I can't believe it. "But it's all a dream. You don't have to worry about whether beds get made. Come on, I've got lucid goals I want to work on."

She stops for a second, laughs, and looks at me, wrinkling up her nose a bit. "Lucid goals? What does that even mean? You better not be trying to arrange a threesome on the bed that I just spent all this time making!"

"Come on, get serious. You'll like this... I want to visit the Great Pyramid." Then I look at her, hold out my right hand and say, "You will come with me."

She laughs. "Oh my God, nerd! I can't believe you just tried to 'command' me. Is that the kind of stuff you do in these dreams of yours?"

I smile, amazed at how like herself she is and how much I'm enjoying her company. "I think I can do this, though," I say, and levitate her a few feet off of the ground. She looks amused.

I float her over to me and set her on the ground. When I try to kiss her she doesn't resist. I feel her fingers graze my left temple but then she turns to walk away. "I still need to make this bed," she says, as the dream fades.

This was the second of two lucid dreams that came out of an experiment with green tea during WBTB. In retrospect, I might have liked to take more time talking to this angry dream character to see whether I could learn more about what he was about. These sorts of things can be hard to remember in the moment, but I'll keep trying.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #45: Crowbar Clint

I'm in a mall clothing store and a crazed young man in a baseball cap is wrecking the place with a crowbar. Frightened dream characters give him a wide berth as he screams, curses, and knocks over racks of clothing. He shouts threats and abusive profanity, swinging that crowbar like a baseball bat. I'm frantically planning the best way to get out of here without taking a crowbar to the face when I realize that I'm dreaming. Somehow I also know that the young man's name is Clint.

I get a rush of positive emotion once I realize that I'm perfectly safe. I notice that I know one DC in the store -- T, a coworker of mine, is standing by the cash register making his purchases.

I speak urgently to Clint, like he's neglected some important task: "Clint! Buddy, you've got to get going. T is over there waiting for you to help him change out his hubcaps with that crowbar of yours." Clint looks at me, his anger turning into confusion. I keep repeating this new story to him over and over, placing a hand on his shoulder and leading him toward T. Clint, now docile, walks silently beside me.

Clint appears to be the only person who believes this story. Other DCs shuffle away nervously as we walk by. T seems to get what's going on as well but he plays along, saying, "Yeah, Clint, let's go have a look at my truck." They walk off into the mall and I follow a few feet behind them.

I step outside to find myself on a second story walkway near an escalator. T and Clint have disappeared into the crowds of shoppers. The sun shines through a large, arching skylight that spans most of the mall's ceiling.



It looks like a beautiful day outside, so I decide that I'll fly to the top and phase through the skylight. The sunlight becomes brighter and brighter as I ascend, but before I reach the ceiling, I wake up.

This was one of two lucid dreams that came out of an experiment with caffeine during WBTB that I tried last night. (Thanks, Xanous!) My beverage of choice was green tea.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #44: Pool Care in the Temple of Zeus

I'm standing outside of a pool where people are swimming around having a business meeting. They're fretting about the now-green condition of another pool that's one story down and perhaps 100 feet away from the one where the meeting is taking place. I jump into the clean pool, swim toward the meeting, and explain that all we'll need to do is get the Ph and stabilizer levels fixed up and then shock it with liquid chlorine or even household bleach. They're relieved and grateful, and I have one moment of contentment before I realize that I jumped into the pool wearing a backpack with a laptop in it and have probably ruined it. I'm pretty distressed by thus until I realize that I'm dreaming.

"Got to go, everybody! This is all a dream." The other swimmers seem mildly surprised by this but they quickly accept it and go back to their meeting.

In the distance I see that the pool ends at what appears to be a sheer drop-off. Past that, I see the skyline of a city in the early morning. Eager to explore, I try to rise out of the water but somehow have trouble getting into the air. I yell out that I am going to fly into the air and nothing will stop me. I employ some probably-unnecessary profanity in my speech. I shoot out of the water, knifing through some overhanging tree branches (where did these come from?) and land on the roof of a stone temple in the style of Ancient Greece.

I'm overlooking a large, open-air courtyard that's surrounded by Doric columns. Past the courtyard is miles of grassland and a sky that's dark with storm clouds. The clouds are lit up with occasional bursts of sheet lightning and I hear low rumbles of thunder.



There's a strange platform of gray stone suspended above me and it's hung low enough that I can't stand fully upright. I decide to phase and begin pushing my hand upward against the platform, which feels solid. I push harder, and my fingers start digging chunks of stone out of the platform. I'm somewhat pleased by this but I decided to refocus my efforts on phasing through the platform.

I push my hands and head into the stone and this time it feels cottony and insubstantial. My vision goes black as my head disappears into the stone and I feel my feet leaving the temple roof. I float upward through the "stone", gradually becoming disoriented. I feel like I'm in a bed now, but I don't believe it. Still blind, I reach out, grabbing onto a pillow. I suddenly become very aware of my sleeping body and wake up in my real bed.

I enjoyed getting back to a dream that was just pure play. I was a bit of a mall rat as a kid, so perhaps that's where the setting came from. Only regret: not looking for the video arcade!

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #43: The Flying Mall Rat

I'm in a mall walking through a jewelry store out into the main hallway. I have to maneuver around a family coming toward me. For some reason I employ a fancy (and physically impossible) spin-move to get around them, twirling all the way around and sliding several feet across the floor. It suddenly occurs to me that I need to remember whether or not I'm dreaming and in this case it feels very obvious that I am.

I walk out into the main hallway and see that the mall is three stories high. There's mall music coming over the PA system. It sounds like it's three or four girls harmonizing, and they're singing about breaking up with some schmo. They're actually quite talented, with sort of a sound like a modern-day Andrews Sisters. The lyrics and the tune itself are utterly generic, but since it's my dream, I can be honest with myself and admit that I find it catchy.



I'm feeling excited and playful so I leap up onto the railing of a short stairway and grind down (in other words, ride down the rail on my shoes.) I want to see what things look like from higher up, so I hop up to the second floor, grab onto the railing and swing myself over. I then perch my feet on the railing and leap upward across the gap to the third floor's railing.

At this point, I remember the Christmas carol Task of the Month. For some inexplicable reason, I decide that "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer" is a Christmas carol and try to see whether I can remember it. In spite of it being several years since I heard it, the first verse comes back to me without any trouble, and I go swinging and leaping around the mall singing it, vaguely worried that I'm singing in waking life. From what I read in the TotM thread, this is a very common worry.

I spend a few more minutes having fun soaring around the mall. As I reach the end of the main hallway, though, I notice the entrance to a movie theater. I land on the ground floor and step inside the theater, curious what's playing. The theater is packed and I'm surprised by how many people I recognize from my own life. I walk through the crowd for quite a while, greeting old friends and acquaintances as I pass by them. The lights in the theater aren't dark yet, but everyone returns my greetings with whispers, as if they don't want to talk over the movie.

I happen on one friend, S, who appears to be the size of a child in her seat. For some reason I feel like I need to make her look "right" and tell her "Oh, you're much taller than that." She starts stretching out until her height seems correct, but now her head has gotten distressingly skinny. I start getting flustered and fixated and it's not long before I wake up.

The second of two WILDs that I experienced last night on galantamine. This dream was much longer than it sounds, since I was in the mood to watch, go slowly, and take in the scenery. Once again I asked a question of my subconscious, and the "answer" struck me as much more ambiguous this time.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #42: The War of the Wolves

The WILD drops me at a dinner party in a fancy house. All of the DCs here are in cocktail dresses and tuxedos. All are strangers.

I walk out into the night past a stone patio, looking up to admire the dome of stars above me tonight. Just past the patio is a sort of desert garden. It's a huge, man-made sandpit where well-tended cacti and yucca plants grow among carefully arranged boulders and signs that indicate the name of each species of plant.

I decide to ask my subconscious a question. "Should I ever try galantamine again?" I shout. There's no vocal reply, but a large, gray wolf creeps from around one of the boulders. He looks at me, saying nothing, but slowly baring his teeth.

My two Siberian Husky dogs (IWL pets) emerge from behind a boulder of their own, and charge at the wolf! They're much smaller than the wolf, but they unhesitatingly go after him. K (the female) lunges for his neck, but the wolf swivels his hind end around and parries her to the side. The wolf swats B (the male) in the face before pouncing on him and bringing him to the ground.

The fight is ugly and one-sided, but (fortunately) completely bloodless. My two dogs run off further into the desert and the wolf approaches me. I'm afraid of him, but try not to dwell on it. I extend my hand toward him, palm forward, as if to say, "Stop." He seems to sense that this is more a plea than a command, and he lunges at me, biting down hard on my hand! For a moment, the pain is alarmingly vivid, but I do my best to ignore it.

After a moment, the pain subsides and the wolf lets up his pressure. Silently, he turns and walks off into the desert. I walk further along, the coolness of the desert air quickly calming me. Eventually I happen upon a dark sea. By now I feel totally at peace. I stand on the shore and watch the waves for a while until the dream ends.

The first of two WILDs that I experienced last night on my first-ever trial with galantamine. Both of these dreams were very vivid and stable but had a much more somber, vulnerable feel than my usual LDs. Confidence was far, far below normal levels, which gave this dream a very different shape than most for me.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #41: This Mortal Life

I'm in a high-rise condo, looking out over a nighttime cityscape. I float to the window but it feels like it takes much more effort than usual. The beauty of the city below captivates me, though, and I spend a long while watching the headlights of the cars below as they travel the grid of city streets.

Outside of the condo is a bank lobby. All manner of friends and family from my waking life are wandering about conducting their business. I talk at length with different people I've lost touch with, asking them about what direction life has taken them. As I talk to each of them, they gradually grow old and tired, sitting down in chairs along the walls of the room. Once seated, the old version of the person looks away from me and lapses into silence.

The adjacent room is a grand ballroom where a group of perhaps two dozen strangers is having a cocktail party. The level of detail on these DCs is unnecessarily high, bordering on ridiculous. Shoulder blades shifting gently under the skin, moles, those subtle wrinkles that you don't notice in waking life.

I want to move on to a new location, and I think of the "Trinity" atomic detonation Task of the Year. I planned to portal, so I try to produce a portal gun with an over-the-shoulder grab I've used time and again to produce items. But I see my hyper-detailed shadow on the floor, and it's got nothing on its back. Sure enough, my hand comes back empty. I try this over and over, but after enough tries I have to give in. I try phasing through a pane of glass, but it's as solid as waking life. I try floating, but now I seem rooted to the ground. Even though I know that all of this is my dream, I just can't muster the confidence and belief necessary to put this into action. I feel like just another DC in my own dream.

Outside of the ballroom I spot Wife walking with my sister-in-law and brother-in-law. I join them, and she tells me that they're heading down to the vaults underground. I'm interested, and I follow them through a long series of tunnels. I spend much of this time trying to convince Wife to try out lucid dreaming, but she keeps insisting that she's got important business in the vaults to worry about first. As I probe further into this, the dream ends.

I tried to achieve the "Trinity" Task of the Year item, where you witness the world's first atomic detonation. I got nowhere near the Trinity site, but having the atomic age on my mind had lots of interesting side effects.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #40: Tibetan Nuclear Winter

I'm on a Final Fantasy-style quest with Wife and my son E. I even have "4245/4245" hitpoints, so I'm feeling pretty impressed with myself as we knock on the door to ask some character in the game for help.

Things suddenly turn nightmarish as we walk inside the house. The house's owner steps out of the shadows and his face is gaunt and drawn, the skin tight and shriveled like a corpse. His eyes are pure white. As he advances toward us, he tells us in this droning zombie voice that "I'm not an American. I've never been a human." His gaunt, zombified wife steps out of the shadows and starts droning the same thing. This is absolutely terrifying to me and now I'm lucid.

I hustle Wife and E out of there back into the daylight and fortunately the corpse-things don't follow. The three of us follow a stone path past a well-kept grassy lawn until the path turns into a smoothly ascending slope. Soon Wife and E have disappeared, and I'm climbing higher up this slope by myself. I continue, badly wanting to know where it leads.

After climbing for a while, the wind picks up and a light snowfall starts all around me. I see that the stone path (barely six feet wide), stretches hundreds of feet over a vast, snow-filled valley. When I look at the surrounding mountains, I see a number of Tibetan monasteries and beautiful pagodas nestled among the peaks.



I think about the task of witnessing the Trinity explosion and almost immediately a mushroom cloud erupts over the distant mountains. The sky goes dark and the wind increases to a howl, the snowfall growing heavier at the same time. Strangely, I don't feel any colder.

More mushroom clouds spring up silently over the horizon. There are maybe half a dozen or more blasts. Suddenly, one of the pagodas explodes like it was packed with TNT. The path that I'm standing on starts to crumble away in front of me and I can't walk any further.



I take to the air and try to fly toward where the nuclear explosions are thickest, hoping that I'll still come up with some way to pull off my goal. I imagine a wind swelling up behind me to carry me over the mountains but in an instant all of the remaining monasteries explode and the stone path crumbles into the valley. This time I feel the blast and I wobble in flight. The last thing that I see is a swirl of snow before I'm awake.

Finally, a DEILD! It's interesting that I keep generating these "endless maze" type dreams for myself. At least I remembered the Exit signs this time.

BTW, the new neighbors in this house have not yet moved in, so it'll be interesting to see whether the dream got anything right about them.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #39: The Endless Farmhouse

I'm meeting our new neighbor "Anna", a fair-skinned lady with red hair in her early 40s. JC, A friend of mine from California, rides by on a recumbent bicycle. I tell Anna, "Oh hey, I know him... that's JC." She says, "Sure, I know him too." This strikes me as very unlikely and I become lucid. I'm lucid only for a moment before I wake up.



I sit tight for a DEILD, focusing on breathing and mantra until I emerge just inside the front door of Anna's house. She is standing several feet away with a little girl of about seven. The girl says, "What's he doing in here, Mommy?" I feel way out of bounds and tell them, "Sorry, it's a lucid dream. I was just leaving." The front door is wide open behind me and I hurry outside.

Outside I'm under a wooden covering that reminds me of an open air stable or farmhouse. A slatted wooden fence hems me in from the sides and I can see sun just outside. I move to the next area, but it looks much the same, only rearranged slightly. I move forward a ways more but it seems that no matter which direction I choose, I'm stuck in the shadows.

I jump up and take a swipe at the ceiling to make sure I stay properly bolted into the scene, but I manage to miss. I'm slightly annoyed that I can't do something I do in real life (something I do when nobody's looking, that is!) I slap a nearby candy striped support pillar and it feels satisfyingly realistic. I move up a steep embankment of dirt, but again it's just more fencing and wooden covering. I'm feeling stuck so I imagine an Exit sign that will guide me out. But before I even see it, my vision goes dark.

I keep calm, and rub my hands together. Feels okay. I rub my face, lick each arm, grab a handful of shirt... everything is as it should be. My vision doesn't budge, though, so I spend perhaps half a minute just waiting things out in the dark, considering what I ought to do. The idea occurs to me to get help as I'd done before, but things fade on me before I get the chance to act and I'm awake.

I nearly had the chance to ask a nightmare figure what they represent but somehow the opportunity slipped away from me. I'm still not sure why this happened, but I'll surely try it again. Also got a little phasing in but failed to roll with the punches when the dream threw in a surprise for me there.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #38: The One Who Knocks

I'm walking through a house in the middle of the night. It's a house I've never seen before but I believe it's mine and that my wife and kids are asleep. The front door is mostly composed of a big glass panel and through it, I see a huge ogre of a man stagger up and stare in at me.

The man's in his early 50s, disheveled, filthy, and at least seven feet tall. His eyes look enormous through his thick glasses and he's staring right at me. I'm terrified of him, and I hide behind a corner, hoping he'll just leave. He starts hammering the glass with his fists and as my fear jumps to the next level, I become lucid.

I'm relieved that it's all a dream and I take a moment to wring the fear out of my mind. I decide that I'm going to talk to the DC and ask him what he represents. I step out from behind the corner to find that both the man and the front door have vanished! Now there's nothing but a blank wall.

I'm having trouble walking now, so I try floating. I can float in the direction that I want, but it's unusually slow. I want out of the house, so I float toward one of the windows so that I can phase through it. It's a long, slow grind to get there but at least I'm moving. As I get close, I see that the window has a screen over it, but I go for the phase anyway.

The phase works very well, my arm, shoulder, and finally head sinking into the window. But when my eyes reach the screen, I feel the screen scratching at my eyeballs. The feeling is nasty, like a brillo pad lightly passing over the entire front half of my eyeballs. It's so unexpected that I wig out and collapse the dream.

I experienced some challenges in this LD and, sad to say, I didn't exactly pass with flying colors. I need to be confident with producing a light source and finding my way out when I'm lost in some building. I wish I'd remembered darknightedlady's observation that "Exit" signs seem to work well for me in navigation. They're a reliable tool for me and I need to keep them in mind.

Not my best work, but I very much enjoyed the exploratory romp anyway!

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #37: Hotel California

I'm business partners with my good friend "Leroy", and we ride a bus to a conference at some sunny resort. We pass by a nice pool complex on our way in, and many DCs are soaking up the sun poolside. I recognize MS, a friend from high school, but she disappears into the crowd as we draw closer.



Leroy and I walk through the hotel entrance and move toward the elevator. There are smashed eggs all over the floor in front of the elevator door, and I say, "[Leroy], I'm tired of walking on eggshells around you." Two things dawn on me: a) That joke was terrible and b) This is all a dream.

Leroy has disappeared, but momentum still has me reaching for the elevator button. I stop when I see that the elevator only goes down. I remember that I'm trying to either witness the Trinity test or relive the Apollo 11 mission. Neither of those are likely to be in the basement, so I start looking for a way out.

I turn toward the hotel entrance and see that it has been replaced by a solid, slightly reflective metal plate. I try to phase through it the way I do with glass, but it feels totally solid. Unwelcome anxiety starts to creep in and I set off down a nearby hallway, hoping for an easy exit. A set of double doors at the end of the hallway takes me into a tunnel that's built of concrete blocks. I feel like I'm descending in spite of my best wishes. There's a door further down the hallway but it's one way and offers no handle.

I step through an open doorway into a dimly lit room. An unseen door closes gently behind me and now there's barely enough light to see. I hold my hands out, saying "Illuminate!" Nothing. "Illuuuuuuuuminate!" I squall, but nothing happens. Fear is growing in me, a helpless sense that there's no way out of this hotel. I try to shake that off, instead imagining that there's light coming from an unseen side tunnel... yes, I see it now.



I start crawling through this new tunnel on hands and knees, but it becomes a tighter and tighter squeeze as I move forward. There's light ahead of me, though, and I shimmy desperately forward. Anxiety begins to slip out of my control and I'm soon awake.

This was the Aurora Borealis Task of the Month, and led to a really outstanding dream with some personal firsts. Some big ones for me were changing day to night and performing the task while the DC of a loved one (my son) accompanied me.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #36: Aurora Borealis

Wife and I are sitting at our breakfast table chatting with RI, a high school friend that I haven't seen in a long time. I look at the clock, realizing that it's 1:10 and I'm ten minutes late for a #DVA chat session. Wife and I go upstairs without IR, leaving her just sitting at the table. (Rude, I know.) I'm about to join the #DVA chat when Wife says, "Shouldn't you show her out of the house?"

I leave, and become lucid halfway down the stairs. The downstairs is different from my real house now. The floor has become shag carpet rather than hardwood and the ceiling is barely six feet tall, my head reaching right to the top of it. IR is still at the breakfast table but she just smiles and waves me on. My three-year-old son E is waiting for me at the back door, and I scoop him up in my arms, knowing that he would love to see the aurora borealis.

I step outside and find that my back yard is either gone or has swollen to gigantic proportions. There's a huge barbecue going on to my left. Vividness is top-notch -- I literally cannot detect any difference in visual quality between what I'm seeing now and what I see in waking life. I walk on, passing a set of grills where a man in a red football jersey numbered "52" is turning over some burgers. His shirt is emblazoned with the words "UNCLE BO". I stare at the guy for a moment, a bit stunned by how real he looks.

I perch my son on my shoulders and start running past the barbecue into a city. A long line of DCs is waiting in line for a movie or a show. I notice that C, someone that I haven't seen since high school is manning the ticket line. He smirks at me and shrugs his shoulders when I recognize him.

I walk to the base of a skyscraper and look into the sunny sky. I need darkness for this Task of the Month so I tell my son, "It's getting dark now." The sun fades out of view and the color of the sky deepens to twilight. As soon as night falls, I see the autora borealis above me!



I start to rise off of the ground but my son is squirming on my shoulders, saying, "Don't want to go! Don't want to go!" He starts crawling around on my head, even giving me a little foot to the face. I shift him so that his arms are around my neck and he seems to settle down. I fly straight up, staying close to the skyscraper to keep my bearings.

I'm feeling an overwhelming sense of excitement as I fly toward the aurora. I'm so pumped that I shout a continuous battle cry as I rise. In response, the dream starts blasting a full symphonic orchestra soundtrack to my ascent. Looking back this seems totally cheesy, but I can't even care! It was amazing. The music was fantastic... I wish so badly that I could have somehow recorded it.

I fly over the Aurora and see that inside it conceals a vast mother ship, almost like a space carrier that stretches for miles. As far as I can see down the length of the ship, smaller yellow spaceships are taking off from the carrier to destinations unknown. As each leaves the mother ship, it emits this purple flash of energy that joins the rest of the Aurora. It's the energy "exhaust" of each of these smaller spaceships that creates the aurora.

All along, the soundtrack (and, amazingly, my battle cry) keeps going. I realize that I can do just as these ships are doing and I start pouring that purple energy outward from my palms, and it bleeds into the rest of the Aurora. More and more energy pours from my hands as the dream begins to fade. Soon all I can see are my hands, and after that I wake up.

I made it snow in this LD, but much earlier in the dream than I'd intended! I'd like to try this one again.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #35: The Blizzard

My friend J is showing off the contents of a huge wall safe to me and a couple of other people. The safe is about 5 feet tall and features not only a combination lock but also the dual-key system you usually find in safe deposit boxes. Each shelf is stacked with interesting little boxes. There's something dreamlike about all of this to me and I become lucid.

I ask J, "Have you got anything really cool in there?" He motions for me to move closer. "Oh yeah. Check this out." He hands me a small piece of paper with cursive printing on it. The top of it reads: "Receipt for Money Laundering". This amuses me, but I decide not to get too stuck trying to read the rest of it. The Task of the Month (making it snow) is on my mind now and I head for some automatic doors.

Fortunately, the automatic doors work perfectly well this time (unlike a few dreams back), and I walk through a two sets of them, repeating over and over to myself, "I'm having a lucid dream and I'm going to make it snow."

The next room is a post office filled with dream characters waiting in line. Hell if I'm going to spend a lucid dream hanging around in the post office, so I start running. Still repeating my mantra, I go through another automatic door into a quiet, windowed reception area.

Through the window I see that it's night outside and a fierce blizzard is swirling outside. There's a road outside and the headlights of passing cars illuminate twisting snow eddies. An 18-wheeler roars by and blows its horn for no apparent reason. The snowfall is so thick that the truck disappears quickly after passing.

I try to head for the building's exit, but it's extremely hard to move. Even though I can't feel the cold winds outside, somehow they're affecting things inside the reception area. I lean into "wind" that I can't even feel, trying to push forward outside into the actual blizzard. It occurs to me that I'm trying to get better at flowing with adversity in lucid dreams, especially adversity in the form of wind. My brute force progress is slow, but I make it close to the exit. Before I make it out, though, I wake up.

I've been reading Robert Waggoner's book so I took the opportunity last night to ask my subconscious a question. I had to ponder the reply a bit, but in the end the message made a lot of sense. Cryptic, yes, but felt very relevant.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #34: The Dinosaur Petting Zoo

I'm walking down a suburban road on a cloudy morning. I look up at the sky, noticing the way that the sun gently illuminates the back of the clouds. Even though everything in the scene feels as real as waking life, I know this isn't any place I've ever been before.

When I shout up at the sky, my voice is loud but takes on a slightly buzzing, almost robotic quality. "Tell me something important!"

There's no response, but I hear two dream characters chattering across the street. There's an Asian lady in her early 60's, dressed in a silvery fairy costume with puffy sleeves and fairy wings. She's talking to a young girl. (Her granddaughter?) I approach the lady and decide to talk to her directly.

Me: "Will you tell me something important?"

Her: "Yes. I'd say that you're not usually afraid, but sometimes you let yourself get scared."

Me: "When should I be less scared?" I can see the scene shifting around me. The house behind her is turning into some sort of white wall, but I ignore it for now, keeping my focus on her.

Her: "You're the kind who won't try the dinosaur petting zoo."

Me: "The dinosaur petting zoo?" Now her face keeps changing. She's becoming younger, then older again, her hair lengthening and shortening while we talk.

Her: "Yes. You're the kind that will walk right up and make a donation... and then be afraid to go in yourself."

I see that we're in a bustling airport terminal now, all white walls and windows. The lady has become a young woman, and she smiles and turns away. I lose her in the crowd.

Briefly, I consider exploring this new environment but decide that I want to remember every detail of this conversation so that I can think more on it later. No more exploration, and no DEILD. Time to just wake up.

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!

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #32: Rollercoasters and REBMEVON

I'm in a bar confronting an 8-foot tall blonde man about why his biker gang threw rocks at me me in front of my parents' house. It's all too weird and soon I'm lucid. The dream feels really stable so I let him finish what he's saying before heading out the door. When I leave the bar, I discover that it's part of a closed-roof shopping center. I try to fly up to the 3rd story but end up floating horizontally across the floor. This time I try leaping off the floor instead. I overdo it, though, and blast all the way through the ceiling.

It's nighttime as I break through, and I fly high into the air, probably 1500-2000 feet up. The city is almost completely dark below me. I shout a grandiose, rather dorky "Let there be light!" and a wave of illumination bleeds over the city from bottom to top. I'm up very high so I see a lot of buildings passing by under me but I don't know what any of them are. For some reason, I think that I need to go back to my old school, so I say, "Show me the university." A group of buildings below starts to glow and I point myself toward it.

I swoop down toward the university buildings but rather than land, I transition immediately into a false awakening inside one of the dormitories. I'm in a small, virtually empty bedroom that I don't recognize. Vividness is very high now.

I step into the hallway and there's a girl sitting at a desk studying, her back to a screened window. She doesn't notice me, and I think about phasing through the window and escaping back out into the night. I try the phase and instead of feeling like I'm passing through liquid glass, my hand feels like it's ripping through a screen door. Shreddings of the screen are in my hand and the girl turns to look at me, saying, "What the hell are you doing?" I do the nose pinch reality check, a bit worried that I'm no longer dreaming.



She's making me feel embarrassed and self-conscious so I step into the next room to get away from her. This room's a study hall that has a narrow desk with hotel stationery and a white pen on it. The hotel stationery has indentations on it like somebody has written on it before. I can't see what the person wrote, but the indentations look similar to my own handwriting! The effect is so realistic that I nose pinch and finger-through-palm RC one after the other. I remember the Task of the Month (write "November" spelled backwards), so I sit down at the desk, grab the pen, and start writing. With vividness so high, my confidence is really solid. I immediately write down "REBMEVON" all the way through and the letters come out correctly (unlike last time.)

Satisfied, I get up from the desk and follow an exit sign through a double door. I stumble into a shabby bedroom where a mother, father, and school-age daughter are sleeping on scattered mattresses. The father wakes up and looks at me, bleary-eyed and displeased. "How'd you get in here?" I want to explain about the exit sign but instead decide to just get out of there. Another exit sign points me toward an external door, and I gladly slip out.

It's daytime now and I step out into a huge carnival that's been set up in a mall parking lot. The rides are elaborate, though, and more like what you'd see in an amusement park: things like rollercoasters and swing carousels. Lines of people are waiting for rides and it's inconvenient to get around on foot. I try to fly over these lines but I go too low and have to step on some heads as I pass. Some of the DCs shout or curse at me as I go.



I get up into the air and start circling around the swing carousel, flying alongside the riders. Most of the DCs ignore me but one lady keeps pointing and repeatedly saying, "Holy crap!" After making a couple of cycles, I decide that I want to go for the other advanced Task of the Month, bringing a soul back from Purgatory. I've envisioned it as being placed in the oceans of the southern hemisphere, where Dante put it. I use the sun to get my bearings and then fly south, heading over a Macy's. A blonde kid with dreadlocks looks up at me as I fly overhead and the dream ends soon afterward.