lucid

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #150: Eden

I'm in a vast, quiet white void. There's a woman here as well, long brown hair, late 20s. She's not a romantic interest but rather a colleague and collaborator on some kind of important project.

We're looking down from high above at a nearly featureless white room floating in the void. Two DCs are in the room, one male and one female, both of them controlled by us. The male is my avatar and the female is hers. While I'm thinking about this, the notion of dreaming crosses my mind and I become lucid.

She says something like, "This is how we create everything." I know she means that this is how we create a dream world.

There's a door in each wall of the white room and we each guide our avatars out through separate doors into two different new rooms. A nearly identical scene takes place in each room: each avatar steps into another nearly featureless white room that contains a DC of the opposite gender. In each room the female gently places one arm around the male's shoulders and lays him down on his back. Then, the female straddles the male like something sexy is about to happen, but she only sits like this for the briefest moment (both of them fully clothed.)

Now the couple stands up, accompanied by a newly created, fully-grown DC! (My avatar produces a "daughter" and my collaborator produces a "son".) Then each of the three DCs exits through different doors into a newly-created room, each of them encountering a DC of the opposite sex. And then the scene repeats again, the woman in each room laying her arm across the man's shoulders, lowering him to the ground, and winding up as a trio.

Each round of this doesn't take long and in just a few moment what was once a single white room is this sprawling network of hallways and chambers where DCs walk outward like ants. Some of the DCs eventually come to doors that lead them out onto a grassy hillside. As they spread further out, the hillside grows along with them. Soon there's land everywhere with DCs walking all around.

My view pulls further and further back and I see dirt roads, a stream, a little town. I'm having a hard time keeping up with how quickly all of this is happening. I make some remark about how beautiful this is and I sense something like silent agreement from my collaborator.

I decide that I want to explore this world more closely and immediately I find myself standing in the middle of one of those white rooms. I walk through a door up ahead of me and emerge into another white room. The idea of trying to complete some tasks finally occurs to me, but the dream ends pretty soon after that.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #149: Chicken Fight

I'm working as a consigliere and fixer for a 20-year-old Filipino billionaire. He's a natural genius, a derivatives trader that controls a global financial/oil and gas empire. He relies on me and a talented, resourceful woman named Rachel as his on-the-ground "problem solvers".

I'm in a dark room watching a movie projection on a wall. The presentation is talking about some aspect of derivatives trading. I get some kind of message or phone call with a new assignment, and I hurry out of the room. There's somebody that I need to apprehend and speak to that's a spectator at a nearby cockfight. I know that both my boss and Rachel are counting on me to handle this and I feel a tremendous sense of responsibility to get it done right.

It's night, and I take a set of metal stairs down to a dusty street, hanging a right into an alleyway. I see a metal door to my right and hear some faint crowd noise -- that's where the cockfight is being held. I detect movement to my left and I sense that a huge man is lunging toward me to tackle me. I twist my body around and throw a right-handed haymaker that catches the man right in the mouth, stopping him short. I knee him underneath the short ribs and he staggers back. Something tips me off that this is a dream and I become lucid.

The man comes stalking back toward me, as fat and muscular as a bear. I'm struggling with what to do next. I have a strong urge to get right to lucid goals but I'm trying to process in my mind what will become of my boss and Rachel if I fail this task. I slowly retreat from my assailant, not ready to act until I'm sure that I'm not letting down real people who depend on me.

I finally convince myself that Rachel and my boss are just dream characters. My attacker is about four feet away when I wind up and hit him with a two-handed force push that sends him flying violently back, where he lands in a heap. His body has gouged a nearly foot-deep furrow in the dusty ground and, more surprisingly, has turned into a huge roasted chicken!



I walk onward as calmly as I can. I hear a few DCs chattering in surprise behind me but I try to put it out of my mind. They don't care. They're just looking.

Walking between two compact cars and onto an empty paved road, I look up at the sky. The stars are out tonight and I can see far more of them out here than I can with all of the city lights that are near my home IWL. I jump up, getting a good fifty feet into the air. I'm on the edge of a much larger city, one where I'm sure that I can find the means to accomplish my Task of the Month and Task of the Year goals.

I hit a second jump, this one slightly higher than the first, but start to sink down again. No, now I'm flying. I imagine myself catching an updraft the way a hawk would catch a thermal. I shoot upward, high above the city. The sky becomes thick and bright with stars and I know that I can go anywhere that I want. I decide that the Colosseum is just a little ways off in a darkened portion of the city. I begin flying that direction when I suddenly feel Wife's hand slam into my pillow in waking life. She rolls over a couple more times. I try to go in for DEILD but I'm a bit too adrenalized to make it back under.

This LD was the second of two from the morning of 9/17/2013.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #148: Musical Travels

I have a false awakening early morning on a couch in a room that looks like a basement. Wife's sitting nearby. I'm unhappy to get up but there's something I need to be doing, so I follow her out into the hallway of an office building. Through the windows I see that it's still dark out. Some guy with glasses and a shaved head is dressed for work and waves toward the parking lot at someone I can't see. I wonder how he's in such a good mood so early.

Wife convinces me that there's something I need to look for in the bathroom, so I go to find it. I walk down a long corridor and take a right through a narrow hallway filled with people. As I'm pushing my way through the crowd I sort of knock this one guy to the ground. Rather than apologize, I hurry away, hoping he didn't see me do it. (Not nice at all, I know...)

Once inside the bathroom, I forget what I was looking for, so I wander out another door back into the hallway. There's a folksy country duet playing over unseen speakers, an older man and woman singing sweetly about the life and love they've shared. I think how cool it would be if dreams could produce music like this... and a wave of suspicion makes me hit the nose pinch RC and I'm lucid.

I continue down the hallway to a fat guy standing behind a small desk that's stacked with literature. One of his hands is resting on the papers and I grab onto it, trying to bring extra vividness into the scene. He looks horrified by this and when I think about it a bit more, I don't feel too great about it myself, either. "Sorry about that," I say, continuing down the hall. I think about what I intended to do with this dream and remember the Task of the Month about going into the girls' locker room.

I follow several twists and turns in the hallway, each one leaving the hallways narrower than the last, all the while expecting that the next turn will lead me to the girls' locker room. Finally, I step through a door at the end of the hallway into a room that looks like some kind of really nicely-furnished barracks or dormitory. A double stairway encircles an elegant fountain and leads up to a room that stretches far into the distance, either wall lined with beds. There's a huge number of DCs here, all female, many of them in the beds and some just walking around.

I try to verbally insist that this is a women's locker room rather than a big dormitory, but somehow I get the idea to sing my intent. As I do this, the whole thing turns into this huge musical number that both me and the women in the dormitory are singing at the same time. It was sort of 80s-sounding, but an original song. If I had to pick a song, it was probably closest to Bonnie Tyler's "I Need a Hero". The whole thing was pretty awesome.

Most of the DCs are dancing while all of this is going on, with a few of them even doing these fancy handsprings over the beds. I can't remember many of the lines, but one of them was definitely something like

"It's the girls' locker room,
Where the lockers have bras and socks and stuff!"

I know that this isn't the locker room and as cool as this musical performance is, I still want to try to pull off a task. There's a cinderblock wall behind me, and I phase through it, winding up in the void. I rub my hands together then try to feel my way forward. There's someone else here with me in this void, a female presence. Rather than speaking, she begins to softly sing. Her voice is beautiful and echoes everywhere around me. She says something like, "I can only take this journey with you if you <something something...??>" (What was it? Wish I could remember this!)

In a moment I feel my body settling onto some soft dirt. I'm laying on my back and the singer, a woman in her mid-to-late twenties is also lying in the dirt a few feet away. Her ethnicity is difficult to guess but I feel like she might be some combination of Asian and Hispanic. We're in some kind of construction site near an unfinished building. To her right, maybe twenty feet away is a chain-link fence. Past that I see a spotlight glaring at us and lighting the area where we've landed. She starts to get to her feet and as I follow her lead, the dream ends.

This LD was the first of two from the morning of 9/17/2013.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #147: Train Station Cafe

I'm in a wood-panelled room looking at some kind of device with Wife and a woman that I think is NyxCC. It's a small wooden box about the size of a cigar box with a mirror-like screen on it when you flip the lid open. There's a big window to our left with a view of an endless forest. After we're through looking at the device, we walk down a long hallway into an area that looks a bit like a train station. NyxCC and Wife are talking animatedly about types of art projects they both like to work on.

On our left is a busy cafe with walls made entirely of glass, and we step inside to find a table. NyxCC and Wife sit down at a table, leaning forward, elbows on the table, still talking about this art thing they're into. Before I sit down, I realize that I've forgotten something back in the room we just came from.

I turn to leave just as I notice that NyxCC's jaw looks thinner and longer than it did a moment ago. I think about this as I'm preparing to exit the cafeteria, trying to think whether Nyx looks different than she used to. The whole thing makes me think of lucid dreaming and a quick burst of critical thinking makes me lucid.

I turn back to look at the crowd, but Wife and Nyx have both vanished. I see one of our friends "LS" seated at a tall but narrow circular table nearby, but as I scan the crowd and return my eyes to this table, LS has turned into my four-year-old son "E", sitting by himself in some kind of boosted chair. I walk up to E's table and say, "Hey buddy, I'm dreaming."

"Uh-huh!" he responds, emphasizing the second syllable.

I grip the edge of the table with my hands, trying to draw out as much vividness as possible from the scene. My hands are a strange color, slightly pinkish. The table feels just like a cool, laminate table edge like you'd find in a fast food restaurant. I look up to see a waiter watching me, along with E.

I reach down and grab the table by its leg. "I want you to see what you can do in dreams," I say, pumping the table up and down over my head. "I can make it float away if I want to." For some reason, the ceiling is high above us, maybe a hundred feet up. The table floats upward for a while and then awkwardly disappears.

I look down to get one more glimpse of E and the water staring at me before I fall into the void. I rub my hands together then reach forward to see what's here. My hands land on what feels like the shoulders of a woman wearing a strapped dress. She's moving around a bit and seems like she might be trying to communicate or interact but none of it is getting through to me. I get a vague vision of her as a woman in her mid-30s with long brown hair, but before I can see her face, I wake up.

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 LD was from the morning of 9/12/2013.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #145: Sleeping Body

I get the sense that a dream may have started, so I will my arm to move downward through the bed. It does, and now I'm floating blind through some sort of substance. It feels a bit like water but less substantial.

I swim through it for a few moments until I can dimly see that the stuff I'm swimming through is black and wispy. My right hand touches somebody else's who also seems to be swimming next to me. It's apparently Wife, because she says, "Are you sure you know what you're doing?"

Now I'm back in bed. I can see, but the light's very dim. I roll out in an OBE style and walk toward the bedroom door. Before I leave, I think to look back at the bed to see whether I'm there... and yes, there's Wife on her side, and next to her, rolled on his (its?) side is my sleeping dream body. For some reason my sleeping body isn't covered by the sheets so I can see that it's glowing slightly and is wearing some kind of blue shorts.

I think about approaching my sleeping body but I decide that I don't want to get too caught up in this. As I'm thinking this, Wife sits up a bit in bed, looks toward me, and says, "What was that?" I wonder whether she's speaking to me or the sleeping body. I sense that this scenario is starting to challenge my lucidity, so I move on.

I walk toward the closed bedroom door and then hear phase through it, briefly entering the void. I decide that the phase is just taking a long time and (somewhat reluctantly) the hallway scene appears and I'm walking through it. It still looks like my real hallway, but very dark.

I continue into my son E's room and find that the place is littered with a bunch of huge toys. Near one window stands a four-foot tall plush zebra with plastic wheels. It looks like you're supposed to ride around on it. There are several other big toys as well, but I didn't get as good of a look at them and don't remember them as well.

I don't see E, and I begin to wonder if he's here. I "sense" that there's a crib nearby and wonder if E is just younger than he was before. This train of thought is starting to distract me, so I move toward the window to phase outside. I wake up momentarily and then hold still for DEILD.

The DEILD once again starts from my bed, and like before, my arm sinks into the bed. I go into the void and float for a while.

Spoiler for Sexytime:

The scene stays dark, and I feel two women snuggle up on either side of me. I can vaguely imagine their shape but I can't directly see them. This doesn't seem to bother me, though, and I manage about 25-30 seconds of fun before...

I wake up.

This is the second of two lucid dreams from the morning of September 6, 2013. So glad I caught that emotion dream sign for this one because it gave me an exit from a nightmare and brought me into a really nice lucid.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #144: Cooling Off

I'm in a furniture store, looking around at couches. A plump Hispanic woman is seated nearby, answering my questions. The front of the store is a huge glass window with a clear view of the street outside.

Spoiler for Upsetting dream premise:

A big luxury car pulls up outside and a man in a light gray suit gets out. He has a mustache and is wearing shades but I can't see him well enough to make out the details of his face. I see other men in the car that look just like him. The man reaches into the car and pulls two teenage girls out of the car by their forearms and tossing them to the ground. He jumps back in the car and it speeds off.

I run outside. Both girls are weeping and it's obvious that they've been terribly mistreated by these men. They're bruised and bloodied and their clothes are in tatters. I help them inside the store where they disappear together into the store's bathroom. I'm boiling with rage and at the same time feel like I'm close to tears.

I tell the woman that these girls have been abused by these men and that we have to do something. She says, "I know" and then calmly tells me that these girls are her daughters and that she willingly sold them to the men. Now I'm yelling at her, telling her that she's an awful person, demanding that she tell me who these men are and where I can find them. I stalk back and forth in the store's aisle, the anger getting worse and worse. Again I demand that she tell me where I can find these men so that I can dispose of them personally.

The rage is so over the top that it feels bizarre to me. I can't remember feeling this way any time in waking life, so I reconsider my situation and I become lucid.

Immediately I feel this huge sense of relief as I realize that there's nothing to be angry about and that none of these awful things have actually happened. I'm still a little shaken from the preceding scene, and I walk to the bathroom where the girls retreated to earlier. I open the door and to my relief it's empty. I close it again.

I take a few deep breaths, cooling off the last of my anger and reminding myself that I'm dreaming. The anger has been replaced by happiness and a sense of peace. I feel contentment at the idea that I took control of this nightmare.

Now happy and relaxed, I remember the goal of getting to the Colosseum. I imagine that the bathroom door now leads to one of the tunnels beneath the Colosseum. I open the door, but nope, still an empty bathroom. I close the door again and walk to the back of the store.

I find myself in a hallway made of cinder blocks. There's some kind of socket wrench lying on the floor and I scoop it up. I feel like playing so I throw the socket wrench at the wall. With a thump it embeds about half an inch into the cinder block. I grab it, prying it back out and throw it toward a nearby mirror. Crack! The mirror cracks rather than breaks, but I'm delighted by how realistic the sights and sounds of this are.

There's a door at the end of the hall that leads outside. I step out into the sunlight, seeing a pavilion with long, wooden eating tables to my left. I remember to hook myself into the scene before continuing further, so I kneel down and run my hands over the small stone squares that make up the flooring. As I run my fingers over the cracks, I see that a tiny river of brown water runs through the separation between each stone. Somehow I can dip my fingers into this tiny stream and it feels cool to the touch.

As I make my way through the lunch pavilion, I lock eyes with a blonde woman in her early 30s. I'm stunned by how realistic she looks. Something about me seems to surprise her as well. For a moment I wonder what she's reacting to, but in the end figure she's just mirroring my reaction. I hop over some tables, reach the other side, and look back at the crowd of people calmly eating lunch. This is why I work so hard at lucid dreaming, I think. I wish that there was some way to permanently capture this experience, but I know there's nothing that can completely pierce the veil between waking and sleep to bring this experience back to me.

As I leave the pavilion, I see an ampitheater up ahead of me. I'm contemplating how to work this to my advantage when the dream ends.

This is the first of two lucid dreams from the morning of September 6, 2013.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #143: This Life or the Next

I'm sitting on a carpeted floor with my oldest son E. There's an IT guy here that I used to work with (who we'll call "Nick Burns"). The interesting thing is that Nick Burns is trying to sleep hanging upside-down from a light fixture like a bat. I believe that he's doing this in order to induce a lucid dream. I tell E that it's not necessary to go to such lengths in order to have a lucid dream.

Talking about lucid dreaming makes me wonder whether I'm dreaming, so I nose pinch and become lucid. I get moving immediately, walking to the adjacent room, which is nearly featureless apart from a deep, square-shaped window. It looks like it's daylight outside, and I'm up a bit off the ground, maybe the 4th or 5th story. I phase out through the glass and the scene changes to nighttime. No, it's daylight, I think and the scene changes to early morning.

I'm flying over a quiet town where all of the buildings are one or two stories, all shorter than the one that I just emerged from. The oddball in this whole scene is some kind of football stadium. (American football.) I fly toward the field to find a football game going on. I want to change the scene to the Colosseum, and I have this idea that I'll start reciting a line from Gladiator to help the scene form the way that I want. As I'm flying down toward the field, I recite Maximus' badass line to Commodus about how "I will have my vengeance, in this life or the next."

By the time I land on the field, I've transformed into a full gladiator outfit and I'm holding a gladius. The football players on the field mill about in confusion. I announce that "this place needs to turn into the Colosseum." I wave the gladius around my head a little bit for emphasis. The football players seem a little put off by this and begin to wander away from the field.

Nearby there's an old man in thick-framed glasses holding a microphone. Over the microphone, he declares that "there's been a little problem on the field, folks." The scene isn't transforming the way that I want, so I focus on the ground, thinking that I'll turn it to sand and work from there. The floor of the football stadium is made of some kind of bright blue carpet. I rub my hands over it for a while, willing it to become sand, but it stubbornly refuses.

I stand up, wondering what to do. A young woman, short, Hispanic, mid-20s, walks nearby. I'm trying to formulate some kind of leading question to get her to help me but the fact that I am confused and the fact that she is distractingly good-looking are making it tough for me to know what to say. Plus I'm self-conscious that I'm dressed as a gladiator. I'm too tongue-tied to say anything. As she walks away, I examine my surroundings again and notice that the stadium has transformed into an open-air restaurant, putting me even further away from my goals.

Okay, new idea. I step outside to a quiet street with a trickle of pedestrian traffic. I imagine that the Colosseum is over the next line of buildings, then I start flying again. As I'm gaining altitude, though, the dream ends.

This is the second lucid from the morning of September 3, 2013.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #142: Hotel OBE

During my mantra, I find myself staring at the ceiling of the hotel room we're staying in. I know that I'm wearing my sleep mask, though, so I'm positive that this is a dream. I will myself to roll away from my sleeping body, and now I'm on my feet.

Rather than walking, I'm just sliding around the room. The scene is dark and a little hazy, but everything looks just like I remember it. I don't look back at Wife or the spot where I was sleeping, although I wonder whether I've left a sleeping dream body behind in bed.

I slide into the adjacent room where the kids are sleeping. Now more things are different. My two kids R and E are each lying in separate cribs, both about two years younger than they are in waking life. R is now almost a newborn and E looks like he's about two. They're both sleeping blissfully on their backs, and I drift past them toward the front door.

When I phase through the hotel room door, I find myself in a darkened hallway that doesn't look very much like our hotel. I note how realistic the dream began and how quickly it diverged from reality. I want to turn on the lights and check out my environment. I give a grandiose shout of "Let there be light!"

The hallway is now better lit, but it's still fairly dim. From out of nowhere, I hear Wife's from behind me: "And there waaaaas light!" She follows this up with a mocking trumpet sound like "doo doo doo DOOOOOOO!!"

I look back, and yep, she's standing there behind me. "Whatcha doing?" she asks.

"I'm having a lucid dream. This one is an OBE." I'm preparing to explain what that is when I remember that there's no need to explain anything to Wife's DC.

I jump-phase through the ceiling, my head going right through into the void for a moment. I try this again, and get the same void result. Okay, next time I'll imagine a new scene... too late, the dream ends.

This lucid is from the morning of September 3, 2013.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #141: The City on a Hill

I'm walking alone through the downtown area of some city when two guys in racing bibs run past me. This strikes me as odd, so I nose pinch reality check to become lucid.

I'm walking by a construction site with workers milling around in hard hats. I wonder how I might be able to change it into the Colosseum. This feels like a tough thing to try so I give it up and fly into the air.

The flight works well, although I tend to keep slowly losing altitude, almost like I'm hang-gliding. My feet touch the roof of a building and I leap up again. Now I can see the edge of the city where it meets grassland that slopes smoothly downward. It looks like this city was built on a hilltop.

I touch down at the edge of the grassland and leap again. It's a beautiful day and I enjoy the tranquility of gliding over the hillside. There are few buildings apart from the occasional fenced area and, interestingly, several humble little churches which dot the grassland. Every time I touch down and then leap again, I see one or two of these tiny stone-built churches with a cross at the top.

I continue my downward glide and pattern of leaping along. I see a Greek temple off to my right and I think about exploring it. I'm really looking for the Colosseum, though, so I stay focused on that instead. I set my expectation to see sand, thinking that I can use this to transition to a Colosseum scene.

The next thing that comes into view is a beach with crashing waves. I land at the edge of the cold water. The day is cloudy now. I focus on the sand, wanting to use this sand as my transition into the Colosseum. I reach down into the sand, willing the water to clear away and leave me with a dry patch to use. But after a few seconds, the water keeps rolling back in. I can't figure out how to keep my spot dry.

I look over my left shoulder and see a towering cliffside. I'm exciting by the idea of climbing it, so I try. The rock feels wet and slick in my hands, but my dream body is so light that it's easy work. The slickness seems to get worse as I climb and now I'm climbing up a huge piece of green plastic. The dream starts to feel wobbly to me, so I focus on how the plastic feels, trying to bring everything back to stability.

Okay, it feels better now, although still not great. I keep climbing, approaching the top. I hear the cry of seagulls, and soon I'm awake.

I'm back from vacation and I've got some catching up to do! Hope everyone's been well and I'll be checking what I missed in everyone's dream journals soon!

This dream is from the morning of September 2, 2013.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #140: Rooftop Surfing

I'm attempting a WILD and get some fast hypnagogic imagery of standing near the wall outside of my childhood home. I reach out to touch the house's wall and it's real. Climbing up to the roof feels natural and easy, so I clamber up to the top and look out over the old neighborhood.

The roof of my house seems to go on forever, somehow connecting with the roof of the neighbors' houses. Off in the distance I see what look likes breaks in this ocean of roofing shingles, and as I focus on them, my feet start to slide smoothly along like I'm surfing. I go with it, imagining that this is taking me toward the Colosseum for Europe Task of the Year.

The rooftops have a smooth rise and fall as I skate over them, moving me up and down. There's a big, fancy house in the distance that I'm steering toward, and I insist that it's right next to my goal. The house acts sort of like a mirage, though, fading out of existence when I get anywhere near it. I'm left with just that endless sea of rooftops. Eventually another house appears in the distance, and I move toward it now.

After a while, the rooftop starts sloping downward and my speed picks up. Now it's not a rooftop anymore but just a blue plastic slide. I try to slow down a bit. This seems to work but these doubts keep popping into my head and then I'm careening downward again.

Now the blue plastic slide is slick and wet like a water slide, heading almost straight down. I splash into a shallow, watery pool in some kind of indoor amusement facility. There's a teenage girl here in a yellow shirt and tan slacks who looks like she works here. Before I can say anything to her, a little girl who's about 6 years old runs up and pushes a button that's just outside the pool of water.

"That means you have to wait here," says the teenage girl.

"Sorry, I'm not doing that," I respond, getting out of the pool. I check her expression to see whether she cares about my rule-breaking. It looks like she couldn't care less.

I walk down a little foam ramp. This place looks like some kind of cross between a gymnastics studio and a water park. There's another girl who works here at the bottom of the ramp, dressed in the same yellow shirt and tan slacks.

"Which way to the Colosseum?" I ask her. She immediately points to my left, where I see a pit of foam blocks and two more girls in this worker outfit. I'm walking toward the foam pit when 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.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #138: Hot Coals

Wife and I are searching the city for rare items that are needed to build some kind of important machine. We crouch on some dirt and gravel road and Wife draws a diagram in the dirt, telling me what I need to do to infiltrate a nearby house. When I'm there, I'm supposed to listen in on a phone call in order to gain an important piece of information.

I somehow make my way into the house and sneak past a woman who's busy preparing some food. Her husband, a guy in his 60s, is talking on the phone and walking nearby. I press my back against a column, trying to stay hidden. But now a clone of the husband is also on the phone, coming around the column from the other side. I realize that I can't hide from both the husband and the clone and become frantic at the thought of being discovered. I briefly consider whether this is a dream and my answer is "yes".

No longer worried, I walk through the living room into a large, spacious room with white marble floors and a skylight. I take a door to my right and step into some kind of sun room. The old man is standing by a door that leads outside and he gasps in shock when he sees me, saying, "You!" He's still holding the phone, and he clutches it to his chest.

"This is a lucid dream," I say, "so I'm not going to be doing this whole thing." I point to each of us in turn. He immediately nods, breaks character, and walks off like an actor leaving a movie set.

I leave the sun room and step out into a stone courtyard, the sky cloudy above me. There's a cheerful-looking guy with a mustache grilling some meat over a pit of hot coals that are glowing a fiery orange. Two women and one other man are standing nearby as well, looking relaxed as they watch him work. I wonder what I could do goals-wise with this scene. The Great Barrier Reef task doesn't seem like a natural fit, but I think about somehow using the hot coals to perform the "travel to Hell and have a beer with Old Scratch" task.

I notice that the vividness of the scene is pretty good and I finally remember that my primary goal right now is to try to enhance dream vividness. I feel a slight jolt of "oops" concern that I should have been focusing on that instead.

I have a weird thought that goes (and I quote) I'm going to stare into that crimson, chocolaty fire. I walk toward the pit of coals and the dream ends. I try to DEILD and get some rapid flashes of HI, but my heart rate is too high for me to slip under quickly enough.

Asia Task of the Year! (Vandalize the Great Wall of China and battle the authorities with kung-fu.) This was the second of two lucids from last night and the level of vividness in this one was incredible. It was literally more vivid than waking life, which is such a difficult experience to describe or recapture. Pretty amazing stuff.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #137: The Great Wall of China

I have a false awakening in my childhood home, wandering into the dining room to find that my parents are hosting a breakfast. Wife is walking beside me, my folks and brother-in-law "Muppet" are seated at the table, along with Mom and Dad and a few other strangers standing around nearby. As I approach the table, I realize that I am not wearing a shirt and feel embarrassed. Then I see myself in the mirror and I look really in-shape. Now I feel better. Still seems a little inappropriate but I sit down, hoping nobody will make a big deal out of anything.

I'm waiting for the food to arrive when something tips me off that this might all be a dream. I nose pinch and breathe in and out 2-3 times. I announce to everyone that I'm having a lucid dream, get up from the table, and phase through the window to the street outside. I hear Mom and Dad telling me to wait, that I'll miss the breakfast, asking me whether I'm sure that I'm dreaming. But yeah, after phasing through the window, pretty sure.

I take a moment to make the scene as vivid as possible, looking over all of the detail that I see around me, the sound of my voice, the way that the morning air feels (chill and humid.) Thick, spiral-shaped clouds hang in the street, totally immobile and so thick that you can't see through them. When I touch them they literally feel like cotton balls pushed together and just floating in mid-air.

I walk down the street for a while, checking out my hands for inconsistencies. They look completely lifelike, with the one exception being that I can't extend my left ring finger. Every time I try, it resists me and just winds up bending again. The street is still foggy but it's a more natural-looking fog now. The other strange thing is that every tree on the street is decorated with dozens of dreamcatchers that sway in a gentle breeze. The vividness is stunning.

At the end of the street is a house with a huge wall safe mounted above its front door. The safe keeps blowing apart in an explosion, reforming, and then blowing apart again, over and over. I pass by my college friend "Bear" as I turn the corner and then come to a roughly ten-foot stone wall that blocks me from going any further. I try to fly over it but end up just doing a weak jump and having to scramble over like this was waking life. From there I enter a mall area where I announce to the passerby that "I'm having a lucid dream." Some of them look at me with some interest, but nobody verbally responds. I find an exit and imagine that the Great Wall of China is right outisde.

I exit the mall and find myself in front of a six-foot tall replica of the Great Wall of China. Now we're getting somewhere! I walk a little further down a covered walkway and see a sign that reads "Joy's Toys" and under that "Great Wall". DCs are walking into a brick building near the sign that looks like a gift shop. I decide that this is a souvenir shop that's located right by the Great Wall, meaning that the real thing is... right behind me.



I turn around and there it is! It's much taller, easily 50 feet, imposing, and really ancient-looking. I vault over a random pile of building materials to get closer. There's a small crowd of DCs gathered near the base watching as three terra cotta warriors perform some kind of odd, stilted dance performance. The terra cotta warriors take no notice of me but I figure they'll be the ones coming after me when I vandalize the Great Wall for Task of the Year.

Advancing right to the wall, I haul back and punch it once, hoping that this will break a piece off. Nothing much happens. I grab at the wall with my fingers and manage to break a tiny piece off, but this doesn't feel like the serious vandalism I was going for. I decide to go with my premeditated plan of tagging up the Great Wall with spray paint. I summon an aerosol can into my hand and start spraying out some letters:

"DV 4 LIFE"

The paint runs and blurs a lot and generally looks like a mess, but I'm still incredibly pleased. Okay, the final piece of this dream is to defend myself against the authorities with kung-fu. I turn around, expecting an enemy... and find myself face to face with a pale, doughy guy in his 40s. He's wearing glasses and is dressed in brown slacks and a rather tight white cardigan that emphasizes his belly and spindly arms.

"So you're 'the authorities'?" I ask, trying to lead him to say yes.

"Certainly," he says curtly in a British accent. He stares proudly back at me.

Immediately I try to do some "kung-fu" on him. I do this atrocious little low kick that clips the side of his left knee. Then I throw another little kick that misses entirely. This time I scream something like, "A-GOCK!!" to make it seem more like I'm doing kung-fu. It comes out really shrieky but the effect is kung-fuey. My opponent does an awkward little hopping kick that misses by a mile. We both kick at the same time and kind of clash feet. We keep throwing these terrible little kicks at each other and I keep shrieking "A-GOCK!!" Finally my awful little kicks get the better of his awful little kicks and he seems to lose interest, and after a moment wanders away entirely.

I take another self-congratulatory look back at the Great Wall and then let myself wake up before I forget anything.

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.