task of the month

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #243: Silent Lucidity

I’m hanging out with Dreamer in a carpeted den and we’re talking excitedly about how a group of us (Dreamer, Jenkees, anotherdreamer, and I) made audio recordings that make us sound like complete idiots. (This is a true waking life memory! I recorded myself using a special audio trick that Dreamer found which made me sound like a complete idiot. The others made their recordings overnight and Dreamer skyped me about this during WBTB.)

Nearby there’s a statue of a tall, naked, muscular woman striding forward while extending her arm toward the sky. The woman is wearing a basket across her lower back and there are three towel-like bundles in the basket. Dreamer tells me that these bundles are the “idiot” voice recordings and that they’ll be ready soon. Dreamer and I lay on the carpeted floor maybe ten feet apart, facing each other and propped up on an elbow. We talk for a while about various things, mostly related to dreaming. I consider the idea that I’m dreaming right now and yes, this is a dream!

I tell Dreamer that all of this is a dream and she smiles, calmly agreeing. We talk a little about the voice recordings, and then I tell her that I can’t remember my goals right now, but I’m content to just chat for a while. She asks me why I’m not wearing my SleepPhones to bed and I tell her that those are fleece and it still doesn’t feel cold enough. I tell her, “And you only know about the SleepPhones because this is a dream!” (Meaning that she knows I'm not wearing them.) She laughs.

I remember that I had a goal of facing a fear. Dreamer and I had recently discussed how we’re both very fearful about awkward silences with friends. I allow the conversation to pause. Dreamer seems to understand what I’m doing and her eyes flick once nervously to the left before locking back on to mine for good. I feel a sharp flutter of panic at first and I’m tempted to blah-blah-blah the moment away, but I resist it and maintain our eye contact. My hands knead the carpet to help keep the dream stable. After I’m past the initial fear, my mantra “Look for the dream” returns to me. Dreamer’s mouth turns up in a half smile as my fear gives way to calm.

After a while, I say, “[Jenkees] must be here, right? I really want to meet him!” Dreamer grins at this idea and agrees. We both stand up and I gesture toward the adjacent hallway, saying, “Ah look, [Jenkees] is even here right now!” A rather doughy, pasty guy who looks nothing like Jenkees walks through the door and joins us in the den.

I notice that he’s way too short. “[Jenkees], you’re supposed to be so much taller than this!” The guy smiles sheepishly and starts shrinking even more until he’s only waist height.

Dreamer and I laugh at how badly I’ve botched this summon. “Sorry, [Jenkees],” I say. “I’ll do better with this next time!”

Dreamer and I try to talk a bit more about dream goals, but it isn’t long before the dream ends.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #242: The Return of the Rabbit

I’m riding in the back of a Suburban with several of my business partners. “PM” is the man behind the wheel and we’re driving slowly around a dirt loop, listening to the soundtrack from the video game that we’re working on. The music for our battle scene concludes and breaks into a slower section.

There’s a new part, a soft solo of a guitar-like stringed instrument that I’ve never heard before. It's beautiful! PM turns back to say, “I thought this part sounded fucking badass.” I enthusiastically agree that the new music sounds “all badass”. PM’s driving very erratically but not very concerned about it. I become semi-lucid, noting that this is probably a dream. I start laughing when he plows right over a stop sign and now I’m sure that this is a dream. PM is laughing too, and stops the car.

We all get out and there are several of the guys here, PM, “Leroy”, and probably “Z” as well as maybe more. I put my hand on PM’s upper back/shoulder and kind of massage it, wanting to stay really connected to the dream. “Hey man,” I say, “this is a lucid dream. This is the first time that you've been in one of these with me. I’m really happy you’re here!” I feel very happy to have these guys here with me and I enjoy the swell of positive emotions. I tell PM that I’ll do my best to remember the new parts of the song and that I wonder whether he’ll remember them too.

We walk down a dirt path through some trees and night falls quickly. We’re moving through an industrial area by the water and I think that I’d like to summon Dreamer. I look down to see that there are 4 shadows in the group. Must be me, PM, Leroy, and Z? I hold out my left hand, imagining that Dreamer will take hold of it. I feel something vaguely like a hand, then look down again to see a fifth shadow (in a dress!) holding onto my hand.

I look over and Dreamer is standing next to me! Her hair is blond rather than purple now and very short, the bangs bluntly chopped almost in the form of a bowl cut. She’s just wearing a shirt and some kind of pants, though, not a dress. We smile at each other. “Hey guys, this is…” and then attempt to introduce Dreamer several times. I’m mortified that twice in a row I completely goof her waking life name before finally getting it right. I feel awful about this, very embarrassed.

The guys continue ahead and Dreamer and I walk just behind, coming to an abandoned wharf. I recall that we had recent, very specific plans for this dream (to try to heal one another’s sniffles, ha ha…) I ask her whether she remembers and she replies, but I have a hard time understanding her. I move really close to Dreamer’s face, trying to understand her or read her lips or anything, but it’s not working. For a moment I wonder whether there was a kissing task, but no, that wasn’t it, maybe that was someone else’s lucid dare. (Correct, actually -- this was a dare that Dreamer completed a while back!) I quit focusing on her lips and on this mumbling problem, assuming that her speech will sort itself out if I just quit worrying about it.

As we walk further along the water, we talk about how nice it is to just stroll through the dreamworld. I tell her that I’m glad that we’re getting to hang out in such a stable dream and how relaxing this is. I feel peaceful and happy, which reminds me of the patronus task. I tell Dreamer that I want to try the patronus and she moves close to wrap me up in a hug. I extend my right arm and she places her left hand under my wrist, almost to support it. I tell her that I feel super happy in this dream and that I think the patronus is going to be easy! She enthusiastically agrees.



Immediately, pulses of blue energy pour out of my fingers and float to the ground in a big ball. And now scampering along the ground near our feet is my bunny patronus. “Oh, he is cute!” says Dreamer. As he hops around, the bunny turns from a blue, glowy patronus into a real bunny. He hops further along the wharf. Dreamer grabs my hand and pulls me along to follow him. We follow him for a while through an old, crumbling breezeway until the dream ends.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #239: Patronus, Part Two

I’m reading a comic book with Wife about spies on a dangerous ocean voyage. There’s a lot of discussion about an acronym MBME and what it means. The meaning keeps changing, which makes me feel vaguely suspicious, but I don’t become lucid yet.

Somehow we become a part of the story and wind up in an RV that we decide is a classroom for my son E. We meet with one of his teachers for a while and at the end of the meeting I start gathering up all of my stuff. Stack of papers. Backpack with my work laptop. Our test iPad from the office. I’m exasperated that I brought so much stuff and left it lying around everywhere, and the whole thing overall feels strange. As Wife and I duck out of the RV, I consider my situation one more time and I become lucid.

We’re outside in a grassy field. I still have the goal of summoning my patronus with Dreamer, which I misremember as wanting to summon the patronus with Wife. “Come here, let’s summon my patronus!” I tell her.

“Oh, okay!” she responds. I take her up in a hug and kiss her for a moment. Then I extend my left arm out and expect a patronus to form.

There’s nothing at first, but I say, “Look, there’s something,” and now there are wisps of silvery, smoky mist flowing from my fingertips. The wisps coalesce into some little critter who leaps to the ground behind a passing DC. I lose sight for a moment and start looking around to see where the patronus has gone.

“Look, he’s so cutie!” says Wife. I turn to find my patronus, a silvery, wispy little bunny, hopping around in the grass under the RV. He turns back to look toward us and his little nose twitches. He returns to nibbling at the grass.



Wife says a couple more things about how cute he is, and I notice that the ground is becoming insubstantial. I think that maybe I rushed around too much in this dream, and it soon ends.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #219: The Conga Convention

I’ve arrived for work at some kind of computer lab where we build or test hardware. Dreamer works here, too, and when I walk into the back room I find her interviewing a candidate, a young woman in her early to mid-20s. Dreamer’s in the middle of having the candidate assemble the scattered parts of a computer, so I decide not to bother them.

I return to the front room to find the door blocked with tables and computer parts. I figure that Dreamer moved all this stuff to make room for the interview but I’m confused as to how it all got here. The idea of lucid dreaming crosses my mind, so I try the nose pinch and I’m lucid. My breathing is clumsy and difficult, though, and I lose stability, falling into the void.

I rub my hands together and talk out loud to myself about lucid dreaming until a new scene forms where I’m walking through a large, nearly empty room with a few tables against the wall. I think this may be the office again and that Dreamer will be here, but there’s only one unfamiliar, dark-haired woman in her early 30s sitting at the table writing on a clipboard.

I walk through a door into a large, brightly lit convention hall, filled with DCs seated at round tables, most of them sitting in front of plates of nondescript convention food. I remember that I need to summon Dreamer for the challenge so I say, “That’s Dreamer right over there,” and turn my gaze to the right while doing this sweeping gesture with my hand. When I turn I see a tiny child (about a foot tall!) with purple hair standing between two of the tables. This mini-Dreamer giggles, hops up in the air, and scampers away. When she’s run about 20 feet, she disappears in a purple flash. Several of the DCs look at me in confusion.

This was not what I had in mind, so I circle the room for a while, rubbing my hands together and thinking about how I want to do this. Okay, new plan. I do a vague, sweeping gesture at several tables and say, “Ah, Dreamer, you’re sitting over here.” A very tall woman is hunched over at one of the nearby tables and I see that purple hair cascades all around her head, hiding her face. She’s covered in layers and layers of shawls, rags, and wraps to the point where she just looks like a big pile of rags and hair.

The enormous woman begins to stir, slowly unfolding herself to full height. When she finally draws herself up to full height, it’s Dreamer, but a seven-foot-tall (2.1336 meters ) version of herself draped in colorful, purple-hued cloth. She smiles and then walks past me before I can say anything else, vanishing behind me.

I’m getting agitated about these summons, so I decide to go for Task of the Month instead. All I can remember is the “get naked” task, so off comes the shirt. Next I whip my pants down, but they get stuck around my shins like I’ve gotten sweaty or something. I get a little annoyed by this and simply will myself to be de-pantsed. Should have thought of that first!

The problem is that none of the DCs are taking notice that I’m in my birthday suit! I throw in a few booty-shaking dance moves, hoping for more of a reaction, and now the DCs start picking up on it. They start getting up from their tables, strip off their clothes (only down to underwear, interestingly) and start dancing as well. A big conga line starts forming to my left and after a moment the whole underwear-clad room is conga-ing around the entire place.

While all of this is going on, I just watch for a while. As I'm doing this, I experiment with looking away from dream characters and looking back to see how they change. They seem to mostly stay the same except some of the DCs seem to undergo slight changes in make-up or facial appearance. As I’m toying with this persistence trick, an attractive blonde woman in her late 20s drapes her arms around my neck and kisses me.

Spoiler for Awkwardness:

She tells me that she wants sex, and what do you know? Apparently I do too. But when she removes her undies, her entire body is made of some kind of smooth, rubberized plastic like a life-sized Barbie doll. She positions herself seductively, but the doll effect is so unbelievably off-putting that I decide to just wander to some other part of the room and pretend all of this never happened.

The conga line dies down and I seem to be dressed again. The DCs are all dressed and seem to be heading for the exit of the convention hall, and after a bit of wandering I decide to give the Dreamer summon another good shot. As I’m heading toward a double door, I pick one of the women at random and say, “Okay, there’s Dreamer…” One quick morph later and now I’ve finally got a proper, purple-haired, normal-heighted Dreamer walking toward me.

I give Dreamer a hug and start walking with her toward the exit, explaining out loud my plans for the dream. She nods and “uh-huh”s along but before we get to any of this, the dream fades out into a false awakening in an outdoor courtyard with a garden. There’s a woman in her late 40s with curly hair standing nearby and I tell her about the dream that I just had.

“I just had a lucid dream myself,” she responds. “I’m glad that one ended. It was getting strange. I think that REM cycle was all played out, so I’m up for the morning.”

“I’m going for more,” I tell her. “If you just wait long enough, there’s always another REM cycle.” She nods, pondering this. I wander the garden for a bit until the dream fades for good.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #212: The Guadalupe Airport

I’m in a cafe talking to an art student in his early 20s as he walks out the door. I’m complimenting him on some piece of digital art that I saw in his online portfolio when I realize that I can’t remember his name. I ask and he says, “It’s Bradley,” as we shake hands. I think that this is a student in my 3-year-old son’s class, somehow all grown up.

Bradley leaves and I just stand there, confused about how this much time has passed. After a brief mental struggle, I realize that these facts just don’t fit together and I become lucid.

I spend a few moments looking around at the DCs in the cafe but they all seem fairly generic. I don’t have goals in mind and I’m anxious that I’ll waste the experience, so I head through the first door that I see, winding up in a bathroom. Somebody flushes from one of the stalls. I am not spending a lucid dream listening to people flush toilets, I think, and head back out through the bathroom, back through the cafe, and out into a mall.

I’m feeling less passive now and I try hard to remember what my goals were. Somehow I dredge up that a Task of the Month is to keep repeating whatever a DC says to you. I approach a balding, blonde-haired guy with glasses in his early 40s. He’s wearing a t-shirt that says something about the Windows registry and he’s looking at me like he wants to tell me something.

“Talk to me!” I say.

He happily launches into an explanation of something about computers, but he’s speaking too rapidly for me to follow. I eventually start catching him mid-sentence. “If you have a memory block that…” and I babble back “If you have a memory block that!”

He scowls at the interruption. “You know what? I don’t think you’re actually into this!” And with that, he turns and walks away, looking offended.

I continue on, drifting through the crowd. I spot one guy that’s unusually tall and for some reason get the nasty impulse to mess with him. I kick him in the right shin and he falls forward, stopping just short of hitting the ground. Then he rises back up, looking angry and annoyed. “Sorry, that was stupid,” I say, scurrying away from him. He floats after me for a moment but I make an effort to think about other things as I evade him, flying down an escalator to the first floor.

I move through a relatively empty hallway, worrying for a moment about whether I’ll be able to remember what’s happened in the dream and take a moment to reflect on how cool this is.

Now I’m back in the main thoroughfare with the crowd. I spot two attractive women nearby, both Indian, one in her mid-twenties, the other in her mid-forties. I fly past them and they say something about going to Las Vegas. I want to impress them for some reason so I boast that I’m having a lucid dream and could travel to Las Vegas instantly. They laugh nervously and sort of edge away.

I say something like, “Here, I’ll show you!” and start flying away, slightly out of control. There’s an open chunk in the ceiling and I pass through it, turning and flailing a bit. Somehow I find myself flying along an airport runway at night. I hear “¡Happy Birthday Guadalupe!” by The Killers playing over what sounds like a clock radio and I worry that a morning alarm is going off. I fly up to a tall column of carved stone in the middle of the runway and reach out to touch it as the dream ends.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #198: The Egg

I’m standing in a sparse building that looks like a cleared-out convenience store. Wife’s standing about fifteen feet away, singing expressively to the room. I’m behind a high countertop staring with little comprehension at a strange deck of cards, wondering how I’m supposed to play with them. The thought of dreaming crosses my mind and I become lucid.

Slightly taken aback at the plunge into lucidity, I try to remember April’s Task of the Month. The actual task is to look inside an Easter egg, but I remember it as “give an egg to a DC”.

I walk up to Wife, reach behind my back, and say, “Hey, [Wife]! Here’s an egg.” I produce a plain white egg and place it into her left hand, feeling smugly satisfied at this “flawless execution”. Wife stops singing and glares at me, slightly shaking her head. She looks pissed and her expression seems to ask me What the hell are you doing?

Then with one swift motion, she smashes the egg all over her right shoulder. A gush of yolk and snotty-looking egg white flows down her arm. After another couple seconds of staring daggers at me, she turns her attention away, smiles, and returns to singing.

I return to my spot behind the counter, curious again about the playing cards. They’re now face down in three separate piles. I turn a few over, but the symbols are indecipherable to me.

Giving up on this, I wander into an adjacent room. It looks like a small basement with one high window along the wall. There’s also a wide hole near the top of one wall that looks like I could crawl through. I begin hoisting myself up to explore it, but the dream ends.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #184: Be Still My Beating Heart

I’m walking through a parking lot into a mall, recalling an earlier dream where Dad had brawled with some pellet gun-wielding high school kid in a parking lot just like this one. As I enter the mall, I recall my intent to have a lucid dream, and one begins.

I walk past a set of red metallic benches, taking in the detail and comparing it to waking life. I marvel at how completely realistic it looks. As I continue down the walkway, I turn toward a woman walking with her two young daughters and half-shout, “Can you believe this is all a dream?” They smile politely and scurry away.

I take a brief detour through a clothing store, walk past a few more places, and then exit onto some kind of outdoor boardwalk area. There’s a tattoo parlor to my left with a wood-carved sign overhead which depicts two attractive, dark-haired, pale-skinned women with intricate sleeve tattoos. The place is called “Nutjob”. I think how cool it’d be to get tatted up in a dream and start to head inside. It looks a bit more like a boutique when I get closer and I suddenly get this irrational fear that things will turn sexy in this place and that I’d better avoid it.

I head back through a door into the mall and encounter a grinning, friendly-looking British woman in her late 20s. I remember Task of the Month and ask her, “Who is my true love?” She says some stream of hilarious nonsense about waffles, and we both start laughing. I think she is super cool. “I’m not going to be able to remember that. Can you answer again?”

She laughs even harder and then starts singing “Polly Wolly Doodle” in a British Donald Duck voice. (The kids have an Easter toy that does this, but not with a British accent.) I can’t stop laughing and I try not to think about whether you can laugh yourself awake from a lucid dream.

I start thinking about what the other tasks were and she wanders off as I do so. I remember something about your heart, and then spy Wife walking in the mall about twenty feet in front of me. Still in an incredibly good mood, I run up to her, get her attention, and after she says, “Hey!” I make out with her for a little bit. This is fun, but okay, back to tasks! I’m supposed to pull my still-beating heart from my chest and give it to a loved one.

“Here, watch this!” Wife keeps looking at the nearby stores instead of me. “You really need to watch. I’m only going to do this once.” She looks back and I reach my hand inside my body. I feel something about the size of a softball pulsing very softly. The movement is a bit too weak for a heart muscle, but whatever. I pull it from my chest and when I present it to her… my hand is empty!

“What are you trying to do?” asks Wife. I explain the task and she furrows her brow. “You really don't need to do that for me,” she says before wandering away into a nearby store.

I wander through the mall some more, baffled by how long and stable this LD is. I pass through a busy arcade area where I see a mom busily taking care of 10-12 girls shouting demands during a birthday party. There’s cake being passed around which I sort of want to try but I feel like I am at enough kid birthday parties in waking life.

As I’m heading back into the hallway, an attractive Asian woman with waist-length hair passes by. We look at one another and the guy she’s with, some generic dude in his late 40s with thinning hair, seems to jealously take notice. He kind of freaks out, storming around and I say, “You want to go to the parking lot.” He obediently leaves. But when I turn back to the woman, blood’s pouring out of her nose like he just hit her. I’m confused because I didn’t notice him do this. I worry that my confusion means the dream is ending.

I pass my hand in front of her face and she’s healed. When I glance over my shoulder, the guy is back, glaring at us. “You’re not coming back here again,” I say, and again he leaves. I say something to the woman about how this is a dream and she agrees. The dream is definitely fading now but we still manage a bit of sexytime before the dream ends.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #180: The Dome of Stars

I have a false awakening in my house where I’m trying to do something as quickly as possible. What is it? Oh right -- I’m trying to get out because I’m having a lucid dream.

I move through the rooms as quickly as I can. The layout is similar, but just different enough to throw me off. I wind up in the garage and there’s a new hallway off of the south wall that wasn’t there before. I follow the hallway into what appears to be a bordello. Five or six women who look like Victorian-era prostitutes are standing or sitting near a set of mirrors. One of the seated women is reading a magazine, a couple of them are applying make-up, and some are just standing around not doing much of anything.

I feel like this is one of those LD scenarios where you’re supposed to be thinking sexy thoughts but the women mostly just seem like they’re relaxing on break. I really don’t feel like bothering them. I start asking them something about why they’re running the bordello in my house, but they start moving around and the scene feels a little confusing. I go ahead and phase out through the wall to clear my head.

Now I’m out on the street. Across the street I see a man standing under the branches of an oak. He looks Hawaiian, heavy-set with a salt-and-pepper hair and a neatly trimmed mustache. I remember the Task of the Month, and approach him asking, “What’s your New Year’s Resolution?”

He’s incredibly eager to answer, and a smile spreads across his face. “To make the most of things, <something something>, and…” He grabs one of my hands in both of his and finished triumphantly: “To cook with more cinnamon!”

His enthusiasm is contagious and I joyously shout, “Thank you for that great answer!” I pause for a moment. “But could you repeat that part in the middle?” He doesn’t seem interested in doing this, though, and wanders away.

Task done, now I just feel like exploring. I fly up past the top of the tree, reminding myself that “The world is yours…” I move up past the treetops and look out at the stars. It’s a beautiful night and I take a moment to enjoy the unfamiliar constellations. I notice one set of stars is exactly the same as a set in a different part of the sky. I laugh at my brain taking this “shortcut”. But then I wonder… did it only do this because I expect it to?

I fly up higher and higher until I can see that the sky is curving above me. In fact, there is no limitless sky but rather just a huge dome that I can reach the top of if I just fly high enough.

And I do! When I reach the very top of the dome, I see a small, glowing control panel! There’s a single flashing green button sitting there at the top of this dome of stars. But as I reach for it, I start losing altitude. I tell myself that “this is all mine” but I can’t shake the notion that I’m just not going to be able to reach that button to find out what it does. I reach up and up, trying to reach it, but the dream fades.

Major rise in confidence during this dream! Got an animal transformation, Advanced TotM, and was getting there on a Task of the Year, too. Thanks to NewArtemis for the dream control suggestions!

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #171: I Am the Wolf

I have a false awakening that places me in my bed at home next to Wife. All of the lights are on and she's fiddling around with some papers in bed, something to do with my new business. "Oh good, you're awake," she says. I grumble about how unhappy I am that this is the case.

"Sorry," she responds, "but we really need to work on this." I whine that it should be able to wait until the morning and that I was trying to have a lucid dream. She turns back to the papers, not bothering me any further. I'm a little worried that I was rude and have maybe pissed her off, but I decide to just take my chance while I can. I roll onto my side and begin my mantra of "The world is yours". I'm shocked to find that almost immediately I start a WILD transition. (Obviously just an in-dream WILD, but I didn't realize it at the time.)

In the transition state, my dream hands are grasping at something rough that's rolling by beneath me. I grasp at it and start clawing my way along. A gravel surface comes into view. It seems like I'm floating while climbing a ladder made out of gravel that's been crudely mortared together. After a bit, the scene solidifies and the gravel becomes a path. There's one more odd little jump as gravity takes hold and now I'm walking along the path in a full-formed scene.

It's dawn and I'm on a path that cuts through a park, not far from a street. Most of the DCs are dressed like it's chilly but it feels mild to me. I remember my intention to be extra confident in this dream and I start shouting my intentions at the passerby. "I can do anything I want! This is all mine!" I shout, interspersing lots of profanity and generally sounding like a total nutjob.

I remember Task of the Month to turn into a white wolf, hide in the snow, and hunt down a meal. I still feel all crazy from my mantra and the insane confidence I had at the start of this dream. I shout in a booming voice that's not my own that "I AM THE WOLF!" Immediately my hands curl into white paws. I practice running a bit on all fours and it's not bad! I kind of get the sense that I'm sort of bent over like a loping hunchback / werewolf thing but hey, close enough!

I go on a brief, profanity-laced tirade about how there's a bunch of snow to my right, and yep there it is. I hop my little wolf-feet into it and crouch down, looking to my left for some prey. Immediately I spy two potential targets: the closest is a large skunk and the other is an orange, semi-spherical alien thing with tentacles. The skunk's closer and the alien makes me a bit nervous, so I pounce on the skunk.

My teeth rip into him and I tear a big chunk away. Fortunately none of this is bloody but the skunk stares at me in shock. The skunk meat tastes atrocious. It's like chewing on a fart. I can't remember whether I'm supposed to eat the whole animal so I take another bite. This time it's more gummy and tasteless at first but after a bit of chewing, nope, this bite's all farty-tasting too. I hope this is good enough because I've had enough of being a carnivore.

I allow myself to change back into a human and walk further into the park. I come to three identical stone buildings with opaque green windows, standing side by side. I think of the Colosseum Task of the Year and shout that the building which leads to the Colosseum needs to light up. No immediate result, so another attempt, more yelly and with more profanity does the trick and the middle building's door lights up.

I move through a series of three automatic glass doors where a steady stream of children is walking in the opposite direction. I say that the kids need to get out of the way and DC parents appear from out of nowhere to pull them to the side as I pass. I emerge in a restaurant area filled with DCs enjoying a meal. An Indian man in his early 40s is playing on a slot machine against the left wall and he turns to look at me with an expression of surprise.

I push through the back door out into the early morning next to a crumbling sports arena. It's huge and looks a lot like the Colosseum apart from some weird details like the rebar that's sticking out of the top of it. I fly up toward the top and as a gust of wind carries me sideways away from where I want to be, I shout and mutter that "this is my world", and things get back on track.

I come over the top of the stadium to see that inside it looks like a grassy version of the Circus Maximus! There's even a little chariot racing by itself around the track. I know I can make this work, so I fly down toward the field, shouting that down there will be someone for me to fight. Before I'm even halfway down, though, the dream ends.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #170: Spellcasting 101

I'm standing in what looks like a hotel room with a spellcaster, a brown-haired girl in her late teens or early twenties. She's holding her palms out in front of her, and a miniature tornado whirls and dances in each of her hands. Each cyclone is about a foot high and spins rapidly but quietly, the tip of the funnel stuck to the same spot on her palms. This trick is new to her and she darts her eyes at me as if to say, "Did I get it right?" I nod approvingly.

For some reason, a flame catches around the upper rim of each tornado and she starts to lose her calm. "Why's it doing that?" The flame begins to spread down the funnel and she starts to panic. I become lucid as the fire spreads down the tornado and wraps ribbons of flame around her arms. I can see that the flames are just wrapping around her, though, and she's not actually catching on fire. It looks like some kind of fire spell is building up that she doesn't understand how to operate or control.

There's a door just behind me that looks like it leads down to a basement. I usher her toward the basement, saying, "Let's go downstairs to practice that. It'll be safer there." She's starting to panic but she starts moving toward the basement as the dream ends.

I hold on for DEILD, imagining myself running down a dark flight of stairs. It takes a moment for the imagery to coalesce again, and when I emerge back in a dream, I'm alone in a different hotel room, running around the room. I'm sort of prancing around on the carpet using just the balls of my feet. It's very dainty-looking and super un-macho but the sensation on my feet's very vivid and is helping me keep fears of an unstable dream at bay. (I know to ignore these, but there they were anyway!)

I run around the room like this for a bit more and then switch to rubbing my hands together. I continue this pretty much throughout the rest of the dream.

I walk out through the hotel room door into a darkly-carpeted hallway and walk for a long way. On my right I see a door that looks just like the one that led to the basement in the previous dream, so I follow it, expecting to find the young spellcaster again. I tromp down a flight of wooden stairs into a well-lit anteroom where an Hispanic woman in her late 30s is sitting behind an old-style cash register. She gives me a friendly smile and I remember the Task of the month to ask a DC for a gift.

"Hey!" I say. "Go ahead and give me my gift now." She nods, reaches under her desk, and pulls out a greeting card in an envelope. I will the greeting card to be open and the envelope just sort of vanishes. The cover of the card is some kind of abstract painting and the inside just has some simple handwriting in pen that read: "THANK YOU FOR THE CARD!" I'm trying to process what this means when the dream ends.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #158: Thankful

Wife and I are starting a company that will manufacture a brand new type of video game console. I'm standing in the middle of a park with her while we pitch the idea to about a half dozen investors while they ask us questions about it. Wife's doing all the talking and I'm impressed with how well she's presenting the idea.

The console is apparently based entirely around a light gun. (Think Duck Hunt from the old Nintendo Entertainment System days.) We present several potential light gun designs, all of which have very kiddie designs. One even has a little plastic teddy bear sitting on top.

Wife is going over the details of how we stack up against our competitors when I see my friend "CV" about fifty feet away, looking around. I believe she's come to support us so I walk up to greet her. There's a glass tip jar nearby which supporters of our project can shove money into.

CV puts two dollars in the jar and I thank her. "I think this project is going to be a huge success," she says, explaining why she contributed money.

I respond, "It's only money, right?"

For some reason she finds this hilarious. "My husband doesn't see money that way! But he'll spend money on... <can't recall this part>" I thank her again and walk back toward where Wife is giving her presentation, but now she and the investors have vanished. I feel terrible, thinking that I've been gone so long Wife had to finish everything up without me and it looks like I rudely walked out on the meeting. Fortunately, I realize that it's all a dream.

I begin walking along a path in the park and take a moment to look over my left shoulder. A beautiful sunset is taking shape over the trees and the rooftops near the park. That means I'm walking north.

Far ahead of me on the path I see two ladies in their late 60s. They look almost exactly alike, with wild hair and somewhat thick glasses. Their appearance reminds me a bit of Professor Trelawney from Harry Potter. I remember the Task of the Month about asking a DC what they're thankful for. I become distressed for a moment that these DCs are too far away and I'll have trouble reaching them. I focus my vision on the two DCs and then imagine myself "zooming in" toward where they are. Immediately I'm standing right in front of them.

"Hi! What are you thankful for?" I say, my words a bit of a nervous, hurried jumble.

One lady immediately answers, "Youthful <something>."

"Youthful what?" I ask. "Can you say it again?"

"Youthful reef," she says firmly.

Huh? "What is 'youthful reef'?"

"It's an activity," she answers. Oh wait, is she talking about Task of the Year Australia? Should I be doing that one next? I thank her and keep walking along the path. The dream feels like it has thinned out, though, and I am soon in the void.

I rub my hands together and keep moving forward, trying to stay relaxed. After perhaps 20 seconds I get the sensation of my feet walking through desert sand. It feels like a scene might be taking shape, but a sudden gust of wind catches me hard on the left side. I feel like I'm losing my balance and become fearful. I mentally decide that I don't feel any wind at all and it quickly dies down.

Unfortunately, at the same time I also lose connection with the ground and now it feels like my feet are no longer walking but flailing at empty air. I keep trying for a while but eventually lose connection with the dream and wake up.

Got a Task of the Month on this one and tried to use it (unsuccessfully) for Task of the Year. Didn't manage to get them both but I'm glad I gave it a try though!

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #152: The Witch

I'm riding in a car (driven by my friend "Leroy"), along with two other unknown passengers who are in the back seat. We're all out together on a road trip, heading down a clear highway during what looks like mid-morning. The road is steeply banked like a race track and we pass by a speed limit sign that reads "50".

Up ahead there's a section of the road that's pitted with giant potholes. In front of us, a pick-up truck is working its way gingerly around a huge pothole that's torn up most of our side of the highway. "Be careful here," I say, pointing ahead at the pothole. But as I say this, I realize that I'm sitting on the left side of the car, Leroy on the right. Yet he's got the steering wheel over on his side, as if we're driving around in the United Kingdom or New Zealand or someplace. I realize that I'm dreaming, even wondering whether it happened this way because I've been playing Dead Island lately.

I decide that if this is a dream, phasing out through the car should be no problem. I look down at my lap and focus on moving my body left through the door and out onto the road. It takes a couple of seconds, but once the phase takes hold, I feel myself lurch to the left and I move through the door as if it wasn't there. My vision quickly dims and I find myself in a semi-void. I reach out for the road surface and grasp onto it. While I still can't see anything I feel like I'm physically still out on the roadway.

I crawl forward for a bit until I feel confident enough with where I am. My vision is still very dark, but I decide not to worry about it until the next scene unfolds. I get to my feet and start walking forward, rubbing my hands together the whole way. I narrate to myself the fact that "I'm having a lucid dream" and keep moving forward until things clear up.

The dimness lifts and I find myself in something that looks sort of like a college gymnasium. A lady in her mid-50s with a long gray ponytail is chatting with another woman that's sitting at a desk behind a window. I remember the task to have a witch cast a spell on you and I decide that this lady will be my witch.

I interrupt them by announcing to the woman that "Okay, you can do that teleportation spell to the Colosseum on me now." She doesn't answer at first, seeming to want to finish up what she's saying.

Once she gets the last of what she wanted to say out, she turns to me and matter-of-factly says, "Okay, teleportation spell... where was that to?"

"The Colosseum," I repeat. As soon as I say that, the "witch" shoves me in the chest and I go tumbling through the air down the hallway, right toward a wall. I think that I sure hope I phase through that and sure enough, I pass right through the wall, kind of floating on my back. My vision rather crudely recenters itself and now I'm standing in a tall hallway with cinderblock walls. I can hear the noise of the crowd... this has to be the Colosseum! The cinderblock walls aren't historical but I think that I can make it work.

I move to the end of the hallway, turn, and find myself in another hallway, this one with a much higher ceiling. I jump/fly up to find that the wall doesn't stretch all the way to the ceiling and I perch on top of the wall to survey the area. Below me I see a twisted, mazelike series of halls where male DCs that look like athletes or possibly gladiators are wandering around. Just past this maze stands a tall gate that I think must be the entrance to the Colosseum.

As I'm planning to fly over the maze to the gate, I briefly wonder whether this dream will remain stable long enough for me to complete Europe Task of the Year item. In response to this thought, the dream almost immediately collapses and I'm awake.

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 was a very vivid, DC-heavy lucid from this morning. I finally remembered to do the "ask a DC about the meaning of life" Basic Task of the Month.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #134: The Dream Fairgrounds

I'm driving on a freeway with Wife and my 4-year-old son "E". Traffic's heavy and I'm in the middle of making a difficult merge but Wife is insisting that I adjust the air conditioning while I'm in the middle of this. I look down, quickly fiddle with a knob, then look back up to find that we're now driving backward down the freeway!

I gibber some kind of complaint about how this is why she shouldn't bother me when I'm driving, and the car turns back in the right direction again. This has to be a dream. Now that I'm lucid, I want to get up in the air and start figuring out how to accomlpish my goals. I feel weird abandoning Wife and E, though. I think about grabbing onto them and kind of phasing through the car with them, but it sounds intimidating. I wonder whether I could just fly the car itself around, and as soon as I think about this, it works -- our SUV is flying high above the freeway!

The city looks vivid and enormously detailed. Most of it is dominated by a huge fairground that stretches off as far as I can see. The fairground is a mixture of tents, stadiums, amusement park rides, golden domes, and even out-of-place landmarks like the Hagia Sophia. Scattered among these are more mundane buildings like banks. One of the rides is a looping starship ride that I remember from my childhood.

Everywhere I look there's something new. I'm overwhelmed and pleased by all of the detail and I laugh at the sheer quantity of images being thrown at me. The car flies quietly over the fairground for a while before I decide that we should land and look around. I look down at one of the rides and my perspective "zooms" down to that level.

The car is gone now and Wife and E are walking beside me. I feel excited as a little kid by this fair, and I'm amused (and dismayed) to see that every adult DC is a bored, miserable-looking parent with their face buried in a smartphone. I work my ass off at lucid dreaming to spend a few minutes a night in a place like this and you DCs couldn't care less!

We walk past the rides and attractions for a while and I see a lot of familiar people from my life, including my little nephew, my sister-in-law Sissy, brother-in-law Muppet, as well as The Schwartz and his wife and kids. Eventually it occurs to me that I need to get moving if I'm going to accomplish one of my goals, and I think of the Australia Task of the Year. I'm just about to jump up to fly off for a new scene, but luckily I remember the "ask a DC about the meaning of life" task.

I walk back over to E and say, "Hey, buddy. What's the meaning of life?"

He lays the side of his head down on a nearby crate and says, "To not die..." I'm not sure that I heard him right so I ask him to repeat that. He says, "Not dying." (He's been having anxiety about death lately, which is probably where this comes from.)

Wife's nearby, so I ask her too. She looks pensive for a moment. "To see the best of living."

Satisfied, I turn my attention back to my other goals. There's not much left of this dream, though, and before I can do much else it ends.

Finally broke that dry spell! This was a really fun one. Emotions got the best of me at the end, but it was great while it lasted.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #113: Woodrow the Giant

I'm in a first-person shooter video game where I'm entering an airport. One of the people I'm with slips some kind of blaster into my pocket as we're walking through airport security. Won't that set off the metal detectors? I think of all this as just a game, though, so I give it a try.

An alarm sounds, surprisingly soft but unmistakable. I keep walking, just in case they think it was someone else behind me. As I head into a broad, bustling concourse, I see a few security guys heading toward me from different directions. They're dressed in plain clothes, which makes them seem less official and more menacing. I change directions and they change with me. I know I'm caught. One guy has his hand on his right hip like he's ready to pull a gun, so I decide to be first. I pull the banana-shaped blaster out of my jacket pocket and start shooting. My first shot catches the guy right in the chest and he crumples to the floor.

I immediately realize that this isn't a video game, but a dream. I remember goals: meet Art at the Alamo and Tasks of the Month. Since this is already a video game scenario, I think that it'll be easy to pull Art in. "[NewArtemis], I know you're right there behind me." No response. By now the other security guys have drawn their guns, although they oddly have not fired yet.

I shoot one more of them and he collapses to the ground. Still, nobody returns fire. "[NewArtemis], a little help!" A woman walking nearby turns around. She's wearing jeans and has dirty blonde hair, not at all the usual hair color for Art's DC, but it's definitely her!

"Hey there!" I say, thinking that it'll be fun to have her take care of the last of these security guys. But when I look for them, they're gone -- everyone is walking through the airport concourse like nothing has happened. I turn back to Art. "You dyed your hair...?" I half-comment, half-ask. (I sincerely doubt this.)

"Hey," she says, with a wry half-smile, ignoring the whole hair thing.

We hug and I say, "Okay, that's Basic. You feel like punching Woodrow Wilson?" (Advanced Task of the Month.)

She nods. "I'd love to punch that guy." (We have never discussed Woodrow Wilson, so I'm likely projecting here.)

I glance around for Wilson. "Let's do it," I say to Art, and then call out to the crowd: "Woodrow Wilson! I know you're here!" We walk along the concourse for perhaps twenty feet when I spot a huge man to our left. Somehow, even with everything around him brightly lit, he's hidden in shadow. The man is at least ten feet tall, probably closer to twelve, and he's flanked by two normal-sized men who don't look like they're doing anything in particular.

"Is that you, Woodrow Wilson?" As soon as I say this, the man's face is illuminated and it's definitely Wilson -- long, expressionless face, glasses, the whole bit. Weirdly, he's dressed in the style of a Catholic priest with a cassock and clerical collar. He strides toward us quickly and moves up very close to crowd me.

Wilson doesn't attack but just stands there towering over me, no expression on his face, his eyes unfocused. I've lost some emotional control and I'm starting to feel fearful. Art circles around on my right, grimacing a little, her hands balled into fists. She can help me, but I know that for Task I know that I need to hit the guy. I try to calm myself down while imagining myself leaping up and doing some kind of superman punch. I'm freaking out a little bit, though, and the dream falls apart.