CanisLucidus

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #118: Water Slide

I'm walking down the central aisle of an airplane when I hear a voice to my right: "Hey [CanisLucidus]! Check out this view!" I look to my right and NewArtemis is waving me over and pointing at the window. "Have you ever seen Los Angeles from the air before?"

"[NewArtemis]!" I take the middle seat and say something about the last time I flew into LA. I talk about how it's been a long time since I was there and ask her what she's doing in LA.

"Same thing you are," she says. "The gymnastics conference." I feel like this is totally unexpected and don't know how to respond. Why don't I remember this? Since when do I care about gymnastics? Art points out the window again. "Look, that's the Staples Center!"

As I'm checking out LA through the window, a flight attendant makes an announcement that the plane will be landing shortly. Art stares at me pointedly, not saying anything. "Am I supposed to be doing something?" I ask, not following what's going on.

"Are you just going to leave your son all by himself while the plane lands?" Now I'm sure that my 2-year-old son "R" is all by himself several rows back. Panicked, I run toward the back of the plane without saying goodbye. When I get back to my row, I see some guy in the window seat and R crawling around freely on the middle seat. The guy turns to me and says something odd, and I wonder whether this is all a dream. As soon as I ask myself the question, I know the answer.

I look out the window again, and the plane is on the ground now. Passengers are starting to stand up at their seats and in the aisle. I stand up in the aisle myself and say, "[NewArtemis], come back this way. I'm going to Angel Falls." Almost immediately she slips past some guy standing in the aisle and appears near my row. I start narrating partly to her but mostly to the dream itself. "Okay, this plane took us right to Angel Falls." We walk through the doorway of the airplane and down a short set of stairs covered by a canopy.

"Can you fly?" I ask her. But I correct myself: "You can fly." And she floats past, bouncing along the canopy ceiling before reaching the end and floating up temporarily out of sight. Now I hear the roar of a waterfall and I'm feeling really excited. I start flying, too, and I wind up bouncing along just like she did before I break out into the open.

The waterfall is there, but it's really just a waterpark slide sitting on an open stretch of runway. The ride's about 30 feet tall, quite steep, and looks like fun. It's got a banner stretched over its exit with its name... something like, "_____ Raging River _____", with a couple of words I can't recall. Art and I fly over to the top of the slide, me just slightly in front. It's 4 "lanes" of slides right next to each other, and I take the 2nd from the left. I think that Art wound up further behind me in the same lane. I reach the bottom, zooming past a couple of portly kids in lanes #1 and #3.

As soon as I hit the bottom of the slide, I hop up again, expecting Angel Falls to be in front of me. And indeed, in front of me is the top of a huge waterfall. This one's got a banner stretched over the top of it, too: "Angel Falls". But it's still some kind of ride, not the real waterfall. It's close. A very impressive, realistic (almost scary) ride, but still a ride. I shout something back to Art about how this probably doesn't count. She says something I can't remember and indicates she's still here.

The dream still feels really stable and vivid, but I'm reluctant to waste any time, so I leap over the waterfall feet-first. Immediately I'm drenched and in freefall. After a few seconds of that, I land smoothly on some kind of big, steep plastic slide and travel along it for maybe another 20 seconds before things flatten out just a bit and the slide takes me underground. I'm still moving at a good pace but no longer at the crazy speeds of before.

The slide flattens out and broadens, and I slide past a few other riders that I'm sharing the slide with. When I feel myself slowing down, I find that I can sort of spin on my butt and gain a little speed. One DC that I pass asks me how I'm doing this and I tell him that I'm having a lucid dream.

After a while, the slide narrows and finally ends. There's a long line of DCs waiting to exit the "ride". I think about whether I should wait in line, then remember that I need to still find the real Angel Falls. I'm thinking about how to do this when the dream ends.