task of the month

June 29, 2015

---

I took the Dream Leaf supplement tonight as well.

Librarian
My classmate was working at the library at the school we both did our internship at, but it was like my old high school, with more ramps and stairs and shit. She was walking around the school, and I saw her. I decided to walk with her, and she was commenting on how her job let her use these ramps on all the stairs. She was pushing around a huge barrel of books and whatnot. The kids all loved her and I got to see some of them. They were second graders now, so some of them were in another class.



The Paint
I was taking a class with mom. It was a huge hippie experience: we paired up and greeted an (inanimate) object in the room, then wrote a Socratic poem for the room we were in (I can't remember the name of the room... But it had a name). Then we sat in a circle and the leader was all dramatic and we got huge paintbrushes and canvases with different colored base paintings. I had orange of course. We all just shared pots and squirt bottles of different colors and had a huge hippie paint fest. I finished early and asked if I could leave, and walked home. I accidentally left my backback on the trail though, on a castle-wall thing. I had to go back and mom saw my painting; she was very impressed.



Librarian
I was with my brothers, in the driveway, turning animals into different animals. We turned a robin into a bald eagle and for some reason it targeted me so I tried to get inside the house without looking like I was running, in case that would make it hunt me faster... It almost got me as I ran the last stretch to the door. I waited inside and was so paranoid because it was still trying to get me for a few minutes. It flew at the windows and tried to get in through the door when anyone went in or out.




(Took Red Pill)




Harry Potter's Paintbrush
I was at an apartment with Anna, Michele, Michelle, Michelle, Mindi, and some other classmates. We were heading out to class, stopping to get food first. But I almost forgot my keys and had to go back. When I caught up to them, a kid was asking for money. I said I wouldn't give her money but I would buy her some food. So we stopped in a store and I let her pick out some food, but she swiped my card. I had a scuffle with her and eventually got it back from her, then she turned into golem... During our scuffle I saw in the back room Harry Potter tied to a chair... I was too busy to do anything about it. I bought at twizzler on my way out of the store and the cashier said she was on my side and thought it was really nice that I was going to buy food for that girl. As I left, Lucious Malfoy was also leaving, and I accused him of raping HP.

As soon as I left the shop, I turned into Harry. All the lights on the street turned off now and death eaters were all over the place. People were falling left and right so I fell to the ground to make it look like I was one of them and three women were near me. One tried to take a necklace in my hand (it was good, with either a crown or a chicken pendant), I shook my head, clenched the necklace tighter, and offered a paintbrush instead. She seemed very pleased with this and one of the others gave me a different paintbrush in exchange.

I spent days on the streets. At some point I was sitting with a young death eater who was saying that he knew their side would lose. I was like "you always have to have faith in your side. That's what makes it strong," but I was having so much trouble speaking, like my throat was all crackly or I was out of breath all the time. But then I found out that I was near the border of deatheater-land all I had to do was cross this street I was on, and they wouldn't be able to get me back. So I pretty much just ran for it and I was fine. On the other side everyone was dressed in flowers and veils and flowing light dresses... It was almost as weird as the other side. Very hippie, very full of life, almost a little cultish. I walked to a secret school I was a part of and some vines opened up to let me in. They were magical and would close around anyone who didn't belong at the school. There was a girl behind me and she climbed up a vine to get in, but the vines closed around me, trapping me, and I saw the girl fall... I shouted and the vines recognized me and let me in. Next thing I knew, I was in a large room with 6 bunks. Hermione and Ron were there. Two of the bunks had colorful alphabet letters and one was a half-bunk that was blue and white. Three other people came in, but I didn't know them. Hermione and Ron told them the story, then the dream faded.



Drinking Battle!
I was walking through an art museum, and saw Van Gogh's Starry Night. I'd been planning on jumping into this painting, so I'm glad I saw it and got lucid after a quick RC. I pretty much ran at the wall, expecting to get sucked into the painting, and jumped in. Everything was in the texture of the painting, with lines and multi-colored. I looked up and there were swirls moving around through the stars and moon. It was beautiful. There was also a giant dildo in the sky, though. Remembering the second task on my planned sequence, I rustled around in my pockets, expecting that what I pulled out would be an odd seed. I found one shaped like those candies the soot sprites were eating in Spirited Away. It was larger though, and had spots that started pink but were changing to blues and greens, all neon-ish. I dug a small hole and planted it, and willed it to grow. The result was petty interesting. It grew a gay strip club.

Woot woot!!

I knew the next thing I wanted to do was clone myself, so I looked into the window of the club at my reflection, and imagined there were two of me. I remembered how this had worked in Zukin's dream. My reflection kept morphing and did eventually show two of me... I looked next to me and there I was.

I went with myself into the strip club, expecting to find the main men for my next task: Hercules and Dionysus. It was very distracting in there but I had recited the order of things to do so many times before I fell asleep (STD but with C in it for clone lol) that I only stopped to watch the strippers for a little while, clone by my side. I tried seeing through both of our eyes, but we were seeing the same things so I don't think that worked... I tried to get her to come with me to find the God of Wine and his competitor, but she wanted to stay with the strippers. I left her there, and shortly after, in the back of the club, I saw two shirtless men (maybe they were workers there on their break). I asked if they were Dionysus and Hercules, and they said they were. I challenged them to a drinking battle, and Dionysus was like "Sweetie, I'm the God of Wine. Bring it on." He scooted over for me to sit in the booth with them.

The first drink had no effect on any of us. The second had none on me but a teeny bit of effect on them. After the third I felt a little silly (placebo?) but they were looking wasted all of the sudden. We all stayed that way for another ten drinks until after the 14th they were both so drunk they started making out and forgot about our battle. I assumed I needed to drink one more to win, so I did. Then I watched them make out, and may or may not have joined them soon after when things got a little heavier. I lost any sort of lucidity I had left, though.

June 25, 2015

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Tonight I took a dream supplement called Dream Leaf. It involves two pills; a blue one before bed, and a red one after about four hours of sleep. Even before the red pill, I was having uh more vivid dreams than unusually do, and I remembered many more of them:



Spoil Sport
Zukin really wanted to go do something with me but I had already taken my red pill and was like sooo ready to sleep and I ignored her texts.



Neat Fridge
I was at home, My little brother was there, and we had a whole slew of things in the fridge all neatly organized, like egg salad sandwiches. I spent prettying the entire dream exploring this new high-tech fridge and then ate a sandwich.



False Red Pill
I took my red pill with a bottle of water Ginger (Zukin's man) brought in and hung on a hook on my wall.



Crazy Car
I was In a grocery parking lot and the van suddenly started going in its own and I was trying to stop it, though I have no idea how I would do that. It kept hitting people and cars and I panicked and called my dad, who was in the store, hoping he could help. I somehow realized (or at least had an inkling) I was dreaming but woke up.




(Took red pill)




I Got Them Moves Like Jagged
I was at my old elementary school, at some sort of information night, and saw a lot of my old teachers. My 6th grade math teacher, Mr. M, gave me an envelope with names on it, and I was like "omg interview!!" A and M (two classmates of mine) were now with me and we were leaving.

I was standing there and suddenly realized I was dreaming (didn't even have to do an RC), and got really sad because that meant I didn't just get an interview at my old school. I told A that I was dreaming and she said, "well I'm not dreaming so how are you dreaming?"

We got in the car and I decided to drive. The school was definitely my elementary school, but in the spot where my old middle school is so I drove down a couple roads until I got to my house back home. I knew I was dreaming so every time I saw a person or car in the road, I decided to run them over to see what would happen. Fireworks is what happened. Every time i hit something, the car went right through then and sparks and fireworks shot out of the spot. It was so cool.

I knew that when I got home there would be a mirror to look into (wanted to stare into it for the TOTM). I got out of car and entered my home... There was a mirror on the floor and M (a different classmate) was sitting in front of it. I watched her reflection; I could see her in the corner of my vision as well. She was arguing with herself, and the reflection was getting very angry, her hair was growing out and she was growing fangs. Then M disappeared but her phone was there. I told her reflection to calm down or she would be stuck in the mirror. She did calm down and returned to normal and then she was back to being out here.

I wanted to find the Pegasus next. All of a sudden Sensei and Ophelia were there. There was almost one of those cartoonish POPs and smoke as they appeared. Sensei pointed to a white board and told me I had to pick a spot to find the Pegasus. I thought I would find him in the clouds and Sensei and Ophelia both said that was a good idea. Sensei also said I would get to pick what happened when I met Zeus, and I was thinking, "of course I do, it's my dream." Then Ophelia talked about Bernie from TBBT winning awards for lucid dreams. I was amazed that Bernie was into LDing. I sat on a bed and let myself drift off into a sleep, I was aware of myself rolling off the bed and landing in someone's leg/foot (I think it was A [a housemate], he was also on the bed beginning to LD).

I was in the clouds next, just floating. I still knew I was dreaming. I looked around for the Pegasus, expecting him to be there. In the meantime, it was so beautiful. I was in a sort of tunnel of clouds. I heard neigh behind me and turned to see the beautifullest white horse with gleaming golden wings. I told it we needed to find Zeus and take his bolt, and it let me on its back and we zoomed off. After a few minutes, I spotted a cloud that had a part that stuck up, and looked like a castle of sorts. I assumed this was Zeus's home, Mt. Olympus. We landed on a pillar, and suddenly it was stone as the clouds dispersed dramatically. We were on a huge mountain that had stuck up into the clouds. (Way cool!!) Someone saw us, but didn't seem at all surprised or alarmed. So I told him we were here because we had an appointment with Zeus. The man nodded and led me through a door Pegasus couldn't fit through, so it waited for me out there. A lot of people were inside. But there was one person on a throne at the back. He looked very Zeus-y. I walked through the crowd and shouted at Zeus, "Give me your bolt. I don't want to have to take it by force." He refused, but said I could have it if I won a dance-off with him.

He started. He looked like a floppy fish, though. Like I couldn't tell what he was trying to do. At some point his arms detached and flew a few meters to either side, then swapped and reattached on the opposite sides. I rolled my eyes when he passed the dance to me, and just sorta let myself dance, expecting that it would be fantastic. Funny thing is I danced like I usually dance (which isn't all that great), but when I stopped, the crowd went wild and Zeus fell back in his chair, defeated. He handed me the bolt, yelled that he wanted a rematch next week, as I left and found Pegasus. I wanted to go find The Face next but the dream started to destabilize and I just flew through the clouds until I woke up.



I'd Like to Have Sex With You Too
I was at auditions / interviews for jobs at my hometown, and there were also lessons of some sort. This is a week long thing and I got to know one of the guys pretty well, he seemed to also like me (I think this was the subC version of a guy I recently met haha). There were like five performance days as well, where we performed a play in the grass, but under a sort of awning with arches. During the last few days I met A (a really close high school friend), she was working at the concession counter haha. That same day I met a girl with one very blue eye, and one very green eye. She knew me already but I couldn't remember meeting her. She did seem familiar though. She gave me a free rice crispy treat covered in chocolate.

During the performance on the last day I wasn't a part of it so I was sitting along the wall at the back of the "stage" and writing in my note book and before I realized what I was writing it was something like "have sex again -> want to do it with me?" It was about the guy I had met. I got embarrassed and covered it up but I think he saw it and he came up to me after the performance and basically said "I'd like to have sex with you, too" so we snuck off to a closet.



Cool Outfit
I was in my game, I think an older Pokemon game. I was in the middle of a mini game with the guy I met at the last dream I think. It was a series of puzzles involving candles that I had to light. But after the first level cleared, I couldn't use the light candle spell anymore (why there were spells in Pokemon I do not know). The huge fire beacon thing in the center was calling to me and I clicked A at it. I was in a selection panel where I could pick a brand new, really cool outfit for my character. The one I really loved was a little like Elsa but all red/orange and flamy. I picked it and my character was pulled into the flame, and I was worried at first that it was a trap, but she got spit back out after a few moments. I picked her up physically and untied her from the smoldering ropes that bound her (dunno WHY they were binding her...) and woke up after noticing my character looked like a young child now, and would have to grow up before the outfit would be epic.

I was having a non-lucid sex dream that had just ended. I walked away down the street and slowly realized I was in a dream. The first thing that I thought to do was to do a lucid dare...get naked in front a DC, I thought. I was half naked in front of two women that were sitting on a park bench when I realized I had already done that dare 3 times before. I continued to get naked for fun. While I was flopping my dick around in a windmill pattern in front of these two nice lady dream characters, I remembered that I could climb to the top of a tree for a task!

I walked down the street and came to a forest clearing. There was an enormous tree with a flat top that I decided to climb. I started to run up it at full speed, but slowed down as I neared the top. I had to climb the final stretch with my hands. When I got to the top, I saw this glorious valley below me and the rocky mountains all around me. I felt peaceful and happy to be around mountains again. While I was sitting there, just minding my own business, the tree suddenly took off flying of its own accord. It was going really, really fast too. I tried to slow it down, wouldn't work for awhile. I eventually got it to stop and I landed in some bedroom where there was a hole in the ground. I put the tree in the hole, and I heard a robotic voice that said something like, "Tree accepted, thank you". Then this metallic flower opened up. I realized I was in my parents' bedroom and then woke up.

I have a short ld in between other dreams, so remember only parts of it. Once again I remember the totm and go find a mirror, this time look at the mirror but instead of myself see the reflection of the DC next to me (looking from an angle). I. Keep staring at the mirror for as long as possible and this time the face of the DC starts changing, it shifts from one DC to another DC, female to male features and vice versa. It goes on for a while, a very cool thing to watch.

23.06.2015

Zooming the mirror (DILD)

NON-DREAM DREAM LUCID

This was a very long and most of it, personal, but there was a lucid part of the dream and I remembered to do the advanced task since it was undone, so I am sharing this part:


After coming out from the house since I needed to go to the big event I wondered if I was ready and all set. As I was gliding I saw a lot of lights and circus-alike tents. The entrance was like an old creepy campsite welcome sign. There were some pot-a-potties nearbie and I did not recognize the place so I turned lucid.

I looked up into the sky, and as usual, it was full of stars, I wanted to take a flight but I remembered I had my advanced task undone. So I got into the pot-a-potty and on the inside it was huge and like a normal bathroom.

I looked myself into the mirror and at first nothing happened, but then, the top of my head started to inflate like a balloon. I wondered if I could change myself entirely if I looked away from the mirror and started at it again, so I did. I saw no changes, other than being deformed and/or having a lot more facial hair.

I wanted to see if I could be absorved by the mirror somehow if I started at it, which I did for quite some time. Nothing happened other than a "zoom" effect on my reflection.

A little after I left the bathroom satisfied with the task completed.

Lost lucidity shortly after and/or woke up/dont recall.

I've been sick, so I slept all day with lucid goals on my mind. The funny thing is, that delirious me thought one of the tasks was fireworks, but I still managed to do the mirror one.

Anyway, I vaguely recall a conversation with a DC where I suddenly became aware I was dreaming. But I don't remember if it was something she said or if it was just a feeling. Anyway, I was in a hallway at the time, and at the end of the hall were 2 mirrors. I stared at my reflection, and like many times, it looked like a younger, slimmer, longer-haired version of myself. I was wearing a really baggy t-shirt like I used to in college, and my long hair all one length and combed down with a power-part like the granola girl that I was lol. Satisfied, I thought about going through the mirror, then thought "nah I always do that." So I tried something different: I noticed the DC was coming after me in a kind of playful "I'm gonna get ya!" fashion. So I squealed and jumped through the ceiling, successfully phasing through it.

I was in a residential neighborhood, with a few large houses and no trees or grass or landscaping of any kind, and really hot dry and sunny. I dream this scenery alot, and it reminds me of the neighborhood where I grew up. We moved into our house before the rest of the neighborhood was really all that developed, so there were few houses and all the yards were just dirt. I guess it's a fairly easy, simple environment to create in dreams.

Anyway, I jumped down off the roof, using some kind of large pipe to slow the descent. I still have height issues, even in LDs, so I've found ways to work around them. I got to the curb and for some reason believed that creating a firework was one of the TOTMs. I know it was for past July tasks, so with July 4th around the corner I guess that's why it just popped in there. So I was standing on the curb, and pointed to the street, fully expecting a firework to appear without a smidgen of doubt. One appeared, the size of a large button. I willed it to light itself, then watched as it shot into the air. It was pretty sunny, and at first all I could see was a bunch of smokey dots, kind of like what you see in the sky after a firework burns itself out. Then there was a flash, and the firework became a large arc of rainbow, surrounded by fluffy clouds and another rainbow that encircled the first one. I applauded lol. Then since the dream was still going, I went on to do tawdry things..

Ritual: Slept from about 1:45 to 6:15am, woke to record a vivid NLD, decided to turn it into a WBTB and try to get lucid. I wanted to use some light supplements but nothing powerful, only alpha-gpc and bacopa... but after wondering why one of the bacopa capsules I'd just swallowed was white, I realized, oh shit, when traveling recently I had put some galantamine in the same bottle! I had no interest in taking galantamine this morning but now it seemed there was nothing to be done. Then I had an idea: since piracetam counters the more unpleasant effects of galantamine, and since it now frequently acts for me as a lucid trigger on its own, what might happen if I took the two at the same time? It had never occurred to me to try this before.

Writing this up after the experiment, I feel like an alchemist who has just stumbled across the philosopher's stone. Wow. After going back to bed 7am I did some prep before falling asleep and then found myself dreaming lucidly for over an hour, waking at 8:30am, probably my longest stint to date. Then I wrote up everything I could remember, lay back in bed to remember and write down some more, went back to sleep, and found myself in another semilucid that presented itself as building on events from the previous dream (though I'm not convinced it actually was). At 10:30am I woke again, feeling thoroughly surfeited and satisfied with so much dreaming.

DILD, "Three Houses": The dream lasted so long that there was even a point midway through it where I thought to myself, "With everything I've already experienced, how am I ever going to remember all this? There's just no way, especially if I keep going. Should I just wake up?" But the answer came readily, "No way! I want to keep experiencing it, even if I can't remember everything later." There were a number of shifts and transitions that might normally have destabilized the dream and woken me, but I felt confident in my ability to navigate them safely.

Although I don't clearly remember the beginning of the dream, I'm sure it was a DILD because I recall having one of those thought sequences like, "Hey... I think I might be drea—yes, of course I'm dreaming. Duh. I knew that." Experiences like these confirm for me that lucidity goes beyond mere dream awareness (which in itself can be non-lucid, as I've experienced many times) to encompass that awareness of dream awareness, a kind of meta-awareness, that enables agency. Once I had agency, it was on to my tasks. I had two main tasks planned, working on the "intellego" technique from Ars Magica and trying this month's bonus TOTM. I prioritized the latter because it is time sensitive.

Random house: Although I was upstairs in a house when I got lucid, I decided that to do the task properly I should start with a fresh one. I went out to the balcony, which looked out over some tall pines bordering the backyard, and easily levitated into the air. I was floating over a residential neighborhood with numerous houses to choose from, so I tried to let instinct guide me. Although the outside of the house I picked didn't inspire any sense of connection—it was an ordinary two-story suburban home in blue-grey clapboard—I figured I should look inside.

My first distinct impression was how heavy the front door was, one of those old ones made of solid wood. I had to manually lock it behind me and the bolt was hard to turn, though even at the time this struck me as mere DR, since the sensation of forcing the bolt was identical to what I have to do currently with my patio gate in WL. After entering, I found myself in a short plain white hallway, and started wandering through and trying various doors.

Although my intention had been to find house that represented me, and I even muttered something to this effect aloud a few times as I wandered through this one, I still didn't feel any connection with this place. All the rooms on the ground floor were vacant and a bit dirty, as though someone had moved out in a hurry. I wondered if I was seeing an empty house because I've never actually owned a house of my own in WL, having always rented, so I never had experienced a house that truly did represent me. I opened one door and it led into an enclosed porch or sunroom, also empty. I went back inside and found an interior room with no windows. I thought that if I did live here, this would be a great place to build bookshelves, something I've always wanted to do if I had a house of my own. This house, however, didn't look like a place would ever really want to live, much less a place could represent me in any meaningful way.

I was annoyed with how empty and uninteresting the ground floor was, so as I went upstairs I reinforced my intention for the house to represent me. At the top of the stairs were two rooms, and these were cluttered with scattered boxes of junk. Might this represent a cluttered state of mind? I looked around at the seemingly random stuff, but once again I felt no connection with it. There were big boxes crammed with vinyl record albums... but I've never owned any vinyl, having grown up in the era of cassettes and then CDs. There was a smaller box containing smaller records, and I tried to remember what that format was called. "Eight-tracks" was what I came up with—clearly I didn't have full access to WL memory, because I'm well aware that eight tracks are those big chunky early cassettes, and only after waking did I remember that the miniature records are properly called "singles." I've never owned any of those either. When I saw that another box on the floor contained an open bag of what appeared to be maxipads, I started to get annoyed. This is just random junk! Sure, I'm a woman, I occasionally use maxipads, but I really don't think they have any special meaning for me... apparently the dream is not cooperating with my intention. That part, at least, is nothing new. My dreamstate has never been entirely cooperative.

I went back downstairs and out through a garage. It was mostly empty, but there was a chest of drawers there, where I began to try out my second task. "Intellego," I said, touching the wood (I wasn't sure if the Form should be "Corpus," so I left it blank.) All I could read from the chest of drawers was a vague impression of the craftsman's hands, and a feeling that it might have been made in India. That made sense, I figured... how much information could I expect out of furniture, anyway?

I went outside and looked up into the sky. It was full of fluffy, almost cartoonish clouds. "Intellego auram!" I shouted. I got no response, even when I repeated the command several times and focused specifically on the wind. Well, what did I expect to learn from the sky? The current strength and pattern of wind currents? What possible meaning could that have for me? I suppose it was a failure of imagination, but "intellego auram" produced no impressions at all.

Aspirational house: I wasn't happy with my first house attempt, but figured I should try again. I tried to find a house that looked more like something I would actually want to live in. Stone walls, of course, something old and solid and dignified. I "located" such a house but it felt a bit fake, like I was forcing the issue, maybe even creating an overlay of what I wanted to see over what was actually there. I tried to remind myself this is dream, nothing is "actually" there, and went through the front door.

This front door was also pleasingly solid and heavy, and it latched shut on its own, a big improvement over the last one. I found myself in a little coatroom or antechamber, and from there passed through another door into a spacious kitchen. As I walked in I was still determined for this to be the house I was hoping for, so at first I felt like my impressions were driven more by imagination than dream. But after a moment dream took over, and my vague wishes solidified into a magnificent kitchen. It was long and narrow, and over to my right I had the impression of a stove range where a woman was cooking. To my left was the food storage area, consisting of a large refrigerator, floor-to-ceiling stainless steel doors that turned out to be the cupboards for dry goods, and the glass doors of a built-in freezer that also occupied a whole section of the wall. Although I had created the basic structures through my own deliberate imagining, as I now opened the doors and peeked at the contents, I was satisfied that dream had followed through and spontaneously filled in the details. When I opened the door of the refrigerator, there was even a beautifully frosted white cake, and although I thought I heard the woman across the room warning me not to touch it, I couldn't resist lifting up a corner of the plastic cover and using my finger to swipe a bit of the frosting. The vivid taste made me glad of my mischief... just like real buttercream!

I don't remember the other rooms of this house as clearly as the kitchen, though in contrast the last house it was furnished and even peopled. Upstairs I ran into a guy with a beard and mustache and decided to work on my ongoing attempt to summon game characters. I wondered if it would work better if I started with a character I had less interest in, so that I'd be less concerned about "getting it right." Last night in DA:I I had some conversation scenes with Blackwall in which I basically friendzoned him, so I tried to transform this DC into him by visualizing the scene I remembered. The voice was easier than the face; it wasn't a complete success but not a complete failure either. Unexpectedly I ended up kissing the DC (which was not in the original scene), and it was at this point that he seemed most like the game character, though I didn't take our interactions any further.

In further exploring the upstairs of this house, I opened a closet door and found myself in—I'm not sure what to call it, maybe "the labyrinth," a kind of claustrophobic dream space that perpetually replicates itself. In the past I've experienced it when I've portaled and accidentally found myself trapped in a seemingly endless series of tiny doorless rooms. This time it wasn't even rooms, just a texture like pebbly pastel-colored styrofoam that was pressing in on all sides. Wherever I pushed through in any direction, I found myself in another identical space. I even "airlifted," a technique of rising vertically that usually extricates me from unpleasant or threatening situations, but was still stuck in the labyrinth. In the past, the only way I've gotten out was to wake up, but this time I was determined to keep cool and persevere. Sure enough, eventually the sense of claustrophobia receded and I found myself in a new scene. Maybe the labyrinth is no more than a virtual rendering of unconstructed dream space.

I was now outdoors on a street far too narrow for cars, and cobbled. It was pleasingly archaic, and I wondered if I could work on the DA:I theme some more. The only distraction was the brightly colored balloons that were attached everywhere for some reason... a festival? At the end of the street I climbed a steep staircase to the second floor of an unpainted wooden building, and on an inspiration, I thought, "When I turn the corner, I want to see my dream lover." (I've been thinking it over in WL, and decided that I might prefer this over a mere "guide." But my DCs have been so inconsistent that to date I've identified neither.)

I turned the corner and... sitting in a rocking chair was a drab, ugly old woman. (I already mentioned how perverse my subconscious can be.) I didn't want to be rude, so I approached her with questions. At my wondering why she appeared in this form, she answered, "We take different appearances." I had the feeling that the "we" included both of us. Although I was not attracted to her in this form, I thought there was something familiar in her eyes, so I kissed her anyway. Around this time another DA:I character, Sera, came climbing up a rope onto the balcony of the room, and I thought perhaps the dream was suggesting that we take a stand for lesbian love. I was up for this, so I yelled at the young man pursuing Sera up the rope that he had better climb down as quickly as he could, if he hoped to stand a chance of surviving when I cut it. I pulled out my knife and let the taut rope brush against the sharp blade, severing some of the strands to show my threat was serious. The man started climbing down again, but the rope was not as durable as I thought, and my knife hadn't cut through more than a third of its width before the rest of it broke and unraveled, dropping him to the street. I peered down anxiously but was relieved to see him stand up again, apparently unharmed. "Sorry!" I shouted, and genuinely meant it.

Things only got weirder from here, and at the point where the jockey told me, "They should tape our warm hands to the wheel," and I was going over this line trying to make sure I would remember it, I started to wonder if I should wake myself up. Hell no, I decided. So there were more things I don't remember clearly, and I'm not sure how I found myself in my old house.

Old house: I was in the house where I lived from the age of ten until I left for college. This was so far into the dream that I can't be sure if it was another attempt at the TOTM that brought me here, but once I found myself in the house, it definitely felt relevant to the task... of all the places I've lived in my life, this was the one I felt the most connection to, and it lives very intact in my memory. I floated through it like a disembodied spirit, mostly impressed by the accuracy of what I saw. But there was something drab and empty about it, too, perhaps because I was aware that everything I was saw no longer existed: the house was sold shortly after I finished college, so although it still stands, it is no longer the home I remember.

I started in my bedroom, floated through the upstairs playroom I shared with my brother, drifted down the stairs, and then made a circuit through the dining room, into the parlor, through the closet that connected the parlor to my parents' bedroom, and through the adjoining bathroom. Everything looked ordinary and intact until this point, when I saw the first oddity: a white enamel woodburning stove, a kitchen model, was in the bathtub for some reason. I continued floating into the kitchen, where we did have such a woodstove—original to the house—though the real one was black cast iron and much too large to fit in any tub. I concluded my tour in the living room, having made a complete circuit of everything but my brother's room, the pantry, and the workroom.

There was something festive about the decoration of the living room, perhaps because of the many wonderful Christmases we had enjoyed there, and another oddity: a giant pair of elk horns, which when I looked closer appeared to be attached to an actual elk, although it was standing as still as a statue. I assumed the elk horns were DR, since I had recently been impressed by pictures of the giant Irish elk, an extinct species (neither specifically Irish nor actually an elk, to be pedantic) that sported massive antlers. It reminded me of the elk that Thranduil rode, and my earlier successes inspired me to attempt another thematic summoning. I clambered on the back of the giant elk and rode it outside (conveniently ignoring the fact that there is no way its antlers would have fit through the the ordinary-sized door that led outside from the living room.)



Outside it was winter, everything covered in snow, and I found myself in a hilly landscape with no connection to my old yard. I focused on finding Thranduil and saw him up ahead on his own elk, actively battling a pack of large winter wolves. He was alone and I feared that if I did not intervene I would lose the chance to talk to him, so I charged ahead using fire magic to clear the pack. When the battle was done and we stood alone again, surrounded by the fallen wolves, he gave me an imperious look and said coldly, "No Lothian tickets will be given to see me." Although I wasn't sure what he meant by "Lothian" (or why I feel like it should be capitalized), I had the impression that he was telling me that he was not someone to be summoned at whim by a mere dreamer. So I changed tactics, presenting myself as his sister. According to the lore I don't even think he has a sister, but it worked.

"So, our father in the middle of a storm brought anzu fruits for our hunters," I informed him, pointing to a cache of green and orange spheres buried under a patch of ice. Thranduil accepted my new identity and greeted me with a prim brotherly kiss, to which I responded with somewhat more than sisterly affection, though I tried not to go full Lannister on him. It was here that I awoke at last, delighted to have finally made some progress in the character summonings that, to date, I have found the most difficult type of tasks.

June 15, 2015

---

I was with a group of my classmates, except that there were some other people there, too. One of them was a girl who was a year below me in high school, who is doing her undergrad in education at the same university as me. She was telling me how she was going to come back to do the same master's program I'm doing when she finished her undergrad studies. another of the people in the group was a guy from my high school.

We were sitting, eating our lunch near a large building with lots of big windows. There were apparently a lot of illegal Asian students at the university lately, and the campus police were really cracking down on them. We could see through the huge windows that a young woman was running from a group of like five cops. She was carrying her books and had classes, she looked like a normal college student but much more modest. She eventually ran out of the building and past us. I was a little worried because one of the people in my group was Asian and I was worried about racial profiling. Three of the cops continued chasing the young woman, but two of them stopped and inspected our group. One stood back as the other confronted me first. He asked my name and major, I answered. He moved on to the friend from highschool, and asked him the same questions. But he was nervous and stammered, and the cop got confrontational and hostile, got up in his face, and then forcefully kissed him violently. I punched the cop in the jaw and yelled at him, telling him I was filing charges and that I had been recording the whole thing. The cop skunked off.

Our group was moving on, to a secret garden type place, where we were going to meet Kali, who was apparently our field instructor or something. He told us we had to go to Germany for a final test, and that the university was paying for our tickets. I was so excited to be going back to Germany! We all packed our things, and somehow managed to get in the same car heading for a place we were going to stay in tonight, before the flight. In the car, I was looking out the window. The scenery couldn't decide what it wanted to be, and I thought this was funny... I had the inkling I was dreaming, so I checked my hands... I WAS dreaming!

I was so happy to be lucid again after such a long dry spell, that for a while I just let the dream play out. We were still in the car, though, and it was still driving. I remembered the TOTM to find a house that represented yourself, and so I told myself that the car would stop in front of the building that was ME. Sure enough, the car did stop very soon after that. I phased through the door and looked. The building in front of us was a large-ish Greek looking place. It was really pretty, and Kali stopped to take pictures of all of us in different poses in front of the building. I opened the door to see what the inside was like. It was fascinating! It was all Winchester-y, with rooms in odd places. I could see most of the rooms at once, though, because it was all very open. Most of the things in the rooms were deep reds, dark blues/browns, whites and splashes of blinding bright orange. Zukin was sitting on a bench in the entry room, and stood up when she saw me. "Finally!" She said, grabbing my hand and leading me around the house. "I've been waiting for you for ages. Let's explore!" We looked through a lot of the rooms, but I knew there were more. We went up stairs and ladders, down some and through countless doorways. Somehow I still knew exactly where I was in the house! Usually I'm so directionally challenged. We heard the maid calling us down for drinks, and I decided to go talk to her to see what she knew about this building. But Zukin wanted to go find the Chinchilla Room.

We split up, me going down and she going further up. When I reached the bottom, I was about to ask the maid what she knew about the Me-House, when the DC of the high school friend thanked me for sticking up for him earlier. He game me a drink in a "candied coconut shell" which was really delicious! I lost a lot of my lucidity and got horny, but the dream faded away after I walked onto a long balcony overlooking a cliff on the ocean. It was beautiful.

A woman and I are running from a pursuer, another woman. "Faster, faster!" the first woman urges me. "Don't look back, it will slow you down." I don't see why I have to run away, but fine, I'll play along... I do look back, however, and I'm surprised how close the pursuer is. This motivates me to try to put some distance between me and her, so I run harder... and yet I can't seem to make much gain on her. I'm perplexed: I know I should be able to do this, I'm dreaming, it's not like I have to rely on my physical stamina. I wonder if the answer is in running with more short strides rather than trying to cover more distance with each step, much as one is advised to run in WL, so I try out variations. I'm making progress, but concentrating so hard on my running form is becoming tedious. "Imagining running is almost as hard as the real thing!" I comment to the woman fleeing with me. Getting bored with this situation I decide to put an end to it, and succeed in sprinting ahead to the point where I can turn a corner and leave the pursuer's field of vision, at which point I figure I've made a fair escape.

However, it turns out that my pursuer had an accomplice: I now find myself in a struggle with a huge brawny man with a shaggy brown beard. I perceive him as a Viking, and I'm aware that his name is Torvald. He is connected somehow with the woman who was chasing me earlier, and is likewise an antagonist. Our struggle manifests partially as a kind of combat, but it feels as much like a battle of dream control as a physical battle.

I easily resist Torvald's initial attempts to subdue me, but his immense confidence makes me wonder if I should doubt my own. I go on the offensive and try to put him out of action more permanently, trying various tactics to destroy his body. For instance, at one point I imagine his body being crushed by a great weight from above, and although this has him stretched out supine on the ground for as long as I'm actively thinking it, he is soon back on his feet. I try crushing his heart and throat from inside his body, but he is only briefly inconvenienced.

I wonder if fire would do the trick, and visualize Torvald's body burning to ash. Though I've said nothing aloud, he appears to understand my intentions, and rather than actively resisting like he did with my other attacks, he simply denies the efficacy of this approach. "Fire won't work," he tells me flatly. I refuse to acknowledge this and continue contentrating on the image of fire consuming him. "Fire won't work," Torvald tells me again. I'm thinking: how could this be? It's my dream, isn't it? Fire should work if I say it should work. So I redouble my focus on the fire. With patient indifference, Torvald insists: "Fire won't work." I find this disconcerting, because apparently my confidence is unable to overcome his. Aren't I the dreamer? But there is no time for philosophical questions; we are still in combat. I switch tactics: if he is resistant to fire, how about ice? I start to try to freeze him—even if it doesn't destroy him it might at least slow him down temporarily—but Torvald has found the opening he needed and pins me to the ground.

Torvald's inexplicable ability to ignore my attempts to burn him makes me wonder if I should worry that he could actually harm me. But I have a superpower too: as the dreamer, I am invulnerable... aren't I? I decide to play it safe, and secretly project my "real" identity to the roof of a nearby building. It is a large square brick structure about 8–10 stories high, and I crouch behind the low brick railing that surrounds the flat roof, tempted to peek out at the combat occurring down below but not wanting to let Torvald see me and discover the trick. So I transfer my perceptions back to my body on the ground, which I now regard as a mere DC, and thus disposable. If my attacker succeeds in destroying this body, it won't matter: I've secured my identity elsewhere. Torvald actually glances up toward the roof when I think this, and I quickly realize that I need to guard my thoughts as well.

"Do you have someone watching me?" Torvald asks. I am relieved, because although he suspects that there is an observer on the roof, he hasn't seen through my whole trick—he doesn't seem to recognize that the person up there is actually me. I project a new thought toward him, gleefully: I recall how undercover police have been tracking him, and that I've been using our encounter to distract and delay him until they were in position. Maybe none of this was true earlier, but it doesn't matter: this is a dream battle, so it is true now! When Torvald looks back down at me, I grin mockingly and deliberately call him by the wrong name, "Harald," just to annoy him further. The game is up, and my undercover officers move in and force Torvald to release me. I'm not sure what happens to him after that... pleased with having solved the dilemma, I simply walk away.

What's next? The last incident was not one that I had intended, but now I'm free to work on tasks. I enter a wide clearing and wonder if I should try the Dragon Age task again. I've always liked the idea of aligning dream space with fictional environments from books, films, or games, but I'm still trying to figure out how to do it. I suppose the first step would be to remember a concrete environment from the game and try to insert aspects of it here. I played DA:I just last night, so I should be able to access those memories... but as I seek them out I feel a tremor of dream instability, and decide not to push it. If there's a risk of waking, I should put that task off until later. For now, there are still a few TOTMs I haven't tried this month, and I decide to work on those.

"Taste a rainbow." That one is easy to remember. I imagine a rainbow in the sky, and produce something very faint and not at all rainbow-colored. The colors are largely ochres and earthtones, and not even in proper lines but arranged in a more tesselated pattern over the arch. I'm not being a perfectionist at this point, so I accept this as a "rainbow" and shrink it into a stick of candy in my hand. The colors have changed in the process, and for some reason the candy stick is white with swirls of red and blue. Still not rainbow-colored! But I take a bite. The texture is interesting, lots of little pieces that crunch between my teeth, but the flavor is a real disappointment: vague, muted, and blandly sweet. Apart from "sweet," no other descriptors really present themselves. This won't do. A rainbow should taste more unusual than this! I decide to start over.

This time I put more work into the rainbow itself. I first visualize it, then focus on the faint transparent arch until it becomes more clearly visible, but this also has the consequence of making it more material. Now it appears like a physical object, a two-dimensional vertical banner in an arch about ten feet high and twenty feet long, right in front of me. I work on correcting the pattern so that it has rainbow colors in properly aligned stripes... I see some improvement, although it is a C+ effort at best. It looks better than my last attempt, anyway, so I approach the "rainbow" and try to take a bite directly out of it. The experience is like... chewing on a shower curtain. It really feels like I've put a sheet of plastic in my mouth, although the material is soft enough to crush between my teeth. Again the texture is more prominent than the taste. I put all my attention on the flavor, trying to detect anything describable, and think maybe I get some underlying fruity notes, but again it remains vague and uninteresting. Taste and smell are the least developed of my dream senses... I wonder if I could improve them if I worked at it?

I feel like I have adequately completed the task, anyway, and wonder what to try next. In all my efforts with the rainbows I had hardly paused to note all the people sitting at various tables around this clearing, like picnickers, but observing them now, I figure it might be fun to try the magic show. What would a stage magician do? I guess the most basic tricks involve having something up one's hat or one's sleeve? I notice that I am completely naked, which has long since ceased to embarrass me in dreams, but gives me a mischievous idea.

"What's up my sleeve?" I start circling among the various tables, challenging the audience members to come up with a response. One of the first responses is: "Following a guy from Eton to [...]?" (I forgot the second place name.) This answer reminds me of the earlier scene, and how I resolved the conflict with Torvald. This DC must have been one of my officers! "Are you an undercover cop?" I ask him in reply. He grudgingly nods. "Not anymore!" I'm joking about how he has just blown his cover, but it also feels like an appropriate analogy to my own lack of sleeves... I'm not "undercover" either.

I continue asking, "What's up my sleeve?" and collect various other responses from the audience, all of which were non-sequiturs... but I reasoned that the illogic of the question itself (since there was no sleeve) invited such creative responses. After hearing from seven different people, I realized that I might have trouble remembering all this when I woke up, so I stopped and went over their answers again, one by one, to help fix them in memory. Already I had trouble recalling two of the answers, but one of the DCs helpfully reminded me, additionally pointing out that the answers varied between the metaphorical (things that never could go up a sleeve) and the literal ("Three shekels" was one of these answers, I think). Meanwhile I was getting ready for the grand finale to my show, when I would reveal my own answer to the question. I had been planning on the groaningly obvious "Nothing!" and was ready for the big reveal when I noticed that something had changed... now I was wearing clothes, including a short-sleeved shirt. I realized that if I was going to go for the groaningly obvious at this point, I would have to answer "My arm!"

I felt myself start waking up, and I already had a lot to remember and report so I didn't resist the process. I woke up slowly enough that I was able to concentrate on those seven answers from the DCs and hold them in mind, with what felt like excellent clarity and accuracy. And then something happened... as I crossed the threshold, despite all my care and preparation, the memories abruptly tattered, the details dissolving. The only one of the seven answers I could still remember, and that incompletely, was the first—and that I suspect only because it was anchored by its reference to the earlier scene.

12.06.2015

Soccer, UFOs and more soccer (DILD)

NON-DREAM DREAM LUCID

Been extremely busy doing many new improvements in my business and other personal stuff. Finished yesterday and already worked back on dreams Did the basic task here.

I was in some place and there was a soccer goal and I told myself why not doing some keeper training. Someone started to shot some penalty kicks and other type of chuts and I was doing pretty well, blocking all the soccerballs from hitting the goal. I felt happy and suddenly, a couple small kids spawned and started to throw soccerballs at me as well. I stopped them all.

After a while doing this, some random soccer players came and started to throw a massive amount of soccer balls, but I think I blocked them all as well. One of them told me that they were going to come tomorrow and use additional balls such as baseballs, footballs, tennisballs, and more... I was wondering that it was such a crazy challenge.

This turned me lucid, but I was enjoying very much my dream, so I kind of said, "Alright, I will just spawn some goal keeper gloves to be able to have better control of my skills." However, I failed. I tried to do it a few times, but when I looked to my hands, I had no gloves on. My hands and fingers changed almost every time I looked at them, just hopping for some gloves. I went outside and I saw a tree and remembered the basic task.

I climbed the tree (hopping to find some gloves) but no gloves. I saw my surroundings. It was a busy city in terms of buildings and lights, but it was silent. I also saw the sky. It was night and it was beautiful. I felt like taking a flight, but wanted to do the soccer thing. However, I saw a few clouds with the shapes of UFOs, some of them where amazing. The UFOs were real, as they had lights and everything, but they were made out of clouds. I decided to fly to one of the UFOs but as I approached at it, it vanished.

I decided to land and look for my gloves. I saw two female characters who appeared to be attracted to me, as they were staring at me in a sexy stance. I approached at them and said, "Do you have my goalkeeper gloves?" One of them said, "Yes, here:" She spawned some gloves similar to these:







I put my gloves on, but it was super hard to puy them on. I lost lucidity at some point, and after a while, I was able to get my gloves on, but now I was in the car, my wife was driving and we were in one of the north San Diego neighborhoods. I saw Gianluigi Buffon moving in a huge house:







I told my wife to stop as I wanted to meet him. We got inside the house and it was under construction still. I was hopping to meet Buffon so he could sign my gloves. I figured that since the gloves were dream-gloves I wouldn't need to return them and if I held tight to them, I could take them out from the dream world to the waking word. We got inside the main lobby of the house and I saw a TV in the distance showing The Simpsons. I was waiting for meet with Buffon until my wife woke me up.

Cool Basic task 1
Tonight I had a main and a mini - lucid dreams- yippee
In the first LD I remembered that I wanted to go to taste the rainbow, so I flew up into the sky and imagined myself flying towards a rainbow - the rainbow was there - "there is the beautiful rainbow I want to taste "I said.
However the rainbow was really not all that beautiful and it was quite hard to imagine - sure it was kind of black and white, not in colour ;(however it was my rainbow that I imagine at that time ...I flew towards it and flew through it. I opened my mouth as I flew through it so that I could taste the rainbow. It is not taste of Much that I remember it was black and white taste perhaps -lol- lucidity was low but I was still aware that I was in my dream. I went on to complete the second task now basic task to climb a tree see the view.I went flying to a close by tree "there is a tree that I will climb and see a beautiful view, space and complete my task" I said. I then woke up.
So I guess this means I completed the first basic task of the month even though it is quite low lucidity effort - still happy

Ok I typed a bunch of this up, then left the room and Sofie sat on the keyboard and messed up my whole world.

I had a nap WILD, phased through my bedroom wall, got a little stuck, got outside, saw a tree, climbed it, got to the top, but I was too heavy for it and it bent over and I was back on the ground lol.

Then I WILDed again and called Lee Pace on my cell phone and he showed up in a sports car and we made out until he disappeared and I woke up.

I was planning on doing a wbtb and then lding for the totm, but I got the ld before the wbtb.

A very long dream where me and mom go from tasting food at some fancy restaurant to running away from street thugs in a nasty area. The dream covered a great deal of distance by foot. At some point towards obviously the end of the REM, my awareness goes up and I have a moment of clarity. I remember the totm and actually also a moment before all the running away and eating that was also lucid and I did a quick tree climb there as well but a short one before losing lucidity. We are in the streets of this South African town and I am excited about exploring, thinking I can do the task of the month later as I feel I have plenty of time. Still, I decide to give it a try now rather than later. There is a tree right in front of me, and while holding something in one hand, I use the other to climb up the tree. It is very easy to do, which feels weird and cool at the same time. As I focus on the tree, couple more branches appear and I wonder would this turn into an endless climbing. Luckily, the tree height stops to extend beyond and I finally reach its top. I remind myself to have a look at the surroundings, checking out the streets below, the buildings ahead and what looks like a small park in between. At this point, the dream ends rather unexpectedly.

Ritual: I haven't let myself get bothered by my dry spell of the last few weeks, since it was easily attributable to lack of motivation and practice. My work life has been much more relaxed, so I think dreaming has been less psychologically necessary. I'm starting to observe a consistent pattern where I get lucid more frequently and intensely at times when I am under the most stress in waking life. I always think I'll have more time to work on dreaming when that stress disappears, but usually I find my motivation disappears along with it. I think this is because when I have more free time, I indulge in other kinds of experiences that satisfy my mind in a way similar to dreaming: films, books, and especially computer games.

Recently I started getting irritated with the bad dream recall and lack of lucidity, and decided to put more work into it. I did a few WILD attempts where my inability to count much higher than ten revealed my lack of mental focus and clarity, and they went nowhere. Today I found myself wide awake after sleeping four hours, a perfect WBTB, so I decided to try again. I didn't want to take any active supplements (alpha-gpc, galantamine, or piracetam), but I also didn't want to miss out on the placebo effect and reifying of intentions that might be gained from swallowing something, so I took a few tablets of bacopa and one of NAC. For good measure I also strapped on my MotivAider, set to 45 minutes, then lay down to do some counting. My focus was still crap.

I was not fully asleep yet when I felt the first pulse of the MotivAider, however it roused me enough that I noticed I was seeing some really amazing hypnagogic patterns. This is the first time I've experienced such distinctly geometric and symmetrical patterns in the hypnagogic state. I got up to use the bathroom and was amazed at the way the patterns persisted every time I closed my eyes, moving and transforming. I was tempted to wake up more fully to sketch them, but realized I could make better use of this state, so I preserved it and kept watching the imagery as I lay back down in bed.

I decided to skip the counting this time and work directly on tactile sensations. I concentrated on trying to move the dream body without activating my real one, and there was that inevitable ambiguity at first, but then I reached up to touch my face and I was pretty sure it was my dream arm that did it. I felt around my mouth with my tongue and was sure of it: the taste in my mouth felt too flat, too muted, to even be the normal background mouth-taste that we typically overlook. When I was confident that I had integrated into the dream body, I got up into my bedroom.

WILD, "Reflections / Zznvogayi": It is my first time getting lucid this month, so I decide to try a TOTM. The mirror task is convenient, since there are large mirrored sliding closet doors only steps away from my bed. I walk over and stand in front of one. At first I think the reflection bears a close resemblance to me, only with fuller cheeks and smaller eyes. But rapidly these features grow more exaggerated until they no longer look like me at all: the face is horribly bloated and the eyes have all but vanished beneath the puffy surrounding tissue. I recognize this as DR: I've been reading Gyo, a horror manga by Junji Ito, and it's full of faces like this. I force myself to keep watching as the image becomes more and more hideous, as though it is deliberately trying to unnerve me, but I remain calm and at last it vanishes.

It seems like the show is over, but the TOTM instructions were to keep looking as long as you can, so I continue watching the mirror. For a while it shows no reflection at all, just an empty dark space. Then a new reflection appears. This woman is beautiful, elegantly dressed in an archaic ballgown. I note that the bottom of her dress expands into almost a full half-sphere, and recall that this style was characteristic of the 1850s. I look up toward her face, but even though the expansive bottom of her dress is brightly illuminated, her entire upper body is in deep shadow and I can make out nothing but the silhouette of an appealingly slender torso. I keep staring until finally a tinge of light illuminates the lower curve of a shapely breast. I never do see the rest of her. As I continue watching, she is replaced by a male figure. I have the impression of a hairy man in rough clothing or primitive furs, but already the dream is deconstructing itself around me and when it stabilizes I am in another place entirely.

I find myself at the top of stairs leading down through water and rockery, landscaping that reminds me of a Chinese garden, though the buildings on all sides look contemporary. I wander down the stairs wondering what to do next. In late May I finally started playing Dragon Age: Inquisition, and was delighted to discover that one of the core characters is a lucid dreamer. This gives me the idea to try to summon him. Summoning people, historical or fictional (I rarely attempt it with WL people because I feel like it would be rude to deal with their doppelgangers), has always been my weakest area of dream control, but I'm determined to make it work. At first I hope to recognize the character among random DCs passing by, but don't see any likely candidates. Then I notice that at the bottom of the stairs is a large cafe, with a number of tables clustered in a semi-interior space with no front wall. This gives me an idea.

The cafe is organized enough to have a hostess desk, so I approach the two women working there and tell them, "There's someone waiting for me." When they ask his name, I say "Solas." One of the women acknowledges that he is here, and tells me to follow her. Oh my, is my trick actually working? I worry that I might get too excited over the prospect of success and destabilize the dream, and of course even that thought comes dangerously close to doing so, but I quell it and force myself to keep going along with the events I've set in motion, despite my impatience. So I follow the hostess, who leads me among the small circular tables toward one where a man is sitting by himself. I squint at him, trying to figure out if he really looks like Solas. Not so much: his face is thin enough but the features aren't right, and his skin has an odd greenish cast. I do my best to will his appearance into a better fit with my expectations, but this doesn't work. Oh well, appearances aren't everything. Maybe at least he'll identify as the character?

I sit down at the table and say, "Are you Solas?" He confirms that he is not. I don't remember our conversation clearly, but I recall being impressed with this DC's confidence and sense of his own identity. He seemed to find my questions foolish or nonsensical whenever I attempted to steer him toward my own ideas of how the scene should play out. For instance, when I asked something like "Are you from Thedas?" he replied emphatically, "I am from here." Still trying to keep up with the DA:I theme, I asked, "Is this the Fade?" I seem to recall he had an interesting answer to that, but I've unfortunately forgotten it.

At some point either I ask for his name or he volunteers it... and it is both odd and unfamiliar. I repeat what I think I've heard: "Vinyogi?" He shakes his head and says it again. This time I can make out that there are four syllables, with the emphasis on the second. "Zunvogayi?" I have to try several times before he's happy with my pronunciation, but it sounded something like that. I ask how to spell it, thinking this will help me remember it better, and he explains that the first syllable is spelled 'Zzn', but clarifies that the second 'z' functions as a 'u'. He gets up to leave and I follow, badgering him about how to spell the rest of it. He asks why I want to know, which I realize is a reasonable suspicion. I try to come up with an explanation that will sound bland and plausible without mentioning that I'm dreaming this, so I say something lame along the lines of, "I like to keep records of my activities."

Outside the cafe we head left down a path and then turn to the right, where some DCs are gathered looking at a long thin object resembling a small oar that is attached to a wall with a number on the paddle end. From their conversation I gather that it is a house number, and possibly they are trying to figure out if they should proceed with some kind of heist. Zznvogayi pulls out some cards and lays down four of them as though doing a divination. There are words and pictures on the cards, but they don't make sense to me. From what I can tell, the cards suggest that "if you have guts you get ice cream." I tentatively interpret that to mean that bravery will yield rewards... a favorable oracle? The DCs discuss the matter among themselves. Meanwhile I'm still pestering Zznvogayi to tell me how to spell the rest of his name, which he finally does. Of course it was just as complicated as the first syllable, and all I remember now is him explaining: "The 'v' and the 'd' are the same." "That makes sense," I reply, thinking how easily the two letters could merge based on linguistic similarity, and the fact that in some languages, like Sanskrit, they commonly occur in the compound phoneme 'dv'.

I want to make another attempt at summoning Solas, but this environment is too modern and urban to be suitable, so I decide to find somewhere better. Since there are a lot of DCs around I offer to make a show of it, announcing, "I'm going to make a portal!" Sure enough, this gets their attention and a small audience gathers behind me. I realize that with so many people watching I ought to give them a good visual spectacle. I begin by establishing, a few feet above the ground, a smudge of light colored deep cobalt blue. Then I wave my hand in a circle to rotate the light, spinning it into a flat vertical disk. I recall the beautiful hypnagogic patterns I was watching earlier as I fell asleep, and decorate the disk similarly. When I feel that the portal is well-established, I step through, trying to fix my thoughts on an environment appropriate to DA:I. However, at the spur of the moment I have trouble remembering any setting in particular, and for a while I find myself floating in unconstructed dream space. I focus on staying in the dream and finally a new environment forms around me. Across well-groomed lawns are large buildings whose style is unmistakably contemporary. There are no windows on the side wall of the building that I'm facing, just a four-digit number to identify it. This place looks like an expensive corporate campus: very far from what I was hoping for!

FA: It was probably the disappointment that woke me, but I had so much to write that I immediately went into "preserve and recall" mode, grabbing the notebook next to my bed and jotting down as many notes as I could before the memories faded, starting with the name 'Zznvogayi'. At one point I noticed that the pen wasn't making any marks on the paper, and remembered that earlier I had covered part of that page with an oval of wax. I tried to remember why and thought it must have had something to do with portals. I flipped over to a new page and continued taking notes, until I woke up more fully and realized that I was not actually writing, it had been an FA, and I would need to pick up my notebook for real and do it properly.

Actually had two different wake-up times today, with several tasks completed in each one.

8:15am
I was at work (during the summer, I work with a Dell contractor setting up computers at elementary schools), but there were a ton of annoying kids that kept asking what we were doing. They kept stealing some of our equipment, and we had to chase them down to get it back. It took us forever to finally finish the job with all the setbacks.

I was at my childhood house, when I spontaneously became lucid. I was able to remember the TOTMs, and one of them was staring at a mirror. I walked over to this body-length mirror we had by the bathroom and stared at my reflection. I had a 5 o’clock shadow of a beard, and was initially wearing a green hoodie (kind of like my avatar), but then everything kept changing. My face kept changing shape, mainly getting fatter and skinnier. My facial hair kept changing from a beard to clean shaven to a goatee. My hair changed styles, eventually growing out until it hung down to my shoulders. Even my hoodie changed colors, from red to blue to purple. I stared as long as I could, but I had to look away for fear the dream would destabilize.

I next decided to walk outside and take on more tasks. I immediately saw a rainbow canopy hanging over the door to the garage. I thought about eating it to do the rainbow task, but figured that wouldn’t really meet the requirements. Instead I looked in the sky, and saw 3 or 4 rainbows that seemed decently close to the ground. One looked like it was right above the top of this tree in my backyard, so I figured I’d kill two birds with one stone and climb the tree to eat it. I started climbing the tree, but after I got about halfway, the tree started to sink into the ground. I managed to get to the top, but by that time it was too low to the ground and I couldn’t see over my house. I jumped off and flew over to another tree in my backyard. I landed fairly close to the top, but before I could take in my surroundings, the tree started sinking again. I was about to try it on one more tree, but the dream switched.

I was now in this futuristic dystopia in what seemed like a space station. Flying robots patrolled the halls, and were required to escort you from one part of the station to another, to make sure you didn’t try to escape. I apparently had done something bad, so I was being escorted by the robots to the police. They brought me to this area outside (if there is an “outside” on a space station) with a large catapult. Next to the catapult, a man was standing with a revolver pointed at me. He didn’t look like him, but for some reason I knew that this guy was a resurrected Joseph Stalin. He threatened to shoot me if I didn’t launch myself from the catapult through a large hoop in the air about 100 yards away. “You’re insane, why do I have to do that?” He cocked his gun, so I reluctantly agreed. I flew through the sky, but missed the target by a lot and fell. Luckily, I respawned next to the catapult, again with Stalin pointing the gun at me. I tried several times, but I missed every time. Eventually, I decided I didn’t want to launch again. I tried to knock the gun out Stalin’s hand, but instead it fired into my stomach, and I died. I respawned yet again, and tried several times to knock the gun out until I woke up for real.
---

10:15am
I was at the house of my 6th grade teacher. I was hiding upstairs because I was naked, and tried to find any clothes I could use to cover up. I thought to cover my nether regions with toilet paper for some reason, so I wrapped myself a nice pair of TP underwear around my legs and crotch.

Spoiler for ”R-Rated Content”:

No, seriously, I’m not joking, this part’s really weird and slightly disturbing. It’s really not that important to the story, I’m only putting it here in the interest of full disclosure. Are you sure you want to read it?

Spoiler for ”Yes, I have a sick sense of humor.”:

Unfortunately, my penis broke through the toilet paper in the front. I was going to reinforce it, but I heard someone coming upstairs. I didn’t want anyone to see me in this embarrassing situation, so in a panicking frenzy, I grabbed some scissors and cut off my penis. I then quickly re-covered my crotch with TP.

A young girl, probably about 5 or 6 came upstairs, and thankfully didn’t seem to care about my lack of clothes. She told me to come downstairs, so I did,but I also spontaneously became lucid. I remembered another TOTM, with the magic show. I got their attention, and then pulled out some scissors and cut off my finger. At first they were a little concerned, but then I waved my hand over my finger, and it reappeared. I did it again just for the heck of it, and they were both impressed.

Next I remembered the house quest. In an attempt to make sure my intention came true, I leaned down to the girl.

“Do you want to check out my house?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s not only my house, it literally represents me.”
“Woah, cool!”

I take her by the hand and we walk outside. Everything looks like it’s built in Minecraft style. We walk over to my house. The exterior of the house had large windows for every room. We walked around the back of the house, and I could see that every room had a single plaque in the middle of each room as a centerpiece. I walked through the back door into a small library, where several of my old friends were sitting at some tables. One of them waved me over to tell me something (which I don’t remember now). I talked to them until I woke up.