CanisLucidus

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #138: Hot Coals

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

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

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

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

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

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

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