DoubleHelix

PRE-LUCID: I am in a huge, round, open, very green grassy field with natural hills at least 1/4 mile in circumference bordered by a forest. It forms a natural bowl and is perfect for a Woodstock-like concert. There are several young men setting up vinyl strap beach chairs with cup holders with cigars in them as if they are getting ready to watch some kind of event. Through the tree line I see diesel powered military-type vehicles with large caliber guns mounted on them slowly, almost stealthily weaving their way between the trees into the open field with some difficulty, along with a number of uniformed, green camouflaged ground troops composed of both men and women. I am entirely unarmed so I duck out of the field into the forest to hide and watch. The vehicles and troops make their way into the open field, and from my position behind their lines, they form a long, thin vulnerable line, so I attack. I run along their line and, like a child, make a machine-gun sound and yell “You’re dead...and YOU'RE dead!” and they fall down as if really shot. As I run, I go off of a rise in the land and....I’m flying!!! I go 100% lucid at this point. Holy crap! I’m dreaming! This is a dream!

I don’t like the war scene responsible for my lucidity, so I fly off superman style at a pretty high speed, in decent control. I spot what looks like an elementary or middle school from the air and fly right down to about waist high right at the brick outer wall. I remember FryingMan’s words that you have to KNOW that the wall is no more substantial than dream air, so I figure either this is going to work or it will hurt and I’ll simply wake up. I succeed in penetrating the wall. For the first one or two feet, there is some light and visible (but not realistic) structure to the wall's interior. As I go deeper, it turns black and I feel a bit concerned and disoriented. I think I’m still going straight, so I keep going. After what seems like a LONG distance (maybe 30 feet) I break through into a well lit gymnasium with a nice wood floor finished in a high gloss.

Initially I am alone. I try to conjure up a woman with whom I can have sex, but she is ugly and misshapen - looking very much like a baby bird with too large a head which is nearly bald, and limbs far too long and thin and bird-like to be appealingly human. I try to get her to look attractive and human by yelling “clarify” and “more detail” but it doesn’t work...she still looks alien and bird-like. I yell out “Is there anyone here who wants to have sex?” and a very attractive woman of appropriate age (maybe 30)with short dark hair and a blouse with a plunging neck line showing substantial cleavage appears on a balcony. I tell her “You will do nicely” and she appears through a ground-level set of double doors. As I’m going down on her I start to feel embarrassed and ashamed, not to mention uncomfortable laying face down on the gymnasium’s wood floor. I change my mind about sex and decide to try and get back outside by phasing once more through the gymnasium wall. I manage to penetrate the wall, but get lost in the blackness on the way out. I start to feel lost and fearful in the dark, and this caused me to wake. Wake time = 4:40am

May 23, 2014: Dream 2 of two: I am seated alongside the hospital bed of a man I do not recognize. He has a minimally injured right hand which looks like a sprained or broken ring finger, because it is taped to his middle finger as a splint for support. Despite the tape, we shake hands and we talk as the two of us leave the room. We find ourselves standing on the red embroidered rug in the lobby of the Bellagio Hotel/Casino in Las Vegas. There is a small adorable puppy at my feet and I pick it up. It has that “new puppy” smell! The puppy belongs to the man with the injured finger. He says the puppy’s name is Clementine. He is not particularly fond of dogs, but I tell him I love this puppy. It is so cute! I secretly hope he will give it to me. I put Clementine down and it playfully romps with another, larger black dog, before the two of them playfully scamper off. When they are out of sight, I see my wife’s springer spaniel Lacey in the far distance coming towards me from the direction the two dogs ran off in.

I go to leave the casino/hotel. My car is parked in an outside lot, and is the only one visible in the deep dark of the un-illuminated lot. It is parked obliquely in front of where a rock band is set up, so I need to move the car. I get in, and Lynne appears in the passenger seat. A tall woman opens the hatch to the Nissan Pathfinder and puts in a large radio controlled helicopter which barely fits inside. A man (evidently the owner of the heli) yells to her from a distance about folding the blades, and it finally fits and she closes the hatch. I start to back up, but can’t see anything behind me that I might run into in the pitch black. The car gains more speed in reverse than I would like or is safe, and no matter how I pump on the brake with my right foot, it doesn’t slow appreciably. I switch to my left foot and also pull up on the hand parking brake. This slows us down and we finally stop. All the time the car is slowing down I am worried that we might hit something that could penetrate the rear hatch window and hurt me or Lynne, but the car finally comes to a stop without incident. I wake.

May 18, 2014: Took 100mg 5-HTP and 480mg powdered, encapsulated ADR: I am at a gathering of people, like a farmer’s market set up at the periphery of a large outdoor parking lot. The parking lot is full of cars, including my own Camry, which I have parked. I’ve been told I have some kind of “internal condition” which was spotted on an MRI or CT scan and I need to take a particular medication or antibiotic to treat the condition.

I am with a person wearing a white lab coat. He has a rectangular box which contains at least one zip lock baggie inside of which are three differently colored, very tiny pills in a foil pack which are to be taken orally. The color coding refers to the three different dosages of the pills, but it is initially unclear which is the high dose and which is the low dose, or what order in which they need to be taken. There is also a tuberculin syringe in the box, but I don’t need that.

I go to leave the market and search and search for my car. I use my key fob to press the panic button to get the horn to beep and headlights to flash, but still cannot hear, see, or locate my car. I wander all around in my search, and even though others have left and there are fewer cars, I still can’t find mine. On several occasions a car is seen to flash a single headlight when I press my fob, but it is never my car. A girl tries to tell me some old junky car is mine, and I tell her no it isn’t, I have a gas/electric hybrid Camry.

The scene shifts to a street where I am speaking with a dream character who asks me if I play basketball with a particular guy. I lie and say yes. He says he does too. The scene shifts again and I am in a car attempting to drive on a road which is deeply rutted with ice many inches thick. In some spots there are ice formations up to a foot high in the road. I come to an intersection where I can only turn left or right. In front and above me is a separate elevated roadway. At my ground-level intersection left leads to Brooklyn, and right will take me to the east. I turn right.

Now I am in a hotel-like, well-lit corridor with two other dream characters, one of whom was a childhood friend, Ray L******* whom I have not seen in over forty years. I am having a lot of trouble moving down the hall, which all of us are urgently trying to do. It feels as if I am trying to move through jello instead of air. I reach out my hand and Ray pulls me along a bit. This helps. I also grasp onto the corner of any table, cabinet or handrail I encounter to try and keep moving forwards. After much effort we finally make it to a dorm-like room or four-bed hospital room. My bed is the one just inside the door. Although there are three other beds, I know that the one nearest the door is mine because my initials are monogrammed into the bedspread. The two dream characters and I arrive at the dorm room ahead of Helen M***** and her daughter who will also be sleeping in this place. I am surprised that it is co-ed. I wake.

May 14, 2014: Dream 4 of four: Dave K***, Lynne and I are all leaving Dave’s house simultaneously. We are each leaving in our own separate cars. Dave pulls out of his driveway in the Land Rover, and heads away from the two of us down a dark street without waiting for us. I am next to drive and Lynne is behind me in her Camry, which is showing only one headlight. As we drive, we encounter dozens and dozens of pumpkins which are strewn all over the road which we cannot avoid since they are so numerous. They are only medium sized (about 10") and we hit them or pass over them as we leave without damaging our cars. We get to a corner where Dave turned right, and do the same. There are no more pumpkins on this stretch of road. I wake.

May 12, 2014: Dream # 2 of three: I enter our old house in E*** N******* through the garage. The house has no furnishings, but there are packed boxes scattered around, as if we were just preparing to move. I walk through the rooms, which are not arranged in relation to one another as they are in real life. As I make my way back towards the garage door exit on the reciprocal course, I encounter (the about to be married) B****** F***** as an 8 - 9 year old child. He has a white sheet over his head, and he is trying to look like a ghost. I remove the sheet, see who it is, and guide him towards the garage to exit the house along with me. I wake.

May 12, 2014: Dream #3 of three: After a brief period of wakefullness where I jot down notes on the above dream, I fall asleep again. I am back in same dream! I am once again entering the E*** N******** house through the garage entrance. The house once again appears to be vacant - or so I thought because there is no furniture. This time, as I walk towards the bedrooms and bathroom, I can clearly hear the sound of an electric razor being used behind the closed bathroom door. Somehow I know it is a girl in the bathroom, based upon the appearance of a “girls” bedroom and the unmade bed in one of the bedrooms. I suspect she is using the razor to trim/shave her legs.

Now that I am aware there is someone else in the house, I feel the need to find a place to hide, so I go further down the narrow hall past the bathroom to an unused, unoccupied bedroom (bed is made). I initially think of hiding behind the door, but then realize that if discovered my only way out would force me past the girl in the bathroom. I decide to leave the house entirely, so I walk stealthily past the bathroom on my way out. All is going well until I reach the living room area, just short of the den, and the way out through the garage. There is a long couch blocking my path!!

I discover I am holding a broom, which I think I had for a while, intent on sweeping the floors clean for the new owners of the house. At first I can’t figure a way past the couch and out of the house undetected. I decide to use the broom as if it were a pole vault. When I do, the bristles do not collapse under my weight, and I float in super-slow motion over the couch. I realize how odd this is, and it dawns on me I am dreaming! The scene goes black and I wake up.

May 10, 2014: NOTE: My first night of sleep following the administration of African Dream Root: I am standing facing a heavy set black woman holding a black baby. She appears to be a nanny. The baby is awake, swaddled in a light colored blanket with no pattern, and contentedly drinking from a small baby bottle. The woman’s face has an attractive, even carmel complexion, but also sports an irregular ring of significantly darker pigment which encircles her face from across her forehead, above and then outside of her eyebrow, down the outer aspect of her cheek, down to her chin and back up the other side in a symmetrical manner. I’m not sure if it is a tribal marking or not, and it does not detract from her appearance at all. It somehow suits her and is in no way startling. In fact, she appears to draw a certain power from the marking or tattoo.

There is a gym bag on a table to the woman’s right (my left). It appears to be filled almost to overflowing with dried marijuana flower nuggets. She needs or wants to do something with the bag, but she is holding the baby with both her arms. I offer to hold the child momentarily for her, but she politely refuses, saying the child might cry or be frightened because I am a white male and stranger to the child.

In view of that, I offer to move the bag for her. Again, she politely, but even more sternly says no. Then I say to her “Then lets engage in a social experiment to see if the baby does indeed cry if I hold him.” Again, she says “no”, at which time I wake up.

May 9, 2014: Lynne and I are driving in my car. I am driving the two of us to some kind of gala event thrown by S*****. I carefully back the car into a spot, parking perfectly between the white lines of an underground garage. I help her get a black rolling suitcase out of the car. The plan is for her to go on ahead of me because the event is going to be crowded. I’m not sure what is keeping me from leaving with her at that very instant. After she leaves I am still by the car, hoping she remembers that the event is taking place on the second floor of the vast, Las Vegas style hotel.

I take an escalator and arrive at the ornate white doors of the venue, which are wide open. Inside, the ballroom sized room is well-lit. There is, as expected, a large crowd already inside, and I am obligated to join an informal line of well-dressed people snaking along outside the doors waiting to get inside. People do leave the line to peek inside the doors and then go back to their place in line. Everyone is exceedingly civilized, mature and tolerant of the people who get momentarily out of line to peek inside and satisfy their curiosity about what is inside the room. A solitary woman exits the venue. It is Kathie Lee Gifford. She is holding and nursing a baby as she walks. I wake.

May 7, 2014: I am walking down a narrow hall of past a series of lawyer’s offices onthe left and right and I speak with two or three dream characters I encounter, none of whom I recognize from my waking life. They are merely friendly strangers. I am looking for and asking about my former work-place colleagues, but none are present. I ask a heavy set man if all of my co-workers are absent because they have out-of-office assignments such as court appearances or depositions, but he genuinely does not know. We talk for a while when I notice I am dressed only in a beach towel, which I have to keep pulling up and tucking in, or else it will loosen and fall.

I pass by a well-appointed double-office suite, and there is a man at the threshold of each. One has closely cropped white hair, the other is younger in appearance. A voice from one of them says something insulting about money...like “How does it feel to be without any?” and I feel anger. I enter the double suite, and confront them. Each DC is clearly is worried I will do something violent, but I don’t, partly over concern that I am only wearing an beach towel like an ill-fitting toga. The white-haired man asks me “What were you planning to do with my estate in E****’s N****?” I am taken aback by his question, as I don’t have the foggiest notion of what he is talking about.

I ask him - “Who are you?” and then as if to answer my own question, I almost simultaneously (with the question) realize that he was someone who had once been injured but now was all better, and this is why I didn’t recognize him. I say “Oh my God, I didn’t recognize you! How ARE you?? Never mind the house in E****’s N***, tell me about your journey back to health!” I say this partly to give me time to recover from my embarrassing flub of non-recognition and to also buy time to figure out what I was supposed to be doing about his estate. When I say my statement intending to distract him from whatever duty I may have had to him about his estate I sound (to myself) genuinely concerned, and my ruse of buying time to think seems like it came out of genuine concern for his well-being, at least as far as I was concerned. I wake.

May 6, 2014: Dream 2 of 4: I am one party to a contract. The other party is an alien female - who looks entirely human. The first of two needed contracts was prepared by me, but now it is the alien’s turn to prepare a reciprocal contract. We seem to be friends that like each other, and are not adversarial in any way. She comes to Earth so we can discuss the terms and so she can get it all written down properly and agreeably. We compare legal pads, which are yellow, and have substantial hand-written things on many lines, but also a lot of crossed out language. She eventually gets all the information she needs to complete the contract she is required to prepare.

The female alien gets ready to leave the room in which we are working, and go to bed. We kiss goodby/goodnight and we each go to our separate bedrooms to go to sleep. There is something incorrect in her contract which she can’t figure out. Whatever is wrong is causing the water in the toilets to run incessantly in the house. This keeps everyone in the house awake. A total of four house occupants (myself, the alien and two other dream characters I can't remember) meet in the hall between the bedrooms to discuss the situation. I say I’ll fix the contract, no problem. I do, and everyone is able to go back to bed and to sleep. I wake.

May 1, 2014: I am driving as a passenger with the couple from the TV series “Oddities” (Mike Zohn and Evan Michelson) in a small mobile home that has, in its underbelly, a second vehicle like a miniature white van. We are traveling around taking pictures of birds.

Mike Zohn says to me that they never purchase fuel for their vehicle. They simply steal it from executives, sports figures, and TV or movie stars that they know of in the area of the country that they are driving through at the time. I wake.

April 30, 2014: Used mantra “Tonight I will Lucid dream.” I am in a house which is “mine” but strange. It is configured more like the R**** home, with a landing at the base of the stairs leading to a front door with a glass storm door. The door is open, and through the glass storm door I can see Nina approaching. Glenn (her ex-husband) is upstairs behind me, unseen. When I open the door, our springer spaniel Lacey bolts out the door and begins chasing a large animal which turns out to be a badger. We all (Glenn, Nina, Lynne, myself) end up outside instead of inside, looking for Lacey and the badger, which escaped Lacey and disappeared into a sewer drain at the curb.

It is a beautiful sunny day outside, so we remain on the front lawn. Lacey is nowhere to be seen. The “badger” re-appears and we pursue it through a maze of low bushes of a medium sized front garden. We all wonder and discuss how it could have gotten out of the sewer and into the garden unseen. When we finally get it out in the open and trapped between the four of us, the creature more or less surrenders to being captured. It is not a badger. Rather, it has morphed into a medium-sized dog, a type or breed I have never before seen. It has medium-long hair, mostly tan, with white and black also. The hair on the ears has tufts. It seems sufficiently tame when not being chased that I try reach out for its collar and to pet it around its neck to calm and console it.

When I reach for the collar I find that the dog is wearing a department store style thin cardboard tag like you see on coats for sale. The tag is the color of a manila envelope. The black lettering indicates that the breeder is located in Honolulu, HI, but there is no name of any current owner. I speculate that we could find the owner through the breeder. According to the tag, the dog is a breed called a “FOMTO.” I wake.

April 27, 2014: FIRST LUCID DREAM: Last night after going to bed (in real life) we received a late night phone call. After getting back in bed and reciting my mantra “I will have a lucid dream tonight” I fell asleep for real.

In my dream I had yet to fall asleep after the phone call and was merely laying in bed thinking, when I grew concerned that my wife may have shut off the wall switch that controlled the power to my bedside lamp. Without getting out of bed, I tested this by pushing the switch on the lamp several times and indeed, it did not come on. This meant that if I needed the light to write in my dream journal later on, I’d have to get out of bed to turn the wall switch on, which I did not want to do as it would risk my recall. In my dream, I got out of bed and flipped the wall switch to “ON”. The bedside lamp did not come on...but this was possible because I wasn’t sure how many times I’d flipped the switch on the bedside lamp. All of this felt totally real. Hyper-real, in fact.

As I made my way by habit and feel from the wall switch near the bedroom door back to bed, I started to sense a growing anxiety or dread about being in our bedroom in the dark. I tried to turn the bedside lamp on, but it wouldn’t come on even though I had just assured myself it should come on because the wall switch power was definitely on. I appeared to be trapped in the dark, and in my dream I started to get anxious. I started to sense there was something wrong...something amiss...but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. I desperately wanted the light to come on, but had exhausted all possible remedies and didn’t know what to do next.

As my anxiety grew over the perplexing malfunctioning of the light, I had the realization...I’m DREAMING!!! This is a DREAM! That’s why the light switches don’t work! And of course...the excitement of being aware of the fact that I was experiencing my first lucid dream caused me to awake. The hyper-real experience of the dream and the joy I felt at having succeeded in having my first LD (no matter how short!) made this a most auspicious occasion!

April 24, 2014: Dream three of three: I am in a high-school sized gymnasium with hard wood flooring, like a basketball court. I am standing with one or two other men, facing a row of approximately ten young student athletes standing shoulder-to-shoulder who hold the hard plastic handles of some kind of clever climbing device with a slot at the top. There is a strong, non-stretch nylon-like ribbon about 12" wide which descends from its attachment at the ceiling and enters the slot at the top of the handle, which each man holds at chest height in front of him. At present, there are no markings on the ribbon, which is plain and dark (purple?) colored.

By raising first one side of the handle, then the other, the men can ascend in unison to the ceiling. Once there, they push a button on the handle and some kind of cam-like device inside the handle causes them to be lowered slowly and safely back to the floor, again, in unison. Now, as the ribbon unfolds, it reveals its slice of a larger picture, which, when viewed from the audience some distance away, is capable of revealing an American Flag, or corporate logo or advertisement. Evidently, I am there to try to sell the notion of this device to the school administrator(s), the other two men who are present. When the athletes meet the floor, I awake.

April 24, 2014: Dream two of three: I am outside on the street along with Bob *****and Glenn *****, who are leaning on their motorcycles which are (strangely) parked on the sidewalk. My motorcycle is unseen. Across the street there is a store which seems to be a cross between an sporting goods/outdoor shop and a head shop. There are numerous people milling about in the street itself, and this obscures the objects/items displayed in the shop’s windows. Even the door is difficult to discern. The door is open, but the threshold is not obvious because it is obscured by a floor-length beaded door curtain. Dave **** is wandering back and forth looking for the entrance, and from across the crowd, I try and direct him, but he appears to discover it all on his own. He passes through the beaded curtain, and then I cross the street and enter as well.

Inside, I do not look for, nor do I see Dave. I end up with a bag of power bars, which evidently I’ve already paid for, since I open and start to eat one. It is soft and chewy, as if it has cream cheese in it, and not what I wanted or expected. I wanted a hard, crumbly granola-type power bar. There is a hippy chick in her early to mid-twenties sitting cross legged on the floor. I give her the bag of power bars since they are not what I wanted.

Now I’m at a glass display counter. I have multiple, amazingly crafted rings on six or seven of my fingers. They are made of silver strands about the thickness of paperclip wire, which are twisted and joined into the most amazing patterns and at least one sports a clear diamond-like faceted stone. They look bright and new, and are crafted with an artistry as is only possessed by a High Elf from Lord of the Rings. I am looking for a stud earring to match, but the items in the display case are actually pins with colored plastic heads (red, and blue that I remember) and not stud earrings at all, so I leave.

When I am back at the motorcycles, Bob and Glenn are both eating something. Glenn has a very large salt pretzel, the kind you get at the circus or in Penn Station. I realize I should eat something too “so we’re all on the same page” before we bike off on our ride. I think I’d like a pretzel like Glenn had. At this moment I realize that I also needed to get a bed-roll or sleeping bag while in the store, and I didn’t remember to do that. I wake.

April 23, 2014: I am rummaging through an attic filled with a multitude of stacked cardboard boxes and plastic bins of various shapes and sizes. They are sloppily and haphazardly stacked, and there are no markings to indicate their contents. I am looking for something, but I don’t know what. I am finding all manner of worthless things, such as used crumpled tissues.

Now I am outside on the front lawn of my ancestral home in *********, not far from the driveway leading to the garage. I can see past the driveway, a little way onto the lawn on the other side of the driveway. There is what appears to be a wounded or dead squirrel. A bit further away, there is an adult male golden retriever standing placidly. The squirrel is face down with its legs splayed and is not moving. A blackbird or crow lands right next to it and pecks at it a couple of times. The squirrel immediately comes alive and goes crazy. It runs around frantically, in a panic, and ends up biting the golden retriever severely in its right groin area and penis, and the dog begins to bleed profusely. Blood gets distributed all over the lawn as the dog runs on the property.

The dog ends up on the front lawn, and Lynne appears. She puts two fingers on the dogs right femoral artery and the horrendous, abnormally excessive arterial bleeding stops. Now there is a small dressing on the wound, and no apparent blood on the dog or the dressing, which is white and taped in place. Lynne builds a tent around the dog to shade and protect it. The dog is weak from anemia. The dogs owners (a man and a woman) walk up to us from the direction of ****** ***** Road. We tell them what happened and they disappear.

My dead (IRL) father is on the front lawn, very close to the house. Lynne, the dog, the tent and I are close to the street. A lawn sprinkler system comes on, but instead of water, it is spraying arcs of blood from the dog which has evidently seeped through the soil into the system of pipes. Dog blood is being sprayed everywhere by the gallon every second. I get sprayed with blood and am grossed out. I yell frantically to my father to shut off the sprinkler system. In opening my mouth to yell, I get a small quantity of aerosolized blood in my mouth, enough to taste it. I wake.