task of the month

Non-dream
Dream
Semi-Lucid
Lucid

I don't know if this is the beginning of the dream, but it's the earliest part of the dream that I can remember. Right away, I know that I am dreaming and that my goal was to complete the basic task of the month before trying to find my dream guide. I am in my room (which is actually messy this time, unlike last time. Much more accurate). I want to go somewhere else, and try to fly, but for some reason am having difficulty. I'm not able to simply start flying, like I usually am, so I decide to go to my "back up" method, which a dream character taught me when I was 5 or 6: I have to throw myself at the ground, and not be afraid of hitting it. (Kind of like that Douglas Adams quote, but I learned this long before I ever read it)It sort of works, but I get stuck hovering a few inches off my floor, and can't really move. I stand up, and try simply jumping. I hover in the air, and have to make some swimming motions to get going, but finally I'm able to fly like normal, and fly through the window. While I'm flying, I remember I need to anchor the dream, so look around at the detail of the shingles on the roof underneath my window, and then at the grass and the trees, rub my hands together, and - because it's so quiet - start singing, until everything feels significantly solid. Rather than trying to go anywhere else, I land in the back yard, where my cat is running around, and take a moment to appreciate the detail - everything is laid out exactly as it is in real life, and when I look down, I can see the detail of every blade of grass (though this isn't quite accurate because our "grass" is actually mostly weeds). I remember the task of the month, and shout

"I need a Dream Character!"

No one appears in front of me, so I turn around (a little too fast) and the whole dream crumbles away. Everything is almost black, but I know I'm still dreaming, because I still feel like I'm standing, and I can't feel my real body, so I start singing and rubbing my hands together until things start coming back, and then walking around in a circle, feeling the grass on my feet, until everything is nicely solid again. My cat runs by, and I reach down to pet him, then start walking farther towards the back of my yard. I turn my head, and see a guy with a giant electric lawn mower cutting my neighbour's lawn.

"Hey, you!"

He stops the lawn mower as I run over and hop the fence.

"Sing me a song."

He looks kind of confused for a minute (and I notice that he kind of looks like Bruce Willis, but not quite), and then..."

"Um, okay... what would you like to hear? Classical? Rock?"

"Sing me your very favourite song."

He gives a huge smile "Okay!" and launches into some kind of jazz song that I don't recognize, but sounds like it must be a real song I had heard somewhere.

I wonder why my brain came up with that one, since I don't really like the style, and start looking around, wondering how long he's going to be singing, because I really don't want to be here forever.

A few seconds after I think that, he stops and says, "I only want to do one verse."

He goes back to his gardening, and I start trying to mess around and make rocks levitate, because in the lucid I had a couple nights before, I was able to make things fly around. But it won't work, no matter how hard I try, and suddenly the dream is gone.

I catch myself before I start to move, and lie perfectly still. I keep telling myself "I want to find my dream guide" and try to pick someplace that I want to go so I can imagine myself there, and hopefully enter my dream there, but I can't think of anything, and start drifting in and out of hallucinations and dreams.

Finally, one solidifies, and again, I already know that I'm dreaming. I'm in some kind of military base, with either cement or metal walls, ceiling, and floor. Only the emergency lighting is on, so everything is kind of yellow. I start wondering around, and doors open for me as I approach them. The place seems to be completely deserted. I start anchoring the dream by touching the walls, the floor, rubbing my hands together, rubbing my legs. I put my ear to a wall to try and hear anything, but it is quiet, so I start singing a little bit again.

I go through another door, to an intersection of a few hallways, and see a DC doing something at an electrical panel, and think "good, I need to get a DC to sing to me," and start to approach him, but then remember I've already done that, and now I'm trying to find my Dream Guide. I turn around, on my left there is a single orange door, and directly in front of my is a double orange door. I put my hands on the door knobs and say,

"My dream guide is going to be on the other side of these doors."

I open them, expecting to see the tall, freckled, curly-haired red-head who I saw once and thought might have been my dream guide (though never managed to confirm it because she disappeared too quickly) but don't see anything. It is very dark, so I walk through the doors, and see another set of orange doors - open - a few feet away, and walk through them into a large room with a low ceiling and dim lighting.

Halfway across the room, I see an asian girl who seems to be standing on stilts.

"Are you my dream guide?"

She nods, and starts walking across the room to stand in the corner opposite me, but on the same side as the door. As she is walking, I realize she isn't on stilts, but has abnormally long legs - she was wearing light-coloured knee-high socks that just made it look like she was on stilts.

"Really?"

She nods, "Yes."

I start to walk towards her, and almost immediately the dream disappears.

Once again, I lie perfectly still and picture the room I had just been in, trying to get back to it, but just drift in and out of non-lucids for a while before my alarm goes off, and I finally get frustrated and give up.

Non-dream
Dream
Semi-Lucid
Lucid

I am in my room, getting ready to go somewhere or do something, I don't know exactly what. For no apparent reason, I think "what if this is a dream?" but decide everything feels far to realistic (As a side note, my dreams are rarely so realistic that I can wonder if it is a dream, and decide that it isn't. 99% of the time, as soon as the thought crosses my mind, I become lucid. Although in this case, the fact that my room was perfectly tidy should have been enough of a clue...) I decide that now is a good time to do a reality check anyway (because I'm still trying to make reality checks enough of a habit that I do them in automatically when dreaming). I look at the doll with two long braids that sits on top of my dresser, close my eyes for a second, and open them again.

What the hell? The hair is in a different position. That can't be right, I must not have been paying attention.

Just to test and prove to myself that I am awake, I step into a more open part of the room and jump while thinking about flying, fully expecting gravity to follow normal rules.

But instead, I float up and hover near the ceiling ("Holy crap...")

Okay, I guess I am dreaming.

I remember reading a post about making dream time "longer" than the amount of time I'm actually asleep, and decide to try it. (Unfortunately, despite being lucid, I am still not particular logical, and this was something I was not planning on trying until after I'd gained fairly good dream control, which I don't currently have) I first decide to simply demand that the dream lasts for an hour, but I know right away that it hasn't worked, and the dream starts to fade. I stabilize it as much as I can, but it is still "dark" around the edges. I remember a different technique where you "travel" to another dream realm where time is different, and say "I want to go to the realm where one waking minute equals one dream hour."

Nothing happens, and I'm not sure if I said it right, or if I had even said it out loud at all, so try again. This time, a portal of some sort appears in the wall beside me, and I go through it. As I do this, I hear a rather sinister voice say "Getting a little advanced, are we?"

I fall backwards through blackness for a few seconds, just like the person who posted the technique had described, and find myself back in my room.

Hoping that it worked, I remember my goal of learning to "waterbend," and fly through the wall, trying to visualize the beach at my cottage on the other side. But, as I go through the wall, the dream fades, and I wake up.

I resist the temptation to move, and stay perfectly still once I realize I have woken up, and continue to visualize the beach, as well as imagining that Katara from Avatar: The Last Airbender is there to teach me.

I am suddenly in the dream, with Katara (and sometimes Aang) there. She talks to me a little bit as I try to do waterbending, but I don't remember what she was saying. I'm doing pretty good with the waterbending, getting it to move around the way I want it to.

Suddenly, for some reason, she becomes evil, and there are people in boats swarming the beach attacking me. And I start attacking back, experimenting with different ways to move the water around, and freezing it to throw little ice darts at some of the attackers. I realize that I can just leave, or ignore the attackers (because they aren't actually doing anything to hurt me) but decide that this is actually kind of fun, and keep at it. For some reason, things start flipping between "cartoon 2D" and "3D," which kind of weirds me out, but then I think "Hey, that's kind of cool," and start doing it on purpose.

At this point the dream is starting to fade again, and I suddenly remember "Crap, I was going to try the task of the month. I NEED AN INSTRUMENT!"

Some sort of cross between a flute and a clarinet appears in my hand, and I start playing it while everything continues to fade. For whatever reason, without me choosing to do so, I/the instrument play(s) the classic "snake charming" Arabian music.

I wake up, and once again try to slip back into a dream right away, but it doesn't work.