lucid

I was walking through gardened, sunlit streets of Paris while servants rushed past me carrying flowers and lanterns. Suddenly, I realized I was dreaming. I hadn't done a reality check - the environment was simply unfamiliar and felt dreamlike. Knowing I was lucid, I tried to collect my thoughts and spun a few times to stay asleep. Because I'd been having with dream control, I decided to start by truly flying rather than the sad floating I'd been doing in lucid dreams lately.

Still in Paris, I flung myself off of a balcony and began to fly. The flying was fantastic - very fast and soaring, yet completely under control. The cities and towns of France were beautiful but also looked rendered, like a video game. I remember thinking that there were no landmarks like the Eiffel Tower, because this was Paris in the early seventeenth century.

I noted at this point that I was flying in a kind of standing position, with my legs pointed down and head vertical. I wondered if flying on my stomach may be a better experience and tried it. However, it felt just like the hand gliding I do in the real world, and my visibility wasn't as good. I went back to flying while standing.

As I was flying around, I noticed a ship that had partially sunk like the Costa Concordia in Italy. I thought hey, it's a lucid dream, I'll fly down and save the ship. However, I was unable to turn it over, and was gored and bloodied in the process with skin ripped off my body. This wasn't painful or scary, though, because I was still lucid. I figured I hadn't "assumed" I could help the boat, and therefore couldn't.

After flying a bit more, I decided to try going to the moon. I became a space shuttle, and rockets blasted below me, propelling me skywards. I landed on the moon and became a person again, exploring a partially unbuilt lunar base with other humans. After that, I flew more, and remember explaining to a dream character that the reason I was spinning in place was to stay asleep. My alarm clock eventually woke me up.

Note: Went to bed drunk

My family and I were getting ready for the upcoming wedding of a family member (note: this wedding is upcoming IRL). My sister and I were trying to get dressed and pack our purses. I was in a state of stress because nothing was going well. I couldn't find my cell phone, my hair was unruly. For some reason, I was desperately scooping up potato chips and dip on the floor into a bag, as they were some kind of joke my sister had set up. I eventually found my phone, but it was low on power - how could I navigate to the venue without GPS in my car? Fortunately, a shared shuttle that looked like a cable car and contained some of my relatives stopped by, and we boarded.

Later in (I think) the same dream, I was in my grandparents' house in a room with many beds. This is the same house my cousins and I would stay in when we were little. As an adult in the dream, I was much too large for my "bed," which was little more than a doll's wooden rocking crib. I woke up (from one dream) in this bed, and realized I'd split it in two. My cousin's weren't impressed.

I stood up from the bed and realized I was dreaming. I hadn't performed a reality check of any sort. It just occurred to me that this wasn't reality. Once I realized it was a dream, the world spun and I did circles in place to stay asleep. It worked, and I continued with a few reality checks. First, I looked at my wedding band. It was there, and the metal wasn't shifting (my typical reality check), but I realized it was thinner in the dream than IRL. I wondered if it was actually a poor reality check after all and noted that I should think about it once awake.

Next, I decided to fly, since I'd been having trouble doing so. I used the advice in the forums and simply assumed I could take to the air. And I did - for a moment, but then had trouble and started merely hovering. Boo.

Some kind of demon or monster came up at this point and grabbed me. I told it to get lost, since this was a *lucid* dream, and if I couldn't even keep monsters at bay then I utterly sucked at lucid dreaming. The monster wasn't particularly scary, but he grabbed me and I was in a pool of water, so it was difficult to spin in place to keep the dream going. I managed to free myself and spin.

I started thinking about the artistic possibility of this lucid dream, and my thoughts became temporarily lost in books I'd read, like the Wheel of Time series. I was in a long building with a high ceiling, and suddenly looked up. A beautiful, animated lightshow was happening on the ceiling. The entire surface seemed pixelated - made of blueish metal squares. But in clumps and shapes, rainbow-colored groups of pixels were bulging and sliding like a bioluminescent mushroom, sending waves of color through the whole ceiling. I watched the show for a moment, wondering how "surprises" and new images are conjured up in a dream that I'm aware of.

After I'd looked long enough at the ceiling, I decided to try and improve my dream control. I decided to create the simplest of environments - a blue sky and black ground - to practice flying in. This environment started to come into view, but I struggled to sustain it, and eventually "woke up" into (I believe) another dream, in which I didn't realize was lucid and didn't remember.

I was in an office complex where my company's building joined with a governmental department next door. In search of a bathroom, I wandered to the other building attached to mine and saw Nancy Pelosi, who worked there. Though we've met before, she didn't recognize me, so I took the opportunity to get her to say something stupid. We talked about how the elevators and floor line up in our two buildings, and she mentions something about how doors and Muslims are involved in a complex liberal conspiracy. I tell her it sounds ridiculous and ask what her evidence is. She walks away, telling me to say hi to [my husband's name], showing she did recognize me after all.

Feeling silly, I wander back over to my office on my side of the building. My coworkers and I are sitting around, drinking and socializing. I see an ex-colleague and we have a friendly chat. Then, feeling sick, I take off all my clothes and lie down on the ground, and immediately wonder if that looked too dramatic and people will think I merely want sympathy.

Then, I was in bed in my childhood bedroom, and I noticed my vision was fuzzy and wavy. I decided to do my LD reality check and examine my wedding ring. Success! The bands were moving around, so I knew I was dreaming. I did a few other standard reality checks: tapped the palm of my left hand with the forefinger of my right, and it went straight through my hand! I also jumped in place - yep, jumped too high for RL. Definitely LDing.

So, what should I do next? I was still in my bedroom and worried that my sleeping body may be mirroring some things I did in my dream, so I decided to stay there. Sex with a friend came to mind, so I tried to create a friend in my bed. But, it really didn't work well - only parts of the person were visible at a time, and it never looked like them. I gave up and decided to just masturbate in my dream to see what it felt like. But, as I laid down in bed, I felt a sharp pain: I'd laid on a stiff comb, whose bristles were jamming into my back. I felt the dream fade as the pain continued. I desperately yanked the brush out and spun in place to get the dream back. I spun and spun and things stabilized temporarily... but then they became fuzzy again and I woke up.

Note: This happened on a Saturday nap after I'd already been up and around. Was very tired from the day before. I really am not good at conjuring up specific people in my dream. This is the first successful use of my wedding band reality check, which I've been doing several times a day since I joined DV.

I was at a theater or opera house where costumes used in past plays were being sold. One item I recognized as a gown from the opera Turandot - I tried it on with the mask from The Fall and posed dramatically.



Around this time I became lucid. I immediately started to fly and felt the dream fade away. To counter this, I came back to the ground and started by spinning in place, since the dream was starting to fade. This stabilized everything succesfully.

Then, I wanted to practice what I'd read in the DV forums - that getting control over a dream is about assuming you can do something rather than questioning whether or not you had the ability. I practiced by making fire shoot out of my fingers. The first two times I struggled, but then practiced assuming it would happen. Then I was able to do it. I went from lighting my finger on fire to lighting my hand on fire, with mostly success.

Satisfied with the fire experiment, I wondered what I should do now that I was lucid. Sex came to mind, and I looked around at the people around me. Lots were beautiful women, so I chose one and started to caress her. But, I wasn't really feeling it. I should have sex with someone I actually know, I thought. I saw a friend in the distance, approached him, and kissed him. He reminded me of another time we'd done this, in RL rather than a dream, and I was mortified by the embarrassing memory (note: false memory, I'd never been with this person in RL).

Not feeling into the whole sex thing, and started to wonder what I should do next. Hey, I should go to Chichen Itza, just like the IOSDP mentions. I don't believe in shared dreaming, but trying their challenge sounded like a good next step. I visualized Chichen Itza, and a few seconds later I was at its base, gazing up at it. The sides were too curvy, so I stared at them until they were straight. I noticed a fence around the pyramid and noted how strange it was my subconcsious put it there. Now I'm at Chichen Itza, I thought, so I should probably meet the people here and try to remember them when I wake. There were about 10-15 people standing with me, so I went around to them to ask their names and remember their faces. There were four blonde women of varying bodytypes, and I remember one man with brown hair, a green barret, and a slightly pudgy figure. Another male was tall and had tousled brown hair - he looked only 17 or 18, and I thought he seemed like a student. I tried hard to remember names - even asked people to put nametags on - but the names kept changing and I had trouble remembering. One person was named Enzo or Anzo, I think. Another was Cho. I woke up shortly after.

Note: Haven't written here lately due to travel and holiday busyness. The night of the above LD I was exhausted from travel - tried sleeping on my back with eyes closed for 30 seconds, then gave up and rested on my stomach and was asleep in seconds.

I was looking down at a platform that looked like a model runway. Two large, white, robotic shoes walked onto it. The camera of my view panned up, and the shoes belonged to a female Stormtrooper-esque robot. At this point I was semi-lucid and knew I had some control. I became the robot, knew I could do anything, and played a first-person-shooter, killing terrified humans around me.

Next dream fragment:

I "woke up" from being a Stormstrooper and was with my husband in bed in an ultra-modern Japanese-style futuristic house. I saw that his friend was there with us, who I had not met, and I was embarrassed because I was in my pyjamas. I said I needed to change, but didn't want to cross the room and interact with my husband's friend before I was dressed. My husband said she wouldn't mind if I just dressed there… I took off my clothes in front of her, and then walked across the room (not sure why).

Clutching my pyjamas and naked, I went to a small, enclosed room which had water on the ground up to one foot. I looked up and saw a bird trapped into the room, and then looked down and saw three goldfish. I called out to my husband, asking him if he knew there was a bird and fish in our house. Then I saw the pig, also in our house, but which I knew about. I opened the window so the bird could escape.

Later, I was walking outside our futuristic house, and it was covered in snow. I was detached from my body, watching a mother and child play in a snowy meadow. A gigantic boar with colored patches on it came up to them, but was friendly. I thought to myself that the woman and child are assuming that I am that bore, because I am a shapeshifter.

I walked back to the house. The going is snowy and tough through the woods, but the sidewalk by the house's door has been painstakingly shoveled.

Next dream fragment:

The people in the snowy Japanese house previously were my husband, my husband's friend, the mysterious woman and child, and myself. Now there is a young woman there. She isn't a pop singer, but she's an actress playing a pop singer in an upcoming movie. In the movie, some role is being filled by Beyonce playing herself, which upsets the first pop star's character. The two were apparently great friends once, even getting a tattoo of the others' hand on their own hand, but had a falling out since.

The only part of these were I was in control was originally, as a robot. Other than that I was watching or participating.

Note: This was after going back to sleep after waking up on Saturday morning.