task of the month

I’d just woken up, and I began to record myself explaining my dreams while they were still fresh in my mind. Never mind that it was on an app that doesn’t exist, I didn’t pick up on that, but while telling my dreams I had the idea to do a reality check. I counted six fingers and realized this was a dream!


I put my phone down, walked toward my bedroom door, and told myself out loud, “I am in my house in [town I used to live in].” (I opened the door.) “The dream is clear and stable.”


I chose to go to that house so I could find my parents, because I live alone but had to find a DC so I could complete the TOTM, but why I picked that house specifically, I’m not sure. We moved out of that house in 2013; I didn’t leave home until 2019.


Immediately, my vision became more vivid (I hadn’t realized it before but it was kind of dull color-wise). I was still in my apartment, but standing in front of me was a man.


“Guten Nacht,” I said. (Yes, I meant Guten Tag, but close enough? Autocorrect tried to change this to Gluten Nacho.)


“Guten Nacht,” he replied. He said something else I didn’t understand. The only word I recognized was verstehen (understand), so I assumed he was asking if I understood German. We were entering the dining room now. (I looked up verstehen while typing this; it’s conjugated wrong for second person, but it DOES mean understand. Yay for recognizing one of the handful of German words I know!)


I tried to recall how to tell him I don’t speak German. “No spreche… German. Alemán?” (Alemán means “German” in Spanish.)


“Alemannisch,” he corrected me.


“Deutsch,” I corrected myself. We were in the kitchen now, and I doubted I could carry this conversation further, so I decided to wake up so I could write it down right away.


By the way, it turns out Alemannisch actually refers to a group of Upper German dialects spoken in Switzerland and parts of Germany and Austria—but I didn’t know that, so I’m going to assume my brain just tacked a German suffix onto a Spanish word in an attempt to make it German. Whatever works, right?

I’m gonna skip the first part; it was a boring non-lucid about checking my reddit messages.

Then I woke up and decided to check my reddit messages for real. I logged on and didn’t question why I wsn’t logged in already, or why it said “pepper” instead of “password”, but I did question why the site switched to French when I logged in. I fully believed I was awake and this was just a silly website glitch, but I did a reality check anyway. I struggled to count my fingers (I blamed sleep deprivation for my sudden inability to focus), but I thought I counted six. This didn’t seem right, so I repeated my RC: six fingers. I was dreaming.

I didn’t get my usual rush of excitement, maybe because of the confusion and difficulty surrounding the RC, but that was a good thing, because it actually allowed me to stop and think instead of running around and acting on impulse.

I asked myself what my goals were for this dream (first time I remembered) and recalled that one of the DV beginner goals was to look around and describe my surroundings. I began with my pillowcase (which looked almost like in real life except the circles on it were brown and only one shade of blue) and described it out loud as being “black and tan”. Then I realized I’d got the colors wrong and tried again, though I don’t remember what I said the second time.

Suddenly, my vision went black. I was afraid I was waking up but reminded myself to keep calm. I could still feel my dream body, so I walked across the room, hoping to anchor myself in the dream world. It worked, and my vision returned briefly. I don’t remember what happened next, but shortly after, my vision turned black again and I could feel my body in bed. I knew on some level I was still asleep, but I also knew I was waking up. I could hear birds chirping outside, so I figured I’d reached the “point of no return” of waking up and opened my eyes.

Funny enough, the birds turned out to be part of the dream. When I woke up, I couldn’t hear any birds, just the neighbors talking.