lucid

My first lucid in forever! This dream made reaffirmed to me the theory that just having LDing on your mind can lead to LDing. It was surprising though that my first day back on DV was also my first lucid in a long long time. On that note, I am going to put this as my first LD in my profile, because I forget how many I've had before this one, but maybe if I can find my archived DJ from before this new format I will edit this personal one to include my older dreams...

Anyway, on to the LD!

This was a DILD:

The dream started at the starting line of a marathon. I was there with my girlfriend and a few of her old suitemates from college. The gun went off and I started running up a muddy hill, which was the first part of the race. Overall the setting of the race reminded me of western Marin County in Northern California. There was a sort of ridgeline that marked the halfway point of the marathon, and the runners had to run up hill from the inland side of the ridgeline then over the top and down towards the coast. I noticed almost immediately a dream sign that is fairly common for me. As I try to run faster I start to slow down. In other words it is a very frustrating sensation of running through jelly when I want to sprint.

This sensation was so strong that I would watch people who were walking casually pass me as I tried my hardest to run quickly. I ran like this for about a minute before starting to think something was strange. I suddenly thought "Oh hey! I might be injured." As I looked down at my legs, I realized that I was extending my legs out very far in front of me in this sort of elongated walk. I realized that my legs were stretching farther than they were long and at this point I became lucid! I quickly did an RC of pushing my finger through my hand and that was it! I knew I was dreaming.

However, I was a bit disappointed at this point, because I only had a very low level of control of the dream. My lucidity was clearly not that strong, because I didn't really think about doing anything except continuing to run the marathon. I began to run again, and faced the problem again of my legs not obeying what I wanted them to do. Now though, I was able to exert a small amount of control on my dream. I thought to myself that if I were dreaming, I could just expect to run faster and I would. My legs immediately sped up, but unfortunately it only lasted for a couple of seconds, before the jelly legs took back over. To explain this phenomenon a bit more clearly, I have had many dreams where I am driving, and as I come up on a car in front of my I hit the breaks. However, the car doesn't really respond to the breaks and I can tell I'm about to hit the car in front of me. This problem with running was extremely similar.

At this point I had a false awakening. I felt myself loosing the dream and "woke up" on my bed with my cat laying next to me. However, I then must have woken up again, because the next moment I was awake for real, and realized that my cat was locked out of the bedroom for the night, so she could never have been laying next to me. It is unfortunate that I couldn't parlay this FA into a new LD, but I am encouraged by the night overall, given how long it has been.