non-lucid

So after my first LD (since childhood) three days ago I thought I would be getting LDs pretty regularly. Not the case. My dreams seemed to have shortened, or my recall has gotten muddy. And my WILD attempts have been wildly unsuccessful. I don't even get vibrations anymore. I'm a little bit paranoid that my medications (Levothyroxine and Stratterra) are interfering with my ability to LD. But I have researched both, and they seem to aid lucid dreaming, not hinder it. Oh well, I soldier on.

I am in a park. All these baby birds surround me. Their legs are extra long, so that it looks like they are walking on stilts. They are very hungry, and chirping at me for some food. I can see their little beaks opening in protest. They are so hungry they try to peck at my clothes. For some reason, I have one of those plastic red bags that my CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) uses to deliver their potatos. The baby birds are ripping it to pieces. I wonder where these birds' mothers are, and look around to find something to feed them. I see a giant plastic jar of peanuts. I walk over to it and grab it, opening it and dumping the contents on the lawn. The birds attack it and have it all eaten in like two minutes. Apparently there were apples in the jar as well, because they roll out and a pack of wolves arrive and eat them. Why the wolves prefer the apples to the babies birds is a mystery. Apparently the peanuts and the apples were supposed to be for a picnic my family was going to have. My sister-in-law had brought them. When she found out what I had done, she said I could have them.

-+-

Somebody tells me I might have something called ver-Johnsonsing. Somebody else complains about English men coming home from foreign parts looking ridiculous in native garments. There is a tent community protected by this old stone wall. The wall is toppling, however, because a modern building had been built right up against it and is pressing the old wall back. I wander through the city of tents, following a guy on a bike.

-+-

All my seminary friends are sitting together at those plastic foldable tables. My sister-in-law is busy taking pictures of us with a camera. We start pounding the tables and singing a praise song "Everyday, it's you I live for..." (Aaaah, get it out of my head!) Some people are using drumsticks to hit the tables with. I started hitting the table early, because my sister-in-law tells me to stop.

-+-

This boy I know from somewhere, maybe highschool, says something sexist and offends me and my friend. I challenge him to a fight. Somebody tries to hold me back, I think it might be my mother, but I ask them to leave and the pressure disappears. We start to fight. I dodge and twist and pound my fists into his face. Everybody closes in like they want to finish him off. But I tell everyone to give him space and ask if he concedes. He nods. I tell him he has to apologize to my friend and to women for being a bigot. He does, his face red with shame.

So I did a WBTB WILD last night (meditated while waiting to go back to bed), but it didn't work. I tried the WILD three times, and each time I would get the vibrations, but I never really lost the sense of my body. Oh, well, it ended up not mattering because my RCs and MILD mantra kicked in and saved the night. Lucid in only five days since I started? Not bad.

I'm in my room, in the dark, looking at my monitor. One of my speakers is to the right. I hear singing from it. It is in another language. I think its Welsh. I know that it is coming from down stairs and that it must be my dad, who sings all the time (he does this IWL, and yes, some of the songs are in Welsh). I'm not sure why, but I go to the bathroom, maybe with the idea of taking a shower and getting up. The makeup of the house is completely different from my WL house, but I don't notice this. The light is on in the bathroom. I look in the mirror. I look normal, except my hair is sticking out on all sides so it looks like I have a saucer around my head. The top of my head, my crown, is also shaved, like a Christian monk. This triggers a reality check. The light in the bathroom must have gone off, because I performed the RC in the dark. I plug my nose and try to breathe. I still can! I become semi-lucid, but I'm so surprised at being able to breathe through closed nostrils that I perform the RC again. I thought my fingers might have slipped and half-opened a nostril. I'm excited, so I run out into the hall, where everything is dark. I whisper "Turn on the lights," or something like that, but nothing happens. I'm whispering because I have a crazy idea that my dad is downstairs, and I don't want him to know I'm lucid dreaming (I get secretive about weird stuff IWL, and this is why I figured this dream was not completely lucid). I find a switch and flick it. The lights come on. I run towards a balcony. Steps lead downstairs to a wall full of large windows. The steps are tiled with wood and the banister beside them is of some exotic wood. I can see that outside it is that time before dawn when everything is gray or deep shades of blue. As I run down the stairs, the sun comes up and by the time I make it outside it is morning. The sky is a brilliant shade of denim blue, without a cloud in the sky.

I am in a cheery neighborhood with comfortable looking homes, most of them ranch style. For some reason the neighborhood reminds me of Norther California. It is definitely not my own WL neck of suburbia. There are paths leading to other houses, and the spaces between the paths are mulched with red cedar.

Everything looks a bit blurry, so I shout "Clarify!". Nothing happens, but it must have worked because the last scene in the dream is very vivid. I remember that if I get too excited I will wake up, so I think stabilizing would be a good idea. I try to rub my hands together, but I am wearing these large red oven mits. I take off the mits and rub my hands together. I don't feel more grounded or anything. I have an idea that it might be a good idea to twirl for further stabilization. But I remember that turning around can also teleport you somewhere else, so I don't end up doing it. I want to explore the neighborhood first.

I look for something to do. I see a dream character across the road, checking her mail. She's this girl I knew from a farm in Northern California when I hitchhiked down the West Coast from Seattle. She has a cute coffee-cream brown face with a sprinkling of freckles on her nose. Her eyes are the color of brown autumn leaves, and her chocolate hair is pulled back in a ponytail. She is wearing blue sweatpants. I forget what she was wearing for her top. I run over to her, and she backs up into the siding of her house. She looks pretty calm, nevertheless, to see a strange fat guy sprinting towards her.

"Do you want the table?" she asks when I arrive. I don't remember if there was a table nearby she could give me, but I certainly didn't want it.

"No," I reply with crazy enthusiasm. "I want to tell you a story!"

I don't know what story I had in mind, but she says something I can't quite recall, but that ends with "alligators."

"I love alligators!" I cry.

I wake up.

In a shady bar, a tramp with raggedy clothes, starting eyes and unkempt hair asks me for my plastic figurines. He can trade them in for points to buy beer, or something. I already swallowed the figurines. However, I vomit them into this large fired clay dog bowl, which become full of not only plastic figurines but olives as well. Everything is covered in vomit. A sour smell rises from the bowl. I rise to leave and pay the bartender with a crisp ten dollar bill, which I shake out dramatically. However there is something funny about the bill. It turns into a check and there are numbers penciled in on the side. 1056 or something like that. The bartender won't accept the check, and hands it back to me, asking for another form of payment. I have no other way to pay, so I get angry and throw it down at his feet. I run out of the bar, afraid he has called the police. The number that was written on the check seems to have something to do with my wife (ex-wife RL) and some mistake she made. I ruminate on this as I pound down a flight of stairs and run outside.

It is a chilly autumn day outside. I run into a sort of greenway, edged on one side by the building I just exited. Along this wall tables are set up we're homeless people are sitting in metal chairs. There are these pear-shaped plastic things on the the tables that seem to give off warmth, because the homeless people are putting their hands close to them. They are eating olives out of large dog bowls, just like mine.

As I run, I try to pick the plastic figures out from among the olives with some idea of eventually giving them to the tramp in the bar. I try one of the olives, slimy with yellow vomit. It tastes awful.

I come to the end of the tables. I think there is a fountain nearby. At the last table my ex-wife is sitting. She looks bad. She's got this vacant stare in her eyes, and her hair has greyed and significant chunks have fallen off. She is wearing a blue sweater with yellow lettering and a yellow night in the middle, a sweater she owns in RL from her high school. I'm curious because the life just seems to have been taken out of her, so I lean in close. As I do this I notice my parents walk by. They are wearing brown gridiron football jackets, like one I used to own. I turn away from my ex-wife hoping my parents don't notice me, but they turn around and hail me. I take off running.

While I'm running I'm joined by somebody who I know but I don't think I ever see. He explains to me that there was a big attack and that my ex-wife and my parents held off bolts of energy from the attackers with a psychic shield. The epicenter of the attack was right over my ex-wife, and she suffered horribly from energy overload. That was why she looked so bad. Anyway my partner, whoever he is, is looking for someone he knows. We eventually find her down an ally, but she has been stretched like taffy and is 30 feet or something tall with limbs as thin as string.

I'm in a highschool taking exams. I'm in a classroom full of boys. Everyone is rendered in anime style. Exam time is over, all my classmates breathe a sigh of relief. Some slump in their chairs and snooze, drooling. Suddenly I do not know where I am. I am sitting in front of a computer with a small rectangular screen. The cursor is controlled by this circular footpad. How, I'm not quite sure. I am in a room full of girls, also illustrated in anime style. A girl with black hair is on my computer screen. I move the cursor and hover over the exit dot. The browser is black-grey with a hint of brown.

I look at my hands. They are not mine. I am sweating, confused. There is another girl in the class with blonde hair. Her hair is pulled back in pigtails and I think she has blue eyes. She is wearing a white school girl blouse. I am wearing a blue sweater. Through dream epistemology, I know she is my sister. I have no sister RL.

My sister is looking around in confusion and panic. As soon as the period is over and the bell rings, she darts to the bathroom. It is at this point, I think, that I realize that I am a girl and that I have swapped genders. My sister baracades herself in a bathroom stall. I enter the bathroom and pound on the stall door, trying to get my sister to come out. She tells me to go away, but I don't. I sympathize with her, letting her know that I know she's afraid and I know what happened to her, because it happened to me too. I woke up in a strange body of a different gender. I'm really a boy. At this point other people enter the bathroom and start doing stuff, what I'm not too sure. At least one is male, however. I get self-conscious about talking to my sister through the stall door with them around. For some reason I don't tell my sister I'm her brother. Eventually, with an ear-splitting squeal, my sister comes out of the stall.

The scene changes to another classroom, this time co-ed. Someone dumps out a boardgame or puzzle for everyone to play. My sister pokes around on her phone, where she is giving this mon creature a haircut. She's super excited that I am a girl now and starts doing my hair. I've sort of become her mascot.