memorable

Had another lucid dream out of the blue last night, due largely to the fact that I noticed a dream sign:

I'm walking with my wife along a sidewalk. I'm not sure where we're headed but she's leading the way. We come to a chain link fence and suddenly she is on the other side of it and I ask her, "How did you get over there?" Looking at the fence, the only way I see over is to climb it, so I do. When I get to the top, I see the fence is right next to what looks like a souvenier shop or convenience store. But it's strange because the store has a chain link (or chicken wire) roof and I can see down into the store as I'm crawling over it. I'm going slowly, as my weight is causing the wire to sag down onto the items that are on the top shelf. I wait for my wife to cross over to where the cash registers are so that it won't have both our weight on it at the same time. We finally climb down and walk out the door.

We're walking toward my truck when I see my son, my Mom, my Dad, my brother & his wife getting out of a car and walking towards us. I tell my wife, "That can't be Justin; he's halfway around the world. And Grandpa (my Dad) is dead. This must be a dream!" I become lucid and do a reality check by pinching my nose closed and trying to breath and I can. So I do it again, just to make sure. Then I remember some stuff I read about studying all the little details around you, so I do stuff like look at the ground and feel the fabric on my shirt. Then I look at my hands and there are fingers missing; I only have, like, two or three fingers on my right hand. So I turn to my son and say, "This is a dream. Look at your hands." He looks at his hands and lets out a little laugh. I say, "You're missing some fingers, aren't you?" and he nods his head. We all walk over to this house and some more people (relatives) are sitting out on the front porch. I tell everyone, "This is what's cool about dreams...you can do stuff like this," and proceed to cup my hands together in a ball but not quite together, and move them back and forth. I'm trying to conjure up a fireball but all I get is this faint blue plasma looking orb. So I concentrate harder to create a ball of flame and the blue color turns to yellow with a small flame springing to life for a few seconds. I try to hurl it forward, like the superheros do in the movies, but it only travels a few feet before sputtering out. Then a cousin of mine says something like, "Uncle Vance died tomorrow." So I ask her, "Do you mean tomrrow? Or do you mean yesterday?" After that I woke up.

I had several dreams last night, the last of which was my first ever lucid dream. Finally!!!

All I remember from my first dream is standing on the front walk of what I know in the dream is my ex in-laws house. But no such house exists in the real world. Another strange thing is that the house, it's foundation and even a layer of soil, is sitting on the ground (kind of crooked) like it had been pulled up from the ground and set down somewhere else. I also notice a trail of ants running up and down the length of the front walk.

In my second dream, I found myself in a large cavern of some kind. There seems to be some kind of community living here. There is one man whom everyone calls "the bird man" because he raises all kinds of different animals as pets. I walk over to his part of the cavern and see a small pool. Then I see a small dinosaur, like a baby, about the size of a large swan or goose. It looks like a stegosaurus, except that it has light purple fur on it's body and the plates running up and down it's back are brilliant shades of yellow and red. When it first sees me, it swims away across the small pool. But then the bird man enters and the dinosaur comes running to me as if for protection. It's rubbing up against me like a cat does.

After I awoke from this dream, I laid in bed, briefly considering jotting down some notes in my dream journal. But I decided to go back to sleep and try to re-enter the dream. This is when I had my first ever lucid dream:

I'm sitting in the waiting area of a small office. The door to the office is open and I can see my oldest daughter sitting in there. I'm talking to her about dreaming and telling her how to to a reality check by holding her nose and trying to breathe. She does it, but is able to breathe. I'm thinking that she's not holding her nose tight enough, so I decide to show her how to properly do it. As we're doing this, two men walk into the waiting area where I'm at. I look at them and say something like, "We probably look pretty silly doing this, huh?". I keep trying to show my daughter how to do the holding your nose reality check, but I'm thinking I must be doing something wrong because it's not working for me either; I can breathe. Then I look at my hands. They're all blurry, not like an out-of-focus picture but like a pastel drawing that has been smudged. It finally dawns on me that this must be a dream! I get up and walk around, looking at everything. I enter another room that looks like some kind of call center, because there are desks everywhere with people sitting at them and talking on phones. The walls seem to be made up of panes of blue glass that are illuminated from behind. I pass by a middle aged woman sitting at a desk and nod in greeting to her; she smiles and nods back. I decide to continue exploring and walk back out of the room. But now I'm in what appears to be a grocery store. I walk by one of the check-out registers and decide to look at my hands again to see if I'm still dreaming. My hands are in perfect focus, but both hands are misformed. There are only small nubs where my index and pinkie fingers should be. I remember that one thing I wanted to do in a dream is find "the girl of my dreams". I look around, wondering whether to ask one of the dream figures or just ask the dream outright to show me the girl of my dreams. Just then, I notice a woman walking up one of the aisles towards me, browsing the items that are on the shelves. She is wearing a white dress, has blonde hair, pale skin and is wearing red lipstick. I walk towards her and as I approach, she looks up and smiles as if she recognizes me. I want to ask her if she is the girl of my dreams but she is talking to me. She says in an excited voice, "Oh my God, I didn't think there was anyone else here who wanted to dance!" Before I can reply, these two guys appear out of nowhere. I can tell by the look on the woman's face that she doesn't like them. She asks, "What do you want?". One of the guys pulls her to him and says, "You said you wanted to dance." But before I can intervene, I lose lucidity and wake up.