Snacks From the Butler's Pantry

Wow. I had an unexpected lucid last night. It was hyper real. I don't know that I've ever been so lucid in such a stable dream. I was able to check the time before and after the dream, and I'm convinced it lasted over and hour and a half. I had to wake up super early yesterday to oversee a plumbing installation, so maybe I missed a REM cycle. Thank you REM rebound!

I was trying to fall back asleep after being woken up by my girlfriend jabbing on the phone with her mom in the middle of the night. Weirdo. I finally started to relax, and rolled onto my side. I immediately felt my body start to hum and vibrate. Shadows started to dance across the room, silhouetted in the light from the open doorway. I tried to tell my girlfriend what was happening, but could barely manage a slurred mumble through the paralysis. The shadows coalesced into a huge demon with horns that curled up to almost touch the ceiling. His body looked hulking and deformed as he advanced toward me through the darkness. When he was almost upon me, I picked up the telephone and yelled into the receiver, "I'm in sleep paralysis. Make me lucid. Make me lucid! I want to be lucid!."

Suddenly, I was standing in my lit bathroom, disoriented. Everything looked so clear and stable, I was surprised it was a dream. I leaned over the counter towards the mirror to inspect my reflection. Everything looked just as it should. My head was a little too large for my body, as if I was looking in a fun house mirror. I clasped my hands together in front of me, and flexed to push my shoulder blades out of my back. I felt them pop through the skin, freed from their confinement. I wiggled my shoulder blades, and watched in the mirror as they grew out horizontally into short white points. As they continued to grow, I shook them to unfurl the opalescent white feathers. I could feel the strength in my huge new wings as I gave them a little flap. It felt so natural. They draped all the way to the ground, like an angel. The room was too small for me to open them all the way. Instead, I turned to the side to admire the shiny pristine feathers in the mirror.

As I turned this way and that, I realized I could not see the doorway in the mirror. No matter how I changed my viewpoint, It remained hidden. I started to get a bit nervous, not knowing if someone was going to sneak up on me. As soon as I had this thought, I saw a heavyset man enter the room behind me. He stood next to me at the counter, and I looked at him reflected in the mirror. It felt a lot like being in a public bathroom, and watching someone walk up next to you to wash their hands. I said a few words to him, but something about his presence made me uncomfortable. I locked eyes with him, and commanded him, "Leave my bathroom right now, and instead, send in your hot sister." He grumbled in annoyance, but left. A few seconds later, a gorgeous blond woman entered. She had a real nasty attitude, which I found really attractive.

I followed her out the room, and down the hallway. She was stripping off her clothes slowly, one piece at a time, as I walked behind her. When she slipped off her skirt, I reached out with my soft feathered wing and slapped her on her naked rear teasingly. We came into a room with a pool table. All of the billiard balls were on the floor. The woman tried to show me how to play some game where you had to pop the balls back onto the table, and into the pockets. It was very complicated, and I wasn't interested. She made some vague promises of sexual rewards if I beat her in the game. I felt like this was a trap, and I knew she had already called the cops. I wanted to try out my new wings.

I looked out the window, and focused on creating a landscape to fly over. I tried to imagine a desert canyon like T.S. has photos of in her D.J. Instead, I managed to create a really bad, plastic looking 3D model of a mountain. It looked very fake, like a 3D landscape from the 1980s. As I struggled to make it more real, it started to move. The window I was looking through was now a camera, and the landscape was a terrible music video for Ronnie James Dio. I changed to channel to a TV crime drama set in a mansion. A Chinese man was trying to molest his young step daughter. Unknown to him, his wife accidentally witnessed the exchange, and turned him in to the police. I watched all this while hanging from the ceiling of the mansion. As the characters walked through the mansion, I had to swing around on the large tapestries that were hung from the high ceiling.

Next thing I remember, is being in an open air marketplace. I started to worry about being lucid for so long. I wanted to write down some of the conversations I had with the DCs, because I felt they had special meaning. I tried to wake myself up, but could not. The dream world was too stable. I was amazed at being able to read the signs, menus, and tags on all the booths. The words were very stable and unchanging. Several times, I looked down at my hands and body, amazed that everything was so perfect, even though I knew it was still a dream.

Looking at my hands reminded me of the DV task of the month. I was at the bottom of an outdoor flight of stairs, in a busy open air marketplace. I focused on my hands, and imagined what it would feel like to shoot fireworks from them. I imagined something like T.S. described, with fountains jetting out of my fingertips. Instead, I watched as my palms tore open painfully. I saw the tip of something shiny in the open wound, and realized it was a rocket. I flung my hand upwards to help dislodge the rocket. Blood splashed all over me from the grizzly gash in my palm, but I managed to fling the rocket free. It flipped up end over end into the air before I saw the back end of it ignite. It hesitated for a second, then shot up a few feet and burst into a cloud of brightly colored confetti. Not quite what I had in mind. I tried the other hand, which felt even more painful. It shot further than the first, and looked more like fireworks when it exploded high in the air. Unfortunately, as the sparks fell downward, they also turned into confetti. I knew I must look like an idiot to the people standing around watching. I felt like a bad street magician.

Now I was frustrated. I decided I had to make it dark, because I could not imagine what fireworks would look like in a daytime sky. The light slowly began to fade to dusk as I braced myself for another attempt. This time, I focused my attention to the tips of my fingers. I pointed my hands away from myself, and locked my vision on a place high in the sky. There was no pain this time, as a series of paper rockets blasted out of my fingertips rapid fire. I watched them as they disappeared into the distance. The sky had now settled to a dark indigo color. After a few seconds, the sky lit up to an impressive display of color. It looked like the end of a fireworks show, when they shoot off a ton of fireworks at once. The crowd cheered, and I was surprised by how amazing it looked. As the sparks settled, I noticed that they, too were turning into confetti. Not again!! I reached out to them with my consciousness, and all the millions of bits of confetti burst into fireworks of their own. The sky lit up with their brilliance, and I cheered along with the crowd.

A small man who looked like a Tarsier Monkey wearing white Buddhist robes approached me:

He excitedly asked me if I could read in this dream, too. I said that I could, and that I thought it was strange. He said it has always been his dream to visit the akashic records to research. He said he has been waiting for a dream where he could read before attempting. I shook his hand, and decided I better wake myself up to write this all down.

I woke up to my father yelling at me. He was angry that I had slept in. Apparently, we were supposed to pick up the blond pool-playing woman at the airport. We were really late. He made me look up her flight on Spirit Airways on the internet. Reading through the page, I was again amazed that I could read all the text. I knew it was a dream, but wanted to see where this was all going. I piled in my dad's car, and we sped off to the airport. He started driving like a total maniac. He was driving on the sides of the road, into oncoming traffic, and even on the sides of buildings. I was not afraid, because I was still hyper lucid. When we finally arrived at the airport, we had missed the flight. My dad was furious. I put my hand on his arm, and said, "Dad, don't worry. This has all been a dream." To prove it, I made him look at my right hand. I had 8 fingers all crammed onto my normal sized hand. He laughed as I waved my monstrous hand around, relieved that he did not forget our friend at the airport. I then told him to look at his own hand, because he was now lucid also. He had only two gigantic fingers, like a lobster claw.

We exited the car into a huge parking garage with ceilings so tall they disappeared into the darkness above. I wanted to go flying again, so I closed my eyes and imagined the 3D landscape I had created earlier. For a brief few seconds, I was flying over it. I could still feel myself standing in the parking garage, hearing the echoes of car doors slamming and horns beeping as their owners locked them remotely. I tried harder, feeling myself in both places at once. I felt something shift, and suddenly I was back in the outdoor marketplace.

I was at a stand with a man who was selling cacti. He explained that they were lucid cactus. If you distilled their nectar into a tea, you could become lucid whenever you wanted. My Tarsier Monkey friend approached us, still very excited. He said that he was finally able to complete his goal of reading 10,000 pages. I told him I was able to complete my goal also, of shooting fireworks out of my hand. We both thanked the cactus vendor for making us lucid.

I decided I really needed to wake up and record this before I forgot everything. I leaned forward, and smashed my face into the cactus. I felt the needles painfully puncture my cheeks and eyes. The eyes hurt especially bad, and I woke up.