Cities in the Astral

LD23 My brain was not wanting to let me suceed at LDing last night. I reached HIs twice but could not initiate an LD until my 3rd attempt at the 9 hours of sleep point. I had put in ear plugs as it was 10 am by this point. It reached a solid atonia with HIs in about 20 minutes, but it then took about an hour of gently trying to start an LD for it to work. I had been at a point for half of that time where I could feel myself move around and even dance around but the HIs would only form ghost like clumsy images that were almost not there. I could say that all of this stuff counts as a low grade LD, but I won't include it in the duration of the dream; it was just warming up.
Finally a dream started to form and I could honestly feel as if I were there moving around and looking at things. I wanted to watch the atomic test for the task of the year thing. I created an image of a field and a trench with men in it. I heard a voice (by expecting to) do the count down. I saw the standard blast and cloud thing and my mind flashed the classic images of the buildings getting shredded. I was disappointed with the effect. Every thing was black and white, thew soldiers looked like shadows, and the whole thing seemed more like just watching it on tv. I decided that I would not count this as completing the task. The task thing is not a competition, but a fun way for people to get ideas to challenge themselves. I had wanted to experience the atomic test and this was more like watching old footage of it.
I decided to let the dream go free form for awhile and get random DCs and plots, until the imagery had intensified. The random HIs came back and I played with things like skating alond through it, turning into a snake, turning into a bird, and spinning around in circles. A forest had appeared but was very dream like and not vivid. I spent about 3 minutes doing every stabliizing technique I could come up with. I felt with my hands all the magor body joints and rubbed them. I looked very close at small objects like the gravel on the ground. When I looked up fairly clear scenery had evolved.
This portion of the dream I let randomly take me through a story with DCs. I was at a university. I went inside and people I apparently were friends with are all gathered. They were talking about things we should do. I only caught on something about hosting an event and serving lots of food. The crowd broke up into smaller groups and I tagged along with one. We wentthrough about 3 dream scenes in various parts of the college and I mostly just watched. I wanted to do something more interesting, but decided to see where this would go. It then turns out that terrorists are planning to attack the school and we are FBI types in disguise looking for clues. I went around trying to get close to the football players when one asked what I was doing. I looked down and was holding a big mass of floopy spegetti noodles. There we go,some real randomness. I pretended I was making shoe laces out of them.
At that point I decided I would go back to trying the atomic task again. I turned into a bird and flew up above the hills. I circled few times then saw a big plain beyond the hills and there was a structure in the middle. I landed over there in human form. I went to the structure and blended in with a group of workers who were inspectin a giant artillery shell suspended from scafolding. I floated up and ran my hands along the tailfins and the rivets. Then I teleported to the trenches were people were ducking down and giving thumbs up signs. Every one was wearing sunglasses. I got in the trench and the count down started. I realized I wanted to be out there in the blast and jumped out of the trench. I could see the buildings they constructed to get blown apart, I appeared over there..
The bomb exploded and a wave of force hit me and the buildings. I felt myself flying backwards and getting shredded into powder (vaporized) but it was fun, not painful. I reformed my body and jumped off the force wave and flew to where the cloud was starting to shoot up ward. I grabed it as if it were a big tree, and it yanked me rapidly skyward. I plunged through the mushroom top of the cloud, and this was like being pulled under white water rapids. Then I was on top of the rising explosion and at the same time could see the mushroom cloud from the side. It spread out under me and stopped pushing me up.
I realized my real body was having a problem, I felt like my mouth was very dry and trying to wake me. I focused on the atomic cloud to try and save thedream, but then I ended up coughing and woke up. Dur~20 minutes