non-lucid

After my WBTB, I WILD into my living room at home. I realize that I’m an idiot and didn’t pick anything to do for this lucid (maybe because I wasn’t entirely expecting another lucid so close to the last one). I try to think of anything that might be interesting to try out. I somehow recall a lot of people on the forum saying that meditating in a lucid is an awesome experience, but considering how I don’t meditate in real life (and when I try to, I get too distracted by my ADD thoughts), I’m not sure if I should try. But, no better options come to mind, so I figure, what the heck. I sit down in the classic meditation pose, and I actually start to levitate off the ground a bit. The sights and sounds around me seem to get much clearer. So far so good, I guess. Surely this’ll be easier than in waking life with all of its distractions.

In this case I was wrong. My dad walks in the room. (Story Time: Whenever I’m home on break from school, I’m basically full-time tech support for my parents. Apart from fixing computers/phones/TVs/cable boxes/etc., my dad will often interrupt whatever I’m doing about every 10 minutes to ask me some question about his phone/computer/Facebook. The answer is always something so simple that he could’ve Googled it himself, but he insists that I help him. As you’ll see, this habit of his has carried over into my dreams…) He sits down and immediately starts blabbing something about his phone acting up. I remind myself that this is a dream and try to ignore him, but it seems to make him louder. I finally get up and walk out of the room, but he follows me out, still talking about his phone. I run upstairs, go in my room, and lock the door. I can still hear him outside the door, now raising his voice to a shout. Ugh, this is ridiculous. I crack open the window, get a running start, and jump outside, flying off away from the house. Unfortunately, before I can get back to meditating, the dream destabilizes and I lose lucidity.

I’m now in this movie theater with a couple friends to see the latest Disney-Pixar movie. It’s supposedly an IMAX movie theater, even though it’s really just a really wide curved screen that stretches across the entire front of the room. The room is much larger than an actual movie theater, and it looks like it seats a few thousand people. Me and a couple friends are off to the left side, about 10 rows from the front. For some reason, though, the seats are angled off towards the left wall, so I only see a small portion of the left side of the screen until I turn my head really far to the right to see the rest of the picture.

We sit through the first few minutes of the movie, when the movie pauses. Some lady walks to the front of the theatre, and 3 more flat projector screens lower from the ceiling, showing a slide about some charity organization. I can somehow see her nametag from where I’m sitting, which says Hanna on it. She introduces herself as Hanna Montana. “I know what you’re thinking, but I’m missing the last ‘h’. So no, I’m not a widely-adored pop superstar.” I turn to my friend next to me. “To be fair, neither is Miley Cyrus.” My joke made 3 rows around me start cracking up, and my friend even spit out his drink from laughing so hard.

We sit through the movie (which amazingly is only about 10 seconds long), and me and my friends kind of hang out in the theater for a few minutes afterwards. A police officer walks up to my friend Joel and tells him that he’s gonna have to come with him. I try standing up for him. “What seems to be the problem, officer?”
“Well, this hooligan was spotted last night causing a ruckus during a showing of Star Wars, and so he’s been banned from the building. Yet somehow, he managed to crawl his way back in here past our security.”
Joel walks out into the aisle, with the cop behind him. He gets to the top of the stairs, and suddenly makes a run for it. The cop quickly pulls out his taser and shoots him before he even gets out the door. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to see Joel falling to the ground (because man, that would’ve been hilarious to see IRL).

After the movie, I head home, jump on my computer, and play some Minecraft. It’s a weird version of Minecraft in that it’s played from a top-down perspective, making it kinda hard to see what you’re actually building. I somehow discover a secret passageway that leads under this nearby lake, but when I travel down it, I get stopped by this massive scorpion. I’m now fighting it in first person, but I realize all my weapons are gone. The scorpion has pretty strong armor too, so it’s gonna be impossible to fight him in this state. Still, I give it my best shot. I run around him, dodging his tail strikes. He charges towards me, knocking me down, though I do manage to land a few punches on my way down. It doesn’t hurt, obviously, since it’s just a video game, though everything else about the experience feels pretty realistic. After a trading a few more blows, I’m down to one health, while the scorpion has barely taken a scratch. Oh well, it’s not like I had anything valuable in my inventory, guess I’ll just die then.

Suddenly, a glowing arrow shoots from the entrance of the passageway, one-hit killing the scorpion. I look in the direction the arrow came from, and see this guy with jet black hair and a leather jacket standing at the entrance, bow extended toward the monster. I go to thank my mysterious savior, but he just raises his nose at me. “Ha, how could you even come into a level 12 cave without any weapons? Maybe you should go back and do the tutorial levels, you noob!” The world around us fades out before there’s a bright flash of light.

Fair warning, the next part reads like a novel. It was a pretty long, detailed section of the dream. I don’t remember all the dialogue that occurred, but I do remember most of the emotional connotation of it, so I based the dialogue on that.

I’m now in this huge wooden cabin, getting out of this strange white capsule on a metal track. As I get up, I have a rush of false memories in my head that give me a context of what’s going on. I don’t really know how I know these facts, I just kinda suddenly know them. I’m somehow 50 years in the future - I have no clue how I got here, but I’m here. Much like in the book “Ready Player One” by Ernest Cline, the world thrives entirely off of virtual reality. People basically live their entire lives in their personal VR capsule. The cabin I’m in is an “access point”, a place where people can bring their capsules and connect directly to the “hub”, the worldwide center of VR activity. The tracks on which my capsule was positioned were used to physically take users to the hub, and during the journey, the capsules would begin the boot-up process before finally being connected at their destination.

Speaking of capsules, mine wasn’t the best. I seem to recall getting one of the cheaper ones - it was enough to successfully connect to the hub, but it wasn’t meant for the incredibly realistic experiences boasted by VR companies. The screen in the eyepiece wasn’t that high of a resolution, and haptic feedback - the equipment that simulated a sense of touch - was pretty terrible. Everything you touched, from a hard granite countertop to the soft fur of a kitten, registered as the same stiff poke - there was no variance on how hard it poked you, you just knew you had touched something because you were poked. But I was fine with it, I couldn’t really afford much more than that.

And of course, my “mysterious savior” was Johnny Blade. Of course, that wasn’t his real name, but he had used that username to climb the e-sports ranks, so it was what everyone knew him as. Because of his gaming success, he had a ton of sponsorships from all the major e-sports advertising companies, and was on the cover of just about everything. He was a pretty big celebrity. Unfortunately, he was also a pretty big douchebag too. His hair color - which was reflected in all of his video game avatars - was an obnoxiously dyed shade of black that apparently made some sort of fashion statement. That, tied with his signature leather jacket, made him look like a mix between a 1950’s greaser and Biff Tannen from Back to the Future - with just about the same attitude. Lucky for me, he exited his game of Minecraft shortly after I left, and just so happened to exit to the same access point as me, conveniently on the track next to my capsule.

“Well, the least you could do is thank me. I saved your precious level 1 armor,” he sarcastically remarks. “We all know you must have spent a long time on acquiring it, so I didn’t want you to have wasted your life. Lord knows you don’t have much of life to waste.”
“Oh, rest assured, if I had half as many sponsors that you have kissing all over your disgusting feet, I could’ve just bought all the armor in the shop. And I guarantee I wouldn’t be half the snob you are about it, either.”
“Jealous, much? Maybe if you spent as much time practicing as you do whining, you might be able to make a name for yourself. Anyway, I don’t have time for this. Network interviews, photo shoots, you know how it is… Oh wait, no you don’t. Adios, peasant!”

Oh man, I want to slap him so bad. I don’t care if he has lawyers at his beck and call, someone needs to teach him a lesson. I walk back over to my capsule, ready to go back into the hub, when I spot Johnny’s capsule still on the track, unlocked and open. I hesitate for a moment before walking over to inspect it. As to be expected, his capsule was state-of-the-art. Stater-of-the-art than state-of-the-art, in fact, as his sponsors often gave him plenty of new equipment prototypes months before they hit the markets. Well, if someone needs to teach him a lesson, I think I just found my curriculum.

I size myself up - we have pretty similar builds, even though I’m about an inch shorter than him. I lay down in the body-shaped contours of the capsule. It’s a tad snug, but it’ll work. I sit up to press the launch button on the side of the track. I always thought that was kind of a design flaw - that you or someone else had to press the start button on the track outside the capsule before it would launch. I guess I never had that problem on my capsule, since the door closed pretty slowly on it anyway, giving me plenty of time to position myself correctly. Unfortunately, the capsule door shuts almost immediately once I press the button, shoving me into it in a weird, squatted position. My head didn’t even make it to the head portion of the machine.

This is bad. For one, I’m quickly feeling uncomfortable, as the cramped position I’m in is putting a ton of pressure on my arms and neck, so I don’t know how long I can stay stuck like this. Second, I can feel that the capsule has already launched down the track, meaning in a few seconds I will be connected to the hub. Normally that wouldn’t be a problem, but in my current position, I have no way to get to the controls to close the connection, return to the access point, and exit the capsule. Meaning I will most likely be stuck there a very long time, with no way to escape.

I manage to tilt my head upwards towards the head hole, and push upwards with my legs until I can kind of wiggle my way upwards. Thanks to the anatomy of the human body, and the human-body-conforming shape of the capsule, I can’t squeeze my head through the neck hole. I can barely look up through the hole and see the boot-up screen on the display. It’s fairly simple - a plain black screen with some green text in the top left corner, probably to show version info and all that. I also manage to see some kind of emergency-release latch in the neck area. Hoping that the latch will help enlarge the neck hole so I can slide my way up, I pull it. The capsule door flings open, and I’m quickly thrown out of the machine. I quickly realize what’s happening, and try to grab onto the door as I’m flying out. My hand just barely scrapes the edge of the door, but I ultimately miss and watch as the empty capsule continues rolling down the track out of view.

I take a moment to assess the gravity of the situation. Or rather, the lack of gravity, because I soon notice that I’m just floating, almost like I’m helplessly drifting through space. The track that the capsule was on simply fades away, and I’m left floating in a sea of black, with nothing around me. Until I notice up in the sky, off in the distance, floating green text. The boot-up screen? But, I’m not in the capsule. And even if I was, I shouldn’t be able to see this, I’d still be cramped in the bottom half with the display out of sight. Yet here I was, floating in a surreal sea of nothingness. I pondered this until a bright flash of light brought me back to my senses.

I’m now riding a motorcycle down this street in a suburban neighborhood. Behind me is a cop car with its lights on behind me. Oh great, they found out I stole Johnny’s capsule, and now they’re taking me in. I contemplate running, but I decide to play it cool, it could just be whatever game Johnny was playing last (besides Minecraft, I guess). It’s probably best to just wait it out and see what happens. I pull over to the side of the road, and the cop pulls up behind me. He exits the car and walks over to me.

“Johnny Blade?”
I stay silent. I don't want to say anything that might give me away.
“Your presence has been requested. Follow me.”

He gets back in his car and pulls ahead. I follow behind him for a bit, until we pull into a driveway in front of this red and white dojo, which seems somewhat out of place in a suburban town. The cop gets out and motions me towards the front door. I dismount my motorcycle and walk up the stairs of the porch, and slowly open the door.

The inside is a bit of a pig sty. The carpets are covered in cigarette burns and assorted stains, some of which look to be of questionable origin. I walk into a room to the right, where there’s a group of men wearing white suits and sunglasses. The leader of the group, who looks slightly like Mark Wahlberg with a beard, laughs and motions to his cohorts, who quickly point their weapons at me. “Well well well, Johnny Blade.” Why does everyone keep calling me that? “I haven’t seen or heard from you in years. Didn’t think you had the nerve to show your face around here.”

He stands up and walks slowly towards me. “Did you finally decide to hold up your end of the deal? Or did you already forget?”
Holy crap, what did Johnny get himself into? I have to keep up the charade, since everyone seems to think I’m the real Johnny Blade, just because I stole his VR capsule. But I have no clue what he’s talking about. I should probably play it safe, just say something non-threatening to disarm the situa-
“Well it was kind of hard to remember it in the first place, considering all the bull crap you were spewing last time I was here.”
Of course. Let me just piss of the first guy I meet here, with all his friends ready to blast holes in me with one innocent flick of a finger. I rest assured in the fact that I’m still in the VR capsule, so any “pain” will be nothing more than a few shocks or prods to my chest from the haptic feedback.
The guy laughs again, and motions to the guy next to him, who pulls his trigger, firing a paintball into my ear. Paint splatters all over the side of my face, and my ear starts ringing from the impact. I wince in pain - that actually did hurt quite a bit. “That was a warning shot. Kind of a warm up for my men. Rest assured the next bullet will be very much real.”

I reach up to wipe the paint off the side of my face, when a very scary thought crosses my mind. See, VR capsules, no matter how advanced, don’t have haptic feedback around the ears or face. This is both a safety measure (you don’t want people poking each others’ eyes out in VR) and a technical limitation of the equipment (there’s too much stuff like visual/audio/olfactory equipment and oxygen tubes in the way for there to be any haptic equipment there). Yet I definitely felt that paintball hit and splatter, I definitely feel the paint running down my face, and my ear is definitely ringing. There’s no way to simulate that. This has to be real.

But wait, what about Johnny Blade? They all called me Johnny Blade. I definitely don’t look like Johnny Blade; how could anyone make that mistake? Plus the whole boot-up screen. This couldn’t be real - I’m still in the machine. Aren’t I?... aren’t I? I am saved from answering this question, as I soon wake up.

I’m driving with my boss, driving a load of desktop computers to our next destination. For some reason my boss let me drive the van, even though I have no clue where I’m going. So when we get to an intersection, I don’t know which way to go. “Where am I going?” He says something, but the AC in the car is roaring too loudly for me to hear it. “What?” He doesn’t respond. I turn off the AC and ask again, but he still ignores me. I finally get to the intersection and drive straight, hoping for the best.

My boss finally scolds me, “You were supposed to turn right!”
“Well maybe I would’ve known that if you had spoken up!”

We get into a bit of a heated argument. I don’t see, however, that the road I’m on takes a sharp right and turns into an entrance ramp to the interstate. To the left of the turn is a deep chasm that looks almost bottomless. It’s pitch black at the bottom, despite the sunny day that should be lighting it up. I don’t have much time to react, so I turn the wheel sharply to the right. The left two tires of the van go over the edge, and it looks like the rest of the van isn’t going to stop in time. I suddenly have an intense fear that I’m going to die. My life flashes before my eyes (if that’s possible in a dream), and I start screaming in panic. Luckily, in some miraculous act that looked like messed up video game physics, my front right tire stays at the top of the cliff and pulls the rest of the van up back to safety.

I take a massive sigh of relief, while my boss continues to scold me for missing the turn, obviously not at all grateful to be alive. I was a little mad and confused myself. Where the heck is the guardrail? Why is there even a cliff in Florida? This seems weird enough to me that I quickly become lucid, but the scene is already disintegrating by this point, and I wake up in my bed. I try to DEILD back into the dream, but despite getting some strong vibrations, I can’t quite make it and decide to abort the attempt.

---

I’m back at college, even though it takes place at my old high school building. The structure of my day is like it was back in high school - 8 periods of different classes with 4 minutes between each period. Basically the only thing collegiate about this dream is the difficulty of the classes.

The only class I remember well is this higher level Spanish class. My friend talked me into taking it because it’d be easy credits. I took two years of Spanish back in high school, so I figure it can’t be that hard. The teacher hands us our first homework assignment: a 30-page excerpt from an English novel that we have to completely translate into Spanish by the next class. I quickly skim the contents of the assignment; a lot of the words are quite large, and some I don’t even know the definitions of in English. I was wrong. So horribly wrong.

I turn to my friend who convinced me to sign up for this class. “I thought you said this was supposed to be easy!”
“It is. I can finish this in like 5 minutes.”
“What are you, half Mexican?”
“Ah, quiet down, you bebé grande.”

I stare blankly at my paper, hoping for some divine revelation to show me how to tackle this great feat. Looking around the classroom, I notice that all the students are using some big book that looks like an old White Pages directory to do their assignment. There’s one of these under my desk, so I pull it out to examine it. An English to Spanish dictionary, huh? I guess this will be pretty easy. I look back at the clock to see how much time I have left. It’s 11:30. Okay, this class gets out at 11:45, right? Wait no, today’s Friday, so classes get out at...

The bell rings. ...11:30… I start panicking again, since this class seems way too hard to struggle through for a whole semester. Wait, it’s still the first week of classes, I can drop the class without any penalty. But then my credit hours would drop too low, and I’d lose my scholarship. So I have to find another class to replace this one. But how am I gonna find a replacement class and fill out the paperwork before 5pm when the offices close? Luckily, I don’t have to make that decision, as I wake up first.

I’m in a futuristic dystopia where the government is slowly implanting microchips into their citizens’ brains. These allow the wearers to enjoy faster reflexes, improved memory, and all of the Internet conveniently accessible in their head. Unfortunately, the government uses the technology to monitor people’s thoughts, and any anti-government thoughts are grounds for arrest.

I am part of a team that works for the government, monitoring the actions and thoughts of those who don’t have brain implants yet. There’s about 15 of us, ranging in age from really old to really young, but most of the group seems to be under 16. Of course, we’re not above the law, as our implants still monitor our thoughts. We’re currently in training, taking cognitive tests to test our brain’s abilities. Our test results come back, and I’m currently the top performer off the entire group.

The next part of training involves learning to report other people’s actions back to the main server. A robotic female voice (similar to GLaDos) explains to us the importance of left and right brain signalling, and how this is key to properly communicating with the server. To report something to the server, you have to transmit what you want to report using your left-brain, and then conclude the transmission with some special password using your right-brain. (In retrospect, the explanation doesn’t make sense, since you can’t relegate thoughts to one side of your brain at will, but I guess it’s okay for the brain to make up weird stuff about itself too…)

The scene changes to my actual job, setting up new computers in a middle school computer lab. Adam Levine (lead singer for Maroon 5) is the teacher, and is sitting in watching us work and answering any questions we have about how he wants the classroom set up. None of my coworkers have the brain chip, and at one point I need to report one of them for something they said. I try to focus my thoughts into sending a report, but then I feel my phone vibrate in my pocket. I pull it out and see a notification from Facebook that I just posted a status with my mind. I open up Facebook to find my full report plastered at the top of my news feed.

Ugh, this technology is friggin’ stupid. I can’t believe anyone would want to use this crap.
I suddenly realize what I’ve done. I expect the police to bust down the door and arrest me for this thought. Instead, I get another notification on my phone, telling me that I’ve posted another status. I open the notification and read what I just put.
“Brigg using relive 14 agggggggggg rap.”
Wait, how did it get that messed up? I realize that the last part of the thought was using the center of my brain, as opposed to a specific side. Could this be the key? Do I have a safe haven for my personal thoughts, away from government scrutiny? Judging by the fact that this new thought didn’t bring about any consequences, I assume the answer was yes. However, I’m still incredibly paranoid that my thoughts could get me arrested or even killed at any moment, so I decide not to risk it.

I am now interrupted by my supervisor complaining about having no network access in the classroom, so we can’t connect the computers to the Internet to configure them. Just then GLaDos’s voice sounds over the intercom. “The network problems are caused by cellular interference. All cellular devices will be confiscated.” The phone I’m holding in my hand suddenly starts floating up to the ceiling. I grab onto it and pull it down, but over time the force pulling it upwards gets stronger, and it gets harder and harder to keep down. I stick the phone under a heavy desk, hoping it would stay there, but then the desk started to lift as well. I try sending a message to GLaDos. What are you doing? I need my phone for reporting!

Instead of answering my question, GLaDos continues over the intercom, advertising the brain implants to the rest of the people in the room. “It’s the way of the future, instant access to all of the world’s resources. Get your implants today, for a better, perfect way of life.” She continues for a while, but then stops abruptly mid-sentence. Suddenly, her tone changes to a harsh, angry tone.

“Adam! That’s not a very nice thing to say.”
We all stop and turn to Adam Levine, who is still in the corner of the classroom. Weird, I didn’t hear him say anything.
“I distinctly heard you thinking. You strongly believe that all this talk of a perfect life is, and I quote, ‘just a red herring for a larger issue’?”
Adam’s expression changes from surprise to extreme fear.
“You are now under arrest by the Federal Court of America, under code 409.12.”
There’s suddenly a high-pitched beeping coming from Adam’s head, followed by a powerful electric shock that sends him to the floor into violent spasms. After a while he finally stops convulsing, but his eyes are rolled back in his head and he’s not breathing. He’s dead.

My coworkers are thrown into a panic and run for the door. Meanwhile, I stay motionless, trying to stay completely calm despite what just occurred in front of me. Don’t think about it, don’t think about it, don’t think about it…

A few seconds later, a few men in uniforms bust through the door. I expect something horrible to happen to me. Instead, they load the body onto a stretcher and haul it off, not paying a bit of attention to me having a panic attack in the corner. I wake up as they leave the room.

---

I’m on a road trip to Virginia to my friend’s house (even though he lives in Florida IRL). As I’m driving on the interstate, I suddenly see a car is heading straight towards me. I quickly swerve to avoid it, but then another one right behind it is also heading towards me. In fact, all the cars around me is heading the wrong direction, hurtling towards me at high speed. But I’m on the right side of the road, why is this oncoming traffic? I look in the rear view mirror and see some other cars behind me heading in my direction, including a few police cars. So it’s not just me then. I turn on the radio, and the traffic news station comes on. Apparently at that spot the roads were supposed to switch sides, but the sign on one side of the road had either fallen or been stolen, so no one on that side knew to switch over.

I luckily safely reached my destination, my friend’s house. He apparently lives in a small RV, which they are planning on driving back to Florida the next day. I’m kind of surprised and angry, since I had just driven 800 miles in one day to find out that I would have to drive 800 miles back right after arriving. But I’m too tired from my travels to put up too much of a protest, and I fall asleep on the couch.

---

I’m at my grandma’s old house, and we’re setting up for a family reunion Thanksgiving dinner. There’s a ton of tables set up, some for the different family cliques and one for the children. I’m a little disappointed to find out I was supposed to sit at the kids’ table, since I’m 20 and I’m bigger than that. My mom asks me to get something from the bedroom, so I head in to go find it. That’s when I realize that I’m in my underwear. Luckily, I’m in my own bedroom, so I pull out another pair of pants to put on. I’m about to put them on, when I turn around to see some guy standing in the doorway. He starts talking to me, asking me questions about how college is going and what I’m studying (the usual questions distant relatives ask when you meet them). Of course, he doesn’t seem bothered by the fact that I’m currently in my underwear. I’ve never seen this guy before. Are we sure he’s not just some creep? My mom yells that dinner’s ready, so I throw on my pants to go eat.

I’m on the set of Jeopardy!, practicing some questions with Alex Trebek. The software used to show him the questions* is incredibly buggy. Random clicks just bring up more windows that mess up everything else. The entire practice show is at a standstill because I can’t get the program to work. Alex finally walks over and says he might have a better job for me. He takes me over to the question board and tells me to stand there and basically be the Vanna White of the show. We start an actual show taping, and my job is to press the screens for each question. One question involves filling in the missing letters from a chemical formula. After no one rings in and Alex reads the answer, I chime in with my own commentary: “Worst Wheel of Fortune puzzle ever.” This warrants about 5 minutes of laughter from everyone on the set, and they had to stop the taping to give everyone a chance to recompose themselves.



I’m now working at this large arena in Los Angeles. There’s a basketball game going on, currently in overtime, but a lot of the staff are getting anxious, since they have to convert the court into a hockey rink before Game 7 of the Stanley Cup the next day. One of the staff presses a button that makes the clock on the scoreboard tick down faster than normal, and finally the game comes to a close. Just then, the court starts to fill with water, and everyone clears out of the area. One of the staff flips a switch, and all the water instantly freezes into a nice thick layer of ice.

I walk outside the arena to a big open courtyard area, where there’s a ton of people having a huge celebration. I’m helping restock the food tables, when my mom asks if I can bring her some cake from another table on the other side of the crowd. I make the long trek through the crowd, grab the cake, and attempt to carefully take it back. I make it most of the way, but about 10 feet away from my destination, a rather large lady backs into me, and I spill the cake all over the front of my body. I’m slightly disappointed, but I’m much more mad at the lady who wasn’t paying attention to where she was going. However, I don’t have long to voice my frustrations, as I receive a message through an earpiece in my ear that there’s a situation a few blocks away.

I run off to the location of the emergency, and I see several other of the staff members running the same direction. As we run through the streets, I see billboards of propaganda everywhere. I begin to remember that I am part of a large group of resistance members attempting to start a revolution against the corrupt dystopian government. The whole scenario has a very Mirror’s Edge feel to it, as my run involves taking passageways through buildings and leaping to distant ledges.

I finally reach my destination, and there’s a large uproar from a crowd of about 300 people. Me and the other agents try to seamlessly blend into the group and join the riot. After a few minutes, a bald man with a goatee silences the crowd to speak.

“Too long have these menaces to society been allowed to oppress us. They threaten the peace we know so well.”
The crowd starts cheering, and I join in.
“They are pests, and must be dealt with if our government is to succeed.”
The crowd starts cheering again. Wait, what?…
“The Resistance must be stopped, for the greater good of our society.”
The crowd is now ecstatic. This isn’t good.
“Remember, they wear earpieces. If you see someone with an earpiece, take them down immediately and report them to the authorities.”
Nope, definitely not good. I hear a voice on my earpiece, “Blues are approaching the scene, get out of there, now!”

I quickly try to maneuver my way out of the crowd, but everyone in my way is jumping up and down, making it impossible to get through. I hear sirens getting louder, and soon several police officers in cars and on motorcycles arrive on the scene. They start throwing out tear gas into the crowd, and the group quickly disperses. I make a break towards a clearing, dodging tear gas canisters as they land all around me. It’s utter chaos around me, as I see people running every direction, trying to find shelter from the gas. One of the canisters bounces off my leg, but luckily I don’t breathe in any of the fumes and am able to keep running.

I pass by an alleyway, when I hear someone shout, “Agent!” I turn to see a lady with an earpiece motioning me to follow her down the alley. She walks over to a brick wall and pushes a secret button, revealing a small hole just big enough for me to fit into. I jump down this slide inside the hole, and eventually slide into a river running behind some of the buildings. I start to swim towards a nearby dock, but the scene goes black.



I find myself in some sort of flashback. I am seated at a table in this small interrogation room with a small whiteboard on the wall. I try reading what’s written on it, but the letters keep changing on me. Just then, the lady from the alley walks in and places some papers down on the table.
“Well, unfortunately, you failed the microexpression test. We noticed that when you tell a lie, the right side of your mouth raises a little…” She pauses for a bit. “Interesting…”
“What is it?”
“Well it appears the side of your mouth doesn’t raise when you’re told a lie, kind of like the lie that you failed the microexpression exam.” I look up at her confused. “Congrats, you passed. Welcome to the team, agent.”
She extends her arm, and we shake hands, but then I wake up.

*Fun fact, there isn’t actually any software that Alex Trebek uses when he reads the questions. He just has a sheet of paper with the questions, and he crosses them off as he goes. I’m great at parties.

It’s been awhile since I’ve posted any dreams, but in the interest of picking my lucidity back up, I’m getting back into journaling. My dream last night was pretty cool, so I figured I’d start now.

First, I started off in this weird video game. There were a maze of chambers and locked doors, and several different soccer balls that I had to kick into their corresponding doors to unlock them. Occasionally there were a few creepy mannequin-like creatures that would block me from kicking the balls into the doors, but I managed to stay far enough away from them that they didn’t hurt me at all.

Next, I was working in what looked like a giant military base, with a large warehouse in the middle. Me and my boss were moving big boxes of paper in from his truck. At one point I looked at the papers, which were printed on one side with what looked like math homework. We finally walked back to my boss’s truck. It was 3pm, and he had to head to another project site, but he said there was one more pallet of paper boxes that I needed to move in, and I could leave after finishing that.

After he left, I was heading back to get the paper, but the wind was blowing pretty hard. At one point I stretched out my arms and let the wind take me up a bit into the air. I figured I’d use this to my advantage. I had some contraption that was basically a pool noodle shaped like football field goalposts. As I held it over my head, the wind picked up under it and lifted me up into the air. I sailed around the base for a while, mostly just staying a few feet off the ground. There were a ton of people around the base, and everyone waved as I passed them in the sky. The weirdness of this situation made me semi-lucid, but I was having fun sailing, so I just kept with it. At one point I took it even higher, flying about 100 feet up, and it felt amazing.

I eventually touched down in an open field. I lifted back up and practiced the landing a few times, but the last time my hands slipped from the pool noodle, and I fell on my back. Cosmo and Wanda from Fairly Oddparents were there, commenting on my “masterful” landing. “You think that’s impressive, check this out.” I pulled a portal gun out (from who knows where) and shot it into the sky. I then turned and pointed at the ground below me and fired. I instantly fell through it and found myself several miles up plummeting towards the earth. I must have been in a cloud or something, since I couldn’t see the ground from where I was. It was incredibly exhilarating. There was a speed meter at the bottom of my vision, so I tried repositioning myself in mid air to increase my speed as I tried to approach terminal velocity. It strangely didn’t change much, so I kept trying to make myself as aerodynamic as possible. Of course, I was too distracted by this, and forgot to actually pay attention to how close I was to the ground. I looked down to see it was coming up alarmingly fast. I pulled the cord to the parachute I was apparently wearing, but it was mostly too late. I blacked out as I hit a tree.

I woke up under the tree I had hit. My parachute was still caught up in the branches above me. I stood up and looked at my watch, it was past 10pm. I remember that I hadn’t finished unloading the paper boxes. I rushed over to the warehouse, only to find it was all closed up, with all the lights off. The gate outside was locked. I was thinking about jumping over, when a white car pulled up next to me. The window rolled down, and one of my friends was driving. I asked her how to get in, but she just told me they’ve been closed for a while. She then started telling me about her day. I really didn’t care about it, and was still trying to figure out how I was going to get inside, but she wouldn’t shut up.

In a fairly cinematic fashion, the scene transitioned into a flashback. The scene was this mix between Frozen and Toy Story. A young Elsa and Anna were in their bedroom, and Anna was excited for her birthday presents.

“Did you buy me a toy?”
“Oh, I bought you all the toys.”

Elsa opened a box with 3 or 4 toys inside, which looked like Raggedy Ann dolls. The dolls sprang to life and did a dance on her bed. I remember thinking (again, confusing Toy Story and Frozen) that it was weird that toys would buy other toys, since that would essentially be slavery. And then I woke up.

I had an extra hour this morning since my college's convocation was cancelled today, so what better thing to do than take a nap.

I woke up in my house. I knew instantly I was dreaming, since I woke up in the guest bedroom. I had already decided before I fell asleep that I wanted to do the blood TOTM, and preferably with dragon blood that would transform me into a dragon. I exit the room and head for the stairs. My mom is in front of me saying something that I don't remember. I think of sucking her blood instead, but I decide against it, as that would be creepy. I start to follow her to the kitchen, but the kitchen wasn't there, and instead I found myself in the bathroom. On the counter were what seemed like hundreds of little bottles of all different shapes, sizes, and colors.


I found myself smack dab in the middle of a Macy's perfume department, basically.

I try to find one that looks like it's blood of some kind, but nothing stands out to me. I can't even find one that was red. Okay, let's just try to make it appear. I start to visualize the bottle, from the bottom up. As I imagine the glass pattern and red liquid, I realize the bottle I'm envisioning is right in front of me. How convenient. I pick it up, but as I shake it, the red liquid slowly turns to blue. Neat. The top, which I hadn't visualized yet, was a cheap plastic trigger-spray thing. I open wide and spray a couple times into my mouth. It tastes metallic, exactly like blood. I keep spraying until I feel like I've ingested enough. Okay, so now to just let the dragon blood do its magic. Within a few seconds, my arms start twitching, and then shaking, and then convulsing. My back tenses up, and I feel something churning inside my stomach.


Kind of like the last time I ate Taco Bell.

I start to lose vision in my right eye, and then my left. The scene goes completely dark, and soon the convulsions stop, and there's a deafening silence. A few seconds pass. Suddenly, the scene reappears. I look in the mirror, and notice my snazzy new wings behind my back. They kind of looked like Charizard wings, but were more flesh-colored. Cool, it worked! I was honestly excited, as I haven't had any transformation work for me even that much. I try to decide where to take these babies for a spin, but I quickly wake up from excitement.

I don't remember if this was a false or real awakening, but I lost lucidity. Still, I had a pretty amazing non-lucid at this point. Beware, it's pretty random at times, with lots of changes happening really fast, but it gets really good at the end. Just a glimpse into my ADD, I guess.

I was at a waterpark with some friends. I went down this slide into this small pool at the bottom. I get out and stand a ways away, as another girl comes down the slide. She kind of stays in the pool for a while, as she's waiting for a friend to come down. I look over to the left to see an old lady in her 90's on a motorcycle. She's at the top of this dirt ramp a distance away, and closer to me was another halfpipe. At the sound of a horn, she takes off down the ramp and heads toward the halfpipe. Unfortunately, she crashes, but the motorcycle continues, shooting wildly off the ramp and careening into the pool next to it, where the girl still is waiting. It lands right on top of her, and she goes under the water a bit. Her head comes back up, but the water starts to turn red with blood. She doesn't have much of an expression on her face, but I know instantly that her legs have been severed off. I wave for someone to come help. Paramedics soon rush in. I see my friends on the other side of the pool. I walk over them, and one of my friends says that we need to pray for the girl that just got hurt. I agree, but I first need to put away the towel that I (suddenly) have in my hands.

We are now on some kind of yacht. My friends are gathered around the kitchen table to pray, and I head to the sink to wring out my towel. I turn around to find I am now on a much smaller boat, and my friends are now tied up and sitting on a different boat. I run over to the edge to get a better look, and see this evil blonde lady standing on the other boat. She laughs maniacally at me.


I originally thought it was some lady from my church, but now that I've googled "evil blonde lady", frick, I think it was Ann Coulter. This expression and everything.

"I'm afraid I can't have you following me."

She points behind me. I turn to see a Heavy from Team Fortress 2 dumping a bunch of gasoline into the bottom of my boat. The gasoline quickly comes up to my chest, at which point he steps out of the boat onto the dock. I remain cool and calm, as I know that "I've played this level of the game before." I walk to the back of the boat to a small white button that reads "Press here to exit." I click it, and the gasoline starts to drain. Well that was easy. I turn to my side to see the other boat speeding off into the distance. "Oh no you don't!" I jump into the driver's seat and give chase. We drive off the lake, down a river, and through the sewers. Meanwhile, the boat appears to get smaller and smaller, until it's about the size of a go-cart, just barely getting around my body. Still, it keeps me afloat, and apparently can fly, as I find out as I drive up a ladder in the sewers. It looks like I am in Counter-Strike, climbing the ladder while carrying the boat in front of me. I drive the boat until I come to a massive room that looks like a level from Portal. I walk down a hallway to my right.

I don't remember at what point he joined me, but my buddy Mike was now with me. We walked through a couple dark office rooms that looked like they were abandoned.


This is not Portal as far as I know, but it looks pretty dang close to my dream.

"So, why are all these rooms dismantled?" Mike asks.
"Oh, I cut the power to these rooms in an earlier level, so nothing in here works. It was optional, but it makes this part a heck of a lot easier."

We come to another large Portal-like room. Lasers line the far walls, stretching diagonally at different heights. About fifty feet up is a small room surrounded by glass with the exit inside. There was a hole in the glass, and the wall on the other side was portalable, so it was a really simple solution. As I'm about to portal up, I hear footsteps around the corner. "Shoot, we gotta hide." We duck in a small recessed area in the darkness. The footsteps get closer and closer, until I'm certain we're going to be killed. Suddenly, I hear a quiet voice whisper,

"Move closer, I can't talk very loud. If she knows I'm here, she'll kill me."

I look up to see my friend Matt, who looks like he's turned into a half-man half-machine cyborg. There's wires running off of him connecting to different places on his body. I somehow know that he was on the boat that was kidnapped, and that he has been forced to work for the evil lady as her slave. He hands me a strange device.


This is a barcode scanner. It's also apparently a futuristic flash drive of sorts.

"I don't have much time to explain. She's set the facility to self-destruct in a few minutes, with all of us trapped inside. I've downloaded my conscience onto this drive. If you can connect it to the mainframe, I can override the explosion and get us out of here."
I continue to stare at the device, somewhat confused as to what all is happening.
"One last thing. If you are caught and capture, be sure to know four things. One, I was never here. Two, we do not know each other. Three, I am not American. And four..." He pauses for a moment, and a single tear runs down his face. "I always loved you."

I embrace him for a hug, tears streaming down my face. "Thanks for everything, Matt. I'll never forget you." He turns and walks down the hallway we just came through, and Mike and I head towards a different exit at the floor level. We enter in what looks like a break room. It's dark, but I can still make out some things. I walk into the closet, and find all of my friends still tied up. Mike and I start untying them and tell them to stay quiet and hidden. Meanwhile, I look for some kind of computer or power box connected to the mainframe. Then, there's a noise.

I turn around to see the evil lady walk into the room with a mug in her hand. She turns on the lights, looks up, and freezes. My friends and I all stare with a deer-in-headlights look. She quickly turns and presses the emergency button on the wall. The lights turn red, and I hear a computerized voice.

"EMERGENCY! Intruder detected. Self-destruct initiated."

She then rushes me. I grab the first thing I can find, a plastic fork on the counter. I stab her in the side, but the prongs of the fork break off and do no damage. She immediately retaliates and stabs me in the side. I flinch, expecting pain, but realize nothing happened. She pulls back her arm, and in her hand is another plastic fork with broken prongs. Looks like she had the same idea. She pauses for a second, and then humorously remarks,

"We just had to get the cheap forks, didn't we?"

She throws the fork over her shoulder and runs out the door. Meanwhile, a few guards rush in the other door and start firing. I duck behind an overturned table. The sprinklers overhead start spraying, until it's absolute chaos everywhere. So this is where it ends, I guess. I look to my side to see a very out-of-place port in the wall that fits Matt's drive perfectly. It's quite a ways away, and would be practically suicide to try to get to it. A voice comes over the intercom.

"Explosion imminent. Evacuate the facilities. Destruction in 30 seconds."

Yep, this is where it ends. No time to waste. I dart out from behind the table and dive for more cover, slowly inching my way towards the port.

"Destruction in 15 seconds."

I try to decide my next move. The port is still a good 30 feet away. I try to take into account the location of the guards, the positions of Mike and the rest of my friends, the odds that the sprinklers would give me just enough cover to make it.

"Destruction in 10 seconds."

Nope, I should probably just go! I pull out the drive and dart towards the port. Everything moves in slow motion. I can see the bullets moving towards me in bullet time. I can see my friends looking on in disbelief. I can see each drop of water pouring from the sprinklers overhead. Just a few more feet. I stretch the drive out in front of me. Time slows to a stop. Until suddenly, I wake up.


I know, random WWE wrestler, I felt the same way.

So I've decided to do a 30-day challenge of using the SSILD technique. I have experimented with the technique before with somewhat mixed success. So this time I'm going to use nothing but SSILD for the next 30 days and record how many LD's and FA's I get. So here we go:

Day 2

I went to bed at about 12:15, although I didn't finally go to sleep until almost 1. I woke up at 5:30, but instead of going to the bathroom, I just sat up in my bed since I was lazy... I then performed the cycles for about 15 minutes before I tried to go to sleep.

I was working at my job at the grocery store (I work there almost every day, so why not dream about it almost every day?). Some other employees and I were on kind of an espionage mission trying to catch this shoplifter who somehow managed to walk out with multiple 12-packs of Coke without paying. I was to keep an eye on the door and on the suspect's car. Everything was going smoothly, but suddenly the suspect's car started to pull out of the parking lot. I ran at a full sprint out the door as I yelled into my walkie-talkie, "Emergency situation. Suspect is fleeing the scene." I ran as fast as I could and tried to cut him off before he reached the street. I lunged for the car, but I missed and fell on the pavement. I then woke up.

A little more disappointing night of dreams, especially after the success I had last night, but I'm sure all techniques have their ups and downs.

Day 2: LD - 0, FA - 0
Total: LD - 2, FA - 0