Recent DJ Posts

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #252: The Struggling Artist

I’m power-walking up a hill with Mom, describing a dream from earlier in the night where she’d had me take her to a spooky house to ghost-hunt. “That’s just over the hill!” she says, and as she walks up ahead, I become lucid.

She speeds away over the hill, which now looks oddly vertical and impassable. When I follow the line of the hill all the way up, I see a ceiling, and realize that I’m now indoors. It looks very much like my childhood home. I remember my intent to try bonus Task of the Month (play an instrument that doesn’t exist in waking life) with Dreamer, so I attempt a summon, saying something about how now we’re going to do the concert that we talked about. I also dimly recall that Dreamer is actually playing music right now in waking life. (True!)

I try a few different varieties of summon, first assuming she’s there, then reaching my hand behind my back, and finally the old “spin around, there you are!” Each time, I get a flicker of presence but I’m just not able to properly finish the summon. I wander into a version of my parents’ bedroom and I see Dad snoozing on his right side. Through the window I see that it’s morning outside.

I still want to try playing a dream instrument, so I hook my right pinky and left thumb together to form a pantomime trumpet. I blast a few notes into this “trumpet” and it sounds like very realistic but very, very poor trumpet-playing. I’m pleased that I made some dream music this way, but I still don’t consider this to be the success that I was going for.

I walk past my blissfully snoring dad to the window and start phasing through. I briefly get hung up on the mini-blinds but after a moment of calming down, I’m all the way through. I drift down to the ground (for some reason I’m on the second floor, unlike waking life where this room would be on the ground floor.) I again attempt to summon Dreamer, by imagining that she’s behind me. It doesn’t work, and I spin around for a few more of these attempts before deciding to focus on the instrument for a bit.

I hover on my back for a while, looking up at the reddish early morning sky, imagining that the dream instrument will take shape in my hands. I feel a sensation like bubbles pressing gently against my fingers, but I can’t seem to turn this into anything musical. I descend back to the ground, coming back to my feet again. There’s a pine tree here like when I was a kid, and I grab a hunk of bark off of the tree in frustration and stuff it in my mouth to gnaw on it. It tastes about like you’d expect, and I blow the chunks of bark out of my mouth in a big, satisfying spray. I’m not sure what to do now and I move half-heartedly toward the deck as the dream ends.