Third sequence: this one was longer, but my recall only retained a fragment of the ending. The dream was some kind of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles RPG; it was in slightly dated video game graphics and all the dialogue occurred in dialogue boxes Suikoden style. Some villain (who may or may not have been Shredder, who made an incidental appearance during the villain's escape) was disguised as Donatello. They go into a plain, empty bland rectangular room with wooden plank floors. On the fall wall near the corner there's a bay window. Someone whom I'm not able to recall enough to identify approaches the window, and is suddenly kidnapped as fake-Don reveals himself. He grabs the person, then runs to the picture window, where he teleports away (as the villain escapes, an image of Shredder is projected onto the window. Michaelangelo is devastated, but is comforted by Raphael. The fourth sequence is another interesting and memorable one, for a handful of reasons. There were several subtle indications throughout the dream that in this particular dream I'm female. As it was, I was trying to infiltrate some kind of evil amusement park (thinking about it now, it's reminiscent of L4D2). At the lines to get in, I'm able to jump over the in order to sneak in. There's a direct passage in off to my right and up some stairs. It leads to an area just off one of the busy pathways in the park. There I met my contact, who happened to be Neil Patrick Harris, whom I was starstruck to see in an unusual, excitably girlish kind of way (subtle hint #1). We walked through the crowd as he explained my mission, but as we were walking I noticed another Neil Patrick Harris casually stroll by. I looked at the NPH who had been talking to me and suddenly realized he was a fake. He knew that I knew he was fake, so he pinned me to a wall and then proceeded to try to rape me. At this point (and I'm finding some more comic irony in how it reminds me of L4D2) the dream went third person, so while my gender in this dream may now be obvious looking back, what with the slim girlish figure, long blond hair tied back in a ponytail, breasts, and a vagina, keep in mind I was going by dream logic at the time so none of this seemed outlandishly apparent. I remember having that odd sort of rape victim psychological crisis where I was simultaneously scared and angry that I was about to be forced into sex against my will and slightly flattered that NPH wanted to have sex with me. Anyways, before it got particularly graphic the dream reset back to the beginning where I was a the line to get into the amusement park. This time, sneaking in I took a pathway to the left. It leads into a backroom/warehousey area. I realize I may have tripped some alarm or that somehow they knew where I was trying to sneak in, because a ways up ahead I could see several strangely dressed girls whom I identified as being with the amusement park's security. I'm able to disable most of them by stealth shooting a barrel that explodes and then a fire extinguisher, knocking them all out but one. The remaining girl looks around suspicious and confused, so I attempt to sneak by her. I make it about halfway through the area she's patrolling when she sees me. I immediately run forward, trying to find an exit while she gives chase. We go running for a little ways down a wide hallway, then up some stairs to a raised catwalk for a ways, then up another set of stairs to a higher catwalk where I find a door. I go through the door and close it behind me. I'm now on a platform jutting out from the building; there's nowhere to go but fall a few stories down. Fortunately, for whatever reason, there's a column of stacked wooden chairs a short distance away from the catwalk and I realize I can jump onto the chairs and then ride them slowly down as they break under me for a soft landing(!?), so that's what I do. I'm now in kind of dusty and sandy area that seems to be a seldom traveled passage around the outside of the park; I can hear music and crowds off in the distance and it's now dusk. Dream ends as I walk towards the amusement park.
I'm pretty sure I just had my first lucid dream. It seemed kind of long at the time but I may only remember some bits and pieces now, gonna try to get down as much as I can. And it's weird, it feels so foggy now. Was a very intriguing experience. There was another dream before it but I want to get down as much of the lucid as I can so I'm writing it first. I'm trying to recall what it was that triggered the reality check. I think it was that I was laying in bed or on the phone with my wife and she said something absurd (I think it had something to do with her saying she was on her way home from class at university, and I quickly realized she doesn't go to school in reality) that caused me to quickly consider that this isn't real and pull a nose-pinch reality check. I was able to breathe like my nose was just a little stuffy despite the nose-pinch. There was an obligatory, "Holy shit, I'm lucid!" moment. To keep the dream from fading from excitement and to calm down, I closed my eyes and (for whatever reason) pictured a topographical map key. Feeling it was stable, I opened my eyes, did another reality check (marveling of course at how weird it was to be breathing through a pinched nose, and then started wandering my environment. I seemed to be in what looked and felt like my old house on Broadway. I was a little unprepared for my first lucid; I hadn't thought of anything cool to do. The first thing I did was go into the bathroom. I figured since I was lucid I might as well start playing around with how well I could control it. I went to the door of the bathroom and decided I'd summon something on the floor outside and close the door to see if it appeared; I arbitrarily chose cake, and then I sort of glanced up and back down and it was there on the floor, slightly stale and with a big slice missing--I didn't even have to close the door. Happy, I went to the big picture window out front and continued experimenting by swapping between night and day by closing my eyes for a second then looking at the sky. I noted some unusual mixed success, namely whenever I wanted it to be day or night it would literally only be just starting day or night (ie at dawn or dusk). It's a little foggy if there was something occurring between now and what happened next, but the next thing I remember was that I was quickly running out of ideas for things to do, so I thought, "Well, I've always wanted to experience sex as a woman, let's give that a try." So I went back to the bathroom (it's notable that the previous time it was the bathroom from the old Broadway house, but it was now the bathroom from my previous apartment on Oak Street), stripped down, then looked in the mirror. Quick comment after the fact, the mirror worked just fine for its purpose in the dream, but before transforming I started in my normal dream avatar--which is myself as I recognize but much thinner. I was able to transform myself by pointing to the parts of my body that I wanted to transform and focusing on them. I started with breasts, then moved on to my penis. I recall being amused/annoyed that as I was shrinking my penis my foreskin wasn't shrinking with it so I had to do that separate. I started to get a little impatient so I just waved my hand around in front of my crotch and looked up at the ceiling to try to speed things up. Eventually everything looked pretty good, wasn't perfect, and I noticed that at some point I had lost all my body hair without intentionally trying to, but it was good enough for a first attempt. I was trying to decide what I wanted to do first with my new body when I noticed I sorta needed to pee so I decided to get that out of the way first, so I did. Just that was an unusual new physical sensation. There was some toilet paper sitting in the bathtub next to the toilet, so I grabbed some to clean things up a bit (since I was planning to shortly be playing around down there soon anyways); as I was cleaning up the phone rang and I answered it. The voice on the other end was some woman trying to tell me about how there were cloths in the tub that I could use for whatever but to leave them there so she could wash them later (I noticed here that it was hard to focus on what was happening now while I was on the phone trying to listen). I looked back into the tub and the toilet paper had been replaced by dark blue cloth. I shortly regretted flushing a few of them down the toilet. I checked the mirror one last time to see if things were still good and then went back out to the living room. I'm think there may have been somewhere here where I experimented with my new body, but if so unfortunately I don't remember it. Eventually there appeared in my house (as though she was familiar with the place) a thin, light-skinned black girl. Delighted to find another person to help me experiment with my new body, I asked her if she wanted to have sex with me. She seemed apprehensive; focusing on her I first removed her clothes then, noting of course that she too was female and thus would make proper copulation difficult, made her instantly grow a penis. She wasn't very amused by this, however, and she angrily stormed off to the basement. Shrugging, and once again bored, I decided to turn my attention on mentally recreating graphic-update remakes of old school video games I love in my mind for entertainment. I started with what I assume was Final Fantasy 6, though thinking on it after the fact the action doesn't match up properly with the game (though I specifically recall Terra's appearance). At some point this was interrupted with my wife calling, when she called what had been the video game scene taking up my entire stream of consciousness suddenly appeared as though I'd taken it out of full-screen mode on my monitor on my computer at my current apartment. I even had my headphones on, so I had to remove one of side of them to expose an ear for the phone like I usually do. I was annoyed at the distraction but answered the phone anyways. I don't remember the contents of the actual phone message, but I note again after the fact that it started to break my lucid concentration. The last part I remember now was going down to the basement where I found the black girl (who had now been transformed into some sort of small Pokémon-like creature) cuddling on a table with another small Pokémon-like creature. Saying, "Oh, so you'll have sex with him but not me!" and did my own storming-off-angrily upstairs and back to the living room, where I waved my hand and did some sort of mental slash across the table they were lying on and killing them both. My memory of this dream ends here, though when I woke I seemed to think that there was more non-lucid dream that came after this. I awoke just prior to starting this journal entry and did a quick reality check that passed, officially ending my first lucid dream. Note to self: be wary about answering phones once you're lucid; it seems to help break lucid focus. In fact, I'm going to try to make an effort to start reality checks whenever answering and/or ending phone calls. I'm going to try to remember that the next thing on my agenda for practice when a dream goes lucid is controlling the environment; this time I kind of let the environment do what it wanted around me. There was a dream sequence either prior to or leading up to where it went lucid. There was a long prelude to most of what I remember, but the bulk of what I remember was that there was this stretch of interstate that I would drive down as though I was in a GTA-ish sandbox type game and try to score points on this segment of highway. The segment of highway was kind of a long straight section with a curve off to the right. I'm thinking I may have lost more memory of this dream out of excitement for the lucid one, so maybe more will come back to me later.