Recent DJ Posts

24th December 2020

Scraps:

(recall faded too much to record details) Dream with pre-lucid thoughts, inside another dream. Don't remember how the transition "out" of the "deeper" dream worked.

26th December 2020

Scraps:

Vague recall of using an auction house in WoW, likely in Ironforge. I was looking at or for a Warlods' Deck or a Heroism card.

In a separate dream/sequence, vague visual recall of some symbolic shapes, mostly relating to genitals.

28th December 2020

Fragment:

I'm a priest of sorts? Both literally and as a sort of RPG class. Recall being in an ancient but intact Greek temple, which has Egyptian styled elements present.

A bit earlier but in the same location, I'm in a group with T and old friends like M. At the end my old friends are being nasty to me. I remember violence and anger, also from my part. I threw brass vases and other decorative items. There were a pair of scrapyard-like crushers outside the temple; the outdoor area seems to have been made up mostly of rough-hewn limestone; there's a vague feeling of it being similar to certain temple locations from Saint Seya. Arrived on bicycles with two other people, but on the way to the temple we had been intercepted by another group of individuals, I don't recall our interactions.

Earlier still? I could give blessings and fortitude (as if buffs or spells) at no cost since I was a priest. It was implied or I had intuitive knowledge that it would otherwise cost reagents and gold coins to do this.

Sep 30 2018

(3 dreams, 2 lucids)

pre-star wars interstate/table in front yard, F's car - why are the keys on a table in the front yard? they can be stolen! have to get her car back, getting angry

lucid/semi-lucid star wars dream* (badass)

wbtb (lasted for 3 hours)

lucid with D and 8, and roach antenae then hopping away like a deer, short, got lucid halfway through

space station dream getting a delivery, we were running out, boss says forget about the reeses puffs and then they give us twice the delivery (everyone mad "we could have been getting twice this whole time? we didn't even get any reeses puffs") and guards and cutting ribbon lines (dad, w/ gun or broom) and other stuff (transformed into noir music video at end); remember the black slats on the divider vividly, and the floor; like an arcade! vivid, long

lots of HI and feeling for dream scene, but no successful WILDs
feeling for a white tennis shoe
feeling for a white metal corner with slats on it

*Star Wars dream:
I'm in the office of 9. My best friend (A) and his previous long-time girlfriend (T) are there. There's also another girl from the previous dream who has orange hair (we'll call her O; I had a feeling she might have been a manifestation of my guide). A has a hooked nose unlike in real life, and he's standing next to the bookcase in the far left corner comforting T. O is sitting in a chair looking at me. It's a persecution-style dream, someone is going to eradicate us. I think I had to kill someone in the office, someone was a traitor. I become lucid but decide that instead of pursuing goals I'll let the dream take me wherever it was intending to go. I have a lightsaber and there was someone else there (my dad or F?) who had one, so I offered the group mine thinking that the other person and I could take them with just one lightsaber. They declined and I decided against it anyway, I would need it. So instead I give them a purplish greenish small box of parts to make their own. The dream shifts and I'm in the front yard in the passenger seat of the van. My sister and F are across the street selling pumpkins (as a disguise/to make it seem normal that we're there and that we have nothing to hide). They need to close up so we can go. In the car with me is O, and my dad and possibly mom are near the car. [I say something to someone.] Sister brings me a pumpkin in F's WL purse, it's ripping, I tell them to stop messing around, there's danger. Eventually the scene transitions and the pumpkin stand disappears, it's darker outside, I can tell Sith are coming. I think I told the van to drive away but I can't remember now.

I walk to the curb and it's much darker like a storm's coming, dust blows by me dramatically and I see two white Hutts at the very end of the street. I remember now that I had told them in the van not to fire their blasters unless they had to, because if they did the others would know where they were. For this reason I don't draw my lightsaber yet (it's probably about 6 houses until the end of the street so I have some distance to cross). When I reach about halfway I notice three more Sith, they looked like Tuscan raiders. Unexpectedly one of the Hutts charged me! It was much faster than I expected because instead of slithering towards me it floated/levitated towards me at an alarming rate. It also held its red lightsaber in a fully forward way, arms up and forward at the chest. It was very intimidating. It also had force lightning. By this point, I had succumbed to the dream's validity to the point where I was still lucid in awareness, but it was more like an elevated state of consciousness and control of my own actions, not control of the dream. In any case I didn't think to use dream powers but was limited to the constraints of the universe, so because I had a blue lightsaber, I only had force push, and becuase they had red, they also had force lightning. So essentially we would circle around each other while facing each other, him sending lightning at me and me pushing or lightsabering it away. This was very intense and I was still only facing one of them. Once I had sen that the van was gone, I decided to flee as I couldn't face them all. I think I may have killed one of the Tuscan raiders first? I ran to a kid's bicycle and as I boarded it, one of the raiders had come up behind me on a Star Wars bike. I used the force to lift the bike up and start flying. The raider and I get into a contest of side-swiping and I dismount him. I have to pull up because there's a white fence/gate at the end of my street.

Now the sky had gone from storm-blue with dust in it to full-on apocalypse brown. I was flying past twisted trees and power lines, turning sideways to dodge them. At some point the dream faded.

Most of these dreams came from day residue; the SW part came from listening to an episode of MBMBAM discussing naming a kid Anakin; we recently got a new end table by our front door where we leave our everyday carried items, and it's next to a window with blinds so I recently thought "what if they can see through those?"; the arcade-themed space station was due to seeing a Dave and Busters-themed scene in the show F was watching (I think Once Upon a Time). Anyway the lightsaber fighting was badass, even though it wasn't as conscious as it could have been; but it probably would have been much shorter if I had been fully lucid the whole time, so I'm in part glad that the dream and the threats it posed felt 100% real.

Interesting note: At the end of the SW dream, I was in an FA with the layout of my room being slightly different and although my eyes were closed, I could see a thin strip of light in front of me (in reality, this would have been to the right of me). I sat recalling my dreams and had a brief visualization/WILD attempt within the FA! Then I woke up. For some reason I wrote in my DJ that it's possible I had the SW dream stemming from visualizations during my FA? Interesting but I don't remember about the FA to say for sure now.

D1 - Dreaming that I was living in medieval times, part way through a dream I am at a farm and someone has a sack that is filled with animals. The animals seem to be quiet happy in the bag until I put a black cat in with the white one that is already there. It gives me "the look" suggesting this is not the done thing at all.

D2 - Next I am dealing with a poor person who is being given some kind of wage (I have no idea ) they are looking out of there window over a muddy lane.

D3- There are twins following me up a dark staircase, they are only young boys but I feel I must murder them as they are a threat (twin princes in the tower, if you know your tudor kings and queens of English history). I hit them over the head then slit their throats (nice Oo).

D4 - In a house seemingly filled with kids (poor house ) I go off with a woman and have sex.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #263: Judo and Giants

As I lay back down post-WBTB, I get the sense that I’m starting to fall asleep. Just before bed, Dreamer had skyped me her most recent dream where she transitioned to WILD by rolling onto her side and partly more onto her stomach. (This one!) I try the same thing, worrying for a second that moving will spoil things, but it’s all fine. There’s a low buzzing sound and a dream starts to take shape. After a little more patience, I find myself outside on a street at night.

Among the people going by, I see a lost boy wandering around calling out for his mother. I ask him who his mother is and he says that it’s RBBB, someone I know from college. I decide that she’ll be close by, and sure enough I see her kneeling in an alcove carved out of a nearby brick building. I bring the boy to her and say, “Hey, [RBBB]! It’s [Canis]. Your son was looking for you.” She gives me a curt, rather cold nod and goes back to fervently praying as her son curls up next to her.

I review my goals and remember my two main ones: first, my 5-year-old son E’s idea to find him, take him to a playground so he could play with Elsa and Anna from Frozen. Second, Iokheira’s (aka NewArtemis) idea to find her and transform into wolves. :canislucidus:

I head down the street to start looking for E, but the DCs on the street start running in terror from something up ahead. There’s a stone giant stomping along the road ahead of me, and he grabs a car from the side of the road and flings it across the street into a grassy courtyard.



He comes straight for me, and I try to think of some way not to turn this into a fight, but it’s just not coming to me. The stone giant seems way too hostile, and the only option that comes to me is to try to end the combat as quickly as possible. I move my hands away from each other in a ripping gesture to pantomime tearing the stone giant apart. It works, and the giant blows apart into a huge scatter of boulders and pebbles.

I hurry past, but almost immediately the rocks start rolling back toward one another so that the giant can reform. Soon I catch sight of his shadow chasing after me, but I resolve not to turn around and instead just ignore him. Sure enough, he vanishes!

I come to the top of a tall series of stacked platforms that descend into the ground, sort of like a reverse parking garage. Every floor is packed with these large, amazing water fountains that flow into one another. I drop down a few levels, expecting to find my son E. And he’s there! He’s curled up in the corner crying, and I scoop him up in my arms. “Hey, don’t cry, buddy! This is a lucid dream! I’m going to try to take you to meet Elsa and Anna!” This settles him down, and I leap off the side of the fountain structure, floating softly about 80 feet or so to the ground.

At the bottom is a playground! I hop up on one of the wooden structures and set E down so that he can walk on his own. Together we cross a wooden bridge and in the middle we meet Elsa and Anna! “[E], look who it is!” They look similar to their appearance in the films, although their facial features occasionally rearrange in unusual, Picasso-like ways. E runs up to them and hugs Anna around the leg.



A crowd of DCs start pouring in, and we get separated for a moment. I feel a loss of stability and grab onto this old guy’s stomach to restabilize. To my surprise, I can feel that he’s clearly got abs. I say, “Dude, you’re like 60! How have you got abs?... Oh right, you’re a DC.” He and some of the other DCs laugh.

I return to where E and the Frozen princesses were, but they’ve been replaced by clear imposters. (The Elsa imposter is non-animated, black, and in her mid-50s!) I talk with the imposters for a bit but decide to move on to Iokheira’s idea, so I leave the playground, finding myself walking down the stairs in a house.

Up ahead I see Iokheira sprint by! I follow her path into the shadows of a living room, but when I get there, she’s gone. I turn back and look around for a bit before someone else comes down the stairs I entered from, a young strawberry blonde woman in her mid-20s. I ask her where Iokheira is and the woman answers that “Sorry, [Iokheira] doesn’t live here anymore.”

As I’m turning to leave, the strawberry blonde woman runs up and starts aggressively kissing me. It’s exciting to some degree but also a little scary. She pulls away for a moment to admit to me that she’s a “very slobbery kisser”, and sure enough, she becomes quite slobbery. Then she says, “And check this out!” As I watch, her left eye moves into the center of her forehead. She checks my face, seemingly expecting a horrified reaction. Instead I laugh and for a moment she seems disappointed not to have frightened me. She returns to aggressive kissing, and after things move on to sexytime, the dream fades...

I hold on for DEILD and I’m quickly back. I’m roaming the hallway of a house, and I continue a room-to-room search for Iokheira. In one of the rooms the light switch doesn’t work and I remark out loud that “That’s a bullshit schema!” I leave the hallway and enter a huge cathedral-like chamber that’s snaked through with all of these suspended balconies.

I run along one of these balconies until I’m confronted by an archeress, a brown-haired woman in her mid-40s. I try to ask for her help, but she starts saying a variety of strange, threatening things and looks like she’s going to take a shot at me. I grab onto her and do a Dreamer-style sacrifice JUDO throw, and it totally works! The archeress is still yelling at me, but I run away from her into a new room as the dream ends.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #259: Flurries on the 58th Floor

I’m an operative infiltrating an office building. My enemies have seen me before and know my face, so I have to enter as stealthily as I can. I enter through some side entrance high up on a section of rooftop, and I have a vague memory of arriving by helicopter. There’s a huge “59” written on the wall -- this is the 59th floor.

I run up, but it’s a dead end that leads back out to another roof. Okay, down instead. As I arrive at the 58th floor, I hear a door open nearby and a security guard steps into view. He looks like an easygoing family man, black, mid-40s, naturally cheerful face. But I can’t let myself get found out. “I’m sorry,” I say, and I rush forward, punching him in the face and then kicking him in the chest.

He somehow bounces away down the hall and I lose track of him. I run down the hall after him, and it twists and turns confusingly as I go. This all seems so strange and I remember that I must be having a lucid dream. In preparation for this dream, I used Dreamer’s goal-chaining technique, and as I become lucid, the excitement of lucidity is followed by the sense of cold, and I remember my intent to summon snow for Dreamer. (She’s never seen snow in waking life!)

I walk through the hall, spending a little time examining my surroundings and narrating out loud that “this is a lucid dream.” Once I feel settled, I tell Dreamer that she’s here in this office building too. She doesn’t appear right away, though, so for now I focus on summoning some snow. I imagine myself smushing up snow in my hand to form a snowball, and as I do that, snow begins gently falling around me as well. The snowball is a little too small and rock-like to be fun, so I discard it.

I walk into an office enclosed by glass walls, and a group of 4 or 5 women follow closely behind me. One of them is Dreamer! She’s pushing a stroller! She looks like herself but older, maybe ten years older than she is now, and she’s wearing a purple head scarf like she came prepared for the cold.



The other women are close friends or relatives, and they’re all here on some kind of important business to do with the baby in the stroller. Amazingly, I don’t look to see who or what is inside the stroller! I say to Dreamer “You’re here!” and do a little ta-daaaa with my hands. “I’m having a lucid dream!”

She laughs like I’m joking and says no, she’s got to focus. This meeting is really important to her. I insist that this is a dream, saying something like: “I was infiltrating this place and then bam! Lucidity! I used your goal-chaining technique, just like the last lucid!”

“Ah,” she says, “like when I had the [???] series!” The other women nod and smile at the apparent memory. “We had some fun with that one!”

“Yeah!” I tell her. “I wanted to show you this!” And the snowfall begins again.

Dreamer looks up and smiles. “Is that snow?” She looks excited and torn between enjoying the snow and following through with the story behind the dream plot. She looks like she's toying with the idea of opening her mouth toward the ceiling and letting snowflakes fall onto her tongue.

I see a handful of people dressed in suits waiting at a desk for the meeting with Dreamer and her posse. I ignore the suits, focusing my energy on the snow, and hoping they’ll fade into the background. There’s a bit more quiet snowfall before the dream ends.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #254: Adobe

I’m driving through a city, looking for some place to park. My dream family is here with me -- a dark-haired woman is my wife, my young daughter is in a car seat in the back, and there’s maybe a 2nd child (a son?) as well. We’re exhausted and homeless, living out of our car. I pull into a parking space next to a hill and sleep for a while. A cop car pulls up soon, though, and we have to move on.

Now we’re driving down a dusty freeway that’s under construction. Workers wander back and forth, while a thick cloud of tan dust obscures my vision. I can barely see 30 feet in front of me and I’m really scared that I’m going to hit someone. A worker walks right in front of the car and I swerve, barely missing him. I’m so afraid that I’m going to kill somebody and I panic myself into…

… a false awakening. I believe that I’m anotherdreamer and that I need to write this dream down before I forget it. My surroundings are alien to me, though, and I’m feeling super lazy, way too tired to get out of bed to journal. Something seems odd, though, and I flow into…

… another false awakening as myself! :canislucidus: I still feel really tired and lazy, but this time since I’ve “really woken up”, I decide to do the right thing and journal. I grab my DJ and walk into the bathroom, but as I’m holding the DJ I notice that the journal isn’t as thick as it usually is. (I keep a pen jammed in it.) I try the nose pinch, blow through, and now I’m lucid. I walk back into the bedroom and my vision dims until I’m in the void.

I rub my hands together, recalling the idea to try a little singing the next time I’m in the void. I sing a line about how “this is a lucid dreeeeeeam” and my voice comes out like half-badass/half-joke rock like Tenacious D. After some more singing and hand-rubbing, my vision comes back and I’m in my bedroom closet. I walk back out to the window and try some air guitar. It’s lame at first, but after a few tries, I hear some distant chords of electric guitar that actually sound pretty good.

I look out through the bedroom window onto a nighttime desert scene. As far as I can see there are rows of adobe buildings lit by neon signs. It looks like fun, so I phase through the window and hulk-jump off the side of the house toward the buildings. I do some mid-air guitar playing during this jump, too, and kind of flail my legs around like I’m trying to do some kind of rock star jump thing. I land between one set of restaurants and buildings on a dusty street, then hop into the air again.

While I’m up in the air, I decide that I want to try summoning Dreamer to hang out at one of these places to talk and pig out on a bunch of dream food. Out loud I say, “Okay, I know we’re supposed to meet here…” and then “Don’t be late!” I nag. When I land, though, the DC waiting there is a woman I don’t recognize, tall and pale with short brown hair, a pierced nose, and multiple piercings on each ear. She starts speaking to me in this really caustic, unpleasant American accent, berating me about my guitar playing.

“Your guitar playing was all bullshit,” says the woman. “That wasn’t even you!” She walks up to me, continuing to scold and complain about my guitar playing, telling me that my playing sucked, etc. I find this pretty annoying but for some reason I don’t think to just leave.

I don’t find this DC appealing, but I decide to turn things around by saying, “There’s no need to be so weird about it. If you wanted to have sex with me, you should have just asked.” As I say this, she takes on a different countenance, her hair darkening, her body growing a little shorter, a little more athletic-looking, and a softer, more attractive face, probably mixed-race. She approaches me and we kiss. We awkwardly lose our balance and do this not-at-all sexy fall onto the road. I make an attempt at escalating things to sexytime, but my vision has faded out. There are a few more seconds of void-kissing before the dream ends.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #250: Open Your Eyes

There’s a long sequence where I help set up a first date between a male friend and the twin sister of a female friend. Proud of having helped, I wander off to a hallway adjacent to where they’re having their date. There’s an old lady here staring at a set of wall hooks and commenting about how she’s a lucid dreamer and always checks wall hooks “just in case she’s dreaming.”

Interesting idea, I say, and notice that the shape of the hooks keeps changing. I spot a wadded up piece of paper and decide to make it float, just to see. It takes some effort, but float it does, and now I’m lucid. I walk through a nearby door into a warehouse stacked with boxes, intending to encounter Dreamer here.

As soon as I enter the room, I see Dreamer carrying some huge, heavy-looking cardboard box. She seems to be doing grunt work for some kind of retail job and there’s a disagreeable-looking young woman behind her shouting at her to hurry up her work. Dreamer sees me and gives me an apologetic look as this supervisor hustles her along. I approach the pair of them and tell the supervisor, “She’s all done with her work now, isn’t she?” The supervisor seems to accept this and wanders away.

I grab Dreamer’s hand and we run as I babble to her about how this is all a lucid dream. We leave the way I came in, but now it’s a marble entrance hall. Then we’re out on a crowded street, people walking in either direction down the sidewalk and cars rolling up and down the street. I shout something bold to the dream world about how this is my dream and nobody’s going to cause me any trouble. A lot of the DCs stop and turn to me at this, and one of the cars veers off of the street and comes rolling toward us.

Dreamer and I leap onto the hood of the car, run along the top of it, and jump into the air as we reach the trunk. She hangs on as we take flight, wrapping her arms around my neck and left shoulder. I comment on how silly it was of me to start thinking about dreamworld hostility when everything had been absolutely fine. Fortunately, none of it feels like a big deal, and we say something about how it should sort itself out.

The flight’s a lot of fun but at some point I lose my sight. Dreamer says, “The dream is still here. Open your eyes.” I’m nervous about this, but I try it. For a second they feel like they’re glued shut and I think this has to be my real eyes opening. But a little more effort and they’re open! We’re high above the clouds now, and I do a hard dive back to earth, determined that this time everything will be easy and peaceful. I somehow hit the ground sooner than expected and faceplant in some grass. Dreamer seems to be gone now.

I feel the grass a bit with my hands, and it feels phony, like mini-golf grass. A couple of DCs I know from another dream pass by, greet me, and I follow them into a building, through halls into a glass-walled office on the 2nd story. Somehow it’s night outside. An easy-going guy named Gary (black dude, friendly, on the tall side) joins us and I incorrectly remember that the Task of the Month is to pull a prank on a DC! (Oops, this is one from a previous month! )

As a prank, I decide to pretend that the window is sucking me out into the night. I act scared and start shouting as I phase through, landing on the corner of a nearby section of roof. I complete the prank by humping the corner of the roof. The guys inside start laughing uncontrollably and I float down to an outdoor restaurant patio that’s just below.

I think about whether I’ve got a chance to encounter Dreamer again and think about doing either another task or whatever the heck I feel like. As I think this, a woman seated at one of the patio tables turns to face me, and it’s Dreamer! She’s wearing a dress and has long blond hair, but otherwise looks and seems like herself. I talk a bit about tasks, but again lose my vision.

In response to this, she starts singing a strange Australian song about “marching around” and tells me to try marching around myself. As I’m flailing about, I feel myself kick over a table or two and I hear some people shout in surprise. “See how silly that is?” she says. “Just open your eyes!” I have some trouble at first, but after a little encouragement, my eyes come open just fine and I’m still in the same scene. Dreamer runs up and gives me a big hug before we walk off together, talking again about what we should do next. We never get around to anything before the dream ends.

This is an interesting lucid that happened about 40 minutes or so after first falling asleep. These are very unusual for me! Also had a much more nightmarish start than most of my lucids.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #247: Happier!

I’m standing by my pool, which looks distressingly green and nasty. While I’m stressing out about how this happened, a large snake comes slithering out of the pool toward me. “Whoa, are you kidding me?” I shout, running a few feet away toward a stone wall that’s about eight feet high. I scramble up to the top before the snake can get me. I notice that this felt easier than it should have, and I become lucid.

I let go of the wall and float away, my feet rotating gently upward until I’m lying on my back, looking up at the sky. I’m in some kind of miniature canyon, and the green water is now just a calm pond rather than my pool. I fly down toward the only exit, which seems to lead into a cave.

The cave interior is well-lit but feels sinister. The walls are stained red as if they’re covered with blood and strange growls echo off of the walls. Further down the slope I see dim, hulking figures shambling through the fog. I think that they look like zombies. I remember that I want to summon Dreamer but I want to wait until the environment becomes more pleasant.

I walk further down the slope and a huge, crazed-looking man with a black beard charges at me, his hands outstretched for my throat. That’s not real, I think, and I feel only a dull impact as he passes through me. Out loud, I say to Dreamer, “I know you’re here with me. I’ll call you in soon.” (I still don't want to call her in while the dream's still going all horror show on me.)

Another crazed figure charges me, decayed flesh hanging off of his face. Yuck! Why is this dream trying to be so scary? I turn away, knownig that he’ll pass right through me, and he does. I emerge from the cave into a large tiled room that looks like an industrial kitchen. About a dozen or so zombies are in here, rising up from the floor, shambling forward, and then collapsing with a sigh into a heap of bones. Then the cycle begins again. It’s gruesome to look at and I really want to fix it.

I decide that the zombies and I are all going to sing together! I come up with some song where the chorus goes, “Happier! Happier! Happierrrrrrrr!!” I belt it out with all I’ve got, and the zombies join in with me. Each cycle they look more and more normal, until after about 30-40 seconds, all of the zombies are now blond guys wearing shades, suits, and sporting 80s looking haircuts.

I keep singing with these guys for a while, really enjoying the turnaround of this dream. I realize that I should think about other goals, and as I’m making my way into the next room, the dream thins out and fades.

Ritual: I got fed up with the dry spell I've been having for the past couple weeks and took drastic measures. Back in 2010 I experimented a couple times with nicotine (in patch form) as a lucidity trigger, but quickly gave it up because I found it impossible to fall asleep with even a very low dose (half a 7mg patch, so 3.5mg). These days my problem—and the main thing hampering my lucid attempts—is that I've been falling asleep way too easily, so I thought there would be a good chance I'd be able to fall sleep wearing the patch and see if it had any effects on dreaming after all.

Went to bed at midnight, woke naturally at 3:30am and stayed awake until 5am, mostly reading, but finishing the WBTB with a brief seated meditation. I googled to make sure using nicotine patches well past their expiration date was advisable, but was reassured by what I found. So I took 200mg L-Theanine to make it easier to fall asleep, and applied a 7mg patch with half its surface covered, so 3.5mg total (though the dose might have weakened with age). I also worked on my mental motivation, not just intending but vowing to get lucid tonight.

When I returned to bed I felt my heart beating faster than normal, though I wasn't sure if it was the nicotine (if so the patches must be exceptionally fast acting, because this was only minutes later) or just a consequence of the excitement and anxiety of trying something new. The feeling reminded me trying to fall asleep on galantamine, which also has a very powerful stimulant effect. However, I started counting and was reassured (and somewhat surprised) when I began to lose my place already by the time I hit "ten." I reset and kept counting, rarely making it as far as "ten," and often not past "one," until I felt my mind had reached a place where I could easily fall asleep, then turned on my side to do so.

I fell asleep very quickly, although my intention to remain aware of the transition went nowhere—I just zonked out. I woke up almost two hours later with the memory of a DILD and least one FA. The dreams were definitely atypical in tone: the plot was epic and confrontational, which I attribute to the nicotine. The dream awareness was spontaneous rather than triggered, but the lucidity was at very low level. Worse, my dream recall was unusually vague and fragmentary.

DILD: The dream had a complex narrative that I can't satisfactorily recall. The most notable aspect was that my husband was in it and my dream logic concluded that it was a shared dream and that he was actually there and trying to learn the ropes of lucidity from me. We were trying to summon spirit allies, and he wanted a gryphon. The first version looked cartoonish, reminiscent of the monsters from Where the Wild Things Are, but it wasn't a proper gryphon. Neither were the next two, though they were massive, monstrous creatures that reminded me of the kinds of avatars you would summon in the later Final Fantasy games. When I summoned my own spirit ally, I was surprised to find that it was just a somewhat transparent virtual version of me.

(Source: I think this was day residue, as last night in ME3 my Shepard came across the holograph AI of herself on the Citadel. The notion of iconographically incorrect gryphons might have been inspired by the poor versions I saw in the astonishingly bad—so bad it was almost good, I couldn't stop laughing—film version of Hercules I caught the last fifteen minutes of on cable yesterday evening.)

I wish I remembered the plot of the dream more clearly. There was a group of entities that we were in conflict with, and they were insisting that I was breaking the rules of dream in some way. I disagreed, as I felt justified to do as I liked in my own dream, so I countered by exerting a massive field of control over the environment that made the ground shudder and shattered buildings. It wasn't quite an earthquake, more a gravity-reversing vibration: I have a mental image of dust and dirt rising and hovering in the air accompanied by an almost subsonic drone. It felt good to do this, powerful, though something of a guilty pleasure.

(Source: I was sure there was a waking life source for this image of dust rising from the earth in the wrong direction but couldn't remember; now it occurs to me that it might have been from the movie Transcendence, which I saw last month.)

At one point I had the presence of mind to wonder, or maybe someone asked me: was I actually hurting anyone by doing this? But I pointed out that you can't hurt DCs merely by disrupting their physical bodies, because the dream state does not have that kind of continuity. I demonstrated this by plucking my own spirit ally from deep in the rubble where she had been buried and reviving her.

I might actually have remembered somewhere in all of this to try the Patronus TOTM, which had been my intention before falling asleep, but if so I don't recall the outcome, unless that was somehow connected with the idea of spirit allies. Too vague to be sure, unfortunately.

FA: I woke up next to my husband and wondered if it had really been a shared dream, so I watched his reaction carefully. He gave me a look which led me to conclude that it had been. But before long it began to dawn on me that this might be a false awakening, and soon I was sure of it. I decided to review the events of the previous dream in my mind before I forgot, but as I was doing so, I became aware that my mind was interpolating new ideas, and whole new scenes were even taking place, spinning off from my memories of the previous plotline—this is the risk of reviewing dream memories while you're still dreaming!

For instance, when I thought about our spirit allies, a girl showed up at the foot of the bed who I took to be a transformation of the gryphon in the previous dream, only now she looked human and very familiar. I tried to place her face and decided she resembled the character "Marnie" from Girls. Not sure where that came from, as I haven't watched an episode of that since the last season ended.

Then when I was trying to remember the main plot, it became confused with a new plotline in which I was worried that war was imminent and that if it took place, the spirits of mythological creatures would fuse with nuclear bombs to create a weapon that was as devastating to dream as to the waking world.

I was out trying to investigate and prevent this outcome, and found myself in the house of people who had melee weapons shaped like real or imaginary animals. One was a rod with a sculpted head shaped like the head of an animal that mingled the qualities of a lizard and a single-horned rhinocerous. Another was a club shaped like a narrow stylized boar, and while my husband was handling it, I noticed that it could also be fired like a crossbow. Again, very random imagery.

Conclusion: I would call this a partial success at best, as the low-level awareness and limited recall made the overall experience less than satisfactory, and I didn't actually succeed in doing the TOTM that was my original goal. Still, breaking my dry spell by any means is reassuring. It definitely felt like nicotine had an effect on dream content, and I attribute the unusually "epic and confrontational" quality to its influence. However, after waking up I felt almost as uncomfortable and unrested as I do after using galantamine, so while I might experiment a little more along these lines, I will not be making this a frequent induction method—which is probably for the best, nicotine bad and all that.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #222: The Australian Odyssey

I’m standing in line with my friends SC and MR along with some other people that I false remember as people from my past. I’m trying to introduce these “old friends” but it’s hopeless because I can’t even remember their names. Very embarrassing, and to my relief the line moves ahead and we walk into a large video arcade.

SC, MR, and I watch this one game for a while that’s a cross between a sandbox-style game, a racing game, and a platformer. I get confused after a while and wander to another part of the arcade, when some creep elbows me aside and then flicks me on the back. The creep stares at me as he walks by with a “what are you gonna do about it?” look. He’s a short little guy with a mustache. “You’re short,” I observe out loud.

This enrages him, and he charges at me, taking an unbelievably slow swing at my head. I push him gently aside and he falls to the floor. “Stop it,” I tell him. “I don’t want to get arrested.” I move away from him down a hallway but he chases me down and tries to hit me again. I scoop up his right ankle and he falls backward to the floor.

I say, “I’m not hurting you because I don’t think you can hurt me.” As I’m walking away I start doing some pondering out loud: “But… what if you try to hit me 5000 more times? Wouldn't all of that practice make you dangerous to me?” Convinced by the dream logic, I pick up a toddler-sized chair and say, “Next time, I’m going to hit you with this chair! In the face!” I shake the chair for emphasis. He ignores my warnings and again comes charging for me. I smash the chair into the center of his forehead and he crumples to the ground.

I walk off down the hall, hoping nobody saw me do that. Something about all this strikes me as completely crazy and I become lucid. I walk down a long hallway lined with school lockers, and at the end I find a dirt ramp leading downward. I follow the tunnel downward into a large temple built with big stone blocks. There are gaps in the stonework near the high ceiling and shafts of sunlight cut across the room from above.

It’s a beautiful place and I begin slowly flying around the room, overcome with joy to be lucid. “Fucking lucidity!” I say, feeling like I might cry with emotion. After flying around for a bit, I walk outside of the temple to find myself in a Venice-like city of canals. A few boats drift gently by.

I look back at the temple and see a large, golden statue of an angel sliding down a ramp from the ceiling to the door right in front of me. From somewhere a voice says, “Although we recognize Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior, we believe this church is powered by the Holy Spirit.” I get the sense that the voice is trying to explain what they use for electricity. After admiring the statue for a few moments, I step into one of the boats and set off.

It’s not long before I find myself at the edge of the city, heading out to sea. I get the feeling that I’m in Australia and the beauty of the story and the scenery eventually drain away my lucidity. Dreamer starts narrating: “Parts of Australia are dirty, polluted, and not as nice as you might think.” As she says this, I notice oily water lapping against the side of the boat.

I set sail away from the city, staying close to the shoreline, Dreamer narrating here and there. The water is clear and beautiful now. Dreamer says that I’m trying to find my way to the islands of the “Hawthorne Formation” but I don’t know my way there. The sea is calm and I feel peaceful and relaxed. Eventually my boat lands on a sandy beach where Noah Bennet from Heroes is working at a carpentry table. I think he’s my dad and that he’s counting on me making this journey to the Hawthorne Formation to get help for my mom and sister. (100% false memories and characters.)

“Son,” he says, “draw me a map of where you think you are.” I draw a globe on a piece of plywood and sketch out Australia. I think it looks pretty good until I see all of the lines of longitude converging in its center. I realize that I’ve put Australia where Antarctica is supposed to go and feel really embarrassed.

Noah Bennet sighs. “Here’s the Hawthorne Formation,” he says, drawing a series of 4 islands off the southwestern coast of Australia.” He draws an arrow pointing northeast into the middle of these islands.

I thank him and return to the boat. “Good luck, son,” he says, and the dream fades.

This lucid is from the morning of 5/19/2014. (I think so at least. I'm embarrassed to say that my records got spotty right here.)

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #211: The Bag Lady

I’m high up on a hotel walkway that encircles an atrium. The room’s huge and bustles with people. I see a group of familiar people from my life seated in plush, comfy-looking chairs and realize that I’m dreaming.

I walk up to “Cyclone”, a friend from high school that I occasionally catch up with. I try to explain to him that I’m having a lucid dream. He’s trying to respond but I’m confused and unable to understand what he’s trying to say. As I grow frustrated by this, the dream fades into a false awakening.

I get up from what I believe is a hotel room and walk out to the street. I’m someplace that looks like New York City and it’s early morning. I walk out onto a brick-lined path toward another building. Maybe 30 feet away, there’s a bad lady standing near a little planter that looks like it contains a vegetable garden.

She seems to notice me and comes staggering over. I hope she won’t approach and try to scurry cowardly away. As I do this, she lets out a blood-curdling scream and starts flying after me. I feel a combination of embarrassment at my wimpy reaction and outright fear that I’m about to get mauled on the street. Her hand grabs my shoulder and I think that come on, this has got to be a dream. What a relief that it is in fact a dream!

The bag lady screams in my face and grabs at my chest and shoulders with clawlike fingers. I’m not feeling very calm at this point, but I try to calm her down by saying “Shhhhh…” and raising my hands in as nonconfrontational a gesture as I can manage.

She seems to settle down and I notice she looks a fairly normal person now. She’s in her late 30s, wearing a hood and shawl. Kind of cute-ish, even. Her teeth are still bared but now she just looks like she’s upset rather than truly demonic. For some reason I start kissing her, and she seems to calm down completely.

I hear another scream from nearby and I see a second dangerous-looking bag lady quickly approaching. Time to go. I make for the building entrance, a simple looking glass door into what looks like a darkened school hallway.

As I make my way down the hallway, nobody follow. That’s a relieft. I emerge from the hallway into what looks like ground floor fo the hotel atrium I’d been in before. I wonder if I can make my way back up, but the dream ends before I can find out.

Finally on the board for Task of the Year 2014!!

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #206: The Giant Killer

I sense a transition into the dream state, but just as it begins I hear our dogs start barking downstairs. Wife stirs in the bed next to me and I wonder how much of this is pure dream and how much of it might be sounds and sensations from waking life bleeding over.

I will myself to roll out of bed OBE-style and I decide to phase downstairs to see what the dogs are on about. I pass through walls and the floor like a ghost and I think to myself that “I’m spirit walking.”

I pass through one last set of walls and the geometry gets weird for a moment and I wonder if I’m losing this dream. I rake my fingers across the floor but I pass right through. Still, it seems to bring me back into the experience and there in front of me are our 2 dogs laying on the floor panting.

Their food and water bowls both lay empty and I figure that’s what they were making a fuss about. Even though I’m still floating like a ghost, I’m able to grab the water bowl and sling it across the room and it clangs realistically against the floor. I consider asking Wife the next morning if she heard any of this commotion.

I head out into the garage, walking like normal now. Rather than phase, for some reason I lift the garage door manually and walk out into the night. I move past the circular driveway to the grass, thinking of the Jack and the Beanstalk Task of the Year. I dig a quick hole and everything’s feeling very vivid now. I do a behind-the-back summon of a seed which feels very half-hearted but fortunately still does yield a tiny seed. I quickly cover it over with dirt.

For water I move my hands in a little sprinkling motion over the little mound and a few drops of “rain” fall. The plant immediately springs up through the ground and stretches skyward. It looks like a normal vine at first but as it continues up it looks more like a twisting rope bridge that goes all the way up into the clouds.



I grab the lower rung and start hauling myself up but I feel like I’m getting nowhere and won’t ever be able to tackle all that distance. I decide that the planks are being reeled in from above and are pulling me up toward the clouds. It works! In a couple of spots the planks twist and turn oddly as if they’re trying to throw me off, but I ignore this and before long I’m at the top! I float up over the edge into what looks like a restaurant that’s being prepared for a party.

Two women standing nearby appear to be in charge of the scurrying wait staff. One of the women, an attractive lady in her early 40s, looks up at me as I walk nearby. She has a streak of her short brown hair bleached almost white. My task is the defeat the giant that lives up here, so I ask, “Where’s the giant?” She points behind me and to my left.

When I turn, there’s a guy roughly 9-10 feet tall walking through the door of the restaurant. He’s mid-40s with dark hair and a thick, barrel-chested build. “So you’re the giant?” I ask leadingly.



“That’s right,” he says and immediately takes a swing at me. His punch catches me square in the face but I decide that it will have no effect. I wind up not feeling anything or even falling back and it kind of feels like cheating. I strike at the man, trying what I for some reason think is a “kidney punch” but actually hit him in the side of the gut. He winces a bit but doesn’t move much.

I follow this up with a kick to the body and the giant clutches at his chest. I feel like this is working but I become paranoid about losing the dream, so I leap up and grab onto the giant’s face. I try to do this thing where I burn him with my hands but it completely fails. The failure makes me kind of vicious and desperate, so I gouge at his left eye with my right thumb and then strike him on the neck with my forearm. He collapses hard to the ground and I go with him. As I’m picking myself up to see what’s next, the dream ends.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #184: Be Still My Beating Heart

I’m walking through a parking lot into a mall, recalling an earlier dream where Dad had brawled with some pellet gun-wielding high school kid in a parking lot just like this one. As I enter the mall, I recall my intent to have a lucid dream, and one begins.

I walk past a set of red metallic benches, taking in the detail and comparing it to waking life. I marvel at how completely realistic it looks. As I continue down the walkway, I turn toward a woman walking with her two young daughters and half-shout, “Can you believe this is all a dream?” They smile politely and scurry away.

I take a brief detour through a clothing store, walk past a few more places, and then exit onto some kind of outdoor boardwalk area. There’s a tattoo parlor to my left with a wood-carved sign overhead which depicts two attractive, dark-haired, pale-skinned women with intricate sleeve tattoos. The place is called “Nutjob”. I think how cool it’d be to get tatted up in a dream and start to head inside. It looks a bit more like a boutique when I get closer and I suddenly get this irrational fear that things will turn sexy in this place and that I’d better avoid it.

I head back through a door into the mall and encounter a grinning, friendly-looking British woman in her late 20s. I remember Task of the Month and ask her, “Who is my true love?” She says some stream of hilarious nonsense about waffles, and we both start laughing. I think she is super cool. “I’m not going to be able to remember that. Can you answer again?”

She laughs even harder and then starts singing “Polly Wolly Doodle” in a British Donald Duck voice. (The kids have an Easter toy that does this, but not with a British accent.) I can’t stop laughing and I try not to think about whether you can laugh yourself awake from a lucid dream.

I start thinking about what the other tasks were and she wanders off as I do so. I remember something about your heart, and then spy Wife walking in the mall about twenty feet in front of me. Still in an incredibly good mood, I run up to her, get her attention, and after she says, “Hey!” I make out with her for a little bit. This is fun, but okay, back to tasks! I’m supposed to pull my still-beating heart from my chest and give it to a loved one.

“Here, watch this!” Wife keeps looking at the nearby stores instead of me. “You really need to watch. I’m only going to do this once.” She looks back and I reach my hand inside my body. I feel something about the size of a softball pulsing very softly. The movement is a bit too weak for a heart muscle, but whatever. I pull it from my chest and when I present it to her… my hand is empty!

“What are you trying to do?” asks Wife. I explain the task and she furrows her brow. “You really don't need to do that for me,” she says before wandering away into a nearby store.

I wander through the mall some more, baffled by how long and stable this LD is. I pass through a busy arcade area where I see a mom busily taking care of 10-12 girls shouting demands during a birthday party. There’s cake being passed around which I sort of want to try but I feel like I am at enough kid birthday parties in waking life.

As I’m heading back into the hallway, an attractive Asian woman with waist-length hair passes by. We look at one another and the guy she’s with, some generic dude in his late 40s with thinning hair, seems to jealously take notice. He kind of freaks out, storming around and I say, “You want to go to the parking lot.” He obediently leaves. But when I turn back to the woman, blood’s pouring out of her nose like he just hit her. I’m confused because I didn’t notice him do this. I worry that my confusion means the dream is ending.

I pass my hand in front of her face and she’s healed. When I glance over my shoulder, the guy is back, glaring at us. “You’re not coming back here again,” I say, and again he leaves. I say something to the woman about how this is a dream and she agrees. The dream is definitely fading now but we still manage a bit of sexytime before the dream ends.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #179: The One Where I Fight Samuel L. Jackson

I have a false awakening but I notice that I’m alone (Wife is missing) and the bed has been turned 90 degrees. Right away I realize that this is a dream.

Something grabs me by the leg, pulls me out of the bed, and drags me to the floor. I look up and Samuel L. Jackson is standing over me! He says something along the lines of “You’re not going anywhere,” and starts to stomp down at me. I think that I should do some tricky/clever dream control thing but I feel too much like I’m in a fight to get it together.

We struggle for a moment until I manage to get my arm wrapped around his ankle, push my foot into his crotch, and then push up, lifting him off of his feet. He falls onto his back and we wrestle around kind of grabbing at each other’s feet to gain control. His head looks close enough to reach so I lash out, kicking him straight in the face. He flops back and stops moving.

I sit up and as I approach Samuel L. Jackson, he changes into a smallish, delicate-looking woman in her mid-20s. She looks Mediterranean and overall completely different from Samuel L. Jackson. “Help me, I’m pretty hurt...” she says, sitting up just a little bit. I feel bad for her, so I pick her up and carry her with me. I notice that she’s very cute but the fact that 15 seconds ago she was Samuel L. Jackson makes me quite uninterested.

We phase through the wall of the house out into the night. I want it to be morning, so I do a hulk-jump or two, expecting the time of day to shift. It does, and before long it’s early morning. We’re on a sidewalk outside of a cafe with a canvas awning.

I walk inside the cafe to find Wife sitting at a table with two strangers, one a heavy, hipster-looking guy and the other a pretty woman in her early 30s with short, brown hair. “I’m having a lucid dream,” I tell them, mostly to explain the fact that I’ve just carried a woman into the cafe with me.

“Ah,” says Wife, giving me a “Oh, another one of those” kind of look. I join them at the table along with the woman formerly known as Samuel L. Jackson, who now seems relatively unhurt and integrates herself naturally into the conversation. The hipster and the brown-haired woman are authors and they’re talking with Wife about their new book. The conversation is strange and it’s hard to understand details.

I’m also distracted by the food. There are little plates of small chocolate bars that I keep sampling. They taste delicious but they fade too quickly, almost as if they were so light and insubstantial that you only get a moment to taste them. At one point, Wife remarks, “He even thinks this is dream food.”

“I admit it, I do!” I say. Everyone chuckles like I’m an amusing eccentric.

Somehow the scene changes to a featureless room with three books lying on the floor. The two writers and the woman who once was Samuel L. Jackson walk out through the door, chatting about something.

I examine the second book. It’s by the writers we ate with and it’s about how early civilizations made fantastic technological leaps forward by using ideas that came to them in lucid dreams. I’m excited by the whole premise of the book. I really believe that it must be true. (I'm also partly offended that they acted so skeptical that I was having a lucid dream.)

“I really want to read this book,” I tell Wife, and she agrees that it sounds right up my alley. Now that we’re alone, I enjoy a little time making out with Wife until the dream ends.

This dream is from the morning of 1/1/2014.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #177: The Rivals

I'm sitting at a table with Wife looking through some photos when I somehow become lucid. She steps away from the table and leaps onto a nearby bed, posing and smiling seductively. I feel super amorous and move eagerly toward her. But to the side of me, I notice four other guys moving toward her, all of them looking just as eager as me. Wife looks playfully at each of us as if she's choosing.

I'm so angered by this turn of events that I punch the closest rival in the face. He crumples to the floor, his face immediately becoming a bruised mess. He shrinks into a little troll monster with a pinched, sour expression and then just sits there, not moving. Now the other men have all vanished and I leap triumphantly onto the bed and sexytime commences.

We get about fifteen seconds of fun before Wife does this strange transformation into a half-sized Wife replica doll. Total mood killer. I pick up the doll and it's light as a feather. I feel sad and guilty, wondering if my attack on the DC caused this. I walk out the door carrying the doll and it transforms into a slightly wilted bouquet of flowers before disappearing entirely.

Now I'm in some sort of indoor carnival. I walk past a vendor with curly, slightly 80s-looking hair and a mustache. I slow down and note how vivid everything is. I remember that it's been a few weeks since my last lucid and I reflect on what a shock it is to experience the realness of lucid dreaming after some time off.

I approach a circle of benches and there's Wife, sitting by herself on the right side of one. I approach her calmly, hoping I can keep her DC more stable this time. She looks up at me and we smile at one another as the dream ends.