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This was the second of two lucid dreams that came out of an experiment with green tea during WBTB. In retrospect, I might have liked to take more time talking to this angry dream character to see whether I could learn more about what he was about. These sorts of things can be hard to remember in the moment, but I'll keep trying.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #45: Crowbar Clint

I'm in a mall clothing store and a crazed young man in a baseball cap is wrecking the place with a crowbar. Frightened dream characters give him a wide berth as he screams, curses, and knocks over racks of clothing. He shouts threats and abusive profanity, swinging that crowbar like a baseball bat. I'm frantically planning the best way to get out of here without taking a crowbar to the face when I realize that I'm dreaming. Somehow I also know that the young man's name is Clint.

I get a rush of positive emotion once I realize that I'm perfectly safe. I notice that I know one DC in the store -- T, a coworker of mine, is standing by the cash register making his purchases.

I speak urgently to Clint, like he's neglected some important task: "Clint! Buddy, you've got to get going. T is over there waiting for you to help him change out his hubcaps with that crowbar of yours." Clint looks at me, his anger turning into confusion. I keep repeating this new story to him over and over, placing a hand on his shoulder and leading him toward T. Clint, now docile, walks silently beside me.

Clint appears to be the only person who believes this story. Other DCs shuffle away nervously as we walk by. T seems to get what's going on as well but he plays along, saying, "Yeah, Clint, let's go have a look at my truck." They walk off into the mall and I follow a few feet behind them.

I step outside to find myself on a second story walkway near an escalator. T and Clint have disappeared into the crowds of shoppers. The sun shines through a large, arching skylight that spans most of the mall's ceiling.



It looks like a beautiful day outside, so I decide that I'll fly to the top and phase through the skylight. The sunlight becomes brighter and brighter as I ascend, but before I reach the ceiling, I wake up.

Stereotypical (8:05)

One of my sisters has a friend over. She comes into the room in the middle of an argument and offers some advice that makes no sense. I find it annoying that she jumps in without knowing enough background on the situation to offer an intelligent opinion. Throwing caution to the wind, I tell her so, in no uncertain terms. Then I walk out of the room.

Or I try to. Somehow the furniture is throwing me off. I keep running into dead ends and having to backtrack. I suppose I must look ridiculous now that my dramatic exit is ruined. I suppose I must also look like a stereotypical rude older brother. Whatever. Eventually I realize I'm navigating like I'm trailing my left hand along the wall of a maze, which is silly. I extricate myself and go over to my laptop. I power it on with the intention of playing some video games, even though that will probably only reinforce the stereotype. Later, I wake up when my alarm goes off.

[I didn't try very hard to remember the details of this dream. I didn't feel especially happy when I woke up, and I figured that meant the dream couldn't have been a very good one. These details came back unbidden later in the morning.]

It's Your Destiny (6:58)

A red-haired anime girl repeatedly walks up to my character and hands him a note. Half the time, she folds it into a paper airplane and blows it at him like she's blowing a kiss. The other half is a similar animation that also involves her blowing something at him. It's obvious that only these two animations were made, and they alternate randomly for variety. In both, after she delivers the note, she uses a pink rod about the size of a penis, which turns into an umbrella, and she floats away.

Some girls I know who have played the game before tell me that no matter how you play it, your character ends up with that girl. It has something to do with your destiny. I'm resistant to this idea, but there's clearly a different girl following me around in the game to enforce my destiny. The next time I see her approach, I get ready to do battle. I'm not exactly excited at the concept. I have a premonition that this battle will involve throwing fireballs, though, so at the least it will give me inspiration for lucid dream control, when I ever have one again. [D'oh!]

Indeed, one or two golf-ball sized fireballs are thrown. We also try setting traps on various pieces of furniture, but I'm not sure exactly how to set them off. Anyway, this girl is herself not an expert at this kind of fighting, so I'm not completely flattened. Some people my age are standing in a nearby driveway (it's dusk), which complicates things, because I think we're supposed to keep our abilities a secret. As I'm looking around, I notice an uncanny coincidence: of the three groups of people standing nearby, all are holding or manipulating a car tailgate/rear bumper, and our spells start affecting all three bumpers at once. It's such a strange coincidence that I start to wonder whether maybe destiny has something to do with it.

There's a man walking around the bar, singing enthusiastically along with the background music (which is Copeland's Hoedown). Our battle ends at the same time as the music.

Gingerly (6:58)

My family is walking into a building through a room with a lot of dog poop in it. Fortunately, there's a clear path around the side. Unfortunately, my mom trips and falls into the dirty part, then rolls through the dirty part before coming to a stop. That last part was totally unnecessary. She could have stopped herself somehow. My sisters are making loud, disgusted noises.

On the way out, I consider going around the other way, but it turns out that there are a ton of cobwebs between the car and the wall of the garage. Not worth it. So I go ahead of the group back around the original way so that I can open the door. We're talking about how this was just a routine checkup for our dog, but last year's checkup was routine and it led to discovering an illness which she hasn't recovered from to this day. So we're hoping for good news, but we're worried. We're also trying to coordinate times and places, because there's something I need to go to on my own, and someone else will have to pick me up.

Burnt Sugar Cookies (6:58)

Last night, someone made SO MANY sugar cookies. Dad shows me the box. They're all a little burnt, so they're brown rather than beige. They're going to be used as rewards. Dad also shows me the container which is supposedly full of grease from all the cleaning that had to be done afterward.

We try talking to my middle sister about something stupid she's doing. Mom's been trying to convince her to stop, but she isn't listening. I decide to pipe up and try to calm things down. I admit to her that I don't know as many of the details of the situation as Mom does, but I still agree with Mom's assessment that she should stop. I try to give some reasons, but I'm not sure that she listens.

Later, we're sitting around the dinner table. Dad tells everyone about how I've solved some of my professor's "Challenge Problems." I hadn't been planning on bringing it up, because that would be bragging. But now everyone's looking at me expectantly, so I say yes, I solved two of them. "Both of which I've already seen from other sources," I add. My eldest sister says encouragingly that there's no problem with that; it's all about "unifying the notation." I nod. I'd never thought of it that way before.

Springtime Traditions (6:58)

Spoiler for Springtime Traditions:

There's a video choreographed to "Rite of Spring." Right now, we're at the frenzied section towards the end of "Mock Abduction." Perhaps unsurprisingly, the accompanying video shows three couples lying parallel to each other, having sex. The video cuts are all over the place. I have a feeling I know what's coming. Indeed, on each of the last chords before "Spring Rounds," everyone convulses together. A helpful white label appears on screen, too, saying, "orgasm." I wake up messily.

Frags:

• Someone asks me my year in school, so I hold up three fingers. "Fourth?" they ask. I suppose the little short wall between us might have gotten in the way, so I raise my hand higher and say, "Ah, no, third," and they say, "Ah, of course." I wonder if my pinky wasn't folded over far enough the first time.
• There's a free bottle of alcohol lying around, so I grab it. Reading the label, I see that it's apparently bourbon. Excellent; I haven't tried that kind yet. [IRL I have this thing where I kind of want to try all the different kinds of alcohol, and then maybe never drink again after that. Who knows.] I put the bottle in my backpack. I still feel weird doing things like that; I feel like it should be illegal for me to possess alcohol. But it's not, anymore.
• I witness an awesome piece of scenery, and I try to impress it on my memory. It might have involved clouds.

Horse and Lava (8:45)

I sit down to play a game I haven't played in a while. I don't mean to play for very long, but when I finish the first level, I'm intrigued enough to play the next one, as well. I don't remember exactly how it goes, and it seems like it will have distinctly different game mechanics than the previous one.

It involves riding a horse around a 3D landscape. If you fall too far, your horse lands on all four feet and just stands there, but the screen fades to black and you start again from the place you fell. I guess they didn't want to make a horse death animation, in case it traumatized the little kids that play the game. Anyway, I manage to climb down a cliff into a red, rocky canyon crisscrossed by streams of lava. I don't think I was supposed to come down this way, but I complete the objective and then find my way out of the canyon by the way I was supposed to enter. Jumping over the streams of lava takes precise timing, and you can feel the heat of it at your back. I keep expecting some difficult enemies to appear, but they never do.

At the mouth of the canyon, three ghostly ancestral figures rise out of the sandy ground. They declare that since I have succeeded in my objective, they will allow me to do one final task to gain their assistance. We start to travel together across the sands, then the scene fades to black and reappears again at the beginning of the next level. My character laughs and tells his horse that he can't come, this time, because of the nature of the task. So it looks like I'll be doing this level on foot. Well, that's different enough that maybe I should try this level, too. I try out the controls for walking around on foot, because I'm not really used to them.

Unethical (8:45)

This game has a top-down view similar to Heroes III. I'm currently being told how the two nations I'm looking at have been unfairly put upon because of their small size. In fact, on the map, each "nation" has a grand total of two buildings. It's an example of that tendency in video games to compress the world. Right now, one of those buildings is being robbed of all its valuables, because the nation doesn't have enough guards to patrol it. My parents send me over to grab some of the loot.

The interior of the building is covered in rolls of coins. When you click on a coin, it disappears, revealing some of the floor underneath. One of the first structures I reveal is one of those ones that enhances your stats when you visit it. That makes me feel a bit better, since it seems I was intended to visit this place. I hear some of the high officials of this nation discussing the robbery. I'm not sure where they are, and I'm not sure why they're not coming in to find me if they know it's going on. I feel bad for them, though. I take my loot and go back home.

My family starts doing stuff with the loot, and suddenly I become utterly convinced that this was unethical. We didn't need this stuff. At the very least we could have left it for some other, needier people to steal. I try to explain this to my parents, but they don't agree. I try to take inventory of some of the loot to prove it to them. Most of what I took was coins, so probably 99.9% of the value of the loot came from that. But we also took a lot of food, so I try to sort it in order to get some kind of handle on how much excess value we took. It takes some time to get everything together. The whole time, I'm just feeling a sort of righteous anger at my family. I get through to them, a little bit, but I still need to gather up all of the candy we took. My family all start eating Starburst and--to my incredulity--dropping the wrappers on the driveway. Littering, on top of theft? I yell at them a bit and then start peeling the wrappers off of the ground (they're wet). There are way too many wrappers here for them all to have been dropped in the last few minutes. They must have made a habit of this over months.

Soon after, some cars pull up at the bottom of the driveway. Law enforcement, probably. I'm happy they're here, even if it means I might get in trouble for being involved.

Oops (8:45)

Birgitte walks onto a bus and announces herself. She has brownish skin. There's a big man standing on the bus with his arm around a girl with blackish skin. It is understood that this man is Gaidal Cain, so he must've mis-identified this other woman as the one he was destined to be with. Oops. He look sheepish. Stepping away from the other girl, he attempts a suave introduction of himself to Birgitte.

Frags:

• a youtuber who makes videos about sexuality

This was my first encounter with a hostile, physically violent DC. Great learning experience, I think. I also wound up giving an LD mini-seminar in dream, which was interesting to say the least!

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #18: DC Wants a Piece of Me

I hurry into a grocery store to pick up some items, passing my friend R on the way in. (The only IWL friend I have that regularly LDs.) I say hey and we catch up about the time he's been spending in Seoul, South Korea. I'm in a hurry so I tell him I have to run.

As he's leaving, I call back to him and ask, "R, what city are we in right now?" He thinks for a moment and then says that he doesn't know. How can we both not know? Something's off. "Buddy, aren't you supposed to be in Seoul? I've never been to Seoul." We agree that it's strange neither of us know where we are and I realize that I'm dreaming. "I figured out what's going on, R. I'm dreaming. Well, one of us is, I guess. Probably me." He congratulates me and agrees that it's "probably" me having the LD and not him. I clap him on the shoulder and head into the store.

I walk through a set of automatic doors and casually explore the store, taking my time marveling at the items on the shelves, the level of detail, and the sheer number of dream characters buying food for the week. I spend several minutes just enjoying the people and texture in the place. One DC, a bulky man in a football jersey and baseball cap, gives me a slightly unfriendly look, but I ignore him.

A more serious confrontation is next. I'm approaching the frozen foods section when a fat, enormously tall man locks eyes with me. His many chins quake with rage and his fists are balled up for a fight. The huge man strides toward me, flaring out his arms like an obese grizzly bear. I hear him grinding his teeth. The sound is awful, like ice cubes being crushed against one another.

My own temper starts to smolder but I catch myself and say, "Wait. You're not upset with me. You're angry about something else. What can I do to help you?" He stops and drops his arms to his side, mouth hanging open in surprise. Sheepishly, he says, "Drumstick." I point to one of the cases in the freezer aisle and it begins to give off a warm glow. "The ice cream's in there," I tell him. "I made this place. That means it's my fault it didn't have what you needed. I'm sorry for your trouble." He smiles broadly and waves, turning toward the ice cream.

I walk further down the freezer aisle, studying the ice cream and shelves full of frozen dinners. (My subconscious seems to mostly produce lasagna and meatloaf.) At the end of the aisle, I come to a door that leads into a hotel banquet hall with a view high above the city. (What city? Still don't know.)

I'm barging in on some sort of convention and the well-dressed DCs act shocked to see me. They protest at first but I inform them that all of this is my lucid dream, so they'll just have to be patient until I'm through. They become very interested, peppering me with questions. A small crowd of well-dressed young professionals gathers around me, asking me why I keep rubbing my hands together and prodding at my arms. I explain a bunch of LD concepts to them, starting with stabilization, going through how I enter an LD, etc. None of it feels like a waste of time. If these DCs represent some part of myself, what could be better than reviewing the basics?

I tell them that I have to find the Cretaceous sea. I hold my hands out and will the Cretaceous sea to illuminate. A chunk of the horizon starts giving off a warm glow (just like the ice cream!) I try to push through the window, which fails, and then try to punch it. It acts like plexiglas, wobbling and vibrating but refusing to break. I finally grab a chair and knock out a smaller panel.

I squeeze myself through to the outside of the building. The wind is fierce, tugging at my clothes, and the ground looks far, far away. I cling to the building, suddenly more afraid than I was prepared to be. I start to calm myself but it's too late -- I'm awake.

Counter-Bullying

I'm sitting at a desk in a high-school classroom. The teacher is an athletic-looking male, and it's a math class. But I'm not paying attention to that, because I feel something hurting me from behind. Some dumb kid thinks it would be fun to bully me, eh? I half turn in my seat, then casually and carefully bite the finger that's hurting me. I only catch a tiny bit of skin in the bite, but I think it's enough.

"Thank you, for not doing that again," I say. No reply.

A few minutes later, I feel a prick of pain in one of my shoulders that won't go away. Apparently I didn't scare them off last time. I have no idea how they're causing this particular sensation of pain, but I try to get rid of it by rubbing my shoulder against the seat behind me. It stops. After a second, I decide it's time for a confrontation. I turn all the way around and grab the kid behind me by the front of his clothes. He looks to be about fourteen or fifteen, with his hair cut long, a bit like Justin Bieber. He had been laughing quietly to himself, but he's not any more.

"What's your name, kid?" I ask. He just keeps looking around, shifting his eyes and not making eye contact. He doesn't look particularly scared. I'm trying to give him an angry, threatening look, and I'm surprised at how successful I seem to be. It's not a look I've had much experience with.

I look around to see if he had an accomplice. The guy sitting to the kid's right seems to be laughing to himself as well, so I ask him, "How about you, huh? What's your name?" He too stops laughing, but he doesn't answer, either. I notice that both kids have the same basic haircut, and also the same hair color: light blond dyed a faint purple. Anyway, since neither of them are responding, I suppose I should start thinking about how to deliver the rest of my speech.

I get up to walk a few feet away, conscious that other people in the room are probably about to start noticing the confrontation. When I turn around, I'm surprised to find things have escalated: an ally of mine's found a friend of his, and they've ganged up on one of the boys who was bullying me. One of them is pinning the boy's arms behind his back, and the other is winding up to punch him. I suppose they figure they'll get him to talk by torturing him. But that's no good, so I run back and shove them apart with my hands. Now the teacher's definitely coming, so I only have a few moments to finish dealing with the situation my way. I start lecturing the kid from the seat behind me, even as the teacher runs up and tells us in an exasperated, angry voice to get back to our seats. It's clear he just wants to end the disruption; he doesn't really care what caused it. I think I should finish my lecture, first.

I [falsely] wake up. I spend a few moments trying to remember the details of the dream, then I open my dream diary. I'm surprised not to see a date on the page: I usually write tomorrow's date right before I go to bed at night. But then I look at some of the text already on the page and remember that I've already written down some dreams from earlier tonight. So I put down a new bullet point and write down some details from this most recent dream, including "slight purplish hair." My handwriting is unusually small. I hope I'll be able to read it later.

Now, I'm not sure what time it is, and I'm not sure whether I have school today. It's the day after I flew back to Chicago for school. [IRL, I'm still on summer vacation.] I'm mostly moved into my room, except I'm pretty sure some of my stuff is still in storage elsewhere in the city. I'd planned to get that before classes started, so I really hope it's not Monday. But then, I'd planned to fly back on a Friday, so maybe I have the whole weekend left? I'm not sure, so I look for my cell phone to check the date.

The room is large and rectangular, the headboard of my queen-sized bed midway up the longer side. My first cell phone tells me nothing. My second cell phone, a red one, confuses me. [IRL, I don't have a second cell phone.] I can't find the date or time anywhere. Then I see the word "recording" on the screen, and I realize I must have left it recording video all through the night. I wonder what size the file is by now.

Okay, after a night of lost sleep my dreams definitely become more interesting. Of course, my recall isn't any better... I only remember this one dream.

There's a building here that basically is an apartment building. It has 4, or 5 floors depending on how you look at it. People only live on the first 3, though. Now, where my recall picks up, me and a group of other people are in this building, trying to help people out. The only person that I'm pretty sure was with me was Silver... the rest are fuzzy. We'd come in on the third floor somehow... through a fire escape or something. This building, I should mention, is much larger than your average apartment building. It's more like an office complex with dozens of apartments on each floor. Also, all the hallways are internal, which is important for the plot of the dream. The reason we broke in on the third floor is that the entire building seems to be flooding, for some reason. There's a thin layer of water across the third floor... hardly enough to be a threat, but it implies that the first two floors of the building are completely underwater! Our group starts to split up, and fan out over the whole floor, warning people of what's going on. The general process here is very fuzzy, and I don't remember any specific faces... but eventually we warn everyone on the floor.

Now, our next job is to get to the higher floors, to speak to the person in charge. The stairway to the fourth floor is locked, so I pull out a keychain that I got from somewhere (it looks just like my keychain IRL) and try all of the keys until one of them works. Then I unlock the door and lead our group in. This fourth floor is essentially just a lobby area... with a mix of officials and non-officials here. Nobody seems bothered by the fact that we essentially just broke in. Now, what the officials are doing here is "guarding" the person who's in charge. This person has some mysterious level of power... people respect him more than a CEO, less than some kind of god... but it's implied that he's somewhere between the two. In any case, he has a LOT of power, and almost certainly knows what's going on already. We just want to bring it to his attention again and ask why he's not doing anything. The officials on this floor don't let just anyone see him, of course... there's all sorts of screening and regulations going on, to make sure that nobody who would want to harm him would get too close.

Here I have a vague flash of pseudo-lucidity... part of me decides that the paperwork stuff is far too boring, and if I just "fade out" for a bit, I can skip it. Somehow this logic works, so I have no memory of the paperwork, but I know it's done. It's also been long enough that we know we are trusted to see the guy in charge. Now we just need to wait. I look around and, for whatever reason, see Sonic and Knuckles logos on things like soda fountains. To my addled brain, this is proof that they trust us... those logos are supposed to be representative of me and Silver some how. I should probably mention that I think only the two of us are going to meet this guy... the rest of the group is milling around, but it was decided that a large group would be too intimidating and security would never allow it. Unfortunately I wake up before we get to meet this guy.

Making Love

I was making love to a gorgeous woman, but she wanted to stop.
Then I was in a high-school setting. (In waking life I am in trucking school).
I wanted to get out of there so bad, so I left about three and a half hours
early. I was afraid at first, but later it seemed I wasn't going to get in any
trouble.

--

Delivering Nothing

I was delivering something in a ridiculous personal vehicle. It was like a go-cart or something.
I was driving on the highway and I was the only person on the road. I got off at an exit, looked
back, and noticed I left the trailer at home.

I was going to have to go back home to get the trailer, but instead I ended up in
line at a strange machine. I needed a ticket or something. I put in 2 quarters and
got a card with two rows of mirrors, one red card with information of some sort,
and two halves of a red card, but they weren't ripped. I didn't understand what I was
supposed to have or what help any of this stuff offered, and the tickets I got seemed
so random, I decided to pay another quarter to see what I would get. I never put in
the quarters though.

Instead, I dream-skipped into a room with some acquaintances from high-school. I told
them I had seen R.B.--someone we went to school with. One of the people asked, "Where
does he work now?" I told him I didn't know, or that I didn't ask. The guy rolled his eyes
at me as if to say, "You talked to him, but you can't answer the most basic question about
what he's doing?!"

I explained to him that R.B. and I never hung out in school. We weren't friends, but I had
talked to him, so if you want to "go" (fight), we can go right now. I walked up on him and
he was a foot taller than I was. I wasn't scared at all, but I said that since that would be immature,
than just understand that I didn't know where R.B. worked, so just leave it at that.

As an aside, there were two cute girls there. I got a good look at the blonde. She was nice to
look at.

I then walked over to a cubby hole and found some information I had lost. There were pads with
drawings on them and a bunch of other written journals and stuff. It was all very familiar, and I
was glad that I had found them. In waking life, I don't have the stuff. I guess it was a false memory.

I collected all the material into my arms and that dream ended.

Mystery Threat:
My sister was going to take some summer course and she filled out the form. I decided to join her on the second day, there was also something else that I decided to do as well that I can't recall. I'm not sure where we went or what happened after but I find myself on a planet that seems to have been ravaged by war. It was very dark, cloudy, stormy and it seems that there were a lot of buildings that have been wrecked and abandoned. I was in the street with a bunch of people that I didn't know, but, can't recall seeing them, just knowing that they were there standing behind me. We were all looking west towards a building. This building had a metal tunnel that was expanding towards another building. The tunnel was supposed to connect the two buildings together and it seems that it was the only way out of this war ravaged city. I do recall, but, can't remember when it happened, clinging to the tunnel to try to get to the first building, but, had to hide from two drones that were circling the tunnel.



Sensing the presence of others, I looked ahead to see a large group of people. They were all wearing black with black bandanas covering their mouth and only revealing their eyes. They had axes in their hands which had black handles and a silver axe hand. It seems that we knew who they were and have had confortations in the past. We launched at each other with great speed. A couple of axes were thrown my way and I dodged them hoping that they missed my companions behind me. Another was thrown which I ended up blocking with my right hand and I was able to pick up another axe which I planned to use against an oncoming enemy.

Dream skips and we are all in a warehouse which is in the shape of an inverted C. They occupied the top half and we, the bottom half. It seems that I have made a bomb to use against them, it was in the shape of a balloon with rods sticking out of it. I threw it at them. They bounced it and got it stuck near the ceiling in the middle of the warehouse. We got it down and one of our members almost backstabbed us by making some odd sign first signalling the backstabbing but she threw it anyways. She ended up joining me and a friend of mine after jumping behind a wooden sheet to hide from the explosion. They threw it back to us yet again. A friend called R, caught it and began saying the time left. We were surprised that he was still holding onto it and beckoned him to throw it back. He did and they didn't have much of a chance to throw it back at us since, it hit their hands and bounced up in the air right above them. At this point, the time ran out and it was about to explode. I looked from behind the wooden sheet to see the impact. When it exploded, I don't recall seeing an explosion, mostly just the sound and then there was an eye, similar to the eye of a hurricane.



Air started circling around this eye which was just a small circle very fast and it started to suck them up and out of the building. They vowed revenge and that someone will get me. After they were all sucked out and everything calmed down, something similar to a scoreboard showed up in my vision detailing the amount of people left using people icons. It had an orange background with people icons using different colors to stand out.

Thoughts: Very nice, long, intense dream. Would have been nice to know more details about the first fight and the background

Confrontation:
Some guy tried to confront me about something and I think he tried to kill me. I reported him and I think he ended up going to jail. Dream skips and I'm in the library. He is there as well using a computer. I walk up to him and recommend some website(onemanga.com) to him.

Thoughts: Don't get many people wanting to kill me in dreams, so, this was a first