Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid Lucid #30: Fire Escape I'm leading a group of perhaps a dozen small children down a fire escape. We're on the third floor, there's no railing (!), and the kids are wandering everywhere. I'm holding hands with two of them and trying desperately to corral the others with my feet. My anxiety level is out of sight and I don't know how to get them down safely. To my horror, a pair of the kids wander off of the unrailed fire escape, falling to the ground below. One of the fallen kids seems to hurt his ankle and the other gets a huge gash on his arm. I scoop the rest of the kids up under my arms and run down to the bottom, grateful that they're not more badly hurt. Later, Wife and I are standing on a viewing platform at the top of a skyscraper. It's night and I'm leaning against the railing, recounting to her what happened, still feeling really rotten. I tell her, "It was like some kind of nightmare..." I get suspicious, perform a nose pinch RC and now I have it all figured out. I'm overjoyed not only to be lucid but also that nobody actually got hurt and none of that earlier stuff even happened. I float up and then fly off into the night, forgetting entirely to say goodbye to Wife. I fly over the city, circling around another skyscraper before banking left. Ahead of me is an empty bridge that crosses a bay. I fly under it, performing a high-speed barrel roll as I go. It feels amazing, but as I emerge from under the bridge, my vision goes completely dark. I'm still flying, though. I can feel cool air rushing past my body, so I just go with it, flying blind for a while. I don't want to lose my lucidity so I start belting out songs that talk about flying. I think that I may have mostly performed Foo Fighters' "Learn to Fly" but I sometimes suffer from musical confusion in lucid dreams. Whatever song it was, I was really going for it and I became vaguely worried that my sleeping body might be singing too. I suddenly find myself standing in our master bedroom, no longer in flight. The room's dark and Wife is asleep on her side of the bed, but I'm not fooled. Still dreaming. For some reason, I drag our bookcase out into the middle of the room to see how realistic it feels. (Very.) But then I worry that Wife will get up to go the bathroom and run into it, so I shove it back into place. I float downstairs and head to the back door. I know that it's deadbolted shut, so I phase through, the glass pane chilling my skin like cool water. I remember that I want to find Purgatory for the Task of the Month. I imagine as Dante described it -- as a terraced mountain located somewhere in the seas of the southern hemisphere. I take flight again and start looking for it. I realize now that I flew north instead of south... oops! Somehow I wind up flying into a huge cavern that takes me downward into a sewer, where I'm soon lost. Rather than flowing with things, I become alarmed and want to find my way out of this "mess" to get back on track. The ceilings are low so I'm forced to run through the (fortunately quite pristine) sewer water. There's daylight somewhere up ahead and I race through twisting, turning passageways to find it. I finally spot a hole in the ceiling up ahead with daylight streaming through it (is it daytime now?) Unfortunately, along with the daylight, a steady stream of enormous, squealing rats is pouring in through the hole as well. They come right for me, and I'm not thinking clearly enough to come up with a clever plan. I punch the rats in the head or their potato-like bodies when they draw near, and each time I do the rat flops limply onto its back, not moving. I'm almost to the hole when Erik Estrada himself steps in front of me, telling me to stop. I've unfortunately gotten swept up into caveman mode and I summon a weapon with which to fight Erik Estrada. Fortunately, I look at my right hand and discover that the "weapon" I summoned is just a modest zucchini squash. As the dream fades, I tell Erik Estrada that I am "really sorry about that", but he doesn't seem to hear.
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