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Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #199: 1985

I’m hanging out with my friends “Leroy”, “Captain Kirk”, and “R” in a hotel room. I’m explaining to them that if we all think of the same time period at once, we’ll begin a shared dream that transports us to that time.

“Think of 1985!” I cry excitedly. Everyone gets a look of concentration on their faces and I become lucid as a “shared dream” of 1985 begins.

I spy a bin full of socks nearby. “Everyone wear their socks like they did in 1985!” I say, and everyone grabs a pair of long socks and pulls them all the way up. (I don’t think people really wore their socks this way in 1985, but oh well.)

I yank my socks up to knee height. “It’s hip to be square,” I say, and the DCs laugh at my awkward 80s reference. For some reason I think this is hilarious, and Hip to Be Square starts playing faintly in the background. (Not released until 1986! )



We walk outside of the hotel room to a nighttime scene at a gas station. “Captain Kirk” points toward a nearby Bronco at a refueling station and says, “We need to put some gas in the car.” We all walk over there and he starts filling up the tank. (I don’t recall him paying in advance with a credit card.)

Leroy suddenly looks worried and says, “We lost [The Schwartz]!” (“The Schwartz” is another friend who hasn’t yet appeared in this scene.) I have a false memory of The Schwartz being in our group earlier and think we’ve lost him. I know that the disappearance of a DC isn’t anything to get worried about, but I agree that we should look for him.

There’s a brick building nearby. Leroy and I enter it through a metal doorway and we wind up in a huge room that’s clearly bigger than the building itself. It looks like some kind of trap-filled dungeon, complete with a large pit of bloody spikes and stone walls lined with torches. On a ledge maybe fifteen feet above, we see The Schwartz gripping a rope and preparing to swing across the pit like Tarzan.

I’m still aware that this is a dream, but I’m not sure that I want to see how this plays out. Leroy and I implore the Schwartz to come down from the ledge and not go swinging over a pit of dream-spikes. Noticing us for the first time, he waves down to us. The dream ends shortly after.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #197: The King

It's modern times, and I’m the king of a small nation. I’m sharing a smallish hotel suite with several royal guests. A few of the royal guests in the adjoining room are very upset with me about something and I’m pacing the room, dreading that I have to talk the issue over with them.

I inspect one of the hotel desks and see two narrow drawers. Somehow I realize that the drawer on the left contains a picture of the girl that my son E (who I think is a prince) is engaged to. I open the drawer and see that the future princess is a cute girl in her late teens with long brown hair. I think for a moment how odd this pairing is since my son is only 4 years old. I struggle with this for a moment, thinking I’ve forgotten my son’s age, until I realize that I’m dreaming.

I walk into an adjacent room where I think my kids are sleeping. There’s a crib here but instead of a child, the crib contains my friend R (who appeared in a few of my early lucids way back when). R is squatting in the crib, not doing much of anything, so I grab him under the armpits and hoist him out of the crib. I tell him that I’m having a lucid dream and that I hope he’s having one too (or maybe that I just hope he’s having a lot of them recently.)

He walks back to the main part of the hotel room with me, briefly exploring the kitchen area, before we turn toward a large picture window overlooking a lake. I invite him to come fly out over the lake with me, but he seems hesitant and apprehensive. He remarks that he doesn’t think he’s got the skills to pull this off.

I say some reassuring words, and when I turn back to the big picture window, the scene has changed from a lake to a large office filled with cubicles. There’s a woman with long, dark hair and glasses working quietly at a desk, and when she looks up to see us seems completely astonished.

The change is a surprise to me, so I decide to head out the other way from the hotel room. I don’t press the issue with R and let him just hang out in the hotel room. The hotel room exit takes me into a library with a high ceiling. I take advantage of the ceiling space by flying around. I help myself navigate around the room by pointing where I want to go, and it works great!

After a moment I remember that I need to pursue my goals, so I land and make an attempt at the Jack and the Beanstalk Task of the Year. I produce a seed from behind the back and then plunge my hands into the industrial carpet of the library floor. I find that I can dig it up easily and all these little chunks of foam pop out of the hole I leave behind. I use them to cover the seed back up and start thinking about how I should water it to help it grow.

As I’m thinking my way through this, the scene goes dark and I feel myself lying in bed. I’m super hopeful that it’s just a false awakening, and I even hit the nose pinch. Too bad -- I’m awake!

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.

I only remember one dream last night, but it was pretty vivid, possibly due to REM rebound from drinking.

First thing I remember, I was with R on a back road just within a forest. We had both eaten some shrooms and were already tripping. Upon waking up I immediately reflected on how much the feeling of it was like actually tripping. The mental state wasn't quite the same, but the physical feeling was;and that's a feeling I can't quite recall while awake. We were supposed to be near the gathering point for some sort of "festival". After sitting there a bit, I started to feel a little uncomfortable. I got up and started walking down a few streets, and was feeling fairly anxious. Shortly I came up to a building that was like that "psychedelic crisis tent" that someone set up at Burning Man (probably where this idea came from). I was pretty anxious at this point, but I didn't want to go in, thinking for some reason that I didn't want to give them my name. I thought of giving them a fake name, but quickly rejected the idea and started to walk away. As I left I quickly started feeling better, for some reason. I walked downhill, then made a 180 to the left and back up to where my friend was. While walking down the hill, something put on my mind the idea that most people don't drink enough water, and came up with some sort of guideline to avoid getting dehydrated. Now I wanted to get back to my friend because my water bottle was back there. As I arrived back my friend was just getting up from where he had been lying. We continued walking up the hill, towards where some people were entering the woods. I asked him "So, is this like, a hippie festival, or something?" I remember wanting to run into someone else who was tripping. We entered the woods and I asked what sort of festival it was. He said "Well, what do we always do?" and made a hand motion like smoking a joint. There were a few people to our right, and a steep hill to our left with more people at the bottom. The people to our right were playing "Candyman" by the Grateful Dead. It sounded amazing, and I think I sang along briefly. Next they played some Led Zeppelin song. My friend and I made our way down the hill, and to our left was this spot where there was a sort of division between the woods and a totally different area, in a desert and darker as if it were dusk, with a door connecting the two. There were two lines of people in the desert area, and me and my friend went over there. That's about the last I remember, and the dream ended just after that.