All DJ Entries

#1
I am at a rather busy gas station with several other people, including the wife. There are security guards there and they have a policy that forbids taking of photographs. Those at the gas station have two options: 1. Give their phones/cameras to the security guards, or 2. Show the guards the "first and last photos" on said devices. I opt to give my phone to the guards. They disable it by taking a part off. I do not mind as I want to comply with the policy. Soon I am in the back of the gas station on a grassy hill with some unknown people. They want to smoke weed. I decide that even thought it has been 10 years, I will join them. We smoke out of some long, blue, dragon shaped pipe. I worry it will make me fall asleep. Then we are laying in the grass, which we can miraculously pull up over us like blankets. We look up at the night sky. There are beautiful stars all around. Next I am inside the station, in the stock room in the back. I am preparing to go somewhere by putting my shoes on. I notice there is weed strewn about on a shelf with other trash and debris. I pick it up. It looks like high quality. An employee peeks in and says "no talking to the security guards."

#2

I am in a car with the wife and several other people. We are driving along a wooded road. There are hills on either side of the road. Nestled in the hills are beautiful, ornate victorian greenhouses. They are all white wood framed and glass. There are small, wispy clouds around the peaks of the roofs of each. I think "it must be from the humidity escaping through the vents." The greenhouses are on both sides of the road. Each is more ornate and beautiful than the last.
The last set are strange and futuristic. They are made of rectangular glass units. The units are stacked into various strange and seemingly impossible shapes. Then the units seem to be tents, with people in some of them, people leaving others. We arrive at a dusty, desert nature preserve. There are more of the tent units on impossible ridges and locations high in the hills. People are crawling along narrow paths to reach them. We lay down on the ground for some reason. Pebbles start to tumble down the cliff, small rocks that do not hurt us. They gradually increase in size until i tell everyone we need to get up or get crushed.
I am then going to go for a hike with my wife. My parents are going to watch my children. I walk through a trailer that has been converted into a kitchen. My wife goes around the structure on the outside. I hear her voice through he windows. I see loads of fruit stacked in the trailer. There are a peaches and bananas. I exit the trailer and do not see my wife. I go back in looking for her and see the fruit again. She is not there. I go out to see if she is outside. she is not. I go in again. not there. I go out and realize as I open the door "This is strange...I am dreaming!!"
Lucid, i drop some food that I have in my hands and immediately rub them together to stabilize the dream. I call out "maximum clarity and stability please!" Everything becomes amazingly vivid and crisp! I leap into the air and fly loop-de-loops under the wooden awning. I begin to sing the mantra of Avalokiteshvara as I am flying. After 5 repetitions, the dream fades and I wake up in my bed.

WBTB: I fell asleep at 10, woke up at 2:30. I practiced MILD as I fell asleep and awoke from this dream at 4:30.

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.

This was one of those rare lucids that I had without employing WBTB. Some pre-bed MILD work did the trick! (Edit: Almost forgot -- thanks to Art for psyching me up to have an LD yesterday! Totally helped.)

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #183: The Inventor

I’m sitting on a park bench, working on plans for an invention. It’s some kind of very high-end computer device and I’m drawing up some tweaks for making it much less expensive and bringing it to the mass market. I’m writing all of these plans with pencil on a rectangular, shiny piece of green plastic.

A woman wearing workout tights jogs by. She looks great and I blatantly stare at her. I become dimly aware that I shouldn’t be staring at people and start to wonder what’s making me act this way. It dawns on me that I’m dreaming.

I get up from the bench and look out over the park that I’m in. It’s grassy, dotted with trees, and maybe 200 feet further on is a brick building that looks like a schoolhouse. There’s a low stone wall behind me. To my left there’s a street with a few cars driving down it.

I’m convinced that it’s a dream but everything is so vivid that I feel a little worried. One of my contacts feels like it’s drifting in my eye and my vision shifts just as if this had actually happened. Now I try drawing on the green plastic with my pencil and I’m able to scratch out persistent lines that look completely convincing.

I wonder whether I’ve finally confused waking life for the dream world. I feel some paranoia settle over me, but I dissipate it by drifting back and forth over the grass without taking a step. Okay, yes, definitely dreaming. I cap it off with a nose pinch reality check and I feel settled again.

Now I see Wife and my oldest son E approaching me from the direction of the schoolhouse. They look completely realistic and again I fight the unsettling sense that I’ve confused reality for a dream. I hit another nose pinch to settle myself down. How can everything look so real?

A huge, lean brown dog approaches us. His head is as high as my chest. It’s the first surreal thing I’ve seen in the dream so far. Wife is focused on rummaging through E’s schoolbag and doesn’t acknowledge that the dog is here.

The dog starts to growl and bark at us, approaching uncomfortably close. Wife and E don’t react. “You see that dog, right?” I ask them.

“Sure,” says wife nonchalantly. I don’t want the dog bothering my family’s DCs so I offer him my left forearm. He bites down on my arm and whips his head back and forth. I’m sure there’ll be no pain, though, and of course there isn’t.

After a moment of this, the dog lets go, sits down, and starts panting. He seems friendly now and I'm almost glad he's there. It helps make me sure that this is all a dream. Wife finishes up with E and we walk together past the low stone wall as the dream ends.

I’m in the street under a train line and as I’m walking I’m thinking about it being morning already and I haven’t had a single lucid tonight. Then it occurs to me - what if I’m dreaming right now? I look at my hands and I realize that I am in fact dreaming, even though my hands look quite normal...I just know. I do a couple of RCs - finger through the palm and pinched nose and they both work. I start rubbing my hands to stabilize and then I spin but it feels uncomfortable rubbing my hands and spinning at the same time so I stop the rubbing. I spin one more time around and it gets a little bit more stable but not completely. I start walking around a little bit and realize that I have a very heavy book-bag on my back and I drop it to the ground by just taking the straps off my shoulders. I turn around and I want to kick this book-bag really hard and I see up ahead about 30-40 feet away there is a doorway with a sign on top. I kick the book-bag real hard in that direction (this thing is huge and heavy) and it goes flying but just off target and I use telekinesis to aim it and hit the sign. The sign explodes and a piece of it goes flying at me and almost hits me in the face. I then see a woman turned away from me. She’s close to that same doorway and I decide I want to throw her against the wall for some reason. I try to do it but it doesn’t work. I then levitate her up in the air and try to do it again but she just floats down to the ground. I then levitate her up again and I start moving her around doing funny dance moves like shaking her butt (she’s wearing a short skirt...like very very short). People around me are laughing and it’s pretty funny how’s she’s floating around and doing funny dance moves. Anyway after a few seconds of that I wake up. I try to DEILD back in but it doesn’t work and I give up to record my dream so that I don’t risk forgetting it later.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #158: Thankful

Wife and I are starting a company that will manufacture a brand new type of video game console. I'm standing in the middle of a park with her while we pitch the idea to about a half dozen investors while they ask us questions about it. Wife's doing all the talking and I'm impressed with how well she's presenting the idea.

The console is apparently based entirely around a light gun. (Think Duck Hunt from the old Nintendo Entertainment System days.) We present several potential light gun designs, all of which have very kiddie designs. One even has a little plastic teddy bear sitting on top.

Wife is going over the details of how we stack up against our competitors when I see my friend "CV" about fifty feet away, looking around. I believe she's come to support us so I walk up to greet her. There's a glass tip jar nearby which supporters of our project can shove money into.

CV puts two dollars in the jar and I thank her. "I think this project is going to be a huge success," she says, explaining why she contributed money.

I respond, "It's only money, right?"

For some reason she finds this hilarious. "My husband doesn't see money that way! But he'll spend money on... <can't recall this part>" I thank her again and walk back toward where Wife is giving her presentation, but now she and the investors have vanished. I feel terrible, thinking that I've been gone so long Wife had to finish everything up without me and it looks like I rudely walked out on the meeting. Fortunately, I realize that it's all a dream.

I begin walking along a path in the park and take a moment to look over my left shoulder. A beautiful sunset is taking shape over the trees and the rooftops near the park. That means I'm walking north.

Far ahead of me on the path I see two ladies in their late 60s. They look almost exactly alike, with wild hair and somewhat thick glasses. Their appearance reminds me a bit of Professor Trelawney from Harry Potter. I remember the Task of the Month about asking a DC what they're thankful for. I become distressed for a moment that these DCs are too far away and I'll have trouble reaching them. I focus my vision on the two DCs and then imagine myself "zooming in" toward where they are. Immediately I'm standing right in front of them.

"Hi! What are you thankful for?" I say, my words a bit of a nervous, hurried jumble.

One lady immediately answers, "Youthful <something>."

"Youthful what?" I ask. "Can you say it again?"

"Youthful reef," she says firmly.

Huh? "What is 'youthful reef'?"

"It's an activity," she answers. Oh wait, is she talking about Task of the Year Australia? Should I be doing that one next? I thank her and keep walking along the path. The dream feels like it has thinned out, though, and I am soon in the void.

I rub my hands together and keep moving forward, trying to stay relaxed. After perhaps 20 seconds I get the sensation of my feet walking through desert sand. It feels like a scene might be taking shape, but a sudden gust of wind catches me hard on the left side. I feel like I'm losing my balance and become fearful. I mentally decide that I don't feel any wind at all and it quickly dies down.

Unfortunately, at the same time I also lose connection with the ground and now it feels like my feet are no longer walking but flailing at empty air. I keep trying for a while but eventually lose connection with the dream and wake up.

This was a multipart lucid dream. There were many stages of the dream, both that I remember and don’t. I am in a large medieval village and it is a sunny day. The medieval village has a market place at the upper part where there are many shops as well as an area to sit down and eat with many wooden benches and seats. It was quite a bit like Game of Thrones and very on in it I became lucid by using a method that I had just read about in the night. I held out my left hand and drove my right thumb into my palm to see if it would sink in it. As far as I can remember all of my fingers were there. My thumb did sink in to my hand, but not before it hit a bone in it that formed a bump at the base of my middle and ring finger. I must have brought my consciousness into the dream from using the WBTB method combined with the MILD method, repeating the line “I will have a lucid dream tonight” over and over.
As I made my way through the part of the village with a lot of people, as well as chairs and benches, I met the eunich from the Game of Thrones and asked him if it was a dream. He spoke gibberish, completely incomprehensible. From there it was confirmed that it was a dream even more. I started to walk around the village and inside of the castle, which was past the marketplace, further up on the mountain that the village was located on. I went inside of the castle to find many men and women. I didn’t talk to them, but it seemed that I was an important part of their town, probably a lord or king. Everyone paid attention to me, and it seemed they were aware of me like the people in Inception were aware of someone in the presence of a dream that doesn’t belong, but that thought drifted away quickly from my mind, and that is when they acted normal again. I make my way further into the castle and find a hallway with an elevator.
There was a metal grating for the floor, and if you looked down it, you could see many metal stairs that were also grating, going down further and further. I enter the elevator and find some people that seemed like they were from the Matrix movie. I did not know what they wanted me to do, but we saw each other and acknowledged each other. I then seem to fade out of the dream and back into the castle, except it is now night time.
There were less villagers now, probably in their homes. I’m not sure if the lights in the houses were on or not. I remember I wanted to fly up so I tried the technique of pushing off with my right foot to get height and putting my arms out like wings to fly all over the place. I got a very good view over the entire kingdom, being able to see all the village, the castle, and the trees dispersed throughout the mountain the kingdom was on. I knew I did not want it to be dark outside and was feeling somewhat paranoid, so I wanted to turn it to day time. I had doubt in my mind that I could do this because there was so much detail in the world around me, that my mind couldn’t possibly imagine light hitting each of the tiles on the top of the village, hitting each of the leaves on the trees, illuminating all the shaded parts of the marketplace, so it did not happen. I was then reminded of a dream earlier, where I was bicycling down a snowy mountain during the day time, and how beautiful a winter scene could be, then I blacked out and was transported to a flat piece of land in a snowy mountain area with large, mansion-like buildings all over the place. It didn’t seem out of place at the time, but I did my reality check again with my thumb to my palm, and again, it sank into it, hitting a bulged out bone from underneath my skin below my middle and index finger, as if I was bending my fingers slightly too far back. I then made my way around the mansions.
I heard some music from the movie It very faintly, as if my mind was almost trying to transition me into a nightmare, or so I thought. There were lightpoles like the one in the scene from that same movie, where Pennywise jumped on the lightpole after dancing in to frame and reached out at the kids. Those lights were on. Knowing that I was in a dream, I knew I wanted to get higher, possibly to the top of the mansions, but moreso just to get into the sky where nothing could happen to me. I stood near the back corner, outside one of the mansions and tried the same technique I used earlier to fly, getting a small distance into the air, but with substantially more effort than before. I never saw the clown, but after getting to a height near the top of the three floor mansion, I started to fly away. I remember feeling liberated as I flew over the same dream scene that I had before. There was a large snowy hill with all the beautiful cone-shaped trees and I was flying over, and down it. This time though, it was night time. I had had enough of the night and decided that it should be day. I then blacked out and ended up in the village.
I realized now that it was day time. I was in the village again, except now I went to another walkway in a different part of it. It had a low wall on the side, and it outlooked upon a vast sea further down the mountain where there was a small pier and people. I’m not sure if I knew this at the time or not. The long hall floor was made of stone, and there was no wall to my right, which was how I could see out of it. I met a few girls I knew and proceeded to talk with them, among other things. I also saw Miley Cyrus in the same outfit she had on in one of her music videos. Everyone seemed to be in a rush to get into the castle but they knew who I was, and that, ultimately, I was in control. After an exchange, I went inside one of the rooms connected through an archway and down another hall. I talked to a few of the people there and do not recall what they said, but I knew I wanted to appease them. One fellow seemed as if he wanted to see Miley Cyrus, so I obliged him, and through the doorway behind me she appeared in to view. I then remembered that I loved the sea, and wanted to know what sort of interesting things the port I saw earlier held, so I believe I flew down to it.
At the port there was a small wooden pier that went into the water about 10 feet. The water there seemed very deep, almost impossibly deep for being so close to land. On the sides of the pier I could see, or I knew I wanted to see large creatures, or rather, gigantic silhouettes, somewhat whale like. Knowing that it couldn’t be just whale like creatures, I saw a somewhat long neck emerge from the top of the silhouette. On it was a large size head for its body, and the sides of its top jaw formed incisor like formations, much the same as a bone fish would have. I couldn’t see any teeth. There were villagers at this area, feeding the giant creatures. I felt that these were large and imposing creatures, but I knew that they were not our enemies, and they probably protected our town. The villagers looked up to me, and I thought more about how I could use my powers in my dreams. I wanted to feed them, but had no fish, so I pointed to an area of water, near one of the creatures, and I flicked my pointer finger against my thumb at the spot, and there appeared a live fish swimming in the water where there was nothing before. I tried out this a few more times, and more fish appeared, one appeared in the air right above the water, and made a splash as it entered the water. Realizing the power that I discovered, I set out back up to the village using the power along the way, to mixed success. Having achieved a few of the wants that I had for my lucid dreaming state, I realized that I wanted to go to outer space. I flew into the sky with much more velocity than before, the village quickly disappearing into the distance, then the clouds, then the atmosphere until I started zooming through space.
I believe that my view of the cosmos was heavily reliant on the pictures I had seen taken through the hubble telescope, and as such it seemed as if the stars, while so far away, seemed clumped together in almost wallpaper-like fashion. It was 3d mixed with 2d, but I saw many amazing galaxies. I felt slightly underwhelmed and overwhelmed at the same time. After a while of traveling through the skies, I wanted something to happen, and I came upon a large smokey cloud seemingly underneath a spiral galaxy. It seemed somewhat malevolent in nature, in that it appeared underneath the center of the galaxy where the black hole of a galaxy is supposedly located. As I traveled closer to it, the veil of smoke had receded in my point of view, and I saw a gigantic creature with around 10 tentacles and a large oval body with one gigantic eye and a mouth. The tentacles seemed to be reaching up in to the galaxy grabbing and destroying things in its path. I floated closer to it and it spoke to me. I couldn't understand, or remember what it said when those large lips moved. I believe when I looked into his mouth I could see large, canine-like teeth. I was not afraid, but rather, wanted to defeat this monster. It reached one of its tentacles out at me and I said the word “Omega” which I had seen earlier online, and out popped a blue shield that was impervious to damage, and protected me from the attack. Knowing that I wanted to take the creature down, I thought on the flip side of the coin, if Omega was the shield, Alpha was the sword, so called upon that same word and no sword popped out. I called out Omega again, after my previous shield had disappeared and out came another shield. The battle raged on, and unsure of the victor, I then blacked out and transitioned again.
I now ended up in the same village during the day time. Nothing too important happened here. I was mostly content with just surveying and walking through it and that was the last of the dream that I could remember.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #153: Foiled Creativity

I'm riding with my family in a car and we pull up near a curb in a shady-looking part of town. When the car stops, my two young children "E" and "R" leap out of the car and bound away toward a group of maybe half a dozen grimy-looking people that are huddled near a wall. I run after the boys and when I catch up to them, I see that the grimy-looking people are muttering angrily and trying to hide some kind of drugs they're using.

I hustle the kids away back to the car and Wife gets out to join us. "We can't just let the boys go running off over here!" I tell her. "Those people over there are using drugs." I look into the car and see Jesse Pinkman (from Breaking Bad) sitting in the front passenger seat. "Pinkman!" I say. "What's that they're using? Is that meth?" He slinks down in his seat and doesn't respond.

Wife and the boys move off together into a nearby building. When I follow, I catch sight of them taking a right into a bathroom, but when I enter they're nowhere to be found. I consider that I might be dreaming, nose pinch, and become lucid.

The scene gets shaky and I move into the void. I rub my hands together, keep walking forward, and mutter reminders to myself that I'm having a lucid dream. After perhaps 20 seconds of this, I get a vague image of a dark-haired woman in her late 30s trying to speak to me. I kiss her, partly to draw myself into the scene and partly because it seems like a fun thing to do. After a few moments of this, she pulls away sort of gestures at the room. I see that I've stepped into a big living room with a high ceiling and hardwood floors.

There's a couch nearby with a gold-stringed violin lying on it. I look at it closely and run my fingers over the strings, trying to make the scene as vivid as possible. Vividness goes up sharply and the strings jangle pleasantly beneath my fingers. I try playing a few open-string notes pizzicato and the dark-haired woman silently observes, looking a little amused. The music sounds nice, but after a few attempts the notes grow soft, almost too soft to hear. I look down at the golden strings and see that they've all broken and hang limply downward. They still look beautiful, though.

To my left there's a projector showing a huge image of a computer desktop. My friend "Conan" is standing nearby, working on a computer, and characters fill the screen as he types. I think that this will be a good opportunity to engage my creativity. "Hey [Conan]! Let's work together to make some kind of game on this computer."

He goes into a long speech about how he got screwed over in his most recent business dealings. Now he never enters into any business arrangement unless everthing is in writing. "No, you don't get it," I tell him. "This is all a dream. Let's just make a game or something." But he's steadfast, telling me again how "careful" he has to be. I'm disappointed, but I let it go.

Now I think about the Colosseum. I announce to the room that I'm going to the Colosseum and I see that the dark-haired woman is observing from a few feet away, saying something encouraging. There's another woman watching from a different part of the room, mid-20s, light brown hair. I think she's someone familiar but I'm not sure of her identity.

I'm determined to change this room into the Colosseum. Oddly, I notice that there's some kind of turban on my head and a something like a long, red satin blanket spills out from the turban over the right side of my head. I find this all super weird but I use it to block out my vision of the rest of the room so that I can change it. I turn slowly around, trying to switch the room into the Colosseum but I can't stop seeing that hardwood flooring. I'm feeling a little stuck so I head outside through a door in the wall, emerging in a grassy field. The elegant house I just walked out of now looks like a temporary building. As I'm deciding what to do next, the dream ends.

Got a Task of the Month on this one and tried to use it (unsuccessfully) for Task of the Year. Didn't manage to get them both but I'm glad I gave it a try though!

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #152: The Witch

I'm riding in a car (driven by my friend "Leroy"), along with two other unknown passengers who are in the back seat. We're all out together on a road trip, heading down a clear highway during what looks like mid-morning. The road is steeply banked like a race track and we pass by a speed limit sign that reads "50".

Up ahead there's a section of the road that's pitted with giant potholes. In front of us, a pick-up truck is working its way gingerly around a huge pothole that's torn up most of our side of the highway. "Be careful here," I say, pointing ahead at the pothole. But as I say this, I realize that I'm sitting on the left side of the car, Leroy on the right. Yet he's got the steering wheel over on his side, as if we're driving around in the United Kingdom or New Zealand or someplace. I realize that I'm dreaming, even wondering whether it happened this way because I've been playing Dead Island lately.

I decide that if this is a dream, phasing out through the car should be no problem. I look down at my lap and focus on moving my body left through the door and out onto the road. It takes a couple of seconds, but once the phase takes hold, I feel myself lurch to the left and I move through the door as if it wasn't there. My vision quickly dims and I find myself in a semi-void. I reach out for the road surface and grasp onto it. While I still can't see anything I feel like I'm physically still out on the roadway.

I crawl forward for a bit until I feel confident enough with where I am. My vision is still very dark, but I decide not to worry about it until the next scene unfolds. I get to my feet and start walking forward, rubbing my hands together the whole way. I narrate to myself the fact that "I'm having a lucid dream" and keep moving forward until things clear up.

The dimness lifts and I find myself in something that looks sort of like a college gymnasium. A lady in her mid-50s with a long gray ponytail is chatting with another woman that's sitting at a desk behind a window. I remember the task to have a witch cast a spell on you and I decide that this lady will be my witch.

I interrupt them by announcing to the woman that "Okay, you can do that teleportation spell to the Colosseum on me now." She doesn't answer at first, seeming to want to finish up what she's saying.

Once she gets the last of what she wanted to say out, she turns to me and matter-of-factly says, "Okay, teleportation spell... where was that to?"

"The Colosseum," I repeat. As soon as I say that, the "witch" shoves me in the chest and I go tumbling through the air down the hallway, right toward a wall. I think that I sure hope I phase through that and sure enough, I pass right through the wall, kind of floating on my back. My vision rather crudely recenters itself and now I'm standing in a tall hallway with cinderblock walls. I can hear the noise of the crowd... this has to be the Colosseum! The cinderblock walls aren't historical but I think that I can make it work.

I move to the end of the hallway, turn, and find myself in another hallway, this one with a much higher ceiling. I jump/fly up to find that the wall doesn't stretch all the way to the ceiling and I perch on top of the wall to survey the area. Below me I see a twisted, mazelike series of halls where male DCs that look like athletes or possibly gladiators are wandering around. Just past this maze stands a tall gate that I think must be the entrance to the Colosseum.

As I'm planning to fly over the maze to the gate, I briefly wonder whether this dream will remain stable long enough for me to complete Europe Task of the Year item. In response to this thought, the dream almost immediately collapses and I'm awake.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #151: Door Delivery

I'm walking out through the front door of my childhood home, moving toward a bike that's parked next to the curb. I need to take the house's front door with me in order to deliver it somewhere, so I lift the door off of its hinges and clamp it in my right hand. I jump on the bike and start pedaling, my right hand still clamped onto the door, which drags alongside me as I go.

I turn around through the cul-de-sac, question what I'm doing, and become lucid. The door feels light and hollow, like an incredibly flimsy interior door. I toss it aside, and it disappears soundlessly behind me.

I pedal along for a bit, thinking over my goals for the dream. I remember wanting to summon a witch to cast a spell on me for Task of the Month, so I decide that I'll stop the bike in order to use a handshake summon. I stop my pedalling and imagine that the bike is no longer there. Its presence fades and I now feel like I'm doing some combination of walking and floating. It feels like my brain's still making up its mind as to what I'm doing.

For no reason in particular, my vision swivels smoothly around behind me while I continue moving in the same direction. It's like I'm drifting backward now. For a moment this frustrates me but I let it go. It'll be fine.

The movement stops and I decide to try for the handshake summon to pull in a witch. I feel out of practice and my confidence isn't where it should be. I don't feel so much as a tickle in my hand. I give the summon two or three tries, turning to get a different visual perspective each time but it doesn't seem to be happening. I'm not interested in getting too hung up on the summon, so I just continue walking down the street.

The scene's very vivid and stable, so I take things slow, enjoying the detail of the environment. I keep having random jolts of fear that the dream will stabilize and become a little scared that this will screw up the dream. Luckily everything holds together fine and I walk slowly along to the next street.

The righthand side of the street still has the suburban look of waking life but the left side of the street is lined with industrial-looking buildings. This makes me want to explore, so I fly up above these buildings and look out over the city. There's a tall glass office building nearby and I fly past it, now hoping to see the Colosseum somewhere in the cityscape.

I'm flying over a construction site toward the sunrise. A very deep, neatly-carved hole has been dug into the dirt of the construction site and as I'm flying by looking at it, the dream ends.

This LD was the second of two from the morning of 9/17/2013.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #148: Musical Travels

I have a false awakening early morning on a couch in a room that looks like a basement. Wife's sitting nearby. I'm unhappy to get up but there's something I need to be doing, so I follow her out into the hallway of an office building. Through the windows I see that it's still dark out. Some guy with glasses and a shaved head is dressed for work and waves toward the parking lot at someone I can't see. I wonder how he's in such a good mood so early.

Wife convinces me that there's something I need to look for in the bathroom, so I go to find it. I walk down a long corridor and take a right through a narrow hallway filled with people. As I'm pushing my way through the crowd I sort of knock this one guy to the ground. Rather than apologize, I hurry away, hoping he didn't see me do it. (Not nice at all, I know...)

Once inside the bathroom, I forget what I was looking for, so I wander out another door back into the hallway. There's a folksy country duet playing over unseen speakers, an older man and woman singing sweetly about the life and love they've shared. I think how cool it would be if dreams could produce music like this... and a wave of suspicion makes me hit the nose pinch RC and I'm lucid.

I continue down the hallway to a fat guy standing behind a small desk that's stacked with literature. One of his hands is resting on the papers and I grab onto it, trying to bring extra vividness into the scene. He looks horrified by this and when I think about it a bit more, I don't feel too great about it myself, either. "Sorry about that," I say, continuing down the hall. I think about what I intended to do with this dream and remember the Task of the Month about going into the girls' locker room.

I follow several twists and turns in the hallway, each one leaving the hallways narrower than the last, all the while expecting that the next turn will lead me to the girls' locker room. Finally, I step through a door at the end of the hallway into a room that looks like some kind of really nicely-furnished barracks or dormitory. A double stairway encircles an elegant fountain and leads up to a room that stretches far into the distance, either wall lined with beds. There's a huge number of DCs here, all female, many of them in the beds and some just walking around.

I try to verbally insist that this is a women's locker room rather than a big dormitory, but somehow I get the idea to sing my intent. As I do this, the whole thing turns into this huge musical number that both me and the women in the dormitory are singing at the same time. It was sort of 80s-sounding, but an original song. If I had to pick a song, it was probably closest to Bonnie Tyler's "I Need a Hero". The whole thing was pretty awesome.

Most of the DCs are dancing while all of this is going on, with a few of them even doing these fancy handsprings over the beds. I can't remember many of the lines, but one of them was definitely something like

"It's the girls' locker room,
Where the lockers have bras and socks and stuff!"

I know that this isn't the locker room and as cool as this musical performance is, I still want to try to pull off a task. There's a cinderblock wall behind me, and I phase through it, winding up in the void. I rub my hands together then try to feel my way forward. There's someone else here with me in this void, a female presence. Rather than speaking, she begins to softly sing. Her voice is beautiful and echoes everywhere around me. She says something like, "I can only take this journey with you if you <something something...??>" (What was it? Wish I could remember this!)

In a moment I feel my body settling onto some soft dirt. I'm laying on my back and the singer, a woman in her mid-to-late twenties is also lying in the dirt a few feet away. Her ethnicity is difficult to guess but I feel like she might be some combination of Asian and Hispanic. We're in some kind of construction site near an unfinished building. To her right, maybe twenty feet away is a chain-link fence. Past that I see a spotlight glaring at us and lighting the area where we've landed. She starts to get to her feet and as I follow her lead, the dream ends.

This LD was the first of two from the morning of 9/17/2013.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #147: Train Station Cafe

I'm in a wood-panelled room looking at some kind of device with Wife and a woman that I think is NyxCC. It's a small wooden box about the size of a cigar box with a mirror-like screen on it when you flip the lid open. There's a big window to our left with a view of an endless forest. After we're through looking at the device, we walk down a long hallway into an area that looks a bit like a train station. NyxCC and Wife are talking animatedly about types of art projects they both like to work on.

On our left is a busy cafe with walls made entirely of glass, and we step inside to find a table. NyxCC and Wife sit down at a table, leaning forward, elbows on the table, still talking about this art thing they're into. Before I sit down, I realize that I've forgotten something back in the room we just came from.

I turn to leave just as I notice that NyxCC's jaw looks thinner and longer than it did a moment ago. I think about this as I'm preparing to exit the cafeteria, trying to think whether Nyx looks different than she used to. The whole thing makes me think of lucid dreaming and a quick burst of critical thinking makes me lucid.

I turn back to look at the crowd, but Wife and Nyx have both vanished. I see one of our friends "LS" seated at a tall but narrow circular table nearby, but as I scan the crowd and return my eyes to this table, LS has turned into my four-year-old son "E", sitting by himself in some kind of boosted chair. I walk up to E's table and say, "Hey buddy, I'm dreaming."

"Uh-huh!" he responds, emphasizing the second syllable.

I grip the edge of the table with my hands, trying to draw out as much vividness as possible from the scene. My hands are a strange color, slightly pinkish. The table feels just like a cool, laminate table edge like you'd find in a fast food restaurant. I look up to see a waiter watching me, along with E.

I reach down and grab the table by its leg. "I want you to see what you can do in dreams," I say, pumping the table up and down over my head. "I can make it float away if I want to." For some reason, the ceiling is high above us, maybe a hundred feet up. The table floats upward for a while and then awkwardly disappears.

I look down to get one more glimpse of E and the water staring at me before I fall into the void. I rub my hands together then reach forward to see what's here. My hands land on what feels like the shoulders of a woman wearing a strapped dress. She's moving around a bit and seems like she might be trying to communicate or interact but none of it is getting through to me. I get a vague vision of her as a woman in her mid-30s with long brown hair, but before I can see her face, I wake up.

This is the second of two lucid dreams from the morning of September 6, 2013. So glad I caught that emotion dream sign for this one because it gave me an exit from a nightmare and brought me into a really nice lucid.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #144: Cooling Off

I'm in a furniture store, looking around at couches. A plump Hispanic woman is seated nearby, answering my questions. The front of the store is a huge glass window with a clear view of the street outside.

Spoiler for Upsetting dream premise:

A big luxury car pulls up outside and a man in a light gray suit gets out. He has a mustache and is wearing shades but I can't see him well enough to make out the details of his face. I see other men in the car that look just like him. The man reaches into the car and pulls two teenage girls out of the car by their forearms and tossing them to the ground. He jumps back in the car and it speeds off.

I run outside. Both girls are weeping and it's obvious that they've been terribly mistreated by these men. They're bruised and bloodied and their clothes are in tatters. I help them inside the store where they disappear together into the store's bathroom. I'm boiling with rage and at the same time feel like I'm close to tears.

I tell the woman that these girls have been abused by these men and that we have to do something. She says, "I know" and then calmly tells me that these girls are her daughters and that she willingly sold them to the men. Now I'm yelling at her, telling her that she's an awful person, demanding that she tell me who these men are and where I can find them. I stalk back and forth in the store's aisle, the anger getting worse and worse. Again I demand that she tell me where I can find these men so that I can dispose of them personally.

The rage is so over the top that it feels bizarre to me. I can't remember feeling this way any time in waking life, so I reconsider my situation and I become lucid.

Immediately I feel this huge sense of relief as I realize that there's nothing to be angry about and that none of these awful things have actually happened. I'm still a little shaken from the preceding scene, and I walk to the bathroom where the girls retreated to earlier. I open the door and to my relief it's empty. I close it again.

I take a few deep breaths, cooling off the last of my anger and reminding myself that I'm dreaming. The anger has been replaced by happiness and a sense of peace. I feel contentment at the idea that I took control of this nightmare.

Now happy and relaxed, I remember the goal of getting to the Colosseum. I imagine that the bathroom door now leads to one of the tunnels beneath the Colosseum. I open the door, but nope, still an empty bathroom. I close the door again and walk to the back of the store.

I find myself in a hallway made of cinder blocks. There's some kind of socket wrench lying on the floor and I scoop it up. I feel like playing so I throw the socket wrench at the wall. With a thump it embeds about half an inch into the cinder block. I grab it, prying it back out and throw it toward a nearby mirror. Crack! The mirror cracks rather than breaks, but I'm delighted by how realistic the sights and sounds of this are.

There's a door at the end of the hall that leads outside. I step out into the sunlight, seeing a pavilion with long, wooden eating tables to my left. I remember to hook myself into the scene before continuing further, so I kneel down and run my hands over the small stone squares that make up the flooring. As I run my fingers over the cracks, I see that a tiny river of brown water runs through the separation between each stone. Somehow I can dip my fingers into this tiny stream and it feels cool to the touch.

As I make my way through the lunch pavilion, I lock eyes with a blonde woman in her early 30s. I'm stunned by how realistic she looks. Something about me seems to surprise her as well. For a moment I wonder what she's reacting to, but in the end figure she's just mirroring my reaction. I hop over some tables, reach the other side, and look back at the crowd of people calmly eating lunch. This is why I work so hard at lucid dreaming, I think. I wish that there was some way to permanently capture this experience, but I know there's nothing that can completely pierce the veil between waking and sleep to bring this experience back to me.

As I leave the pavilion, I see an ampitheater up ahead of me. I'm contemplating how to work this to my advantage when the dream ends.

This is the first of two lucid dreams from the morning of September 6, 2013.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #143: This Life or the Next

I'm sitting on a carpeted floor with my oldest son E. There's an IT guy here that I used to work with (who we'll call "Nick Burns"). The interesting thing is that Nick Burns is trying to sleep hanging upside-down from a light fixture like a bat. I believe that he's doing this in order to induce a lucid dream. I tell E that it's not necessary to go to such lengths in order to have a lucid dream.

Talking about lucid dreaming makes me wonder whether I'm dreaming, so I nose pinch and become lucid. I get moving immediately, walking to the adjacent room, which is nearly featureless apart from a deep, square-shaped window. It looks like it's daylight outside, and I'm up a bit off the ground, maybe the 4th or 5th story. I phase out through the glass and the scene changes to nighttime. No, it's daylight, I think and the scene changes to early morning.

I'm flying over a quiet town where all of the buildings are one or two stories, all shorter than the one that I just emerged from. The oddball in this whole scene is some kind of football stadium. (American football.) I fly toward the field to find a football game going on. I want to change the scene to the Colosseum, and I have this idea that I'll start reciting a line from Gladiator to help the scene form the way that I want. As I'm flying down toward the field, I recite Maximus' badass line to Commodus about how "I will have my vengeance, in this life or the next."

By the time I land on the field, I've transformed into a full gladiator outfit and I'm holding a gladius. The football players on the field mill about in confusion. I announce that "this place needs to turn into the Colosseum." I wave the gladius around my head a little bit for emphasis. The football players seem a little put off by this and begin to wander away from the field.

Nearby there's an old man in thick-framed glasses holding a microphone. Over the microphone, he declares that "there's been a little problem on the field, folks." The scene isn't transforming the way that I want, so I focus on the ground, thinking that I'll turn it to sand and work from there. The floor of the football stadium is made of some kind of bright blue carpet. I rub my hands over it for a while, willing it to become sand, but it stubbornly refuses.

I stand up, wondering what to do. A young woman, short, Hispanic, mid-20s, walks nearby. I'm trying to formulate some kind of leading question to get her to help me but the fact that I am confused and the fact that she is distractingly good-looking are making it tough for me to know what to say. Plus I'm self-conscious that I'm dressed as a gladiator. I'm too tongue-tied to say anything. As she walks away, I examine my surroundings again and notice that the stadium has transformed into an open-air restaurant, putting me even further away from my goals.

Okay, new idea. I step outside to a quiet street with a trickle of pedestrian traffic. I imagine that the Colosseum is over the next line of buildings, then I start flying again. As I'm gaining altitude, though, the dream ends.

This lucid is from the morning of September 3, 2013.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #141: The City on a Hill

I'm walking alone through the downtown area of some city when two guys in racing bibs run past me. This strikes me as odd, so I nose pinch reality check to become lucid.

I'm walking by a construction site with workers milling around in hard hats. I wonder how I might be able to change it into the Colosseum. This feels like a tough thing to try so I give it up and fly into the air.

The flight works well, although I tend to keep slowly losing altitude, almost like I'm hang-gliding. My feet touch the roof of a building and I leap up again. Now I can see the edge of the city where it meets grassland that slopes smoothly downward. It looks like this city was built on a hilltop.

I touch down at the edge of the grassland and leap again. It's a beautiful day and I enjoy the tranquility of gliding over the hillside. There are few buildings apart from the occasional fenced area and, interestingly, several humble little churches which dot the grassland. Every time I touch down and then leap again, I see one or two of these tiny stone-built churches with a cross at the top.

I continue my downward glide and pattern of leaping along. I see a Greek temple off to my right and I think about exploring it. I'm really looking for the Colosseum, though, so I stay focused on that instead. I set my expectation to see sand, thinking that I can use this to transition to a Colosseum scene.

The next thing that comes into view is a beach with crashing waves. I land at the edge of the cold water. The day is cloudy now. I focus on the sand, wanting to use this sand as my transition into the Colosseum. I reach down into the sand, willing the water to clear away and leave me with a dry patch to use. But after a few seconds, the water keeps rolling back in. I can't figure out how to keep my spot dry.

I look over my left shoulder and see a towering cliffside. I'm exciting by the idea of climbing it, so I try. The rock feels wet and slick in my hands, but my dream body is so light that it's easy work. The slickness seems to get worse as I climb and now I'm climbing up a huge piece of green plastic. The dream starts to feel wobbly to me, so I focus on how the plastic feels, trying to bring everything back to stability.

Okay, it feels better now, although still not great. I keep climbing, approaching the top. I hear the cry of seagulls, and soon I'm awake.

9/6/2013, 10:10-6:25

Regular Dream Lucid Dream Awake

I went to sleep after meditating, repeating the mantras, "I remember that I'm dreaming when I'm dreaming," and, "I remember my dreams when I wake up." During meditation, I repeated those mantras, too. I took a drink of water, went to the bathroom, and went to bed with the air conditioner on.

Dream 1:

I remember a Sith base, and people running around it. I was watching from the ceiling, but it was really a camera dream, without me being in an actual body. I watched as the base was apparently under attack.

I woke at 3:21 (with a reality check of course). My dog seemed to need to go outside, so I went out with him. It was cold out there. As he took a piss, I looked up at the stars, and tried to sort out any constellations I could find. None. I then got back inside, drank some more water, took another piss, and went back to bed at 3:26. I couldn't really sleep because I was thinking of too much about my dream from last night AND my dog was barking a lot. I eventually got frustrated and put him in my neighboring room, where my grandma was sleeping. I eventually got back to sleep.

Dream 2:

I remember playing Empire: Total War. That is all.

Dream 3:

This one was a false awakening. I went out of my room and started reading a book on the living room couch. Then I started noticing that the house was vibrating! I went downstairs into the basement and noticed that the house wasn't completely on the ground. It was lifted up slightly by a piece of wood. "That must explained the vibrations," I thought to myself. I probably thought the boiler was making the house vibrate, combined with the house lifted up slightly. (In real life, it probably was the train passing.)

I eventually noticed the illogical sense behind this, and turned lucid. A sudden rush of energy and vibrations came over me. I heard a sound similar to a helicopter starting up as I turned lucid, too. I suddenly imagined the TARDIS (probably as a reality check). I suddenly saw the TARDIS levitating off the ground, and me, as a camera, rotating around it as I lifted off the ground. I then tried to do something else, but I "pressed the wrong button", and accidentally opened my real eyes. I woke up to the sound of my dog barking again.