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Angel Falls!! Finally on the scoreboard for Task of the Year!

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #119: Angel Falls

Wife and I are driving in a car through a field. Somehow, we believe that we're experiencing her brother's future and what will become of his life. The mood is relaxed and exploratory -- we're journeying with of a sense of curiosity rather than concern or foreboding.

I veer off on a path that goes to the left. "Not that way! The zoo is this way!" Wife grabs the wheel and yanks it back so that we're going straight once more. We follow this dirt path for a while before emerging onto a suburban street.

Somehow we're now pushing a big lawnmower rather than driving a car. The left side of the street is taken up by an angry-looking giant while the right side is littered with "doggy clean-up bags" that are filled with poop. Wife thinks that we should steer toward the poop bags and I think we should head for the giant because the poop will be too gross on the lawnmower wheels. We're not sure what to do, and as I examine the situation, I realize that this has to be a dream.

I'm slightly unclear on what happens from here, but I know that I was lucid for a good while, flew, found our 4-year-old son "E", and lost lucidity. Much later I'm walking through a train station with E when I remember how recently I was dreaming and realize that I still am. "[E]", I say, "I'm dreaming."

"That's a lucid dream!" he responds, and hops a little bit.

"That's right, buddy," I tell him. "Come with me outside. Remember that you can do everything that I can do." (I'm speaking to E, but mostly trying to remind myself.) I'm holding E's hand, and together we start flying toward the exit. A few DCs glance at us as we fly, but most ignore us. For no reason in particular, my flight momentum cuts out, but I focus on the street outside, thinking, We're out there now.

Now we're moving through the air again. I hear a DC shout "No!" and a hand grabs my ankle. For a moment this slows us down, but I think Bullshit, we're flying just fine... and right away we're moving perfectly again.

We land outside on a peaceful street scene. It's cobblestoned with no cars, just pedestrians. A river runs through the center of the road, running past the obelisk of a town square on our right, flowing toward a bay that's on our left. We follow the river, which grows broader and flows under a bridge before ultimately joining the bay. I decide that this river is perfect. This is the place where Angel Falls will be.

I turn back toward the distant town square and shout to the crowd: "This is Angel Falls! It's right here at the end of this river." And I unironically add, "Watch meee!"

From behind me I hear the thundering of a massive waterfall. Now when I look back toward the bay, everything looks strange. The original river is standing still, almost like time has stopped. But now there's a second, wilder river running right beside it. The bay has dropped completely out of sight, like we're at the top of a mesa. E and I fly over the calm river toward this new river and I can see it -- the top of an enormous waterfall! This is it!



I land close to the waterfall, realize that I'm no longer holding E's hand, and look for him. I want him to come with me, but I won't wait long. I'm too desperate to complete this task! Fortunately he's just behind me. "[E], hurry!" I tell him. "We're going over this waterfall!" He doesn't hesitate, scurrying up to the waterfall and leaping off in a clumsy-looking froggy posture. I plunge over the side, just behind him.

I'm freefalling now, soaked and yelling with excitement. I'm speeding toward a vast, green valley below me. I make no attempt to control my descent, move, or do anything apart from enjoy the sensation of falling through this curtain of water.

Suddenly I hit a pool of water below and instantly enter the void. I can still feel water all around me and for a moment I think about trying to reemerge. But no -- I did what I wanted to do. Time to wake up.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #118: Water Slide

I'm walking down the central aisle of an airplane when I hear a voice to my right: "Hey [CanisLucidus]! Check out this view!" I look to my right and NewArtemis is waving me over and pointing at the window. "Have you ever seen Los Angeles from the air before?"

"[NewArtemis]!" I take the middle seat and say something about the last time I flew into LA. I talk about how it's been a long time since I was there and ask her what she's doing in LA.

"Same thing you are," she says. "The gymnastics conference." I feel like this is totally unexpected and don't know how to respond. Why don't I remember this? Since when do I care about gymnastics? Art points out the window again. "Look, that's the Staples Center!"

As I'm checking out LA through the window, a flight attendant makes an announcement that the plane will be landing shortly. Art stares at me pointedly, not saying anything. "Am I supposed to be doing something?" I ask, not following what's going on.

"Are you just going to leave your son all by himself while the plane lands?" Now I'm sure that my 2-year-old son "R" is all by himself several rows back. Panicked, I run toward the back of the plane without saying goodbye. When I get back to my row, I see some guy in the window seat and R crawling around freely on the middle seat. The guy turns to me and says something odd, and I wonder whether this is all a dream. As soon as I ask myself the question, I know the answer.

I look out the window again, and the plane is on the ground now. Passengers are starting to stand up at their seats and in the aisle. I stand up in the aisle myself and say, "[NewArtemis], come back this way. I'm going to Angel Falls." Almost immediately she slips past some guy standing in the aisle and appears near my row. I start narrating partly to her but mostly to the dream itself. "Okay, this plane took us right to Angel Falls." We walk through the doorway of the airplane and down a short set of stairs covered by a canopy.

"Can you fly?" I ask her. But I correct myself: "You can fly." And she floats past, bouncing along the canopy ceiling before reaching the end and floating up temporarily out of sight. Now I hear the roar of a waterfall and I'm feeling really excited. I start flying, too, and I wind up bouncing along just like she did before I break out into the open.

The waterfall is there, but it's really just a waterpark slide sitting on an open stretch of runway. The ride's about 30 feet tall, quite steep, and looks like fun. It's got a banner stretched over its exit with its name... something like, "_____ Raging River _____", with a couple of words I can't recall. Art and I fly over to the top of the slide, me just slightly in front. It's 4 "lanes" of slides right next to each other, and I take the 2nd from the left. I think that Art wound up further behind me in the same lane. I reach the bottom, zooming past a couple of portly kids in lanes #1 and #3.

As soon as I hit the bottom of the slide, I hop up again, expecting Angel Falls to be in front of me. And indeed, in front of me is the top of a huge waterfall. This one's got a banner stretched over the top of it, too: "Angel Falls". But it's still some kind of ride, not the real waterfall. It's close. A very impressive, realistic (almost scary) ride, but still a ride. I shout something back to Art about how this probably doesn't count. She says something I can't remember and indicates she's still here.

The dream still feels really stable and vivid, but I'm reluctant to waste any time, so I leap over the waterfall feet-first. Immediately I'm drenched and in freefall. After a few seconds of that, I land smoothly on some kind of big, steep plastic slide and travel along it for maybe another 20 seconds before things flatten out just a bit and the slide takes me underground. I'm still moving at a good pace but no longer at the crazy speeds of before.

The slide flattens out and broadens, and I slide past a few other riders that I'm sharing the slide with. When I feel myself slowing down, I find that I can sort of spin on my butt and gain a little speed. One DC that I pass asks me how I'm doing this and I tell him that I'm having a lucid dream.

After a while, the slide narrows and finally ends. There's a long line of DCs waiting to exit the "ride". I think about whether I should wait in line, then remember that I need to still find the real Angel Falls. I'm thinking about how to do this when the dream ends.

This one was a lot of fun, in large part because it was the first time I managed to really modify terrain in a major way. I still can't believe that I fell for the last false awakening, especially after catching the others.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #117: Carving the Coasts

I'm standing on a bus, blathering some false memory to the other riders about how a friend of mine was on an episode of Friends. I suddenly realize that I've missed my stop by miles, we're in the final bus terminal, and everybody's getting off. A middle-aged bald guy hands me a bunch of coins, including a JFK half dollar and a weird coin with a hole in the middle of it, and announces that he's paying everyone's bus fare. I hand the coins over to the bus driver, who takes them all. Once we're outside, the bald guy asks for his change and then berates me when I say that I gave the driver everything.

I feel like an idiot and everyone's staring at me, so I slink away and walk outside, wondering how I'm going to get home. On the corner I see a gang member carrying a pistol and wearing a blue bandana face mask. He jumps out from behind cover and starts firing at some unknown enemy. I think that this must be a really bad neighborhood and that I'd better get out of here. I look up at the sun to figure out which way is east, but notice that the sun's too low in the sky for the brightness of the day. The sun self-consciously moves higher in the sky to match my expectations and I realize that I'm dreaming.

I'm walking by an apartment complex with a little playground filled with grade school kids. I start flying to look for Angel Falls and one of the kids says, "It's Superman!"

"That's right!" I say, and start "bah bah baahhh"ing the original John Williams Superman theme. I decide that I want to hear the real thing and immediately my subconscious produces the original soundtrack (or close enough to convince me, at least.) I fly off, the Superman score playing in my head and filling me with nerdy confidence.

I come to a broad river with some low hills along the water's edge. I fly along the river until I come to a coastline, proceeding along that for a while, looking for Angel Falls. I start eyeing those low hills and think about whether I could turn them into Angel Falls. As I do this, they start growing taller, and I find that I can raise and lower the height of these hills just by thinking about it. Something seems to stop them from getting up to full mountain height, but I can still get them high enough to impress myself, at least. I keep flying along the coast, building the hills taller and watching as the occasional small waterfall even erupts from the side. These waterfalls are all pretty modest, though, and not nearly high enough for Angel Falls.

As I'm happily traveling down the coast and raising the hills up to the sky, a group of elderly people that look like tourists start flying in front of me, way too close, and blocking my view a bit. The tourists are pointing at the hills and reading some kind of guide book, and disturbingly, one of them is only wearing a diaper. I maneuver past a couple of them, but the old man in a diaper won't get out of the way. I say, "You want to land," and he immediately banks to the left and drops out of sight. Satisfied, I continue flying and trying to make the coastal hills climb higher and higher. I can't get enough of watching this! As I'm raising one set of hills really high, I start to see water cascading off of it, and I think that it's going to turn into Angel Falls. As I look up and up, my perspective suddenly clonks onto its side and I'm pitched into the void.

I rub my hands together to make sure my dream body's ready to go, then I try to find the floor. I imagine my hands rubbing against the smooth rock of a river bed, but the sensation I feel is different. More like cloth. Soon I can see out of my left eye, but only in a small circle. Right eye's still blind. It looks like I'm laying facedown on our comforter -- false awakening. It's morning and I'm alone, laying across the bed.

I get up and check myself in the bedroom mirror. I've got a bunch of blankets and sheets and stuff wrapped around me. I put my arms out so they can fall to the floor. I look just like myself except that my eyes are filled in with black and these dark wisps of smoky electricity-looking stuff are crackling around my head. Overall effect: badass. There's still something wrong with my right eye, but I just tell myself that the blankets are gone and I can see fine. Pretty soon, I do.

There's a new door in the wall of our bedroom, and I walk through it into some kind of sunroom. (This is strange since our bedroom is on the 2nd floor.) My friends "Leroy" and "Leroyette" (husband and wife) are here working on some kind of art project with a bunch of strangers. Everyone's working away with scissors, paper, and cloth. I call out, "[Leroy]! I'm having a lucid dream."

"Here, let me get the door," he says, undoing a bunch of strange locks on an external, glass-paned door. I step outside and there's a small waterfall, about 15 feet high, going in a small garden. I'm wondering how to turn this into Angel Falls when the scene goes dark right before...

I have another false awakening in my master bedroom. The door to the sunroom is still there, and I head through it again. There, again, is Leroy. This time I try undoing all of the locks myself. There are an unbelievable number of curtains, locks, and shutters covering the door, and I'm finding it really frustrating to mess with them. "I don't recall your doors being covered with this much bullcrap," I whine. Leroy chuckles and tries to help me. (Apparently I thought this was his house, but it doesn't resemble any room in Leroy's home.) "You know, I could have just phased this whole time. Sorry, man!" I phase through the door onto a grassy lawn, jump into the air, and start flying again. After flying for a short time...

Another false awakening, this time in the sunroom. Embarrassingly, this one fools me and I'm non-lucid. An overweight bearded guy in his 20s is dressed in a wookiee costume (sans head.) He's complaining about how girls are always too interested in lucid dreaming. Don't they understand that stuff is just fantasy? He puts the head of the wookiee costume on and poses for a photograph, doing his best Chewbacca cry. Cameras flash. The dream ends.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #114: The Vampire Apocalypse

Wife has opened a restaurant and somehow all of the recipes have been lost. She and I are in some place that looks like a choir room, desperately searching through a pile of hundreds of envelopes for the one that contains them. Suddenly I become lucid, but it's a very low level of lucidity. I grasp that I'm dreaming and I understand that this gives me awesome powers, but I have no idea that I could just ignore this whole recipe thing.

I point at the pile of envelopes, willing the recipes to emerge. One of the envelopes floats a couple of feet in the air and opens, freeing a few sheets of paper that I know have the recipes on them. I grab them out of the air and hand them to Wife. She starts talking excitedly and waving her hands in these grand gestures, but I soon wake up.

I hold still for DEILD, but after a brief wait emerge non-lucid sitting in a small, boxy room that's shaped vaguely like a confessional booth. My friend "Dragon" and I are laughing and swapping stories of all the stupid stuff we did when we were kids. From outside my friend "RF" knocks on the booth and then sort of phases or melts through the wall. I realize that this has to be a dream but immediately wake up.

Back down for DEILD, again winding up in a non-lucid, this time in the hallway of my childhood home. Our neighbor "Mr. G" from when I was a kid is wandering around in our backyard, holding a bag of lawn clippings. I know that he's helping me try to find a 4-leaf clover in this bag of clippings. He becomes angry that I'm not helping and starts throwing the lawn clippings everywhere. I suddenly remember trying to DEILD and become lucid again. There's a door at the back of the house that's not usually there and I walk toward it, preparing to phase. The door swings open just as I approach, though, and again, the dream ends.

I look for another DEILD and again come up non-lucid. I'm at home with Wife now and she's telling me a story of how someone was attacked by a vampire downtown today. We worry about what this means and whether she's safe going to work.

Time advances, and now it's early morning. The sun's just coming up and I'm at the back door, looking out over our back yard toward the horizon. I see a swarm of bats approaching and I know that overnight vampirism has become a plague that's spread throughout the world. I tell Wife that we have to hide, and we run upstairs to the bedroom to bunker ourselves in.

Once upstairs I peer out of a tiny window to the street below. About a dozen vampires are congregating on the street with a handful of human prisoners. The leader of the vampires, blonde and dressed completely in black, shouts bizarre warnings and threats to those of us holed up in our homes. He kicks one of the prisoners, a middle-aged man, to the ground, sprays him with liquid from some kind of squeeze bottle, and lights him on fire.

I duck down from the window, shaken and frightened. "They're killing everyone," I say to Wife. "Is this like what happens in The Passage? I haven't read that far yet." (The Passage is a book that I'm slowly reading.)

Wife nods. "It's exactly the same."

"Okay," I say. "What did they do? How do we fight these things?"

She shakes her head gravely. "I can't give spoilers."

I think this makes complete sense. "You're right. Maybe if we shoot them in the head...?" I now have the AR-15 in my hands.

"That won't work," she says. Then from out of nowhere, she very graphically and directly demands that we have sex. This is so completely out of character (particularly in a vampire apocalypse) that I realize it's all a dream.

"Don't worry," I say. "It's just a dream." I kiss her for a moment. In spite of her earlier insistences, the mood is completely non-sexual. I stand up, thinking about phasing outside.

"What are you doing?" she says. "Stay down!"

"This is a dream. There's nothing to worry about." But I can see that she doesn't believe me. I know that she's just a DC, but at this point I'm really attached. I decide that I'll just carry her out of this scene, change locations, and hopefully this nasty dream plot will die off. I kneel down to scoop her up as the dream fades...

Finally broke that dry spell! This was a really fun one. Emotions got the best of me at the end, but it was great while it lasted.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #113: Woodrow the Giant

I'm in a first-person shooter video game where I'm entering an airport. One of the people I'm with slips some kind of blaster into my pocket as we're walking through airport security. Won't that set off the metal detectors? I think of all this as just a game, though, so I give it a try.

An alarm sounds, surprisingly soft but unmistakable. I keep walking, just in case they think it was someone else behind me. As I head into a broad, bustling concourse, I see a few security guys heading toward me from different directions. They're dressed in plain clothes, which makes them seem less official and more menacing. I change directions and they change with me. I know I'm caught. One guy has his hand on his right hip like he's ready to pull a gun, so I decide to be first. I pull the banana-shaped blaster out of my jacket pocket and start shooting. My first shot catches the guy right in the chest and he crumples to the floor.

I immediately realize that this isn't a video game, but a dream. I remember goals: meet Art at the Alamo and Tasks of the Month. Since this is already a video game scenario, I think that it'll be easy to pull Art in. "[NewArtemis], I know you're right there behind me." No response. By now the other security guys have drawn their guns, although they oddly have not fired yet.

I shoot one more of them and he collapses to the ground. Still, nobody returns fire. "[NewArtemis], a little help!" A woman walking nearby turns around. She's wearing jeans and has dirty blonde hair, not at all the usual hair color for Art's DC, but it's definitely her!

"Hey there!" I say, thinking that it'll be fun to have her take care of the last of these security guys. But when I look for them, they're gone -- everyone is walking through the airport concourse like nothing has happened. I turn back to Art. "You dyed your hair...?" I half-comment, half-ask. (I sincerely doubt this.)

"Hey," she says, with a wry half-smile, ignoring the whole hair thing.

We hug and I say, "Okay, that's Basic. You feel like punching Woodrow Wilson?" (Advanced Task of the Month.)

She nods. "I'd love to punch that guy." (We have never discussed Woodrow Wilson, so I'm likely projecting here.)

I glance around for Wilson. "Let's do it," I say to Art, and then call out to the crowd: "Woodrow Wilson! I know you're here!" We walk along the concourse for perhaps twenty feet when I spot a huge man to our left. Somehow, even with everything around him brightly lit, he's hidden in shadow. The man is at least ten feet tall, probably closer to twelve, and he's flanked by two normal-sized men who don't look like they're doing anything in particular.

"Is that you, Woodrow Wilson?" As soon as I say this, the man's face is illuminated and it's definitely Wilson -- long, expressionless face, glasses, the whole bit. Weirdly, he's dressed in the style of a Catholic priest with a cassock and clerical collar. He strides toward us quickly and moves up very close to crowd me.

Wilson doesn't attack but just stands there towering over me, no expression on his face, his eyes unfocused. I've lost some emotional control and I'm starting to feel fearful. Art circles around on my right, grimacing a little, her hands balled into fists. She can help me, but I know that for Task I know that I need to hit the guy. I try to calm myself down while imagining myself leaping up and doing some kind of superman punch. I'm freaking out a little bit, though, and the dream falls apart.

Session 27 on the Procyon AVS, linked in with a WILD and using anchors such as RT linked with finger pressure and MILD intentions.

I think pushing forward with the WILD will make a large impact on the other methods as they link in.

The deep session on the Procyon will help me get into the right state as well and help train my brain to slow down while using the WILD method which is the opposite of what was happening originally.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #100: The World Is Yours

I'm flying high in the sky around what looks to be a computer-generated globe that's populated with little dots. I feel like I'm on a plane with Wife but I don't see a plane. It's just me and my floating perspective as we circle slowly and gracefully around this globe.

I tell Wife, "This is a music video for a Phil Collins' song called 'Julia' from 1980." (Not true.) The song immediately starts playing. In it, Collins sings of how this globe is "not CGI" and that the dots represent people around the world. He sings that the dot he remembers best ("the one I best recall") was one of him over the ocean, flying on a plane to be reunited with his beloved Julia.

As the song ends, I suddenly find myself falling downward out of the sky. I hope that this is a dream, I think, and of course it is.

I immediately halt my fall and find myself hovering over a huge, vivid cityscape -- highways, skyscrapers, cranes, bridges, traffic jams, all arrayed for me down below. I want to fly around and explore this city, but when I attempt to fly, I'm unable to move. For some reason, I feel totally confident that I'll come unstuck. Stop asking, I think.

I ignore what the dream is telling me and I imagine that I'm already flying Iron Man-style around the city. A second later, I'm flying effortlessly, cruising anywhere I like. I get briefly stuck a time or two, but I just ignore it, imagine that I'm succeeding, and immediately start flying again. Eventually, the little glitches stop.

I see a tower that I remember from waking life -- it's one that I pass during my commute. I fly up to the top and circle around it. I glide low over roadways and high above a cluster of skyscrapers, then descend back to one of the bridges that spans a piece of some unfamiliar bay.

My confidence is soaring, and I decide try some large-scale dream control. I put my hands out in front of me and then bring them apart like I'm performing the breaststroke. As I do, I rake cars off of the bridge in either direction and dozens of them go plummeting toward the water. I bring my hands back together and I watch as time rewinds and they return to the bridge, unharmed. I fly back toward the skyscrapers, select a pair of them, and then begin moving them up and down, one for my left hand and one for my right.

I look to my left and see an enormous fire ogre (a la "Orcs Must Die") stomping toward me down one of the city streets. He towers over most of the nearby buildings, at least 100 feet tall. I wonder whether maybe I'll be fighting him later. I feel no fear at all. I reflect for a moment about what it would be like to have this much control and confidence in every LD. Nothing could stop me. What sort of things would I do if I had years of this kind of power?

Leaving the fire ogre behind for now, I fly over my city for a while and just let my dreaming brain show me what it can do. I look out at the waters of the nearby bay and think about using all of this overflowing confidence for some Task of the Month parasailing, but the dream soon ends.

Although this wasn't the right location, I did at least successfully find/conjure/whatever NewArtemis. Forgot all about swapping gestures and keywords, but it's all good... dry spell broken!

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #99: Walking the Path

I'm walking a beautiful nature trail. I sense that this is a place of peace and sanctuary outside of a hospital. I remind myself that I need to be sure that I'm not dreaming and I quickly realize that this is a dream.

I hear two female voices from the trail up ahead and somehow I know that this is NewArtemis and her cousin. (No clue whether she even has a cousin IWL.) Art's cousin appears first, with Art trailing maybe 15 feet behind. "Come on!" calls Cousin. "You were right! It worked!"

Cousin walks right past me, saying, "Hey! I'm [NewArtemis]'s cousin. She was so nervous this wouldn't work. She's been spinning her ring nonstop. That's what she does when she's nervous." With that, Cousin disappears from the scene, never to return.

"Hey, [NewArtemis]!" I say, giving her a hug. "Good to finally see you!" ("Finally see you" is a little weird since I've encountered Art's DC a bunch of times -- was I implying this was "the real her" for the first time? Or just flapping my gums?)

"Did you just break your dry spell, CL?"

"I did!" We continue walking in the direction Art and Cousin were going, which has me doubling back toward wherever I came from. "Dude, I'm trying so hard to remember what I was supposed to do when we met up. I remember parasailing but I don't think that's right."

She rubs her forehead or kind of scratches her head. "I don't remember anything either. Definitely not that we're supposed to go parasailing." (Art called this one right -- the parasailing thing was Task of the Month, not anything we'd talked about.)

I hear road noise from nearby and I make some kind of comment about wondering where it's coming from. The scene shifts to where we're walking through the corridor of a hospital. I remember something I wanted to ask. "Hey, is it true what your cousin said? That you spin your ring when you're nervous?"

She shakes her head. "No, that's total bullshit. My ring is kind of loose in the winter though." On the nature trail it felt like spring to me, and I'm able to remember that IWL it's summer.

Art holds up her hands to demonstrate and I see that she's wearing rings on four or five of her fingers. Then she kind of wiggles her hands and now she has even more rings, including a thumb ring. She does this ring reconfiguration trick a few more times and I think it looks super cool. I wonder whether she's got the right number of fingers but she's moving around too much for me to count.

We come to a T-junction where another hall comes from the left to meet the one that we're walking. I see my two boys E and R running off down the hall to make mischief. Art asks why we wound up here of all places rather than the Alamo. I say that I don't know. The dream ends.

Blame it on the menthol.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #98: Menthol and Marriage

I'm watching my son E perform some kind of a play with other 3-year-olds. At one point he's supposed to pretend a wiffle ball bat is a magic wand, but of course he goes waving it around dangerously close to other kids' heads. I run over to intervene but another mother gets there first. "I'll take that," she says, plucking it out of his hands.

"Sorry! Thanks for grabbing that from him," I say, embarrassed that she got there first. The woman gives me an unfriendly "where were you?" look. This annoys me, but as the father of the kid who was going nuts with a wiffle ball bat, there's not much I can say. I look back over at the play and E, laughing merrily, leaps over a low stone wall and goes running off God-knows-where. I take off after him...

...and have a false awakening in complete darkness. I hear Wife stir in the darkness and she asks me why I'm awake. I tell her that "I had this crazy dream where [E] almost hit a bunch of other kids in the head with a wiffle ball bat." I move to settle back against the pillow and realize that it's way, way too dark in here. "I'm dreaming," I tell her.

"Mm-hmm," is her sleepy reply, and I hear her roll over.

"It's super dark in here," I say. "I can't even see you." She doesn't respond but she rolls over again, leaning her head against my shoulder and putting her hand on my chest. I'm feeling really frisky and I think about asking her whether she wants to "make out a little bit."

Before I can unleash this suave line on her, she exclaims, "God, your breath!" and rolls away in horror. As she says that, I notice that the inside of my mouth feels nasty and vaguely thick, like my pre-bed dental care has totally worn off.

My confidence is a bit punctured, but I respond, "This is a dream. I can't possibly have bad breath in a dream."

"Okay, if you're sure," she says.

I move toward where her voice is coming from and try to kiss her. I wind up just finding her feet, which start flailing around when I touch them. "Why are you facing the wrong way now?" I ask, confused and a little exasperated.

"I don't know!" she responds. Holding on to an ankle, I very clumsily sort of turn her around. Since it's dark, I can just imagine that she's now facing the right way. As I do, the light in the scene increases ever so slightly until I can see her. I've managed to put my "death breath" from earlier out of my mind, so we kiss.

As they say, "one things leads to another", and the dream ends with roughly 4 minutes of very vivid LD sex before I wake up. Describing this part in detail would be a little too personal and graphic, but even after having a fair number of lucid dreams, the realism and detail of LDs still amazes me.

The second of two LDs from the morning of 05/18/2013. This was a big, big dream, and this dream and I did not always get along. This was my first serious attempt at meeting NewArtemis for a dream sharing attempt.

I also got into a big fight with a powerful DC that escalated into a me against the world situation. I could have handled this a lot better. My self-control wasn't what it should be... but it was still kinda awesome.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #96: Clash at the Alamo

I'm Marty McFly from Back to the Future, driving my DeLorean on a set of rails that stand hundreds of feet over a bay. The DeLorean starts to shake as it picks up speed and before I can make a time jump, the rails end and the car goes plummeting toward the sparkling water.

I brace for impact and the DeLorean flies to pieces as it strikes the bay. Miraculously, I'm unharmed, and I thrash about for something to hold on to so that I can get my bearings and figure out what to do. One long, fin-like piece of metal from the car bobs to the surface and I grab onto it. The moment that I do, an unseen engine roars to life and takes off like a jet ski.

As I'm racing across the bay, I realize that this has to be a dream. After riding for a moment, I'm perhaps a hundred feet from shore. I leap off the impromptu "jet ski" and fly the remaining distance, landing in a stone plaza that stands at the water's edge.

I remember that I'm planning to meet NewArtemis at the Alamo for a shared dreaming experiment. I turn toward the water, raise my hands up in the air, and make an announcement to all of the DCs. Most of the passerby stop and turn to look at me. "The Alamo is right behind me! That's right -- Alamo right behind me!" I imagine it in detail, rebuilding my mental map, forgetting and scrubbing out the buildings that were there before and replacing it with my image of everything that I remember about the Alamo. I continue this until I can think of nothing of what's behind me except for this image of the Alamo.



I turn around, expecting to see the Alamo... and there it is! The stone's a little darker and the construction looks a little too new to be quite right, but it's more than close enough of a lookalike for me. I walk around past the front entrance to a courtyard. The geography is different in this dream from that of the real Alamo, and I come to a stone wall with a little alcove and a bench. There's a woman sitting on the bench and we look at each other immediately.

She gets up and approaches me right away. She doesn't look like NewArtemis' DC has in the past, but I'm not sure of anything yet. She speaks first: "I'm here to meet someone. How about you?"

"So am I," I say, studying her. She's roughly the same height as Art's DC but her skin is paler, her hair curlier, her build heavier, and her face is different -- broader, different nose, different shape... just different. "But you're not her, are you? I don't think you're [NewArtemis]."

She smiles noncommitally, but I continue. "That's okay," I continue. "Let's still do the passphrases and gestures." I speak my chosen word to the DC and perform my chosen gesture. She doesn't bother speaking a passphrase in return but she does perform a gesture. (These have been reported to a 3rd party who is not NewArtemis just in case she's able to guess them.)

"Well, I need to go!" the woman says. She walks out of the alcove and passes me. As she goes, she becomes a much older lady, blonde, mid-50s. She grows to an enormous height, probably close to 8 feet tall. She's wearing shorts and I see that her legs are covered with a crisscrossing patchwork of scars.

I contemplate following, but I'm distracted by a man who's sitting at the top of a stone wall nearby, staring at me with a malicious grin on his face. He's in his late 30s with close-cropped reddish-blonde hair. The guy keeps staring at me with that joyless grin and I know that he's looking for trouble with me. I want no part of it, so I turn and walk away.



He hops down from the wall and grips my right forearm with his right hand, twisting my arm around so that my hand is near my head. I try to pull my arm out of his grip but when I yank, it doesn't budge. He laughs, shaking his head as if he can't believe that I would bother trying to defy him. "You're never leaving here," he says. "I mean it. You are never leaving here." I yank my arm again but I feel as weak as a kitten.

I know I have to turn this around fast. I grab him by the back of the head with my left hand and begin to imagine my adversary as frail and lethargic. "You're so weak and tired," I tell him, trying to sound compassionate, even though I'm boiling with rage. "There's just no strength left in you at all." And I gently move to lay him down on a nearby table. I think of him as totally weak and barely able to move. His grip slips from my arm and he flops backward onto the table.

"And small," I say, pressing on his head with one hand and his feet with the other. He begins to shrink. His hair has turned jet black now, and his eyes close. I squeeze him together, thinking of him as so tiny, and soon he shrinks to the size of a child, then to the size of a baby, then disappears into his clothes entirely. My self-control cracks and I ball up his clothes, throw the bundle on the ground, and give it a vicious stomp. I wonder for a moment whether I've gone too far and hope for a moment that the bundle was empty. I walk through a nearby archway, not sticking around to find out more.

I emerge in a cafeteria. A table of 6 or 7 teenagers immediately looks up from their meals at me. "It's him," one of them says, and they all get to their feet and come after me. I fly through a nearby doorway and emerge in a large, empty room with a skylight. I fly up to the skylight, intending to phase through it, but something seems to restrain me from getting high enough. I run through a doorway into a drugstore that dead-ends in a frosted glass window. I vault toward it, phasing through onto a street scene.

There are police everywhere on the street. I know that they're looking for me. There are strange little ball-shaped hoverbots scanning the streets with cameras, also trying to track me down. I sprint up to one and kick it against a nearby wall. With a pop, it breaks into two smoking, fizzling halves.

Everything seems to be happening too fast for me to control. I run down the street, looking for some way out of this fear. I want to buy time to calm down, so I phase through the door of a nearby house. Cops are turning the place over while the family, a husband and wife and their little girl of about 8 are glued to the TV. One cop notices me as I walk in, but I swoop in on him, grab him from behind, and choke him unconscious. The other two cops don't seem to notice any of this, and the little family stares obliviously into their TV sets.

I watch the TV for a moment. It's some sort of political propaganda which claims that the moral code of their "great society" is built upon a foundation of classic arcade games like Centipede, Pac-Man, and Donkey Kong. I'm torn -- on one hand, I find top-down, statist morality codes repugnant. On the other hand, I sure do love classic arcade games.

I phase out through the back of the house into the yard. The cops yell at me as I pass and I hear them calling for backup. The back yard is peaceful for a moment before the wail of what sounds like an air raid siren fills the air. I look up at the sky, feeling helpless, trying to find peace for a moment. But all I can think is They're coming for me. The dream ends...

First of two from the morning of 05/18/13.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #95: The Garage

I'm backing our SUV out of the driveway. As always, it's a little tight so I'm focused on what I'm doing. I catch sight of a bearded, creepy man advancing up the driveway toward the car. He makes me nervous, so I pull the car back into the garage.

Once I'm safely back in the driveway, I look back out to find that the man has vanished. Relieved, I get ready to leave again. But now Wife's car is at a funny angle that blocks me from leaving. Come on, [Wife], why would you park me in like that? I try shoving the back half of the car so it'll spin around and get out of my way. Amazingly, this works! I'm immediately sure that I'm dreaming.

I try turning Wife's car back and forth a few more times. It spins as smoothly as if it were on a turnstyle. I think about picking it up and flipping it over but realize that there are other things I need to be doing.

I remember that I have a goal of getting to the Alamo for a shared dreaming experiment. I try to look outside and see that the garage door is closing. It's only about 3 foot away from shutting completely. Even though I should know that this doesn't present any permanent impediment, it feels important that I don't let it shut on me. I hurry to the garage entrance, flop down on my side, and log roll under the garage door.

Outside now, I get to my feet on the driveway and look around. It's a cool, clear evening and the street's quiet. No weirdo in sight. I plan to Hulk-jump to the Alamo but as I begin to make my move, the dream ends.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #93: Rolling

I'm in an old-school first-person shooter video game. It's some sort of very metallic, clean-looking sci-fi setting, maybe a spaceship or some kind of alien base on a distant planet. I've got a numeric health meter in the lower-right of my view, ranging from 0 to 100. I don't seem to have any kind of weapon, but I'm speeding around the level, dodging enemy fire from generic-looking storm trooper-style enemies.

At some point, a laser beam starts waving wildly around the room in front of me. I'm not sure what it does so I try not to touch it. I slip up at some point, though, and the laser grazes my leg. My health instantly drops from 100 to 7. This seems unfair and really upsets me. I feel like I'd been doing well and have been punished way too severely for this minor slip.

I perform a diving roll to dodge the beam and I notice that I'm actually experiencing the sensation but that it feels different from waking life. I realize that I'm dreaming and the scene suddenly looks less like a space ship and more like a dimly-lit room with hardwood flooring. It feels a bit dark and unstable, so I perform another diving roll since that seems to be something I've got down. This goes well, so I immediately do another one.

I realize that I'm having a really good time doing these so I keep at it. I figure that I'll just keep dive-rolling until I figure out what it is that I want to do with this LD. I remember that I wanted to try NewArtemis and/or Xanous out on their werewolf transformations, but I'm having a little trouble remembering what specifically I needed them to do. I stop rolling after 5 or 6 tries to give myself a chance to think.

I'm in some kind of long, dark hallway with hardwood flooring and occasional doors leading off adjoining rooms. The scene feels very empty and I'm worried that I'm understimulated, so I go back to dive-rolling for a while. I do this for quite a while, probably another 20 rolls or so. I then decide that I should reverse directions, so I attempt a back flip. This isn't something I've actually tried in waking life, so I'm curious how I'll do. I go right over but land on my shins rather than on my feet. Still, not half-bad!

I perform a couple of other back flips, and on about the 4th attempt, land proudly on my feet. I'm in a bedroom now with a window that's letting in some morning sunlight. There's a man of about 25 sitting on a bed, his head in his hands. He looks up at me and I see that he has a goatee, a nose ring, a lip ring, and at least one earring. He sees me and tries to say something, but I'm being pulled in the opposite direction and can't hear what he's trying to say. He stands up and walks toward where I am, but I'm drifting away faster. He tries to shout something, but I don't hear any of it, and I wake up.

This lucid dream was very unusual for me because it occurred less than 25 minutes after falling asleep, right at the beginning of the night.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #91: Talking to Myself

I'm seated at a restaurant, talking to a couple of friends, including "Leroy". I'm making a point about some amusing fact I'd heard when a waiter seats himself at the fourth chair at our table. I say, "There's even this study where..." and trail off when I realize that the waiter isn't going away. I turn to him and say, "Uh, how's it going?"

"It's going well," he says. "I was wondering if you needed anything." He says this last part with some concern, like I might be very unwell.

I look back at the rest of the table and see that my friends are gone. I'm confused and a little embarrassed. "Were there two other people here...?" I ask. The waiter gravely shakes his head. I start worrying about myself for a moment before realizing this is all a dream. "Don't even worry about it. This is a dream."

"Ah, very good, sir," he says, standing from the table and gesturing toward the exit.

I get up from the table and walk toward the exit. There's a glow coming pouring through the cracks at the edge of the door as if something as bright as a star was behind it. I phase through the door, winding up in a room that has plywood flooring and a ceiling that's sloped like the top of a roof. It looks like an attic. At the opposite end of the room, maybe 25 feet away, I see the source of the light: a fiery, brightly glowing furnace.

I walk toward the furnace as it spits these little gobs of liquid fire onto the floor. I'm close now, but I don't feel any heat. As I close to within just a couple of feet, the view of the furnace fades and I find myself on a set of sharply descending stairs. Each stair is only about 4 inches long but drops almost 2 feet. As I walk down them, I'm descending so fast that it's almost like slowly falling into a pit. I can't see where I'm going. I wind up stepping onto the railing and slowly making my way down that way. Somehow that seems to normalize the slope of my descent.

I get to the bottom of the stairs and I'm in what looks like a family room with hardwood flooring. There's a board game laid out on the floor. The dream starts to fade around the edges, but I manage to hold onto my view of the board game for a couple more seconds, seeing that it's composed of a game board, a stand with some cards, and some sort of gently-spinning purple sphere. I can no longer move and my field of vision shrinks rapidly until I'm awake.

Key: Notes/Comments Nonlucid Dream
Lucid Dream
I was going to try a WILD, but it was way too loud, so I instead did a MILD with a mantra of "I will realize I am dreaming." I had some REM rebound from lack of sleep from the night before.

Dream 1, Nonlucid Dream

I was in a city like San Francisco, except it was cleaner. This asian guy had this big staff with colorful bubbles in it. I acquired the staff somehow. I realized that the staff had magical powers. I pointed it toward a car and a white light flew from the end of the staff to the car: the car grew in size. Eventually some guys came up to me, they were like "Give me that staff of yours" and so I shrunk them. Later this girl came up to me and said, "The staff of gods! You can grow things, resurrect people, and kill people!" I walked around 'San Francisco' and I dropped my staff at one point. It rolled under a car. I went under the car and noticed that the colorful bubbles, which looked like bubbles, had spilled out. I used the staff to suck them up somehow. Someone called my name, though, and I forgot the staff. The dream sort of 'skipped' at this point and I was in a car driving with my mom. I think she was driving to work. I realized that I had left my staff at the city, under the car. I said,
"Oh no! I left my staff under the car! It has magical powers." My mom gave me an annoyed look.
"Staffs in real life don't have magical powers," she said.
"It must have been a dream then," I said.

Dream 2, Lucid Dream

I was at my school. Two boys were following me around. They said, "I can't believe she doesn't realize that this is a dream."Then, of course, I became lucid. I'm dreaming!I thought, shouting it in my mind. I forgot to stabilize, but I DID remember the TotM. I took off running, and found the nearest person I saw. His name is Nate Yu. I barely know him in waking life, but he goes to my school. I ran up to him. I was confident he would give me a lump of coal when I asked.
"Hey, I need you to give me that lump of coal you're carrying around." I got this idea from CanisLucidis' dream journal post. He nods, and pulls out of his pocket what my dream thinks to be a lump of coal. It's got some black, like coal, but it's connected to some sparkly, rough, silver rock that's more pliable, like clay. "Thanks," I say. I squeeze the rock in my hands, but instead of getting a diamond, I got a boring rock. I ran off, still squeezing the rock, but eventually I gave up and threw the rock on the ground. I thought of making coal materialize at this point, but I decided I'd try asking a few more people first. I went to where there was most people: the lockerrooms. I ran over screaming, "HEY, IF ANYONE HAS A LUMP OF COAL CAN THEY GIVE IT TO ME PLEASE?" Everyone just looked at me oddly and continued what they were doing in the lockerroom. I noticed that the boys were also entering the girls' lockerroom along with the other girls. Eventually I gave up and ran off to these 3 boys. I was also thinking of some of my dream goals I also had. I asked them, "Hey, can I have that coal you're carrying around? I can turn it into a diamond." They looked at eachother, considering it, and the middle boy nodded and handed me a lump of the silvery rock instead of coal. For some reason it seemed like the 'coal' was used like a drug in this dream. I squeezed it into a diamond shape, but no actual diamond. They started to look angry. "It's okay, it's okay. I can make it into a diamond like they have in minecraft." I tried again. No diamond. The boys looked even more angry, but instead of beating me up, like I thought they would, they ran off. I turned around. I could hear my 5-year-old stepbrother Gabriel screaming in waking life. He's going to wake me up!I thought. I could hear my brother trying to quiet him down. The dream was blurry and extremely unstable now. I ran my hand across the nearest wall, and it felt real as one would in real life. Then, thinking of a post on dreamviews about 'making out' with the dream, I dropped to my knees. I felt super disconnected from the dream by now when I said, "The ground is going to taste like strawberries instead of the ground." I licked the ground. It felt rough, like the ground would normally, and it tasted like a juicy strawberry. Then his screaming started again. I decided that he would inevitably wake me up anyway, so I decided that I'd try my first DEILD. I exited the dream, and then I kept my eyes closed when I woke up. Almost immediately I heard the 'vibrations' (which, to me, sounded alot more like blood rushing through my ears.) I freaked out because this is my first time hearing them and started flailing my leg around in an effort to wake myself up. I kicked myself in the morning for not tolerating the vibrations

The good news for this LD is that the light switches worked great! The bad news is that my prospective memory wasn't the best and my DC summons didn't work like they should, but I had fun trying. Some more focused mental prep and reminding myself of my goals would have helped, I think, so I'll just blame the short WBTB.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #89: Under Construction

I'm walking down a hall in my office with my friend "Leroy" and one other guy. The hallway is dimly lit and even though we're far from any windows, somehow I know that it's night outside. We're looking for some room that we can use to host a remote meeting that's scheduled to start in a few minutes.

The door at the end of the hall has been replaced with a thick sheet of plastic and the entire area looks like it's under construction. I think, "How do I know that this isn't a dream?" and I become lucid. I run my fingers over the wall, and it feels just like the walls at the office. "[Leroy], I'm having a lucid dream." Leroy doesn't respond and just stares robotically ahead. I continue to mutter about how I'm dreaming, but the target audience is really just me -- Leroy seems to have checked out.

We reach the end of the hall and I phase through the plastic into the next room, which should be a large, windowed room of cubicles, adjoining offices and meeting rooms. The windows are there but all of the furniture is missing and the room is incredibly dark. I reach for a switch on the wall without looking, knowing that it will be there, and flip it. The lights come on and I watch as the room quickly populates itself with gym equipment! I see a treadmill, a couple of stationary bikes, and a weight tree with 45-pound plates appear. I stare at the weight tree for a moment, and the image wavers self-consciously, forming odd little rectangles and finally disappearing entirely.

I decide to "give the room a moment", and look over my right shoulder at the wall for a few seconds and then look back. The room is still mostly the same but now there are five or six arcade-style redemption games arranged back to back in a circle in the middle. (The sort of ticket-winning games that you might find at Chuck E. Cheese's.) I take a quick lap around the games to size them up. During the lap I notice that Leroy is still standing by the room entrance and still seems unresponsive, so I don't worry too much about him.

I have the nagging sense that I'm supposed to be doing something but I can't remember what it is. I try to think of the tasks that I had planned but nothing comes to mind, not Task of the Year or Task of the Month. I remember talking with NewArtemis about trying to see whether her DC could shapeshift the way that she can in dreams, so I attempt a handshake summon, averting my eyes and extending my right hand. I do it incorrectly, though, more asking for her to show up rather than expecting that she will. Nothing happens for a while and at the end I rather pathetically say, "[NewArtemis], don't leave me hanging!"

Now I've become fixated on summoning so I decide to try getting Xanous to join the scene. Again I do the handshake summon, but the result's the same. I think of shapeshifting again and realize that Xanous can do this too. For some reason I remember that he uses the term "blutbad" in conjunction with shapeshifting so I randomly blurt out "Blutbad!" like that's going to help somehow. No idea what that was all about, but it doesn't work!

Edit: I remembered one more part of the dream. I give up on the summoning for a moment and try speaking directly to the dream. "Show me something important!" Nothing happens, though, and I try this twice more before giving up.

Amazingly, the thought of simply phasing through the walls and flying off into the night doesn't occur to me. I turn my attention to the redemption games, hoping that this could be fun and might even reanimate Leroy. I stand in front of one machine that's about 6 feet high and has a joystick on the front and a tall, tapering tower of lights inside its case. The lights are illuminated in a wave that moves repeatedly from top to bottom. I place my hand on the joystick, noting the little red button on top, and the dream starts to fade. I feel it coming and ready myself for DEILD, but when I emerge from the dream I'm too awake to go back in.