All DJ Entries

This was a very long dream / lucid dream series, going on for at least 45 minutes to an hour. I lost lucidity early on and regained it, so the first part of the dream is extremely scrambled. Also, a little background on one portion: I recently found out that Wife thinks lucid dreaming is more or less a waste of time. I was disappointed by this and concerned about what her DC might be like in future dream appearances.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #88: Reconciliation Hour

I'm in a lucid dream where I'm in a current of strong running water. I'm taking things easy, reminding myself to be more patient in life. I have a false awakening into a completely rearranged version of my house, downstairs. I hunt around for my dream journal... there it is, on the counter! I reach for it and as I grab it, my friend The Schwartz walks up and asks, "Hey, whatcha doing?"

"Hang on, [The Schwartz], I've gotta get these dreams written down. My dream memory is good for like 3 seconds. If I think about anything else, it'll all go away." I feel my dream memories leaking out of my ears. (Figuratively.) He looks a little hurt and I remember that the message of the dream I just finished was to be more patient. "Sorry, man. I know I'm not as patient as I should be sometimes. My dream was about getting better at that. You were even in it." (I assume this is true but no longer have any memory of it.)

I crouch down by a coffee table and get ready to write. Just then a full-sized poodle noses aggressively toward me. "Hey puppy," I say, reaching out to pet it. The dog turns away, totally snubbing me, circles around behind me, and then bites me hard on the butt. Another dog, a German shepherd joins the poodle and behind them I see my real two dogs (Siberian Huskies) lying on the carpet, panting.

"[Wife]!!" I wail, going into the kitchen. "Why do we have four freaking dogs in this house now? Wasn't two bad enough?"

Wife is in the kitchen cooking huge pans of a strange, purplish, bubbling yogurt conconction with her mom. "Oh, those belong to sissy and [brother-in-law Muppet]. We're just taking care of them." I grumble at this but sit down to journal. All but the last 2 pages of the DJ are filled, and the last entry is really hard to read. It says something about 139 pounds, but everything else is blurry and shifty. I demand proof that I'm not dreaming and become lucid.

"Hey, [Wife]," I say. "I'm having a lucid dream."

"Cool!" she responds. "Why don't we go to the park?" And then we're someplace else, holding hands and walking outside along a broad, grassy path with a great number of other people. We trudge past a flooded parking lot and the steel-toed boots I'm apparently wearing are soaked through. I'm annoyed at first, then remember that I can just fix it -- I do.

After walking for a long while, we get to a playground. The playground is a sort of cross between a playground and a petting zoo because all sorts of little animals like sheep and pigs are playing on the equipment as well, mingling with the kids. Our two kids (who weren't in the scene before) streak past us and join in the playing. My oldest son E sort of sits on another boy and I cringe, worrying that there might be some sort of confrontation. All is well, though, and everyone plays happily.

We do this for a while and then wander various paths in the park, the kids coming and going. There's an indoor scene as well where our son E gets to take a class and writes on the blackboard (something he can't do all that well IWL yet.)

Eventually we return home and put E to bed, except he's sleeping in a crib for some reason now. I'm happy, the way I feel after a great day out with the family. I keep looking at my hands as we put him to bed, reminding myself that I'm dreaming. Each time I do, I seem to grow an extra finger. The extra fingers even work pretty well although it seems to take extra special effort to move the "new" fingers vs. the old ones. By the end, my right hand has nine fingers.

As we leave his room, I show my freaky alien-looking hand to Wife and she laughs, saying, "That's awesome." I laugh too, peeling the extra fingers off like a glove and tossing it into the corner of a room where it lands with a rubbery thump. The fingers transform into a brightly-colored kerchief.

I say, "You know, I wish you felt differently about lucid dreaming." (IWL, Wife expressed that she thinks lucid dreaming is pretty much a waste of time.)

"I love that you have these dreams," she says, smiling.

I'm confused. "But you pretty much told me that this was a waste of time." She looks away, her smile fading. Then it hits me how caught up I am in confusing fantasy and reality, even while lucid. "Sorry. I forgot. Here and now."

She smiles again and turns to leave the room. I check her out as she's walking away. "Not gonna happen..." she says, without turning around, and bounds out of the room. I follow as the dream fades...

Finally -- Advanced Task of the Month!

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #87: The Diamond

I'm driving somewhere in California, preparing to merge onto the freeway. Some guy in a Hummer blocks me from merging in, though, even steering his behemoth vehicle toward me so that I have to run off the road. I wind up on some semi-abandoned, crumbling old road, following one other car. The road's filled with enormous potholes and huge slabs of the road jut up at crazy angles. The other driver and I steer carefully around these chunks as best we can and I'm very worried that I'll break an axle. I think that this is all cause by California's ever-present budget woes.

The road ends at a marina but the other car has vanished. I get out of the car and sit by a wooden railing, pouting about my problems. As I look down at the water, I see a little girl crash a jet-ski into a dock, fly over the handlebars, perform three perfect back hand-springs, and walk off as if nothing has happened. I'm impressed by her athleticism and very relieved that she wasn't hurt.

There are narrow wooden walkways leading in a couple of different directions, but none of them are wide enough to fit a car. I need to keep driving but I don't want to leave my car here. I think that if this was a dream, I'd just go jack one, Grand Theft Auto-style. This thought makes me critically question reality and I realize that I'm dreaming!

I leap to my feet and take flight, soaring high enough to see the top of a nearby apartment building. There's a huge pool party on the roof of this building, lots of DCs milling around, and I decide to check it out. I discard the "Great Wall of China" Task of the Year for now and decide that I'll do the "make a diamond out of coal" Advanced Task of the Month.

I look for the DC who seems most in charge and central to the storyline of this party scene. A girl that's seated in a beach chair nearby seems to be the focal point of the scene. She's mid-20s, black, very cute, and three or four of her girlfriends stand deferentially around her as they all talk. While it's not an exact match, I notice that she looks a bit like Stacey Dash.



As I walk up to pseudo-Stacey, she and her friends turn to look at me. I say, "I'm going to give you a diamond." One of her buddies, a brunette holding a slender glass of what looks like champagne, laughs at this.

"Are you serious?" asks "Stacey".

"Totally serious," I say. "It's for a task. You just need to hand me that lump of coal that you're carrying around."

"Sure, take it!" she says, handing me a peach-sized lump of coal. Whew, glad that worked, I think to myself. Stacey and her friends watch me, intrigued. I give the coal one quick squeeze, imagining that it immediately feels sharp and hard like a diamond. I open my hand and yes it's a diamond! There are some lumps of dusty black coal-crap on it, but I quickly brush them away, revealing a sparkling, golf ball-sized, round cut diamond.

Her friends murmur appreciatively and I hand Stacey the diamond. "Aww, it's so nice!" she says, smiling appreciatively. She holds it up to the sunlight to admire it then stands up and approaches me. "Hey, will you help me out with a question that I had?" she asks.

"Sure. What's up?" I'm very intrigued about what her question is.

"What's the difference between..." she begins, pointing toward herself and circling her finger as if to indicate "me" or "all of me". Her voice trails off and I quickly wind up in the void. The excitement of TotM and the anticipation of the question get me too wound up, though, and I wake up before I can use the void to travel anywhere.

I buckle down for DEILD but I feel like I'm not going to fall back asleep. I try to really let go, and after waiting for a bit, I slip back into a non-lucid dream: "Stacey" is in a dark, wood-panelled office, seated across from a severe-looking woman in her 50s. Stacey is visibly upset and says, "You have no right hire someone else to ghost write my story! How can you do this to me?"

The lady, who I think is her publicist, is unsympathetic. "Not everything is about you." I wake up.

This was a a very vivid, pleasant lucid dream. My Task of the Month attempt didn't succeed, but it was a beautiful experience nonetheless. Also, this is the third time that my dad's DC has hinted to me that I'm dreaming and finally I listened!

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #86: Rock Candy

I'm standing at the door of a lakehouse with Dad, recounting an extraordinarily vivid dream from earlier in the night. I lean against the doorframe, looking out over the water. "I can't believe how much of this stuff you remember," he says. "And then that whole 'vivid dreaming' thing you do."

"Yeah," I respond. "It's actually called 'lucid dreaming'." It hits me that this is all a dream. I step outside to a wooden walkway, leap over the railing and take flight over the lake. "I'm dreaming right now!" I shout over my shoulder.

"That's amazing," I hear him say as I cruise away over the lake. I pass through a cypress canopy and get high enough to survey the lake. The lake stretches as far as I can see, its surface criss-crossed by dirt paths that are decorated with beautiful marble archways.

I land on one of these paths and walk along for a while, enjoying the serenity of the moment. I pass a bulbous, bright blue flower that's the size of a basketball. Its petals ripple gently in the sun and give off a glow that looks like a bloom effect you'd find in a video game. Just before I come to a marble archway, I find a pile of rocks and think of the Task of the Month (find a piece of coal and change it into a diamond.)

I dig through the rock pile, hunting for coal. The closest thing that I can find is a black, rectangular hunk of glassy, volcanic-looking rock. It looks too crystalline so I get the bright idea of crushing it into coal by popping it in my mouth and chewing it up. I bite a hunk of the rock off and begin to chew. The taste is amazing! It's like a homemade raisin bar with just a hint of chocolate. I'm immediately reminded of the goodies Mom would bake when I was a kid.

I wander the paths for a long while, contentedly passing under the shadows of archways, walking by strange, brightly glowing plants, and happily biting off pieces of this delicious black rock. I feel immensely pleased with what I've created for myself and unmotivated to change anything.

Eventually my path takes me to an ancient-looking stone wall. Oddly, there is a working escalator alongside the wall, and I board it, curious where it leads. As I ride up, I pass many people that I know, most memorably my friend DX (who I recently saw for the first time in over a year.) His short hair has been replaced by an enormous ball afro. We swap greetings, but the escalator quickly moves us past one another.

At the top of the escalator, I remember Task of the Month and spit out a bit of the black rock to see if it's coal-like enough to work. Unfortunately, it's more like slightly sticky, finely-chewed glass. I look back at the escalator and see Fedora, a guy that I used to know in college but was never friends with. I say, "Fedora, go ahead and give me that piece of coal you have." It works! Fedora hands me a perfect lump of coal and I get to work on squeezing it. It's becoming smaller and smaller, and I feel like a tiny diamond is beginning to form. Fedora demands that I give him the diamond when I'm finished since it's "his". I'm about to tell him that this is fine when the dream gets really unstable.

I prepare to DEILD, and it goes black. I'm very aware of my body now, almost awake. I release all awareness of my body and try to let the dream take me under. Apparently I let my self-awareness go too, because I'm shortly back in the dream, but no longer lucid.

I'm standing about twenty feet from the escalator talking with my friend The Schwartz and another person that I can no longer recall. "So what went wrong?" asks The Schwartz. I walk them through the last portion of the dream in detail. As I'm describing what happened, I see an attractive stranger in her early 20s eyeing me. She smiles and waves me over. Excited, I begin walking toward her but suddenly feel super guilty. I remember that I'm married and feel like a dirtbag. Then I remember that I'm dreaming and feel awesome again. The stranger smiles and turns away, an older guy (her boyfriend?) draping his arm over her shoulder and walking away with her. I start thinking about Task of the Month again, but the dream fades...

Although the lucid portion was shorter than I'd have liked there were two awesome things about this dream: 1) I finally broke my dry spell. 2) I played the part of a bulked-up, ghost-hunting Stephen LaBerge. Who could ask for anything more?

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #85: Stephen LaBerge, Ghost Hunter

I am Stephen LaBerge, and I've been hired to investigate an apparently haunted cruise ship. The vessel's owners aren't sure whether the ship is haunted or whether this is all a dream. Therefore they've invited me, Stephen LaBerge, to investigate.

I'm standing outside the ship, waiting to board. The crew shuffles past me on the gangway, leaving the ship empty for me to investigate. I board the ship, and quickly become lost in a maze of hallways. Creepy, whispering voices and strange groans echo through the halls.

I feel wimpy, vulnerable, and way out of my depth. Looking for a place to hide, I duck into one of the ship's bathrooms. Suddenly it occurs to me that I should prove to myself that this isn't all just a dream. I quickly realize that I am dreaming after all.

The moment that I become lucid, my confidence comes flooding back. I check my look in the mirror, and find that even though I'm still Stephen LaBerge, I'm now enormously, cartoonishly muscular. I'm wearing a dress shirt that looks like it was torn to ribbons when I did my Incredible Hulk transformation. I hit a double biceps pose in the bathroom mirror and smile at the sight of Stephen LaBerge's head on this freaky, bulky body.

Suddenly, one of the stall doors in the bathroom slams shut. I'm still sort of stuck in ghost hunting mode, so this frightens me a bit. I hang onto lucidity, though, muttering to myself that "I'm having a really stable lucid dream..." I walk up to the stall door that slammed shut and kick it right at the latch. It swings wide open and I'm relieved to see that there's nobody in there.

I walk to the next stall in the bathroom and for reasons that I can't remember, I stick my head into this stall to see if there's anything interesting in there. This time, the door slams shut right on my face, striking me in the nose. It doesn't hurt very much but it scares me and makes me stagger back. Just then, a hand caresses the back of my neck and I absolutely freak, losing lucidity and running out of the bathroom into the halls.

There's a bit of a memory gap here, but I spent a lot of time running lost through the halls and looking out of portholes. I can see the ocean through these portholes but I've lost sight of the docks or any kind of land. During this time, ghosts definitely keep touching me and it definitely keeps wigging me out.

Ultimately I make my way deeper into the ship. I end up in a hot, dark boiler room, engaged in a fistfight with some kind of green-hued stone man that I think is a demon. (He sort of reminds me of Frank Fontaine from the final battle in Bioshock.) We're punching, shouting, and cursing one another. I think of how odd it is that I am Stephen LaBerge fighting a green demon in the boiler room of a cruise ship and briefly become lucid before the dream ends.

I took a pass at Advanced Task of the Month (turn a lump of coal into a diamond) but was running into all kinds of cognitive and dream control problems. My brain seemed to be a little zonked. This was my first lucid where I'd taken Valerian Root for sleep, so it's something to consider. Still, a nice long dream, even just counting the lucid part! If I'd managed to get lucid earlier I might have even had more time (and avoided that chaotic freeway scene.)

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #84: Vehicle Fire

Everything in the house is breaking at once. The plumbing is leaking all over the place, the dogs have destroyed a bunch of stuff, and I hear some kind of weird crunching noise from outside. To top it off, we're late picking up the kids from something.

I head outside to find my brother-in-law Muppet swinging around like a monkey on one of the external brick columns that supports our house. Each time he swings around, a couple of bricks fall off of the house and land nearby. Plus, the pillar is actually moving a little bit each time he goes around it. "What the hell are you doing?" I say to him. "You're gonna break our house!" I perform some half-assed reality check and it succeeds.

"What did you do just now?" asks Muppet.

"That was a reality check," I explain. "Everything is such a mess that I hoped I was just dreaming."

"Ah," he says, not especially interested. He points at our roof. Three objects that look like wooden shipping pallets are sticking out of it. "Hey, what are those?" asks Muppet. I grimace, thinking that they must have fallen out of a plane or something and wound up embedded in our roof. Muppet gets distracted, makes some remark about the flowers on the banana plants in our back yard, and then hops away over the top of our house. (Yes, over the top of our two-story house.)

Wife and I get in the car to go pick up the kids. We drive around the city for a long time but every road seems to be closed. Finally we take a tollway but traffic suddenly gets really heavy. I lightly bump some car as I'm driving around but nobody makes a big deal about it. Looking up ahead, we see the reason for the delay: ahead of us a disabled car is engulfed in flames. Black smoke billows up to the sky.



"We've gotta get off this road," I tell Wife, and steer the car toward a left exit. Just as I do that, though, a fire engine comes racing toward me, going the wrong way up the exit. I throw the car in reverse to try to get out of the way. I have to bump a lot of cars to clear a path, but I figure that's okay.

Finally, our car gets totally stuck, so I hop out and start pushing it sideways, kind of lifting it each time. I realize that I'm way too strong and become lucid. Wife has vanished, which is probably for the best -- the scene has grown totally chaotic, with cars driving around everywhere bumping into each other and the siren from the fire truck wailing in my ear. I pick up the car over my head and throw it across the road. In mid-air it changes from an SUV into a yellow Volkswagen Beetle. Then it becomes just the front half of a VW Beetle.

The license plate looks like a bar of soap with words carved into it in cartoony handwriting. I get closer so that I can study it. There are four words, but I only remember "ship" and "check".

Now I remember Task of the Month -- turn a lump of coal into a diamond. Unfortunately, I start trying to conjure a diamond at first. I'm very aware of my hands for some reason, and even when I put them behind my back I can't seem to make myself buy into the conjuration. I bring my hands back to the front of my body and see that now I'm wearing these black, rather lady-like leather driving gloves. Annoyed, I take them off and pitch them away. I try the conjuration again -- again, more lady-gloves. Then I remember that I wasn't even supposed to be conjuring a diamond in the first place but a lump of coal. I start working on that, wind up with lady-gloves again, and start getting frustrated. A car clips me as it goes by, I start getting agitated, and darkness comes over me, pitching me into the void.

I feel relaxed, and start probing at my dream body. It's only a few seconds before I find myself standing in my own bedroom, walking toward the door. I say something encouraging to myself like, "Hell yeah, sexy new dream body!" For a moment I contemplate turning around to see whether Wife is in bed and might be down for doing something sexy but I get scared that approaching the bed I'm actually occupying IWL would be destabilizing.

I head to the top of the stairs. The baby gate's blocking me but I just power through it and it sort of snaps open. I get nearly to the bottom of the stairs when everything stretches way, way out and takes on that stereotypical "endless hallway" look. I keep moving but no matter how far I go everything seems to stay in the same place. Then the entire room suddenly rotates 90 degrees, floor becoming wall, and I slide down the rest of the way to the first floor.

Our coat closet has been replaced with what looks like a giant iPhone. The screen is displaying a game with a 5x5 array of tiles. When you touch various tiles, you receive prizes in the form of troops for Clash of Clans. I earn 4 Minions and a Hog Rider just pushing tiles at random, but now I'm interested in learning what the rules of the game are. I'm trying to figure this out when the dream ends.

I was really going for the "sand" trick that I used in The Sands of the Colosseum but I never could figure out how to capitalize on it. I need to learn to be a bit more flexible and much less fearful of the dark. Given what I've learned, all of that concern about the dark is nothing but a bad habit. This was a good learning experience though!

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #82: Afraid of the Dark

I believe that this was a DILD, but my first memory is of being lucid in a huge, empty office space with plain white walls, harsh fluorescent lighting, and blue-gray industrial carpet. It looks like a place where there'd normally be a cubicle farm, but the floor is totally clear.

I'm happy to be lucid, but I want a new location. I want to perform the "sand trick", which involves focusing on the floor and rubbing it until I'm convinced that my hands are digging through sand. I start crawling around on the floor, find myself a spot, and start rubbing.

Nothing happens at first, so I focus harder on the thought that this is sand. Unfortunately, I'm looking right at industrial carpet and the thought won't go away. Finally a bunch of disgusting dust and dirt puffs up from the carpet and blows around, but it's not what I'm looking for. I try for a while longer but I feel myself becoming obsessed.

I get up and notice a set of doors in a far-off wall. I run over to it, place my hand on the doorknob, and imagine that the Colosseum is on the other side. I throw the doors open and instead of the Colosseum I see a darkened warehouse. I can't see in too far but I do make out a few scattered cardboard boxes.

"Too dark", I think. "Not going in there." I close the door, think about the Colosseum, and open it again. This time the boxes are gone and the room looks even darker.

I give up, close the door, and follow the wall to a closet-like cubby hole. I crawl around in here and again try to produce sand from the carpet. Even though this cubby is set off to the side, the lighting is unbearably harsh and I just produce more puffs of dust, like the carpet needs a good vacuuming. I try to close my eyes but they won't comply. It seems like this office scene is burned into my brain.

I jump to my feet and run around a bit, doing a quick dive-roll just for kicks. I round a corner and find one of my Siberian Huskies locked in a big cage. He whimpers and paws at the door. I fumble around for a latch but don't see anything.



I'm preparing to open the crate via telekenesis when Wife appears from behind me and says, "Oh here, let me take care of that!" I almost tell her that I'm having a lucid dream but I figure that she already knows. She crouches down and starts working the lock. I make the mistake of waiting around and lose lucidity.

The lock pops open and our dog comes bounding out. He runs past us and buries his face into a used-up paint can that's nearby. I look to see what he's doing and am horrified to see that he's happily chowing down on a couple of dead roaches. I'm about to tell him to stop but Wife hugs him around the neck and says, "Oh, such a good boy!!" I feel ill. Still, I decide to let it go because he's probably hungry.

Wife wanders over to a nearby window and I follow her. There are a pair of laser gun emplacements on the window sill. We each take one and she points across the dark city to a tall office building. Wooden boxes float silently out of the office building, flying off to destinations unknown. Wife explains: "Those boxes have dangerous cell phones in them that will give people cancer." We start firing our laser cannons at the evil cell phones, destroying as many boxes as we can. We get most of them but, I'm sorry to say, many get through. The dream ends...

This Task of the Year attempt was a big step forward for my teleportation from the void. I combined my idea of relying on tactile sensations to teleport with Chimpertainment's approach where he focuses on a single point while allowing the rest of the scene to build. The results were excellent. Even though I didn't manage Task of the Year, this was a pretty big one for me.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #80: The Sands of the Colosseum

I'm driving with Wife over a hilly, Dr. Seuss-like landscape in a car with giant tires. It occurs to me that this all might be a dream and I decide that it is. As I become lucid, Wife immediately stops talking.

I drive for a bit, wondering where I should take my funky new car. But then I remember my goal of touching and engaging with the dream world as quickly as possible to really draw myself into it. I stop the car (seemingly through an act of will) and feel the seat with my left hand. I reach my right hand over to Wife and begin to feel and massage her left thigh. My initial intent was non-sexual but right away I feel a stir of excitement and distraction, so I stop. I try to touch the seat with my right hand instead, but I somehow miss and transition into...

...a false awakening where I'm standing by the bed in a dark hotel room. I remember everything, though, and I remain lucid. I see Wife's vague outline in the bed, but darkness is already pressing down. I know the void's coming so I start rubbing my hands together. Soon everything is totally dark and I keep probing my dream body. I probe each side of my chest and try flexing just a bit. Everything feels totally realistic. I check my junk to make sure all is as it should be (yep, we're good ), and poke the outside of my thighs with finger-spears.

Comfortable with my dream body, I crouch down in the dark and move my right hand in a rubbing motion, imagining that I'm moving my palm over sand. Soon I feel something like a thin layer of sand. As I keep rubbing, the layer seems to grow thicker and thicker. Now I can actually see the motion of my hand and I can vaguely make out sand shifting around. I think specifically of the sand in the Colosseum, then dig my fingers deep into the sand. I feel them scrape what feels like a wooden board.

The sand comes fully into view, sharp and detailed. I keep staring at it, imagining that I'm surrounded on all sides by the Colosseum. I hear the crowd now, and after a few more seconds, I have imagined right where I'm standing in the Coloseum (close to one wall), what kind of day it is (sunny), and what I'll be trying to do (kill orcs.)

I stand up, raise my eyes, and I am there in the great arena. Every detail looks perfect. I sweep my gaze from side to side, grinning at the thought that I'm actually here. I think that it looks just like stepping into a scene from "Gladiator". I'm excited and happy to have finally made it!



I want to see more and more of the scenery, and without meaning to, I allow my perspective to float high up above my dream body. I scan the crowd for a while, eventually viewing the scene from high enough that I see the surrounding Roman streets. I suddenly zoom in on a street scene packed with Roman citizens. Lucilla from "Gladiator" is laughing and playfully hopping down the street. It feels strange because the whole scene is playing too fast.

Now I realize that I'm just watching all of this on my Kindle Fire and a little display tells me this is being played at "4x". I'm distressed that I'm now just watching all this on a screen and I try to "rewind" to the part where I was in the Colosseum. The controls don't seem to work properly, although I do manage to slow the scene down to normal speed.

I've lost all connection to my dream body and soon I wake up.

This was a great LD for breaking a dry spell! No progress on tasks, but some fun action, a DV member cameo, and what feels like progress on keeping caffeine dreams stable. As usual, the last thing that I read during WBTB (in this case, a Visitor Message from NewArtemis) has a significant impact on my dream content.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #79: The Hall of Letters

I'm sitting on the side of the mountain, looking across a green valley at another mountain that's dotted with caves. A person sits in each of these distant caves. I recognize my college friend RS and somehow I can talk to him even across this huge distance. The weather is sunny, clear, and beautiful, so I casually say to RS, "Isn't the day amazing?"

"It is!" he says, and suddenly blankets and rugs come pouring out of the mouths of these faraway caves. The blankets and rugs go tumbling and sliding down the side of the mountain to the valley below. Fascinated, I wander into the valley, not sure what to make of what I'm seeing.

Now the valley is teeming with hundreds of people. Each of them spreads out a picnic blanket, removes their shirt, and flops down onto their stomachs to sun themselves. I see RS take a spot of his own ahead of me and to the left and I realize that I am now holding a blanket as well. I start scoping out a spot of my own.

As I'm looking around, I see AA, a mutual summer crush from high school. I want to say hi but when she removes her shirt I see that unlike the rest of the female DCs, she's not wearing a bikini top underneath. I turn away, not wanting to get caught staring. I lay out my blanket and remove my shirt, looking forward to feeling the sun on my skin. But when I check, I find that I have another shirt on underneath my original. "This is a dream..." I tell myself, and almost immediately Hulk-jump out of the valley, thinking of the Great Wall of China.

As I'm soaring through the air, the scene quickly darkens and soon I'm in the void. "This is fine," I tell myself, "I can do this all night." I rub my hands together and feel my forearms, drawing myself into my dream body. With my left hand I reach down and massage my knee cap, extending my right hand for aid. I beg for help, saying, "Bail me out. Pull me into a new scene."

A smallish hand, seemingly female, grips mine and yanks me forward. A voice says, "Hey! It's [NewArtemis]! I know you can't see yet, but we need to keep running!" I obey, and I sense that we're running through the hallways of some building.

I start getting flashes of imagery -- signs with arrows and strange, all-caps letter patterns like "ABCD ->" and "<- PQDELJH ->" (the first one was definitely in the dream, but the second is a reconstruction/guess.) Seconds later, I'm in the halls running, my vision restored. Art says something along the lines of, "Okay, you're good now," and drops my hand.

I hear the running footsteps of pursuers, so I begin floating so that I can get a look behind us. I move a few feet ahead of Art, turn around, and start floating backward. A squad of frightening-looking Enclave Soldiers (from Fallout 3) is pursuing us, perhaps 50 feet behind. "It's those guys from Fallout," I say, not able to remember what they're called. Art doesn't appear particularly concerned about this, so I figure this isn't as big of a deal as I'm making it out to be.



At the end of the hall, we take a right turn into a circulator elevator with a bumpy, cylindrical metal pole in the middle of it. I feel the bumps with both hands, and the texture is like that of a cheese grater. "You should do this," I tell Art. "It really helps with stabilization." Feeling confident, I boastfully add, "This is making my dream so stable. Try it." She laughs and shakes her head like I'm really failing to grasp something basic.

Art shifts to where she's out of sight behind the pole, and when I look around the other side to find her, she has completely vanished. The elevator doors have shut now and I'm on my own. There are buttons with weird symbols on them and I start pressing them at random. Each one lights up as I touch it and soon I feel a faint vibration from the elevator like it's moving.

I wait a long time, hoping that the elevator doors will open, but nothing seems to be happening. I begin to fret that I'm in a bad situation now -- stuck in a small room, inactive and waiting for something to happen. The dream begins to feel thin, goes dark, and my half-hearted DEILD attempt fails. I'm awake now.

This was the second of two lucid dreams from last night, and a pretty close call for the South America Task of the Year. I'm getting closer! Just need to seal the deal! Very fun dream, success or no. Man, I want these bad.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #77: The Mesa

I'm driving under an overpass, approaching a stoplight. Out of nowhere, the car in front of me stops and I slam on the brakes. The brakes are super sluggish to respond and the car drifts to a very leisurely stop, stopping just a couple of feet from an embarrassing fender-bender.

The driver in front of me, a stout, balding man in his 40s with a shaved head, gets out of his car and circles around to the trunk. He shoots me a dirty look, pops the trunk open and pulls out a cooler. It takes a moment before it dawns on me, but I recognize him as a prominent DC from an earlier non-lucid dream and I become lucid.

I step out of the car, and the DC walks confrontationally toward me, like he's eager to argue about something. "Not right now," I say, and walk past him, emerging from the overpass into a bright day in some city's downtown. Beautiful glass buildings line the right side of the street and there's some sort of park to my left. Further ahead, a silvered, decorative archway spans the street.

Angel Falls is on my mind and I go for a quick Hulk-jump to try to get there. Instead of soaring into the clouds, though, I float gently up into the air, turning slowly around. It feels wonderfully relaxing and I lay back to stare up at the sunny sky, my arms flung out to the side. I float upward, a few feet away from one of those tall, windowed buildings. This feels fantastic to me and I start laughing, continuing to drift upward and slowly turn.

I'm having a ball with this, but I don't want to forget what I came to do. I tilt myself vertically again and start to rise more quickly, expecting that Angel Falls will be there on the other side of the building. As I shoot past the roof of the building, I see a broad bay dotted with distant boats. And looking out further over the bay, I see a mesa covered with greenery... one that looks just like the mesa that Angel Falls originates from! (I looked it up and this mesa is called Auyan-tepui.)



I decide to sing to keep myself focused on the task, and I come up with the following: "I'm going to Aaaaaaangel Falls!! Hell yeah Aaaaangel Falls!" I'm oblivious to how horrible my lyrics are (and my voice sounds totally rockstar) so this all seems awesome to me. After a while I think about the "Halls" brand cough drops I'd had during WBTB and come up with some second "verse" that rhymes "Falls" with "Halls". I'm sure it sucked as bad as the others but I wish I could remember it.

I'm making good progress in my flight over the bay, and I cut past a boat that looks like it's loaded with tourists (most of whom are in bucket hats for some reason.) I'm excited, happy, and confident, but for some reason I lose the dream and wake up. Really thought I had that one!!

I'm recovering from an illness so it was a coughing, uncomfortable, rough night. I finally had to take 1.5 mg of melatonin to tip myself into sleep at around 4 am to get this LD (which explains the melatonin reference in the dream.) Given all that, I'm really pleased to have gotten lucid. I just wish I'd gotten more than 4 hours of sleep!

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #75: Floodlights

Wife and I are staying in a hotel room and having some disagreement about the use of melatonin in cooking and laundry. She tells me that she will never bake melatonin into bread or use it to wash our towels. Peeved, I hide around the corner out of sight, and sulk about how unreasonable this ban on melatonin baking is.

Then we're in bed trying to fall asleep. I roll over to my right side and find that there's a hammer in bed with us! I think about how horrible it would be if REM atonia malfunctioned and one of us had some kind of combat dream. (I've had a vague but long-standing fear of REM behavior disorder since I was pretty young.) I'm pissed that the hotel staff has left this in our bed and I get up, deciding that I have to get rid of this hammer.

I slide the hammer flat along the floor and throw it into the hallway through the gap under the door. It spins round and round then clonks into the wall on the opposite end of the hall. It suddenly seems ludicrous to me that the hammer would fit under the door like that and I become lucid.

Vividness looks good, so I'm excited. I head for the window of the hotel room, passing two more double beds on the way out. (It occurs to me that the bed I was just in was crammed into the kitchen nook.) As I approach the window, I notice that a four-foot metallic cube is shoved against the wall. It's vibrating ever-so-slightly and there's a strange voice coming out of it saying something about "Orcs Must Die!" (I played this game before going to bed.) I think that the voice is telling me to "insert a coin". I'm really interested in this but I start feeling confused. Worried for my stability, I turn away from the cube and turn my attention back to the window and my goals.

I want to make my way to Angel Falls for Task of the Year, so I plan to phase through the glass. I halfheartedly try to push through it, but I know that I'm doing it wrong and my hand is stopped at the window. I struggle to remember what I'm supposed to do. Oh right -- the glass isn't even there. Just do what you want. I simply walk outside into the night, paying no attention to the glass, and find myself standing on a ledge looking out over a nighttime city scene, many stories off of the ground.

I don't feel like I can Hulk-jump from this tiny ledge, so I allow myself to rise up to get a better look at the city. I'm high up now, and I see a distant tower topped by a turning searchlight, clearly visible in the night sky. It intrigues me, but I decide to stick with Task of the Year. After floating upward for a while, I land on the hotel roof. I look to the sky above me and see a strange array of floodlights shining down on me like I'm in the middle of a sports arena. The lights are blindingly bright and my vision first goes completely white, then fades to black.

For some reason, I don't think of readying myself for DEILD but instead become fixated on asking the dream scene a question. While I'm fiddling around, everything collapses around me.

I was talking with NewArtemis yesterday about mantras and lucid dreaming and apparently the conversation stuck... well, for me at least. Popped a B6 and chowed down on some raisins before bed and got this pair of dreams. This is really a micro-lucid followed by a full LD, but they're so related that I'm just journaling them together.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #74: Mantras in the Green Valley

I am in a large, brightly lit room of white marble. There are a lot of strange, rectangular foam blocks lying around. I decide that they represent sleep cycles or maybe chunks of REM. I say out loud, "You will have a lucid dream!" I feel like this mantra is very important. Who am I saying this to?

Now I see NewArtemis perhaps ten feet away, standing there looking sleepily around, apparently not noticing me. She has one or two foam blocks at her feet but I think she needs more. I toss a couple more of these at her and they bounce off of her and land nearby. I'm disappointed that I can't seem to add REM (or whatever) to her sleep. I say again, "You will have a lucid dream!" but it seems to make no impression on her.

I decide that she's already asleep and dreaming. "You're dreaming right now!" I tell her. "Don't you remember your mantra?" I put a hand on her left shoulder and she gives me this bleary-eyed look. I suddenly get it straight that I'm the one who's dreaming. "This is a lucid dream! Okay, now you!" I say, but she stares at me uncomprehendingly. I quickly wake up.

Try to DEILD but accidentally think about work. (Gah, rookie mistake!) Awake for a while. Then back into a non-lucid...

I'm in the back seat of a jeep that's pulled over on the side of the road. The jeep is being driven by my friend TB. Someone I don't know is in the passenger seat and he's pouring his heart out to TB because he had to shoot someone in self-defense. TB tells him not to worry about it and makes some sort of slightly offensive joke about it. The passenger gets even more upset, but TB calms him down.

TB puts the jeep back on the main road and ahead of us is a one-lane bridge with 10-feet concrete walls on either side of it. Looking further out, I see that we are in the most beautiful green valley that I've seen in my entire life. I feel like it's the most brilliant green that I've ever seen in my life and realize that I have to be dreaming.

Now the jeep has become a long van with four or five rows of bench seats. I float out of my seat and swim toward the front of the van. TB is still driving, but the passenger is someone else. I think it's Xanous.

As I pass the third or so row of seats, I see NewArtemis to my left, looking out the window at the green valley. "[NewArtemis]! This is a lucid dream." She looks at me, then looks back out the window, then back at me again. But now she has transformed nto a blonde woman in her mid-40s. I decide that this isn't working, so I swim further up.

I make it to the second row of seats, w/ TB and (presumably) Xanous right in front. I look out the window and see a mountain rising in the distance. Now I realize that we're driving toward Angel Falls for Task of the Year! Things start feeling unstable, and I reach out to grab onto something. I grab onto a nearby female DC (a stranger) to bring myself back into the scene, but things don't stabilize. The skin on the lady's face begins to glow slightly orange, and everything fades out but this glow. Then I'm awake.

This was an interesting little LD where I pulled off Basic Task of the Month. The woman in the restaurant was a very intriguing dream character. Much sharper than the typical DC. Who was she?

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #72: The Wish

I'm in an elevator talking to some guy from Brazil. I suddenly realize that I'm going somewhere with Wife but she's not in the elevator. The doors are open, so I step outside the elevator, thinking that she must have fallen behind. Instead of Wife, I see my friend SA heading toward the elevator and become lucid when I remember that SA moved to Seattle a few years ago. I also remember the fact that I intended to have a lucid dream.

"Hey!" I say to SA as she hurries by and steps into the elevator. "Oh hey!" she responds, giving me a quick wave just before the elevator doors close.

I'm in a long marble hallway. I rub my hands together and say, "I am having a really stable lucid dream." I feel confident and I remember the Tasks of the Month that I wanted to try. At the end of the hallway is a restaurant and when I enter it, I'm greeted by a tall Indonesian-looking man who's about 20. "Can I help you, sir?" He seems friendly enough, but somehow he strikes me as dull-witted.

I'm about to perform the "wish" Task of the Month ("Tell a dream character that he/she may have 1 wish granted.") But I have this sense that the DC I'm speaking to is just an "extra" in the dream and that I'll get a more meaningful answer from someone else. I tell him to "Take me to the most amazing woman in the restaurant." (This sounds shallow, and in large part it was -- I thought it'd be more fun to grant an attractive woman a wish than some dude. But the important subtext of my request was that I wanted to speak with an interesting, highly intelligent DC.)

"Right this way," he says, without missing a beat. I follow him to a table with a window overlooking the city. The woman seated at the table is a short, very attractive Asian woman who looks like she's about 25. She's seated at the table with four men in suits, also Asian, who looks more like bodyguards than boyfriends. Even though she's easily the smallest person at the table, her presence is by far the most commanding. As I approach, the men inch subtly but protectively toward her.

The woman casually waves her left hand and says, "It's fine." The men settle back into their seats, the aggressive tension subsiding. She looks at me, cocks her head to the left and simply says, "Hello."

Through the window behind them, I see a downtown skyline backlit by the sunset. I somehow feel like this is her city. I'm not intimidated by her, but I am impressed by her. I may be the king in this world, but she's somebody important too. A crime boss? The city's mayor?

"I can grant you one wish," I say. "You tell me what you want and I'll do it."

Without hesitating, she says, "Can you grant me a kiss from any DC that I want?" (Yes, she said "DC"!)

"Definitely. I can do that."

"Okay," she says. "I want a kiss from Brad Pitt." She says it like a challenge.

The straightforwardness of the request amuses me. I nod, extending my hand to the right to try the "handshake" summoning trick that I used to summon Xanous a few dreams back. I imagine that Brad Pitt is standing just a bit off to the side and is now reaching forward to shake my hand. There's just a slight pause and then something slithers into my hand that feels like a cold, wriggling fish. It feels disgusting and I hope that Brad Pitt just has a really weak handshake.

I turn to look at what I've got and see that I've somehow latched onto the elbow of a woman that was walking by. I let go of her elbow and she walks away, seemingly oblivious to what just happened. I wonder why her elbow was so gross.

When I look back at the table, I see a couple of black spots forming in my vision. I laugh off my failure, saying, "Don't worry, I've still got this!"

The black spots are growing now, partially obscuring my view of the attractive young Brad Pitt fan / mayoress.. "Careful," she says. I think that I ought to be prepping for DEILD but I also feel like I'm close to success and want to try to sneak this one in. As the black spots grow, I have this overwhelming sensation that the reason the room is darkening is that my eyes are closed. The urge to open my eyes gets the best of me and my real eyes open.

I entered this menthol lucid via an in-dream WILD but never picked up on the fact that I had entered from a dream. I also got completely fooled by a false awakening, not waking up for real until long after the dream had ended. Because of that, a lot of the LD is pretty scrambled, including a couple possible Task of the Month attempts. Still, this one's filled with amusing little tidbits.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #71: Fooled

I am wandering in my house during the day, thinking about lucid dreaming. I decide to visit DreamViews (on my Kindle?), starting with the Task of the Month thread.

I see a post from PennyRoyal and suddenly remember that I'm supposed to be making him a fake ID. I remember that he badly needs this ID and I'm way, wa behind on producing it. (Needless to say, this is not true!) Being on DV and getting reminded of this task I'm putting off makes me feel like a slacker and a procrastinator, so I close the site.

I sit on the floor of the living room and pick up a strange comic book with moving pictures. The hero, a billionaire similar to Bruce Wayne, does a parkour safety vault over a railing onto the front porch of his mansion. I watch the move replay over and over, thinking about how I should find a spot to learn the safety vault near the house or the office.

Eventually I decide that maybe I should just practice this vault myself in a lucid dream. I lay down on the floor of the den to attempt a WILD and instantly emerge standing in the living room of my house! I gloat to myself about what a stud I've become at WILD. I rub my hands together and walk into the kitchen.

There's a man standing in the kitchen and after conversing with him, I learn that he needs a sword. I conjure one into my right hand. The sword is awesome and looks just like the one He-Man uses. I give the sword to the DC, but he looks disappointed. He complains that "it's not a magic sword." This annoys me, so I tell him that if he wanted a magic sword then he should have asked for a magic sword. He hurls himself on the ground and throws a massive tantrum, bawling, rolling around, and kicking his feet like a toddler. (This may have been me granting a DC a wish, but I do not remember properly asking the question, so I will not count this as a Task of the Month completion.)



Annoyed, I walk away from the DC. I look for the note that I left myself for TotM. I don't know whether I find it, but the dream destabilizes somewhere inside the house and I have a false awakening that puts me back lying on the floor of my den. I think about writing the dream down, but I'm distracted when I look over at our couch and have sexy thoughts about doing stuff with Wife on it. I'm surprised by how vivid my imagination is right now. I vaguely remember consuming menthol, but when? (I had peppermint tea at WBTB.) Is menthol why I'm thinking about happy happy fun time?

Then I have another memory of recently eating popcorn. (Also true, right before bed.) I realize that I have one of those annoying little popcorn hulls stuck between my two front teeth. I absentmindedly conjure a box cutter into my right hand and use it to pick the hull out of my teeth.

I finally remember to write the lucid dream down. I open up some sort of notebook to write the dream down but it's just filled with Wikipedia pages. These Wikipedia pages contain hyperlinks that respond to my touch, so I surf around for a while reading about stuff. I think about how much you can learn these days without even talking to anybody. I wonder how we introverts used to learn before the internet. Oh yeah, I think, there were always books. I happily surf Wikipedia for a while, and I remember nothing after that.

This is the second DV member lucid I've had in a row! For some reason, my subC is teeing these up for me right now, which is cool. Hope it keeps up.

I noticed that I was fairly stupid throughout this dream, including the lucid portion. I took a pretty high dose of melatonin at bedtime, so I wonder whether that was related. Good vividness though!

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #69: The Scorpion

I'm walking through the desert, heading down the slope of a tall sand dune. The sun is high and bright. I feel relaxed almost to the point of sleepiness.

Suddenly, I feel a sharp, painful stab in my foot! I decide that I must have been bitten by a scorpion. I try to remember if you're supposed to die when that happens, but I think maybe it just hurts like hell. When I look down to find the "scorpion", all I see is an unhooked safety pin lying in the sand. The safety pin dances a bit and says, "It's me! Paigeyemps!"

"Yeah right," I tell the safety pin.

"Seriously, it's me!" The safety pin wiggles a bit. "I got shrunk down and I'm too small to go anywhere. So I found this safety pin and I stab people with it when they come by so that they'll help me. I'm really thirsty."

I find this totally convincing and I feel bad for doubting her. "Of course I'll help you! Let me get you some water!" I look around and see that about 100 feet away is the "Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas" sign. Oops. I feel silly wandering around in the desert when I'm this close to the Vegas strip.



I walk toward the Las Vegas strip and somehow I find an empty cup and a big bottle of water. I fill up the cup and bring it back to Paigeyemps and her safety pin, feeling like quite the hero. The little safety pin waves around a bit and she says, "That cup is filled with bacteria! I can't drink that!" I'm sort of embarrassed that the cup is so dirty and I wonder how she's able to see bacteria so well. I figure it's because she's so little, but something seems funny about the whole situation. All of this "heavy duty thinking" seems to get my brain into a higher gear and I become lucid.

Even though I'm lucid, I still feel very, very stupid. I think that maybe Paigeyemps could use a bigger signaling object than that tiny safety pin, so I conjure a knife into my right hand. It occurs to me that it would probably be bad to have her out here in the desert knifing everybody that comes close. I toss the knife over my shoulder.

"Hey," I tell her, "I'm actually lucid now! Let me just shrink down to your size and see if I can help." (I wonder why I didn't try to make her bigger instead. ) She says something along the lines of "cool" and I focus my vision on the safety pin, willing myself to shrink down.

The shrinking effect feels sort of like zooming on Google Maps. I focus on the spot where the safety pin is and will myself to move closer and closer to it. There's a momentary visual streaking effect and then everything looks bigger. After a few iterations of this, the grains of sand look more like huge rocks and for some reason they're glowing. From up close, they look beautiful.

"I think it's working!" Paige shouts. "You look much smaller!" At this point, I see a tiny humanoid-looking figure hopping around among the grains of sand! Encouraged, I do a few more cycles. On my last zoom, though, I zoom in on the wrong spot and find her completely out of view.

I call out to see if I can still find her but there's no response. I figure that I'm totally lost. I don't know how to proceed so I try hopping around like a sand flea for a little while. I get tons of height when I flea-hop like this and sand-boulders fly everywhere when I land. This is great! I do that a few more times until the dream ends.

I doubled up the menthol at WBTB and I think it definitely had a strong effect on the early dream content. Also, it was cool to finally bring a DV member into a lucid dream! Reading DV during WBTB was a huge help, I think.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #68: Losing My Grip

I'm in a long bedroom, and immediately I realize that this is a dream. Wife is reclining on the bed in her winter pajamas, reading her Kindle. On the opposite side of the room is a large window with its curtains open. Sunlight pours into the room.

"Hey," I tell Wife, "I'm having a lucid dream!"

She looks up. "Good! Have fun." She returns to her reading. I know that I'd planned to go to Angel Falls for Task of the Year, but my head is buzzing with sexy thoughts. I look out the window for a moment. The sun's too bright to see outside and the window is consumed by a warm, yellow glow.

When I turn my gaze back to Wife she has changed. The Kindle has vanished and she's gone from lounging in flannel pajama pants to laying over the bed in a negligee and booty shorts. My urges are going crazy. I decide that I'm not getting any of my goals done this dream. "What did you just do?" she says, looking amused.

"It's the menthol," I tell her. "I had 6 bags of peppermint tea. I think it's making me frisky." She raises her eyebrows and tilts her head forward, looking skeptical. "It sounds like an excuse," I admit. "I make too much out of these drugs. Kind of like how I think galantamine gives me magical powers." For some reason, I turn and force-push a clock off of a nearby dresser and shout "Galantamine!!" (So embarrassing. What a dream-dork. )

I join Wife on the bed and start to kiss her. The sensation is incredibly vivid and I start getting caught up in these really strong fantasies about what's going to happen. (These were crazy, cosmic fantasies that involved space, time, and dreams-within-dreams. Sadly, most of the details got scrambled up.) The fantasizing quickly runs away with me, and I'm close to losing lucidity. Before we can start doing anything, I hear the sound of little feet on the floor near our bed and a little voice say, "I see Mommy!" I freak when I realize that our two boys are here and lose lucidity. The sexytime mood leaves the room as quickly as it arrived. Wife is now back in her flannel pajamas and it looks like nothing was ever happening. I'm relieved that she's so good at acting normal.

We go downstairs with the kids and start going through a semi-normal morning routine. After a very long time spent doing mundane morning stuff, the boys are helping me bake bread in the bread machine. As I'm taking the bread out out, R (my 1.5 year old) climbs up on the counter. Before I can stop him, he burns himself on the bread, bonks his head on the bread machine, and tumbles all the way to the kitchen floor. This scares me but the accident is so comically absurd that I regain lucidity.

The boys run off and I see that Wife's looking at me. I tell her, "Don't worry, that whole thing with the fall was just part of this dream." She says okay and joins the boys in the den.

I notice that the living room is filled with a strange darkness. I catch figures moving in the darkness but I can't make out who or what they are. They don't seem hostile, and I somehow decide that they're DV members and that I want to pull one of them into the scene. NewArtemis, Alyzarin, Xanous, and OpheliaBlue are in there. I catch little flashes where I sort of "see" their faces without seeing them. (It's a little hard to explain.) I choose to bring Xanous in. (Even though the sexytime mood from earlier is long gone, I feel like it's a really bad idea to bring a female DV buddy into a menthol dream.)

I turn my head away from the darkness and extend my hand for a handshake. I expect Xanous to walk into the kitchen and shake my hand. After only a second or two, I'm gripped by a firm handshake... I turn to look, and hell yeah it's Xanous! He's in a gray t-shirt with some logo and he's laughing about something. Before I can say anything, he rapidly shrinks down until he's about a foot tall, but somehow I'm still shaking his hand.

My vision goes black but I still have a hold on the handshake. I ask Xanous what he thinks I should do but he just says something unintelligible in a weird robot voice. The handshake slips away and I fall back to the gladius trick. This doesn't do anything, and I alternate between swinging a sword and slapping myself in the face. It doesn't seem to get me anywhere.

After a bit, I wake up, staring straight at a wall. Wait, Wife should be where the wall is. Still dreaming. I try to move but I'm totally frozen. I start contemplating an OBE exit before I wake up for real.