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These were the most realistic non-SSILD false awakenings I think that I've ever had. Made for a fun series!

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #121: Barefoot

I'm dimly aware that I'm dreaming in some scene that I can't remember, and as I become lucid, I'm thrown straight into the void. I hang on for dear life and start rubbing my hands together like crazy. It feels solid and realistic and pretty soon I feel comfortable that I'm anchored pretty well into the dream.

Right away I remember that I want to get to the Colosseum. Like the previous dream, I want to build the Colosseum scene from the void. This time I choose to do so by constructing the Colosseum's inner stone wall. I reach my left hand out and yes, it feels like it's dragging along stone. I walk along this wall, dragging my fingers upward until they reach a... ceiling? No, that's wrong. I deny the ceiling's existence and after a bit my fingers keep climbing until they reach the wall's top.

Now I'm feeling the top and side of the wall with both hands. It feels very realistic now, and the scene comes sharply into focus. I see that I'm rubbing some isolated piece of stone that's standing in a modern-looking, well-lit library. It's very cleanly decorated and only sparsely populated with bookshelves, and two spiral staircases lead up to a second floor. I see a couple of friends standing around. Near a table is "AJ", and standing across from her is "LS". Neither notice me. Further away I spot an extremely attractive female stranger (Asian, mid-20s, long hair). I suppress a strong impulse to approach her for "that thing" and instead turn toward the glass door, phasing through to the outside.

Outside is a plaza with a broad set of bricked steps leading down to a grassy area. At the top of the stairs to my right, two teenage girls are seated at a white metal table having a meal (lunch?) "Which way to the Colosseum?" I ask them, and one girl points immediately across the plaza, swallowing like she has a mouthful of food she wants to down before speaking. "Thanks!" I say, and start flying in that direction. I get high enough to spot a distant tower and a tree-lined street nearby, but the sound of a wet sneeze over the baby monitor sends me into the black. I keep my eyes closed, trying to DEILD, but I hear Wife groan unhappily, and now I don't think I can get back to sleep.

I open my eyes and find myself lying in bed in our darkened bedroom. (False awakening.) I get out of bed and reach over to grab my journal, expecting my Kindle Fire to be on top, but it's missing. Where the hell did it go? I step into the master bathroom, close the door so I don't disturb Wife, and try to flip the light switch on. Instead the fan comes on. I try the other switch. Fan again. Come on, what the hell? I'm going to forget everything. Both switches at once, and still no light, just the fan. I hit the nose pinch and blow through. Amazing.

I go back to the bedroom and it's brighter now. Wife's missing, and the shutters are open. I leap up, phase through the window, and perch on a dream balcony that's outside. The balcony overlooks a courtyard far below, very much unlike the geography of our real house. I fly out over the courtyard, soon coming to a forest of extremely tall trees. The trees are like pines that stretch far into the sky, coming close to touching the cloud cover. I think that if I can just get over these trees, I'll be able to look down at a huge chunk of the landscape, spot the Colosseum, and fly there for Europe Task of the Year.

I fly higher and higher, trying to crest just over the treetops. I get close to the top but keep feeling resistance. I know that it's mental, so I keep shrugging it off, insisting to myself that I am flying higher each time. I approach a cloud and do this flailing little grasp for it. For some reason, I briefly see stars and get the sensation of my heartrate increasing. This takes me straight into...

A false awakening in our bedroom. I look at the clock and see that the screen's completely dark. I nose pinch and blow through. I approach the window, phase through, and hop out onto a ledge. I'm over another courtyard (this one with a pool), and about 3 stories up, suddenly feeling very nervous about attempting flight. I just became lucid. Am I sure? I hit a secondary nose pinch and make sure that this feels vaguely like "dream gravity". I think about the phase and the multiple nose pinches, and decide that I should be okay.

I'm still nervous, though, and when I jump, I float to the ground rather than fly. The landing's soft, and I'm sure that I'm dreaming, but I decide not to push it with the flying just now. I walk around the pool, scanning the crowd for a while, seeing many familiar faces -- my friend "The Dragon" and his wife, my father-in-law, and a couple of other friends that I can no longer recall. I walk past the shallow end of the pool, past where some kids are playing some game with a ball. At the edge of the courtyard is an ivy-covered archway that I'm planning on walking through, maybe turning it into a gateway to the Colosseum.

I remember to try to summon NewArtemis. As I pass by the stairway out of the pool, without stopping, I extend my hand toward the pool, and say, "[NewArtemis], are you ready to go?" It works! Art emerges from the water, walks up the stairs, and hops out of the pool.

Her voice is faint, but as she walks along she says, "Don't want to wear shoes. Don't like to wear shoes."

I don't know what to make of this, so I just go back to my stuff: "The Colosseum's right through here. You ready?"

"Yeah!" Her voice is still faint, but much more enthusiastic. As we approach the doorway, the dream ends.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #120: Raiders of the Lost Colosseum

I'm an Indiana Jones type of character. I'm in a huge stone chamber, deep underground, sitting on a platform on the arm of some strange metallic device. The device appears to be some kind of scale, with two arms extending to the side, my butt planted firmly on the left arm.

There are square receptacles along each arm and I'm holding a square-shaped block. I'm somehow supposed to fit into the right spot in order to make the scale balance and unearth some kind of treasure.

It occurs to me that I might be dreaming and I quickly decide that I am. I'm fascinated by this device, though, and want to keep playing with it. I try the little square block in a couple of different receptacles, which seems to lower and raise the platform I'm sitting on. After doing this for a bit, I blank out and go into the void. It's pretty sudden, and I lose track of my dream body.

Now I'm seated at my kitchen table, semi-lucid and slightly confused. There's a weird cord hanging down by the back door like something that would go with a set of blinds. I don't recogznize it, and I realize that I'm still dreaming.

I phase through the door into the yard. It looks like my yard, but the sky is orange and the fencing around my pool is missing. There's a strange ripple in the water of my pool, and I walk toward it to investigate. When I'm a few feet away, though, my vision goes black and I wind up in the void.

I'm determined not to lose my dream body this time, so I quickly lick my right hand, then rub my hands together. (Why lick first? Nobody knows.) I poke at my jaw, chest, stomach, and weenie. All are present and accounted for, and I'm satisfied that my dream body is intact.

Now I want to get to the Colosseum. I drop down to one knee and rub my right hand in the ground, expecting to feel Colosseum sand in my fingers. Immediately I do. Now I recall that in the past I had imagined a gladius (ancient Roman sword) in my hand and started swinging it around to transition out of the void. I decide to do this again.

I feel the weight of the sword in my hand as I whirl it around like a crazed chimp. I can hear the noise of a crowd all around me now and my vision's beginning to form. It's still blurry, but I know that I'm heading in the right direction. The momentum seems to give out at some point, though, and I wake up.

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.

Narcissism and botched summonings ahead. Still, every lucid's fun and this was a good reminder not to be too casual with details in dream control situations!

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #111: Vanity at The Doppelganger Waterpark

I have a false awakening. Faint morning light filters in through the window. I wonder whether it's too bright to get back to sleep. A bedside clock says that it's 5:00 AM. It seems too bright and too late to have a lucid dream. I remember the micro-lucid from earlier in the morning and feel disappointed that I didn't hit a real one. (I really did have a micro-lucid earlier, as well as an earlier false awakening.)

I get up to use the restroom and notice that I'm not in my usual bedroom but rather on the first floor of a building -- a hotel perhaps? I feel like I'm awake, but the bathroom is just... so different. I'm dreaming.

As I leave the bathroom, I hear Wife beginning to stir. She's muttering something but I can't make it out. The morning light makes it seem urgent to get started with my goals, so I phase out through an external wall, my head and shoulders passing through a window. I end up in a fenced, grassy yard with a circular stone table surrounded by simple stone benches.

My strategy for this dream is to forget the meeting location for now and just try to summon NewArtemis directly. I walk toward the yard's open gate, holding my hand behind me as I go. "[NewArtemis], grab onto my hand." No good. I have the sense that I did it all wrong. Stop asking. I sort of try again but my level of intent is poor and nothing happens.

As I exit the yard, I'm distracted from the summon by a mirror hanging on a brick wall to my left. I check my reflection and see that I'm wearing a pair of jeans without a shirt. I vainly check myself out and notice that I'm less in shape than I remember being -- torso a little smoother, face a little puffier. I start worrying that I've let myself slip in waking life and try to remember whether that's true. It suddenly occurs to me that this is probably the most pathetic, narcissistic thing I've ever wasted lucid dream time on in my entire life.

I walk further along the grass until I come to a large, packed pool that's being rocked by gentle waves, almost like it's a half-activated water park wave pool. I notice my friend "SC" playing with a young child (too young to be one of his sons). About twelve feet to his right, I see another SC! The doppelganger smiles and gives me a nod of acknowledgment.

As I continue along the pool, I see my high school friend "LM". And just as with the other friend, not far from her is another doppelganger. Again, the doppelganger looks my way and smiles. The smile seems genuine rather than threatening so even though I find it a little weird, I'm not too troubled by anything that I'm seeing.

The water makes me think of Angel Falls. Okay, new plan: summon Art while on the move and dash to Angel Falls for Task of the Year. My hope is that if I'm very casual about the summon it'll just work. I reach my hand behind me and say, "[NewArtemis], Angel Falls is just up ahead." I feel a hand grasp mine and I look back to confirm that it's Art. But when I do, I see that the hand is sticking straight up out of the water. The geometry of all this strikes me as strange. How is their arm so long that they can still be submerged and grab onto me?

As I'm thinking this, the person floats up out of the water, still gripping my hand. She's a complete stranger -- blonde, early 20s, fair-skinned, slightly heavier build. She's wearing a black one-piece swimsuit. "Who are you?" I ask, and her only reply is to half-smile and turn away. I notice that her teeth have a very mild yellow/brownish stain to them.

"I'm going to change you into [NewArtemis]. Okay?" I'm not trying to ask permission so much as... explain what's about to happen? There's no reply. I look off to the side to make the transformation easier, but the dream ends before I can take this any further.

Another swing and a miss at meeting Art at the Alamo. But the good news is that I managed to remember (and execute) Basic Task of the Month!

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #104: Reservations

I have a false awakening at home and stumble out of bed. I'm disappointed and slightly grouchy that I failed to achieve a lucid dream. Feeling unmotivated, I wander aimlessly through the house, contemplating how late for work I probably am. I think that it's Friday, though, and I'm looking forward to ordering pizza with the guys at the office and shooting the breeze for a while. (Nope, today's Wednesday!)

I wind up in the exercise room but the power rack and dip station are completely missing. It's halfway converted into an office and I see the guts of a half-built computer on the floor. I kneel down to work on it, seeing that the RAM is missing and that the box is full of dust like it's been sitting there for years. I finally grasp how dreamlike this all is and become lucid.

I rub my hands together and assemble my goals. Two come to me fairly quickly: 1) meet NewArtemis at the Alamo 2) go water-skiing. (Oops, Advanced Task of the Month is actually parasailing.) I move into the master bedroom where I see Wife standing nearby as my two young children E and R run around the room. I announce that I'm having a lucid dream, eliciting an "Okay!" from Wife. I phase through the external wall of our house. I'm on the 2nd story, so I drift down to the driveway below, lightly brushing the branches of our oak tree with my fingers as I pass.

It's a bright morning outside and I'm preparing to fly off for the Alamo when I hear the voice of my son E behind me. "Daddy, wait! Daaaaaaddy!" I think that it's probably smartest to ignore him but I can't help looking back. Somehow he's followed me outside and I see him standing about fifteen feet away, looking so small. He looks at me with enormous, pleading eyes and says, "Daddy, can I go with you?"

I start feeling all melty-hearted and I know that resistance is futile. It'd probably be amusing to see E and NewArtemis' DCs interact anyway. "Sure, buddy," I say, scooping him up and placing him on my shoulders. I hop up into the air and we fly together over the neighborhood, heading vaguely northwest. The city's different in this direction, and we pass a park and a block of tall buildings. I decide that the Alamo is in the next block and I tell E this to cement it further in my mind. "Uh-huh!" he enthusiastically agrees.

When we hit the next city block, though, I'm disappointed to find no sign of the Alamo. There's a river running east-west with a simple stone bridge crossing it and a walkway on either side. I shout down to the DCs milling around below: "The Alamo's supposed to be right here! Which way is it?"

A blonde lady walking with her daughter points westward toward the bridge. "It's that way, just past the bridge!" I thank her, land, and walk under the bridge with E still on my shoulders. We emerge to see the Alamo up ahead but there's some kind of enormous line out front. I feel the urge to get in line and patiently wait but remind myself that this is my dream and it is therefore okay to be a bit of a jerk. I stride to the front of the line where I find a restaurant host holding a clipboard. It's apparent to me that the Alamo has been converted to some sort of amazingly popular restaurant.

The host asks me whether I have reservations. "Of course," I say. "Check under [CanisLucidus]."

"Ah yes!" he responds. "Party of fifteen. Your table's almost ready."

Fifteen people? "[NewArtemis] is in our group, isn't that right?" But the host wanders off, saying that he'll "be right back."

I decide to give him a moment before prodding the dream plot onward. I remember Task of the Month (speak gibberish to a DC and see how they respond.) A sour-looking girl of about eight with brown hair and freckles is waiting nearby, sitting on a piece of luggage. "Ooooooga booga booga!" I exclaim.

She looks very annoyed. "Can we please just skip the whole 'Mess with DCs' show?" I hear her fine, but her response shocks me into just saying, "What?" She sighs dramatically and repeats herself: "I said can we skip the whole 'Mess with DCs' show? Have you seen how long this line is? I am not in the mood."

Amused, I turn away. Good enough for me. I want to keep things rolling, so I announce to the unseen host, "So my table's ready then, right?"

The host scurries back into view. "Sorry for the wait, sir. Mr. Graham was napping and needed to be woken up. Who schedules a lunch for a nap?" he says with a laugh, even though I haven't the faintest idea what he's talking about or who "Mr. Graham" is. "Right this way," says the host, and I follow, now holding E by the hand. We're moving through a wood-paneled hallway into the restaurant interior when the dream ends.

Looks like I need to go back to my "stop falling for false awakenings" and "stop missing dreamsigns" fundamentals. Still a fun dream, and got to try out a new teleport method (with mixed results.)

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #102: El Camino Real

I'm at a lucid dreaming camp with lots of people from my past. Throughout the day, we swim and boat in the lake, walk by the lakeside, and do various crafts. I tell everyone that "it's too late for me. I took galantamine and it didn't work. Let's get the rest of you lucid." I teach them about dreamsigns, awareness, and even supplements. I'm frustrated that I've failed to have a lucid dream but I figure maybe I'll feel better if some of the other camp participants can have a lucid.

This goes on for a really long time and eventually I run across Britney Spears eating a blueberry muffin in one of the hallways. She complains that her career is in a slump. I suggest that she would be a perfect spokesperson for blueberry muffin sales. She's thrilled with the idea. In celebration, she takes a staggeringly huge, very unladylike bite out of the muffin, paper and all. I feel incredibly savvy and very proud of myself.

From there, I have a false awakening: Wife and I are starting our day and she switches on the TV. (She never does this in the morning.)The music video for Madonna's "Like a Virgin" is playing on the TV. Her love interest is the guy who played the mummy in The Mummy movies. After the first verse, the TV switches to a 3d rendering of The Killers performing in front of the university Wife and I attended. "That's The Killers," she says. (She doesn't know what they look like.) We're sitting in a cafeteria now, watching people order food while I complain about how I failed to realize I was dreaming just a moment ago when it was so obvious. Some guy carrying a tray of food totally wipes out and gets spaghetti all over himself. Wife laughs when this happens, which seems cruel and out of character. (Big dreamsign. She thinks the part in Karate Kid where Daniel-San spills spaghetti on himself and everybody laughs is super mean.)

Now I'm staring out of a window in some kitchen, feeling sorry for myself that I didn't get lucid. I think that I could be dreaming right now, but everything is just too vivid. And yet... it finally dawns on me. I look over at Wife preparing food at the kitchen counter and it's so real that it almost costs me my lucidity. I decide that I'd better get moving.

The next room is a darkened dining room with an elegantly set table and an unlit candelabra. It's dark in the room and I decide that it would be best to leave the house, so I head for a wall and phase through it. There's no scene beyond the wall, and I wind up in the void.

I quickly rub my hands together and keep walking, thinking that I'll try a new teleport method out of the void, building on an idea that PennyRoyal had suggested. I place my fingers in front of my eyes and imagine them gently wiggling. Pretty soon my hands take shape in front of me and I begin to imagine a new scene behind them -- the Alamo, the arranged meeting spot with Art. Once I feel like the scene's ready, I move my hands aside and find myself in...

... Silicon Valley, walking along El Camino Real. There's even a roadsign marking out the intersection of "82" (El Camino Real) and "93" (unknown road.) It's a beautiful day, typical perfect weather for the South Bay. I jog up a residential street, and a lady power-walking with her dog gives me a friendly wave. I wave back. I know that I have tasks that I'm forgetting, but they refuse to come to mind.

Moving a bit further along the street, I pass my old friend Wang. I ask him how he's been and he says, "I can't talk right now. I've got to be careful not to catch a cold." When I accept this, he breaks into a laugh like he really pulled one over on me. "I'm just kidding!" he says. "I know that you're dreaming this!" He shouts across the street to a lady who's watering her lawn. "Do you know he's dreaming all of this?" I'm a little distracted by how hyper-realistic Wang looks. His lips move flawlessly with the words he's speaking. I wonder how it's possible for all of this to fit inside my head.

The woman is dark-haired, mid-40s, clad in sweat pants. "Oh, like that 'lucid dreaming'? I've always wanted to do that." I respond with a few encouraging words and jokingly say something along the lines of "better make sure that you're not dreaming right now, too." She and Wang laugh and I say, "You know what? Let me show you guys a couple of things." With that, I hope onto the trunk of a parked car and leap to to top of another parked car, intending from there to take off in flight. For some reason the flying doesn't happen, though, and I wind up hovering face-first a few inches off of the ground. Fortunately, this is still cool enough to impress.

"Guys," I tell them, "I'm going to try another teleport. It was good talking to you." They say goodbye, and I put my hands over my eyes again, trying once again to imagine the Alamo. I give it a little longer to incubate this time, waiting until I can "see" the structure fairly well in my mind. But when I remove my hands, I'm somewhere else near Palo Alto. I can see the Stanford Foothills. The vision out of my left eye looks odd, sort of like I have one messed up contact lens. I ignore it, take to the air, and fly just a bit before the dream ends.

These are all of the lucids I've had since I went on vacation. It's good but I really need to get back on track with journaling, all of these have been high vividness but vanish so easily when I wake up. My ability to enjoy a lucid is high, but my recall is terrible. I definitely need to fix this....

But in the meantime, dreams! It's been a while since I had some of these, so my apologies if my memory is a little shaky on them.

May 21

Right before my eyes!! [DILD]

The first thing I remember is hanging around my neighborhood. I was hanging out with a couple old friends, I believe a couple who I went to elementary school with, and we were staring at where the elementary school used to be and reminiscing. It had been replaced with a college campus, though in reality it still stands there. I became lucid when I separated from them, and I headed down the alleyway that leads to my house. The main thing I recall about the beginning of this lucid was that there were a bunch of DCs chasing me like screaming fangirls. They were all cute, somewhat chubby white girls. I was fighting one of them off near my garage and I decided that I needed some kind of weapon. I held out my hand as if I was holding something and just stared at it and visualized a wrench being there, and it faded into existence right before me! It wasn't really that useful to me though, I'm not exactly sure why I went with a wrench, so I just tossed it at her and ran back out into the open. On my way out I also tried to split my body in two and summon fire but I wasn't able to do either. I was also able to reach up to my face and remove a pair of glasses, twice without putting any back on, that increased the vividness of the scene each time.

When I got out of the alleyway I was still being chased by the girl, she tried to jump me and I ended up accidentally groping her, but then I got away and she seemed to disappear. I turned down one of my neighborhood streets and saw this girl who looked like ML, that I knew all throughout public school also since elementary, but she looked almost like a porn star. Also, I have no earthly idea what this means, but in my phone notes at the end of that last part I added "and apparently it was an ongoing procedural thing." I believe I picked her up as I walked by her and started inviting her to my house, but then the dream faded away.

May 22

Good thing we're not.... [DILD]

I don't remember too much about this one. TB, a guy from elementary school, and some other guy were there, and at one point I was walking with this girl MH who people used to think we were related back in like first or second grade. I was thinking about making out with her, but then I realized that this all was odd and became lucid, but then I woke up.

May 24

Hammerspace trial. [DILD]

I was back in high school talking to M's friend C at the end of a class and the beginning of break, then I left to find someone else though I forget who now. All I know is that I was done with classes at that point. I became lucid while walking into a classroom and took off my backpack and randomly decided to just drop it through the floor so I could store it for later. When it actually worked and the floor swallowed it up, I got kind of distracted and decided to toy around with it a little more. I stuck my hand into the floor and tried reaching around for the bag but couldn't find it anywhere, so I pulled myself back out and tried to summon it directly into my hand like the wrench from before but I couldn't get that to work either, and since I focused so much on it the rest of the dream faded away.

June 4

#1 - Acid carnival? [DILD]

I was lucid outside at night at some kind of bizarre carnival. This whole section of the dream had a very strange psychotic feel to it. I was bursting with energy and the random chains of events happening around me were unfolding in a way that made me feel like I was in an acid trip. Everywhere I looked I had to fight off a good deal of sexual temptation to avoid getting too swept up into the dream and losing track of the lucid. The main ones I remember now are the barber shop girls and the girls getting their hair cut there, and then some beautiful performing girls including LK from middle and high school who wer just singing and dancing. There were also some weird guys here and there, and I specifically remembering sticking out my hand at one of them and yelling "Bang!" Other than that it's really hard to remember what all happened in this dream, it was very frantic and there was a lot going on.

#2 - Maybe I'll just wait.... [DILD]

This is an interesting dream to me because I'm pretty sure I accidentally incubated it while falling asleep due to what I was considering doing. I'm fairly certain the dream just kicked in with me lucid while walking down a hallway with the intention of masturbating. I seem to be in some kind of school or something and I come upon the bathroom so I head inside and notice that it's massive and there's a huge line of girls waiting inside, and even a few guys. I just decided to fuck the system and walk past the line all the way down to the end. I look in the stall and I try to throw this one girl out but she won't budge. She says something about seeing a "nasty phallus" or something like that, and then immediately holds up this suitcase with three fake but realistic and damaged-looking penises just sitting in it to show me. They looked like they were diseased and rotting or something, and it really grossed me out and I woke up.

June 6

Sort of like being drunk in an out-of-body experience. How can you beat that? [DILD]

The first of this lucid is hard for me to recall now which is annoying because I know it was cool, but mainly what I remember is starting out in some high up apartment building out in the hills somewhere and flying out and above a city scape for a while. I also saw this old abandoned building on the ground I was approaching at one point so I did a twirl in the air with the expectation that it would be inhabited when I turned all the way around and saw it again, and it was successful. When I got there I just flew around a bit and through walls to see what all there was to do, and I came upon this very attractive girl, just a little bit younger than me by the looks of it. I picked her up and just carried her in my arms with me for a little bit and got distracted talking to another DC or something. I can't remember what was said now, mainly because of what happened next. I focused back on her again and looked down at her body and noticed that she was completely naked. That combined with the fact that I was only somewhat lucid and already pretty horny, and my prefrontal cortex must have taken a big hit. I don't remember much about the next part other than basically becoming an animal. Seriously, I could get addicted to this. >.>

The bummer though was one part when I looked up from my partner and noticed that we were being swallowed into some sort of pit of darkness that was taking the stability of the dream along with it. At the last second I realized that I hadn't been able to keep focus, but there was no time to try to save it before my awareness vanished. The dream became a third-person, non-lucid scene of a woman who was escaping some thugs or something by jumping out of a window of the apartment building from before and realizing she could fly too, and I saw us flying next to each other while I told her that we were in an astral projection together. Then, I suddenly had a false awakening in that same building. I got up and noticed that my parents were talking right outside my room, and figured that that was probably what woke me up. But after that I actually did wake up.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #101: Choke

I'm sitting in a car with Dad at a place that's a cross between Sonic and a Chinese take-out restaurant. We're pulled up next to one of those mic/speaker combos where you place your order and I'm debating whether to order sweet & sour chicken or just get a giant bucket of tater tots. (I don't actually eat like this. )

A guy who looks like Mako Iwamatsu sticks his head out of the main restaurant building and shouts something about "three orders of sweet & sour chicken". I get out of the car and approach to hear him better. Then Mako makes some remark about our order and something about dreaming. It's semi-amusing, so I chuckle politely and look up at the night sky. The stars look artificially bright and the moon has been replaced by a flying saucer! "This is a dream," I say, and immediately start walking.



I leave the restaurant parking lot, moving through an alley that dead-ends at an open door into a house. I go inside, exploring the house for a bit. It's nicely decorated and very realistic. I'm pleased with how vivid it looks -- classy carpeting, great lighting, really tasteful decor. I wonder why I suck so bad at decorating IWL if I can imagine scenes like this. It occurs to me that no matter how many LDs I have, part of me always thinks They can't really look that good, right? But they can and they do.

I'm a bit lost in the house and as I turn down one hallway, I suddenly find myself in a noisy European street scene. It feels like Germany. The fast transition surprises me and before I can think to speak gibberish to these DCs for Task of the Month, I round another corner and wind up back in the house again. Well that was weird.

For some reason this reminds me of my intent to get to the Alamo and meet up with Art. I decide getting outside will be the best way open up the map and get where I want. The closest internal wall of the house is brick (oddly enough), and without hesitating, I phase through it. There's nothing on the other side of the wall, though, and I wind up in the void.

Rubbing my hands together, I continue walking through the void. I imagine that I'm walking along a street outside. I can feel the roadway underneath my feet (which feel like they're in nothing but socks.) I keep walking forward, waiting for the new scene to form. After a while, I see a pattern of squareish lights that coalesces into the window of my darkened childhood bedroom. I leave immediately, phasing through the window into the street.

It's late at night and I'm outside on the street where I grew up. I try to figure out which way San Antonio (and the Alamo) would be from here... and totally get it wrong. When I look out at the horizon, I see a huge observation tower surrounded by some scaffolding, like it's under construction. Was there some kind of tower in San Antonio? (Yes, it turns out -- the Tower of the Americas.)



I start to zoom-teleport to the tower but the moment I begin to move, I swallow my gum. Swallow my what?? Did I go to bed chewing gum? I try to remember, worrying that it's now lodged in my throat IWL and that I'm about to be in big trouble. I freak out and the scene goes black. I manage to calm myself at the last minute but the dream is too far gone and quickly ends.

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...

Flying Over a Mountain Range [DILD]

The setting in this dream was odd, I was at home but I was also in some kind of school class working on a project. There was a decent chunk of this dream that was non-lucid, but I can't really remember much of it now. Basically where my recall comes in is when I became lucid and decided to go for a change of scenery.

I had decided to try walking through some doors instead of phasing for once, but then I remembered a thing I read where it said that walking through a door is enough to disrupt short-term memory and decided against it. I phased out through the backyard door of my house and flew over the fence and across other peoples' yards. The main thing I remember is that in this yard immediately behind mine, which looked nothing like it does in real life, there was a naked woman sunbathing that just caught me by surprise so I thought it was funny.

Next thing I knew the area around my house had completely changed, and I was flying high over a bunch of fields and a mountain range. It was extremely vivid and lifelike, I think it may have been the most realistic flying scene I've ever had in a lucid. I was just in awe of all of it, especially the trees, some of which were hanging in the air. They actually had very similar designs to these plants we have hanging from our living room ceiling, so I'm betting that that's what inspired them, but they were much larger, more complex, and very beautiful and natural-looking. The whole view was just incredible.

Anyway... I started thinking the name S, which I've known lots of people named, and landed somewhere in a field by this compact trailer home. I looked around and saw this girl who was one of the people with that name, this girl SS I knew from acting classes in middle school, and ran up to her and said hi. She pointed out this tornado to me that was in the distance, and either she told me or I just suddenly knew that she was training to be a wind witch and I told her to try to change its path. She wasn't really able to though, but it did pass right by us in a very unrealistic fashion without even creating any feeling of gust, it's more like it just phased out of existence by getting closer to me in my vision.

After that SS and I just sat down and I wrapped my legs around her, but then I woke up.

Kick the Dog [DILD]

I was hanging out on the street in front of my old elementary school with J who also went there and O who didn't, though he might have been D for some of this dream.... Anyway, the whole building had apparently been reconstructed and now looked much fancier than it ever has or probably ever will, so we were just checking it out and talking about it for a bit. At one point we decided to go back to my house though, and even though it's literally like right on the other side of the alleyway behind the street we were on, we were suddenly in my car driving there. We come up to the garage and I park in there, even though I don't use the garage in waking life, and my dad's car is in there too but the actual structure of the garage is totally different from normal. This doesn't throw me off though, I just get out of the car and see that my two companions have now become JB, this guy who I used to hang out with all the time when I first started smoking, and DW, this girl I saw a lot in middle school drama classes. I didn't pay much attention to this and just walked into the house.

As I walked in, I noticed that the whole inside looked wrong too, and there were four little kids sitting on the couch. JB has a little brother and I guess because I just saw him I immediately assumed that we must have accidentally come to his house instead, even though it looked nothing like that either. Also, three of the kids were black like JB but one of them was white, but I still assumed that all four of them were his brothers. His little brother in waking life would recognize me so I guess I also assumed that they all would in this dream, so I just started apologizing and asked if it was their house, and they said yes. I asked them about my dad's car in the garage and the white brother says that it's his car. I just kind of chuckle and smirk and say um, you're like 12, which he actually looked much younger than. He starts to get a little mad, but around that time I had started becoming lucid.

When I had walked in the four brothers had been sitting on a couch in front of windows facing the street outside of the house, but while I wasn't looking the outside scenery had changed. We were now very high up in some apartment building in the middle of a big city, which seems to be a pretty common environment for me in dreams for some reason even though I'm literally almost never anywhere like that in waking life. I notice that there's some random dog running around in the room now, and I decided to see if I could make something else phase through a wall just like I can, so I kicked it toward the window and it passed right through it with no trouble and fell off the side of the building. Next my friend N's dog showed up too and I kicked her out the window as well, but as I could feel her presence falling down the side of the building I reached out with my hands and remotely grabbed ahold of it. I started raising it back up and soon I saw her come back up just hanging in the air outside the window. This was my smoothest telekinesis that I could really remember, so I just directed her around to fly through the air and then made her blast off into the distance, and she looked pretty stiff the whole time, like moving a 3D model that was just in its awkward default stance before being able to run its walking or idling animation.

After that I wasn't quite sure what to do, but a strange thing happened. This black line appeared down the center of my vision, and I reached my arms out to the side only to see copies of my arms, facing me, so when I moved my right arm the one I saw on the left moved, and vice-versa, and there was nothing in between them other than the line so it looked very odd, no body or anything. I started waving them around trying to leave patterns and parts of my arms would smear out or random things would happen like my fingers would start multiplying, and it looked pretty neat on this downtown sunset sky backdrop, but then the dream faded away.

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.

#1 - Missed Opportunity!! [DILD]

I was in a warehouse setting where I was doing something that I feel like I would have wanted to remember, but I can't recall it very well. This is most likely because it was my first dream of the night and I fell asleep high because I had smoked to get rid of a good deal of stomach pain. I vaguely remember a couple quick, nondescript but tauntingly awesome looking flashes of it and then I went though this big opening to be standing outside of a small building waaay up high on a cliff. It basically looked, from my perspective, like it was a cliff looking down into the Grand Canyon, it was so far away. I could also see a bustling city in the center of it in the distance, and I decided that it would be really cool if I got to the city by doing a running jump and roll off over the cliff and just bounce all the way down there. I wanted to get a good shot so I climbed up to the top of the building I was next to (somehow...) so I would have more running space, but as soon as I turned back around to get the view again the whole scenery had changed to just be a city around me. Damn it!!

I was sad but then I heard a mysterious evil voice saying that they had kidnapped someone and hid them on a tall rooftop, so I scanned the area and found them. I flew over to the roof and this guy was just stuck up there and he was grateful to be saved but seemed really unstable. He was really paranoid about being touched and backed away from me when I tried to approach him, and then things got really psychedelic before my eyes. He was rapidly transforming into different humanoid shapes, the only one I can really remember being a LEGO body, but I knew that it was just because the dream was falling apart.

#2 - Star Wars Restaurant [DILD]

I was with some girl at a Star Wars themed restaurant, and there was a dream leading up to it I'm pretty certain, but I can't really remember how we got there. I became lucid as I was just looking at her, but then shortly after that I woke up.

Not the most exciting thing, but still a lucid.

#3 - One Gathering After Another [DILD]

I was hanging out in this big building in some room that was supposed to be like a chatroom except in person, and it was for DV users. Unfortunately I don't really remember anything that happened in this room , but afterwards I met up with my friend M and went with her to a party downstairs. There were lots of people I knew there, including this guy GL that I hugged, and when I was there I started becoming lucid. I noticed that there were far too many things in my pockets to be comfortable, like significantly more than they could actually hold since they're pretty small, so I decide to go find somewhere I could safely put them down. As I was leaving I saw this girl S and her girlfriend P who I had just met recently at a meeting of BDSM people around here. Somehow I decided that they must be good lucid dreamers, so I had them come with me.

We all three walked out of the room and then flew up and phased through the ceiling up to the next floor. I was taking us back to the chatroom, but we had to walk through this fancy party (almost like a ball with royal dresses) to get there and we lost S along the way. I got to the room and noticed that there were lots of people I knew from growing up there now like this girl AH I met in kindergarten instead of people from that forum. I wasn't phased and just started emptying my pockets there, but in the meantime my lips began to swell and were feeling very bizarre. I tried to distract myself from the sensation but it was very solid. I turned around and P told me that we needed to grab S before we went back to the party, but we would have to find her first because she had shapeshifted into a girl in a fancy dress in that room. I see this short girl in black and suddenly know that it's her, so I just walk up to her and grab her around the waist and say come on and she gives in.

I think this dream could have gone on longer, but the lips thing was becoming worse and worse and I started trying to move my tongue around to see if I could get my real body to do it and see if I was lying on my face in an uncomfortable way or something, but I couldn't tell so I just said to hell with it, time to wake up. I opened my eyes seconds later and, of course, there was nothing wrong.

#4 - Time Flowing Backwards [Non-Lucid]

I got up in the morning and I was using my cannabidiol oil, and the first thing I noticed was the clock in my room. The second hand was moving backwards, and I became slightly concerned about it. Not enough to really spring into action, though. I went into the bathroom to start putting the drops on my tongue, and saw that the clock in there was still moving normally. I was suspicious of it though, and didn't think of it as enough evidence to convince me that time wasn't flowing backwards.

#5 - Depth? Who Needs It? [DILD]

I was in a class in what appeared to be something like high school, but I was communicating with someone I only met this semester in college, this girl in my humanities class named C who sits two seats to the right of me. She wasn't actually in the class though, while this guy SJ from high school was, I was just talking to her remotely. Depending on when it was in the dream I was either typing an email or instant message to her or something or I was writing on a piece of paper that magically functioned like that and filled in messages whenever we wrote them. She was talking about mushrooms and I told her they were really cool. She said she secretly wanted to try them but she was afraid of getting into it all, and she used this metaphor where she said for example that a reason that she wouldn't want to use amphetamine is because it speeds you up and she wants to experience her thoughts at the natural pace, she doesn't want any of her life to race by and when it came to mushrooms she felt the same way about her creativity.

Around this time Rob Huebel and Rob Riggle walked into the room and I perceived them as cops based on their comedy routine that they showed in Super High Me. At that time I suddenly noticed that I had a bong in my hands and was hiding it under the table, and they never saw it though it should have been really obvious. I became a bit nervous and sort of forgot about my communication with C, but then I started to become lucid. I got up and hurled the bong at the wall and watched it shatter, and in the process I accidentally knocked my cellphone forward off of the table. I stretched out over it and tried to reach down and back to reach it but it was too far away, but then I got an idea. I did that trick like where a cartoon character will act like the moon actually is really tiny and right there in the sky and they'll just put their fingers right around it in their point of view and grab it, and it worked perfectly. My phone was a little bit smaller than normal but I still had it in my hand, so I put it in my pocket and started walking off.

I could tell that the dream was starting to fade away, and I saw this large girl in blue scrubs around my age who reminds me of someone I've seen before at school leaving the classroom. I jumped up on to her and just hugged and squeezed her, but as she started taking us out of the room things were getting very dark and all I could really still do was hear people talking in the halls. I started making out with her and could feel it a bit and I had hoped that this might revive the dream, but no luck.

When I woke up I really wanted to go back to bed and try to keep this crazy ride going, but I had a friend who crashed here overnight and I didn't want to be rude by just staying passed out all morning, so maybe next time!

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.

Three Nights Ago

#1 - Guilt-Free Food!! [DILD]

I was with high school friends and random people in a large mansion watching tray after tray of food be prepared. A large dish was placed in front of me with an assortment of snacks on it. As I was staring at it I suddenly became lucid and came to an important realization: guilt-free food!! I reached out and started grabbing everything that I could and shoving it into my mouth. First I remember tortilla chips and guacamole, then chicken strips and ketchup, followed by cupcakes with icing and sprinkles, and something else too but it's hard to remember now. The flavors of all of these foods seemed correct, but there was a significant drawback to it all. I had the flavor, but not the physical sensation of actually eating. It made the experience seem less realistic or satisfying, and I decided that I should try to focus on that whole process next time.

As this was all going on I had the feeling that the dream was starting to lose stability. All of the other people in the room began to chant "the burning bridge in Bethlehem", oddly enough, and I started repeating this along with them to keep the plot going. However, it only worked for so long and the environment ended up falling apart.

#2 - Summoning Practice, Again [DILD]

I was wandering through a high school, not necessarily one of the ones I went to, looking for my next class or something of the sort. I spontaneously became lucid and started talking to people in the hallways and opening doors to practice my summoning. The first person who came to mind was this girl who I met in my physical education class in senior year and always found attractive, and I would expect her to be behind each door or actually say out loud that she would be but it didn't quite work. However, there was a girl behind every one and with each try it seemed to resemble her a little more and I would feel them up a bit before moving on, getting particularly distracted with the last one's rather plump posterior.

After that I gave up on her and decided to call out for an old friend instead, and the door I took looking for her led me into a large and empty office. At that point I lost what I sometimes call the dream "chatter", this sort of ambient non-sound that tells me that the dream hallucinations are still running in full force. Without it the scene lacks realism and begins to collapse in on itself, and that's exactly what happened despite my best efforts from that point on.

Last Night

#1 - Meeting The In-Laws [Non-Lucid]

There was a family party going on and my family had somehow joined with a new "step-family" and this absolutely horrible woman was my new grandma. I was eating my dinner around a table with her and some other people and she picked up a bag of fucking dog turds and put some in my food. She had a really nasty attitude too, but I can't remember what made me think that now. Eventually I walked away and started talking to my cousins about how awful she is and they agreed, and then I met into a new step-cousin, another one of the woman's grandchildren, and she said that they always have to put up with her crap. She starts telling me something about her and her brother run some company that owns the building we were partying in and she had vouched for him for something at one point but he used her support to snatch part of the company out from under her.... I don't know, it was confusing, but she was showing me these computers she uses to remote control salad bars and other things with high-tech interfaces. That's about all I remember about that, though. And at one I definitely walked back to the new grandma's food when she stepped away from the table and spit in her rice. Hehe.

#2 - Flexible Walls [DILD]

I was at a party with some high school friends that I've still kept in touch with, and one of them gets me and few other girls to sneak out the front door with him and tells me that he's going to make a dash to his car and take off. I follow him down to the parking lot, and apparently the party is taking place in this large apartment building with some kind of event going on on the ground floor. There are celebrities in fancy suits and dresses all over the place. I follow him to his car and the other girls get in with him and I start to joke with him about something, but I can't remember what exactly. He laughs and rolls his eyes at me as he pulls out of the lot with me still hanging on the window and threaten to say that he has speed in his car with all these cops and celebrities around, very loudly. He freaks out but I was just messing with him anyway, I knew he didn't have any and I just wanted to pay him back for brushing me off and I know how paranoid he can get, but he's pretty much straight-edge. He stopped and started begging me not too, but I just laughed and said no one would care in the middle of all this commotion anyway and he drives off.

I walked back to my own car, which was not my car at all and is very pink, but there were some creepers following me. For some reason I went to the back right passenger door and unlocked it manually, and I could tell that they were waiting for me to auto-unlock all the doors because they were standing over by the driver door. They all panicked since it wasn't going according to plan and I started trying to close all the doors and windows in time but one of them got in the door I unlocked and grabbed a few things, but aside from that I was able to shake them loose after a little bit of a struggle. I decided to re-park my car somewhere more in the middle of everything and go back to the party. As I was walking back I saw some celebrity in a dress looking at me from a distance and I had a momentary feeling that she was Hayden Panettiere, who oddly seems to be something of a dream sign for me and who I've become in both lucids and non-lucids, but I got distracted easily and didn't pursue it. The last thing I remember doing outside is looking at my phone and seeing that it was, I believe, 5:27 PM. I thought to myself that my friend was acting oddly for having left so early.

Next thing I know I'm back in the building and I'm either walking into or already in the elevator back up. There are metal walls on all sides and this is where I become lucid. The first thing I did was sort of make my hand stiff so that my thumb and all my fingers are pointing out in the same direction. I firmly pressed them up against a wall to see if I could push it back at all, but I wasn't expecting to be able to. I used to do this to try to phase through walls before I figured out a much better way to do it, but I did remember that back then after enough pushing the walls would start to bend back some. I backed up and had both of my hands in the same position now and pulled them back to put my all into this, and then I lunged them forward at the wall. There was a loud banging noise and the whole thing bent back pretty far and stopped, then bounced back and forth until it balanced itself out again and became a solid wall. I laughed at this and started doing it over and over again to all of the walls and the ceiling. However, I realized that I was getting too into this rather than continuing the plot of the dream, and I phased through the elevator doors to try to get out of them and into some hallway, but all it did was cause the dream to fade to black and I was unable to retrieve it successfully.