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Finally got one for the challenge! Now we've got a competition...

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #214: The Challenge

I have a false awakening in the early morning, worried that I’ve run out of time to have another lucid. I get up, pee, and return to bed. To my dismay Wife has already removed the sheets from the bed. The clock says “5:50” and I complain to her that this is way too early to be up. “This is so unlike you!” I whine. She’s too busy to pay much attention.

I walk over to the gym and lay down on the floor, tossing and turning for a while. I have another false awakening in a field near a tent where a movie is being filmed. I walk around and explore for a while, feeling oddly comfortable and in charge, like this is my place even if it’s not familiar to me. I enter a nearby building where I’m required to remove my shoes, then move further on to find my friends PM and RP standing under an open rooftop. I try in vain to point out how much the clouds look like the ones we’ve worked on in our game project, but they’re too busy to pay attention.

I move further through the building, moving through a confusing maze riddled with dead ends until I emerge in a retro arcade. I stop at a machine that’s a multicade which features Street Fighter II and a library of 8-bit Nintendo games. I’m considering firing up Double Dragon when I realize that this has to be a dream.

I move outward from the arcade back to the main entrance. I’m still shoeless, so I produce some running shoes and walk off into the night. I’m on a concrete driveway and hordes of DCs on bicycles go whizzing by, not a trace of lights or reflectors on their bikes and bodies. They’re super hard to see, getting too close, and making me nervous, so I step off into the grass and move over to a sidewalk.

Now I remember my challenge goal of trying to summon Dreamer. I reach my hand behind my back, expect her to grab it, and immediately feel someone grab on. I turn around and she’s right there, purple hair and all! When I see her I exclaim, “Well that worked!” She seems to find this hilarious, squeezing her eyes shut and doubling over with laughter. I try to say something else but the dream destabilizes into a false awakening at my parents’ house.

My mom asks me if I need to go to work and I tell her no, just let me sleep as long as possible. She asks me to help clean their now-green pool (false memory, they have no pool) but I tell her that I’ll do it after I get some sleep. I crash back down on the bed, transitioning into…

...a false awakening on a bare mattress in a dark, candle-lit room. I get up and see that there are 4 or 5 similar mattresses here, too. There’s an Asian woman in her early 50s laying on one bed, tossing and turning restlessly. Some unseen male narrator tells me that, “She wants to dream but in here, she can’t. In this place, nobody can.” I’m disturbed by this, and I move toward the wall, hopeful that I’m dreaming right now. I phase right through, and the wall crumbles in cubes around me -- lucid again!

I float about twenty feet down to a poolside area with ankle deep water next to wall covered by a large mirror. The dream threatens to fade but I rub my hands together and splash around in the water. I again remember my summoning goal and reach my hand behind my back, summoning Dreamer for a second time. For some reason, I point to the mirror to help “prove” to her that she’s been summoned and say, “Look! It worked again!”

Dreamer seems fascinated by this, reaching out to the mirror and then waving her hands back and forth. “Look at this,” she says, bending forward at the waist a couple of times as her reflection copies her actions. I wonder whether this counts as two points in the challenge or just one.

We walk back inside and it’s another creepy room with those anti-dreaming mattresses. Dreamer stiffens her fingers like a spear and drives them into one of the mattresses and digs around like she’s looking for something but doesn’t seem to find it. I ask her what she’s looking for but she doesn’t say. I sweep my eyes around the room but when I look back to where I expect to find Dreamer, instead there’s a brown-haired girl of about 8. I kneel down and ask, “Are you Dreamer?” She gives me a you can’t be serious look and then walks out of the room.

There’s a mirror on the wall here and I get the idea to try summoning NewArtemis into the dream now. I keep watching myself in the mirror as I try to perform this summon, but it keeps failing. I realize I'm making this harder for myself but I can’t seem to help it. I want to see what she looks like when she actually materializes. I give three separate efforts to summon NewArtemis, but they all fail. I feel like something is wrong with me or with this room. Now I try to summon Dreamer. Another failure.

I feel like my mojo is fading out in the room, so I run for the wall and throw myself through it. There’s a glass shattering effect and now I’m falling through the darkness, air rushing past me. I fall like this for a few seconds until I wake up.

I walk into a room where I have to complete some challenge, a kind of game. I have a vague sense of danger, it's not quite a nightmare but it feels similar, as if it has the potential to become one. I'm semi-lucid, in that stage where I'm aware that I'm dreaming and can easily control my surroundings, but still following the dream storyline. Small rings of light form around my wrists - at first I'm not sure what this is, then I think of it as both something that this room provides for the challenge, and something that I summoned myself. I decide that the user has to make the light take a solid form before it can serve its function. Focusing on it, the light condenses into a metal cuff around my right wrist; the left one fails, it remains light. Looking at the right cuff, I decide it represents a kind of shield, a personal force field. I focus on the left one again, without looking at it this time, trying to make it condense into the other cuff, and I decide that it's worked, though I don't want to risk looking down to check; I can now feel the shield working in the air just around me. I move further into the room and start the game, which involves running a course and using the shield to deflect small projectiles. A woman's voice keeps score. At the first curve in the course, everything goes black.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Due to a conflict with someone else, an immortal has been forced to enter another immortal's territory. Although they appear to be different species - the one the territory belongs to is a sphinx, the other one looks like a human man - they're still similar enough to require separate territories, so this has led to a confrontation, although on the surface it looks like a casual conversation. It's night. The one that looks like a man is saying something about how anyway, this isn't the same city he agreed to stay away from - it's partially joking (the city's changed names in the years since that agreement), but it's also partially serious, grasping at straws, looking for an out. The sphinx has no particular ill will towards him, and understands his situation, but nonetheless can't permit him to stay here.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

A vampire guy's in a subway car, picking out a meal. There's a small group of others with him, people he'd turned, but he's the only one doing the hunting. One of the others, recently turned, is impatient with him. Finally she says to him, come on, let's just take the whole car, let loose once in a while, please? The other vamps are a little annoyed with her - they're impatient too, but she's being childish - but he's considering it. I'm in first person now, though I'd started out in 3rd and I have no sense of when I switched; as one of the other vamps, I look around at the number of people in this car. There's a lot of them; the car's not full, but there's enough that they outnumber us. I'm thinking about crowd control. I notice a couple of them looking this way, starting to pay attention to the conversation between our leader and the new girl. Without saying anything, I get up and move to stand by the door to the next car, to block the exit. I look through the window into the next car, and consider the number of people in that car, too.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

There's a man I think of as a legendary king riding on the back of some enormous reptile through a completely black space. He's not human, at least not anymore, and this isn't a physical space; he's something that is sometimes summoned into the physical world. The creature he's riding is covered in trunks and carpets and cages piled so high that I think of it as a moving mountain; I can't tell how much is luggage and how much is the body of the creature itself, but the whole thing is maybe four times the height of the man riding it, who is sitting cross-legged just behind the creature's head, front and center. At the very back of the creature, the king's servant is opening the top of one of the cages. It contains a small and unhappy creature that they've just captured, something very rare; the top of it opens up like a flower and contains a kind of liquid, which contains some 'essence' that the king is after.

There's three people riding a motorboat through a river in a jungle. They stop when they pass a man standing waist-deep in the river, working at something, and one of the guys in the boat talks with him about a foreign researcher who's made some big discovery that's driving up prices in the area. The guy standing in the river is saying that pretty soon they're all going to be out of a job. The guy in the motorboat says it wouldn't be the first time they've had to live out of tents; they'll survive.

Based on F/SN, as Emiya, I've just found myself in a timeline where I'm acting as Servant to the white-haired version of Sakura. I'm thinking that I've been through this type of timeline before, and there are only two ways events play out after this point, neither of which I want to go through again. I'm trying to think up a way to avoid repeating those same patterns, to create a third possibility instead. At the moment, I'm helping Tohsaka climb up into some passageway, to either hide or escape from Sakura.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

After a series of extremely loosely IRL-based scenes (although I thought of all the locations as IRL-based, the only thing that actually resembled IRL was my own identity), I'm walking into the lobby of a hotel where I'm living, heading for the stairs. I pass a woman working at the front desk, a woman with straight black hair in a bob. Looking at her, I think that she reminds me of the woman who appeared in a shared dream with my IRL sister years back, in which she'd been my sister's roommate. Her hair's longer this time. When I make eye contact with her, I become lucid. I immediately start floating. I remember my intention to try summoning Julia today (usually my most common recurring DC, she hasn't reappeared since my first and last attempt at deliberately summoning her), and I start to do so, but then I change my mind about the method - rather than try to summon directly, it's easier for me to 'summon' by traveling. Since I'm still moving towards the stairs, I decide that Julia is at the top of those stairs. It's a spiral staircase, gold railing, huge, in the center of the room; it reminds me of a pillar and also of DNA. As I focus on it, I become aware that I'm waking up. I can feel the bed against my back, and the image of the staircase has frozen, as if I'm no longer moving. It gives me the impression that it's melting - not the staircase itself, but the visual image, like a filter being applied to a photo. I lose visuals. I spend some time trying to force the dream to reform, and have the feeling I'm getting somewhere, there's a brief sense of something shining in the darkness, but I eventually have to admit that I'm now too awake for this.

Except it's a false awakening. I spend some time in that same hotel lobby, looking through my backpack, trying to find a pen with which to write down that dream, before waking up for real.

So I had an unexpected lucid after expecting it to happen during the night and giving up.

I was in my room and all of a sudden I realized I was dreaming. I don't remember the very first beginning of the dream. I was like 'Oh man this can't be a dream, it's too real to be a dream' but I did a RC to just be sure of it and Whops! How the hell?...
I felt the need to do something, and I felt my body taking off and I did a little flight towards the door. I opened it and went downstairs. 'What should I do?!' I went to the bathroom and thought 'Okay I'm going to try to go to another place' so I thought of this place I was so anxious to see, an endless green field with just an enormous tree and an electric sky full of planets and stars. I thought of it, expected it to appear and then opened the bathroom door. Nothing, it didn't work. So I tried again. 'Okay, when I open the door it will be there'. I opened it a second time and nothing. This time it was not the same bathroom, but some big public hot springs. 'Fuck this!'

I went to the living room and thought 'Okay, I'll try to summon a friend of mine', so I thought of him and expected him to be there watching the TV. I opened the door and he appeared. Not only him but two copies of him. 'The hell did I do...?' I wanted to talk to him but he was way too rude. So I disturbed the hell out of him and then woke up. Fuck you dream character.

After this I woke up into another dream and told a friend of mine that I just had had lucid. I did a RC but it failed, so the dream just went on for a while and then I woke up.

I'm aware T. is going to rob my home and kill me tonight, as if I'd seen the future. I took some steps in preparation for that, but I believed that what is going to happen can't be averted. However, it turns out I'd misinterpreted something: while T. really was robbing the place, the killer turns out to be someone else, a stranger who broke in with a knife. T. and some other people who live here help fight him off. We get to the scene I knew was coming, when the knife's supposed to cut deeply into my shoulder and stop just above my heart, and I wonder if I'll be able to feel pain in a dream. I decide to have the scene go a different way instead, I close my eyes and imagine that T. and the others hold him back enough that the knife turns aside. When I open my eyes again, the stranger is on the floor, dead.

I decide to perform "Deedlit's healing spell." (It's been years since I watched Lodoss - did Deedlit even have a healing spell? - I think this was mostly some generic mental association between elves and healing.) I say something I no longer remember, a phrase in English something like a prayer, and there's a warm gold glowing light around my hands, which I hold over the dead man until he revives, though he remains quietly on the floor. I then repeat the spell with the others in the room, although they don't seem to have any wounds, and they're surprised but appreciate it. I leave the room and go to heal my IRL sister L., who in the dream lives next door, waking her up in the process. I then go down the hall to find T. again and heal him too.

Me and T. talk for a while, and as he talks his appearance changes. He walks into the kitchen briefly and when he comes back, he's become a different person entirely, and he's joined by another man. They both claim to know me and to have been looking for me for a long time, although they call me by two different names. The one who wasn't T. speaks with a heavy Scottish accent and calls me Jack. As I'm speaking to them, I remember that while I'm lucid, I had some things I wanted to get done, and I try to remember what those were. I decide it was the Task of the Month. (Apparently reading the TOTM thread last night was enough to overrule my personal lucid goals.) I remember that the Task was to ask a DC who your true love or soulmate is, so I ask these guys, who's my true love? They both go silent and look extremely uncomfortable, like that's a question I shouldn't ask. I tell them any answer is fine, it's just a task, and I try phrasing it with 'soulmate' instead, but that doesn't get a better response. I feel like their belief that they knew me a long time ago is affecting this, that it's part of what makes this a question they don't want to answer, so I decide to go outside and find someone else to ask.

Outside my IRL home, I'm appreciating how vivid it is. There's a chill in the air, a nicely realistic touch, and there's no snow on the ground, which is a great change. I walk off the driveway and onto the main road, and for some reason I feel like that's an important dividing line, particularly when lucid. My attention is caught by a squirrel across the road standing on its front legs, craning its neck to look up at the sky; and then by the body of a dead deer at the 3-way crossroads. I believe (incorrectly) that this dead deer is always here at the crossroads when I dream, and I think about going over to talk to it, but on second thought the idea makes me a little uncomfortable - I think it'll follow me home. Better not. There's a rock just beside my driveway with some words carved into it, and I start to go over to read it, but a car drives by. I stop it and walk over to the driver, ask her who my true love is. Again, she goes silent and gives me the impression that this is a question I shouldn't ask. I decide to go for a ride, and I climb into the car through the window.

Inside the car, the woman I spoke to isn't the driver at all, she's a passenger. There's six women in the car, all of them working in the fashion industry or as models, and with the exception of the woman I'd spoken to and the driver, the rest of them resent someone who's not part of the industry hitching a ride. No one except the driver knows where they're going - it's a surprise. The driver's name is Audrey, she's someone big in the fashion industry, wearing large dark sunglasses. I ask Audrey who my true love is, and as an answer, she produces a piece of lined paper with something written on it, crumples it up, and throws it out the window. She's not throwing it away - she means for me to reach out my window and catch it. I'm too slow, I just miss it. But I decide - no, I didn't miss it. I caught it. I announce out loud, "Got it!" I 'remember' the feel of catching it, and then I draw my hand back inside the car. No good, my hand's empty. The women in the car look at me oddly for claiming to have caught the paper when I hadn't. I try the hand-behind-the-back summoning trick, but still nothing.

Since I keep failing to get an answer to this question, I decide I'll switch to a different Task of the Month. For some reason I believe that the other basic task is to kiss a DC. I stop to think about that for a minute, since I'm sure that can't be right, that's too basic, but then I decide it's meant as something simple to stick with a Valentine's Day theme. (Was I mixing it up with the kiss-a-zombie one? I had just raised someone from the dead, shame I didn't follow up on that. ) Although I'm not sure how I got here, I'm now following Audrey into an elevator with one of the other women from the car. I ask Audrey if I can kiss her, and she says sure. I can't remember what happened after that, but next thing I remember we're leaving the elevator and I'm thinking that didn't work. We're now standing in a large room with a mirror and a couch, and I ask the other woman, a slightly chubby, very beautiful blonde, if I can kiss her. She says okay. We're standing in front of the mirror, and I'm surprised to see the mirror's actually reflecting her and the room we're in (though not me, as usual), and her reflection looks exactly like her, although it's watching us instead of mirroring her actions. I lean in to kiss her and close my eyes, but perhaps because I was distracted by the mirror, I find I've wound up kissing her reflection instead, through the glass. I move us away from the mirror, focus on the feeling of her shoulder under my hand, and try again. I'm too focused on comparing this to real life and trying to improve the realism to enjoy it much - the feeling of her lips themselves is accurate, but that's about it. I'm thinking that this sort of thing really doesn't translate to dreams well, and I should focus on doing things that aren't possible IRL. So I remember the 'other' (actual) task of the month: I step back and ask her if she knows who my true love is. Again, she seems uncomfortable with the question and doesn't answer. Then I think that asking someone you've just kissed to tell you about your true love may be a little tactless.

There's a cat by the mirror now, yowling. Two people who work here rush over to it to try to get it to be quiet. On the other side of the room, there's a whole row of mirrors and a hairdresser standing in front of them, talking about originality or lack thereof in fashion shows. I lose lucidity and follow him, listening to him for a few moments before I wake up.

I'm in a house which contains a dollhouse which is an exact model of the house, even containing a miniature version of the dollhouse itself, which in turn is a perfect model with its own miniature dollhouse inside, and so on; the dream camera zooms in through what seems to be an infinite series of nested houses, and I say "It's recursive."

Inside one of these levels of houses, I can hear a woman's voice singing, not a recording or anything professional, it's the way someone might sing to themselves around the house, going "la la la" instead of words. I'm in a hall, passing by a woman's bedroom where there are a few cardboard boxes open on the floor, one with old Victorian clothes spilling out, and a mirror in a gold frame. The mirror catches my attention and I go lucid. I'd been thinking earlier (while awake) that mirrors are often linked with magic and summoning in my dreams and I'd intended to try using that deliberately the next time I had a lucid dream, so I look at this one now and try to summon Julia, who I'd expect to be the easiest character for my mind to summon. After a moment I see a woman moving in the mirror in the distance, too far away to see much, but it's not Julia. I start to try again with a slightly different approach, but then think that I'm a little too close to waking up for this. I lose visuals.

I 'wake up' in bed and reach for a pen to jot this down, but I drop it and have to get out of bed to look for it. I'm irritated by this, thinking I'm going to forget the dream - then I wake up again.

Fragments: Something composed of metal loops that I take for an art piece, believing it's something to do with male and female; instead I'm told it's a spell for godhood. A scene with a teacher and student. A reference to 'maenad.'

Classic movie monsters. The dream was in black and white, and featured Bela Lugosi's Dracula and Lon Chaney Jr's Wolfman. Through some plan of Dracula's, Talbot winds up becoming a vampire, while Drac becomes the wolfman instead, and essentially human when it's not a full moon. Talbot's not thrilled with any of this. There's a scene in which Dracula springs Talbot from an asylum through the window, before the monster-type switch; and afterward, a confrontation in a swamp in which Dracula is talking about world domination, and how the ability to appear human was required.

I'd been talking to someone about a career change I was considering, when I realize I'm still wearing a change of clothes I acquired earlier in a dream. At first, I think it a marvel, a thing in a dream that carried over into real life - but later on, as I'm sitting around a dinner table having a boring conversation, I realize that actually it must be an indication that I'm still dreaming. I become lucid and immediately start floating in the air; I stopped paying attention to the other characters in the room and didn't see them after this point. Initially I intended to go outside and continue flying, but then I decide to try something new this time. I decide to summon a god - Apollo, since summoning his light for an anti-nightmare technique has been very effective, but he's yet to show up in person. I'm also thinking his association with trance states might carry over into lucid dreaming. I close my eyes so that I can't see the room, and I focus on him, call him. Nothing happens. I eventually give up, open my eyes again. I think a little more structure may be helpful, and I should probably keep my eyes open; I remember a time when a dream fell apart completely after I stopped focusing on visuals.

I go to a mirror, but instead of calling Apollo again, this time I decide to call up an image of my ideal future self (possibly related to the non-lucid talk of career changes earlier). Several options appear one at a time, and I reject each of them. Many of them bear very little physical resemblance to me, and most are wearing glasses (which I don't need). Eventually I settle on one that I approve of (though why I approved of this particular one, I don't know); he looks like something out of the 1700s. When I turn away from the mirror, he's standing next to me. He seems a little confused by this, but he's just here for me to get a more detailed look at him. But while he's here anyway, we decide to fuck. Eventually I remember my original intention to summon a god and I decide that's more interesting than what is essentially dream masturbation, so I leave him on the floor by the mirror and go back to the table. I sit down, then remember I didn't bother to get dressed again; I decide I'd rather have clothes on for this. I try to summon clothing by just deciding I am wearing clothes, but this doesn't work; I think perhaps it doesn't work only because I can clearly see and feel myself not wearing clothes, so I'm trying to overrule the evidence of my senses. My shirt's by the table, but my pants are all the way across the room, so I just pick up the shirt and try to extend it, to use it as a source of materials to create something new. This seems to be working, but very slowly. I don't care to wait; I give up and just walk back across the room for my pants, and start thinking about the 'rules' of dreams - thinking that perhaps it's better to work with what's already in the environment rather than try to create new things from scratch all the time; less wasteful, less effort. I become aware that I'm starting to wake up.

This dream is from earlier this month, when I am finally properly introduced to my Dream Guide. I first met my DG in my first LD about 3 months ago…though I didn't know she was my DG. A couple of months later I saw her again and she appeared different but I knew it was her (also maybe because I summoned her). Here's my dream where I met her the second time but this time I confirmed it with her that she is my DG.


I'm in a low lucidity dream and at the end of the dream I start spinning and I'm in an abyss experiencing a feeling of true bliss. This lasts about 5 seconds and then I wind up on my bed still spinning. The spinning comes to a stop and I try to get out of bed. I find it difficult to sit up and in fact feel my stomach muscles contract trying to sit up. I finally make it and get out of bed. I know I’m dreaming and I do an RC just to make sure. I look at my hands but they look normal, which lately has been happening a lot. I try to breathe through my pinched nose and it doesn’t work but I try again and it works the second time. I also jump up in the air to see if I can float and I do float back down. I first think of flying out the window but then decide that I’m going to call Dean (my Dream Guide…she told me her name in my first LD where I met her but didn't know she was my DG) on the phone to see if she is waiting for me downstairs. I grab the phone off my desk and head out the door. I don’t dial but just call Dean’s name like I’m talking to her and she answers. I ask her if she is waiting for me downstairs but she doesn’t know what I’m talking about and maybe doesn’t recognize me. I tell her “it’s me, are you waiting for me downstairs,” as I’m waiting for the elevator. She answers “no, I’m in my room getting ready.” I decide that her room is going to be the apartment just across from the elevator. It seems that all the doors on my floor are covered with some kind of red carpeting, with the exception of my door. I go to the door and try it but it seems locked and I knock on the door. Then I decide the door is going to be open as I try to open it again...and voila...it opens. I walk in and it’s a nice apartment and I hear the shower running. I go to the bathroom and I see the door is kind of cracked open with some steam coming out. I knock on the door and enter and I see an attractive black woman about 5’5 with short hair (not too short) taking a shower and I know it’s Dean. It’s a large bathroom and the shower is sort of in the middle and it’s open with no doors around it. She covers herself up but I’m not even really looking at her nudity...maybe just a little. I turn around and I tell her “Dean, I have to ask you a question - are you my dream guide?” She’s still in the shower and she answers me but I don’t quite hear what she says. I ask her again and she says “yes.” I run to hug her and tell her “oh my god, I’m so happy” and in fact I am. I don’t care about the fact that she’s naked and I have no sexual thoughts toward her. I’m just truly happy to encounter my DG. I ask her to help me in the future and she says she will. I also ask her if she’s going to look different every time she appears and she says that she will and in fact tomorrow (or some other day) she will look like (I don’t recall what she said). Maybe I’m paying less attention still caught up in being so happy finding out she’s my DG. There is a baby or maybe even two babies in the apartment but I kind of just ignore them. I figure that while Dean gets ready I can go have some fun and I ask her if she has any attractive girlfriends that live nearby...maybe neighbors so I could just go next door. She says “no...oh yea, there is one.” I head out into the living room and she’s almost ready also she just doesn’t have her shoes on. So I decide to just wait for her to get her shoes on and I think maybe I also decide to do a recall of my personal info (name, dob, address, phone #, etc.) but then I wake up.

A psychiatrist talking to another doctor about music and musicians, saying this is the type of personality that in these days uses hypnosis to tell themselves "this is my fanciful, flighty dream, that no one lets die." In other words: treating a wild dream as a practical career path, and being convinced to abandon a dream, are both viewed as mistakes.

There's a group of women in a small village, they all wear black and cover their hair, and a while ago they summoned up the Devil. Now he can't leave until a certain thing happens - he's trying to cause that thing to happen, the women are trying to prevent it. The women are talking about another, younger woman, who's either new in the village or has been away, and so isn't aware that this thing must be prevented.

The scene changes to show that Devil, who's been posing as a human man in that village, and at the moment is trying to get home without being caught by the sun and without being seen by his wife, who believes him to be human. He gets out of the building he'd been in by crawling down the side of the wall head first, and sneaks into his own home through the kitchen window, just before his wife enters the room. She finds him there casually drinking a glass of wine, and he mocks her for some supposed addiction problem of hers.

Someone's playing a waltz, I'm looking at LaCroix dancing with a blonde woman. I don't know him (I'm not playing Nick's role this time, though I'm not myself either), but something about seeing him gives me the sense that I'm seeing a path not taken. As I'm watching him and the woman he's dancing with, I become aware that this is Underhill, and a dream; and possibly those are synonyms. (This wasn't lucid at all - the character I was at the time was thinking of this scene as his own dream, not mine.)

A nightmare from over the weekend:

I'm watching a TV show involving something supernatural, and the character in the show is looking at a TV screen with some monster/demon/spirit/etc on the other side of the screen, coming closer, intending to break through. It looks like a white-skinned (literal colorless white) woman with brilliantly red hair and this blazing sparking moving light where its eyes should be. I notice that I can see it not just on my TV but on all the reflective surfaces in the room, and I know it's really trying to break through into the real world. I try holding it back with various protective symbols and calling on various things (not Apollo, curiously, as that's been my go-to nightmare cure recently; possibly it's because this one's not on the theme of darkness like all the others were) but they're not very effective, I have the feeling it's only a matter of time. At the same time, the door at the far end of the hall is open - I came through it earlier - and through it I can see a woman laughing, different from the woman in the screen but I have the feeling they're related. Feeling like I don't have much time, I sprint across the hall, slam the door and lock it. The dream 'camera' zooms in on that image of the lock turning, and closely focuses on the feel of it - and then the scene isn't a nightmare anymore. The thing on the screen is gone, now it's showing the main character saying to his sister, "It's you and me, we're all we've got now."

At some point while I was watching the show (I can't remember whether it was before or after the nightmare part), I thought to myself that watching creepy things every week might impact your dreams.

(Woke up around 5:30, an hour after bed, with a high-pitched ringing in my ears that reminds me a little of TV static, so that was presumably the cause of this. Recall for the rest of the day was terrible.)

Tonight's dreams:

People living in tunnels who have to move due to some imminent danger.

I'm walking through this vast room, mostly filled with a pool of water, cranes are standing in it, and one of the people I'm with comments on the way one of the birds is holding its leg up out of the water, she says she bets it's pointing to something, we should investigate. I disagree, but investigate anyway just to prove the point. I float above the water, and pass various cranes pointing in different directions, meaningless. But at the far side of the room I meet a man, a traveler, who I start talking to and who decides to come with us; he's standing beside this curtained alcove, and through the white curtains I get a glimpse of this beautiful woman sitting on the stone floor in white robes, hair down to the floor, and at first I think she's wearing a mask, something representing the moon, and I think she must be a princess or a priestess. Then I realize that's not a mask, it's her face, beautiful and strange.

3rd person, that traveler and the man who I was in the previous scene are walking down a flight of stairs with a little boy running ahead of them. There's a festival, a sending on of spirits, which are these floating pale lights filling the room, sending them on involves covering them with cloth, and the boy reaches for one of them, but it's acting differently than the others. The traveler says that because this one had been killed, it would be wrong to send her on in that form. The light takes on the image of the little girl it had been, and starts talking to the little boy, calling him Koya, saying he's gotten older. He tells her he's not Koya, sounding frustrated, but one of the older men says quietly to him that she needs him to be the person she's waiting for.

Hypnagogia: A woman's voice saying "Run!" over and over again. Disconcerting. Woke myself right back up.

Nightmare: I'm in a dark cave full of dangerous creatures. So I decide to summon up a pterosaur to kill them for me. I hide behind a door against the wall and listen to it move around; it won't be able to reach into that narrow space, so I'll be fine. Except I start doubting whether the space is small enough, and become aware that I'm not in a narrow space, I'm in the much more open space of my bed.

(Woke up at 5:30 am, half an hour after bed. Back to sleep.)

A connection between the Palin family and a family of actors, a law that makes it possible to win an election without gaining a majority of votes, and a great deal of anger at both these things, though I don't much mind myself.

Birds flying overhead in V formation above my IRL home, thinking about luring them down.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm the Doctor, the ninth, traveling with Rose, and trying to get into a building which is apparently strictly for the upper class and we don't look the part. The guard at the door stops us at first, then lets us in after I wave the psychic paper at him. After we're inside - looks like a casino - Rose asks if the paper made him see us as someone else, or in nicer clothes. I tell her it doesn't change the things people see, just the way they interpret them.

(Woke up. Suspect that last scene was inspired by the 'Run!' hypnagogia. Back to sleep.)

A little dark-haired girl, a relative, who hides behind the furniture and speaks quietly, tells me I should have listened to my visions. I'd just agreed to something, and I probably shouldn't have.

Napping on the couch during the night: A nightmare of the vague, unseen, menacing, I'd-call-it-demonic-except-the-demons-in-this-dream-are-on-my-side variety starts to take hold. Since I think of this as associated with darkness, I summon 'the golden light of Apollo' which lights me up from inside for a moment and this does the trick, but Amon and the other demons around me look rather hurt/betrayed that I would do such a thing, calling on some light god instead of relying on them.

Fragments from 8 and 10:19 wakeups, having gone to bed at 7 am:

A man with a phobia of the upper class he's trying to join; the name Benjamin.

An immortal man offering another a light for his cigarette and saying "Here. Rachel's mother couldn't stand (this brand), could she? Now it's the scent of (a three-syllable name of a town in China, a place associated with another woman)."

My new wife, Julia, has drawn me away from my potion-brewing for the night, and as I carry her up the tower steps to her bedroom, she quotes, "And it was better that the beloved behold the tainted cities of Mephisto dreaming."

(Woke up at 10:19, and shortly afterward my neighbor started to play the drums. After half an hour I called him. Back to bed at 11, though I didn't get back to sleep for at least another 20 minutes.)

I'm riding in a car with my IRL sisters, and I notice that I can see the grand houses we're driving past even though my eyes are closed. I keep them closed for a while to be sure of it. I suspect I'm dreaming. I take out my sketchpad and start drawing what I see with my eyes closed - the inside of the car, I considered drawing the scenery but better to go with something that isn't passing so fast - but I find that although I can see both car interior and sketchpad, my drawing isn't enough to prove anything. We stop at a hotel and I've run out of drawing paper, and I go through an old sketchbook and find it's full of paintings from Shadow Hearts.

Dream briefly switches to Shadow Hearts scenes featuring two Alices, one 'real', the other either dead or the result of time travel shenanigans or a figment of Yuri's mind or some combination of the above. It's this potentially imaginary Alice who more closely resembles the version from the game.

Back to the hotel - my father's current IRL girlfriend comes to the hotel room to tell me to hurry up, Dad's in the car and waiting. I'm surprised since I thought I was the one waiting, all I have to do is stick my sketchpad back in my backpack and I'm good to go - but no, I see my sisters are already at the door too. My bad. I grab my things and go after them -

After I walk through that door there's a memory gap, but I wind up lucid, floating up and down through the levels of the hotel through a convenient octagonal hole in the floors leading up to a skylight. I stop floating around and look for a door to go through to change to a more interesting scene, but as I pass through the door I get a sense of danger, and immediately look for another door. I pass through a series of rooms this way, most of them halls filled with marble statues and skylights or balconies opening onto clear blue skies, but still with that sense of something wrong, until finally I open a door to a public bath filled with attractive people making out with each other. I have no particular desire to join in but it makes for pleasant scenery and the sense of danger is gone, so I strip and get into the water.

I seem to have gotten my timing wrong, most people are getting out of the water and getting dressed, but I'm not bothered by this. The doors on the far side of the baths are so large the view is almost entirely brilliant blue sky. Someone offers me a tab of acid, and I take one and offer one to another before handing the rest back to him, which he's surprised by. I wonder if it'll have any effect in a dream, and as I wonder this I decide to find a robe to put on. I remember the summoning-by-putting-your-hand-behind-you trick and decide to try summoning a robe - which doesn't work, but I walk past a stack of towels, and then a stack of clothes, and this seems to be the dream's response to my request. The clothes are slightly too large for me but I put them on anyway, listening to the conversations around me.

(Woke up just before 12:30. Resigned myself to a bit of sleep deprivation.)

Dream recall from today's naps.

There was some forum game/video game(It kept switching at places), where player character had to search through very abstract-style factory place, there were two brown puppet things in one of the rooms and some kind of huge engine/mechanism. Then there was different forum/video game that was happening in same place but in different time, one of players was using some 'meta' actions to summon various things, at one point he summoned spherical metallic drone with a laser. He also suggested to open the portal into the other forum game. Then later another player joined the party, he was a dragon. And after some talk everyone exited the factory outside and major enemy appeared, triggering the boss fight.

Dream recall from today's nap.

Dream 1(fragments):

There was something about one forum game on some forum.

Dream 2(fragments):

I was reading update of certain forum game W, and was discussing it with someone, questioning that update was going different ways, not that way.
Then i wake up, and realize that i am dreaming due to feeling, i try summoning something, shortly chandelier appears and turns into a person, then i...
Wake up again, then talk with dad, but for some reason try to summon that dream feeling, but before i get too successful...
I wake up again, in bizarre position in bed, reversed. Somebody's talking about going somewhere and i pretend to be asleep but have a bit of problem closing eyes. Then i wake up properly.

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.