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This dream is from the morning of 12/15/2013.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #173: Luxor

I’m in a hotel room bedroom talking with Wife. She has the lights off like we’re getting ready for bed but there's an errand to take care of. We need an access card for the pool and she’s sending me out to get it.

When I get to the main room of the suite, rather than our kids I encounter a guy that looks like Henry Rollins. I think he’s some kind of celebrity, although I’m not sure who I really think this is. We talk for a little bit and he tells some kinda funny but off-color joke. He motions toward our room and says, “Sorry, forgot about the wife.”

I decide that I’d better not leave Wife alone with a stranger in our hotel room so I decide not to leave. As I’m thinking through this, I become lucid and walk back into the bedroom. I crawl into bed next to Wife, planning on performing a WILD. Wait, no, I’m already having a lucid dream. I get out of bed, walk to the end of the room and phase out through the window into the void.

I rub my hands together as I fall through the void. The descent slows until I can no longer feel it and I give myself a bit of a pep talk about how “all of this is mine”, hoping to be ready for some dream control when I emerge from the void. I’m thinking of Task of the Year, and imagine that I’ll see the Great Pyramid when I emerge.

After a bit, the void gives way to a dusky desert scene. And about 70 or so feet away is the base of an Egyptian pyramid! There are a lot of smaller pyramids around the in the area as well, most of them only ten feet high or so. Everything’s covered in billboard and neon signs that say things like “Clearance!” and “For Sale!”

I make my way toward the main pyramid when I encounter an attractive brunette in her late 20s. “Can we help you?” she asks. Just as she says this, she’s joined by an identical twin. The idea of an attempt at sexytime sounds appealing, but no, the Pyramid is right here. Stay focused.

Confused about what the Pyramid task is (repair/reanimate the Sphinx and ride her to the top), I respond, “Can you show me the way inside the Pyramid?" Then I add: "By the way, you two are really cute.” (I think I was trying to impress them/myself for staying on track or something, I don’t know. )

They pose and raise their arms over their head in a “We know!” kind of gesture. One of them (the first one I met) says, “Sure, I’ll show you.” She heads off around the side of the Pyramid and I follow. As we’re walking she narrates like a tour guide, gesturing at some wares as we pass by some stalls in a market area. “Here’s where they sell Khuddush and vials.” (I’m spelling “Khuddush” the way it sounded to me, but it’s a guess since I don’t know this word.)

“What’s Khuddush?” I ask.

“You don’t know? This is supposed to be your dream. If I know something that you don’t, does that mean…?” Her voice trails off. I have kind of a “whoa” moment. (I looked up “Khuddush” and couldn’t find anything. The closest match was the kiddush, a Jewish Sabbath ritual. Kiddush - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

I follow her into a high stone chamber where a few other DCs are wandering around. We walk toward a staircase leading down and the dream falls into the void. I can’t rescue it, but before I emerge, I hear an unfamiliar female voice say, “Don’t get too attached.” The dream ends.

Well, a close-ish call with getting to the Pyramid and some fun play with a few new techniques. Still have a lot of refining to do!

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #168: Pyramid Artwork

I have a false awakening where I wake up excited about some video game idea. I’m desperate to write it down. I grab my dream journal, deciding that’s the best place I’ve got to write the idea down. This makes me think of dreaming, though, and I become lucid.

I walk toward the window, glancing over at the bed as I go. I see Wife sleeping peacefully on my side of the bed, and my sleeping body is nowhere in sight. I’m amused by the unusual layout and note that this is definitely not an OBE. I think about saying something to Wife as I pass but decide to just leave her alone.

I phase out through the external wall, winding up in the void. I imagine the scene as it should be, though, and after a few seconds it works itself into a convincing replica of my street at night. This gives me a nice confidence boost, so I imagine that the Great Pyramid is behind me. I turn around to find that it hasn’t worked, though, and it’s just more houses as far as I can see.

I’m feeling aggressive, though, so I use my fingers to draw a triangle in the distance. The triangle isn’t perfect, but it comes out in a shimmering neon green. With some focus, I’m able to slowly change the green outline into the distant Great Pyramid!

Seeing the Pyramid gives me a target to be excited about so I immediately attempt a zoom teleport. Something goes wrong, though, and the Pyramid actually gets further away rather than closer to me. This frustrates me and I start making a half-hearted attempt to fly there instead.

The scene resets somehow and I’m in a huge aircraft hangar. Okay, starting over. Again I go for the “draw a triangle” trick and I get a decent-looking triangle. I try to change it into the Pyramid but it stays stubbornly neon and triangular.

Several other attempts follow, including erasing and redrawing the triangle, chopping the top of it off and reforming it into a trapezoid, and drawing several copies at once. I can never quite make any of this work before the dream ends.

22:29 1/2 cup cold sleep tea (Mother's Wort + rose hips)

00:00 Friday 2013-11-22

00:30 ?? bedtime.

02:24

1) With DD, we had been fighting, we made up at the concert/graduation, it was a big thing that we were friendly & together again, we were being filmed. I saw my face DO and DD's face, my face wasn't my own, it was a generic young blonde face, with a dark spot under the right eye.

2) Filling out paperwork trying to get the deposit returned on a set of skis, the guys asks about (some kind of) skiing, I answer "that's the kind of skiing where you go off the trails." He says "ah, nah, forget that, I just want to go on the main streets." I say "Yeah, I know, you can go one street to another street, and you can just say, 'Ah, F*ck this, gimme a beer.'" I'm filling out the form, I draw a strange W-like character (sort of like a greek omega) but with 3-4 loops instead of 2.

06:20

F1) Young S1 and S2 are wearing University color shirts and waving flags as the train arrives.

F2) A man hosting a show about lucid dreaming, "Be Who You Want To Be!"

Crappy recall, I think that tea kills REM or something. Or maybe I'm just tired? Can't get back to sleep. AGAIN. SH!T. The night started out good with two dreams at about 2 hours, but then couldn't recall.

09:30 BTB nap

10:48 LD #8 DILD !!!!!!!!!!!!

Long time getting to sleep, did incubation scene injection (not holding hard on to visualization) of TG and JQ, and sometimes the scene started changing, like a new DC entered from off-stage, or I noticed something else in the scene suddenly that I didn't put there myself. Happened several times. Turned from back to left side. LD happened on left side. Told myself "The next thing I see is a dream" several times. Told SC "OK time to get that next LD to move along the November goals!"

3) I'm on my parent's deck it's twilight there's a beautiful view out over the city and the water, I immediately realize I'm dreaming! I get the lucid rush/feeling. I think "All RIGHT! Lucid right at the start!" I feel very aware, and I anticipate a long and awesome LD. But then vision goes black! I still feel lucid. I try prying open my dream eyes with my dream fingers, and I "feel" the dream eyes open but everything is still black. I try to imagine taking off and flying towards the water. Slowly fades to feeling my body in bed and I'm awake. Try to DEILD back in but too awake. Need to prepare strategy for the void (if that's what it was). Start rubbing hands RIGHT AWAY at lucidity!

November goals progress: 3 LDs / goal of 8. Still have a week, let's GO!

No more of that sleep tea, I get crappy recall after drinking it before bed.

Right. I am way behind with journalling. In the meantime, got mostly short lds and finally a long one today (will post separately).

Date: 1 Nov

Combo: SJW, B6, p.oil cap, latte

It's been around two months since the last time I took this combo. This time, I found the dreams before the wbtb very emotionally charged and not with pleasant emotions. It was mentally exhausting.

I do a quick wbtb and go back to bed repeating the mantras. An hour passes by where I thought I was awake but actually I was in some sort of deep sleep. Can't recall thinking or dreaming anything. I take a couple mins to concentrate on having an ld and fall asleep.

LD: From the darkness, the scene begins to form around me and I start walking briskly to allow myself to get in properly. I am on the street in some neighborhood. As I examine the surroundings, I see a chimp in the yard across the street. Cool! I remember that I was supposed to turn into a gorilla for the NY task, so having a point of reference for the transition is very welcome. My thoughts and emotions make the chimp stand on its feet and beat its chest or something like that.

The dream is kind of unstable and as I look around, I see the chimp suddenly vanish in front of my eyes. It quickly fades away to become transparent, where only the contours can be seen, then these disappear as well. I want the chimp to reappear and look in another direction. Behind the fence of a close by yard, there are now a number of bear cubs and as I am staring at them they quickly increase in numbers. The whole yard is now filled with bear cubs, maybe 15-20 of them. I look towards what I feel is the city center, hoping to see a tall building, but there are only 5- story blocks here. There's this gut feeling that I shouldn't have started changing the dream so early on as this is causing too much instability, but it's already too late. I wake up.

I do another quick and rather sloppy attempt to have an ld, but it seems that I fall into unmemorable sleep again.

4 Nov

From scratch short ld in the living room. High instability, decided to do yoga - handstand but lost the feel of my hands and dream collapsed.

5 Nov

Stable, vivid, somewhat unpleasant atmosphere. Recognized frequency of objects (toilets) as DS. Decided to leave the place by phasing through a mirror. Imagined Egypt behind and phased but ended in the void. Shortly felt warmth and some sand around but then continued floating forwards in the dark void. Minor dream paralysis (in the void) while trying to rub hands.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #158: Thankful

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Youthful reef," she says firmly.

Huh? "What is 'youthful reef'?"

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

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

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

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #156: Split

I'm somewhere hazy, talking with IR, a friend from high school. She tells me that she feels like her physical fitness is stagnating and that she's getting old. I'm preparing to disagree when I suddenly become confused and worry that this will be misunderstood and taken as a flirtation. My brain feels stuck in slow motion, and when I wonder why, I realize that I'm dreaming.

IR is gone, and now I'm walking through a darkened hallway. I step through a door into an office with two desks in it. To my left is a window offering a nighttime view of the city. A woman, professional-looking and in her late 30s, walks toward me from the opposite end of the office.

As I prepare to tell her that this is all a dream, the scene "rewinds" a few seconds, and now I'm walking through the door again, and just as before, the woman is at the opposite end of the room. I walk toward her as before, and again the scene resets, placing me back at the door.

Confusion is starting to get the best of me, so from the door I blurt to her (and to me) "I'm having a lucid dream!" She approaches and we exchange a few sentences related to a project that I'm working on, but I can't remember what was said. (I didn't write this dream down until several hours later.)

The scene starts hazing out as she's talking to me, so I move toward her and start kissing her. This seems to keep things on an even keel for a bit, but as things take a shift toward sexytime, it quits working and I wind up in the void.

I rub my hands together for a while, holding things together. My brain feels very foggy and I'm aware that I'm having real trouble thinking clearly in this dream. I just keep rubbing my hands together, hoping that the answer will come to me, but eventually I find myself aware of my physical body.

The amazing part is that when I concentrate, I realize that I can still feel the experience of my dream hands rubbing together. I start getting mixed up about which set of hands is real and which is fake. Sensing the opportunity to "roll out" of the situation and have an OBE-style lucid dream, I try to imagine myself pulling away from my body. It feels like it's working, but the dream takes one last lurch toward instability and collapses.

10/23* indoor sports again. This time indoor soccer I scored a goal vs 2 other players but they said no it didn't go in I say but wait the ball won't even fit all the way inside the small goal and I demonstrated that it went in through the front of the goal just couldn't go all the way in because the goal was too small. Now if it came from the side hit the post or side netting then I would not have counted it.
Huge game bureau or cabinet I remember there was a ping pong drawer which probably has ping pong balls in it and to the right of that was a drawer with a change machine, a way to get change I assume for any games that require coin operation there were other drawers labeled as well. This bureau became my wife's grandmother's bureau of stuff. She's close to passing away in waking life. Inside there are stacks of 1 yen bills on one of the shelves and my wife says yes there's like ten thousand yen in there. The stacks look uncirculated and perhaps in sequential order . Supposedly they're from the 70's. I tell my wife that they're worth more than that probably. My wife tells her mother and my son who is sitting on a couch facing away from the Bureau says shhh, she will spend it all. I think hmm is my son worried about inheritance? My wife tells her mother and her mother points to a zip lock bag full of a couple of wads of euros. My wife says no
the yen's. I wake up.
Fragment: perhaps a false memory of a break in to the back area of a garage. The house is different, a ranch style home but the garage is on the left like IWL. I wake up lying in bed thinking about why some short term memories come through to our dreams? And how some dreams are influenced by that very day's events. I wonder if it could be like one theory holds that dreams are part of the filing away of memories process. Perhaps during the filing away of the memory it gets included in our dream. That day I was watching a news story about a neighborhood that was having a lot of burglaries but the culprits were caught on surveillance camera.
I guess this would be a fragment because I do not remember how the dream started but I have a sneaking suspicion that I was lucid or semi-lucid before becoming lucid at the end. A guy and myself are escaping from group of pursuers and he is leading the way we come into some kind of warehouse and he walks up to a wall and it becomes a device that looks kind of like an elevator he pushes a buttonthe door opens I look inside and there are golden grid lines in an otherwise black void I follow him inside the door closes behind us and I wonder if anyone else got through that was chasing us. I realize I am dreaming as I seem to be zooming through space or perhaps a wormhole at very high speed and then all the sudden I'm shaken and I am just sitting there in a void of black, the shake and perhaps also the starkness of the surrounding is probably what woke me up and I'm back in bed.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #154: The Truck

A WILD attempt drops me non-lucid into the living room of a house. My dad and a few other people are standing nearby and I wonder why we're all here and how I arrived at this place. I can't figure it out and I remember that I was just trying to enter a dream.

I'm overcome with this feeling like it's been forever since I had a lucid and that I have to accomplish a goal. I decide that I want to teleport to the Colosseum and I remember the teleportation tech Nyx and I had both dabbled in: cover your eyes and imagine yourself in a new scene.

I try it now, covering my eyes, imagining the Colosseum and then taking my hand away. This makes all of the DCs disappear, but I'm still in the same living room. I try again, covering my eyes and spinning this time. It's still the living room, but it looks more drab. I hear the vague noise of a crowd, but it fades away. I feel like I'm not really believing it and I try to remember how to do this better.

This time I completely close my eyes, spin, and imagine a new dream scene. The scene goes dark and as I'm thinking about opening my eyes I suddenly get really nervous that this will wake me up. Instead, I just treat the darkness like the void, rub my hands together and start walking forward again. After a short time, I emerge outside at night, walking through suburban streets.

I imagine that the Colosseum is behind me and turn around, but I've half-assed it -- instead of the Colosseum I'm looking at a grassy vacant lot surrounded by a low chain-link fence. I jog forward now, taking three or four turns over the course of perhaps two minutes of dream time. I expect the Colosseum to be around each corner, but I'm not feeling confident enough to make it happen.

From out of nowhere a rusty red pick-up truck comes barreling toward me, lights off and speeding. I step lightly over the truck, one foot on the hood, next step on the roof, then gliding over as it roars past underneath me. I feel happy and excited about how I handled things with the truck and my confidence starts coming back a bit.

This makes me consider whether travelling on foot is such a good idea. I remember talking with Ophelia in the podcast about how flying is the better way to go for transportation and I'm considering doing that when a pick-up truck pulls alongside me, rusty red just like the last one. For some reason I think that this is a different truck.

The truck's being driven by an attractive red-haired woman in her early 40s and a younger woman (blonde, mid-20s) is sitting in the passenger seat. The younger woman beckons me toward the truck. I climb into the cab of the truck and immediately she kisses me. She pulls away after a moment and turns her head so that I'm seeing her from the side. I'm surprised to see that her appearance has completely changed -- now she's Asian and completely bald! She turns her face back toward me and now she's Wife with fairly short hair (like she wore it several years ago.)

Both Wife and the red-haired DC move toward me and sexytime commences. This part's way too graphic for the public DJ, but this (fun) portion of the dream lasts about four minutes. I lose stability once in the middle of the scene but manage to regain it. There's a final loss of stability that puts me into the void.

I rub my hands together and walk forward, emerging into a new scene where I'm walking into an apartment. A woman greets me at the door. She's unfamiliar to me (about 5'2", late 20s, Hispanic, very good-looking.) "Don't you remember me?" she asks, giving me a friendly hug. "It's [name I can't remember that starts with 'L']! We were like best friends back in high school." I completely buy into this false memory, losing lucidity and start catching up with L and asking her how she's doing. She's hosting some kind of a party with a few of her other friends there. I go on about family life for a while, briefly wondering why Wife isn't here with me. Eventually L wanders off to do something in the kitchen and I notice one of L's female friends giving me a semi-hostile look. I worry about this for a while until the dream ends.

Dream recall fro today's WBTB/naps.

Dream 1(fragments):

I was playing Terraria and there was something ab out lightning strikes and weapon debuffing.

Dream 2(fragments):

i was watching some kind of story, it was happening on sky islands and it was raining. Inhabitants were afraid of rain, then more characters arrived and inhabitants were telling them about rules of the place. Then i found some place in void where authors of the story were making some art, a drawing of skulls, i've talked to them and was watching. Then characters from the story were suddenly in different part of void and they had to find can of paint, then they were back on sky islands and they had to dig out some people that were stuck in the ground, that made another person angry which shout was heard through the island and he summoned thunderstorm, scaring inhabitants even more. There was also some text on the side of island.
Then i wake up, hearing chanting voice and i realize that i am dreaming, but split-second after i move i get teleported into initial position. That continues a good number of times where i either get teleported or FA again. During one i briefly see brief shadowy dragon figure, which then vanishes.After a few more teleports/FAs i even lose lucidity for a bit, but then some DC falls on bed from the ceiling and i regain lucidity, and also get unstuck from the loop, i get up and go to balcony, then dream fades out.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #153: Foiled Creativity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #148: Musical Travels

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #147: Train Station Cafe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This LD was from the morning of 9/12/2013.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #145: Sleeping Body

I get the sense that a dream may have started, so I will my arm to move downward through the bed. It does, and now I'm floating blind through some sort of substance. It feels a bit like water but less substantial.

I swim through it for a few moments until I can dimly see that the stuff I'm swimming through is black and wispy. My right hand touches somebody else's who also seems to be swimming next to me. It's apparently Wife, because she says, "Are you sure you know what you're doing?"

Now I'm back in bed. I can see, but the light's very dim. I roll out in an OBE style and walk toward the bedroom door. Before I leave, I think to look back at the bed to see whether I'm there... and yes, there's Wife on her side, and next to her, rolled on his (its?) side is my sleeping dream body. For some reason my sleeping body isn't covered by the sheets so I can see that it's glowing slightly and is wearing some kind of blue shorts.

I think about approaching my sleeping body but I decide that I don't want to get too caught up in this. As I'm thinking this, Wife sits up a bit in bed, looks toward me, and says, "What was that?" I wonder whether she's speaking to me or the sleeping body. I sense that this scenario is starting to challenge my lucidity, so I move on.

I walk toward the closed bedroom door and then hear phase through it, briefly entering the void. I decide that the phase is just taking a long time and (somewhat reluctantly) the hallway scene appears and I'm walking through it. It still looks like my real hallway, but very dark.

I continue into my son E's room and find that the place is littered with a bunch of huge toys. Near one window stands a four-foot tall plush zebra with plastic wheels. It looks like you're supposed to ride around on it. There are several other big toys as well, but I didn't get as good of a look at them and don't remember them as well.

I don't see E, and I begin to wonder if he's here. I "sense" that there's a crib nearby and wonder if E is just younger than he was before. This train of thought is starting to distract me, so I move toward the window to phase outside. I wake up momentarily and then hold still for DEILD.

The DEILD once again starts from my bed, and like before, my arm sinks into the bed. I go into the void and float for a while.

Spoiler for Sexytime:

The scene stays dark, and I feel two women snuggle up on either side of me. I can vaguely imagine their shape but I can't directly see them. This doesn't seem to bother me, though, and I manage about 25-30 seconds of fun before...

I wake up.

This is the second dream from a pair of lucids that I had last night.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #133: The Royal Australian Navy

I'm outside helping my friend "The Schwartz" throw a bunch of random junk into a dumpster by an apartment complex. We heave a big box of rusted old crap into the dumpster "Are you sure they'll take all of this stuff?" I ask.

"Sure," he says. "This dumpster's always moving around to different places in the city. That must mean they come to take the garbage out of it." I nod, accepting this. But when I look into the dumpster, I see a shipping pallet that I'm planning to bust into pieces next week (in waking life.) I can't understand how it would have gotten mixed in with The Schwartz's stuff. I nose pinch reality check and become lucid.

"This is a dream," I tell him. The Schwartz frowns thoughtfully and nods his head. For some reason, I decide to give him a password as if this were some kind of shared dreaming experiment. "I'm going to give you a password."

"A password?"

"Yeah." I consider explaining but decide not to. I no longer even know why I'm doing this. "The password is butterfly." He nods again, not particularly interested.

Okay, time to get out there and do something with this. I look up at the sky and see a huge, awkward bird flying by that looks like a pelican. I try to fly but for some reason I don't budge.

I notice that the pelican flew right by a cluster of very weird objects floating in the sky -- the cab of an 18-wheeler, a barrel, and other random objects like that. I focus on the objects, expecting myself to rise, and this time it's no problem. In a few seconds, I'm about a hundred feet in the air.

As I look out over the landscape, I expect for there to be an ocean nearby. It works better than expected -- there's a huge, sparkling sea laid out in front of me! It's packed with military vessels, probably about two dozen destroyers.

Each of the destroyers has an emblem of the American flag on its hull. I think that this flag should be Australian for Australia's Task of the Year. The flag changes as soon as I think this, switching to what I believe at the time is the Australian flag. (But is actually the UK flag, oops. )

I'm amused that the flags changed to be "just so", and I'm laughing as I fly past the ships to the open sea. I want to start the Great Barrier Reef task, so I plunge straight into the water at high speed. For some reason, though, my vision goes black when I hit the water. I can still feel myself swimming, though, so I keep paddling "underwater" in a pseudo-breast stroke. I probe at my body while continuing to swim, but eventually the feeling of water subsides. After a while, the dream ends entirely.

The power was out at our house for the afternoon and overnight, so I had no excuse not to go to bed on time. Discipline at last! This is the first of a pair of lucids from last night.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #132: The Raccoon

I'm sitting at our breakfast table with Wife, my two kids "E" and "R", my mom, and my dad. R's in his booster seat and positioned close to the back door (which is made of glass.) A huge raccoon walks up to the back door, gets onto his hind legs and starts pawing at the glass. "I think he likes [R]!" remarks Dad.

I wonder whether I should be concerned that we have 3-foot raccoons wandering through our back yard. After pondering this for a moment, I decide that this is a little strange and use the nose pinch reality check, breathing clearly and immediately becoming lucid.

Immediately I want to head outside, so I phase through the glass into the yard. Everything looks more or less like waking life. My goal is to get to the Great Barrier Reef for Task of the Year and I think about using the pool as a transition point. The plan: fall backward into the water, imagine that I'm actually in the ocean, then turn around. Hopefully then I actually am in the ocean.

I walk up to the edge of the pool, turn around so that my back is to the pool, and fall backward into the water. I go under briefly but quickly surface. I imagine that I'm on the edge of a huge ocean, but when I turn around, I still just see the other side of the pool. I swim around for a while, wondering what to try next. I'm getting ready to try to imagine an ocean behind me again but before I can, I wind up in the void.

From the void, I probe at my dream body but after only a couple of seconds I experience a shuddering sensation and hear a crackle like electricity. It reminds me of a violent WILD transition. Almost immediately a new scene forms -- a tan, smoothly curved, dumbbell-shaped object spinning by itself in the void. I want to reach out to it but I don't seem to have a dream body. I can shift my perspective, though, and I "move" closer to the tan dumbbell. It seems to be lit by some unseen light source behind me. I spend a few more seconds here before the dream ends.