LD achieved!!! For a quick half second...

I've been recording my dreams for just over a week now, and managed to have my first lucid dream on the fourth day!

… Only problem was, even though I knew I was dreaming I couldn’t control the events. And the trigger I’ve been trying to train my sleep self to recognize as proof I’m dreaming ended up being the thing that killed my lucidity and forced me back into the internal logic of the dream.

Thwarted!

Here's the dream if anyone is interested:

I dreamed that aliens had come to the small town I was living in order to take it over and start mining our resources. We had something that WE thought was without value in the muck of our harbour seabed, but the aliens were using it to build weapons or some such thing. And so to gain unfettered access to the harbour’s ocean floor, they began taking over the local townsfolk one by one. Cue scary music here…

Some of our coworkers at my workplace began disappearing. They’d just not show up for their shift and then we’d never see them again. Others, meanwhile, were acting very strangely. Inhumanly, you might say. My boyfriend, his friend, and I — the three of us began to watch them with suspicion. We knew something insidious was happening and we figured we needed to get some proof before we approached the cops about it.

[Note: I'm actually married in real life -- the boyfriend was just part of the dream and not based on anyone I know. Though I can still recall his face with startling clarity.]

Then one of the chief meanies fired my boyfriend’s best friend, leaving just the two of us to solve the mystery. My boyfriend tried to make me stay away from the whole thing — he was worried that things were heating up and he didn’t want anything bad to happen to me. But I didn’t want anything bad to happen to him so I insisted I was staying by his side until the bitter end.

… Then there was a brief interlude in which I was granted a vision of the giant sasquatches that were soon to become our allies in the war against the evil aliens. They were as tall as the trees they were walking through. There were other, regular-sized sasquatches with them, who reached only to their knees.

Suddenly I was back with my boyfriend again, in a crowded bookstore. One of the women we worked with was there. She was the receptionist for the chief meanie that fired our friend. Since we knew she was sleeping with him, we figured she was one of the bad guys. Our suspicions were confirmed when she exposed a raw gaping wound above her knee, then shoved her fingers deep into the wound and pulled out a pink, fist-sized pulsing organ, not unlike the mollusk under the bridge from my dream the night before.

… Then she began to eat it. We were suitably grossed out.

One of our geeky but brilliant coworkers was there as well. I realized he would be the perfect person to help my boyfriend and I figure out what the aliens were up to, so I suggested my boyfriend go and talk to him.

THAT was when I realized I was dreaming. I think some part of my brain was analyzing the scene with the giant sasquatches and thought, “Hey wait a minute, that’s not very realistic.” (Unlike evil soul-snatching aliens.)

As soon as I knew I was dreaming, I grabbed my boyfriend’s elbow. “Screw all this,” I said. “Let’s go have sex.”

He looked at me as if I were crazy.

“Seriously,” I told him, “This is all just a dream. Let’s enjoy it while we can!”

Reluctantly, he agreed to go with me, but said he wanted to talk to the geek first. I sighed and rolled my eyes, but agreed. “But hurry — I don’t want to wake up before we have some fun.”

He promised he’d be quick.

As I waited impatiently for his return, I glanced down at my left hand. The same left hand I’ve been trying to train myself to look at in my dreams, with the idea that if I don’t see my wedding ring, I’ll figure out I’m dreaming and be able to control my dream environment.

Well. I looked at my left hand and didn’t see my wedding ring. What I saw instead was a red open sore on the back of my hand the size of a golf ball. “Holy crap,” I thought. “I’ve been infected!”

That’s when I lost my lucidity. I forgot I was dreaming and fell right back into the plot of the dream. Desperate to find my boyfriend, I went into the book store’s private back room. He was there, talking with the geek. I went up to them and tapped him on the arm. “We’ve got no time to lose!” I said, showing him my hand. “If we don’t act soon, I’m going to become one of them!”

That’s when I woke up.

(And yes, pretty much all of my dreams are this bizarro weird, and most of them involve me being part of a rebel alliance fighting an evil authoritarian regime... do you suppose I'm wishing I had greater control over my waking life? Hmm.)