lucid

I am already flying around aimlessly in a non-lucid dream, when suddenly I realize I am dreaming. I look over and notice a female DC, whom I do not recognize from WL. We start exploring the scenery together by flying into a dark office building and wandering amidst the empty corridors. I am giving her instructions on what to do in this LD. The lights abruptly come on and I discover we are in an office break room, with a sink, cabinets and a refrigerator. The female DC is sitting on a shelf near the sink in a dish of what appears to be lemon-scented soap. Because I plan on going down on her, I ask her not to get soap all over her ass. She hops off the shelf and we leave the kitchen. As we leave, I take her arm and pull her into me, saying "This is what I want to do first." We begin to kiss and undress each other. I gently lay her down on the kitchen floor and mount her. But at the moment penetration I suddenly hear the sound of a toilet flushing. I realize this is my wife coming back to bed after using the bathroom. This jolts me and the DC girl fades beneath me. I can't stabilize and soon awaken. Dreamt 3/7/2017

I am in an old concrete stairwell, resembling a turret in a castle. I am going up and down within the turret, hovering above the stairs. I hear the sound of moaning as I ascend and descend in the stairwell. I am not sure if I am making the moaning sounds, or if they are coming from somewhere else. I float all the way down to the bottom level where the moaning grows louder and I see a small partition in the wall which opens up into another chamber. I try to enter the partition with my floating body, but it does not fit. It is at this point I realize this may be a dream. I look at the palms of my hands to do an RC: they are deformed and mutated. I see a reptilian-looking eyeball in one of them, in the center of my palm, blinking back at me. My hands are black, with an electric, neon-green outline. As I marvel at this, I feel the dream slipping away. I quickly attempt to stabilize, but I lose control and enter back through the hypnopompic curtain and into wakefulness. Dreamt 2/20/17

I am with a person who is eager to show me a house he just inherited. I am there to do some repairs/remodeling so he can turn it around and sell it. When we arrive we see how old and dilapidated it is. It looks like an old abandoned crack house. The front door is ajar and windows are wide open, the curtains fluttering in the breeze. We step cautiously into the house and are met by a homeless-looking man with a long beard and a crazy eyes - he is the schizophrenic brother of the man I am with. He has apparently moved into the house. He walks into the living room, holding a toothbrush. The two brothers begin fighting and screaming at each other: "Get out of this house!" "I ain't goin' nowhere! Mom and dad gave it to me!" "Mom and dad disinherited you!" "Like hell they did! One half of this fucker is mine!" And on and on they go, yelling at each other. The fighting eventually escalates from verbal to physical. The schizophrenic brother picks up a television and hurls it at us. We move out of the way and it smashes against the wall. We decide to leave. I suggest we go back to my place temporarily while we decide what to do.

The house we go to is my old home in West Islip, NY where I lived from 1984 to 1989. We sit down in the parlor and decide what course of action to take against his crazy brother. I suggest we hold him at gunpoint until the police come. We go down to the basement and I take out a bag of guns. I ask if he has a preference as to what gun we use on his brother: we have a .22 but we also have a lever-action 30/30. He says to use the .22, but I can't find it so we end up using the 30/30. Taking it out of the bag, I accidentally discharge a bullet through the basement ceiling. When I get up closer to inspect the bullet hole, the hole suddenly transforms and widens into an air conditioning vent. As we head back upstairs with the gun, I ask him if his brother will seek revenge on us for holding him at gunpoint. The answer is yes. I turn off the AC before leaving, but then change my mind and turn it back on. My parents will want the house nice and cool when they return from vacationing in Italy. Dreamt 2/9/2017

I am in a huge underwater amphitheater with my father. The amphitheater is a glass dome under several hundred feet of water. Along with me and my dad there are several groups of people sitting in the bleachers. We are all waiting for a show to begin. Mozart begins to play as prehistoric-looking sea creatures in mid-evolutionary stages begin to walk out from a side door. The Mozart music is original hypnogogic permutations from my subconscious of his German marches from the Opera "Die Entführung aus dem Serail"

The creatures march to this music in the underwater amphitheater, and pause so we can pet them. Some of them look like gigantic mollusks. Others look like horseshoe crabs the size of dogs and huge, mutated crocodiles. They lumber across the aisles in perfect synch with the music. Among them is a big sawfish with legs. These are all prehistoric creatures. Sitting next to me with her arm around me is a sexy blonde woman. I have no idea who she is. She leans in very close and I can feel her breath against my ear. I am wondering who her boyfriend is, and also worried that my wife might see us. Meanwhile, the prehistoric creatures are crawling all around in front of us. I have to lift my legs to let them pass by. In the dream, I remember this as a strenuous exercise. My father is sleeping next to me. He is sprawled out across two chairs. He is wearing a shirt with back lettering, but the words keep shifting as I try to read what they spell. As I reach out to try to stop the letters from moving, he drowsily awakens and tells me to stop touching him. He actually says, "If you keep touching me, I'm gonna lay you out like I am." After he says this, three men in shorts come over to where we are sitting and try to wake him. They say, "Hello" to him at the same time, intentionally loud and obnoxious. He jolts awake. As they laugh, I assure my dad I had nothing to do with this prank. The Mozart, meanwhile, has gotten more pronounced and my attention is directed toward the gorgeous music. In a brief glimpse of lucidity, I realize this music is not real Mozart, but a figment of my imagination. I marvel at how beautiful and realistic my subconscious rendition of his operatic marches are.

Miscellaneous fragments from the same night:

1. I am explaining to my son how vitamin C works in boosting the immune system. I explain that the vitamin builds a wall through which the microbes are unable to pass. In my dream mind, I see a bubble wall collapse on a bunch of marauding bacteria.

2. I am on vacation in Russia, returning to the bungalow I rented. I am somewhere down by the Black Sea I think, in a coastal resort area. As I enter the door to my place, I notice some people on the road watching me. The walkway from the road to my door is a short wooden bridge, resembling a boardwalk. When I get inside my bungalow I look at myself in a mirror. I look like a pathetic tourist: red hat, white American tennis shoes, preppy shorts and a Hawaiian-themed shirt. No wonder people are looking at me! I am suddenly very conscious I may soon be robbed. Dreamt 1/27/2017

I am investigating an area on earth where there has been recent alien activity reported. There is a huge Chinese or Korean space satellite floating above me in the sky. I am in a quiet village that has become a ghost town, going from home to home and looking in the windows. It is night and the homes are all dark and empty. There are stickers on the outside window panes of the houses that warn of recent alien abductions in the area. I come across one sticker that has a photo of a famous actor who has recently disappeared. It is assumed this actor was abducted by aliens. As I go from home to home reading the stickers, I look out over a field (the village park) and see a luminescent, glowing butterfly which flutters to the ground and slowly transforms into a human figure. The human figure stands up in the distance, glowing with neon radiance. As it walks through the dark park, I can see through its body transparently: the creature's muscular and skeletal systems are fully visible with incandescent lime-green bones and electric orange-neon muscle. It is a beautiful, surreal sight to withhold. I transfix on it as it strides through the park. I am not afraid. While watching it, I suddenly become lucid, check my hands, and discover I am dreaming. But the intensity of the dream is such, that I am totally paralyzed by the awesomeness of the sight and cannot move. My recall fades shortly thereafter. Dreamt 1/27/2017

This lucid dream came about after reciting the mantra, "When I am dreaming, I am aware I that I am dreaming" and visualizing the image on my vision board, which is a picture of two hands during a reality check. I practiced this technique for several days. The resulting dream came about from these efforts:

As I fall asleep, I notice brief HH before sinking down into unconscious sleep. As dream imagery emerges, I notice I am driving my truck. I am travelling down a street near a home I used to live in in the late 70's near Lindenhurst, New York. I notice familiar homes and street signs. I make a turn and my point of perception is at tire-level on the driver's side of the truck. I see the road whizzing by as the wheel hugs the curve and the truck turns down a street. My perception changes and now I am sitting in the driver's seat, looking out the windshield. I pull up behind a large moving van parked in front of a house. I notice my breaks are bad; I really have to press hard to make them work. I begin to realize that this shouldn't be so. IRL my truck's brakes work fine. A beam of awareness enters me and I think, "Could this be a dream?" At once I look at my hands. They do not look like the normal pair of hands on my vision board. They are fat, distorted, grotesquely misshapen. I am dreaming! I begin thinking of all my goals and planned adventures. But almost as soon as my lucidity is registered, I feel myself losing control of the environment. My truck begins to roll backwards. I step on the brakes but it does absolutely nothing. Before I can even begin to stabilize, the scene begins to fade and I return to full wakefulness in my bed. Dreamt 1/25/2017

A very fat man is talking to an old, Italian Godfatheresque character. It looks like they are negotiating a deal. The Godfather suddenly takes out a penknife and proceeds to slice the man, separating his thoracic cavity from his ribcage with clean precision. As the fat man lay on the ground dying, another man comes to finish him off by strangling him but a parade of children march between them, stopping the act. I wake up momentarily and begin counting, "1...I am lucid dreaming...2...I am lucid dreaming...3...I am lucid dreaming..." and slowly drift back to sleep. After several moments of HH, a new dream scenario begins to unfold:

I am back where the killing took place, but this time within a prison of concrete walls and corridors. I walk the length and breadth of the prison, focusing on the cement pattern in the walls. I keep putting my hand on the walls, trying to push through. Although I am seeing my hands, I have not done an RC yet. Yet I keep thinking, "If this were a dream, I could go through these walls..." My hands then begin to meld into the walls, like soft butter. I realize I am lucid. I quickly spin around and leap into the air and begin to float around the prison. As I levitate, I try to remember my dream goals and go over everything I want to do: sex, time travel, etc. but the dream suddenly darkens and I begin to lose control. As I fade out, I hear a girl's voice tell me that the counting method is a bad technique. Dreamt 1/21/2017

I am playing a game behind a big glass window, almost like a virtual old-fashioned pinball game, which started out with me playing it on my iPad, but then quickly morphed into a full-size attraction. It has huge flippers protruding through the glass to propel the ball. I walk outside the glass structure and notice I am naked (bingo dream sign). I do an RC and check my hands: they are deformed. I then look over to see a DC walking towards me, in the parking lot of where that glass pinball game was. It looks like an elven creature from one J.R. Tolkien's LOTR stories. It's very gangly, with big ears and a mouse-like face. Its big, intense eyes peer straight ahead, fixated on something in the far distance as it shambles forward. The mythological-looking creature never looks at me. I try to greet it. It doesn't talk to me.

As he walks past me, my subconscious informs me that this DC is, in fact, me. That this is how I look when I dream; this is the form and the image I take on. I marvel at this, wondering why my subconscious has projected me as in such a alien, non-human way. I figure I'll have a lot of introspective, self-analysis to do come morning. I try to address the creature and tell him that this is a dream. Again, no response; it is as though he is deaf. I think I even try call him by my own name, Paul, but to no avail. This lucid dream is very low-quality and blurry. There is a dirty, ubiquitous fog which permeates the dreamscape.

I follow the creature as he shambles into the building I just came from. The glass window is gone, the gigantic pinball machine which was behind it is gone. The interior now looks like someone's dingy apartment. It reminds me of the inside of a dank mobile home which hasn't been remodeled since 1979. The carpet is dark brown shag, and the kitchen is grotesquely in need of an upgrade. The walls are made of a type flimsy faux-wood paneling which was popular back in the 1970's. There are old, dirty plates and bowls piled up on the countertops. The strange caricature of me goes into the kitchen. I stay in the family room with the brown shag carpet. I walk around in circles, looking down at the carpet.

Because of the foggy, sluggish ambiance of the dream, I am unmotivated to do anything, and I and am reluctant to go anywhere without my dream-double (even though he seems oblivious to my presence). I peer pack into the kitchen and there he is, standing by the sink and eating something from a dish. He still hasn't said a word or looked at me. I decide to commit myself to staying here in this ramshackle abode with him. To make the most of my time, I practice dream stabilization and increasing vividness by rubbing my hands together and focusing on details in the room. I inspect a fire extinguisher hanging on the wall; I scrutinize the individual strands of brown shag in the carpet and I focus intently again on my hands. Every time I look at them they shapeshift. The final time I inspected them, they were black with outline of my fingers glowing with a green and red neon charge. There is a light switch on the wall. It worked (proving yet again that this type of RC can be unreliable).

I eventually lose control and my LD recall fades. Dreamt 1/15/2017

I am talking to a guy in a bar who says he'll bump up my commissions to 65% if he ever becomes boss of my company. I pull out my iPad and show him the sweet deal I just closed. As he looks down at the contract, I look up and see my dead friend Don Wilson leaning against a far wall in the bar. Don died last September in an automobile accident. I forget the guy I am talking to and slowly walk over to my dead friend. As I do so, I realize that I am dreaming. This is a dream!

Don was a funeral director and fellow embalmer I worked with for about 3 years. His death shocked everyone. He was only 45 years old. We were pretty close and got along very well. Seeing him, now, in this LD, was a very beautiful experience. This was by far the most vivid LD I had ever had. As I approached him, I focused intently on his skin, his hair -- and, in particular, on the individual salt-and-pepper strains. Everything was perfect; he was as crystal-clear and identical body-wise as he was IWL. I could even smell his aftershave. I saw him and he looked at me and smiled, then he looked back down. I said, "Don, this is a dream. We are dreaming." He continued to look down, smiling. I touched his arm. He was solid, warm, real. I said, "I am so sorry about what happened to you. We all really miss you. Your mom loves you so much...and so do I." I touched his arm again and he continued to look down and smile. I was in awe of how detailed he was. He looked fantastic. I was tempted to say, "Death becomes you, my friend" but did not. I just stared at his hair. The more I focused on it, the more vivid and brilliant the LD became. I rubbed my hands to ground myself in lucidity even more.

I noticed the lights in the bar were starting to dim. I looked over my shoulder to see what was going on. Don did the same. When I looked back at Don, he was wearing a dark blue pullover sweater with a black zipper that went a quarter of the way down in the front. He wasn't wearing it before. Don was still looking inquisitively up as to why the lights were dimming, and he said with amusement, "Now I know what you mean about this being a dream..." As he said these words, I began to float. I didn't want to float away, but I couldn't stop it. I say to Don, "Look what we can do!" But he just stood there and watched me go up, slowly, like a helium balloon that was let go. My vision went dark as my head went through the ceiling, and I went into the attic. I looked down at my rising feet to see if Don was following me, but he wasn't. I was still looking down for Don when I suddenly heard my son in the TV room yell at his sister. His scream jolted me from the LD and I regained consciousness in my bed. I lay for about five minutes, processing it all. The realness of Don in the LD was so great that I found myself weeping as I poured my coffee. I earnestly thanked my subconscious for the experience, and found myself wishing that Don's mother and sister could have experienced the same. It was truly a miraculous experience.

I am at the zoo with my wife and son. The zoo is indoors and it is empty. We wander the silent corridors peering into the glass animal cages, but all the animals are either absent or asleep. We reach a glass cage filled with water that has two tigers deflated under the water. They look like twin neglected floatation toys sitting on the bottom of a pool. Upon closer look, it appears the door to the cage is damaged. I carefully open the door, expecting a wave of water to gush out, but nothing happens. As I open the door wider to look inside the cage, I suddenly see a HUGE Bengal tiger walk out of his cage. He turns his massive head and looks at me. He begins walking towards me, and I step away in panic and turn to my wife and son. They are asleep on the floor in front of the cage. I desperately try to awaken them, but they are unresponsive.

The tiger emerges from the door and snarls at me. I turn away to run and he chases me. We are in a rotunda and we go round and round and round. The walls and doors of the rotunda are white. I see an opening in the wall up by the ceiling and leap into it and escape his jaws just in time. I now visualize the tiger returning to my sleeping wife and son to devour them. In a panic I run to the zoo's administration offices and burst in shouting, "A tiger's escaped!"

There is a black lady at the information booth, and she quickly gathers a group of people to go and investigate. As we walk back across the zoo grounds, I am unable to remember where the rotunda was located. She keeps asking me which rotunda the tiger was in, and all I can answer is, "The white one." To my great consternation, she tells me she doesn't know of any white rotunda. She then asks me about my family. I tell her the tiger is "guarding" my family. We continue walking until at last we arrive at a red circular building. She tells me this is the only rotunda the zoo has that she knows of. I say in a fury, "But it is red!" She shrugs and says she doesn't know what else she can do. I tell her that if it were her family, she would be in hysterics. This makes her angry, and I abandon her to go search for my wife and son myself.

I crawl up a steep hill on my belly, though some high grass and snow and stumble through several different buildings in my quest to find my family. One building looks like a deserted concert hall. I tell myself that I will always despise tigers from now on. When I exit the concert hall, it is evening outside and I am completely lost. I see some strange highway I do not recognize in the distance, with lights from the cars and trucks whizzing by. I reach for my cellphone to activate my GPS, but the battery is dead. As absolute dread sweeps over me, I suddenly realize I am dreaming. I look up to the dark sky, raise my arms above my head and shout, "Oh Paul! Wake up from this dream now!"

I awaken in my bed and sit up, breathless and terrified. This nightmare was extremely vivid, as I had taken Huperzine-A and Valerian Root extract together in an effort to get past a dry spell. In retrospect, it wasn't very wise and I won't be combining these two herbal supplements again. Dreamt 1/3/2017

While drifting off to sleep after doing the FILD technique, I suddenly became aware of being enveloped by a purple-white haze in my bedroom. I tried to move, but sensed the grip of SP and immediately relaxed, bracing myself for lucidity. The purple haze cleared, and I had a crystal-clear view of my darkened bedroom. I immediately sat up in my bed, did an RC (pinched nose), and discovered I could breathe perfectly through it. Play time!

I got out of bed and flew up like a rocket through my ceiling and out the roof and into the night. I didn't have a plan (something I need to work on), and wound up inside an old, dilapidated warehouse with a DC who was in the image of my brother. He didn't seem to know we were lucid. I told my brother to look at his hands: We're dreaming! I looked at mine and saw I had an ectrodactyly-like disfigurement in both hands, and my nails were black. I rubbed them together to increase the vividness of the scene. I instructed my DC brother to go through the walls and columns in the warehouse with me. He followed me around as we diffused like two ghosts through the concrete walls, back and forth, round and round, in and out. We then flew up together, through the roof of the warehouse and into the night, he by my side. He never spoke to me. We saw another building down below and flew inside through its walls and into a chamber where there was a blue, translucent pool of water. I told my brother to follow me into the pool and I'd show him how we could breathe underwater. We both flew into the pool and went all the way to the bottom, where we sat down, breathing perfectly, and examined the floor of the pool.

When we were done with the pool, I temporarily lost control of the LD and we translocated to another warehouse that was being invaded by insectoid-like zombie figures. They wore gray pants, had black, rectangular heads with white glowing eyes and they slowly advanced toward us with outstretched arms. I imaged myself in a FPS, like Resident Evil, and yelled to my brother, "Let's start taking these fuckers out!" Crossbows manifested in our hands and we began shooting them down. But instead of bolts, the crossbows fired beams of light. I was on a staircase, halfway up, shooting down at them. My brother was beneath me, on the first floor near the base of the stairs, firing at them from his point. I got up close to examine one of the dead zombies that had fallen on the stairs, and saw he was trying to reanimate. I shot him again, at point blank range. He stopped moving. When I looked up, my brother was gone.

In this LD I saw myself as a disembodied ghost (as in basically all my LDs), looking in and "spying" on people who seem to be in WL. After the warehouse zombie shoot'em fest, I decided to lurk among the living and haunt them. I flew out into the night, amidst the downtown suburban city skyscrapers. People were out on the street with their Christmas shopping bags, and there was snow on the ground, with parents holding hands with their children, bundled up and wearing scarfs. It was a cold night. I flew over them and observed the people. Eventually I came to a tall penthouse building with huge glass windows that went up maybe twenty or thirty floors. I flew up midway and saw a young woman sitting with her back to the glass talking to some people inside her apartment. She was attractive and had a long, braided chestnut-colored ponytail and a slender frame. I decided to enter her apartment and observe her and her family more closely. But when I tried this I bounced off the glass. I tried again and failed. After several failed attempts, I became frustrated and kicked her window, making the snow on the outer ledge puff up in a burst. At that moment, she looked over her shoulder, as though she had heard a strange noise or disturbance behind her. After looking out the window with puzzlement and seeing nothing, she turned back around and resumed her conversation. I noticed my fingerprints with pieces of snow and slush were left on the glass.

I flew back into the night, somewhat dismayed that I was not as "omnipotent" in an LD as I thought. I wondered with trepidation if this was going to be the norm: not being able to pass through things anymore. I left the metropolis area and flew into a suburb. There I descended into a neighborhood I recognized from my childhood in Hollywood, Florida. It was late at night and all was quiet. The streetlights shone in the darkness and all the houses were dark. I approached the homes from the back, descending over the backyards, flying lower and lower. I targeted a house and wondered if I'd be able to penetrate the wall. To my relief, I entered through the back wall and stood in the dark kitchen. The occupants were presumably sleeping in their bedrooms. I thought to myself, "They have just been invaded by an astral ghost!" I looked around the silent house, exploring the kitchen and saw there were boxes everywhere and miscellaneous stuff stacked up on tables, as though they were moving or had just moved. I decided to make my way to the bedroom to see who lived here. But before I could, all the boxes on the tables began to blur and shake and move up and down, as though in an earthquake. I heard, "Daddy" and now noticed the bed my physical body was on was moving. Still in the dream house, I realized my seven year-old son had just jumped on the bed to wake me up so I can make him breakfast. Damn, I thought. I returned to my physical body and my conscious mind resumed full control of the wheel. I sat up and hugged and kissed my boy.