Recent DJ Posts

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.

This was the second of two LDs from last night.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #54: Into the Gray Matter

I'm seated on a train, looking out the window as a grassy landscape rolls by. An older lady sits down on the seat directly across from me so that we face each other. She tells me that she’s AH's mom. (AH is a friend from way back that I've lost touch with.) I'd never met her mom before, and we chat pleasantly for a bit. But soon I realize that AH's mother passed away before I'd even met AH herself.

The mother looks at me suspiciously the moment that I become lucid. She starts rocking in her seat, waving her finger at me, and hectoring me about why I chose that seat on the train and what business did I have on her train, anyway? She's speaking to me so aggressively and angrily that I'm taken aback. My fresh lucidity can't bear up and the scene blacks out. I refuse to believe that the LD is over, though, and I wait just a moment before I hear voices.

Through the darkness, I clearly hear Wife saying, “Sorry, guys, it’s time for bed.” I can hear my kids laughing and running around. It’s very loud and sounds incredibly real. Out loud, I say, “I know that I’m still asleep and that this is still a dream.” My voice, too, sounds shockingly real, and I can’t help but worry that I’m saying all of this in waking life as well.

I feel the kids hopping around me on the bed, but I remind myself that this is just my dream body feeling this, not my real one. My son E bounces nearby, gleefully saying, "Daddy's sleepin! Daddy's sleeeeeepin!" It seems so real that I feel like my lucidity is in jeopardy. I raise my voice until I'm almost shouting, "This is a lucid dream" over and over.

Suddenly, the voices stop and I find myself viewing a simple office that contains only a swivel chair and a desk with a hologram projected over the top of it. The hologram is a fully 3-d, semi-transparent projection of a human brain. I find that by thinking about it, I can rotate this hologram to the left or right.

I have no dream body, but as my curiosity grows, I find that I can move my viewpoint throughout the room, and I zoom in close on the brain. My perspective sinks into the brain itself and I zoom closer and closer until finally I can perceive individual synapses. I see neurotransmitters flowing across the synaptic cleft! To me they look like small, clear beads or little bubbles. I wonder what kind of neurotransmitter I'm looking at.

I watch this strange interplay for a moment, wondering whether I’m looking at my own brain or someone else’s. I travel around inside of this brain for a while before I wake up.

I had this short lucid dream during a very brief mid-morning nap. Lucid napping is a first for me. I didn't perform at my best in-dream and I allow the dream to end much too soon. Also, I get beat up by a little kid. But hey, lucid is lucid! Always learning.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #22: Unwelcome Houseguests

I'm holding hands with my two toddler-age sons, preparing to go outside for a walk. Before we reach the front door of th house, twin boys with curly blonde hair open the door and scurry inside. They look to be about eight years old and are complete strangers to me. This feels strange, and soon I'm lucid.

I decide that I don't want these weird kids running around in my house so I start ushering them out the door. They seem to cheerfully accept getting kicked out so my thoughts turn to lucid goals. I remember that I wanted to do the Task of the Month and replace my head with a pumpkin. But what was the other one? Ah yes, get a vampire, werewolf, or zombie to bite me. Now I remember.

Just as I'm thinking this (and probably because I'm thinking this), the twin on my left suddenly lunges at me and bites me hard on the left pec, right by my armpit. He snarls like a dog, whipping his head back and forth. I'm taken completely by surprise, both by the suddenness of the attack and by how much it actually hurts. I try to shout some kind of command at him but all that comes out is this pathetic yowl.

I blank out for a fraction of a second and my perspective switches to the top of the stairs, looking down at the scene of the attack. I have no dream body and everyone (me, my kids, the twins) is now gone from the scene. My view is turned on its side, as if I were lying down. I try to move, try to RC, but with no body there's not much that I can do.

I imagine that I'm lying here because I passed out and I'm just waking up. This seems to work! I have hands and a body again and I slowly get to me feet. Just then, I hear the sound of my alarm clock and voluntarily wake up. But when I wake up, it's only been 15 minutes since I laid down! The alarm wasn't anywhere close to going off and I fooled myself into waking up for no reason.

This was easily my wildest, trippiest lucid dream of all time. A big first from this one was meeting my doppelganger. Confusion, chaos and questions of identity reigned in this LD and what little control I had amounted to very little in the end. Very different from my usual LD fare but fun nonetheless.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #21: Technicolor Thomas Jefferson

It's nighttime and I'm standing in the shadow of a deserted overpass, talking on a cellphone. I'm some sort of drug dealer or smuggler, talking to one of my scumbag smuggling associates about when and where our next deal will go down. The conversation ends, and I start walking back across a parking lot to my car, a silver Mercedes Benz.

As I'm walking, I get that familiar feeling of recognition and think, "This isn't me. I'm not a criminal. Am I just dreaming this?" I become lucid and look for the nearest piece of usable scenery. Before I can get anywhere, though, darkness begins pressing down on me and I feel the dream fading. I look at my hands but they're vague and insubstantial, with wispy ribbons of skin hanging off of them.

My vision goes completely black but I keep repeating, "I'm still dreaming" and refuse to wake up. Jumbles of random letters fall slowly from the top to the bottom of my field of vision. I reach for the letters, trying to feel them, turn them into some kind of new dream scene. Even though I can't see my hands, I finally manage to grab a letter and squeeze it. It feels like a squishy piece of felt. The letter suddenly squirts out of my hands and floats away. I flail for a new letter.

Now I'm back in bed and my hands are thrashing in front of me. Out loud, I'm saying "I'm still dreaming", although I no longer believe it. Wife rolls over and says, "What are you doing?" I look over at the alarm clock and see that the numbers are flashing at random. Still dreaming, indeed. "It's okay," I tell her. "Go back to sleep." I get out of bed and walk toward the bathroom, planning to go for the "pumpkinhead" Task of the Month using the bathroom mirror.

Before I make it to the bathroom, the image of a huge, hissing black cat is stamped across my vision. Behind this cat I still see my first-person perspective but much of it is now obscured. Then another stamped image over that, this time of a woodworking bench covered with tools. Then an old woman pushing a cart. Then another, and another, and another each new image papering over the last.

Finally, things settle onto an image of Thomas Jefferson reading in a comfortable-looking chair. He's super-saturated with color, just like the boldest Technicolor films. Think Wizard of Oz but with the saturation even more intense. I remind myself, "I'm dreaming" and a banner reading "I'M DREAMING!!!" appears over Thomas Jefferson's head. He glances up from his book, sees the banner, then stares straight at me in surprise.

Suddenly, I'm in the passenger seat of a car, heading west on a road near my office. It feels strange, so I try to remember how I got there. I remember Technicolor Thomas Jefferson and I'm immediately lucid again. I look over at the driver of the car and I realize that the driver is me. Only it's not really me but a Dream Character version of myself. I can hear my double's thoughts but I can't influence him and I see that I'm a disembodied observer with no dream body of my own.

I hear my double think, "I've got to go back to where it started. Back to where I became lucid. I have to make it happen again." My double pulls into a parking garage and we're soon wandering the halls of an office building. My double visits each office that he finds, and in every one we see friends and old coworkers. Finally, my doppelganger steps into an office shared by two female twins (IWL friends of mine) and a woman who calls herself Susan.

The twins greet my double and welcome him to their office but Susan isn't buying it. She shakes her head and says, "That isn't your friend. I don't know what that is, but your friend is there." Susan points, not at my double but at me, the spot from which I am observing with no dream body. The twins turn to look, not comprehending and I wake up.

01/13/2012
Dream Fragment One
I had gone to a club with T, in Orlando, and we had taken some 'skates'. During the course of the night, I'd seen him about to get into a fight with some random, really tall, dude. They were in each others' faces, and apparently only seconds away from throwing hands. Attempting to intervene, I stepped between them, somewhat sliding them apart with my hands. Obviously upset with this, the tall guy reaches over and shoves me backward, forcefully, as if trying to knock me to the floor. I instinctively rebounded back at him with a lunging fist to his jaw, completely laying him out. In no time at all, I was being ushered outside by the police, and questioned about what happened. I don't remember much of the interrogation, but they ended up letting me go.


Dream Two
"Tatano"

I was exploring a mine, or some other sort of underground cave, which was flooded with waist-deep water. A small ledge rimmed the outer edges of the chamber that I was in, along with a few friends of mine. The water was very murky and someone soon exclaimed there was something moving in the water. Shortly afterward, a surge of current came through this waterway, and some of us began to get swept away and toward a dark tunnel ahead. We were able to hang onto the wall, where the current was much weaker then in the center, and pull ourselves out of the water and onto the ledge.

While we were sitting there on this leg - pretty much stuck, until the current subsided enough for us to make our way back out the way we came - we encountered another group of people coming (somehow) out of the cave that we were almost just swept into. They were of either Native or Latin American descent, and all carrying guns. Apparently, it was some kind of illegal faction or cartel. I also had a small pistol on my hip, but there were more of them than there were of us, and I figured drawing on them would probably be the worst mistake I could make. The leader of the group made some rambling threat to us about how "the Tatano Comes" for the people of our region, however, they didn't really go into detail about just what 'The Tatano' was. After holding us for a brief period, they let us go home. We were all terrified, though, because they had issued the threat not necessarily to us as individuals, but to all of the people in our community. They were extremely vague, though, so even though we knew that they were planning something, we didn't exactly know what. Once back in our community (apparently, we shared a neighborhood), we started theorizing what they meant by 'The Tatano Comes'. I couldn't figure out if they meant some kind of abominable monster or if 'The Tatano' was the name of their outfit, and they were going to raid our community with guns and whatnot.

It turned out to be the latter. A short while after our encounter, the men had begun to invade our neighborhood. It was now the dead of winter (and was snowing heavily, even though I live in Florida), and I was now watching the dream from a disembodied perspective. I was watching a tiny Latina friend, from my earlier group (whom I believe is someone I know IRL, but am not sure), and she was dressed in a ninja dogi. My perspective followed her as she sneaked around through the night time snow flurries, using stealth to sneak up on the individual, occupying members of 'The Tatano', silently executing them, one by one.

(Sometime during the day after this dream, I came to realize that this dream was directly influenced by a mission that I'd played on Skyrim, before bed. I'd tried to incubate a Skyrim related dream, while playing, and didn't even recognize the similarities, because of how well-hidden they were. In the game, I had to break into a cave belonging to a group of bandits, who wore primitive, Native American-esque outfits. The cave was slightly filled with water. There was a lot of tension building up, while I made my way into and through the cave, stealthily taking down as many opponents, individually, as I could. The apparent 'boss' of these bandits was a female, which might be the reason why I found the tiny female in my group to be such a prominent character.)


Dream Fragment Three
(This entire dream was disembodied, though I only remember two very brief scenes.)
I was watching Marty McFly (Back to the Future) test out a hoverboard in Doc Brown's garage/lab. I got the distinct impression that this was still the 1985 reality, and that the hover-board was either brought back from the future or built from the design of the one he had in the future (and then the past). There was some little kid hanging out in the garage, too, and he said something like "whoa! A hover-board!" and, even though I was just kind of observing this dream, passively, I remember wondering just how this kid from the '80s knew what a hover-board was.

Later, Marty was at home with his girlfriend from the movie. She'd gotten around to telling him that she was pregnant and they were going to have a baby. They were both overjoyed with the whole thing, and began making love on the couch. Again, even though I was nothing but a spectator, I remember becoming a bit jealous at the amount of raw emotion and passion I was seeing in the scene.



01/17/2012
Dream Fragment
(Unfortunately, I've pretty much lost all of the details to this dream. I had watched the movie The Immortals before going to bed, so the dream was heavily based upon that.)

There was some epic, mythological battle going on, and I was entrusted by the Gods to wield Poseidon's trident. Of course, I was reluctant to take on the responsibility, but the deities (whomever they were) were convinced that I had it within me to succeed in destroying Earth's foes. The main thing that I can remember is a part in the battle where I was treading water in a seemingly bottomless ocean or harbor or something. There was an opponent coming up at me from the depths, and I kept firing shot after shot of golden light from Poseidon's trident, down toward my attacker. Every desperate shot pushed him/it further and further deeper into the water beneath me, as I just continued frantically blasting away from the surface. There was so much more that went on in this crazy, action-packed dream, but I really don't recall anything else.



01/20/2012
Dream Fragment
(I successfully incubated a guitar-related dream, after a night of guitar practice.)
The only thing I really remember was that I was teaching someone to play guitar, focusing mostly on fingering the fretboard. That's about it.



01/22/2012
Dream One
"Indecent Proposal"

I was in my old neighborhood, at the house my baby's mom and I used to share with her dad. It was late at night, and some unknown guy comes by. I happened to see him standing on the porch, through my bedroom window, and was wondering just wtf he was up to. When I went outside to question him, he told me that he was new to the area and thought that someone else lived here. We started talking for a moment and he told me that he'd been going around the neighborhood meeting people and had been set up to meet some girls in a nearby house, for some fun. He said that I seemed pretty cool, and he invited me to tag along. Apparently, my ex and I were still together, and I told him that I wouldn't be able to join him. He then smiled and asked if my girl was a freak, because I could just bring her along. Lol.

Again, I respectfully declined and sent him on his way. After that, I remember having a brief conversation with my ex's dad, whom I was surprised to find was actually home at the time. Then, sometime later still, I was out on the porch again and saw that the guy I'd met earlier was coming back around in the direction of our house, with a girl on each arm. He noticed me standing around outside and, just as he was restating his offer for me to come hang out with them, I woke up.


Dream Fragment Two
I was with some friends and family, at some kind of massive protest downtown - like an OWS function or something. There was an insane crowd in the street. My mom was with us, and I think my friend JS was there. The more the night went on, the more volatile things were becoming, and we were beginning to fear that violence was going to erupt, any moment. Indeed, in one corner of the sea of people, a commotion started. The small scuffle led to a lot of pushing and shoving and angry words, in that region of the crowd. The last thing I remember is my group wading through a crowd of the potential rioters, in order to have some words with the more important figure heads of the event, and try to help them restore order.