Recent DJ Posts

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #2??: One Last Mission

I’m heading upstairs to change my lightbulbs, but arrive to find that we’ve got tons of people upstairs visiting while my father-in-law changes them for me. I feel embarrassed, as if it looks like I never take care of anything around the house. He even somehow installed light bulbs with little solar panels attached to them, which I’ve never even heard of!

I head downstairs, feeling inadequate. I see that we have a big video screen that greets people at the front door. I see that it’s programmed to show a big story about turncoat spies within some US government agency. It’s some kind of huge story and these traitors are all over the news. As I’m heading into the kitchen, thinking about this fancy video monitor and the fancy lightbulbs, I realize that this feels a whole lot like a dream.

My father-in-law joins me downstairs and I say, “Hey, [Father-in-law], I’ve got an even cooler way to change lightbulbs!” I gesture at one of the recess lights in the kitchen ceiling and with a couple quick hand gestures, pull it out, summon a new one, and place it into the socket. It lights up!

He looks amazed and asks me how I did that. “This is actually a lucid dream,” I admit. “You can really do anything here.” He nods in acknowledgement, still looking impressed.

I recall my conversation yesterday with Iokheira where we were talking about cool dream ideas that people had never, ever done. I chose one of the ones we had decided was awesome enough that we were going to try: werewolf skydiving! :canislucidus: I phase through an external, curtained door out onto a back patio.

There’s a long row of side-by-side deck chairs here, with lots of people lounging around and relaxing. I look at the woman closest to the wall, but no, this isn’t Iokheira . One chair over, though is a group of three women sitting together, and on the left is Iokheira ! She hops out of the chair and we hug.

“It’s great to see you!” I say.

“Great to see you too!” she says and then starts nodding as I’m about to say, “Do you remember what we’d planned to try in this dream?” I can tell that she already knows the plan is werewolf skydiving.

Iokheira throws on a pair of aviator sunglasses, grabs my hand, and strides forward. We walk through a large yard into some suburban streets. She says, “Dylan (??) and Romero tried to tell me that this is my last mission. We’ll see about that...” I get the idea that she’s some kind of spy or secret agent. “The agency’s in [turmoil? chaos?] right now.”

I’m strongly sensing a backstory where she’s an agent in some kind of secret government agency. I wonder if it’s some kind of special division for werewolves. We go past a bus stop to a grassy field, while she continues to explain some more of the backstory. I wonder whether there will be a cliff at the end of this field for a possible BASE jump! Before we get to anything like that, though, the dream ends.

In this dream I was at my cabin with my father in-law. We were working on installing a chimney for the new fireplace on the 2nd storey. We were both kneeling, and doing something with the pipes. I noticed that all the walls on the 2nd storey had insulation and vapor barrier; however in the waking world, this is not the case. My cabin’s not insulated yet! Yaaay, I’m dreaming! I said to my ‘father in-law’, “We’ve got to be dreaming!” He stood up and looked around the cabin and said, “I think you’re right?” He looked at me with a shocked look of disbelief, and then he rubbed his eyes.

The 2nd storey floor then lowered to the first floor and we stepped off. I have no idea why the floor lowered. Strangely, I didn’t feel the floor lowering; maybe the 1st floor rose up to the 2nd. I said to my father in-law, “Watch me float!” I jumped up in the air a couple of feet and then slowly floated back down, and repeated this one more time. He stood perfectly still, with a broad stance, and stared me straight into my eyes. He opened his eyes so wide that his irises had white all the way around. He then said, “I’m having a real hard time with this.” My stressed father in-law then rubbed his eyes continuously and started to stumble around. All of a sudden, my son walked around the corner, and I started to describe to him what was happening. Fyi, my son has become sort of a dream guide to me over the last 6 months. Without warning, I woke up.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #196: Wonderful Distractions

I’m lying on my side anticipating a lucid dream. I sense the transition into a dream, but my dream body is lying on its side in the same position as my waking life body. I approach this in an OBE style and will myself to roll out of bed onto the floor. I ooze off of the edge of the bed and drift gently to the floor.

My vision is dark at this point, so I spend a moment chilling out and digging my hands into the carpet to build up my physical sensations of the scene. After everything feels right, I stand up and look out over the bed. Wife has completely buried herself under the comforter. I throw the covers back and she sits up, blinking in the daylight which streams in through the window.

I’m struck by the clarity of the scene. There’s a slight haze at the edges of my vision, but even though there’s a dreaminess to everything I see, it all looks incredibly realistic. She gets out of bed and I follow her toward our walk-in closet while I try to remember my goals.

The structure of our closet looks the same as waking life except for the fact that it’s grown much larger. There are two attractive women standing there, an Asian woman and a shorter lady with brown hair, just sort of hanging around and talking to each other. Hanging around three cute DCs makes me forget all other goals and (somewhat complex) sexytime commences.

After a few moments Wife says, “We forgot to close the bedroom door!” as if she’s afraid that the kids will barge in. I reluctantly leave the closet to go check on this, but find that the door’s already shut tight.

“Everything’s fine,” I say, and when I turn back to the closet, the other two women have vanished. I’m also surprised to see that it’s night outside now. I look out through the window and see that there’s a tow truck out front hauling off a cute little car that’s shaped like a phone booth. “Hey check this out!” I tell Wife.

“That’s a shame,” she says. We watch as the tow truck drives off.

When I turn back toward the bed, I see a freckled woman in her early 20s laying on our bed. She’s wearing shorts and flopped on her stomach, reading some kind of pamphlet. I’m too far gone to think of goals at this point, so this leads to some additional sexytime with Wife and this newest DC.

Afterward, I get up from the bed and feel the scene darkening. I look at my hands and I can see the light fading from the dream fast. I dig my hands into the carpet, but before long I have a false awakening where I hear my father-in-law shout, “3 AM faaaaail!” I'm confused for a moment and then “remember” that a bunch of us are staying at some vacation house and needed to wake up at 3 AM for some reason.

I walk out of the room, feeling sleepy, and see my cousin SU. “Hey, did you hear? JP Morgan is going under.” I’m astonished to hear this.

My brother-in-law Muppet says, “This pisses me off so much.”

“That we’ll wind up bailing out a huge bank?” I ask.

“No,” Muppet says, and launches into a long, disjointed speech about finance. After a while I realize that this person isn’t even Muppet anymore but some guy I don’t recognize. I wonder how I got so confused and eventually pull myself away from the conversation shortly before the dream ends.

Long dream! I think that in all this dream may have gone for about 30 minutes. It's got me excited about the Great Pyramid Task of the Year again!

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #139: Kunoichi

I have a false awakening in some kind of luxury hotel suite, feeling frustrated that I failed to have a lucid dream. All of the lights are on, and a digital clock on the kitchen counter tells me that it's 4:45 AM. Okay, I still have a little time left to have a lucid dream.

Suddenly I realize that Wife isn't here and I panic. I have a false memory that she went out just as I was going to sleep and I start freaking out that something has happened to her. Two men walk into the suite from the adjoining balcony and I run at them, demanding that they tell me where she is. They look bemused by the intensity of my reaction and I wonder whether this could all be a dream. I try the nose pinch reality check and become lucid.

Ignoring these two random guys, I phase through a glass door out to the balcony. Rather than go leaping off, I float up a few feet first (just to be safe) before flying out into the early morning sky. I'm about 80 feet up, and I swoop down toward a park that I see below me, landing near a tree. I notice that the tree looks amusingly pixellated and I remember my goal of trying to maximize dream vividness. I focus on drawing out the detail of the tree, feeling its bark and studying its needles until it becomes extremely vivid.

I follow a dirt path toward a mall, scooping up a handful of reddish dirt and (for some reason) popping it into my mouth. (It tastes about like you'd expect.) At this point, there's a long segment of the dream where my memory gets a little hazy, but I recall that it was fairly long, involved me travelling through a shopping mall and flying around a bit between levels. I remember flying close by a harried-looking mom struggling to manage a pair of kids and a pair of shopping bags, a bright central area, and at one point a black guy in a purple dress shirt gives me a thumbs up when I fly by.

Finally I leave the mall through an emergency exit and emerge in an alley. A man slouches lazily against the wall and farther away a dark-haired teenage girl is sitting on a stack of shipping palettes. I look at each of them in turn and they immediately return my gaze. I'm struck by the subtlety in the way their faces move, blink, and shift so realistically.

As I'm deciding which way to go down this alley, I remember the Africa Task of the year (fix the Great Sphinx then ride her to the top of the Great Pyramid.) I decide that the Great Pyramid is just at the end of the alley, imagine it in detail, then turn around with the image still firmly in my end.

I'm shocked by how well this works. I walk out of the alley onto a windy landscape of sand dunes. In the distance I see an enormous version of the Great Pyramid dominating the horizon, probably four times larger than the real thing. Dark storm clouds roll violently above the Pyramid. At the top of the Pyramid, the wind is so strong that I see stones rolling off of the top and tumbling down the side.



I run over the dunes toward the Pyramid and as I get closer I see not just one Great Sphinx but probably a dozen of them scattered near the Pyramid's base. Some of them are in a horrible state of disrepair, but this doesn't worry me. If I can fix her nose, I can fix everything else too.

As I'm approaching the top of one dune, a pair of female ninja dressed in red appear and come racing toward me, each wielding a pair of sai. The first one leaps at me and I force-push her to the side so that she flies past me. The second I force-push directly forward and she flops onto her back on the dune. I walk past her and I watch over my shoulder as the two of them regroup for another attack. I hold out my hands toward them and jokingly say "Now kiss!" They glare at me like I'm a huge pervert and I feel a little embarrassed. (This is a nerdy reference to this meme.) One ninja gives the other a quick peck on the cheek and then they return to glaring at me.

I say something about how I was only joking and that I drank a lot of peppermint tea before bed, and as I'm going on and on explaining myself, the two ninja start making out. I realize that all my blah blah blah is only making things worse and I'm feeling sexy and distracted. I turn back toward the Pyramid but the landscape doesn't seem stable anymore. I wind up in the void.

I rub my hands together to stay locked in and start feeling the floor, trying to turn the ground back into sand so I can return to the Pyramid. I go at this for a good while. After roughly a full minute, the floor starts feeling like carpeting and I emerge in what looks like a dormitory. I walk out into a nearby hall and run into a college friend that I've lost touch with (and is notorious for being hard to reach.) I ask him how he's been and he gives me an email address (!) and promises to respond if I email him at that address. I make him repeat the promise (which amuses him) and bid him goodbye before phasing through a glass door to a second-floor walkway.

My father-in-law is standing nearby with a few elderly Asian men and women. I jump onto the railing and start pulling myself onto the awning when I feel hands grasping at my legs and shouts of "You'll hurt yourself!" and "Are you crazy?" They pull me back down to the balcony and my father-in-law starts explaining to the other DCs that I'm "special". I fly down the walkway to provide a visual aid and the DCs react by speaking in astonished Mandarin. I think about how amazingly realistic this Mandarin sounds but then think, oh yeah... of course it sounds realistic to me. It's what I think Mandarin sounds like.

I fly off of the walkway, landing in front of an entrance to the same mall I was at earlier. I decide to retrace my steps through the mall, and I pass through a store that sells little pet sweaters for tiny dogs. Little sweater-clad dogs roam everywhere. I exit the store and it isn't long before I have a false awakening back in the same dorm room, no longer lucid.

I walk outside to find that it's daylight out. NewArtemis and her husband are standing nearby. We say hey, not at all surprised to see one another. Art lays down on the sidewalk, still participating in the conversation but also trying to sleep by curling up with this big canvas bookbag she's holding. I tell Art and her husband about the dream I just had, mentioning that I went through a store "that sells sweaters for those little yappy dogs". Immediately a little white yappy dog comes crawling out of Art's book bag, dressed in a green sweater. "Seriously?" I say, feeling like a jerk. "I'm sorry." She laughs and says it's cool.

Art seems to kind of fall asleep and I talk with her husband for a while about dogs, telling him they did the right thing by not getting huge, crazy dogs like us. I look down and notice that Art's hair has changed and become really curly and sort of red. It seems weird to me but since her husband doesn't say anything, I figure this is normal. He and I talk about other random stuff for a while until the dream ends.