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Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #2??: The Curtain of Reality

I’m walking through a darkened hallway in some kind of restaurant with my friend RF. There’s an enormous guy coming down the hallway in the opposite direction, tall, Hispanic, athletic-looking, and probably close to 300 pounds, built like a linebacker. He seems to be coming right for me, so I squeeze myself over to the side wall so that I don’t get flattened. Something about this feels dreamlike, and I become lucid.

I walk further down the hallway toward a door, but before I walk through, the scene changes into a semi-darkness like the void. I rub my hands together and keep walking forward, preparing for the next dream scene. From out of the darkness, a voice says, “Oh, that’s the guy who thinks he’s a wolf.”

For some reason I take this as an affront to my lucidity and I shout back, “I am the motherfucking wolf!” :canislucidus:

The voice falls silent and now I can make out repeated patterns in my field of vision, though it’s not at all clear what the patterns represent. I reach toward them and they respond to me touch, moving like cloth. I go into a long monologue about how “I’m peeling back the curtain of reality” and try to push these shapes aside to see what’s beyond.

Finally the “curtain” parts and I’m in semi-darkness, seated in a huge, ornate movie theater. The seats are filled with people, animals, and even unfamiliar alien creatures. They’re all staring drowsily at the screen, fascinated by what’s playing out there.

I can make out shapes and action on the screen, but don’t study it too closely since I’m fascinated by everything else I’m seeing. I feel like all of these beings (myself included) are gathered here to dream. I narrate to myself, “That’s what dreams are…”

As I look around, I notice that every moviegoer has a little icon above their head which indicates what kind of food they’re eating. One tall, insectile alien has an icon representing Hot Tamales candy bouncing over its head. Not long after noticing this, I wake up.

Very well-meaning but flawed attempt at the North America Task of the Year. (The King Kong one!)

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #128: Donkey Kong Junior

I falsely believe that I have a young niece named Emily that's arriving by plane. I'm waiting with Dad in the airport for her and all of the passengers have gotten out with no sign of Emily at all. I'm becoming fretful. Dad isn't very worried and is loudly telling me stories about how thoroughly the new cereal he is eating "cleaned out his colon". I'm very embarrassed by how loudly he's talking and decide I'd rather go look for Emily.

It's like the old days when you could meet someone at the gate, and I'm allowed to stroll right through the jetway and onto the plane. I walk up and down the rows of seats, but there's no sign of her. But when I double back I find her waiting by a bend in the jetway. She's about 11 or 12, short, blonde, a little pale. I realize that I have never seen her before in my life and become lucid.

There's one of those little doors that leads out to the runway, and I walk through it and start flying toward a city that I see on the horizon. Night either falls quickly or I suffer some kind of memory gap here, because I land at a parking lot in a cluster of buildings. There's some sort of party going on with loud music bleeding out into the parking lot. There are a lot of people milling around in the parking lot itself, and some of them start following me.

I spot my friend "RF" as part of the nearby group and I tell him to "check this out" as I approach one of the parked cars. I decide that the car is as light as an inflatable balloon, lift it, and turn it over on its side.

RF looks stunned and asks me how I did that. I tell him that you just pretend something is the way that you want and you usually find that it is. I become sort of boastful and start showing off. "Look at this car. If I decide that it tastes like cake, it will." I take a huge bite out of one of the tires and it's pretty good! Tastes like a fairly decent birthday cake. Several other people in the crowd join in, taking bites out of the car here and there. I spot my high school friend "Alf" in the crowd, and he makes some remark about how cool this is. Pretty soon, a huge crowd of DCs has surrounded the car and started to devour it. It's cool to watch them consume the car but also vaguely disturbing. Reminds me a bit of a Walking Dead zombie feed.

RF and I walk away from the car along the sidewalk, reaching a building with the mural of a skyscraper painted on it. I suddenly remember the North America "Empire State Building" Task of the Year. The mural doesn't look quite like the Empire State Building, but I decide that I'm going to start climbing it and then turn it into the Empire State Building as I go. I tell RF this is for "Task of the Year" and he says "Go for it." I latch myself to the mural like Spider-Man and start climbing up the wall. It feels really forced at first, but the more I get into it, the more it feels like I'm scaling the side of a tall building.

And now here I am, clinging to the side of the Empire State Building, the wind pulling at my clothes and body. I'm trying to remember what the Task of the Year even involves. (I'm supposed to transform into King Kong, climb to the top, and fight with the military.) I feel a little frustrated with my memory, so I decide that I want to get inside and think about what I'm supposed to be doing. I either enter an open window or phase through a closed one, winding up in a small, quiet marble elevator lobby.

There's an elevator waiting here, and I step inside. It only goes up to "9", and I wince that this is not nearly high enough for the Empire State Building. I press "9", assuming that there will be a new bank of elevators I can take at that point which will bring me all the way up. The elevator begins its ascent and I pace nervously, worrying that I'm buying too much into the mechanics of the dream. I can't remember whether I'm supposed to be ascending normally, climbing the building, or what, so I just go with it.

The elevator doors open on "9" and I step out into a lobby that looks much like the previous one. There's a bulky, square-jawed maintenance man in overalls here. "Hey!" he shouts. "You're not supposed to be here!" With that, he winds up like a baseball pitcher and throws a large crescent wrench right at my head. It clonks straight into my forehead and drops into my right hand. My forehead tingles a bit, but there's no serious pain.

Somehow I now have a wrench in both hands. I feel angry with the guy for attacking me. "You're an asshole!" I inform him and throw both wrenches at his stomach. They bounce off of his torso and he doubles over, glaring at me but not seriously hurt. I feel a little bad and have no interest in going to war with this guy, so I dash into another elevator, stab at a button without looking, "knowing" that it leads to the viewing platform.

Again I wait, and soon the elevator opens up to an open-air room that looks a bit like a bell tower. There's a guy in a lab coat here explaining some scientific breakthrough about lycanthropy and animal transformations in general. I run past him along a plank to a balcony. Now I want to transform into King Kong. I look to my left and there's another skyscraper, even taller than the "Empire State Building" that I'm standing on. On top of this other building stands the cheesiest-looking Godzilla-style lizard monster I've ever seen, and I can't help but chuckle. Looks like all the movie monsters are out and about today.



I start hopping about like a gorilla and imagine myself transforming into King Kong. In my craziness, I manage to leap off of the building. Rather than a fall, there's an odd transition and now I'm just running along a tree-lined street below, roaring like a gorilla and pounding my chest. The chest-pounding feels a little phony but the gorilla roars are amazing. My hands and arms look big and gorilla-like, but I'm not nearly large or hairy enough to be King Kong. I feel more like a big, strong, long-armed dude with a gorilla roar.

Some DCs rush up to attack me, but they're all just regular men in casual street clothes. I shove them away, remembering that I need to get attacked somehow and win, but I'm very confused as to the details. I take a few swats at these DCs and amusingly, they go flying off whenever I hit them. I know that something's off with all of this, though, and that I need to be a lot bigger, I need to be up on top of the building, and I think I need to fight something tougher. The details are really hazy, though, so I just lumber around for a while longer amusing myself until the dream ends.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #114: The Vampire Apocalypse

Wife has opened a restaurant and somehow all of the recipes have been lost. She and I are in some place that looks like a choir room, desperately searching through a pile of hundreds of envelopes for the one that contains them. Suddenly I become lucid, but it's a very low level of lucidity. I grasp that I'm dreaming and I understand that this gives me awesome powers, but I have no idea that I could just ignore this whole recipe thing.

I point at the pile of envelopes, willing the recipes to emerge. One of the envelopes floats a couple of feet in the air and opens, freeing a few sheets of paper that I know have the recipes on them. I grab them out of the air and hand them to Wife. She starts talking excitedly and waving her hands in these grand gestures, but I soon wake up.

I hold still for DEILD, but after a brief wait emerge non-lucid sitting in a small, boxy room that's shaped vaguely like a confessional booth. My friend "Dragon" and I are laughing and swapping stories of all the stupid stuff we did when we were kids. From outside my friend "RF" knocks on the booth and then sort of phases or melts through the wall. I realize that this has to be a dream but immediately wake up.

Back down for DEILD, again winding up in a non-lucid, this time in the hallway of my childhood home. Our neighbor "Mr. G" from when I was a kid is wandering around in our backyard, holding a bag of lawn clippings. I know that he's helping me try to find a 4-leaf clover in this bag of clippings. He becomes angry that I'm not helping and starts throwing the lawn clippings everywhere. I suddenly remember trying to DEILD and become lucid again. There's a door at the back of the house that's not usually there and I walk toward it, preparing to phase. The door swings open just as I approach, though, and again, the dream ends.

I look for another DEILD and again come up non-lucid. I'm at home with Wife now and she's telling me a story of how someone was attacked by a vampire downtown today. We worry about what this means and whether she's safe going to work.

Time advances, and now it's early morning. The sun's just coming up and I'm at the back door, looking out over our back yard toward the horizon. I see a swarm of bats approaching and I know that overnight vampirism has become a plague that's spread throughout the world. I tell Wife that we have to hide, and we run upstairs to the bedroom to bunker ourselves in.

Once upstairs I peer out of a tiny window to the street below. About a dozen vampires are congregating on the street with a handful of human prisoners. The leader of the vampires, blonde and dressed completely in black, shouts bizarre warnings and threats to those of us holed up in our homes. He kicks one of the prisoners, a middle-aged man, to the ground, sprays him with liquid from some kind of squeeze bottle, and lights him on fire.

I duck down from the window, shaken and frightened. "They're killing everyone," I say to Wife. "Is this like what happens in The Passage? I haven't read that far yet." (The Passage is a book that I'm slowly reading.)

Wife nods. "It's exactly the same."

"Okay," I say. "What did they do? How do we fight these things?"

She shakes her head gravely. "I can't give spoilers."

I think this makes complete sense. "You're right. Maybe if we shoot them in the head...?" I now have the AR-15 in my hands.

"That won't work," she says. Then from out of nowhere, she very graphically and directly demands that we have sex. This is so completely out of character (particularly in a vampire apocalypse) that I realize it's all a dream.

"Don't worry," I say. "It's just a dream." I kiss her for a moment. In spite of her earlier insistences, the mood is completely non-sexual. I stand up, thinking about phasing outside.

"What are you doing?" she says. "Stay down!"

"This is a dream. There's nothing to worry about." But I can see that she doesn't believe me. I know that she's just a DC, but at this point I'm really attached. I decide that I'll just carry her out of this scene, change locations, and hopefully this nasty dream plot will die off. I kneel down to scoop her up as the dream fades...