All DJ Entries

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #166: The Melatonin Tunnels

I'm walking along an underground tunnel that looks a bit like a subway station. For some reason, melatonin is tightly and suspiciously regulated in this world and I've just gotten the license to take some. I'm vaguely aware that I hope this will make me have a lucid dream.

I'm passing by a bunch of ticket windows where old, serious-looking men stare out at me. I'm nervous that I've done something wrong, but I'm so excited about my melatonin privileges that I don't worry too much about it.

I see Wife up ahead and I wave hugely to her. She looks a little embarrassed by how excited I am. "I took some melatonin!" I shout to her.

"Very good, sweetie," she says in a much quieter voice, cutting her eyes from side to side in embarrassment. I'm very excited about the possibility of a lucid, which makes me realize that I'm having one right now.

I say something to Wife indicating that it worked and she nods, smiling slightly. She leads me down the tunnel through a door into what looks like a cafeteria with folding tables laid out. Wife's extremely purposeful and is taking me through what seems to be a mandatory process, so I go with it. We stop at a table and there's some kind of form we're supposed to fill out. But Wife just briefly lays her hand down on the form, leaving a little Wife hand-print on there and she's apparently all done. I do the same and we move past the table.

We pass through a doorway into a room that looks a little like my new office. Waiting to greet us near a desk is an attractive woman in her late 20s, Asian, with glasses and a vaguely librarian sort of look. She says a few things about melatonin, showing us a piece of metal pipe where melatonin apparently grows naturally and can be harvested from. She's very friendly and cute and I begin vaguely wondering whether she and Wife would be interested in any sexytime.

The line moves on before I can figure this out, though, and we proceed into a tunnel of stone blocks. As we're walking along, the tunnel becomes crowded with a flood of running girls and young women, all chattering excitedly and moving toward a huge wicker basket that's sitting in the center of a nearby room. The girls elbow roughly past me as they move toward whatever's in that basket, and I become incredibly curious about what's in there.

By the time I get to the basket, Wife has disappeared into the crowd. The basket is filled with little handheld video game consoles, so I grab one. I work my way out through the crowd of girls as they continue pulling these little handhelds out of this apparently-bottomless basket, each of them running off excitedly as they grab one.

I stare at my little handheld and it comes on. There's a picture of a cartoonish lizard with its tongue sticking out. The text on the screen keeps shifting, but it seems to be accusing me of breaking some kind of game rule. The word choice is so strange and keeps shifting so much that it's hard to be sure. I assume that the problem is that this handheld is for girls and dudes are not supposed to use it. But too bad, I got one, it's my dream, and I'm playing it.

The screen shifts to the image of a handful of deer playing in a gently-flowing stream. It looks like a beautiful scene and I get the sense that it's taking place somewhere high in the hills. I remember Nyx and Xanous talking about moving into the image of a television so I bring the handheld super close to my face and try to make myself a part of the scene.

No matter what I do, though, I can't seem to get rid of the border that defines the edge of the screen. The image is up close and very vivid but that border starts driving me nuts. I really try this for a while. I feel like I'm close but know that I'm not getting some part of what I ought to be doing and the dream ends before I can figure it out.

11/18/13 LD #72 Late morning quick wbtb led to an awareness dild where I floated around the room and structure(drew it un-artistically), found Girl Friday and had a great time between the sheets. Dream sign mantra seems to be yielding some results but this one had more to do with awareness that the location was not in the same condition as it is in waking life...basically it was in the middle of remodeling.

---

11/19/13 What is really strange is that one of my dream signs that only comes around maybe once a month but is usually a lucidity inducer (my deceased father in law) has shown up the last 2 nights and went right over my head (I assume my mantra incubated him into my dreams)...yet last night it may have kept me going in a more meaningful dream that was really quite special to me personally...it was my wife as a 2 year old coming up to me and she was just so darn cute...I didn't know her that young but I assume the DC was created from pictures I have seen of her around that age...(I am not posting my other dreams, getting lazy to and besides I have them in my personal journal) The dream:
Special one, false awakening into a fluffy bed with lots of comforters I can hear the train outside and I think that is strange this is not a place where I normally hear a train, it feels like its a house near (next town south) but perhaps it is the house on M. I get up and go to the living room and sit on the couch...later father-in-law gets up from bed I assume and comes and sits next to me as well as someone else gets up at the same time (feels like it is the strange version of my mother in law from the previous night's dream). He's telling me that he was seeing (this mother-in-law DC) or whoever doing something like a yoga pose where she's starts off on her back and legs up in the air and he's kind of wondering why does she do that, it seems like it has something to do with being able to lucid dream. A little kid walks by in the hall on the far side of the room, maybe about 2 years old and I hold my hands out and say come here about 3 times quickly and the kid comes towards me and surprisingly it looks like a young little (my wife's name)!! She is just so adorable. She has short hair and it just looks like her, like her pictures or like a really good representation of what my mind would think she would look when she was that age. She comes towards me but my father-in-law(her father) picks her up and it looks like she's fussing a little bit like she wants to come over to me and I say no its okay stay with (father-in-law) about 3 times as I rub her shoulder and arm in assurance. It feels like this was about to make me lucid as I woke up. As I'm laying in bed awake I think about how neat it is almost like traveling back in time to see her when she was young when she looked so darling. I also wondered if perhaps it was supposed to be our baby since I've been dreaming a lot about babies lately (no baby expected that I know of!).

This is the first of three lucid dreams from this morning.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #163: Indoor Swim Lesson

I’m standing in the master bedroom, thinking about lucid dreaming when it occurs to me that I’m having one right now. I hear Wife getting the kids ready for an activity nearby. My first instinct is to go see what they’re up to but instead I decide to work on a task.

I remember the Great Barrier Reef Task of the Year. I walk around the master bedroom a bit, trying to figure out whether there’s anything here I can use as an easy bridge to the Great Barrier Reef.

I wind up standing in front of our closed television cabinet, staring. I have some vague idea of watching a related TV program, but it all sounds too complex. Instead I start trying to swim my hands and imagine that I’m in the water. There’s a confusing moment where my feet float off the ground for a moment but I pretty quickly plunge into the void after that.

I try to keep up the swimming motion but for some reason my right arm is now pinned to my body. I feel very confused about this. I wonder if I’m sleeping on my stomach and becoming aware of my physical body, but quickly try to shift away from this unhelpful line of thinking.

I flail around trying to swim with just my left arm for a bit. It feels awkward but at least I seem to be in some kind of water. My feet brush along the bottom of this “ocean” I’m in and it feels like my bare feet are touching sand. My breathing starts feeling a bit choked (not like drowning, but more like my throat needs to be cleared) and I wake up.

13.11.2013

Riding a turtle, biting and breaking a shark in two and completing the ToTM underwater. (DILD)

NON-DREAM DREAM LUCID

Both tasks of the month and third task of the year done... only 3 ToTY to go (hence I started working on them on mid October!) However, I L-DEILDed into a brand new dream and did a 4th Task of the Year, which I will report in a different one.


I was with some friends outside doing some camping and we were chatting about ET beings and ESP. One of them, had firecrackers and lit one that looked like a tennis ball. it blew up a few times and then, it turned into a grayish tennis ball. I was told that it would take between 3-4 minutes to blow up. We started to play catch and playing the game "bomb" with it. I felt it was dangerous as we were kicking it and grabbing it with our hands, it could blow away one of our hands if we were unlucky, talk about a risky "bomb" game. I had the guts to run down so stairs, grab it with my hand and fling it away. I successfully did and it went to one of my friends. As my friend hit it, it started to explote but did not hurt my friend. It went under my car and I was worried it would blow up my car, but nothing happened.

I then went to an airport for some reason with my wife and we traeveled to Australia. As soon as I entered the plane, I was in australia already (there was no plane... the door to the plane it ported me to Australia.) We were going to some sort of hotel and I realized there was some sort of event. I felt it was about Psychic Mediumship and wondered if I could join the class to sharpen my skills. I saw a couple people chatting and it appeared it was a Christian gathering. I felt threathened as most Christians dislike Psychics. One of the gals who was very friendly tried to flirt with me, but I was not interested and left.

I went into some building that had a 12 feet deep pool, but it was like a cave. I found a lot of gold coins and started to fill up my pockets excited because I could make some good money selling them.

As I was picking up the coins, I wondered how I would take them out from the dream world into real life, and then, realized that it was impossible to do that. I decided to work on the Tasks of the Year. I was in Australia after all!

I started to swin within this cave alike pool and focused on appearing at the Great Barrier Reef. As I came out from the water, there I was. Funny enough, there was a weird sign that said Great Barr*& R4th or something like that... who cares... I was there.

I saw a sea turtle and I sat on the top of it. The turtle (that was swimming) started to sink, but it was moving forward still. The shell was very slipery, but I was able to ride it for a while. Check.

I then started to swim with my wife and I saw a great white shark. I recalled I had to kill one, so I placed one arm right above his head and the other arm on the tail. I tried to break the shark in half like if it was a wooden stick. The shark was moving nonstop, but it was not slippery, it was dry and hard like a rock. I recalled I had to bite it also. So I munched on the back of the shark and chewed a small piece. The texture was like a gummy shark, but it had a taste of salt, fish and blood. It was a bit gross.... Upon doing it, I kept pushing both ends of the shark until I head a "crack" and the shark was like a triangle on my hands... the actual skin did not break nor there was blood or anything, but the skelleton broke in two. A few seconds later, the shark vanished within my hands... weird... oh well, 3rd task of the year done.

I took a swim with my wife and while underwater, told my wife that the task was done and told her I could still do another one. As I was speaking, I remembed that it was only one ToTY per dream. I wondered what I needed to do.

My wife told me, "How about the Task of the Month." Without excitement I replied, "Oh... yeah..." and with a silly and mockery voice I told her, "What are you grateful for?" She replied, "I am grateful for my success." I said, "Good.... Now that silly months thing... November, October, September, August, July, June, May, April, March, February, January." ToTMs done...

I emerged from the water and exited the bulding. I saw a giant turkey in front of a store. The turkey was made out of plush. I believed I had to carve a turkey too, so I spawned a huge knife and pulled out some plush from it (it is a turkey, not specified it had to me an edible one, but this was not a ToTM anyway, the ones done were, so who cares.) I also remembered there was a hard ToTM to get done, something about some Pharao but I could not recall well.

My dream started to fade, so I allowed it to happen but focus on doing my own L-DEILD technique (Lucid-Dream Exit Induced Lucid Dream, a 100% success rate for a DEILD starting from a Lucid Dream.

I kept repeating to myself, "I won't move when I wake up and I will enter another lucid dream." The dream faded completely and I woke up with sleep paralysis... Then another lucid started to form. But this goes in the next dream... other ToTY done...

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #161: The Journey Mural

I'm walking around in the kitchen with Wife, carrying a baby girl and lamenting the fact that my previous lucid dream was too short. I look over to see that the microwave timer is counting down from 59. "A short lucid dream is better than nothing, isn't it?" asks Wife.

I figure she's right. I look back at the timer again and notice that it's now counting 2... 1... and then blanks out completely. I realize that everything about this is odd and I become lucid.

The baby girl has vanished and I no longer hear Wife saying anything. I guess they've both left the scene. I move toward the closest exit (the back door) but it looks oppressively dark in that direction. The dream is not feeling stable to me and I don't feel like my cognitive abilities are all there.

I turn back toward the living room, slowly moving past the dining room table, through the living room toward the front door. The darkness presses down on me the entire time, and I feel like I'm slowing down.

I suddenly notice that I'm having trouble breathing. I try again and can't manage more than a few gasps. The whole experience is starting to make me nervous, and I start wondering if I just need to make the dream more vivid to make these problems go away.

A picture on the wall catches my eye. In waking life, it's a stylized world map. But in this dream, it looks more like some kind of abstract mural, similar to the artwork you find in the video game Journey. There are 3 or 4 robed figures at the bottom of what looks like a multi-story building.



As I approach the painting, I see the robed figures stir just a bit as if they're alive. I'm still not breathing, but I hope that if I can somehow just change the scene everything will be okay. I rub my hands together for a moment and then reach for the painting, intending to dive into it. The robed figures stir to greater activity, the painting becoming a larger and larger part of my vision... but the dream ends.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #160: Siberian Stache

I have a false awakening and get up out of bed. Wife stays snuggled under the covers. It's daylight outside and it feels like we badly overslept. Our female Siberian Husky "K" is sitting by the door, slouched over lazily and panting. Something feels off about this and I realize that I'm dreaming.

Wife gestures at K (the dog) and asks, "What's she doing here?"



Even from several feet away, I notice that K's whiskers look oddly thick and prominent. The effect reminds me of a mustache, so I do this thing with my fingers where I "paint" a mustache in the air. When I'm done, she has a thick, brown handlebar mustache. I laugh a bit at this and K looks back at me, seemingly crestfallen from behind her enormous mustache.

I feel ready to go fly around and for some reason decide I should take the dog with me. As I approach K to pick her up, Wife says, "Wouldn't you rather take [E]?" (Our oldest son.)

"Oh, is he here?" I ask. And of course, there he is, standing close by in our room.

I look up at the ceiling and it's gone -- there's just open sky overhead. I prepare to take flight, but the dream ends.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #158: Thankful

Wife and I are starting a company that will manufacture a brand new type of video game console. I'm standing in the middle of a park with her while we pitch the idea to about a half dozen investors while they ask us questions about it. Wife's doing all the talking and I'm impressed with how well she's presenting the idea.

The console is apparently based entirely around a light gun. (Think Duck Hunt from the old Nintendo Entertainment System days.) We present several potential light gun designs, all of which have very kiddie designs. One even has a little plastic teddy bear sitting on top.

Wife is going over the details of how we stack up against our competitors when I see my friend "CV" about fifty feet away, looking around. I believe she's come to support us so I walk up to greet her. There's a glass tip jar nearby which supporters of our project can shove money into.

CV puts two dollars in the jar and I thank her. "I think this project is going to be a huge success," she says, explaining why she contributed money.

I respond, "It's only money, right?"

For some reason she finds this hilarious. "My husband doesn't see money that way! But he'll spend money on... <can't recall this part>" I thank her again and walk back toward where Wife is giving her presentation, but now she and the investors have vanished. I feel terrible, thinking that I've been gone so long Wife had to finish everything up without me and it looks like I rudely walked out on the meeting. Fortunately, I realize that it's all a dream.

I begin walking along a path in the park and take a moment to look over my left shoulder. A beautiful sunset is taking shape over the trees and the rooftops near the park. That means I'm walking north.

Far ahead of me on the path I see two ladies in their late 60s. They look almost exactly alike, with wild hair and somewhat thick glasses. Their appearance reminds me a bit of Professor Trelawney from Harry Potter. I remember the Task of the Month about asking a DC what they're thankful for. I become distressed for a moment that these DCs are too far away and I'll have trouble reaching them. I focus my vision on the two DCs and then imagine myself "zooming in" toward where they are. Immediately I'm standing right in front of them.

"Hi! What are you thankful for?" I say, my words a bit of a nervous, hurried jumble.

One lady immediately answers, "Youthful <something>."

"Youthful what?" I ask. "Can you say it again?"

"Youthful reef," she says firmly.

Huh? "What is 'youthful reef'?"

"It's an activity," she answers. Oh wait, is she talking about Task of the Year Australia? Should I be doing that one next? I thank her and keep walking along the path. The dream feels like it has thinned out, though, and I am soon in the void.

I rub my hands together and keep moving forward, trying to stay relaxed. After perhaps 20 seconds I get the sensation of my feet walking through desert sand. It feels like a scene might be taking shape, but a sudden gust of wind catches me hard on the left side. I feel like I'm losing my balance and become fearful. I mentally decide that I don't feel any wind at all and it quickly dies down.

Unfortunately, at the same time I also lose connection with the ground and now it feels like my feet are no longer walking but flailing at empty air. I keep trying for a while but eventually lose connection with the dream and wake up.

110313*+ 11 ~4? time chg SSILD WILD patience. "The next time I see , I am dreaming!" (and I mean really see not just images flashing by). Fragment remembered when getting up to go to the bathroom involved a group and making sure that everyone is showing that they are thankful. I walk around a little bit go back to bed and think about new goals since I hit one of my biggest short term ones but I didn't make any of the goals real concrete so need to work on that. Anyway I was patiently laying in bed not the least bit worried getting to sleep- maybe a few times and put it out of my head. After a while I feel like I am about to enter the dream state and I get what I assume now were just convincing HH's of my wife getting out of bed probably to go to the bathroom I assume. Since I feel like I'm almost there I try to will myself out of bed and it seems like I can't move out I do get the sense that can rotate parallel to the bed in my sideways position laying
on my side and I began to rotate and it feels like fun and then I think this feels like a rollercoaster and I imagined I really long dive on a coaster and before I knew it I am flying along holding on to the rails of a rollercoaster kind of like my hands became rollers on the track I am enjoying going up and down the roller coaster. Is one of those coasters where you're hanging below the track. Is daytime and it is just incredible when I reach the bottom and the track is getting ready to go back up I release and start flying over a beautiful cream landscape feels like suburban area there's a lot of green rolling hills but there is also plenty of activities cars driving on their way to wherever. This was one of my new goals I thought about when I'm back to bed I wanted to see crowds of DCs is it seems like they're usually just small groups of people in my lucid dreams. I'm focusing on one particular truck like a big cargo truck just too see what the DC
is doing and the truck has an accident and flips over upside down and I think no not interested in seeing what an accident victim looks like in a dream and I continue flying.But then I hear sound from my bathroom that I thought was waking life...I feel some vibrations...and I even thought I sensed the light was on in the bathroom but it seems like so long ago that my wife seemingly got up but it was just a false awakening. FA continued: When she came back towards the bed I asked her where she was for so long and she said that she had to go to the store to buy some medicine and I looked at the clock and it was something like 130 in the morning (in the dream, it was really much closer to 530 or 630 IWL according to the time I actually woke up later). I ask why would you go at this time of the night? And then I started looking for my dream journal to record the incredible lucid experience I just had and it was missing. Ask my wife did you do something
with my papers over there. Where is it? My wife threw it away. Where is it...is it actually gone? And I start imagining all of the journal entries that may be forever lost. I feel heartbroken. She asked me does it give you release before your games? I said yes okay so do you still have it? Then Girl Friday appears to my right completely naked mostly with her back to me (I included her in my new goals also) . Her body looks so beautiful. I realize it's a dream! I start to hold her and we both move towards the bed but now the room seems different . We're kissing and touching each other enjoying each others naked skin and at some point I'm looking at her face and I realize how incredibly vivid and beautiful her face is and then she starts acting strange as if she doesn't know what is happening. We have our tongues in each others mouths and she pushes mine back out with her tongue and I think that is strange, look on her face is strange and I wake up. When
thinking about what just happened I was obviously exhilarated I also wonder what happened at the end there and with my mind running wild it made me question if only for half a second whether or not we were both and some shared dream experience and she realized hell real or weird it was and have that reaction. One of the other goals is to continue the second part of traveling above the earth and continue on to the moon for some fun. I also thought it would be cool to fly around over to Paris or some other places around the world. I also remembered what I wanted to be able to freeze group of DC's in time while I continue to be able to walk around like in the old Twilight Zone episode.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #154: The Truck

A WILD attempt drops me non-lucid into the living room of a house. My dad and a few other people are standing nearby and I wonder why we're all here and how I arrived at this place. I can't figure it out and I remember that I was just trying to enter a dream.

I'm overcome with this feeling like it's been forever since I had a lucid and that I have to accomplish a goal. I decide that I want to teleport to the Colosseum and I remember the teleportation tech Nyx and I had both dabbled in: cover your eyes and imagine yourself in a new scene.

I try it now, covering my eyes, imagining the Colosseum and then taking my hand away. This makes all of the DCs disappear, but I'm still in the same living room. I try again, covering my eyes and spinning this time. It's still the living room, but it looks more drab. I hear the vague noise of a crowd, but it fades away. I feel like I'm not really believing it and I try to remember how to do this better.

This time I completely close my eyes, spin, and imagine a new dream scene. The scene goes dark and as I'm thinking about opening my eyes I suddenly get really nervous that this will wake me up. Instead, I just treat the darkness like the void, rub my hands together and start walking forward again. After a short time, I emerge outside at night, walking through suburban streets.

I imagine that the Colosseum is behind me and turn around, but I've half-assed it -- instead of the Colosseum I'm looking at a grassy vacant lot surrounded by a low chain-link fence. I jog forward now, taking three or four turns over the course of perhaps two minutes of dream time. I expect the Colosseum to be around each corner, but I'm not feeling confident enough to make it happen.

From out of nowhere a rusty red pick-up truck comes barreling toward me, lights off and speeding. I step lightly over the truck, one foot on the hood, next step on the roof, then gliding over as it roars past underneath me. I feel happy and excited about how I handled things with the truck and my confidence starts coming back a bit.

This makes me consider whether travelling on foot is such a good idea. I remember talking with Ophelia in the podcast about how flying is the better way to go for transportation and I'm considering doing that when a pick-up truck pulls alongside me, rusty red just like the last one. For some reason I think that this is a different truck.

The truck's being driven by an attractive red-haired woman in her early 40s and a younger woman (blonde, mid-20s) is sitting in the passenger seat. The younger woman beckons me toward the truck. I climb into the cab of the truck and immediately she kisses me. She pulls away after a moment and turns her head so that I'm seeing her from the side. I'm surprised to see that her appearance has completely changed -- now she's Asian and completely bald! She turns her face back toward me and now she's Wife with fairly short hair (like she wore it several years ago.)

Both Wife and the red-haired DC move toward me and sexytime commences. This part's way too graphic for the public DJ, but this (fun) portion of the dream lasts about four minutes. I lose stability once in the middle of the scene but manage to regain it. There's a final loss of stability that puts me into the void.

I rub my hands together and walk forward, emerging into a new scene where I'm walking into an apartment. A woman greets me at the door. She's unfamiliar to me (about 5'2", late 20s, Hispanic, very good-looking.) "Don't you remember me?" she asks, giving me a friendly hug. "It's [name I can't remember that starts with 'L']! We were like best friends back in high school." I completely buy into this false memory, losing lucidity and start catching up with L and asking her how she's doing. She's hosting some kind of a party with a few of her other friends there. I go on about family life for a while, briefly wondering why Wife isn't here with me. Eventually L wanders off to do something in the kitchen and I notice one of L's female friends giving me a semi-hostile look. I worry about this for a while until the dream ends.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #153: Foiled Creativity

I'm riding with my family in a car and we pull up near a curb in a shady-looking part of town. When the car stops, my two young children "E" and "R" leap out of the car and bound away toward a group of maybe half a dozen grimy-looking people that are huddled near a wall. I run after the boys and when I catch up to them, I see that the grimy-looking people are muttering angrily and trying to hide some kind of drugs they're using.

I hustle the kids away back to the car and Wife gets out to join us. "We can't just let the boys go running off over here!" I tell her. "Those people over there are using drugs." I look into the car and see Jesse Pinkman (from Breaking Bad) sitting in the front passenger seat. "Pinkman!" I say. "What's that they're using? Is that meth?" He slinks down in his seat and doesn't respond.

Wife and the boys move off together into a nearby building. When I follow, I catch sight of them taking a right into a bathroom, but when I enter they're nowhere to be found. I consider that I might be dreaming, nose pinch, and become lucid.

The scene gets shaky and I move into the void. I rub my hands together, keep walking forward, and mutter reminders to myself that I'm having a lucid dream. After perhaps 20 seconds of this, I get a vague image of a dark-haired woman in her late 30s trying to speak to me. I kiss her, partly to draw myself into the scene and partly because it seems like a fun thing to do. After a few moments of this, she pulls away sort of gestures at the room. I see that I've stepped into a big living room with a high ceiling and hardwood floors.

There's a couch nearby with a gold-stringed violin lying on it. I look at it closely and run my fingers over the strings, trying to make the scene as vivid as possible. Vividness goes up sharply and the strings jangle pleasantly beneath my fingers. I try playing a few open-string notes pizzicato and the dark-haired woman silently observes, looking a little amused. The music sounds nice, but after a few attempts the notes grow soft, almost too soft to hear. I look down at the golden strings and see that they've all broken and hang limply downward. They still look beautiful, though.

To my left there's a projector showing a huge image of a computer desktop. My friend "Conan" is standing nearby, working on a computer, and characters fill the screen as he types. I think that this will be a good opportunity to engage my creativity. "Hey [Conan]! Let's work together to make some kind of game on this computer."

He goes into a long speech about how he got screwed over in his most recent business dealings. Now he never enters into any business arrangement unless everthing is in writing. "No, you don't get it," I tell him. "This is all a dream. Let's just make a game or something." But he's steadfast, telling me again how "careful" he has to be. I'm disappointed, but I let it go.

Now I think about the Colosseum. I announce to the room that I'm going to the Colosseum and I see that the dark-haired woman is observing from a few feet away, saying something encouraging. There's another woman watching from a different part of the room, mid-20s, light brown hair. I think she's someone familiar but I'm not sure of her identity.

I'm determined to change this room into the Colosseum. Oddly, I notice that there's some kind of turban on my head and a something like a long, red satin blanket spills out from the turban over the right side of my head. I find this all super weird but I use it to block out my vision of the rest of the room so that I can change it. I turn slowly around, trying to switch the room into the Colosseum but I can't stop seeing that hardwood flooring. I'm feeling a little stuck so I head outside through a door in the wall, emerging in a grassy field. The elegant house I just walked out of now looks like a temporary building. As I'm deciding what to do next, the dream ends.

This LD was the second of two from the morning of 9/17/2013.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #148: Musical Travels

I have a false awakening early morning on a couch in a room that looks like a basement. Wife's sitting nearby. I'm unhappy to get up but there's something I need to be doing, so I follow her out into the hallway of an office building. Through the windows I see that it's still dark out. Some guy with glasses and a shaved head is dressed for work and waves toward the parking lot at someone I can't see. I wonder how he's in such a good mood so early.

Wife convinces me that there's something I need to look for in the bathroom, so I go to find it. I walk down a long corridor and take a right through a narrow hallway filled with people. As I'm pushing my way through the crowd I sort of knock this one guy to the ground. Rather than apologize, I hurry away, hoping he didn't see me do it. (Not nice at all, I know...)

Once inside the bathroom, I forget what I was looking for, so I wander out another door back into the hallway. There's a folksy country duet playing over unseen speakers, an older man and woman singing sweetly about the life and love they've shared. I think how cool it would be if dreams could produce music like this... and a wave of suspicion makes me hit the nose pinch RC and I'm lucid.

I continue down the hallway to a fat guy standing behind a small desk that's stacked with literature. One of his hands is resting on the papers and I grab onto it, trying to bring extra vividness into the scene. He looks horrified by this and when I think about it a bit more, I don't feel too great about it myself, either. "Sorry about that," I say, continuing down the hall. I think about what I intended to do with this dream and remember the Task of the Month about going into the girls' locker room.

I follow several twists and turns in the hallway, each one leaving the hallways narrower than the last, all the while expecting that the next turn will lead me to the girls' locker room. Finally, I step through a door at the end of the hallway into a room that looks like some kind of really nicely-furnished barracks or dormitory. A double stairway encircles an elegant fountain and leads up to a room that stretches far into the distance, either wall lined with beds. There's a huge number of DCs here, all female, many of them in the beds and some just walking around.

I try to verbally insist that this is a women's locker room rather than a big dormitory, but somehow I get the idea to sing my intent. As I do this, the whole thing turns into this huge musical number that both me and the women in the dormitory are singing at the same time. It was sort of 80s-sounding, but an original song. If I had to pick a song, it was probably closest to Bonnie Tyler's "I Need a Hero". The whole thing was pretty awesome.

Most of the DCs are dancing while all of this is going on, with a few of them even doing these fancy handsprings over the beds. I can't remember many of the lines, but one of them was definitely something like

"It's the girls' locker room,
Where the lockers have bras and socks and stuff!"

I know that this isn't the locker room and as cool as this musical performance is, I still want to try to pull off a task. There's a cinderblock wall behind me, and I phase through it, winding up in the void. I rub my hands together then try to feel my way forward. There's someone else here with me in this void, a female presence. Rather than speaking, she begins to softly sing. Her voice is beautiful and echoes everywhere around me. She says something like, "I can only take this journey with you if you <something something...??>" (What was it? Wish I could remember this!)

In a moment I feel my body settling onto some soft dirt. I'm laying on my back and the singer, a woman in her mid-to-late twenties is also lying in the dirt a few feet away. Her ethnicity is difficult to guess but I feel like she might be some combination of Asian and Hispanic. We're in some kind of construction site near an unfinished building. To her right, maybe twenty feet away is a chain-link fence. Past that I see a spotlight glaring at us and lighting the area where we've landed. She starts to get to her feet and as I follow her lead, the dream ends.

This LD was from the morning of 9/12/2013.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #145: Sleeping Body

I get the sense that a dream may have started, so I will my arm to move downward through the bed. It does, and now I'm floating blind through some sort of substance. It feels a bit like water but less substantial.

I swim through it for a few moments until I can dimly see that the stuff I'm swimming through is black and wispy. My right hand touches somebody else's who also seems to be swimming next to me. It's apparently Wife, because she says, "Are you sure you know what you're doing?"

Now I'm back in bed. I can see, but the light's very dim. I roll out in an OBE style and walk toward the bedroom door. Before I leave, I think to look back at the bed to see whether I'm there... and yes, there's Wife on her side, and next to her, rolled on his (its?) side is my sleeping dream body. For some reason my sleeping body isn't covered by the sheets so I can see that it's glowing slightly and is wearing some kind of blue shorts.

I think about approaching my sleeping body but I decide that I don't want to get too caught up in this. As I'm thinking this, Wife sits up a bit in bed, looks toward me, and says, "What was that?" I wonder whether she's speaking to me or the sleeping body. I sense that this scenario is starting to challenge my lucidity, so I move on.

I walk toward the closed bedroom door and then hear phase through it, briefly entering the void. I decide that the phase is just taking a long time and (somewhat reluctantly) the hallway scene appears and I'm walking through it. It still looks like my real hallway, but very dark.

I continue into my son E's room and find that the place is littered with a bunch of huge toys. Near one window stands a four-foot tall plush zebra with plastic wheels. It looks like you're supposed to ride around on it. There are several other big toys as well, but I didn't get as good of a look at them and don't remember them as well.

I don't see E, and I begin to wonder if he's here. I "sense" that there's a crib nearby and wonder if E is just younger than he was before. This train of thought is starting to distract me, so I move toward the window to phase outside. I wake up momentarily and then hold still for DEILD.

The DEILD once again starts from my bed, and like before, my arm sinks into the bed. I go into the void and float for a while.

Spoiler for Sexytime:

The scene stays dark, and I feel two women snuggle up on either side of me. I can vaguely imagine their shape but I can't directly see them. This doesn't seem to bother me, though, and I manage about 25-30 seconds of fun before...

I wake up.

This is the second lucid from the morning of September 3, 2013.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #142: Hotel OBE

During my mantra, I find myself staring at the ceiling of the hotel room we're staying in. I know that I'm wearing my sleep mask, though, so I'm positive that this is a dream. I will myself to roll away from my sleeping body, and now I'm on my feet.

Rather than walking, I'm just sliding around the room. The scene is dark and a little hazy, but everything looks just like I remember it. I don't look back at Wife or the spot where I was sleeping, although I wonder whether I've left a sleeping dream body behind in bed.

I slide into the adjacent room where the kids are sleeping. Now more things are different. My two kids R and E are each lying in separate cribs, both about two years younger than they are in waking life. R is now almost a newborn and E looks like he's about two. They're both sleeping blissfully on their backs, and I drift past them toward the front door.

When I phase through the hotel room door, I find myself in a darkened hallway that doesn't look very much like our hotel. I note how realistic the dream began and how quickly it diverged from reality. I want to turn on the lights and check out my environment. I give a grandiose shout of "Let there be light!"

The hallway is now better lit, but it's still fairly dim. From out of nowhere, I hear Wife's from behind me: "And there waaaaas light!" She follows this up with a mocking trumpet sound like "doo doo doo DOOOOOOO!!"

I look back, and yep, she's standing there behind me. "Whatcha doing?" she asks.

"I'm having a lucid dream. This one is an OBE." I'm preparing to explain what that is when I remember that there's no need to explain anything to Wife's DC.

I jump-phase through the ceiling, my head going right through into the void for a moment. I try this again, and get the same void result. Okay, next time I'll imagine a new scene... too late, 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.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #138: Hot Coals

Wife and I are searching the city for rare items that are needed to build some kind of important machine. We crouch on some dirt and gravel road and Wife draws a diagram in the dirt, telling me what I need to do to infiltrate a nearby house. When I'm there, I'm supposed to listen in on a phone call in order to gain an important piece of information.

I somehow make my way into the house and sneak past a woman who's busy preparing some food. Her husband, a guy in his 60s, is talking on the phone and walking nearby. I press my back against a column, trying to stay hidden. But now a clone of the husband is also on the phone, coming around the column from the other side. I realize that I can't hide from both the husband and the clone and become frantic at the thought of being discovered. I briefly consider whether this is a dream and my answer is "yes".

No longer worried, I walk through the living room into a large, spacious room with white marble floors and a skylight. I take a door to my right and step into some kind of sun room. The old man is standing by a door that leads outside and he gasps in shock when he sees me, saying, "You!" He's still holding the phone, and he clutches it to his chest.

"This is a lucid dream," I say, "so I'm not going to be doing this whole thing." I point to each of us in turn. He immediately nods, breaks character, and walks off like an actor leaving a movie set.

I leave the sun room and step out into a stone courtyard, the sky cloudy above me. There's a cheerful-looking guy with a mustache grilling some meat over a pit of hot coals that are glowing a fiery orange. Two women and one other man are standing nearby as well, looking relaxed as they watch him work. I wonder what I could do goals-wise with this scene. The Great Barrier Reef task doesn't seem like a natural fit, but I think about somehow using the hot coals to perform the "travel to Hell and have a beer with Old Scratch" task.

I notice that the vividness of the scene is pretty good and I finally remember that my primary goal right now is to try to enhance dream vividness. I feel a slight jolt of "oops" concern that I should have been focusing on that instead.

I have a weird thought that goes (and I quote) I'm going to stare into that crimson, chocolaty fire. I walk toward the pit of coals and the dream ends. I try to DEILD and get some rapid flashes of HI, but my heart rate is too high for me to slip under quickly enough.