Lucidity Challenge 35 > winner Koharo!

5-10-12
Frozen Canals, dreamternet and surfs up
I will add some comments to this dream because I joined this lucidity challenge to improve/restore my LD skills. I guess that means I should at least analyze my dreams. So after some time with bad recall I had this LD

[ND]I am back in Amsterdam and Wulf is with me. The canals are frozen after a few days of cold weather. This strikes me as odd, I just left Sweden and there we only had a few colder days, but not cold enough to freeze anything yet. People are walking on the ice like it has been there for days. I am a bit cautious though, I don’t believe the canals can have frozen this fast. I walk on the ice behind Wulf and it seems very strong. This can’t be. I count my fingers, This is my standard RC that somehow always works. (No matter what I count). I usually I have 6 fingers in dreams, but now I even have 7., [LD]I am lucid. After becoming lucid I usually feel the freedom and I express that by flying immediately or telling DC’s it is a dream, until I realize I should do what I wanted to do irl. This time I start ice skating with an enormous speed. I start ice skating as fast as I can and I make very wide and nice circles. The wind blows in my hair.

I remember quite soon that I wanted to be lucid to do tasks from the Lucidity challenge. From beginning on I wanted to do several tasks in one dream. Unfortunally I remember that I never read the most recent tasks, so I will have to do the older ones. So I decide to do the dreamternet and I ask Wulf to bring me to a computer. This is smarter than I usually am in dreams. Normally I try to summon something or to expect it behind a door. I noticed that my conscious thinking is then interfering with my subconscious creating the environment. I do not have enough faith in myself to summon something, something I wish to change. Asking Wulf made things easier. I gave my subconscious a task by asking a DC. Wulf brings me over the ice to an internet café. Inside a computer is already turned and I see an online game. You sort of have to shoot bath tube ducks in the first round. I find this amusing and I think of how funny this might sound when I write it in the challenge topic. I do very well at the game. A man in the room tells me that he also was very good in the first round, but this resulted in him being ranked too high in the further rounds. In the next rounds you play in a room against people of your own level. The man want me to sit on his lap and I decide it is time to leave. I know I could have scored up more points by doing additional things on the computer but I can’t recall what exactly it was and I think I can score more by doing the next task than to struggle with this one. I also couldn’t remember what more I was supposed to do for this task when I woke up, so it is not a problem of recall within the dream.

I can do the surfs up task I decide and I go back outside. When I leave I think that it was funny that this was Ysim’s bar and that people from the challenge will be amused by all the LD4all members in my dream. Dream thinking, I only met Wulf and I just knew it was Ysim’s café. My vision goes bad. I often wake up like at this point, or I have a FA, or a new dream starts. I try to move a lot to stay in the dream. And it works for a short time. New tactic, worked quite well. I can feel myself lying in bed, and I am afraid to wake up. I feel the cold floor underneath me. I am confused. Did I sleepwalk? Did I fall out of bed? Is it just another dream? I decide it is that I and I let myself go to the next dream. A new tactic as well. And it worked so well! I should RC more often after waking up, as I advise others. I am in Amsterdam still. I get up and look at my hands. I count 5 but I don’t even really care. Not really wise, but I was lucid before so I allow myself this. I run towards the canal, which is conveniently not frozen anymore. I want to surf but there are no waves. While running I think waves in the water. The first wave is small, but they increase rapidly. I jump on the water and can instantly surf on the water. I didn’t think of a board for one second. Only when I woke I realized I could have scored point for it. But surfing on bare feet was quite amazing as well. And I think it felt the same, but I never surfed so I don’t know. I use my arms for balance, but like with the ice skating I can do this very well. I take several waves and on top of one I do a salto. Actually I think it was a backwards salto, but in the dream I thought of salto. I remember that doing tricks would score me point. I do another salto and then quit surfing.

I remember that I liked the first task best and I now want to do that one. I just can’t remember what is was. I also didn’t remember when waking up. I think I can also do the current Quest, but I realize that I didn’t read the new Quest on the English forum yet. I doubt that old Quests can score me points, so I safe myself the effort to think of them. I know I should remember the Dutch Quest and I probably would have if I stretched my mind. I wrote it myself only days before. But I doubt it would score me points so I don’t bother. Unfortunally I don’t think of the personal goal!

I find my boyfriend. My lucidity decreases. Now I am sort of outside the dream and see that it was all just a game.[/LD] I see that everything I did was written down for everybody to see.[/ND]

Things kinda continued from a previous one. (Not all that action packed…more on the emotional side I guess )

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, [color=red]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[/color] 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.

[color=blue]I’m walking through the mall with my friend T. We encounter a scrawny old man that I recognize (wrongly) as a professor at the university that T and I attended together. The “professor” excitedly describes his latest invention – a self-propelled wheelchair that is guided and powered by your mind. With that, one of these wheelchairs pops out of an unseen hole in the floor, scoops T up, and starts racing around with him.

T shouts in protest, insisting that his legs work fine. I decide that this is completely insane[/color][color=red] and I become lucid. I ignore T and the professor, and they lapse into silence. I can see daylight coming in from around a corner so I start moving toward the exit, making my way through a food court that’s packed with dream characters. Sprinting toddlers and their harried parents crisscross my path but always move aside in time for me to pass. I’m tempted to check out the food but my desire to get outside is stronger.

When I reach the automatic glass doors they don’t open. For some reason, this doesn’t worry me and I press my left hand straight through the glass.[/color] (I think that I owe this to reading about all of melanieb’s phasing yesterday.) [color=“red”]I phase the rest of my body through as well, feeling a slight chill as I pass through.

When I get outside, it’s parking lot as far as the eye can see. The day is mild and breezy and all I can think of is what a perfect day it is for flying. I float up nicely but get hung up in the mall’s entrance overhang. There are a few moments of grinding where for some reason I have trouble turning my perspective. Fortunately I manage to force myself sideways just far enough that I break free and shoot up into the sky.

Straight ahead there are hills shrouded in fog. I’m eager to avoid turning so I fly toward the fog, imagining that in these hills is the neighborhood where all of the Dreamviews folks are. (I want to perform the “trick or treat” Task of the Month.) As I near the fog, the wind increases to a howl, pushing upward and against me. Rather than force forward progress, I imagine that I am going the wrong way and that this wind is trying to guide me to the real Dreamviews neighborhood.

I turn with the wind and it carries me upward the way that a thermal column lifts a condor. This feels amazing! I’m being carried toward some kind of sky fortress. The “sky fortress” is an enormous collection of buildings connected by a tangle of walkways and I know that this must be where the Dreamviews neighborhood is. Dream characters move unafraid along the narrow, unrailed walkways and I see guards armed with rifles patrolling some of the paths and rooftops.

I arrive at a row of townhouses. Above the front door of each townhouse floats bubble letters that spell out the owner’s name. The row stretches as far as I can see in either direction and most of the names are unfamiliar to me. I do see “Xanous” above one of the doors and I fly toward it, imagining that there’s a huge DV party going on in there.

The door has a television screen in front of it that seems to show what’s going on inside the house. I’m astonished that the screen displays a prairie dog splashing around in a big bathtub. “Xanous?” I ask. The prairie dog stares at me, a bit shocked. He barks, “Phil doesn’t just open the door for anyone who knocks!” I can feel myself growing confused but don’t know how to regain my composure. “Are you some kind of bodyguard? Are there Dreamviews people in there?” But the dream is beginning to unravel and soon[/color] I’m awake.

I’m hiding in the shadows of a safe house that’s part of the Underground Railroad. I’m afraid and when I whisper for help, the shadow itself speaks to me: “Freedom is close. I’ll take you there.” Then something yanks me through the wall of the safe house and sets me gently in an open field lit by a violet, pixellated sunset. The pixellation of the sunset makes me lucid just long enough to enjoy the moment before I wake up.

Wife has sent me to a restaurant to find out whether they recycle “#19 plastic”. I’m just about to ask the cashier this inane recycling question when I see that a nearby table has our diaper bag and Wife’s wallet sitting unguarded on top of it. I hurry over to pick all this stuff up and see Wife herself standing a few feet away. [color=red]I recognize all of this for the weird nonsense that it is and tell Wife that I’m having a lucid dream. “Okay,” she says, and wanders off.

I turn back toward the cashier to find that she and the register are gone, replaced by a bunch of school lunch tables jammed together in a tight rectangle. I skirt around these and head to the back of the cafeteria. High up, a bit outside of my reach is a large window showing an overcast day outside. I float up in order to phase through it like I did last dream but this time my hands just bounce off of it. I float back down to the ground and look for a door, not wanting get hung up on this.

There’s a pair of doors equipped with crash bars to my left. I shove my way through and emerge outside under a cloudy, gray sky. To the right, I see a huge gathering of runners and spectators for some sort of foot race. I’m intrigued and I jog toward it, deciding that I want to compete.

I become very aware of my clothing as I run and I notice that I’m wearing shorts without a belt. The shorts are too big for me and they keep trying to slide down off of my hips. I hike them up once and then do my best to ignore them. I’m surprised to find that I’m also wearing some kind of baseball cap. I remove it and see that it’s black with a Papa John’s style logo that instead reads “Papa Go’s”. (I know something’s wrong with this name but can’t figure out what.)

The race starts when I’m about 30 feet away, runners ranging from hardcore 30-year-olds to 4-year-old kids setting off on the race. They stream through a huge pizza-decorated starting banner that reads “The Papa Go’s Race”. Since I want to win and also wow the crowd I take to the air, flying about 20 feet up. But the moment that I catch up with the other runners, a sharp gust of wind kicks up against me, stopping me dead.

I’m determined to participate in this race so I stubbornly imagine a fresh wind blowing from the opposite direction. This gives me a huge, exhilarating kick forward. But before long, the current of wind that’s against me shoves back even harder and I’m stuck again. I force my own wind to blow even harder but the opposing wind rises to a shrieking gale.

I feel stubborn and unbeatable, though, and I keep pouring on more power. But the howling wind rips my pants away and I suddenly feel much, much less “unstoppable” with no pants. Tears stream from the corners of my eyes and cold wind blasts down my throat. Trees are swaying crazily below me and DCs are running in panic. It dawns on me that I’ve started something I can’t finish. Moments later, [/color]I’m awake.

My very close friend F is a famous rap star and I’m his manager. I’m driving him to the marina in a black Escalade, arguing with him not to buy a helicopter for “one million dollars”. He’s adamant that he needs this helicopter and he brushes off all of my objections about his spending vs. his record sales. As I park the Escalade, I suddenly remember that F is an IT consultant with two kids, not a rapper – [color=red]now I’m lucid.

We get out of the Escalade and I see that we’re parked near an absolutely pimptastic white yacht. The day is bright and clear and the sun is high over a calm ocean. And in spite of my earlier helicopter-related harangues, there’s also a nearby helipad with a helicopter waiting on it. F and I have been friends since we were kids, so I’m psyched to be hanging with him in an LD. And with all of these cool toys just lying around!

I follow F as he heads toward the yacht. I stop him on the gangway, saying, “Hey man, I’m having a lucid dream.” He nods and says, “Cool.” But F and I have never discussed lucid dreaming IWL. For some reason, I’m overcome with the desire to explain it to him right now. I ask him whether he knows what LD is and he tells me not to worry about it.

But for some reason, I cannot let it go. I go into the whole thing, talking about the sleeping brain, how consciousness is activated, the role of serotonin, all kinds of stuff. At one point I even start rambling about acetylcholinesterase and its role both in dreaming and nerve gas. I’m feeling terribly pleased with myself for recalling all of this information while having an LD and I’ve lost all regard for my “audience” or my own experience.

Suddenly, a shudder seems to run through the whole dream world. The gangway starts to shake and the sky flashes black for a moment. F grabs the handrails and shouts some kind of profanity.[/color] The dream ends immediately afterward. I try to DEILD back in but I come up dry. Curses!

I’m a spectator in an arena where dueling teams of wizards battle it out with fire and ice spells. I’m ranting with another spectator about how terribly they’re playing. The spectator says that “it’s like they have no awareness!”[color=red] Hearing about “awareness” instantly makes me lucid (thanks, subconscious!) and I run out of the stands into an outer hallway that’s filled with dream characters.

I want to perform the Task of the Month which requires shooting turkeys with 17th century weaponry. I imagine that I have a huge bundle of preloaded flintlock muskets strapped to my back and it isn’t long before turkeys start darting around in the crowd in front of me. I reach over my right shoulder, grab a musket, and aim it at a nearby turkey. I carefully aim and fire, the musket thundering and kicking my shoulder. The shot’s a clean miss, and the DC’s in the scene start running and screaming.

I toss my old musket aside and grab a new one from my “bundle”. I keep catching sight of turkeys up ahead and I run after them, firing and missing time after time. I chase them onto the arena floor itself, the magical combat still raging wildly around me. I skate across a field of ice that’s melting beneath the heat of a raging volcano, the floor nearly collapsing beneath me. It’s vivid and exciting but what really has my attention is getting one of these turkeys.

I take a side door that leads me into a golden elevator. The elevator begins rising the moment that I enter and through its ornate viewing portals I see the shore of an island. I sense that this is an island filled with turkeys and I immediately dive through the portal, plunging headfirst toward the shallow water along the shoreline. I manage to float just in time to avoid a jarring landing and immediately spot a turkey ahead in the distance.

I run for miles, grabbing musket after musket off of my back and tossing them aside each time that I miss or get a “close call” that yields nothing but a puff of feathers. I even manage to cleanly hit 2 or 3 of them, but each time that I draw close I see that they were really just large pigeons. At one point I reach a narrow valley that’s painted with brilliant, cartoon-like colors. I laugh, feeling elated and invincible, like I can run here forever.

After some time I chase a turkey deep underground through an old barrow. Dream characters join me and leave at times, all strangers. Eventually I run through a weapons display area that’s arranged around a giant upright sarcophagus, but all the weaponry appears to be from the Egyptian Bronze Age, not the 17th century.

In the next room I stumble upon a sad, sullen group of friends and coworkers arranged around a board room table. They’re being lorded over by some obnoxious stranger named “Rod” who announces that he’s taking over our company and that I should “sit down and shut up”. This annoys me, and I slap him so hard that it leaves a handprint on his face. He orders me not to do that, and in response I slap him hard enough to send him sprawling out of his chair. The others around the table applaud, and I jog out of the room, spotting daylight up ahead.

I emerge onto a dirt road and lean against the guardrail for a moment, thinking about how this is the first time that I’ve ever attacked a DC. I reflect on how thin my justification was and wonder how this relates to dream yoga’s description of playing out negative “karmic traces”. Unable to really digest the concept of karma in the dream state, I walk further along the road.

At the end of the road stands a Roman arch with golden light spilling out of the arch onto the roadway. The arch is designed roughly like the Arch of Constantine.

When I approach the arch, an enormous flock of brilliantly glowing turkeys goes flying through the arch, passing right overhead! It must be hundreds of them. This kicks up a rush of wind that picks me up off of the road, lays me flat on my back, and carries me gently backward as the stream of turkeys goes flying by above me. It’s beautiful and serene and I’m overcome with bliss and elation. I can’t stop laughing at how incredible it all is.

The wind sets me down some distance from the arch and my friend A is standing nearby, smiling at my reaction. He asks how much longer I think this LD can last. I say that I don’t know but that it feels like it’s been an hour and a half. I tell him that I took some B6 and wonder whether that will change the dream’s length.[/color] Gently, I wake up, still blown away by what I just experienced.

[color=blue]I’m in a false awakening where I’m a kid living in my old room at my parents’ house. I sense some terrifying presence in my room so I jump out of bed, crouching down in fear. I reach under the bed and pull out a long-barreled, Dirty Harry-style .44 Magnum and hold it in front of me, searching wildly for whatever is after me.

I suddenly have no idea what I’m doing holding this gun and I’m afraid that I’ll wind up shooting myself or my parents with it. I duck into the bathroom and close the door behind me, trying to figure out what to do. I try the light switch but it doesn’t work. Something reaches out in the darkness and starts wrestling with me for the gun. My fear combined with the craziness of the scene is enough to [/color][color=red]make me lucid.

I gently pull the .44 back toward me, no longer believing that there’s any lurking presence trying to pull it away from me. I try the light switch again but it doesn’t do anything. I’m trying to think of some way out of here when the scene suddenly shifts to a cluttered basement. The basement is a roughly ten-foot cube and walls are gray concrete. There are no doors or windows but benches, tables, tools, and other assorted pieces of junk litter the room.

Seeing no way out, I float up and try to phase through the ceiling but the concrete stops me cold. I shut my eyes and imagine the Great Pyramid, but nothing has changed when I open them again. Next, I try some Stephen Laberge-style spinning but I move with an odd slowness when I spin and the scene won’t change.

Just then I notice a tiny surveillance camera attached to the ceiling and I feel like the presence that I sensed earlier is watching me through the camera. I float to the camera, determined to phase through it and see who (or what) is watching me. I push myself through the lens but immediately[/color] find myself awake in bed.

I’m watching as Breaking Bad’s Walter White (dressed as Heisenberg) plans to set fire to a Jeep full of laughing teenagers. He pours gasoline all over the kids in the car but they don’t react, somehow not understanding what’s going on. I’m panicked and horrified and feel like I can’t let him get away with this. The intense emotion[color=red] makes me lucid and the scene vanishes.

Now I’m sitting in what looks like a log cabin, staring at a simple television that’s no longer switched on. I see daylight through a nearby doorway so I run outside, passing through a short alleyway before I emerge in a grassland with mountains on the distant horizon. It’s a beautiful scene and I’m so relieved to be free of the nightmare that I start flying.

I’ve been in the air for only a couple of seconds when the Task of the Month occurs to me – I need to write “November” backwards. I’ve created a mnemonic device that instantly brings the correct word (“REBMEVON”) to mind. (My chosen mnemonic device is my friend Von introducing himself to Reba McIntyre.)

I try to produce a pen and paper from behind my back but only manage a pen at first. I try writing on my hand but can only fit “REB”. That won’t do, so I do another “behind the back” object creation to get a notebook. I try to write the word but end up getting sudden strings of garbage characters like “REBhjklhlhlh”. I scratch it out and try again, but only get a similar string of garbage characters as soon as I get past “REB”.

I can see the word perfectly in my mind so the garbage character problem starts making me feel agitated and doubtful. It’s not long before[/color] I wake up.

Wife, dressed in a labcoat, straps me into this huge contraption that we’ve built called “The Lucidity Machine”. She explains that when she turns this on, “you’re going to be lucid and the dream will be really pixelly, like an old video game.” I tell her that I’m ready. Wife walks over to a huge rocker switch on the wall, flips it, and [color=red]I’m lucid.

As promised, my view of everything is extremely pixellated, reminiscent of classic Atari games. I’m immediately reminded of Adventure:

I appear to be in a low-resolution version of the same room but Wife is no longer here. I get out of the machine, focusing on sharpening the scene, knowing that it will grow clearer and clearer as I work my way through it. Sure enough, the graphics tighten up with every step that I take and within a few seconds everything’s in full clarity.

I walk outside of the building into the sun and my recall gets hazy for a bit here. At some point, I find myself standing in front of a cute bungalo that’s surrounded by a broad moat. It has a pleasant garden in front of it and I want to see what’s going on in here.

I decide to use a technique that Xanous described in an old DJ entry that I believe he got from Robert Waggoner. Basically, I employ a sort of “targeted flight” where I focus on where I want to go and imagine myself being drawn there rather than on any specific mode of transport, like flight. I focus on a flower in the bungalo’s garden and sure enough I’m pulled into a vivid close-up of this bright pink flower.

I hear voices coming from inside the bungalo and my perspective returns to normal. I’m now standing by the front door, safely across the moat. I open the door and walk through a small foyer into a modest bedroom with a window that overlooks the ocean. Two young women in their mid-20s are sitting on a bed taping a video podcast about lucid dreaming. I feel like they must be from DreamViews but they’re both strangers to me.

My dream body has sort of faded from my awareness and the two podcasters don’t appear to see me, so I just listen. They describe a guy who “built his own lucid dreaming machine” and describe things that I’d done earlier in this dream. I remember them talking about us building the machine in our lab and mentioning something about me hopping on a train (DC nonsense or forgotten scene?)

Suddenly, a group of people in lab counts bursts into the room, completely unnoticed by the podcasters. My friend S from work is part of the group, which is led by an older lady with graying hair. They’re an amiable group but they announce that they are here to put a stop to my “abuse” of this “lucidity technology”. The gray-haired lady says, “What you did was impressive but now it’s gotten out of control.” She gestures at the podcasters, and I see that one of them has turned into a 3-foot-tall Asian of indeterminate gender.

Lucidity is probably starting to slip, and I become angry that they want to take this technology away from me. I tell them that they’ll never destroy what took years to build. The gray-haired lady says, “You’ll find that these things are much easier to destroy than to build.” Emotion sweeps me away[/color] and I lose my lucidity. I get wrapped up further in this new dream plot but my recall gets very hazy from here.