I’ve got a few LDs to record. I’ll just do them one by one:
Average-length lucid dream
SPOILER - Click to view
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.
Short lucid dream
SPOILER - Click to view
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!
b long lucid dream[/b]
SPOILER - Click to view
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.
Short lucid dream
SPOILER - Click to view
[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.
Short lucid dream
SPOILER - Click to view
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.
Average-length lucid dream
SPOILER - Click to view
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.