Since High School, at least, I’ve been fascinated with the idea of lucid dreaming.

I’m not sure that I knew there was a term for it when I first experienced it. My first lucid dream was derived from a recurring dream that I had been having where I could float, but only about 6 inches off the ground. It took extreme concentration, but when I put my mind to it I could defy gravity … a little. After about the third time I had this type of dream, I finally questioned it in the dream. “Why just 6 inches?” Questioning it allowed me to exceed it, and I was in a church at the time, so I soon found myself floating just below the ceiling. My next thought was “Wait a minute, I’m dreaming.” Then I KNEW I had control. I could feel it. I burst through the roof of the church like Superman and kept going, through the atmosphere, into space, past the sun, into the deep black nothing.

And then I woke up.

The veil had been pulled aside. I had attained lucidity.

I read a couple of books about it from the library, but it wasn’t until around 1997 and the new dawn of the internet that I researched it further. At the time there were special masks you could buy that would monitor your eyes for REM sleep, and then flash lights. The thought was that the lights would also flash in your dreams, and recognizing the pattern, you could become aware that you were dreaming. I couldn’t afford that back then, so I took another route.

I began to print out stickers and sheets of paper that said “RUD” on them. I put one under my work phone so that every time I answered the phone I would see it. I put them in plain view and I hid some, making their appearance both mundane and surprising. The idea was that I would begin to see them eventually in my dreams. RUD is “Are you dreaming”. Reality checks in real life can carry over into your dreams. An easy one is checking your watch. You can set an alarm to beep every hour that reminds you to lift your arm and look at your watch and say or think “Am I dreaming?”. For some people, it works rather well. Well, it never worked for me.

Lucid dreaming for me comes randomly. It’s like when Arthur Dent learns to fly. He trips and falls, but is distracted by something during the fall and forgets to hit the ground. Absurd, right? Well, that’s kinda my thing. I trip into lucid dreaming.

Two nights ago, I had difficulty going to sleep. I didn’t take an Inositol, and I had been playing Far Cry 2 right up until I went to bed. If I dreamed, I don’t remember any of it. I decided that last night, if I woke up in the middle of the night and had a dream that was fresh in my mind, I’d write it down. Well, it worked. These are my glorious dreams:

THE ACCOUNTANT, THE BUGS, AND THE COMPLEX

I did not like this dream AT ALL. I’ve had a lot of snake dreams throughout my life, but not bugs. I only remember the last part of this dream. I was in some type of complex of buildings. It was kind of like the buildings you find sometimes at Civilian Conservation Corps projects, usually barracks and dining halls. I was in one that the power was not working in. With me was the accountant from my current job. We had both been sent there to investigate why the power wasn’t on I guess. We located the circuit box, and before we even entered the room it was in, we could hear what the problem was.

Bees.

The box itself was weird. It was a mesh cube set in the wall and you could see through it to the outside. Sure enough, it was filled with…

Hornets.

I know, right. It was supposed to be bees. The accountant said at this point, “This is why i hate children.” Wut?

But they aren’t hornets, and it’s not a small mesh box anymore, it’s an entire wall that is a cage, and inside are two elongated ant-looking things with awfully cruel looking mandibles.

But they aren’t in the cage, they are coming at us, and now they are slimy caterpillar things with baby faces and awfully cruel looking mandibles. The accountant was screaming at me to kill them and I had one pinned against the wall by its neck.

And then I woke up.

BILL GATES’S AMAZING ERECTOR SET CITY, GO KARTS, AND SOME ART DESTROYED

I don’t recall the beginning of this one, but events had led to myself and three other people to being loaded into a helicopter, that eventually turned out to be just a van with open sides. The van took us through an entire city made up of erector set gears and other weird machinery. As we were passing by an apparatus, I absently pulled a rod from the assembly, and didn’t say anything. Oops.

We arrived in a large complex and were met by a woman who introduced herself as Bill Gates mother, a young version. This is a direct pull from yesterday’s Reddit. There was a picture of Bill Gates with his mom. We were eventually introduced to Bill Gates himself who was working in a little workshop on what looked like a mouse. He demonstrated how it worked, only it didn’t. He was suddenly angry and frustrated, and I turned around and could in the distance a giant ferris wheel that was collapsing. I looked at the rod in my hand.

Fast forward to an amusement park/mall and a go kart track. I was with Bill Gate’s mom, who had aged considerably. We signed up to ride the Go Karts, except that it it wasn’t a large circular track, but about ten or so tiny donut tracks with a radius so tight that it was only big enough to fit one kart which just continuously circled.

While we were waiting for our turn, one of the karts flew off its track and splashed into the pond that was next to the track. No one went to help the man that had been driving it, and he never resurfaced. They announced that the track would be temporarily closed.

I left Bill Gates’s mom there to listen for when they opened the track and went to explore the mall. In a small courtyard area, I saw a Japanese man fiddling with some kraft paper that appeared to covering the entirety of a good sized circular fountain. I assumed he was trying to find an edge to begin pulling to reveal the new fountain underneath. I decided to help and aggressively ripped the kraft paper away. There was no fountain underneath, it was an origami sculpture of a fountain that I had just destroyed. He and several people around me looked at me horror. I quickly walked away.

Trying to re-enter the Go Kart area, I swung open a glass door which then inadvertently smashed a woman between the glass wall next to it and the door I had opened. It was not a door at all, though. It was an art exhibit containing movable glass partitions that when arranged in a certain way and photographed with people in between them, caused artistic distortions. I had smashed this woman between the partitions. I quickly walked away.

By this time, the Go Kart area was packed with people waiting in line and trying to book a spot. I was up against woman that looked exactly like an ex of mine, and there standing next to her was the ex of mine. I told her “You look like an ex of mine” to which she responded “You look like you’ve made three people very angry over there, you should confront them.” I could here the woman I had smashed saying “That man smashed by breasts! They hurt!” I quickly walked away.

I ended up back in the mall and caught a fleeting glimpse of a giant Lego Death Star II before I woke up.

An aside: I often dream of bookstores, toy stores, video rental stores, etc. There are always an assortment of dream products that don’t exist. There is an entire series of fantasy novels I continuously see in my dreams that are color-coded for the families/kingdoms that are the focal point for each book. There’s a canon to it all that I retain in my memory as if they are real. The blue books are about a royal family of knights who have befriended dragons, the green books are a nomad kingdom that roam vast forests, the red books are mage-knights that have an affinity for flame. I’ve seen orange books and black books as well, but only rarely and I can’t recall their contents. All have intricate illustrations on the fronts. I’m always excited in my dreams to find them. There are video games that don’t exist, movies that were never made. I tried to rent Ghostbusters 5 one time only to find that the case contained Rambo 7. But, most interesting of these dream products is the Lego sets. They are always real life places, like The Olson’s house (my next door neighbor growing up) or Showbiz Pizza or Joe T Garcia’s. It’s really kind of cool. Just thought I’d share that.

This post is getting long, so I’ll make another later that details the rest of the dreams I had last night.