Taking action in a lucid #dream

The nightly routine of quiet reading, NyQuil, and melatonin continues to set the stage for successful lucid dreaming.

Most of these dreams find me as a passive observer, even though I’m fully ware that I’m dreaming at the time thus qualifying the experience as a lucid dream (at least, that qualifies them in my opinion). However, I finally made the decision during a dream to play a more active role, to enter into conversation with someone there.

In my dream…

…I first found myself being entertained by a small boy, maybe four or five years old, who was wearing an “Elvis is King” tee-shirt and singing Elvis Presley songs. He was trying to do an Elvis impersonation and was actually pretty funny.

We were sitting in the stands of a large auditorium, rather removed from most of the other people, some of whom were snacking, some of whom were chatting, most of whom were watching the action of a martial arts competition down on the main floor. The boy was standing next to has father who was busy analyzing chess games stored in a Correspondence Chess Post-A-Log, and had a book of annotated games and a clipboard on which he was studiously entering notes. When his son moved a few seats away from us to sing to another group of folks, I decided to see if I could more actively participate in the dream. I commented to the father, “Ah! A Post-A-Log. I’ve got one like it at home, but it looks like yours is a lot busier than mine.”

He looked over at me and replied, “Busy!” Then holding up his clipboard, he continued, “I’m trying to finish an article for publication and I’m right up against a deadline.” And he resumed working.

I turned my attention then to the main floor of the auditorium where mats were spread out and and the fighters and judges were busy. And then…

I woke up.

A flood in the laundry room

It is with a great sense of relief that I note the return of dreaming to my sleep segments. For approximately the past week I’ve been rather under the weather: not terribly sick, not enough to keep me from functioning, but certainly visiting enough unpleasant symptoms on me to restrict my activities. That nastiness appears to have passed, thank God, and things seem to be returning to normal.

During the week of illness my sleeps were nearly devoid of dreams, they were certainly empty of any dreams I can mention here. But now I’m feeling better, generally, and I have dreams to post. Today’s second sleep segment brought me a pair of interesting and unrelated dreams.

In my first dream…

… there was an episode of flooding here in the hotel where I live.

Noticing the unusual sound of running water outside in the hallway, I opened my door and saw a big water stain on the carpet in front of the laundry room. The laundry room, by the way, was situated next door to my apartment just as it is in real life. The stain was growing larger by the second, fed by a mini-waterfall cascading from the slightly elevated floor of the laundry room, which is one step higher than the level of the hallway.

Very curious about this situation, I looked into the laundry room (which, in this dream, was much deeper than in real life) and saw a plumber working feverishly with a big wrench at some pipes in the back of the room. “Looks like we have a bit of a flood here,” I shouted back to the plumber.

He turned to me and yelled back, as he continued to work, “And it’s a cold flood, too! I’m about to freeze! Hopefully I’ll be able to get it stopped pretty soon!”

Looking at the mess I shook my head and… woke briefly.

The “Y” was closed, but…

My most recent sleep segment brought me a very short, but very pleasant dream that was set in a YMCA building. For the record, I should state that I have been a member of two different YMCAs in my past, and have visited several others. This that I visited in my dream wasn’t any of those, though it bore some architectural similarity to the downtown YMCA in Indianapolis of the mid to late 1990s: the one that shared (and perhaps still does, I don’t know) building space with an upscale nightclub/restaurant.

In my dream…

…I walked from my apartment to the neighborhood YMCA with a gym bag slung over my shoulder. With a few extra hours at my disposal, I was hoping for a light workout followed by some relaxing sauna time.

As I entered the vestibule I noticed things dark and quiet, and I thought that very odd. Then I saw a female employee near a stairway bundling items in plastic bags. Snapping my fingers when I remembered what was going on, I said to her, “Oh, that’s right. You’re closed today for the newspaper drive, aren’t you?”

She smiled at me and replied, “Well, so somebody does read the notices I mail out!”

I chuckled, “Yeah, I do the reading thing just fine, it’s the remembering thing I have trouble with. Carry on, then.”

When I turned and headed toward the outer door, she dropped her bundle and came over in my direction. Hopping up on a big chest by the door she grinned and said, “You know, if you’re not in a big hurry… you could stay for awhile.” Saying that, she braced one arm against the door to block my way and stretched one leg out, brushing it against mine.

The dream proceeded for a little happy while longer, but not nearly as long as I’d have preferred. Then I woke.

Who WAS that woman?!

Last night’s sleep was properly segmented, and the first such I’ve had in weeks. Some folks get all their nightly (or daily) sleep in one solid chunk. Sometimes I do, too. But usually my sleep is divided into two distinct parts: the first one being five or six hours long; and the second, coming sometime later in the day, is generally two or three hours long. And it’s this second sleep that usually contains my dreams. That was the case this morning.

In my dream…

…there was a higher degree of lucidity than is normally the case for me. This awareness that I was dreaming while I was in the dream manifested itself a number of times and finally allowed me to wake calmly from what would otherwise have been a rather disturbing situaton.

The setting of this dream was here in San Antonio. As a matter of fact, it began down in the residential foyer of the hotel in which I live.

As the door to the elevator opened, I found myself eye to eye with an attractive, smiling woman whom I apparently knew in the dream world, but whom I cannot place among the various women I know or have known in real life. I could see her very clearly, and heard the sound of her voice as we talked. I’m guessing that she may have been a composite of different individuals I know or have known. If I was an artist, (which I’m not, by the way), I could very easily draw a sketch of her.

She was headed out of the hotel as I was headed up to my apartment, but we decided to spend a little time together. We took a stroll down by the river, then rode the bus to a part of town where she was headed. At a number of times when we were walking and on the bus, things seemed more than a little strange, as they often do in dreams. When the strangeness would distract me from our conversation, I’d apologize to her, saying, “Oh, you’ll have to excuse me. I’m not usually this disoriented, but I’m dreaming.”

And she’d laugh lightly each time, telling me not to worry about it, that she understood completely. Then she’d put her hand on my arm or her arm in mine and I’d laugh, too. All would be well, then: happy and well.

When the bus finally dropped us off she used a pay phone at the bus stop to make a quick call. I looked around and realized that I didn’t know where we were at all. Looking back at where the pay phone had been I saw that it was gone, and so was the woman with whom I’d been spending time. The bus had pulled away. There I was standing in a strange place. But I realized that since I was dreaming, all I’d have to do is wake up and I’d know exactly where I was.

And that’s exactly what I did.

Such a short dream, so many elements

Last night’s sleep was a rough one; the wonky sinuses had me sort of awake but still half-asleep through much of it. But there was some dreaming in it, and that’s a good thing.

Though I suspect there were more dreams last night than what I can now remember, the one that was with me as I woke is freshly in mind.

In this dream:

I was much younger than I am now, probably in my thirties, and had just finished a leisure ride on my mountain bike. The “home” I was headed back to was a rented room in a big house that could have been a composite of houses I knew in Peru, Warsaw, or Bloomington IN.

When I was about a block away from the house, a mysterious woman appeared on the sidewalk next to me. She was wearing a flowered t-shirt and black lycra running shorts and seemed to be headed to my house, too.

As I approached the front porch and shouldered my bike to carry it up the steps, the mysterious woman bounced up to the porch and let herself in the front door ahead of me.

The scene then flashed, and I was standing in the house’s big common living room. Another blond woman, whom I only know in a very tangential way over the Internet, looked up at me from a couch, smiled and said, “Surprise! Bet you didn’t think I could come right into your dream like this, did you?”

And then I woke. Sort of. It was a sinus thing that made me sit upright for a few minutes, but I never came fully awake.

When I laid myself back down, I focused on the last image remembered from the dream just mentioned, and I smoothly transitioned back into it. The woman on the couch was still smiling up at me. This time she said, “Hey, let’s use Latin, okay?” And she started speaking to me in Latin. And she laughed. Then I woke for real.