lucid_dreaming raze i met the architects of my dreams once. this was almost twenty years ago. it was one of the last times i dabbled in lucid dreaming before deciding it was too much work for too little reward and i was more interested in letting my brain_movies play out the way they wanted to, without actively rewriting the script myself. first there was a car accident. a woman woke up in a hospital bed. "i remember everything," she said. a gloved hand coaxed pepper from a wooden shaker and let it fall in her face to keep her from telling anyone what she saw. then there was the note from the vice principal that pulled me out of a high_school class. part of some larger conspiracy. that slimeball was a regular dream antagonist at the time. i was always trying to cut class and get home so i could get away from him. "where are you gonna go this time, john?" he said. he took me by the ear and led me down to the main floor. "you just remember that this is a dream and i'm the one who has control over it," i said, letting my right hand slide across the smooth railing. "not quite right," he said. "what, so it's just the level of lucidity i have control over?" "correct." at the end of one flight of stairs i watched a group of teachers hover above the linoleum. their feet never touched the floor. they weren't anyone i knew. they were more like templates. i was made to understand that these were the people who wrote my dreams. i asked them why they would make me dream something like this. there was a woman with short hair who looked just like the vice principal. she said something that made no sense. the words were lost to me as soon as they hit the air. knowing i was dreaming didn't do me any good. there was no flight to freedom. no sudden increase in detail. just the knowledge that i'd been beaten. my nemesis picked me up and carried me into his office. while he spoke to his receptionist, something like smooth jazz played on the soundtrack. and that was it. 260916 ... epitome of incomprehensibility Shared experience = a sort of relief here. I thought I was "bad at" lucid dreaming - in that I can't control a dream just because I know I'm dreaming. Mine sometimes drift into and out of the knowing condition. It's funny that your dream characters spelled it out, too. And were teachers. My dream architects are scientists, said my young dream_mind. I was something like nine. In a dream, I opened my eyes to several people in white lab coats surrounding me. "She's waking up," said a doctor-like man. I think he gave others an instruction to give me more of something that would make me go back to sleep. I woke up and felt a bit frightened: what's if THAT world was real? What's if what I thought was waking_life was really my dream life while I was being monitored by sleep scientists...? (Then the Wachowskis watched the replay of this dream_movie and remade it into The Matrix. But it's not very original. An offshoot of childhood solipsism, like what's if everyone else isn't real, etc.) Anyway, that wasn't a lucid_dream - it just related to raze's dream_architect idea. (I should dream about an architect and write the above, liberally and literally linking...but can I control my dreams enough to will an architect into joining them?) 260917 what's it to you? who go blather from