Had a hard time getting to sleep last night. Started the late evening off with acute abdominal pains in the abdominicular area. That's located just to the right of the stomachular area, and just above the thighicular region.

It felt like a dwarven porcupine had gone to sleep in my internal organs, and that it had possibly invited a few friends over for a little "fun."

When you go to sleep with a feeling like that, a ways below the chesticular muscles but definitely above the groinicular surprise, you have weird dreams. That's just the way it is.

Last night's main attraction wasn't actually as weird as I would have expected given the pain and suffering, but it did become a lucid dream at one point, and that always makes for a fine dream experience.

For the uninitiated, lucid dreaming is when you are conscious while you dream. Sounds a little odd, no? Yes.

It's tough to explain if you've never had one, but it's a dream that seems every bit as real as waking reality, except that it's most definitely not real, and there are typically clues to tip you off about this (vampire octopi, roaming the landscape for another virgin sacrifice, for example, is a good indicator that you're not dealing with reality anymore).

Lucid dreaming is cool, though, because you can sometimes decide the outcome of the dream. You can will things to happen, and they do. It's like reality except that you aren't powerless and under the control of influences that bat you to and fro in a constant lifelong ping-pong game of the soul which, in the end, is neither a win or a loss for you because, damn it, you're the ball, and balls are just tossed in the trash when they're finally so beaten, bruised, and spiritually broken that they can't be played with anymore, and not even stuffed with catnip and given to the neighbor's cat because there's just a point at which the ping-pong ball says, "Jeeus, just send me to a landfill already - can't you see I've had enough? Let me go! Stop the planet - I'm getting the hell off!"

They're different from reality in other ways, too, but that's the main differentiator.

Another cool thing about lucid dreaming is that, with enough discipline and desire to do so, you can have them on demand. I had time for weird pursuits like that in my youth, but it seems that I've been spending most of my adult years dealing with things like taxes and syphilis, so have had to let the lucid dreams slip to the wayside.

But not last night.

Oh, no, mes amis. Not last night. Last night, in spite of my pain (or, perhaps, because of it), I was transported away to a magical make-believe world that only exists in my brain...

When the dream began, it wasn't lucid. It was one of those "regular" dreams that we all have. Nothing particularly special.

I remember being on a gigantic cargo transport plane. Bill Gates was there, as were quite a few other Microsoft personnel. They were there because this plane was transporting the first ever shipment of Microsoft cars.

The cars themselves were just like regular old cars, except that they did what you'd expect Microsoft cars to do: Receive stock prices and display them on the dashboard, tell you what the weather's like exactly where you are - stuff like that (they were basically SpotWatch cars).

At some point in the flight, though, things went horribly wrong. The plane suddenly entered a dive. The thing was completely vertical and heading straight for the ocean below. Everybody was scared - except me.

I looked around, saw the people screaming, and thought, "What's the big deal? It's just a dream."

And, pow - Lucidity.

I was conscious and in control. One of the tricks to entering a lucid dream state is recognizing that you're dreaming and then acting on it without waking up. In this case, it happened accidentally, and I was pleased.

After a few seconds (not long enough to be realistic, but this is a dream), the plane hit the water and dove far below the surface.

When it finally came to rest, I swam out of a compartment in the side into blue, blue, blue water. I wasn't breathing, and didn't need to. I decided that, for the time being, breathing wasn't necessary. I was underwater, after all.

Swam around for a little while. I spent a lot of time looking at my hands. If you ever have a lucid dream, you might find yourself doing this. As you're having the dream, you're constantly amazed that it's happening, and you'll look at your hands in a "Is this really happening?" kind of way. You'll turn them around and examine them from a few angles. You'll watch the sunlight filtering through the water, drawing patterns on them. It's nice.

I looked up and thought I could see some people near the surface, but wasn't sure, so I began my ascent. It wasn't far, and I was about ten feet below in little time.

When I got there, I saw something quite spectacularly beautiful, but I don't know if I'll be able to do it justice in description.

I saw people.

Imagine if someone took a photograph of you, printed it out life-size, and then laid it on top of the water. Now, imagine that the photo was glowing brightly all over with its own diffuse source of light. Now imagine that it was just floating up at the top of the water, undulating in time with the little crests and troughs of tiny waves. Now imagine that you're actually underwater, about ten feet down, and looking up at about twenty of these photos. Now, imagine that they're alive.

Like I said, it's tough to describe.

I floated along in the water, just gazing at the two-dimensional, glowing floating people who were looking right back at me. Some of the smiled. Some of them just blinked.

It was fabulous.

And then I woke up. The people were gone, and all I had left was that freaking miniature porcupine orgy going on in my intestines.

The lame thing about lucid dreams is that, even though you're conscious while they're happening, you don't remember them any more clearly than regular dreams, so you lose just as much detail after the fact.

Still a great experience, though. I can highly recommend it to a few friends.