Lucid Dreaming

Lucid Dreaming is something I’ve always wished I could do, and would like to train myself to do, because the dream world is an amazing world, where anything can happen, like a virtual reality fantasy land, but without the computers. Last night I came close but, as the saying goes, no cigar.
I was at a party in somebody’s very normal looking living room, probably about 20 people or so, none of whom I recognized but that is par for the course, and something I think is different in my dreams from most people’s dreams, from conversations I’ve had and all I’ve read. My dreams are generally populated with complete strangers, and friends and family only pop up infrequently. Well, one I recognized, of course, Bill Clinton was there. Bill Clinton is a politician I once liked and admired, back when I still bought into the fiction that Democrats were trying to get good things like universal health care, but history has burst that bubble. Anyway, as he was moving from one hot girl to the next, I said “Hey, Bill, nice to see you haven’t lost your touch!” and gave him a thumbs up sign to which he responded with a wink and a lift of his glass. (red wine, btw) Shortly after, I was seated at a table with a bitter looking old woman who said “I’ve watched your classes, and analyzed your teaching. It’s not good.”
So, I left the party and started to walk home. At that point I thought of the idea of lucid dreaming, because I read an article recently (in the waking world) that said one way to induce lucid dreaming is to learn how to recognize when you’re in a dream by training yourself, in the waking world, to look around occasionally and see if everything is normal, if everything could possibly exist in the real world and if not, then you are dreaming and can try to turn it into a lucid dream. So, I looked around. I was on E. 13th St. in Des Moines, just around the corner from our old house. Everything was just as it should be. There was the Paterno’s big white house, the green lawn, and I continued up to Buchanan St., walked around the corner to our place and everything looked perfectly normal. So I kept on dreaming, without direction, accepting it as reality.
It never occurred to me that our house was torn down decades ago, and the neighborhood now doesn’t look the same as it did then, or how odd it would be for President Clinton to be at a random house party in my old, very average neighborhood. Lucid dreaming is tricky. You ask yourself if everything is normal and of course it is, because you’re in a damn dream. Catch 22.