Growling

This was one of those rare lucids that I had without employing WBTB. Some pre-bed MILD work did the trick! (Edit: Almost forgot -- thanks to Art for psyching me up to have an LD yesterday! Totally helped.) Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid Lucid #183: The Inventor I am sitting on a park bench, working on plans for an invention. It is some kind of very high-end computer device and I am drawing up some tweaks for making it much less expensive and bringing it to the mass market. I am writing all of these plans with pencil on a rectangular, shiny piece of green plastic. A woman wearing workout tights jogs by. She looks great and I blatantly stare at her. I become dimly aware that I should not be staring at people and start to wonder what is making me act this way. It dawns on me that I am dreaming. I get up from the bench and look out over the park that I am in. It is grassy, dotted with trees, and maybe 200 feet further on is a brick building that looks like a schoolhouse. There is a low stone wall behind me. To my left there is a street with a few cars driving down it. I am convinced that it is a dream but everything is so vivid that I feel a little worried. One of my contacts feels like it is drifting in my eye and my vision shifts just as if this had actually happened. Now I try drawing on the green plastic with my pencil and I am able to scratch out persistent lines that look completely convincing. I wonder whether I have finally confused waking life for the dream world. I feel some paranoia settle over me, but I dissipate it by drifting back and forth over the grass without taking a step. Okay, yes, definitely dreaming. I cap it off with a nose pinch reality check and I feel settled again. Now I see Wife and my oldest son E approaching me from the direction of the schoolhouse. They look completely realistic and again I fight the unsettling sense that I have confused reality for a dream. I hit another nose pinch to settle myself down. How can everything look so real? A huge, lean brown dog approaches us. His head is as high as my chest. It is the first surreal thing I have seen in the dream so far. Wife is focused on rummaging through E's schoolbag and does not acknowledge that the dog is here. The dog starts to growl and bark at us, approaching uncomfortably close. Wife and E do not react. "You see that dog, right?" I ask them. "Sure," says wife nonchalantly. I do not want the dog bothering my family's DCs so I offer him my left forearm. He bites down on my arm and whips his head back and forth. I am sure there will be no pain, though, and of course there is not. After a moment of this, the dog let us go, sits down, and starts panting. He seems friendly now and I am almost glad he is there. It helps make me sure that this is all a dream. Wife finishes up with E and we walk together past the low stone wall as the dream ends.