I'm in a garden-pavilion complex in the Midwest. Hidden objects everywhere. They're magical, and if you find the most you win the big prize. My father and I are a good team. We find stones of red, green, blue, white--each with a different power.

Search in a basement store; my father finds an instruction sheet saying where to go, follows its directions and wins a fine trove of stones.

I head for the building where the race/hunt started. It's a temple past a long low fountain-sculpture; my intuition says a hidden treasure's around here. Sit down, look. Nothing. Cross the fountain-trough, sit again. A man comes and sits by me. He has a White Stone; I trade one of mine for it. Mine is heavy with a spell; he doesn't like it, finds it too heavy; so we trade back. I don't mind; it's a strong stone.

My father says "Come on!" Eager to win the grand prize.

So we race back toward the finish line on our sailboat! Contestants are allowed to use any stone-magic we've acquired, to speed our boats, so it's pretty wild. Twelve knots, fifteen... Suddenly our sail goes slack and slow. A blue-sailed boat sailed upwind of us, stealing our breeze! Without headway we can't even steer out of their wind-shadow. Clever. Must have yacht-racing experience.

I rush into the cabin--in the shade, the glowing threads of our stone-magic are more visible. I pull all the red purple orange white threads aside, leaving only the blue power, to turn us around. We come about smartly, faster than the rudder alone could.

Now I pull the white sail-threads tight until they thrum, and off we go with a roar!

Now wait--sails don't roar like diesel motors! I know what sails sound like, from my REAL sailing experience on that mountain lake, sailing from islet to islet in that wishbone-masted Polynesian ship. Sails can drum in a gust, but not this steady roar. They're not lions or motorcycles.

So this must be a dream!

As I go lucid, I wake.

NOTES

• Stephen La Berge, the guru of lucid dreaming, says you'll often see some discrepancy between dream and waking life that tips you off you're dreaming. Here, though, the scene brims with surreal prompts that it's a dream--the fountains & pavilions, that stone's heavy aura, the glowing magic-threads... But I happily accept it all--until a minor sound-effect right at the end is more than I can swallow!
• When I dreamed this, I hadn't sailed! My memory of sailing a Polynesian boat with a wishbone mast in a mountain lake was from a dream too--months or years earlier, so far back it was filed under "general knowledge."
• So I went lucid by comparing the dream to waking experience that in fact was also a dream!
• Can you say... bootstrapping?

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