To recap since my last post, it was definitely a low-grade cold that kept me in all day on Tuesday, too. Sniffling, sneezing, not feeling too bad, but enough to convince me to stay home, although honestly it doesn't take a lot to do that. It's a daily labor to get myself out the door.

On Wednesday I went on a short, 20-mile "recovery/fitness" ride, even though it wasn't that bad of a cold. However, I hadn't eaten anything substantial those two days, so no gas. 20 miles was about all I could handle.

On Thursday I went on a more substantial 35-mile bikeway ride, also not having eaten much on Wednesday. I bonked towards the end and took a short-cut home. My leg muscles were fried.

Then yesterday and today were gym days. Yesterday I probably went too hard on running and felt some aches I shouldn't have, but today I'm feeling my strength and nutrition are normalizing.

Sleep has been good until this morning, but it wasn't insomnia. It was fading in and out, and then came the crazy dreams and the lucid dreaming. There was so much going on in this sequence of dreaming that trying to describe it would just be visual gibberish.

So many details I can't even begin to describe, when apparently a Namie Amuro song came on outside the dream on my CD player, and suddenly there she was in the dream and out of nowhere her background dancers arrive and they dance the song.

Then the next song comes on, a teeny-bopper Taiwanese pop song that I was embarrassed to have liked when I first heard it in 2005. But I've adopted the principle that if I listen to a song and it hooks me and I like it, I'm gonna accept it as a good song (but I accept the descriptive of 'bad song that I inexplicably like'; everyone has those), therefore it's on the CD. Unlike my musical integrity.

I think I may have wondered if that singer was going to show, but then Namie is still there in a different costume and performs this song (I don't remember what either of these performances looked like, just that they happened). When I faded out of sleep, I groggily thought I should've known it was a dream when Namie's costume changed without explanation.

So I thought (still not very clearly) that if I find myself in another dream, I'd try to kick myself into lucid dreaming by telling myself that I'd go out from wherever I was and run down the street and put both hands against a wall. It sounds completely bonkers writing it out now, but it made sense at the time.

I'm not sure I was all that successful. I did go into a dream and I remembered and ran out of wherever I was, but there was no street to run down, just like a lawn on a college campus. But I ran anyway, but then there was this kid running ahead of me and he got to the wall of a building and put both hands against it.

Yea, I think at this point I think my dreaming mind hijacked the lucid attempt and I was just dreaming. But it continues and becomes inception-ish because I was in the dream thinking I was lucid dreaming, and I was supposed to meet someone else who was also lucid dreaming and we had some mission to do.

So I'm at the meeting point but I don't know who it is, but I notice someone who looks suspicious and I tentatively approach, and he makes a tentative response and then decides I'm not the person he's supposed to meet, but then I remember there's a code and I call out the first phrase of the code, of which he's supposed to give me the response, and so we do make contact.

That line of dream doesn't get any more interesting, kind of a bust, and we part ways as I feel my sleep getting lighter, but then going back to where I started in the dream I realized I was on a U.S. college campus! Pizza! And in a few steps I'm in a food area and a pizza counter is right in front of me.

But I'm having trouble reading the options, so the pizza guy hands me a menu but I'm still having trouble reading it. Suddenly a line starts to form behind me, and I hate being the guy who gets to the front of the line (although I was already there) and hasn't decided what to order.

So the pizza guy makes a suggestion and I say, "Yea, that!", and he goes to start preparing the ingredients without ringing me up first. While he's doing that, I reach for my back pocket where I always put my cash these days and realize I only have Taiwanese money. And I realize the only way out of it is to wake up, which I did.

Kind of a quasi-lucid dream.

* a final note about that insidious Taiwanese pop song that no one needs to know: I liked the song in 2005. I didn't get into K-pop until roughly 2010. If someone pressed me to name my favorite K-pop act, it wouldn't be a second Hallyu wave group, but solo singer Lee Jung Hyun who came to prominence during the domestic first Hallyu wave in the mid- to late-90s. It turns out that the Taiwanese song is a re-make of a Lee Jung Hyun song. Bam. (and strangely I think the Taiwanese song is "slightly better" because the hooks are clearer)