I went up to São Paulo, Sunday, to get my “moving bag”. This is the bag that had everything I didn’t need, but I wanted anyway. The distance from Porto Alegre to São Paulo is about the distance between Boston and Jacksonville, Florida, but in Brazil terms, they’re both in the southernmost quarter of the country.

I just got back and unpacked my bag, and got to see all the funky stuff I brought. A third of the bag was my beloved books (of course) and my card system, a third was a sleeping bag and a few more clothes, and the last third included electronic parts, a sauce pan, colored pencils, accidentally smuggled drugs, checkbooks, and a mosquito net. It’s nice knowing I can live without them, but it’s even nicer having them too.

I took a plane up, but I felt guilty about the carbon so I took a bus back down. But as a reward, I figured out how to lucid dream! The trick was releasing that I’d already done it before.

Does this happen to you?

So you’re sitting in a car, reading and listening to the radio and people talking. And it gets darker and you keep reading and the time passes, and at some point you realize that you’re reading with your eyes closed. But you can still see the page and you’ve been reading like this for half a chapter already, and you can look around and see everything in the car too. And you can hear the other people talking, occasionally mentioning you sitting there sleeping. But you aren’t sleeping, and you’re just about to tell them this when the car pulls to a stop at its destination.

Or you’re dreaming, and you decide you want to do/remember some things in the morning. So you start making a list. When it’s done, you realize a dream-list won’t do any good. You have to wake up. So you dream you wake up, and start the list again. But soon you realize you’re still dreaming, so you stop and open your eyes for real. But then to make the list, you reach for the dream-pen, closing your eyes again, and start writing on the dream-paper again. You realize the mistake and that you need to actually *get up*. So you open your eyes again, and then close them, and stand your dream-body up, get a new dream-pen and dream-paper, and start making your list again. Finally, you realize you have to the “getting up” in real-life too, so you do, get the real-pen and real-paper and start your list again. And you can only remember the first item.

They happen to me often enough that I never realized that they were the special kind of dream I’ve been trying to have for years.