Boring Dreams Can Still Happen

 No matter how long you've practiced lucid dreaming, there are still going to be nights where you completely miss blatant clues that you are in a dream.  You wake up smacking yourself in realizing that you missed an opportunity to have a great lucid dream.

But there's no need to metaphorically or literally beat yourself up -- unless you're into that sort of thing.  Anyway, just remembering your dream can be hard enough to do, even if it was dull.  Don't give up trying to lucid dream even if you have a long string of boring dreams.

I have this happen to me more times than I care to admit.  The dead giveaway that I'm dreaming is if Peter Gabriel shows up.  But I can miss even that blatant sign, which happened to me the other night.

In real life, I spent many years working at one retail store after another.  As the Wikipedia image shows, Kmart was my longest employment stint.  It was the best job I could find.  I worked the graveyard shift stocking shelves, setting up displays and taping up and ripping down those goofy little blue-bordered Sale signs Kmart used to have.  I worked from 9pm to 7am.  That's a long time that made a deep impression on my subconscious (unfortunately).

So the dream was a night shift where shelves needed stocking, lost merchandise placed back on the correct shelves and each item in the sales circular properly signed.  This takes a long time.  And in the dream, not only does PG show up with a band, but so does Sting and Bruce Springsteen.  For some reason, this did not register as "abnormal" to me because I was so worried about not getting my job done on time. 

Peter was playing last and Bruce went long.  I had to take Peter aside to tell him that my co-workers and I had a job to do and we could not watch the rest of the concert.  Peter did not argue and so we went back to work. 

I wonder why Peter didn't tell me that I was dreaming (as he had done in other dreams of mine) and so my job no longer mattered, but I guess that's not his job, is it? It's mine.  So I spent the dream working for a store that did not exist while I skipped a Peter Gabriel concert. 

Man -- my subconscious needs to get its priorities in order.