Strange dream

Strange, but they usually are. My dreams are like surrealist movies.
The dream starts with me and a bunch of people I didn't know sitting around in a house talking. All of a sudden, one of them looks out the window and says that these people are shooting a sexually explicit video of a child outside. We all go outside to confront them. Two of the people run off, so we call the police. We take the child with us, who is a little girl around eight years old, and perform a citizen's arrest on the last pornographer. Who looks somewhat like John Lithgow. (I am in no way suggesting that John Lithgow is involved in child pornography.)

We take him into custody, and he is yelling things about his lawyers and we tell him we are not afraid of his lawyers. He keeps slipping away from us, because apparently we are the most bumbling group of citizen's arresters ever. At one point, John Lithgow slips away from us and goes to the food court that has opened up inside of the house, which is now the size of a mall. I intercept him at the food court and he is irritable, saying that he just wanted to buy a sausage, egg, and cheese bagel because he was starving. I let him buy the bagel but don't let him buy a coffee, which makes him curse at me. He comes with me back to the group, and we are sitting around impatiently because there is a concert we have tickets for that we want to go see, and we are afraid that the police will not come in time to pick up the last pornographer. The little girl has been adopted as a mascot, and seems surprisingly well adjusted and unharmed by the attempt to film her involved in explicit sexual acts. She is somewhat attached to John Lithgow so we try to keep them separated, which is partly why he keeps slipping off--we are using most of our resources to keep the little girl safe. I think of Nabokov's nymphets, because of how she is acting.

Then I was lying awake in my bed, wanting to go back to sleep to find out the outcome of the dream. If I had gone back to sleep, I mostly likely wouldn't have returned to the same dream, although sometimes I do.

Do you ever have lucid dreams? They are dreams that you are in, in which you know you are dreaming. You don't wake up, but keep dreaming, with full awareness that you are in a dream. I usually test to see if I am dreaming when having a lucid dream by trying to do something like dial or memorize a phone number, or do math. I can't process numbers in any way while I am dreaming. If I tried to read a phone number, I would probably be able to read the area code, and maybe the last few digits, but something would happen to prevent me from reading the digits in the middle of a number. In a lucid dream, you can "consciously" influence the course of the dream, so if you are having a bad dream, you can decide to stop having it, and have another dream instead. Or you can decide what you want to dream about. Lucid dreams are very cool. I have them all the time, and I have my numbers tests to verify if I am dreaming. Having lucid dreams is a skill you can learn, starting by developing some reality test that helps you know when you are dreaming. It's kind of like Inception.