dream fragment

Vague and poorly remembered dreams overall, linked by a pervasive feeling of threat, but in the end I came to an insightful realization.

In one scene, the garage door was open, and I was with at least one other DC pointing a gun at some cats milling around just outside. I love cats, but I suspected that these might be evil spirits in disguise.

In another scene, I saw a collection of malevolent dolls outside the front door of a house at night. Their malevolence was limited by the fact that most of them had no arms, except for one shaped like an octopus, which had its full complement of tentacles. That one was almost cute, though. Another doll was especially wicked but consisted of only a head, and I watched as a dog came up and carried it off. "It's just as well," I commented to someone standing nearby. "He was already almost dead."

In the final and most notable scene, I was holding a door shut against some evil force that was trying to push it open. I was exerting as much strength as I could, hoping to lock the door to better secure it, but I couldn't get it closed tightly enough to fasten the latch. I felt the door beginning to open wider, despite all my efforts, and my anxiety increased... until I suddenly realized that I was making a category error.

If this was my world, a physical threat, then yes, I would need to try to hold the door with physical force. But I recognized that this was not my world, and in this world, my attempts to push the door closed only gave more power to the threat. To avoid the threat I needed to deny it my strength by denying it my attention, just like in dreams. I did not actually recognize that I was dreaming, only that this was an analogous situation.

There was a woman standing next to me, so I expressed my thoughts to her and distracted myself by caressing her face and shoulders. The sensuality quickly dissipated the anxiety I had felt about the door, and it ceased to be a threat even though I was no longer holding it closed.

I was inspired by my realization, and inquired the woman's perspective on it. "So it works because we are aliens here?" I asked her. She replied that some groups held this point of view, but others disagreed, so that my standing in relation to this world remained controversial.

"So they sold me for no onions... man, I don't know."

Trying to keep working after midnight, nodding off at my desk, shake myself awake and realize I just half-dreamed someone complaining in these words... time for bed!

Now that my extensive travels (Paris, Rome, Montreal, Montana) of this month have ended, and I'm back home and gradually returning to my normal sleep patterns, I find that dream awareness is stirring again, though so far it falls short of full lucidity. I had no trace of it while on my journeys, and I didn't even have any dreams I judged worth writing down. This was not overly disappointing because I was not actively engaged in any kind of dream practice and too busy to spend an hour updating my dream journal every day, so it felt okay to take a break.

A couple days ago I had a dream that was atmospheric but not very interesting plotwise, so I didn't write it down at the time. However, one detail is notable: there was a giant white USB cord on the ground, at least twenty feet long, and arbitrarily I found myself wondering if I could bring it to life. I focused my attention on it and sure enough, it raised its "head" (the USB plug) and began to slither and writhe like a snake. This gave me an eerie sensation, because I found myself thinking, "This better not be happening in real life!" I decided I'd better check to see if I was dreaming. I levitated and was relieved to conclude that yes, indeed I was. However, true lucidity did not emerge because even though I now knew that I was dreaming, I did not stop and think what I could do with the dream state but unreflectively continued to go along with the dream events, which largely involved trying to take a good photograph of a distant landscape. It was a classic case of awareness without agency.

Last night's dreaming included one of my classic dream signs, a public restroom of questionable functionality. Although I did not recognize the dream sign, I did find myself wondering if the facilities would be clean enough to use. Then I remembered, "I can keep them clean and functional by maintaining the right mental attitude." Though I fell short of actual dream awareness, I still recognized the causal link between my will and the surrounding environment.

I find it interesting that, though I have still not done any sort of LD practice since early in the month when I left on my travels, simply returning home and restoring my ordinary sleep schedule has been enough to reawaken the potential for dream awareness that felt very distant while I was on the road.

I just woke from a night that was thick, rich, dense with dreaming, but the recall was scattered and sparse, which makes me ponder the nature of dream memory. After this last waking, I lay there for some minutes without being able to remember a single thing, not one detail, yet I knew for certain that I had been dreaming. This is a peculiar state of mind, the ultimate experience of ambiguity. I lay back down on the bed sideways across the covers so that I would not accidentally fall asleep again, and then let my mind drift, looking for the particulars. At first it seemed hopeless, like groping through mud, until through some mysterious process a tiny detail took shape...

...near my new house, a stream full of fish, all sizes and varieties...

That detail links to more images and events, and then there all are, as vivid as life, all those memories that had seemed to be lost, and might have never been recovered had I not taken the time to seek them...

...I look forward to fishing, catching my own dinner... is the water clean enough? I need a fishing pole, I can buy one right now on Amazon, I'm sure they sell them, it will be here in two days... or is this the sort of thing I should buy in person? find a sporting goods store, feel the weight and balance in my hands first, try out the cast...

...and finally I'll have somewhere to shoot my bow! so nice to have space again.... but my bow and target are still in my old house, I won't have them until we complete the move... guess I'll have to be patient...

...a bit concerned about the neighbors, though, that father yelling at his children, hitting them with tires, and so openly, right in the yard! should I call and report? but surely someone has tried before, and nothing has changed. I walk back that way and he's still at it, now they're all carrying tires, all four or five children, and he's still hitting them, yelling "we don't put wood in the house!" what does that mean? all houses have wood in them, it's a basic building material... I should inquire with the other neighbors, something has to be done... at least my house is across the stream, away from here, secluded in the woods...

And this reminds me of yet another dream...

...the two boys were living in such a house, alone in an open field, only woods on all sides. the old man must have been living off the grid, so no one knew when he died, and they quietly took over the house... his guests become his heirs... what did they do with the body, bury it in the yard? and then the seclusion let them build their operations, what was it, computers? what were they trying to accomplish... still can't remember...

And another...

...but before that we were looking for someone, an uncle?...can't just "lose" someone these days, not unless they don't want to be found... it takes a lot of care not to show up on the internet, to avoid social media entirely. the only clue we had was a partial bag of english muffins, not sure what that can prove, but then I wonder if the city where it was purchased is printed on the bottom... sure enough it is... but it is the name of my own city! is he here, or is this not even the right bag?

And so on... from no memories at all, to more than are worth writing down.

What would have happened to those memories if I hadn't taken the trouble to consciously retrieve them? What happens to all the memories of the dreams we don't remember, or have forgotten? Is there a kind of deep storage? I think there must be, because from time to time they come swimming up in flashes, like fish catching the light near the surface...

....a gleam of light against the wall of the building across from us, like a tile of glass catching the sun... Arya isn't paying attention, I catch her eye and direct her toward it with my own... she looks the wrong way and I have to pantomime the gaze even more cartoonishly before she sees it... we are under observation and can't speak aloud... but at last she sees the gleam and we go over to find out what it is... I think it is magic itself, these signals... this isn't the first... but is it directed by a person or inherent in the world, plot, fate? we climb the stairs inside the building and open the door at the very top... with satisfaction I perceive it is a magical goods store, and actually tell the lady proprietor what brought us there... perhaps she or something she sells here can assist us in our predicament...

That was yet another from last night, where my own turn of phrase, "catching the light," caught the memory. But often I'll be sitting around doing things in waking life and apparently random glimpses will surface of dreams I know I had years ago, probably ones I never even wrote down, yet in some obscure way they still shadow me. Where and what are memories when we're not remembering them? Dream memory feels like it is stored separately from waking life memory, which would make sense if we need to distinguish the two to maintain sanity. But maybe that sense of separateness only comes because dream memories do not fit into the established contexts of ordinary life... at least for me, where dreams and waking life have so few qualities in common.

There are people who hardly remember their dreams at all... are those dream memories buried inside them as if in some secret vault? Could some odd balance of brain chemicals unlock it, bring them all flooding back, the dreams of a lifetime?

Recall: 4/10. I woke up with a crystal clear memory of what I was saying to a DC just before waking, but the context is lost:

"My short-term memory is phenomenally good. Better than most people. I test extremely well. That's how I got this far in academia. But my long-term memory is absolute shite." I go with the British pronunciation for emphasis. "It's like living with a disability. About half the people I know, if they come up to me, I have no idea who they are. I've been living with this my whole life, so I can usually bluff my way through it. Half the time, at least they look familiar, and I spend the whole conversation trying to remember where I've seen them before and what their name is. But the other half of the time, I don't remember ever even having met them."

Recall: 1/10. WTB 4am, woke 10am. All night on waking I had the impression of complex dreams but could not recall even the broad outlines. At one point there was a fragment of Japanese in my head: play between the words "iro iro" (which I think means "various") and "iru" (infinitive of "to be"). After final sleep had the vague impression of seeing places on a map, and was sure that I had dreamed something urban and apocalyptic... but I cannot seem to find the thread.

10:45am. Took a shower, still trying to remember. At first I thought the hot water was a distraction, but after a few minutes something flashed into mind and I murmured: "I was in the woods."

I was in the woods. There was at least one other person, and we were digging for something. And then another entity approached us. I have the impression that he usually drove a horse and carriage, but at the time of our encounter he was on foot. I recognized him as something terrifying and supernatural. He had a name, the everyday kind some boogeymen develop in folklore, consisting of an adjective and a common first name. The adjective might have been "dark"; I don't remember the name. I have the impression he had a stunted body, a normal-sized male torso on short and shriveled legs.

When I saw this creature on the forest path, I recognized the terror and danger he represented, and then the strangest thing happened: on a whim, I ran up and hugged him! And as this was happening, I was thinking wryly to myself, "If I were lucid, would I dare to do this? I don't think so!" Somehow I managed to have this thought without being lucid in the slightest—I guess you could say it was dream awareness without memory or agency. However, there might have been a touch of dream memory, even if WL memory was absent: my comment was in reference to an incident that occurred several years when I was lucid, and my intended task was to approach a fae spirit, but the one I glimpsed in the distance was so creepy that all she did was glance in my direction and I started running away as fast as I could!

Recall has been terrible for the last week or more, absolutely minimal. Last night was a little better, maybe 2/10: I dreamed all night but could barely piece anything back together, even right after waking up.

NLD fragment, "No Chicken": I was in the backseat of a car being driven by someone else. I can't remember why we needed a live chicken. Although I had no awareness that I was dreaming, I knew instinctively that I should be able to conjure a chicken out of thin air by will alone, and I got frustrated after trying again and again with no success.

NLD fragment, "No Pants": My mom wanted to enter an underground cave complex that had been set up as a tourist site, but I was afraid they wouldn't let me in because I wasn't wearing pants. I solved this problem by taking off my bulky green sweater and slipping it on like a skirt, fastening it by tying the arms together in front. Though this left me with nothing but a sports bra on top, I buttoned my coat over it and at that point felt like I could pass muster. In the cave, I looked down at my improvised "skirt" and thought it was working pretty well—to a casual observer, it might even look like I was wearing a normal skirt with a sweater tied around my waist.

I commented, "Okay mom, this is the weirdest thing I've ever done." Though in retrospect I have to acknowledge that it really wasn't all that weird in the great scheme of things.

NLD, "Spheres of Gas": A journalist or scientist was reporting from near the top of one of the world's tallest mountains. He or she was filming the thousands of frosty white spheres, each one a few inches across, that spread in clusters over the rocks, and explaining about how these were a type of gas (carbon dioxide?) that was naturally sequestered here in solid form. The purpose was to expose some misinformation that was being spread about climate change. I think the prospects were dire, because changing conditions would cause the release of the gasses.

He was well above the frostline, so high that he was barely within a breathable atmosphere, yet he could look down and see the beautiful warm waters of the tropics directly below. When he was done with his report he simply jumped off the sheer mountainside and floated gently down to the sea, landing precisely in center of a spiral of white sand in the brilliant blue water. All this time my perspective fluctuated between observing him/her and being him/her (perhaps that is why the gender feels ambiguous?)

NLD, "Jidori Chicken": I'm at a grocery store looking for something to cook for lunch. I remember that I like venison sausage and ask about it. They don't seem to have any but give me a sample of cheese spread. I think I could fry up some chicken if it is fresh enough, and I find a small cut-up chicken with a label proclaiming it is only nine hours old. "Jidori chicken!" I think approvingly, having long wanted to try one of these ultra-fresh birds, but I wonder if the label is accurate given that it must have spent at least some time sitting on the shelf. How often do they update the label or clean out the old ones? I decide that it must be at least daily and put the chicken in my basket.

Afraid to Call
SB is standing up from the table and pulling out her cellphone when a cop drives by outside. She puts the phone away hurriedly, expressing the fear that she might be arrested. We argue with her, "How could you be arrested for making a cellphone call in your own house? Come on, what would the charges be?" But we can't talk her out of it and she, still anxious, goes to bed. After she has left the room, I ask the others, "Is this normal?" meaning, does she act like this all the time? They indicate to me with their eyes and subtle nods that it is.

Note: It's odd, this is a friend I haven't talked to in a couple years, and after I dreamed this last night, today I got an email from her...

Turquoise Bob
Look in the mirror, see that my hair is cut in a turquoise bob. It looks surprisingly good; I think I might keep it this way. It will be annoying to have to get it trimmed all the time, but I should make an effort. Should I get the color done professionally or do it myself? Decide on the latter, that's how I've always done it. Look online to find the color. How to get the hued variegated like this? Figure I need to bleach it white first, then can selectively coat parts of it with vaseline.

Bus to Sabaville
In some vast interior space, need to get back home. Find a shuttle that I think will take me toward where I saw the bus stop, but then it goes too far and in the wrong direction. I discover it is heading to a stoner convention. As everyone stands up to disembark, young man in seat in front of me (hefty, dark hair, pale skin) stares at me and asks out of nowhere: "Who are you?"

I stare back, perplexed. "Why would you ask me that? We've never met before. How could it matter who I am? I'm a stranger, on a bus."

My answer seems to have disoriented him. "Am I dead?"

Sarcastically, I respond, "Could be. It happens sometimes." I leave, going in a different direction from the others disembarking the bus.

Awed by the sheer size of this place. Don't see any internal columns or supports... what is keeping the roof up? Must be miles across. Find the stop to take the shuttle back in the other direction. Young woman there, think I've seen her before.

"Can you tell me if this place has a bus that can take me back to Sabaville?" I inquire.

"That's not where you should be spending your time." I assume she means that it's not a very cool place to live.

"Well, it's where I need to get back to."

Increasingly frustrated, I was trying to rearrange the objects on the top shelf of the refrigerator. This was made challenging by the downward slope of the shelf and the fact that there was no raised lip at the front to catch things. It was also quite full, so the weight of the objects in the back was pushing down against the things in the front and knocking them off. My dad walked up as I was once again moving things around trying to find a more stable arrangement, so I complained to him:

"The fridge is full of bread—bagged bread! And milk." I screwed up my face, pronouncing "milk" with as much disgust as I could put into my voice. I've never liked milk, but thought I should provide a better reason for my objection. "The milk's going to go bad in a few days and then we'll have to throw it out."

"Room for more bread!" My father kept a straight face, but I was pretty sure he was teasing me.

"Look," I said impatiently, "If this is some kind of survivalist thing, we'd do better to stock complex carbohydrates than all this processed crap."

I blew my nose, and noticed that something solid had emerged into the tissue. My growing unease ripened into sharp alarm when I inspected the contents. Next to some meatier pieces of phlegm was the unmistakable segmented shape of a short, light grey worm. It was about half an inch long, and completely alive and intact. I'm not sure if it was a true worm or had two hair-like rows of short legs, but it even started to move as I watched. The thought of such a thing living in my body, in my sinuses even, infused me with silent horror quickly ripening to desperation as I saw the front half of another worm, which would have been twice as long as the first if it were intact, in the tissue's contents. On the underside was a distinct mouth with two visible mandibles curved back so that they lay flat against its body like fangs. What were these things doing to me?

Just after discovering the worms in the tissue, I felt an itch just above the hairline of my forehead and absently scratched it. A soft body crushed under my fingers, getting tangled in my hair, and I brought them back to find the green ooze of yet another worm staining their tips. The horror became even more intense. Were there so many in my body that they were emerging? I needed to do something about this now.

Mustering all my willpower to stay calm and focused, I brought the unwieldy vehicle I was driving over to the curb, put it in park, and engaged the parking brake. It was a boxy shuttle like those that sometimes ferry people and their luggage around airports; this one had no seats and was specced for military use. I left the engine running, even as I wondered why I was doing so: this was unlikely to be a short stop. As I disembarked, I said something like, "Men, make sure not to move this vehicle," to my company. They were prone to horsing around, and I was afraid someone might bump the parking brake and accidentally disengage it. The vehicle was tricky to operate.

I disembarked, dodging the idle men lounging on the short flight of steps that led from the strip of grass bordering the curb down to the sidewalk bordering the building. The door was open, and there were more men clustered around the steps that led down into the building. I knew they were here because I had left for the last mission in such a hurry that they had been left behind. I had already sensed that something was wrong at the time, but it had still been too vague to articulate, a vague but crushing sense of oppression rather than any physical symptoms I could describe.

I was looking for someone in particular. Not the young doctor, but the old one, who I had known for a long time and trusted completely. After passing a row of men leaning against the bar to the right of the entryway, I turned left and was relieved to discover him standing next to a table. He had grey hair and a lined, weathered face, with a serious but not unkindly expression. I addressed him in a tone that was urgent but still tightly focused, doing everything I could to remain cogent and not lose myself to the mounting hysteria I was feeling.

"Richard, I think there's something wrong with me."

He looked up, and I saw that he could tell from my face that the matter was dire, but when he spoke his tone was relaxed, the practiced ease of an experienced combat physician. "Okay, tell me all about it."

"It started about a week before this mission," I began.

It was here that I woke up. The dream was a patchwork of distinct day residue. The worms were inspired by Jimmy Carter's appearance on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, where they briefly discussed his efforts to eradicate guinea worms in Africa. The doctor's face was a combination of Lance Hendrickson, who I saw the night before last when Aliens (1986) came on TV, and another old guy from another film of which my husband made an approving remark when he appeared. The film might have been The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), which we caught much of on cable last night, in which case the guy must have been Philip Baker Hall (b.1931)—I had to look up his name, but the face looks right. My role as a female leader of a military company comes directly from Mass Effect 3 (2012), which I was playing last night. I think there was a lot more to the dream, because it actually started with the scene prior to the mission when I first felt a foreboding uneasiness. I reported it in retrospect because I couldn't remember most of what happened before that last scene; the mission itself remains a blur in memory. There was physical input as well: when I woke up I still had a slight itch on my head where I had scratched in the dream and discovered the third worm.

I was sitting with two women friends (no one I know RL) across a table from the Dalai Lama. One of the women was showing us pictures of a guy she said had just died. The pictures were a vertical strip of three, like those that come out of a photo booth, only larger format, about 3x4 I guess, vertically aligned. What was more striking was the figure in the photos, which didn't look human, but like a skinny reddish angry muppet with an open howling mouth and a shock of hair over its eyes, a bit like Animal but more gangly.

I recognized him at once, though: "That's Kelsang Gyatso," I told the other women. "He's like a dissident, except in relation to mainstream Tibetan Buddhism. It's over some stupid doctrinal dispute." Then I remembered that the Dalai Lama was sitting right across the table and I blushed and apologized, since obviously the dispute was important to him and I hadn't meant to offend. "I just meant it seems stupid to people on the outside."

The Dalai Lama gently admonished me, "It is better not to say things that you might have to apologize for." I felt like retorting, "I know, but I'm not enlightened," but recognized that he was right so I just nodded in acknowledgment.

I wasn't practicing seriously for the last couple weeks as I felt too busy with work to devote much time to journaling, so my motivation to LD was also low (because successful attempts commit me to hours of writing if I'm going to record them right). Last night I felt more motivated so instead of playing video games late at night I went to bed early (11:30pm, early for me anyway) and put in a solid WILD attempt, with a full two-hour WBTB (from 1:45am when I woke up naturally until 3:45) followed by 14 minutes seated meditation and the usual counting ritual on returning to bed.

The attempt felt promising as I didn't fall asleep too quickly but maintained liminal awareness for awhile, and it was around 4:15am when I finally went back to sleep. However I did not achieve a WILD, and experienced nothing but an extremely vague NLD (something about a shoot-out, I was a young man in Vietnam I think, maybe during the war, the guys on my side had a sort of built structure to take positions in but it was full of rats, and my character felt very uncomfortable about the rats).

I woke up again at 6:30am and was desperate enough to take galantamine, even though I hate the after-effects and it hardly works for me anymore. This was followed by another vaguely-recalled dream which involved distinct manifestations of dream control (elaborate flying and levitation, which felt like I was deliberately testing the limits of my abilities) but very little dream awareness. At the end I was having what felt like a very meaningful conversation with a DC, but I don't remember what we talked about. It felt like there was great complexity to this dream as well as the previous one but my recollection was not sufficient to preserve it.

At 8:30am I woke up again, realized I had another bust, and as a last resort tried my vibrating alarm. I felt it go off three times but each time it jostled me out of sleep and I didn't feel like there was much I could do dream-wise, nor did I remember any dreams of note. The last time I at least remembered to try to DEILD but the REM atonia was apparently already broken, so it didn't work. I've always been able to instinctively DEILD-chain my WILDs, even before I knew what it was called, but for some reason that is the only situation in which I've been able to pull it off. Woke up for the final time at 9:30am and now I'm frustrated enough to declare a dryspell. Writing a report anyway because it was a deliberate attempt and also so that my mind can't use the break from journaling as an excuse for not dreaming properly.

Hypnagogic imagery and phrases fascinate me. They are even less structured and substantial than dreams. Even when paying close attention, I find almost impossible to preserve them in memory unless I rouse myself to write them down immediately on my notepad. One recent example resembled a conversation between Fry and Leela from the cartoon Futurama (this was WLR as I had seen an episode earlier that day on TV).

Fry, in response to something Leela has just said: "I'll get some more jellybeans, then." He sinks out of sight, as though vanishing into the ground. A moment later he reappears in a space that resembles a dark cavern, and cries out: "You! The stomach god!"

NLD: I was in large cavern with pools of water on either side of a land bridge and wanted to go fishing. I found a rock-lobster tail on the ground and since I didn't know where it had been or how old it was, I didn't want to eat it, but thought it might make useful bait for fishing. I baited my hook with a small piece of the lobster meat and cast the line. I wasn't sure how deep the water was but let the line sink naturally. I wasn't using a modern fishing rod, but the old-fashioned kind made of a single long bamboo cane with a simple length of cord attached to the tip.

Soon I got a bite, and from the degree to which the pole was bending, I knew it must be something big. I didn't want the pole to snap so I rapidly moved up to the end where the cord was tied and started drawing in the line directly, folding it around my elbows like rope as I was able to pull it in (it was a rather thick cord, closer to thin rope than the modern fishing line filament).

When I had drawn in enough cord to see my catch surface, I was startled to see the shape of a giant lizard breach the surface of the water. I momentarily wondered whether it was an alligator or a crocodile but couldn't remember how to tell the difference. Right after that I realized that the difference didn't matter—this thing was dangerous either way! I needed to cut the cord and quietly back away before it recognized me as an antagonist.