Night Vision

…or at least the parts of it I can still sort of remember.

I am with a group of people in a large space. There seem to be many small groups here, spread out in a number of seating areas, I guess you’d call them, except it’s more along the lines of cushions on the floor. The best comparison I can make would be an evacuation shelter in terms of the scale of the space and how it’s configured - although that isn’t what it is. There’s no sense of danger or conflict or anything outside of the ordinary.

The people with me, all women, I think, are DJs, and at some point, I take out my field recorder and offer to make a recording of some strange sound they’ve discovered and are messing around with making and send them a file of it later. (Because everybody likes to collect sounds, right?) But first, I check the settings to make sure I’ll be making a high-quality recording in the correct format. The interface is an unfamiliar one, which I rationalize by thinking that this isn’t the recorder I normally use. I also lose another chance at recognizing that this is a dream because, in spite of the fact that I’m looking at text on an electronic display, my recorder does not seem to be suffering from dodgy dream device syndrome. Far from it. Everything looks stable, and quite detailed - it’s actually the part of the dream I have the most precise memory of - and I don’t have a hard time adjusting the settings.

1.1.25

I seem to have got lucid early in the night somehow and have decided to experiment with something I’ve been meaning to try out: intentionally connecting with my dream environments on the more intimate level that I sometimes experience in my non-lucid dreams. That was the general plan, but now that I’m here, I know how I’ll carry it out: doing without my vision. It’s something I’ve done out of necessity before in dreams, but never on purpose.

I’m in the basement of my old house in M---, or the basement plus, I might call it, since it’s the expanded version of itself it usually takes in dreams. This iteration of it is completely empty and has the usual weird tunnel leading off who-knows-where. But for the time being, I’ll be staying in this room. The place is a bit creepy, but just right for what I have in mind.

I turn off my vision and feel for the influx of knowledge that I’m confident is there, latent in the dream - and find it. It’s difficult to describe - I'm not up for trying right now, but I think anyone who plays around with dreams much will have some experience to extrapolate from. I walk around for a while like that—I really don’t seem to have any trouble navigating this way. I turn my vision back on to confirm that it’s the same bare room. It is.

But there’s something else I want to try, so I turn my vision off again. I want to see if I can actually navigate a dream using sound, which I’ve never done before. I walk around some more, this time paying close attention to the echoes of my footsteps, trying to model the shape of the room with them. The sound seems to take on a living quality somehow, as if using it in this way has really turned it into an extension of my consciousness. And I’m actually getting an impression of a room, though a very rough one, and it’s hard to be sure when I already know it pretty well by now.

Vision back on. And with that done, I go off and have some non-lucid dreams until about 3:30 am, when I wake up and record the experience.

20.3.18