Verre

Ritual: My LDs have all but vanished now that I am not actively working on it (not for lack of interest, but work is way too busy right now, and I'm not playing any computer games either!) However, when I got up before dawn to feed the cat and realized I was wakeful enough to call this a WBTB, it occurred to me that I didn't even know what the October TOTMs were, so I looked them over before returning to bed. I tried to do some counting but had no focus and fell asleep. I did end up complete one of the tasks, but essentially within the context of a non-lucid dream! The distinctions between LD and NLD used to seem a lot crisper when LDing was new to me, but I would call this an example of agency without dream awareness, which I'm not sure has happened to me before. I always thought dream awareness was the prerequisite for agency, but apparently not!

NLD: I was in a community that was preparing for a special festival. They had a great deal of maguro (lean tuna meat) and slices of it were lining a long stone staircase that cut through a wooded park-like space. I wanted to marinate the maguro like I had done at last year's festival: it had been a big hit. I tried to remember the marinade recipe, and knew that it was very basic: pretty much just soy sauce and cilantro. Soy sauce was easy to come by, but I was out of cilantro. I had a limited time before all the maguro went bad, so I had to find cilantro right away.

I went into town to see if I could get any. While walking down the sidewalk, I saw some women holding cameras. I assumed they were photographers for the festival. This reminded me of the TOTMs, so I tried to remember the one I had prioritized. Oh right: if I see a DC, I should follow him or her. I picked one of the photographers, a black woman with her hair bound in two pigtails, and started shadowing her as she walked down the street.

The DC only walked about fifteen feet before she turned around again, so I turned as well and continued following her. She walked back to the place where I had first spotted her and stopped again. What was she doing? I studied her closely, trying to understand her behavior. She wasn't taking any pictures; her camera hung ignored around her neck. However, she seemed to be posing to display her fur coat to best advantage. Suddenly I understood: she had put on a gorgeous costume for the festival, so now she was walking up and down the sidewalk in order to be seen!

I decided that continuing to follow her would be redundant if she was just going to hang out on that same stretch of sidewalk, so I went into a local bookstore to ask about the cilantro. There was a guy who had a piece of paper with pictures of the various types. Right now only the cilantro from China was available, he said, but it didn't have the best flavor: they had picked it too early. I told him I'd settle for that if I couldn't get anything else.

Notes: Since I stopped doing active dream practice, not only my recall but even the content of my dreams has degraded. The more epic and story-like elements have dwindled and my dreams currently seem to be pieced together primarily from waking life residue. This one is full of it: I ate similar slices of maguro on Sunday night; on Monday I attended a lecture where the speaker used a fur coat as a metaphor; and in the back of my mind I had been wondering if it was true, as someone recently told me, that cilantro can lower the raised mercury levels one can get from eating too much maguro. Even marinating the maguro has a precedent, a very delicious form of sushi called zuke.

Ritual: wtb 1am, woke 5:45am, wbtb about an hour, take supplements (piracetam, bacopa, choline, alpha-gpc, l-theanine), lay on back, doze off, turn to side, woke 8am to record dream.

DEILD: I half-wake from an unremarkable NLD and realize I can DEILD. As I transition I can distinctly hear a woman's voice speaking, though she wasn't saying anything memorable. After a while I hear a new voice a man responding, and figure this is a good sign, suggesting that the hynagogic state is deepening toward dream. As soon as I feel like I am fully transitioned, I get out of bed. I remember the task I had intended: the storm TOTM. I go outside, intending to summon it, but the dream does not yet feel stabilized and my surroundings become vague. I retransition and realize that there's no reason I should feel constrained by concepts like "inside" and "outside," and decide to summon the storm from right in my bedroom. I look up at the ceiling and it becomes transparent, so that I can see the sky overhead. It is half-lit, with faint stars and gauzy clouds: I will the clouds to thicken and darken.

After another spell of vagueness, maybe a retransition, I go back outside to see if there is evidence of a storm yet. It is working! There is a patch of very heavy dark clouds overhead. It it not yet a full-blown storm so I work on it a little more. I raise my hands and shout, "Wind!" I am modeling this on the scene from the film Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992) where he conjures the clouds so it will get dark faster. I decide to add a little more panache: "WIND AND FIRE!" I yell, still gesticulating at the sky. The clouds are roiling and I do see patches of fire, so when it is sufficiently apocalyptic, I fly directly up into the cloudbank.

The effect is disappointing: I have no real sensory impressions apart from sight, and the visibility is very poor. It is hard to distinguish the greyness inside the clouds from the greyness of unformed dream, except that I notice that the fire has coalesced into vaguely anthropomorphic forms that resemble elementals or demons. Although they are distant and none moves to threaten me, I feel vaguely anxious and start singing to reassure myself. The dream destabilizes and I retransition.

I go outside again, and find myself on a slightly elevated walkway; just below is a middle-aged white guy who seems to be gardening. He looks up at me and says with an air of disappointment: "You can do better than this." I feel as though he is chastising me for summoning the storm, and feel a pang of guilt, although there is no rational basis for this. After entering a building, I look down and notice that I am carrying a phone. It is not a contemporary model but resembles those old Nokias with the small monochrome screens that can render text but not graphics. Distinctly legible on the screen is the word: "SmarKu," a mix of lower-case and capital letters as though it were abbreviated from something. The word intrigues me, so I ask:

"SmarKu, what are you?"

"A phone," it answers simply.

Well, duh. I try rephrasing my question, "I mean, what do you represent?"

"..."

Since the phone seems confused or reluctant to answer, I finally resort to a term I dislike, speaking forcefully for emphasis: "What do you symbolize?"

"A pimp and a whore," retorts the phone with an edge of sarcasm.

I can't help but laugh at the inexplicable rudeness of the reply. What is this, a dream version of Tourette's syndrome?

I retransition and go back outside, running across two gentlemen having a heated discussion. I find their conversation boring and don't make any particular effort to remember it, but this reminds me of the thread (I think it was last month's TOTM) where we were discussing the fact that it feels different to "think" something in a dream versus saying it "aloud," even though it is hard to conceptualize the difference. To test this principle, I comment inwardly on how dull their conversation is, and pay attention to how this manifests. I do not "hear" the words with my dream ears, nor do I seem to "speak" them in my dream voice, so it feels no different from thinking something in waking life. I walk over to them and think it directly in their presence, to see if they will respond: "How dully, sir!" (In retrospect it seems like an odd turn of phrase, but it felt natural at the time.) They do not react to me, so it still feels like a private thought. I decide to try a little experiment: I silently will one of the DCs to say these words aloud for me. Without a moment's hesitation, he pipes up to his companion: "How dully, sir!"

This was so successful that I'm encouraged to try again with the second guy. Mischievously, I select the same words that the SmarKu used earlier. Sure enough, the guy says out of nowhere, "A pimp and a whore." At this point I go right up to him and ask, "What do you mean by that?" I expect him to be confused or uncertain about why he said it, but instead he starts explaining himself. This is really unexpected: he is taking responsibility for the phrase as though saying it were his own idea! All I could think was... so DCs rely on dream logic? I... guess that makes sense.

There is a destabilization, and before my eyes I watch the environment fluctuate from brilliant light and clarity to hazy vagueness. I suspect this is due to my own lack of mental focus, slipping too close to wakefulness again, and I tell myself that I don't have to wake up if I don't want to. Back in my bedroom, I maintain dreamstate through a rough patch by singing again and focusing on sensual impressions. As I sing, it feels like my voice is joined by invisible others, singing with me in harmony. This reminds me of my lucid dare—from last year—which I've never quite completed to my satisfaction.

I go back outside, willing it to be stable. I frame my arms around empty air as though around an unseen person and dance, hoping the invisible owner of one of the voices will manifest. No such luck. I notice a DC standing nearby, a middle-aged black man, and ask him, "Have you seen an elf around here?"

"Yes," he replies. Okay, I realize I might have willed him to say that using my new trick, but if it conditions my expectations into manifesting the damn elf, it will have been worth it.

"Who?" I inquire further, a specific name in mind.

"Thranduil," he says promptly, just as I anticipated.

"Where is he?" I don't have an answer to this one, so I'm hoping he'll say something helpful.

He points behind me. "Right over there."

I turn and look, hoping my expectations are primed enough that he will be visible. Afraid not. As I squint into the distance, the man explains helpfully, "You can just barely see him, in the edge of the forest."

I still don't see him but I'll take his word for it. The man goes on, "If you hurry, you might be able to catch him. The best way is to go left up those stairs."

I follow his instructions, wondering I should summon a horse to cover the ground faster, but I don't want to add unnecessary complexity and figure that on horseback is not the best way to climb stairs anyway. The stairs are very rustic and appealing, constructed of irregularly cut slabs of old grey stone, with small plants growing out of the cracks, and a low stone wall on either side. They turn to the right and continue to ascend. I'm climbing as fast as I can and observe that either the steps are getting smaller or I'm getting bigger, because now I'm covering at least a dozen with each stride, but I'm still only halfway to the forest's edge when I wake up and sense that the dream state is unrecoverable.