Verre

Ritual: I thought it might be nice to get lucid again, so I read DV before bed, though my motivation was considerably reduced when I realized that the time change had caught me unawares, and I was going to bed an hour later than I had intended! Also drank some sage and mugwort tea before bed. Those are the only relevant factors I can think of. WTB at 3am, woke 9:15am with dream.

DEILD: I came out of an NLD and started going over it in my mind, when it dawned on me that I had not fully woken up. I was in a hallway carrying a large package; to confirm, I tossed it in the air and sure enough, it hovered for a moment before drifting back down. It occurred to me that maybe I should take up the habit of tossing things into the air in waking life as a kind of RC. But it would have to be something smaller than a large box, something more like a coin or small ball. I produced a small black ball and tried again. To my amusement, this one behaved as if gravity were operating normally. Maybe not such a good RC unless I actively intervene: I tossed it again and concentrated on holding the ball in the air. That worked well enough. I resolved to spend more time in WL trying to move small objects with my mind.

I exited the building and thought I might try a TOTM. Even though I had just reread the list before going to bed, I now realized that I couldn't remember any of them. Thinking hard, I finally recalled the one about the dream guide.

"I'm ready for my dream guide!" I shouted. I've never had a dream guide before, so I had no expectations. I shouted a few more times until a woman showed up. She was of hefty build, with straight shoulder-length dark hair, and looked to be in her late forties. On the right lapel of her uniform-like black jacket, resembling that of a hotel clerk (or more to the point, a tour guide) was a name tag reading "RUSH." There was something very blank and bureaucratic about her demeanor that immediately put me off.

"Take me on a tour," I instructed.

"A Grand Tour?" she asked. Lately I've been reading about the Grand Tours eighteenth-century travelers would take in Italy, so I assumed this was merely waking life residue.

"Take me on a tour of Hogwart's," I proposed instead.

The woman must not have understood, because she started saying things about temperature and time that sounded like the details of a technical process—brewing coffee, I guessed. I was getting impatient.

"This isn't working out," I told her. Perhaps I should have been more patient, but she reminded me of one of those blank, automaton-like DCs that never have anything interesting to say. I turned my back and walked away, determined to try again.

"I'm ready for my dream guide!" I resumed shouting, trying to muster a sense of optimism. Nothing changed at first, but I persisted, shouting about five times before another figure drew my attention. He was a short brown-haired man standing next to a bar, gazing at me with a slightly amused expression. As I walked over, I was startled to see that he was the spitting image of Michael J. Fox. This perplexed me, because I have no particular attachment to that actor, nor did I recall having encountered his image recently in waking life. I remembered that in WL he had developed a terrible disease and I couldn't remember if he was still alive. This DC looked like the younger version of him from the 1980s or '90s, and his cheerful confidence created much more favorable impression than the last DC.

"Are you my dream guide?" I asked uncertainly. He replied with something casual, along the lines of, "If you want me to be."

"Let's give it a try," I said. "First, take me somewhere beautiful. Then, take me somewhere that I will find interesting." Since I'd never had a dream guide before or thought much about their proper role, now I was acting on the assumption that their job was to give me tours. In retrospect that's kind of funny.

As we walk out of the building together, he expresses a sexual interest. I'm surprised at his bluntness, but tell him okay, it's natural that there might be sexual tension between us, I can accept that. He seems relieved, telling me that many of the applicants ruled it out from the start. In fact, a lot of the essays he received closed on that note. I commiserate, noting how even from a purely rhetorical standpoint, that does seem like a terrible way to end an application essay.

We continue through a park-like setting, and as we descend along a wooded path I see a tree with several conjoined trunks. Emblazoned across it like a light projection is the name of a website, "www.tabu.com." I look again to make sure and the text shifts. "www.tabut.com." I wonder what it means. Is this in reference to the Polynesian word "tabu," the basis of our English "taboo"? [I looked them up as I was writing this and...seriously, it's a big world out there, how could these websites not exist?]

We walk right to the edge of a wide shallow lake. I realize we'll probably need to travel somewhere by a means other than walking, and let him know I'm familiar with some basic methods: "How are we going to get there? I can spin and teleport, if you like. And I know how to fly."

He offers another possibility: "See that brown line?" He points to somewhere behind us. I look back, and without thinking about it we automatically start rising into the air and drifting toward a brown line that runs across the grass of the lawn. "That's where we'll transition," he explains. We start gliding toward it, and sure enough, a moment later we are flying across a completely different scene.

The previous landscape was park-like, but we emerge higher in the air over a vast landscape. Distant hills, distinctive coloring, shades of red in the earth and sky. Everything becomes a bit clearer. "Okay, this is beautiful," I acknowledge aloud. He's definitely succeeded in the first task I set him.

We drift closer to the ground and I notice an odd detail: an enormous fence of thick horizontal wires strung between vertical poles that must be at least 50 feet high, stretched across a valley between two steep hills. There are only a few of the wires, maybe eight, strung in pairs of two. It would be no barrier for a person at all, or any earthly creature—it's so big it doesn't even obstruct the view—but then I see what it is keeping in. They look like giant green mantis-like creatures, clearly insectoid, but enormous. Despite the monstrosity of the creatures, the enclosure reminds me of a nature reserve. Are the fences for our protection, or theirs? Perhaps both.

I think about how my second instruction to my guide had been to take me somewhere interesting, and it would certainly be interesting if one of those things got out! However, I decide not to vocalize my thoughts or deliberately influence the course of events, instead waiting to see how things will play out.

One of the creatures catches sight of us and scuttles over, moving with astonishing rapidity for its size. It crosses several hundred yards in a matter of seconds. It pushes against the fence, snapping at us with its mandibles. It has surprisingly long reach and the wires of the fence are being bowed out by the weight of its body—they hold, but we have to dart away very quickly to avoid the initial attack. I realize the safest course is to fly directly upward, well out of its reach, in case the fence breaks. I can feel my adrenaline pumping and have to admit, that was definitely an interesting experience.

Abruptly the environment changes and we are back in a room that I think I recognize from earlier in the dream—but way earlier, the NLD sequence before I even got lucid. I realize the dream is ending, but I'm very pleased with how well this dream guide was able to fulfill my requests. "Can I meet you again?" I ask. His acquiescence is as casual and noncommital as when I first asked him to be my guide.

Ritual: WTB 3am, woke several times before and after dawn but didn't WBTB, woke around 9:30am and put vibrating alarm on wrist, set for 24 minutes. Woke up too soon, before it went off, reset it. Next cycle effective.

EILD: I feel the pulse of the alarm on my left wrist, waking me, but remember to lay very still and see if I can maintain dream state. I experimentally move my hands and arms and from the sinuous and unimpeded sense of motion I'm convinced this is working, that I'm moving the dream body and not the physical one. I know I have to be careful not to overdo it and actually engage real motor functions, so I spend some time almost "dancing" in place with my arms, writhing them bonelessly like a snake dance, until I have enough sense of engagement with the dream body that I risk rolling out of bed. I can't walk yet: I can barely crawl over the rug. I know I need to engage the environment, so I stare at the carpet, noticing the texture of the pile. I'm pleased when I spot a piece of random detritus under my dresser, because something unexpected means the dreamstate is gaining momentum. To gain traction I focus on physical sensations, running my hands over the carpet and even bending lower to rub my cheek against it. Even though I've done this many times before I'm still impressed with the vividness of the sensation, it feels so scratchy and real.

When I feel sufficiently engaged with my dream body, I manage to stand upright and walk. I easily recall my plan to work on memory—carefully though! I don't want to actually wake myself up. Trying to remember where I went to sleep seems unnecessary, as I still haven't left the bedroom. What about the date? I'm pretty sure it's February... I don't want to think harder to get the precise date lest that efffort wake me. (It's worth nothing that I usually have to think just as hard to remember the calendar date in WL. Usually I just look at my phone because it's easier.)

I start walking through the hall toward the kitchen. What other memory should I try to access? I know, what have I been reading lately? I'm pretty sure I came up with the correct general impression, but even as I write this, details of my waking life knowledge of this topic are corrupting and crowding out the dream recollections to the point where it is hard to be sure how specific my answer was. At any rate, in the dream I felt satisfied with my level of memory access and moved on.

As I entered the kitchen I noticed something peculiar: even though I was in a very accurate mental model of my house and had a strong access to waking recollection, and had even managed to access WL memory without disrupting the dream state, it had not in the least improved it either. I had a good sense of tactility (I find that the easiest sense to maintain), but as so often in early WILDs (which this effectively was though induced by EILD technique), my vision was still extremely poor. The haziness was mitigated by the fact that I was in a dream version of my house, as I almost am at the start of dreams of this type, so I "knew" what was around me and that knowledge could help make up for the lack of visual clarity. Perhaps that is partly why my mind instinctively frames such dreams in this way, in addition to the straightforward logical continuity of entering the dream from a mental model of the same place I went to sleep. It moreover suggests that from the start of WILDs I always instinctively remember where my WL body is sleeping, even if I am not paying deliberate attention to the fact.

I wondered if concentrating would clean up my vision but there was no improvement— it's too bad I didn't think of Fryingman's awesome technique, which I only read about last night, of "taking off the blurry glasses." I figured I should try to clean it up in the usual way, interacting with the dreamstate until it naturally clarified and brightened. Meanwhile, I thought about the other tasks I had been planning. Most important was the elusive forest. After many tries fruitlessly trying to reach it on foot, I decided that I need to stop chasing it, since I seem to be encountering a mental block, and instead will it to manifest around me. I also remembered another task that I've been wanting to try for ages but never managed to think of when dreaming (so maybe this memory trick is working after all?) My idea was to see if I could "play" my WoW character, a Forsaken, and explore the Undercity. I murmur her name aloud, but decide to save that for another time—right now my main goal is to work on the forest.

I stand squarely in my kitchen and start to visualize myself surrounded by trees. There is a tall houseplant to my right with feathery foliage: it must be the little potted tree I used for Christmas, a Norfolk pine. I reach out and grasp its soft needles with my right hand, thinking this will help focus my thoughts on the forest I am attempting to conjure. Intriguingly, I fail to notice the spatial discrepancy: although the real tree is only a few feet from where I dreamed it, in WL it is now outside on the patio rather than inside the house.

Unfortunately, this is as close as I get to manifesting anything like a forest before my husband comes into the room. I figure he'll just ignore me because I am dreaming—and oddly I make the assumption, as I seem so often to do in the dreamstate, that I am encountering the real-life version of him even though I know I am dreaming. Maybe it is this tendency that makes some people interpret dreams so closely modeled on RL spaces as "OBEs". But I am thrown into confusion when my husband looks right at me and starts talking. What does it mean? How can he possibly see me? Could I have been wrong in my conviction that so-called "OBEs" are a naive misinterpretation of certain kinds of LDs; might I really be "projecting" an image of myself into the waking world? This still doesn't seem plausible, but the only alternative I can think of is that I am actually awake. (Note the dream logic: despite the generally high level of memory access and mental function in this dream, I completely fail to consider the most likely— and as it turns out correct—alternative, that the encounter with my husband is nothing more than a projection of my dreaming imagination.)

So am I awake or dreaming? I'm not sure anymore. It feels like a dream, and I'm still not seeing my environment very clearly, but maybe I'm still groggy and bleary from having just gotten up. How could I be confused about this, though? Although there are plenty of times that I'm fully convinced I'm awake and turn out to have been dreaming, not once have I ever been fully convinced I was dreaming and turned to be awake. It doesn't occur to me to try any of the typical RCs, but I focus my attention inward, on my sense of bodily awareness, to try to figure this out. I've often noticed that my dream body is characterized by a peculiar kind of inward vibration radiating from the area of my solar plexus—this impression used to be very strong and distinct, especially when flying, but it has become much less noticeable as I've grown more experienced. I think I can sense it now but it is very faint.

My husband is still talking, and although I am too perplexed to follow what he is saying, he seems to be complaining about some bad habit of mine. "...twenty-one times a day," he concludes. Apparently that's how often I do the thing that has been annoying him. Does it have something to do with my dream practice?

The encounter has now totally disrupted my concentration on the forest task, so I turn around and approach the patio door, thinking I'll just go outside. The weather looks lovely, cloudy and wet. "Hey, it's raining," I comment aloud, and anticipate how nice it will be to feel the cool water on my skin. I start to take off my sweater so I'll have something dry to put on when I come back in (it doesn't occur to me how odd it is that I'm wearing a sweater if I supposedly just got out of bed) and pull open the door.

"Don't, we have to leave," warns my husband. I recall (correctly) that he wanted us to go out on an errand today, but even if I am somehow actually awake, it must still be mid-morning. I assumed we were going in the afternoon, why would he want to leave so early? With these thoughts the dream is finally disrupted and I wake up.

Note: On the way to my laptop to write things down, I remember the silent alarm still on my wrist and look at the time. It reads 20:42, and it was set for intervals of 24 minutes, which means the whole dream played out in just under three and a half minutes. Of course, then it took an hour and a half to fully record, which is maybe why it's a good thing I don't LD every night, lol.

After reading about Tlaloc's homebrew EILD technique, I wanted to try something similar, so I compared the devices available on Amazon and settled on the "MotivAider." Although bulky and overpriced, I liked that the vibration length and intensity are fully customizable, and the fact that it has an option to go off at random intervals. It recently arrived in the mail, so I read the instructions before going to bed last night, but decided to wait until my WBTB to program it, since I figured the task would help reawaken my mind as well as focus my intention.

Went to bed at 1:30am, woke naturally at 5am. I realized my motivation wasn't as high as I had anticipated because I remembered how much work I needed to get done before the weekend was over, and reasoned that sleeping in after a long WBTB and writing a dream report if successful would really cut into my available time. However, the MotivAider beckoned, so I decided to do a very short WBTB, just long enough to program it and set it up before going back to sleep. I set the vibration to its minimal length (two seconds), programmed it to go off in random intervals up to 45 minutes, and placed it in the case of my leg pillow, where I should be able to feel it through the fabric. (I am a side sleeper and always use an extra pillow between my knees.) I thought the vibration would be too disruptive if it was near my head, so I wanted it somewhere closer to my feet. I returned to bed at 5:20am. I lay awake for a while with anticipation, and eventually decided I had better also put the vibration on its weakest setting, so I reprogrammed the device by the light of my phone.

At some point I must have drifted off to sleep, and then I felt the device go off. But something had gone wrong: the vibrations were pulsing repetitively without cease. I tried to ignore them, but they seemed to be going on for over a minute. I decided I must have programmed the device incorrectly, so I got up and took it out of the pillow, setting it aside. Tomorrow I could figure out what the problem was.

Shortly after that I was walking through the house, and I noticed something odd. Glancing through the sliding glass door in the kitchen, I saw that the water level of the river next to the house had risen way too high. In fact, the water was coming right up to the base of the door, like it was on the verge of flooding in. This observation was so startling that it made me realize I must be dreaming... maybe the EILD had worked after all! Had I ever really gotten up, or had it all been an FA?

In retrospect there was something very intriguingly incomplete about the observation that prompted me realize that I was dreaming. Through the door, I could see a vast sea of water that I interpreted as a wide river, with just a strip of land visible a mile or two distant on the other side. The water looked entirely natural, brownish-hued, its surface sleek and reflective of the warm pre-dawn light. At no point, even after I fully realized I was dreaming, did it occur to me that there is no such river next to the house, much less a broad vista of this kind... the only body of water visible in that direction is an in-ground pool of the conventional turquoise hue on a concrete patio bounded by thick trees that block any view further into the distance. Yet only thing that seemed odd to me in the dream, even after getting lucid, was the high level of the encroaching water, not the improbable existence of the vast river!

Probably because I have been thinking about dream music again, I was inspired to turn my observation into a song. "If there's water near the house, it's a dream," I sang, repeating the line several times to reinforce the association, just in case it came up again in the future. Then I wondered which tasks to work on. I decided to try StephL's lucid dare (enter an enchanted forest, look for an elven gathering and learn a new song from them), which I thought would pair well with the October bonus TOTM (create a song on a musical instrument that doesn't exist in waking life). No sooner did my thoughts turn to the bonus task than I could actually hear ambient music in the air around me, like notes plucked from a stringed instrument. Perhaps I should have paused and investigated—I could probably have found a suitable instrument to fulfill the task—but I already had a plan in mind for getting to the enchanted forest, so I walked out of the house through the front door.

Traveling to a forest on foot hasn't been working well for me in my TOTY attempts (I tried it in Hansel and Gretel a couple times), so I had been pondering alternate strategies. One possibility simply involved growing trees around me in the house until the environment around me transforms into a forest, but another approach I found appealing was to try to use the little fir tree growing outside the front door as a portal.

It was three or four years ago that I bought this little tree at the grocery store one December and that year used it as a miniature Christmas tree (at the time it was only about two feet tall). Afterwards I put it outside in the front yard. Improbably it thrived, more than doubling in size, and apparently seemed to be doing well with no care other than being watered by the automatic sprinklers that went on briefly every morning, so I left it alone. Then one day I went to move it and discovered the secret reason it was flourishing: its roots had apparently gone right through the bottom of the pot and grown directly into the ground! I am impressed by the resourcefulness of this sapling, so I had the idea of approaching it in a dream and asking it to transport me to the enchanted forest.

When I opened the front door, I was surprised to see snow on the ground. This is probably because last night I was looking up pictures based on the search term "winter forest" to incubate appropriate visual impressions. However, since I live in a climate where snow is impossible (it has been in the nineties the last couple days!), I immediately recognized that this was more evidence of the dream state, so I added a new line to my song: "If there's snow on the ground, it's a dream." Looking over at my little tree, I saw that it was also covered in snow, and added another line, "If there's snow in the branches, it's a dream." Since I was already singing, I saw no reason to stop. I walked over to the tree, grasped its narrow trunk, and requested in song, "Take me to the enchanted forest, the enchanted forest of dream!"

Unfortunately, I promptly woke up. Normally I might have been annoyed that the dream ended before I could accomplish anything, but this time I didn't mind because it was such an amusing first success for my new EILD device!

Sure enough, the whole experience turned out to be a false awakening: when I got up to start my report (at 6:10am), I discovered that I had never removed the device from the pillow like I remembered doing. And this indicates that it must not have malfunctioned after all, and that the extended sequence of vibrations I felt was most likely an experience of time dilation conditioned by the dream state.