nautilus

Sunday, 9-13-20, Core 2

After a couple of long, regular dream fragments I found myself in the upstairs bathroom, sitting on the toilet. It was night and I was spacing out a bit, staring at the fan grate in the wall (which was on the wrong wall though I didn't notice at the time.) For a few brief moments, the grate I was looking at blurred and faded, and in fact everything in my visual field seemed to "glitch" and become less solid. I stared hard at the grate to try and unblur my vision, and it seemingly popped back into existence, becoming even more sharply defined than before. This whole experience was very similar to common waking life experiences where one might defocus one's vision when tired or consciously refocus on an object in order to sharpen one's vision on it. However, I found the extreme degree to which this happened here unnerving as it seemed as though the reality around me was liable to disappear altogether without constant attention to it. This is very likely a dream. I thought. My mind threw up the requisite resistance in the background due to the realistic, mundane nature of my experience up to this point. No, this could be a dream. I insisted mentally. I thought backwards, remembering the previous two dream fragments as if they were part of my day, then thought back further to remember myself getting into bed for core 2. There had been something a little strange about everything after that point, when I thought about it. I haven't woken up since then, I realized, I am dreaming!

I decided to test gravity by seeing if I could think myself into floating, as I habitually do upon first becoming lucid. However, this time I felt heavily weighted down, as if my body were made of lead. Everything was vague and I knew I needed to stabilize the dream. I went to raise my hand in front of my face so I could stare at it to bring more clarity, but I couldn't raise it a single inch. I was genuinely surprised. Why do I feel so heavy? I asked myself, If it's just my expectation I should be able to change it with a thought... I tried this and failed. I then noticed that I could seemingly sense my waking life body where it lay. I could even feel where one of my feet was hanging off the end of the bed. The sensations mapped to the position I remembered falling asleep in. REM atonia? I wondered. Am I closer to a waking state than in previous lucids, but still deeply enough asleep for the atonia to be present? Is my brain translating my bodily sensations into this dream experience of extreme heaviness?

I looked around again and realized the dream had faded more. Brute forcing things wasn't working. While I didn't feel close to waking up in terms of sensation (the level to which I could sense my body wasn't changing), I was reluctant to sit in a blurry dream scene for an extended period of time. If this is due to atonia, maybe I can work with that. I'll let images come and go they might in a WILD, observe them and wait for them to stabilize to a more solid dream. After a few moments, the fully blurred out scene randomly gave way to a vision of water, waves, the surface of an ocean. Before the scene could fully form, however, my consciousness lapsed. I know I dreamt some more before waking, though I don't remember the content.

Spoiler for Additional Notes:

Although this lucid was brief in terms of dream time and actual action, I'm very happy with the ease of logical thought in this dream, whether or not that reasoning process was completely accurate. There was definitely a greater awareness of myself in relation to waking life and a higher degree of observation within that context than is usual for me. I've certainly had other lucids where I recalled what I wanted to do with the dream from waking life, but I don't remember ever tracing back through my dream memories all the way to a waking memory of going to sleep before! The recall process isn't usually that effortless, either. It's just too bad my dream control wasn't equally effortless this time.