Verre

Ritual: WTB 2am, woke up after a couple hours and strapped on the Motivaider, timed for 30m intervals. I woke up again after what I thought must be at least an hour and hadn't felt any vibrations. I decided that my awareness was not sufficient tonight to continue, removed the device, and went back to sleep. But apparently this process created an anchor for the idea of lucidity, because in my next sleep interval I became aware of lying in that intermediate state between sleeping and waking and went through the motions of getting up into a WILD. However, in retrospect it is clear that I was already dreaming at the start of this experience, so it was not a genuine WILD but a dreamed WILD (hence DWILD). It was 5:45am when I woke from the dream.

DWILD, "Another rainbow": I am lying on the flat surface of a wooden table as though it were a bed in a large, strange room with a distant, domed ceiling. I feel groggily half-asleep, but notice the distinctive sensations in my body that make me wonder if I'm close to the dream state. I start playing with it as I would when inducing a WILD, attempting to roll and rotate my body while avoiding real physical movement. When I find myself face down and succeed in getting up on my hands and knees, I'm sure that I'm sufficiently integrated with my dream body to get off the table and explore the dream—and given that in retrospect I know was dreaming all along, it is apparent that the sense of difficulty that I experience as I carefully maneuver myself into a standing position, similar to what I experience in real WILDs, must be wholly a mental fabrication.

My awareness is still low and initially lacking in agency, so I go along with the dream narrative for a while. The space in which I find myself is strange and hard to describe. There's a kind of reflective dome above me that rotates and shifts to reflect different parts of an upper floor or balcony. The dome moves until it is showing a distorted reflection of what looks like an early twentieth-century radio, one of the elegant ones in a large wooden cabinet. I am aware that seated up by the radio there is an older man who owns this place, and I am his guest. After this is a scene in which someone tells my brother that if he wants to get along with this man then he should take up shortwave radio as a hobby.

Then a bunch of us are seated at a long table for a dinner party. [Source: Order of the Phoenix was on TV last night, and it has a number of scenes with people seated at long tables.] Plates are served and they all contain huge sandwiches. The older man that I saw in the balcony earlier is picking disinterestedly at his sandwich and asks where the other food is, the stuff that had been simmering in the crockpot. My brother, who had put together the food, says that it will be coming up as the next course. I'm seated directly across from the older man, who I think of as our "host," and can tell from his expression he doesn't want to eat the sandwich. I decide to be helpful and comment loudly: "That's a huge sandwich! I couldn't eat all that even for one meal." Although this is true, my intention in speaking was to save face for the other man by legitimizing the option of leaving the sandwich uneaten while waiting for the next course.

After the sandwich course, we take a break from the meal and everyone who was at the table, about a dozen people in all, are standing in another room. The host is there, and a bunch of vague random people I don't recognize, as well as DC versions of my brother, mom, and dad. For some reason, maybe because of the lull in the narrative, I finally remember my intended task, the leprechaun TOTY, as well as how I had planned to accomplish it. My chief difficulty in previous attempts had been that once I managed to create the necessary rainbow, I got thwarted in my attempts to seek the end of it. As I had earlier been pondering this difficulty, a straightforward solution, perfectly obvious in retrospect, finally occurred to me: why not create the rainbow such that it ends right in front of where I'm standing?

"Okay everyone, we're going to play a game, kind of like a party game." I smile at the host and add, "It'll give you time to digest before the next course." I reach out and pat his belly, an oddly familiar gesture given that the DC did not scan as anyone I know in WL. [Possible source: yesterday I was doing research related to Budai, the so-called "Laughing Buddha," and rubbing his belly is a recognized ritual gesture. But the DC did not in any other respect remind me of Budai.] I complete my announcement by telling the group: "We're going to make a rainbow!"

The room we are in is walled entirely with glass on two sides, like a skyscraper, and I recognize that this clear view of the sky will be helpful for the task. I'm slightly more concerned about the fact that we're three or four storeys up, which means that if the rainbow ends here and I start digging through the floor, I won't actually be digging in solid ground. I remind myself that it is silly to maintain these kind waking life assumptions in the dream state. It can be solid ground if it wants to be, or maybe I can find the leprechaun in the room below us. Dream is nothing but malleable, so I really don't need to be this finicky.

I continue with my instructions to the group: "What we need to do is hold hands and create the end of the rainbow right here." I gesture to indicate the patch of floor in middle of our circle of people. "Then we'll go through, fight the leprechaun, and take his gold." I look around to gauge the response and decide the DCs need a little more incentive. "We can split the money," I add, and am pleased to see that this perks up their interest.

We join hands around a large circle. I feel that my shirt cuffs are too long and and getting in the way, so I have to break off and fold them up in order to get proper skin contact with the people around me. Once again I wonder if I'm being too finicky. Probably. Even the hand-holding seems like overkill, but I thought it might help us join our focus on the same goal.

My assumption had been that the assistance of the DCs would help my own confidence and focus on the task. This idea was probably based on my last rainbow-making dream, when I really did feel like I benefited from the help volunteered by the little girl. But this group of DCs is not helping at all. Like typical adults in a social setting, they are only marginally interested in my unusual party game. While I'm trying to concentrate on making a rainbow, the others are getting distracted and starting to chit-chat among themselves. This is distracting me in turn.

"Quiet!" I rebuke them sharply. "No talking, please. I need you to concentrate. Focus your intention." I figure they could use a reminder of the goal of our task: "We're going to create a rainbow"

Periodically I've been glancing out the windows to see if a rainbow is visible in the sky yet. This time I notice that the weather has changed. The sky is grey and a steady rain is now pouring down. Rain, well, that's halfway to a rainbow, isn't it? I let myself be encouraged that the environment is showing some response.

I continue attempting to focus, and the DCs continue to stand around without helping much. They're quieter after my reprimand but still distracted, and I have the impression that they don't seem to know how to focus their intentions properly. This is exasperating. What good are dream characters who don't even know how to interact with a dream? My mom starts speaking and I almost raise my hand to swat at her, irritated by yet another interruption, until I realize that what she's saying might actually be helpful. She is commenting on the light, how it needs to filter through the water particles a certain way to create a rainbow.

I had never intended to create a rainbow with meteorological accuracy, but hey, since it's already raining outside, we might as well give it a shot. If we can just get the right sort of light, it might encourage our expectations in a way that will make this easier. You know how when it rains and then you see the light break through the clouds, and you wonder if you will see a rainbow? That's the expeirence I was now trying to recreate. I look out the window and sure enough, in one direction bright sunlight is now alternating with the dark clouds. Very well, the rainbow can come from that direction.

Once again I concentrate, reminding myself that rainbows consist of light broken into the spectrum of colors. I think I almost see them in front of me, faint and translucent, but I can't tell if I'm only imagining them until the DCs all break out into "oohs" and "ahs," and saying things like "amazing!" I smile triumphantly, amused that everyone is acting so impressed after their earlier disengagement.

(While it seems odd to make the above distinction between something that "happens" in a dream and something I'm "only imagining," given the many times I have attempted to complete some task by imagining the outcome and it has not tangibly manifested in the dream, some such distinction seems warranted, if much less clear and stark than the difference between imagining and experiencing in waking life.)

It is a bit odd to try to look at a rainbow head on, from immediate proximity, but I do see a faint shimmering band extending from the lit quarter of the clouds to the floor right in front of my feet. I remind everyone that creating the rainbow was only the first step. "Now we have to dig through the floor." I start scrabbling at the smooth wooden boards, trying to imagine that the floor is soft and that my hands can scoop it up like clay. I feel everyone watching (no one else is trying to help) and their expressions are dubious. If merely creating a rainbow surprised them, imagine the skepticism they must feel watching me try to break through solid floor with my hands! I wonder if I can better align the expectations of the onlookers if I use some sort of tool to dig with, but I can't think of what might be handy.

This time it is my dad who speaks up with some advice: "The location of the floor isn't localized on the floor." I don't understand what he's trying to tell me, and I don't have long to think about it because I feel myself waking. I lose the dream and lay still for a few minutes, feeling to see if I can DEILD, but no, my body is fully awake now.

The setting of the dream was the farm where I lived as a teenager, but nothing about the plot resembled waking life, and my own character was an adolescent boy. I was the son of our tribe's chieftain, and another adult male in the tribe approached me with an offer. He wanted to buy my father's flower that was growing near the chicken house, offering me a groat in exchange. I refused, of course: the flower was not mine to sell.

On my way to the barn I passed the flower and glanced at it. It was beautiful and otherworldly, with large hanging bell-shaped blossoms of red and purple. I thought I had made the right decision by turning the man away. I went into the barn, the bottom floor of which was completely empty of everything but a pile of horse manure that had been gathered into the center of the space. This was a bit odd, but my thoughts were elsewhere.

I was remembering what the same man had done for the nuns: by giving them an iPad, he had eliminated their tendency to engage in other, more heretical, forms of augury. Had he been testing me? Obviously it would have been wrong to sell the flower for my own gain, but perhaps it was also wrong to refuse outright. I should tell my father about the offer and see if he might want to sell the flower after all. Perhaps he needs a groat.

I go talk to my father. He is not a human but a ring of flexible tissue suspended within a rigid round frame that forms an outer ring. My character, the young boy, is not surprised by this, but OOCly I find it odd. It is hypnotic to watch the creature talk: the inner ring changes shape, forming geometric and other patterns, while vibrating. Together the shape-changing and vibration sound quite similar to a human voice, though higher-pitched and with more vibrato.

I mention that I want to talk about so-and-so, the member of the tribe who offered me the deal (at the time I knew his name, but lost it on waking), and at once my father starts describing a recent encounter with the guy:

"We chat a while, then he tells me what a fine young man you are. I'm thinking, wowwww!" He emphasizes the word "wow," drawing it out with varying intonations a bit like a hippy or stoner might... and then the sound blends into the chime of my alarm going off and waking me. I was annoyed to be interrupted mid-dream!

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 was stressed about work. How am I going to complete all the obligations piling up this month, which is already getting shorter? I figured it would be best to prioritize. I should be able to finish the map in an afternoon if I get the right materials together. I thought about what I would need to finish it, and came up with vellum and archival paper. Fortunately I knew I already had these somewhere and was pretty sure where I had last put them, in a box in the storage area. I could see it in my mind's eye. I had woken up early and wanted to go retrieve them, but the rest of my family was still asleep.

My mother, brother, and father were all staying with me in the house and I didn't want to disturb them by walking through the building and rummaging around in boxes. I decided to go outside for a walk instead. I walked down the stairs, which were littered with all the discarded santa masks. This struck me as odd at first, but I reasoned we must have had a holiday party yesterday.

Outside it felt like early morning, and there was a narrow stream of clear water nearby. Next to the stream was a small building of naturally weathered wood, a sort of shed. Just after I entered it, it occurred to me that even though I know I'm awake, I should practice some RCs to instill good habits. No one else was around and there was no reason not to do a blatant one, so I jumped. Yes, just as I thought, it's obvious I'm awake, because that felt perfectly normal. But just for good measure I should do it a few more times in order to internalize the feeling of what a proper jump feels like in waking life.

So I jumped in the air several times in succession, concentrating on that critical moment at the apex, when the upward motion reverses and gravity takes over. I knew that I would be able to tell if I were dreaming because the timing would be off, that moment would feel drawn out slightly, extended. Hmmm.... it isn't, is it? Was that a touch of hesitation at the top? No, I'm pretty sure this is natural. I've just never concentrated on it sufficiently before, my attention is making it seem more pronounced.

And yet... it does seem a trifle too long. Could it be...? What if...? I had just begun to seriously consider the possibility that I might be dreaming after all, when I woke up in bed. Only very slowly did I come back to myself and realize that all the things I had taken as evidence that I was awake were wrong or askew, signs of false memory. The building and surroundings that seemed so familiar at the time were pure dream space, unlike any place I know in waking life. It made sense at the time that my whole family was there, but the only accurate part is that I'm currently sharing a hotel room with my mother. The anxiety about work is real enough, but it was only well after I had written down my initial notes that I realized that in the dream I had felt responsible for an additional project that didn't exist in WL, in addition to the real ones. Finally, as I initially lay in bed reviewing the dream, I didn't even notice how I slipped back briefly from genuine waking into an FA, and briefly found myself another place entirely, which only transitioned again to lying back in bed once I reached the point where I felt I had enough grasp of the memory to get up and write.

I was in a small shop when blood dripping from overhead stained the white shirt I was wearing. I looked up and I could see small circles of blood pooling and dripping down from from the ceiling in two separate places. Where could it be coming from? The explanation that seemed most likely was that the vampires were leaving their victims on the roof again. If so, I was going to be very annoyed, because sometimes it was days before anyone found them and by then they were going bad. I wondered if I should go up and check, but remembered that there was somewhere I needed to be shortly so I would have to hurry home to shower and change my shirt.

Back home, I had sufficient awareness to notice that the place looked unfamiliar (like most of my dream places, it resembled nowhere I've been in RL), but then I remembered that we had just moved here. I walked around admiring the new house: it was much more spacious than the last one, and had great atmosphere. For instance, in my room there were places where tree roots were growing down over the wall, creating beautiful lattice patterns and giving the room a pleasant rustic feel. I remembered my last landlord was always paranoid about tree roots growing near the house, but in this case their growth had been shaped in such a way that they formed a wonderful symbiosis with the architecture. There was a shallow pond my room too, unless I'm remembering a different room, and some kind of fish or crustaceans living in the pond.

I found my mother in the yard just behind the house. She was engaged in some kind of task, using a tree stump as a base to scrub the blue pigment off of some pieces of paper (as far as I could make out) and wanted me to come help. I also noticed a little pool or pond in the backyard that I thought I should take a closer look at when I had more time. But it was already 11am and I needed to be at my next engagement by 11:30, which barely left me time to take a shower. My brother came out to help my mom instead, so I excused myself and went back inside the house.

I passed a room that was entirely filled with an inground swimming pool, leaving just enough floorspace to walk around the edges. I gazed down into the water and was surprised how deep it was. I think my dad was in the room; I remember asking about the depth and then noticing the large black numbers marked on the side of the pool that confirmed his answer: eighteen feet. I reached down to touch the water and was delighted by how warm it was. This was much better than an outdoor pool because we could use it year round! And it was the third body of water I'd seen in the house so far. "I'm really starting to like this house!"

There was more but my recall gets vague after that. One thing to note, though: this dream was little more than a concatenation of dream signs! Mother, father, brother, unfamiliar house, no less than three bodies of water—somehow I went from one to another in a state of total obliviousness, and yet the dream kept throwing them at me as if to say, "Erm, excuse me. Hey. Hey! Notice anything?"

I was walking with my dad, who now resembled the older Russell Crowe from Noah, out of the town into a desert to join an expeditionary force that was tasked with recovering some powerful ancient artifact. "Are we going to help them get it or take it for ourselves?" I asked him, trying to clarify our motivations. "We'll see how it plays out," he replied. In the next moment I observed the leader of the expeditionary force raise at least a hundred undead elephants from beneath the sands, adding considerably to the impressiveness of their force. "For them, it looks like," I commented wryly, answering my own question.

Moving swiftly ahead of the rest, my dad and I were the first ones to reach the stone antechamber that served as the entrance to the dungeon where the artifact was said to be buried. While we waited for the others to catch up, we heard an altercation outside. I heard a booming voice that I understood to be that an antagonist in the form of a powerful AI, announcing that it had trained an orbital telescope upon the army we were assisting. It claimed that the telescope was pointed at an ancient city beneath the sands, and was capable of igniting some flammable resource right underneath the army's feet.

Although in dastardly-villain style the AI had revealed its plan before executing it, there was no chance to thwart it: in the next moment we saw a tremendous conflagration through the cracks in the partially-open doors of the stone chamber in which we took refuge. Fortunately the entrance was facing the opposite direction from the blast, and although the stone walls at our back protected us from immolation, we still had to put our hands over our faces to protect them from the sudden withering heat.

We knew that anyone outside who had been exposed to the blast must have been destroyed—all but one, a single man who had arrived just outside the stone antechamber in time to be protected by it. I took him to be the leader of the army that had just been decimated. "Wow," I said, not directing my words to anyone in particular, as he slipped into the antechamber and joined us. "That was... overwhelming." I realized that under these changed circumstances, we would no doubt be seeking the artifact for our own purposes now, though whether this third guy would turn out to be an ally or antagonist in the long run was impossible to predict. "Guess it's just the three of us now," I commented as, without further ado, we started down the stone steps into darkness to begin our adventure.