Verre

Ritual: I'm coming out of my longest dry spell yet, but it was clearly a problem of motivation. Even when I had the superficial motivation to LD (I always do), the deeper motivation that makes it actually work was thwarted. In time I came to recognize the reason for this. At the end of last semester I started talking to a colleague that I knew was very interested in dreams. Even though their interest had been shaped by Freudian principles, I ventured to reveal my interest in (and practice of) lucid dreaming in the hope that we might have an interesting dialogue across perspectives. Well, the colleague promptly stopped talking to me, and I was so annoyed and embarrassed that it took a terrible toll on my dreaming. Not just lucidity—even the quality of my NLDs and my ability to remember them faded drastically. And even after I finally diagnosed what was causing the problem, I couldn't seem to dismantle the emotional block. I would just get irritated whenever I thought about it. I think this combined with the natural cyclic tendencies of my dream practice—I have too many interests and hobbies so all of them seem to wax and wane at various points to make room for one another—but hopefully my dreaming is now on the verge of a comeback. I can't think of a better New Year's resolution.

I went to bed early last night (11pm) hoping that would help to get lucid, and for good measure spent some time browsing DV. I woke up a few times during the night and it seemed like it was going to be a bust, since I barely had any dream impressions. But the last dream I had before waking (at around 7:45am) was lucid and controlled and clear, if not ultimately successful in completing my intended task.

DILD, "Making Rainbows": I was in a warehouse-like space with tall shelves crammed with every imaginable object, though everything looked old and used. I was having a conversation with someone about the place, though I don't feel like there was anyone walking with me; I think I was speaking aloud, but the other person was answering in my mind. I was observing that many of my own dreams (the comparison suggests that I did not yet recognize this as my own dream) included environments just like this, crammed full of objects, often taking the form of stores, libraries, archives. I proposed the hypothesis that these kind of object-archives were a metaphor for the mind, for the way it stores impressions or information. I wondered if I could put that idea to the test. (This idea suggests that I did recognize that I was in a mentally-constructed environment. What did I think it was, if not my own dream? Maybe the dream of the person I was talking to.)

This next section is ambiguous in that I can't be sure if I had the name and was looking for the object or holding the object and was looking for its name or shelf location, but it was definitely a matching exercise between object and name. The object was a tool of some kind, flat strips of somewhat oxidized metal bent into a particular configuration with a short chain attaching some sort of polygonal fastener. It vaguely resembled one of those old metal spring traps, but not exactly, and its function was unclear. I had never seen or heard of such a thing, but I learned that it was called a "streng." I either got the name at the outset from the voice I was talking to and then found the object, or (and I think this is more likely since I have memories of holding the object as I walked), picked up a random object and then had to find out its name by looking for its shelf. But this is a false dichotomy... dreams don't always divide so neatly between what, in waking light, seem like the logical possibilities.

At any rate, I was putting the idea of this warehouse as a kind of memory archive to the test by trying to match an object with its name. The mental effort took, I reasoned, as long as it actually took me in the dream to find the shelf. Given that it sometimes takes me a day or more to recover some sought-after piece of information from memory, this doesn't seem too far-fetched. I'm sure my archives are, like my physicial spaces tend to become, terribly cluttered with extraneous matter, making it hard to find anything. I actually commented at one point, looking at all the crap on the shelves, "I can't stand to throw anything away." But the details that make this whole exercise less plausible as a valid hypothesis of mental functioning was the object itself: neither the name "streng" nor the metal object it described corresponded with anything in waking life. The whole process seems at best to have been metaphorical.

After this improvised task was complete, I wondered what to do next and remembered, sinced I'd just browsed DV before bed, that I still had a couple unfinished TOTY. At this point it occurred to me that if I'm now taking conscious control of my intentions and the dream environment, I must be lucid, but it didn't feel like there had been any qualitative change in my mental state. Rather, the difference between being non-lucid and lucid seemed in this case to come down primarily to whether I was acting spontaneously within the structure of the dream (as in my former task) or whether I was accessing memories and intentions that I had earlier established with waking consciousness.

I wondered if I should try basilisk or leprechaun, and decided on the latter. Its no wonder that I'm stuck on these last two. I think I have a mental block against leprechauns because my mental imagery is composed primarily of cheesy cereal commercials; maybe that's why I have yet to actually meet one. Meanwhile I keep avoiding basilisk because it explicitly instructs killing DCs, which I am reluctant to do. I have no problem killing NPCs in RPGs and computer games, or experimenting with different ethical alignments in those environments, but dream feels different, like the stakes are higher. I'm not sure why. At any rate, given the options, I went with leprechaun again.

Would it be possible to create a rainbow indoors? I thought it over and figured that in dream, that should be entirely reasonable. And even though the shelves in this warehouse were only a bit over head-high, the ceiling itself was vastly higher overhead: the space was huge. So I started trying to conjure a rainbow. At first nothing happened. I put my hands together in front of me, touching at the sides with the palms up, and tried to use this as a focus to create a rainbow directly from my hands, arcing upward. I managed a weak one a few times, but they quickly fizzled out.

A young girl, maybe eight years old with blonde hair, noticed what I was doing and approached with an offer to help. "Sure," I said. I don't remember exactly what form her help took, she might have just added her concentration to my own, but with it my rainbows were getting better. I managed to make one finally that had bright colors, though there were only four of them and they were oddly separated into tube-like strips resembling neon lights, and shining with the same fluorescent intensity. Good enough for the task? I gazed at it critically, annoyed that there were only four colors. In response, the second tube from the left split down the middle and became two different colors. Good enough, I figured, and started looking for the end of the rainbow. But then that one flickered out, too.

Every time a rainbow failed, I regrouped and tried to improve my concentration. The four-color failure made me realize I needed to focus on what the colors of a rainbow actually were, so I started chanting them as I concentrated: "Red orange yellow blue indigo and violet...." I had a hard time keeping them in the right order, and after I woke up I realized that I had completely left out "green," an interesting difficulty given that while awake, I can easily and accurately recite the colors of the rainbow without a second thought.

The little girl continued in her role as my assistant, and now that I was working on the getting the colors straight we managed to produce a bright, very proper-looking rainbow. Best of all, it touched the floor right in front of us, so all we had to do was dig, presumably, to find the leprechaun and his gold. But no sooner had we rushed up to the spot than the rainbow disappeared again. This was getting annoying.

Just then I became aware of a commotion in the building. We were now standing outside one wide entrance to the warehouse, which opened onto what looked like an atrium of a shopping mall, still an enclosed space but walled with plate glass windows. People were rushing over to the windows in excitement, and through the windows I could see the people outside down below (we were around four storeys up) moving in the same direction.

The view through the glass looked out over an urban street and the row of buildings on the far side, beyond which the city ended at steep brown hills of nearly barren rock and earth. Everyone inside with us was pointing and staring at the hills, or hurrying outside to get closer to them, and the moment I looked out the window I could see why. An extraordinary rainbow had spontaneously appeared outside, and its end was clearly visible where it touched the side of one of the hills. The rainbow actually resembled the four-colour neon one that we had created earlier, but this one was exceedingly large and bright.

The hills were probably at least a mile away and too steep to climb by foot, so I knew I would have to fly. I started pushing out the large square glass panes in the wall above me, wondering if this was the most efficient way to leave the building, or if I should just walk the thirty yards or so to the exit everyone else was taking. (The exit occupied the space to our right that had formerly led into the warehouse, which was no longer visible.) The exit led onto a sort of sky bridge that crossed the road, so it would also be a fine place to take off from. I chastised myself for wasting mental energy deciding between trivialities and decided to just continue with the window.

After pushing out four panes to make a larger square, I grabbed the girl's hand and asked, "Have you ever flown before?" She shook her head. "Well, hold on tight." I levitated both of us up and through the space I had made. I did not feel physically obstructed by the metal frame that criss-crossed between the four panes of glass I had removed, though I felt a bit annoyed by the way I had so blithely floated through it. It felt careless. I mean, why bother taking out the glass at all if I was just going to pass ghost-like through the frame? I realized that again, I was letting myself getting bogged down with unnecessary and unhelpful mental baggage, but I've never felt comfortable "cheating," even in dream.

We flew high over the street and buildings bordering the city, and I realized how startling the experience of flight must be to someone who was unaccustomed to it. Indeed, the girl felt very tense at my side, and murmured plaintively, "I want to sit down." I felt it would be cruel to ignore her terror, so as soon as we cleared the city, I aimed for a flat outcropping of rock at the base of the hills. We came down fast and landed hard, much harder than I had ever landed when flying on my own, so I attributed it to her fear weakening my own buoyancy. As soon as we landed, I asked her, "Are you alright continuing?" She shook her head and I prepared to take off on my own, but even as my feet left the ground I felt myself waking up and was unable to forestall it.

Ritual: WTB 2:30am, woke up to work from 5:30 to 6:30am, realized I'd drunk too much coffee before bedtime and have trouble going back to sleep. I figure as long as I'm insomniac, might as well try for LD and take some L-theanine and alpha-GPC. I try counting but have trouble focusing, realize I need more motivation so resolve on a task. I had been thinking earlier about the use of mantras for getting lucid, and I've had trouble deciding on one so I thought I should ask a DC.

WILD, "Balloon and Mantra": Since it seemed to initiate directly from the waking state, I guess this was a WILD though there was no distinct experience of transition, at least in the way I usually experience it (shifting into dream while continuing to perceive that I am lying in bed). At the beginning it felt more like hypnagogic imagery that I was playing around with, but gradually acquired more solidity and focus. (Or maybe that's the "normal" way people do it, haha.)

I'm on top of a building, playing catch with two other girls. We're throwing a ball around between us counter-clockwise. The girl to my left spikes the ball to make it hard for me to catch, so I retaliate by throwing it right back at her when she's not expecting it, instead of continuing to pass to the other girl. She says it's not fair because she wasn't paying attention. I retort that I did it because of the way she was playing.

The game becomes more leisurely and the ball becomes a balloon. I sit down and I'm practicing moving it telekinetically. The balloon is making the kind of strange echoing sounds that you hear when handling real balloons, only strongly magnified. I'm impressed with the way my mind can conjure that unusual but distinctive sound which I probably haven't heard in years. Although the sound component of the dream is impressively vivid, the visuals are terrible. The whole scene is in grainy black and white, and the balloon is white too, which makes it very hard to see against the sky when I bounce it up into the air. At one point I launch it away from me and lose sight of it altogether. When I go to summon it back, instead of the balloon returning to my hand, my right hand is contorted with a strange sensation, like it's being squeezed.

Around this time, everything switches over to bright color, brilliant blues and pinks. It happens as suddenly as turning on a light, and makes everything look much more vivid and cheerful. I figure this is REM switching on more fully, and comment to one of the DCs, "Hey, color just kicked in!" I notice that instead of the two girls, there are now at least a dozen of them, and they seem to be having a dance party. I hear a bouncy pop song playing in the background.

I get up and wander through the group, then suddenly I remember the task I had designated as I went to sleep. I approach a girl at random. She's dressed very unusually and elaborately, probably day residue from a Chinese painting I was looking at in WBTB, and I'm doubtful about whether she will be able to help, but figure it can't hurt to ask.



"I'm looking for a lucid dream mantra," I begin, then think I should explain more clearly what I mean. "Something that—"

"Who is your mantra?" she interrupts. It's such an odd question that I stop and look more closely at her. Her face is pretty but blank.

"That was my question," I reply, then wait to see if she'll have anything more helpful to offer.

"Who is your mantra?" she repeats, in exactly the same tone and words, like a broken record.

"That's what I'm trying to figure out," I insist. This is going nowhere. Reaching back with two hands I grasp the edges of a cloth, as though it were a scarf I were wearing around my neck, and draw it over both our heads. Now the two of us are alone in the dark, face to face, with just a bit of the background peeping through under the edges of the cloth behind her. Although I had performed the gesture instinctively, my intention was to blot out the distractions so I could try to communicate with the girl more effectively. A more rational course would have been to find someone else to ask, or ask the dream directly, but I got too caught up in my determination to try to make her understand. My approach was not helpful, however, as this deconstruction of most of the dream environment makes me lose traction and wake up.

FAs: I had gotten up and was nearly ready for work. I went to use the bathroom before leaving and stood there dumbfounded: everything else looked normal, but the toilet was gone! I recognized immediately what this must mean. "You've got to be freakin' kidding me," I said aloud. Usually I would be delighted to realize I was still dreaming, but this time I already felt like I'd invested a lot of time in getting ready for my day, and now I would have to do it all over again, so I was actually annoyed.

My lucid awareness must have been pathetically low, because instead of doing something cool with the dream or thinking of one of my many fallback tasks, I stood there until I had successfully conjured the toilet back into place, because I still wanted to use it! Then I noticed that the clarity of the dream was waning and in an attempt to restore focus, told myself: "Open your eyes." But I accidentally opened my real eyes, waking up! It was a fail on so many levels.

I wanted to get back to the dream state so again I tried to play along with hypnagogic visuals. I had an image of a three medieval-looking riders in a wooded hillside. There was a male, a female, and one other. I was loping after them in the form of a wolf. The scene felt stronger and more stable than the usual hypnagogic imagery, but less tangible than a fully manifested dream. I realized that I instinctively knew the names of the man and the woman. (I suspect the indistinct third was their servant or page.)

After I had nearly caught up with the riders, I worried that if they noticed me in wolf form they might shoot me with an arrow, so I transformed into a woman (nude, I noticed) and caught their attention. They turned around one exclaimed, "A forest sprite!"

I "woke up" (I might have even had a vague sense at the time that it was not a real waking, since it still felt too "thin" for a proper dream) and tried to write down their names on my computer. The man's came so easily that it left no trace in memory, but the woman's name took me a lot of effort to type correctly, and I kept making mistakes and having to fix them. On the bright side, this meant that I still remembered it clearly when I woke up for real later. Her name was "Gwynrse," which I took to be Welsh.

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