Verre

Ritual: I went to bed at midnight and found myself quite awake at 5am, so I got up and worked for an hour. On going back to bed, I realized that although I had not intended a WBTB, the conditions were good for LDing. I had to get up at 8, so I didn't want to spend the time on a formal WILD attempt, but I thought about what task I should do if I got lucid. All I could remember of this month's TOTMs were "fart" and "draw," so picked the latter. I decided I would draw a dinosaur, since I never got around to riding one last month.

DILD: I think I was outside my workplace—something I rarely dream of—when I reached down to pick up something off the ground. As I straightened, I realized with clear certainty that I was dreaming. I wasn't sure what had triggered the awareness, so thought it over, but there didn't seem to be any specific anomalies that I had noticed, and I hadn't RC'd either. On this occasion I just felt very naturally aware of the dream state.

I had originally planned to draw a dinosaur and bring it to life for the TOTM, but now I decided to start with something easier. I had been at my HEMA class yesterday, so I decided to draw a sword, then manifest it and do some practice. My initial strategy was to simply draw the sword in my left palm, so that I could manifest it directly in my hand (I am right-handed, so I was using my right hand to draw with). However, the lines changed as soon as I had set them down, turning into a cartoon-like character. I figured fine, I can work with that, it doesn't matter what I manifest... but my intention to transform the drawing into a real being fizzled. Nothing happened except that the drawing changed into a different character, and then faded.

Changing strategy, as I found myself walking next to a building I drew a sword right on the wall. It was a poor drawing, chunky and ill-proportioned, but I figured I could fix it in post-production. I put my hand over where the hilt was drawn, intending to grab the sword as it manifested. Nothing happened. I wondered if it would help to reach into the wall, in case the sword was inside it. I pressed my right hand against the wall, which consisted of a reddish, textured stucco. It resisted at first, but I kept pressing, and eventually it yielded like a crumbly semi-moist clay, and my hand went right through. I closed my hand over an object and pulled it out. Unfortunately it was not the sword I was trying to create, but a comic book.

It occurred to me that I was always trying to make the dream state conform to my will, and I should pay more attention to the things that it offered me unexpectedly, so I took a moment to flip through the comic book as I walked on past the building. The hero of the comic was a young boy, but nothing caught my interest, so I tossed it on the ground. Lucidity got a little weak, and I found myself grilling a piece of chicken for my husband's dinner. The image of the piece of meat on the grill was, in retrospect, an obvious bit of day residue from a Facebook post I had seen last night.

While getting the dinner ready I found myself indoors, where I made a third try at drawing the sword, inscribing an outline on the wall again. Since there was a DC in the room with me, I thought I would be clever and asked him to grab the sword off the wall and give it to me. I figured it would still count for the TOTM as long as the drawing transformed into a three-dimensional object by any means. But he couldn't do it either!

Later I got fed up and just manifested a sword directly into my hand so that I could actually get some practice in. For some reason I found it easy to create a sword in my hand out of nothing, even though I had been unable to do it from the drawings! I went through a few rounds of the "flow" movements I had learned in my HEMA class, but found myself wondering why I was wasting precious dream time practicing something that I could work on just as well in waking life, so I flew off to further explore the dream.

Only then did I notice the beauty of my surroundings. Some dream environments are drab, but this was one of those landscapes that is gorgeous beyond anything you've seen in waking life. Pink-tinged clouds of beautiful hue and texture filled the sky. All around me was water, interspersed with strips of inhabited land, like a strange city straddling the sea. The water was full of beautiful sailing ships of many varieties.

I felt a bit lonely in all this splendor and wished I had a friend to hang out with. Something inspired me to seek "Ozymandias," though the name has little relevance for me (outside being vaguely aquainted with its literary source) and has never come up in a dream before, nor can I trace it to DR. I loudly called "Ozymandias!" but no one appeared. Then I had an intuition that one of the boats was his, a small craft with a complex array of small square black and red sails.

I flew over and landed on the boat, which was not much bigger than a rowboat despite its magnificent sails. There was a tall vertical form in the prow that I had assumed was Ozymandias, only to discover that it was made of wood and evidently served as the steering apparatus. The boat was empty, even though it was not anchored but sailing freely in the harbor. Something caught my eye and I knelt down to find some single earrings and a few tiny beads in the bottom of the boat, as though a woman had been here. Though I retained a degree of lucidity, I found myself being drawn into a dream narrative. I lingered in the boat until it drifted vertically down a tall waterfall, although the movement was gentle and not frightening.

I wanted to figure out why Ozymandias had apparently disappeared from his boat, so I transported myself to an office where I could speak to a harbor official. I told him about the empty boat and the evidence that a woman had been on board.

"The only other person allowed in his boat is Delphine," the clerk informed me. Something made me suspect Delphine was a courtesan, so I asked about the local brothels, and the clerk described two locations.

As I went in search of the brothel I became confused.... now I began to wonder if I was Delphine, that is, if that was the character I was playing in the dream. But if so, why hadn't the clerk recognized me, since he had appeared to be familiar with her? Could it be because I don't currently resemble her, and instead look like my waking self?

Without resolving these doubts, I went to the brothel and asked if they knew what had become of Ozymandias. "We don't give information about our clients," the madam informed me politely.

"He might be dead!" I insisted, explaining my discovery of the empty boat. That persuaded them to give me a piece of paper listing the dates that he had visited. That was as far as I was able to pursue the mystery before I woke up.

Ritual: I went to bed around midnight, but the knowledge that I had to wake up earlier than usual this morning, at 7am, created a subtle anxiety that woke me up at 4:30am and made it hard to sleep afterwards. The natural insomnia created good conditions for lucidity, and I woke up at 6:30am after this dream.

DILD: Since I was lying in bed mostly awake for a couple hours, I had already gotten up several times to use the bathroom. This seemed like another one of those times, but an odd detail caught my eye. There was a steel mesh frame surrounding the toilet paper roll and someone had left a lot of used cotton balls in it. They were stained on one side with a color like Betadine. I assumed my husband must have left them there, and wondered what he had been using them for.

On some level I suspected that there was something wrong with this scenario and decided to RC. I braced one hand on the bathroom counter and the other on the towel rack, and tried to lift myself. My body lifted effortlessly off the ground with no real muscular exertion, which made me suspect I must be dreaming. (The fact that the bathroom did not correspond to its WL layout was something I failed to notice, as usual.) I checked again, with the same results, and then to be sure, I tried the same stunt without using my arms at all—that is, levitating. Upon levitating successfully, I was confident that this was the dream state.

It's so gratifying to get unintentional LDs! But one isn't always prepared with a task. I felt an impulse to go outside, so I went back out to the bedroom and quickly exited through the screen door. Immediately I noticed a destabilization of my vision. Experience reminded me not to fret, just relax and let images suggest themselves, the problem should straighten itself out. Sure enough, a moment later I started to notice colors, then the colors organized themselves into geometry, and before long they had resolved into a new scene: I was looking at a large stack of different colored shipping containers.

I realized that the deck I was standing on overlooked a great harbor. There was water on all sides, and my house was apparently on some tall island in the middle. I was surprised by the number of ships that I could see moving to and fro. They came in all sizes, everything from large cargo ships to little tugboats, all looking very industrious. There were so many ships that I wondered if the place I was in lacked air transport entirely: I didn't see any planes flying at first, but a moment later, perhaps summoned by my thoughts, a helicopter veered very close overhead.

I decided that I should do something useful as long as I was in the dream state, and tried to remember this month's tasks. Eating a moon rock leaped to mind. Okay, how should I do that? I didn't feel like shifting scenes just yet, actually traveling to outer space. I thought, well, maybe a rocket could land nearby and an astronaut could get out and present me with the moon rock. It sounded like a good strategy but I was not strongly motivated to try it, so I tabled the idea.

As I was contemplating the possibilities, I heard music from nearby, and noticed a miniature stage on one edge of the deck. This reminded me of one of the other TOTMs, attending a concert. Well, here are some creatures playing music in public, that might count. I call them "creatures" because the music was being played by what looked like muppets, only a foot or two in height. The initial music sounded like a piano, and a female muppet was playing it, but her fingers were moving over a clear plastic stand, with no visible keys. I thought she resembled what I can only describe as the "hippie girl muppet," but googling that now, it seems to be a good search term and reveals that the name of the muppet in question (in WL, anyway) was "Janice."

After her piano solo ended, a male muppet to her right began playing guitar. This muppet resembled Fozzie Bear, and and was singing as he played. I listened closely to the lyrics and did my best to remember them. As usual in deep dream, I was impressed how easily the rhymes came—though of course on waking, it was hard to remember the lyrics clearly.

The first rhyme involved the phrase "...how we live," which later rhymed with "...give." There was another stanza that I couldn't remember at all by the time I was writing my report. I have a slightly clearer memory of the third stanza, apart from the absent first line:

...
...and I'll let you do the rest,
Because you know Amos and Andy
And can put them to the test."

After that, the muppet went into a refrain of:

Can you help me?
Stranger, can you help me?

The lines may sound plaintive in plain text, but they were a little more jazzy the way they were sung. I was listening to the song and smiling down fondly at the muppet. I felt that "Amos and Andy" was a phrase I had heard before... was it related to cookies? Or an old TV show? I was certainly willing to offer help, if it was needed, but a moment later I woke up.

Note: Googling now, I see that "Amos and Andy" was originally a radio show in the 1920s, later moved to television, and lasted until the 1950s. I have no idea why my subconcious dredged this up! I must have thought of cookies because of the similarity to the brand name "Famous Amos."