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    1. Lost Music (DILD + FA)

      by , 01-20-2015 at 09:41 PM
      WTB 3am, woke just before 7:30am. Although I had set no alarm, it must have been intention that woke me, since I needed to take my car to the mechanic this morning, and 7:30 is when they open. So I drove in, did some grocery shopping across the street, and then walked back home since it's not too far. Returned to bed around 9am and focused intention to get lucid since I'd had such a good WBTB.

      I was at a party in some guy's house. (The "party" theme must be WLR because last night I did the party scene in ME3, though none of the details were similar.) I was younger, maybe even a teenager—I think so, since the guy hosting the party was living with his parents—and wasn't really "me" in terms of identity. I was lounging on the floor with some other kids. A guy next to me joked with someone else about me taking my clothes off, and I reprimanded him sharply.

      Vague scene change; it was the next day, and everyone else was gone, but I was still in the house—only now I didn't have my clothes. Obviously I needed to get them before I could leave, but this was complicated by the fact that the host's mother had come home, together with her young baby. I was sneaking around, hoping not to get caught, because I was afraid of how she would react if she found a nude girl in the house. I didn't recall doing anything inappropriate but she would naturally assume the worst.

      I managed to sneak into the bathroom and thought that from there I could maybe call her from the door and make up some story about how I had taken a shower and now needed my clothes—though I worried that it might be hard to explain how my clothes had ended up in another room, and it didn't help that I wasn't exactly sure where they were. But my anxieties about this were resolved when I looked down and noticed that I was fully dressed after all. (Thanks, dream!)

      Now my only challenge was sneaking out of the house. But the dream was even more obliging in that regard. The mother caught sight of me as soon as I entered the next room, and I was afraid that she would respond with horror and alarm at discovering a stranger in the house. Instead, she just called me over in a friendly way as though we were already well-acquainted and she expected me to be there. We went into her large walk-in closet, where she wanted my opinion on some clothes as she changed. She put on a lower garment that was made of two separately patterned pieces of cloth, one for each leg, that fit very loosely like Thai fisherman pants. Attached to the upper part was a horizontal band of cloth, at least six inches wide and several feet long, in a third contrasting color and pattern, that she could wrap around her waist to secure the garment. The cloth and patterns were lovely and I complemented it; she said that she had made it herself. Next, while she was putting on a top, I noticed how beautifully flat her stomach was in profile and complimented her on that as well. She laughed and said modestly that it had just looked that way because she had been holding her arms over her head.

      After that she and her husband went out to an indoor mall and I tagged along. As I glanced around at the various shops, I reminded myself that since we were dreaming I should make sure to attempt one of the tasks, since it had apparently slipped my mind until that point. This made me wonder when I had first realized I was dreaming. I thought back and couldn't figure it out. In retrospect, I don't think I really was cognizant of the dream until that point, but at the time it felt much more ambiguous, like it had been a latent awareness all along. (I get this a lot—I think there is often a latent awareness of dreaming on some level, in which case lucidity requires becoming aware of the awareness!) That might explain why earlier the dream had soothed my anxieties rather than exploiting them, even though I hadn't been aware of directly controlling it.

      I figured that since it was the New Year's holiday in the dream, it would be a great time to try the fireworks TOTM again, since there were bound to be fireworks tonight anyway. Again, it's hard to say if I had really "known" all along that it was the holiday, or if I had only just "realized" this when it was convenient to my goals. I was lucid enough to know that in WL it was much later in the month, but remembered it was still January at least... so close enough.

      I walked back to the front doors of the mall, which were transparent glass, and looked out over the landscape. I didn't see any fireworks yet—it was dark out but it seemed like it was too early in the evening—and I hoped my intention could make some appear. I scanned the horizon but nothing manifested. I decided maybe it would be easier to spark them directly from my hand, so I turned around and started walking through the mall again, willing some kind of visual display to manifest from my palm. This should be easy, since in the past I've practiced summoning all the basic elements, and fireworks just seemed like a variation of this. But again, nothing happened.

      I tried to figure out what the problem was, and wondered if maybe I was too distracted with the music. Here's another case where I can't say for sure when I started singing. Often I deliberately use music in dreams as a way to channel focus into particular tasks, a method that has worked very well in the past, but right now I felt like I was singing for sheer pleasure, and the music was of unearthly beauty. Now that I noticed it, I put aside my other goals for the moment to pay attention to what I was singing. I was using my voice, but there were no real words, just abstract vocalizations emerging spontaneously in a lovely, lilting melody. The most distinctive thing about it was that I was singing in harmony with myself, as though I had several different interweaving voices, at least three, maybe more. I've sung like this before in dreams and once again had to wonder: what does it mean? When the music manifests like this, so complex and ethereal, it feels like it has some primordial significance.

      Most of my attention was now focused on the song, and nothing else seemed so important. I wanted to be in the open air, so I returned to the front doors of the mall and walked through them. I sang for a while longer, until the world around me faded in color and substance and I knew I was waking up. My first impulse was to grab my phone and try to record some of the melody as best I could before I lost it entirely. However, my phone seemed to be stuck on camera mode, and although I was insistently pressing the button and even trying to close the window manually by clicking in the upper right corner (a PC reflex, obviously this doesn't work on phones!), I couldn't get back to the main screen. Problems with tech like this are a dreamsign so I even wondered if this was an FA. However, my main concern right was to preserve any shred of the music intact, so I didn't want to distract myself with an RC, but tried to keep as much attention as possible on preserving the song.

      Even though I now only had a single voice, I was surprised how easily and spontaneously the music was still flowing, and figured it was because I had just woken up and retained lingering traces of the dreamstate. More than traces, I realized, when I woke up again and knew that it been an FA after all. I once again reached for my phone and was gratified that I could now access the main screen. But I was still having difficulties: I looked through all my apps for the voice recorder and couldn't find it! I went back and forth from screen to screen, cycling through them all three or four times, and it was nowhere! I was forced to question if this was yet another FA, even though I was now sure that I recognized everything around me from waking life, and the dream memories and music were fading rapidly. In the past I've sometimes had trouble recognizing the voice app icon because it has such a bland appearance, but I had made a point of remembering that it resembled a microphone.

      After taking more time and deliberately examining every icon on every screen, completely baffled by my inability to find it, the mystery was finally solved. I found it at the very end of all my apps, where I had placed it deliberately with the notion of making it easy to find, only I had misremembered its appearance: the last OS upgrade had completely changed the graphic to some wavy lines. It was too late to salvage the music. I tried to record the one line of melody that I could still vaguely recall, but it sounded completely wrong. I couldn't get my real voice to match the way the song sounded in my head, either in terms of the general register or even the specific notes.
    2. Photographing the Dragon Moon

      by , 09-11-2014 at 07:30 PM
      Ritual: After five hours of sleep I woke naturally and was determined to make a good WILD attempt. I spent an hour-long WBTB reading and writing about dreams, then returned to bed just before the sun rose. Despite a promising transition phase in which I observed hypnagogic visuals and audio distinctly manifesting, I was interrupted by frequent re-awakenings and eventually realized it was time to turn on my side and enter real sleep. I fully expected to WILD at this point because the conditions felt ideal, but instead I just had NLDs.

      NLD: I had just left a cafe and was walking down the sidewalk to where I had parked a couple blocks away. The sky was oppressively dark, darker than seemed natural, and I composed a couple lines to try to describe it:

      The world cowers beneath an enormous dark,
      Unrepentent and unredeeming.


      I wasn't sure if I liked them but figured I should write them down as soon as I could, because if I came up with a whole structure I could always come back to it and work it into something better.

      As I entered the parking lot I noticed the moon. The last few days have seen a huge harvest moon, but this one was even bigger, with that sallow yellow hue that tints it when it is still low in the sky. Moreover, the pattern on its face was unusual: it resembled a winged dragon, drawn with iconic simplicity and in a rampant position like a figure on shield heraldry. I felt an urge to photograph it.

      I opened the passenger side door, left it open, and sat down on the edge of the seat to brace myself so I could try to frame a good clear shot of it on my iPhone. I thought I felt movement and the image was bouncing around on the screen, the moon lost among some trees now. Was the car driving off with me? How inconvenient! I reached to the side and jerked up the emergency brake, then returned to my attempt to take a picture.

      As I held up the phone again and looked at the image on the screen, I was more alert to the possibility of movement this time, and yes, I was able to confirm from it that indeed we were moving, and this was preventing me from taking clear photograph. Bad car! We were now driving rather quickly down a city street so I scooted fully inside and managed to get the door closed. (I realize now that in the dream the car door was hinged in the back and opened backwards, flat against the side of the car, rather than being hinged in the front and opening outwards as in WL.)

      Once the car door was closed I wanted to get control of the car back, so I awkwardly climbed over into the driver's seat. A towel seemed to be wrapping around my feet and impeding me, but with some effort I managed to get myself seated appropriately so that I could take over the driving. I had been planning to do some other things before leaving the quarter of the city that we'd come from, but by now we had driven away too far for it to be convenient to return, so I decided to just go home instead.

      After that I was waking up, but there was one more scene where I was standing next to a tram and again wondered if I wanted to return to the area I'd been in at the start of the dream. Once more I decided not to, since I couldn't be sure the tram would go to the right place either, and I was at that point under the impression that it was the tram, not my car, that had driven off with me.

      Then I realized with exasperation how absurd it was that dreams continually present me with situations that are extraordinary by the standards of waking life, yet I usually don't recognize them as evidence of dreaming. Why not? "I guess I just don't find them strange" was all I could come up with. Later I realized that I was at least still half in a dream state as I had these thoughts, and didn't realize I was dreaming then either.