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    1. Let's See What's in My Backpack! (DILD)

      by , 01-30-2017 at 05:58 PM
      Ritual: Woke at dawn after about 4–5 hours sleep and complex but dimly remembered dreams. Considered taking galantamine but decided against it, as my motivation was not sufficiently high. I didn't want to completely give up, so I took a quarter teaspoon each of piracetam and bacopa. Woke at 8am with dream.

      DILD, "Let's See What's in My Backpack!": I was walking through some type of institutional corridor when an odd plaque on the wall caught my attention. It was a rectangle of flat grey stone like slate, about a foot long and a few inches high, with block capital letters incised, reading: "AWAKEN."

      Like what, into a dream? I thought wryly. For that to work, I'd have to be... oh wow... am I dreaming? No sooner had the suspicion arose than I immediately recognized it to be true. I immediately went into dream observation mode, taking the plaque into my hands and examining its details.

      Feeling grateful that the dream itself had given me a clue as to its nature, I was reminded of a similar incident that had happened just earlier tonight: this was the second time I had gotten lucid due to events in the dream. A DC had said "lucid" and that had triggered me. No wait, actually it was the third time... I remembered briefly getting lucid in an even earlier dream, but I was embarrassed when I realized how quickly I had lost that awareness.

      Of course, the fascinating thing about these memories is that I have no way of knowing if they are real. I'm more than half inclined to think that they are false memories, the kind of deja vu that is so common in the dream state. Then again, I still forget such a great portion of a full night's dreaming, even now, that the possibility remains that these incidents actually occurred. There's no way of knowing for sure, which is interesting in itself. It is the perfect epistemological quandary.

      Now aware that I was dreaming, I continued walking through the institutional corridor, and felt that I had been walking through similar corridors in my just-remembered lucid episodes earlier tonight. If the memories are not false, there is nothing surprising about the coincidence: for some reason bland institutional corridors seem to be my default dream space.

      I wandered aimlessly for a bit—I think I passed a cafeteria—until I realized that if I wanted to stay lucid this time I would need to perform some deliberate action. During my WBTB I had not felt motivated to attempt any DV tasks, so that is probably why none occurred to me now. As I continued walking and wondering what to do I noticed a familiar sensation, and realized that I was wearing my backpack. Since 2001 I have been using the same leather backpack, seemingly indesctructible, every day at school and on every journey I travel. I was amused that it was with me even here in a dream, and surprised by how distinctly I could feel the impression of weight on my back. Wondering what might be in it, I realized that this could be a fun spontaneous task.

      I passed from the corridor into a very large rectangular room with walls tiled in squares of light blue glazed ceramic. The room was completely empty, with no features or furniture or people. I walked to the very center and announced loudly, even though no one was in sight: "Okay, everybody! I'm going to play the game of 'Let's See What's in My Backpack!'" I unslung the backpack from my shoulders and held it upside down, dumping its contents into a pile on the floor.

      The first thing I pulled off the pile was a winter jacket, made of smooth synthetic cloth with a quilted core. The inside was a rich royal blue, and the outside was bright red with black highlights. It was very clean and new, and resembled no jacket I have ever owned, nor would be likely to purchase.

      The second thing I picked up was a clear plastic bag with a zip lock, one of the medium-sized ones that is deeper than it is wide. It was full of coins. I looked more closely at the coins and it was clear that they were all Thai, though they resembled no WL Thai currency. "I wonder if I just got back from Thailand," I mused—meaning within the context of the dream.

      The next thing I grabbed was a plastic bag of similar shape and size, and this one also contained flat pieces of metal, but instead of being round like coins, these were engraved rectangular strips. I decided that they must be some decorative pieces I had picked up in Thailand. This idea had evidently taken hold, because the next few items in the pile were cheap Thai souvenir gifts, like decorative little pouches and other small assorted knickknacks. I set these aside impatiently.

      Next was a book, evidently a journal, titled A Wonderful Compendium of Lessons of Life Learned. I regret now that I was not inspired to open and read it! I must have figured that if the lessons were already learned, I wouldn't get anything new out of it. It did not occur to me that my waking mind might be really interested in what my dreaming mind might think to put in such a book.

      After this I pulled four different water bottles off the pile, one after another. One was a hot water bottle like you use in bed. One was military style canteen that I thought I recognized as one I used to own. Another was a flat drinking flask, fairly large in size. I think the last one was just an ordinary plastic bottle of water. My impression was that I needed all four bottles because they each served a different purpose: hot water for warming, cold water for drinking, warm water for drinking, and flask for drinking. But I realized that it was terribly inefficient to carry four separate water bottles, and I wondered if I could consolidate them down to just two, so I would have less to carry around. I decided to worry about that later.

      The last thing I pulled from the pile was a very large duffel bag, the size of the one I use to carry my HEMA gear. In WL my bag is plain black canvas, but this one was (not inappropriately) emblazoned with the Tournament of the Phoenix logo. It occurred to me that given how much stuff had been in my backpack, perhaps I should be using this duffel bag to carry it instead—but I remembered what a pain it was to lug around a huge unwieldy duffel bag, and decided to stick with the backpack.

      At this point a huge crowd of people suddenly thronged the room, all seemingly in a hurry to go somewhere, and they were sidestepping me and my stuff with annoyed expressions like I was in their way. "Hey! I claimed this space first," I protested. One DC paused to look at my Tournament of the Phoenix duffel bag and asked another DC standing across from me something about martial arts training in the area, talking right over my head (I was still sitting on the floor with my stuff). "You'd think you'd be asking the person with the duffel bag," I muttered, slightly miffed. I noticed that whereas I had initially occupied the very center of the room and had not moved, now I was all the way over near a side wall, and yes, right in the path that everyone was trying to walk through.

      I had time enough to wonder if I should wake and write or dream on a little. I decided the latter—I usually do—but found myself waking up anyway.