Verre

I had taken a two-hour nap earlier in the day, so when I went to bed at 1:45am I did not feel particularly sleepy. It seemed like a good opportunity to get lucid, so I fixed intention on fireworks task and did a few rounds of SSILD before falling asleep.

I had an NLD that was strongly WoW-influenced (day residue) in which I had gotten stuck in the middle of a quest chain and was searching the environment for objects that had a yellow exclamation point over them. This went on for a long time but at some point I finally recognized that I was dreaming. Although this pushed me near waking and disrupted the dream, I had enough awareness to avoid moving and held on to dreamstate as well as I could. I searched for something to better anchor me there, and noticed that I could distinctly hear voices conversing, although I could not see the figures—in fact I couldn't see anything at all.

I don't recall the specific words now although I could hear them clearly at the time. I recall how spontaneous and random the conversation seemed, with no relationship I could discern to day residue, my own memories, or even the earlier dream. I listened carefully to try to figure out what was going on. A younger girl who sounded like a teenager was arguing with an older woman about something she wanted to do. At first I assumed it was her mother but then decided it must be a caretaker after she called her "Nanny" at one point. I was not involved in the scenario, I was just listening in the dark.

Even though I didn't feel integrated into my dream body and lacked visuals altogether, the audible conversation was so vivid that I figured I must be reasonably secure in the dream state, so I figured I'd try the TOTM and see if I could coax a better REM state into effect. The fireworks task was perfect for this, since it was something I could attempt without moving much or needing anything from the environment. I imagined holding out my hand, palm up, and shooting fireworks from the center of my palm. Something did happen: I could half-see a kind of ghostly outline of my hand, like when you look at it in almost total darkness, and then above the palm emerged a faint graphic that resembled a model of the solar system, with the planets hanging in space and lines indicating their orbits.

It's hard to describe what "seeing" this was like, since it was neither seeing in the usual sense, nor was it merely thinking or imagining, but something in between, or possibly different from them all. Have you ever been in a situation where it was so dark that you looked at your hand and weren't sure that you were really seeing it or your mind was just filling in the outlines where it knew they should be? It was a bit like that, but different, because in addition to my hand I could also "see" the solar system graphic, an image I would not have expected, and because ultimately I didn't feel like I was really "seeing" any of this with my eyes, even dream eyes. Part of the problem is that I still didn't feel fully embodied, so the darkness didn't just feel like an absence of light, but like a condition—inner darkness as opposed to outer darkness? Even at the time I suspected I wasn't in full REM. The visual impression was there, but it didn't register as genuinely visual.

I decided that I must not be dreaming deeply enough to see properly, and this gave rise to a more substantial physical sensation of lying in my bed, as though I had woken up, yet I knew clearly that I was still in the dream state. I had half a mind to try fireworks again right then and there, and half a mind to better integrate with the dream body, so it seemed like what happened next was an amalgamation of the two intentions. I was focusing on my hands and they began to rotate rapidly, not the normal rotation permitted by the wrist joint, but a full 360-degree rotation, as though they were propellers. They were moving so fast that I could feel the vibrations throughout my whole body.

Although this result had been spontaneous and unexpected, I wondered if I could use it to leverage myself out of the bed, since apart from my weird propeller hands, I still didn't feel well-connected to the dream body. I hesitated to try any larger movements lest I accidentally move my real body and wake up. So I let my left propeller hand slacken and lifted the right, willing it to turn into something like the blade of a helicopter that might elevate me vertically out of bed. The propeller movement became wider and faster, as though my whole forearm was now spinning around the elbow, and the vibrations intensified, but I felt no sense of lift. I remembered that helicopter blades needed to be angled a certain way in order to provide lift, and tried to will my propeller arm to work similarly, but I guess I don't know enough about aerodynamics to convince myself that I could pull it off!

Since the right arm was not doing the trick on its own, I put my left arm back in play to provide more oomph. Now both my propeller arms were rotating at incredible speed and I could feel the whole bed vibrating along with my body. I couldn't believe that all this movement wasn't waking up my husband, who was lying pressed up right next to me. This is a common failing of dream logic: even when I am perfectly aware that I am dreaming, I irrationally worry that something I am doing might disrupt his sleep. Around this time I woke up for real, and of course he was over on his side of the bed, so the feeling of close physical contact had also been a dream impression.

It was unusual that the audio and physical impressions were so clear but that the visual field remained opaque. Is this an NREM state? The closest parallel I've experienced to this in the initial stage of many WILDs, right after transition, and in those cases I have also theorized that REM hadn't fully kicked in yet.