Verre

Ritual: Yesterday was full of work and stress, conditions that I have previously correlated to vivid dreaming. I worked until going to bed at 2am. Woke at 5am to feed the cat, then again at 6am after a dream that culminated in an experience of intense frustration, vivid enough that I spent around 45 minutes writing it down—an unintended but useful WBTB. Since today will also be very busy I did not do any other lucid practices, however, I had primed myself a little by reading the list of TOTYs last night. Apart from those conditions, the following dream was spontaneous, and I woke from it at around 8:45am.

DILD: I am at my mother's house, but it is unlike any WL house. I am in a long room with high ceilings, very spacious and sparsely furnished, with no modern accoutrements. Maybe it is the medieval look of the interior that reminds me of the TOTYs, and I become lucid. Which would be a good one to do? Fairy would be easier to do outdoors. I could turn into a dragon but then I'd have to destroy everything and I don't want to wreck my mother's house. Phoenix? That would be a good one. I try to remember the details. I can't just summon it directly, I have to burn something, right? I look around the room for something suitable.

On the far end of the room is a table under a shuttered window. The table is covered with a white cloth, and spread across it is an assortment of jewels and precious stones. These look ideal. I select a faceted gem and place it in my left palm. It is small, only about six millimeters across, transparent with cobalt blue striations, like a combination of diamond and sapphire. It is faceted into what I think of as a classic gem shape. [According to online sources, this is simply called a "round" cut.] I walk slowly across the room back toward the couch where my mom is sitting, concentrating on the stone and willing it to catch fire. The stone feels inert in my hand, and I feel that I have chosen the wrong one. From the coloring, this stone is clearly attuned with ice, not fire. I should go back and pick a different one.

I return to the table and find a small stone of matte earthy red color. This is more a mineral than a gem, and it is shaped like a narrow lozenge, almost a centimeter long, pointed at the ends, and only a few millimeters wide in the middle. I begin to will it into flame, but immediately have second thoughts. The stone is so skinny and small, it would probably make a scrawny phoenix. I go back to the table to look for a better one.

I decide to find a gem that could pass for a phoenix egg, examine the options more carefully, and finally come across a good-sized stone around three centimeters across. It is also matte and reddish, but a generous oval in shape, and the top is composed of randomly assorted rounded protrusions, like bubbles. The bottom has been leveled off and already set into a metal frame. I decide that this one is ideal, put it in my left palm, and begin to invoke fire in earnest. Around this time my mom tries to talk to me about doing some household chore but I hush her: "Not now, I'm busy."

The stone resists at first, but I do not let myself doubt my ability to do this. I've summoned fire in my palm before. This time I'm just transmuting it from a substrate. I will a flame to emerge from the stone and soon it does—but I notice that in the process, the stone has transformed into a candle. The candle is larger than the stone, filling my hand. It is a 6cm tall cylinder and is conveniently fitted in a round container. Between the candle and the sides of the container is what looks like a filling of crumpled dry grass.

The flame is burning on the wick in the ordinary way, and I will it to expand and consume the whole candle, turning it into the phoenix I am trying to create. For a moment it burns quietly, but then the whole object transforms again. Briefly I seem to be holding a bundle of smoldering dried grass, around a foot in diameter, until the whole thing explodes and violently flies apart, patches landing in various places around the room. Failure? I'd better check the remains.

I wander around to a couple of the smoking remnants, but see nothing notable. I remember that I need to keep my expectations high, so as I walk toward a third, larger patch, I anticipate finding a baby phoenix. Sure enough, when I prod at the charred dried grass, underneath I discover a tiny, long-necked, bird-like creature! The phoenix has hatched! But it is it skinny and completely limp. What can I do to help? As a creature of fire, I reason, it must need heat. It is probably freezing to death.

I gently pick up the baby bird, which drapes across my hands with no sign of life, and take it to the fireplace. Luckily there is already a good fire burning. There is a kind of metal chain screen separating the fire from a metal grate on the hearth. Sprawled on the grate, soaking up the heat, is a long iguana-like lizard that I had previously noticed on the table when I was selecting jewels. I figure it must be a salamander, with the same need for warmth as my new phoenix. Should I place the phoenix in the fire directly, or on the grate? Since my hypothesis about the wisdom of putting the phoenix in the fire is as yet untested, I decide to lay it on the grate in case I need to remove it quickly.

The experiment goes well. As soon as I lay the baby phoenix next to the fire, its body begins to perk up and fill out. It grows until it resembles a toucan in shape and size, though red in color and with a sleeker bill. Success! But was there more to the task? I can't remember if we were also supposed to fight something, and figure I'd better do that as well as long as I can maintain dreamstate. "Let's go fight something!" I say to the newborn phoenix, and it hops up on my shoulder.

I head past the table with the jewels and open the window in the end wall. The window is a square aperture about three feet on a side, fastened with a single wooden shutter. The shutter is hinged on one side, flush with the wall when closed, and opens inward to the left. This truly resembles a medieval house in that there is no glass in the window, so it is easy to climb up and out. I pause on the sill and bid the phoenix to fly on ahead. Meanwhile, I hang up the long metal hook that I used to open the shutter so that I can grab it when I come in later, then use another device that resembles a hook attached to a wire loop to suspend myself from the sill and ease the drop to the ground, which is far enough below that it requires some precaution. I have the feeling that I have done this many times before.

Once on the ground, I look around for someone or something to fight. I am on a grassy lawn that extends between a number of different buildings. The buildings themselves don't leave a distinct architectural impression—I wish I had taken a closer look. Instead I was scanning the ground between them, but all I see are ordinary people walking about, none of whom seem like suitable opponents. I don't want to be an unprovoked aggressor.

The dream begins to fade. I worry that the abrupt transition to a different space might have unbalanced it, and I immediately take steps to stabilize, falling on my knees and examining the details of the grass while running my hands over it for texture. For a moment the grass turns grey and although I see all the usual plants among it, like clover, everything looks unusually small. But then a voice hails me from above and the dreamstate resumes its integrity: "Do you want to fight?" I promptly agree.

I am facing a man who is accompanied by a creature resembling a muscular, short-haired white dog. The man has a sword, and immediately begins to strike at me. Although I am unarmed, I find that I am able to parry his blows with my hands without too much discomfort. I suspect that I could turn the fight to my advantage if I want, but the whole point of this exercise was to fight in tandem with the phoenix. Where is that bird? "Phoenix? Phoenix!" I call anxiously.

The blade keeps falling, and I keep catching it and pushing it aside, but luckily the dog is hanging back for now. Suddenly to my relief the phoenix swoops in, aiming a stream of fire at the dog. More gouts of flame follow, consuming the man and dog, but they do not go down easily. I watch the phoenix, who has now taken human form, take a blade right through his stomach, angling up toward his chest. It is an unmistakably lethal blow, and I run over to him as he falls. I feel guilty for having put him in this predicament—but recall that for a phoenix, there should be a way to fix this.

Looking around frantically, I am pleased to discover a fireplace in my immediate vicinity. Nevermind the unlikelihood of finding a fireplace outdoors; it is just what I need so I don't question it. I drag the phoenix, currently in the form of a slim Asian boy, over to the hearth and dump him directly onto the flames. I expect the fire to heal him; instead he begins screaming as his skin burns and chars. It is horrifying, but I hold him down as he struggles—he was dying already, this is the only thing that might help. Maybe this is how it is supposed to work. A phoenix has to die to be reborn, right? The human body blackens and burns away. Sure enough, in its place I find a little baby bird, looking much like it did initially but yellow instead of red this time. I wonder if its pale color means it needs to eat. The bird pecks at some morsel of food near the fire and I try to tempt it with something better. "Here, eat a hot one." I pluck an olive-sized piece from a row of snacks baking in the fireplace (I don't feel the heat, just as I didn't feel pain from the sword earlier) and offer it directly. The little bird compliantly swallows the morsel, growing in size and turning red again.

I feel that I have completed the task to satisfaction, so even before I wake up I begin reviewing the details, making sure I commit them to memory. There is a moment when I am back in the same house as the beginning of the dream and ask someone to remind me the name of the guy I fought. "Ziggy Starduster and the Hoarfrost," comes the reply. I note that they definitely said "Starduster," not "Stardust." Since I only hear rather than see the names, I briefly wonder if the dog's name is spelled "Whorefrost" or "Hoarfrost," but decide that the latter is more appropriate on a number of levels.

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.