Verre

Ritual: WTB 2am, woke up after a couple hours and strapped on the Motivaider, timed for 30m intervals. I woke up again after what I thought must be at least an hour and hadn't felt any vibrations. I decided that my awareness was not sufficient tonight to continue, removed the device, and went back to sleep. But apparently this process created an anchor for the idea of lucidity, because in my next sleep interval I became aware of lying in that intermediate state between sleeping and waking and went through the motions of getting up into a WILD. However, in retrospect it is clear that I was already dreaming at the start of this experience, so it was not a genuine WILD but a dreamed WILD (hence DWILD). It was 5:45am when I woke from the dream.

DWILD, "Another rainbow": I am lying on the flat surface of a wooden table as though it were a bed in a large, strange room with a distant, domed ceiling. I feel groggily half-asleep, but notice the distinctive sensations in my body that make me wonder if I'm close to the dream state. I start playing with it as I would when inducing a WILD, attempting to roll and rotate my body while avoiding real physical movement. When I find myself face down and succeed in getting up on my hands and knees, I'm sure that I'm sufficiently integrated with my dream body to get off the table and explore the dream—and given that in retrospect I know was dreaming all along, it is apparent that the sense of difficulty that I experience as I carefully maneuver myself into a standing position, similar to what I experience in real WILDs, must be wholly a mental fabrication.

My awareness is still low and initially lacking in agency, so I go along with the dream narrative for a while. The space in which I find myself is strange and hard to describe. There's a kind of reflective dome above me that rotates and shifts to reflect different parts of an upper floor or balcony. The dome moves until it is showing a distorted reflection of what looks like an early twentieth-century radio, one of the elegant ones in a large wooden cabinet. I am aware that seated up by the radio there is an older man who owns this place, and I am his guest. After this is a scene in which someone tells my brother that if he wants to get along with this man then he should take up shortwave radio as a hobby.

Then a bunch of us are seated at a long table for a dinner party. [Source: Order of the Phoenix was on TV last night, and it has a number of scenes with people seated at long tables.] Plates are served and they all contain huge sandwiches. The older man that I saw in the balcony earlier is picking disinterestedly at his sandwich and asks where the other food is, the stuff that had been simmering in the crockpot. My brother, who had put together the food, says that it will be coming up as the next course. I'm seated directly across from the older man, who I think of as our "host," and can tell from his expression he doesn't want to eat the sandwich. I decide to be helpful and comment loudly: "That's a huge sandwich! I couldn't eat all that even for one meal." Although this is true, my intention in speaking was to save face for the other man by legitimizing the option of leaving the sandwich uneaten while waiting for the next course.

After the sandwich course, we take a break from the meal and everyone who was at the table, about a dozen people in all, are standing in another room. The host is there, and a bunch of vague random people I don't recognize, as well as DC versions of my brother, mom, and dad. For some reason, maybe because of the lull in the narrative, I finally remember my intended task, the leprechaun TOTY, as well as how I had planned to accomplish it. My chief difficulty in previous attempts had been that once I managed to create the necessary rainbow, I got thwarted in my attempts to seek the end of it. As I had earlier been pondering this difficulty, a straightforward solution, perfectly obvious in retrospect, finally occurred to me: why not create the rainbow such that it ends right in front of where I'm standing?

"Okay everyone, we're going to play a game, kind of like a party game." I smile at the host and add, "It'll give you time to digest before the next course." I reach out and pat his belly, an oddly familiar gesture given that the DC did not scan as anyone I know in WL. [Possible source: yesterday I was doing research related to Budai, the so-called "Laughing Buddha," and rubbing his belly is a recognized ritual gesture. But the DC did not in any other respect remind me of Budai.] I complete my announcement by telling the group: "We're going to make a rainbow!"

The room we are in is walled entirely with glass on two sides, like a skyscraper, and I recognize that this clear view of the sky will be helpful for the task. I'm slightly more concerned about the fact that we're three or four storeys up, which means that if the rainbow ends here and I start digging through the floor, I won't actually be digging in solid ground. I remind myself that it is silly to maintain these kind waking life assumptions in the dream state. It can be solid ground if it wants to be, or maybe I can find the leprechaun in the room below us. Dream is nothing but malleable, so I really don't need to be this finicky.

I continue with my instructions to the group: "What we need to do is hold hands and create the end of the rainbow right here." I gesture to indicate the patch of floor in middle of our circle of people. "Then we'll go through, fight the leprechaun, and take his gold." I look around to gauge the response and decide the DCs need a little more incentive. "We can split the money," I add, and am pleased to see that this perks up their interest.

We join hands around a large circle. I feel that my shirt cuffs are too long and and getting in the way, so I have to break off and fold them up in order to get proper skin contact with the people around me. Once again I wonder if I'm being too finicky. Probably. Even the hand-holding seems like overkill, but I thought it might help us join our focus on the same goal.

My assumption had been that the assistance of the DCs would help my own confidence and focus on the task. This idea was probably based on my last rainbow-making dream, when I really did feel like I benefited from the help volunteered by the little girl. But this group of DCs is not helping at all. Like typical adults in a social setting, they are only marginally interested in my unusual party game. While I'm trying to concentrate on making a rainbow, the others are getting distracted and starting to chit-chat among themselves. This is distracting me in turn.

"Quiet!" I rebuke them sharply. "No talking, please. I need you to concentrate. Focus your intention." I figure they could use a reminder of the goal of our task: "We're going to create a rainbow"

Periodically I've been glancing out the windows to see if a rainbow is visible in the sky yet. This time I notice that the weather has changed. The sky is grey and a steady rain is now pouring down. Rain, well, that's halfway to a rainbow, isn't it? I let myself be encouraged that the environment is showing some response.

I continue attempting to focus, and the DCs continue to stand around without helping much. They're quieter after my reprimand but still distracted, and I have the impression that they don't seem to know how to focus their intentions properly. This is exasperating. What good are dream characters who don't even know how to interact with a dream? My mom starts speaking and I almost raise my hand to swat at her, irritated by yet another interruption, until I realize that what she's saying might actually be helpful. She is commenting on the light, how it needs to filter through the water particles a certain way to create a rainbow.

I had never intended to create a rainbow with meteorological accuracy, but hey, since it's already raining outside, we might as well give it a shot. If we can just get the right sort of light, it might encourage our expectations in a way that will make this easier. You know how when it rains and then you see the light break through the clouds, and you wonder if you will see a rainbow? That's the expeirence I was now trying to recreate. I look out the window and sure enough, in one direction bright sunlight is now alternating with the dark clouds. Very well, the rainbow can come from that direction.

Once again I concentrate, reminding myself that rainbows consist of light broken into the spectrum of colors. I think I almost see them in front of me, faint and translucent, but I can't tell if I'm only imagining them until the DCs all break out into "oohs" and "ahs," and saying things like "amazing!" I smile triumphantly, amused that everyone is acting so impressed after their earlier disengagement.

(While it seems odd to make the above distinction between something that "happens" in a dream and something I'm "only imagining," given the many times I have attempted to complete some task by imagining the outcome and it has not tangibly manifested in the dream, some such distinction seems warranted, if much less clear and stark than the difference between imagining and experiencing in waking life.)

It is a bit odd to try to look at a rainbow head on, from immediate proximity, but I do see a faint shimmering band extending from the lit quarter of the clouds to the floor right in front of my feet. I remind everyone that creating the rainbow was only the first step. "Now we have to dig through the floor." I start scrabbling at the smooth wooden boards, trying to imagine that the floor is soft and that my hands can scoop it up like clay. I feel everyone watching (no one else is trying to help) and their expressions are dubious. If merely creating a rainbow surprised them, imagine the skepticism they must feel watching me try to break through solid floor with my hands! I wonder if I can better align the expectations of the onlookers if I use some sort of tool to dig with, but I can't think of what might be handy.

This time it is my dad who speaks up with some advice: "The location of the floor isn't localized on the floor." I don't understand what he's trying to tell me, and I don't have long to think about it because I feel myself waking. I lose the dream and lay still for a few minutes, feeling to see if I can DEILD, but no, my body is fully awake now.