Verre

Ritual: Lately I haven't been dreaming much because I've been staying up too late (after 3am usually) playing computer games late at night. I've noticed that the later I go to bed, the less awareness I have in my dreams. Tonight for RL reasons I went to bed two hours earlier than usual, at 1am, and wondered if it might cause me to LD naturally. Sure enough, without any special intention or practices, I woke at 6am with the following...

DILD: I was moving through a grocery store, picking up some items and observing what else I might want to gather, until I reached a row of cash registers and knew I was in the last room. I had already picked up a bag of assorted stuffed animals from a whole bin of them. I recall making the same kind of obsessive comparisons I do in WL to decide which bag to pick. There were slight variations in all the stuffed animals so I was looking for the set I found the most appealing. I decided relatively quickly, the decisive factor being a stuffed bat I liked, and was carrying the bag with me.

I turned around and walked back through the store to pick up some remaining things I hadn't fully decided on the first time through. I was considering getting some food, and glanced at what was on offer in the seafood section. I think I ended up going back out the front door at this point and found myself at a bus stop. The bus came and I didn't think I wanted to leave yet because I wasn't finished in the store. I was planning take the next bus if it were going to come in an hour, but I know sometimes the schedule is slower on Sundays. I asked the ticket seller when the next bus would be, and she said, "1:40." This startled me because it was already around 3:30pm in the afternoon. The next bus couldn't come earlier than this one... did she mean the next one wouldn't be here until the middle of the night? I asked about this and she nodded. I decided I'd better scrap my plans and leave on this bus, because I didn't have enough I wanted to do here to occupy a whole evening. I yelled at the driver not to leave yet and quickly slipped the ticket-seller a twenty dollar bill, which I figured should be enough, though I didn't know the exact price. I grabbed the change without counting it and jumped on the bus. But then I remembered I would also need a ticket for the guy I was with... there had actually been no guy with me earlier in the store scene but now the scene shifted.

I was sitting next to a really hot guy and trying out a computer game he was showing me. This is how my mind accounted for the scene shift: I had been playing a game. Now I was distracted by our conversation. The guy was trying to figure out if he should go to—I think he was calling it "Burning Man," but I knew he meant a big festive parade through the city. After talking to him a few minutes I realized that I hadn't been paying attention to the game. I looked back at the screen and didn't recognize where my character was. Fortunately it was easy to restart from a save. But then my conversation with the guy took an even more distracting turn when I noticed how hot he was, felt an attraction that was apparently mutual, and started kissing him. After a few minutes of that I remembered the game I was playing and worried my character would have gotten killed, but I looked back at the screen and everything was fine... my character was actually going around doing things on his own.

"This game plays itself!" I commented in surprise. But I didn't want to miss any part of the story, so I restarted again, only this time I was disappointed to see that the game had apparently been creating its own saves too, and now even the save point was well past the spot where I had gotten distracted. I wondered if I should just stop playing for now and start over from the beginning later.

The scene shift at this point is vague, but the next thing I knew I was bodily in the game, back at the grocery store—though it looked different than the first one—this time with two companions, a guy and a girl. We were engaged in combat with the store employees, and everyone was throwing bottles. I didn't like this, so I called a halt to the bottle-throwing and my friends and I went outside. I was trying to explain to them what my objections were. "Too much broken glass," I complained. Even out here, the ground was littered with it, and on looking at it I felt a tiny sharp pang in the sole of my left foot. It seemed like I might really be feeling this with my physical body, so I continued my explanation: "The problem is, when there's too much broken glass, then you can feel it in the real world. Some kind of psycho-physical complex." The pang in my foot, which I could still feel, seemed like a great example: here I was in virtual reality, but stepping on broken glass made my real foot twinge. (Interestingly, I think a sensation in my physical foot was actually bleeding into, because I thought I could still feel it faintly when I woke up.)

Up to this point I was not lucid, rather I was convinced that I was bodily immersed in a computer game (I think my brain often explains dreaming this way to itself), but as the pang in my foot made me contemplate the connection between my VR body and my physical body, I realized that I was actually dreaming. I was about to walk off with my friends, but it occurred to me, "If I'm lucid, I should do something useful." I remembered the wine TOTM. I'd just been in a store where we were smashing bottles of wine, what a waste! And we left on such bad terms, they might not like me going back in there... not to mention all that broken glass... but I guess I'd better hazard it. I turned around and half-opened the door, but then I realized there might be an easier way.

I turned back to my friends. "Does anyone have any wine?" The girl immediately pulled a bottle from her backpack and gave it to me. Then I realized there might be another hitch. "Do you have an opener?" I asked her dubiously. She actually did! She pulled out a corkscrew and was waving it in the air at me, but I had already realized that I might be making things more complicated than necessary. I glanced at the bottle of wine and saw that although it was still sealed, the top covered in light blue foil, under the foil the cork seemed to be protruding three-quarters of the way out of the bottle. I tried to pull it out manually and was able to do so easily. There was still a small piece of cork in the neck of the bottle, but this shouldn't be a problem. My other friend was holding a butter knife, so I grabbed it from his hand without ceremony and used the handle (as the blade was smeared with butter) to push the cork inside. Lest it bob up and block the flow of the wine, I kept the knife handle in the neck to hold the cork to one side as I lifted the bottle toward my mouth to drink.

"You guys don't mind if I drink the whole bottle, do you? I'm supposed to for my task." Without waiting for a reply, I tilted my head back and chugged. I was finished in seconds. Fortunately, even though the bottle had been full, it didn't feel like I drank any more than a glassful. My immediate reaction was surprise—that it tasted so convincingly like real wine. "It's actually a decent chardonnay," I commented to the girl who had given me the bottle. I focused my attention on the taste that lingered in my mouth: very buttery, rich, even ambrosial, with a hint of something sour around the edges but not strong enough to be off-putting. As I thought about what words I should use to describe it, I felt myself waking up.

Slept from around midnight to 2:45am then got up for several hours. Returned to bed at 6:15am, after meditating a few minutes and taking some supplements (choline, Alpha-GPC, L-theanine, vitamin B complex, piracetam). Did some casual SSILD while falling asleep. Woke at 6:45am with dream.

I was in a room with dark walls, a sort of "black box" theatre, and about two-thirds of the room was full of tangled billows of blue cloth up to knee-level. Around eight people were positioned at various points in the cloth, flailing against it as though they were swimming (or drowning) in water. I knew it was a rehearsal for a play, and I felt a strong desire to join them but was restrained by a sense of propriety since I was not related to the production. I sat in a chair and reflected on how much I've always been attracted to the idea of acting even though I apparently have no talent for it.

Slowly and naturally it dawned on me that I was dreaming. The awareness brought with it a change of scene, perhaps a half-waking: I was back in my bed, but still in dream. I began to focus on animating my dream body as though it were a WILD, thrashing around in the tangled covers (not unlike how the actors had been flailing in the water-like whorls of cloth). I noted how my visual field was very chaotic, almost back to the fluctuating hypnagogic state, but the tactile field felt more stable, so I ignored the visual clutter and got out of bed. I don't need to see well to navigate my own house, whether in WL or a dream.

I wondered what to do and quickly decided to try to knock off the wine TOTM, which seemed like an easy one. So I walked swiftly to the kitchen pantry where I keep a lot of wine and reached for one at random. It was a rosé in a clear glass bottle. The level was very low, well down the shoulder, but since the cork was intact I figured it should count as a "full bottle" as specified in the TOTM. At first the bottle was the shape and size of a typical wine bottle, the more streamlined profile you usually see with burgundies, but as I set it down on the kitchen counter to get a better look, it transformed in front of my eyes to the larger, plumper form of a two-liter plastic soda bottle.

I was still determined to open it, so I picked it up and carried it over to where the corkscrew should be. It occurred to me that I should make a more detailed observation of the bottle first, since it was covered in writing printed directly on the glass. The writing was in white script of various fonts and sizes, but the white lettering against the clear glass was hard to read, especially with the level of the wine so low. The fonts were also elaborate and hard to make out. I held it up at an angle to get the best view and looked carefully. I could make out that the biggest word was "Mersault," which would make sense since (as I suspected and google confirms) this is an actual appellation in Burgundy. The next largest set of letters spelled "Farb," which reminded me of the German word for "color." I wondered if this had to do with the color of the wine, and was startled to observe that the wine was now colorless and looked exactly like water. Moreover, the bottle was starting to remind me of a water bottle. Oh dear, had I accidentally turned my wine into water? I'd better grab a different bottle! I was walking back to the pantry when I woke up.

There was actually a lot of day residue in this LD. Last night I ate out and had an elaborate meal with wine pairings: they included a rosé and a wine from a bottle that was partly empty but whose cork remained intact because the wine had been extracted with a needle and replaced with argon. Both of these details manifested directly in the dream, although I didn't recognize them as day residue until after I woke up. I just double-checked the menu and there was no Mersault, however, nor can I recall when I last had it, so I'm not sure where that came from.

Ritual: This was my third experiment with the vibrating alarm. Again it was successful, though in a somewhat inexplicable way. I had intended to get lucid but slept from 1:00–6:20am, and realized when I woke it was too late for a proper WBTB. So I used the vibrating alarm, set to go off in 45m. It was 7:19am when I awoke again, so it must have triggered, but I never felt the vibration at all this time. I had an NLD I don't clearly recall, and then a DILD—in which I simply became aware that I was dreaming, with no particular RC or "aha!" moment. The lucidity was low-grade, though, in that I never remembered the tasks I had intended to work on.

DILD: I found myself in K&L in San Francisco. (This is a real wine store that I like, but the dream version had no physical resemblance to RL.) While browsing I noticed all the good food in the cases—fresh food, like slices of cake on plates, ready to be eaten—and reflected on how amazing the food culture is in SF that you can even get great fresh food in a wine shop. There was a tray with samples of wine, generous pours of about two ounces in full-size glasses, and another tray with samples of a variety of little cut bars and pastries. As I began eating and drinking, the impression dawned on me that I was dreaming, but I felt that I was not fully integrated. (This must have been dream logic; I was already deep in dream so there was no question of integration, but apparently what I was sensing was that I was not fully lucid.) I thought that using my senses would help, so I was focusing on the tastes and textures and even the sounds that occurred as I sampled the various confections. I wanted to find one that was more savory than sweet. A couple pieces were green in color, which seemed promising, but they turned out to be more dessert-like than I had hoped. I was amused to notice how I was behaving with dream protocols: if I didn't like a piece, I would just spit it out and leave it on the tray, an act that would be incredibly rude and disgusting in waking life!

I thought after I got better integrated I should go explore the dream—wasn't there something I was dreaming about earlier, a wilderness landscape, that it would be interesting to get back to? I recollected it only vaguely. But first I wanted to try each of the food samples. The very last one I tasted was savory after all, and had a kind of bi-layer construction with a spicy-savory mixture sitting on top of a nest of dried coconut strands—it was my favorite, and I wished I could get the recipe.

Nearby was a little display box full of pamphlets or maybe even CDs about nuns, and as I leafed through them I saw that they broached the question: do nuns wear their habits even when they are locked away together in their nunneries, or do they, like Muslim women, remove their head coverings when at home? I felt that in waking life I knew the answer but now I couldn't remember. I thought about it and considered that the tradition of nuns covering their head must be related to similar phenomena in related cultures and places, such as the way women have to cover their heads when attending a Russian Orthodox church service. I figured it probably did have ties to the tradition among conservative Islamic women to cover their heads. I concluded on this basis that nuns would indeed remove their wimples when alone among themselves. (In retrospect I'm pretty sure I wrong, but I can't say with absolute certainty. The only Christian nuns I've met don't wear habits at all!)

Earlier, when I had decided that I would go explore the dreamscape after I was done here, as if in direct response to my thoughts a horse had promptly cantered up outside the shop and stood there waiting for me. (If only my human DCs were so obliging!) Now that I was finished eating I went outside and prepared to ride away. The horse had been completed tacked up when he arrived—excessively so, I had thought, as he seemed to be carrying bedrolls and other long-distance gear—and when I mounted he had definitely been wearing a saddle because I distinctly braced my foot in the stirrup and held the pommel to get on. However, no sooner had I started riding away than I felt I was slipping around a bit and was surprised to discover that this was because I was riding bareback. Oh well, it will be good practice. I remembered how some people say that LDs can help you practice RL skills, and I figured that I could certainly use some practice improving my seat and position, so I decided to focus on that for a while and see if it paid off in this week's lesson.

I still felt we were in downtown San Francisco but everything felt old-timey. Even the cars looked like 1920s models. Fortunately there weren't many of them, because I was moving through the city at a canter. I realized how unrealistic this was: in RL I would hesitate to stress the horse's legs by cantering on hard paved streets, and I definitely would not cross intersections without stopping, like I was doing now, but since I knew I was dreaming I felt it would be okay. Crossing the street still felt dangerous as there were sometimes cars coming, but there weren't too many of them and they were going slow enough that we were able to dodge one another. I was cantering because that is the gait where I need the most improvement on my seat and position: I was focusing on trying to keep my legs long and heels down, with my core on, back straight and shoulders back.

We cantered right out of the city, though I was paying so much attention to my form that I didn't have much to spare for my surroundings. Just as in RL I noticed the tendency for my legs to creep up and my torso to lean forward at the canter, so I was trying to counter these bad habits and reinforce good ones. At some point I finally halted the horse, and I worked on trying to do that properly as well, keeping my seat deep and using my weight properly. The dream ended around this time, as though by halting the horse I halted the dream.