Vesterguard

07-07-11 Lucid: I don't quite remember how I turn lucid, but I am outside and it is misty and raining. I start out wanting to take off in flight, but I quickly realise that the detail isn't all that great so I decide to spend quite some time stabilising. I do this by engaging all the senses and verbally commanding it. There is a wall covered with a bronze layer on lop and I run my hand over it. I feel the water and cool sensation of touching metal in the rain, it is a somewhat grainy texture as well as if sand has been lying on top of it. I keep trying to see past the mist, which produce quite a solid boundary for my area of perception. It does expand a bit, but not a great deal.

After a while doing this I feel I am anchored well enough in the dream to start exploring. So I do just that. I start out with flying through the rain and I realise I am getting a bit cold. I try to focus on increasing the temperature of the winds hitting my body, which in turn makes me think about how cool it is I am able to simulate that (nothing I haven't done before, just keeps amazing me). After a while of flying around and looking at walls and their details I decide to go up the road to some friends' place. I know they have moved out of that place, but only recently.

When I arrive I can see through the windows that there are 3 people sitting in there my two friends and a dad to one of them. I walk through the wall and appear in their living room. I look around and see that the flat is empty bar some boxes and the three people sitting in there. I start taking off my shirt, I don't know why I do this as I have no intentions of attempting anything adult with any of them.

I start talking to them.

“Yeah so we are in a dream, did you know this?”

They respond with a period of speechlessness and attempts at smiles.

“So how does it make you feel that you are just a figment of my imagination?”
“Ronja I would think that you at least would enjoy this experience” (Yeah ok, my logic is probably starting to mess up a bit here)

They provide the same response, and I get a strong feeling of guilt. What if there is something to them that in a sense they are real. I don't have any rights to rob them of their existence. This guild and introspective focus is causing the dream to destabilise, I sense it and get periodic flashes of diminished clarity.

I shout out “Stabilize the dream!” and it gets back on track, but I can feel it is a wobbly ground I have entered (metaphorically). So I spontaneously start jumping around, I realise a bit later that this is actually a good way of stabilising the dream (can't actually remember if it is or not, but it works). I shout out “Increase vividness!” and to my delight I notice that the ground now has multiple little light reflections in the watery areas of the pavement I am walking. “Ooooohhh that's nice” I smilingly proclaim to myself, I enjoy that a lot.

Sooo what to do? I now get reminded of the ToTM and also my idea of chasing down the devil and killing him with the sound of my bass. Yeah that's a splendid idea. I take off in the opposite direction of my flat and I turn around mid air continuing flying backwards. Here I start imagining that I am tightening an invisible elastic string that will send me off fast towards my flat when I let go. This effect does happen, though not as powerful (don't get me wrong I am picking up A LOT of speed) as I would have thought. I decide to take a quick detour by flying upwards and as altitude increases I notice the ocean. It is beautiful with the large steady waves and a sunset in the background. As I am up there the final light of the sun disappears.

I decide to fly down towards it and continue out over the water. And although I am cold I decide to fly down so I am skimming the surface. I can clearly feel the water against my torso, but there is no obstruction to my flight from the water. After a short while I look out over the horizon and it is starting to bend upwards in the sides (The opposite direction to how it would normally look considering the earth is round). Straight ahead of me I sense a big (BIG!) maelstrom and although the temptation of looking at it close makes me fly just that little closer to the edge, I decide it isn't the right time to investigate that.

I turn around and am amazed to find that the vortex is making it really difficult for me to fly away (I am not sure if me thinking there could be a black hole in the bottom of it comes before or after I notice I am struggling to fly away). I remind myself that I am lucid and with a quick effort of will the gravity chains break and I am off again. Although I remember being cold I am thinking to myself that it isn't that bad now. Still I try and think of the temperature of the wind against me increasing.

I fly to my flat and enter from the garden side. I am looking around and can't immediately find my bass. After turning around one more time, with a bit more intention of it being there I realise there are two of them. I start out by picking up the one lying on the bed, but to my surprise it doesn't have a fretboard. I wonder if this will count negatively towards the task as to me at that instance it doesn't really. However, I might miss out on some training so I ditch it and go for the one on the couch, which is pretty much lying in the position it is in real life, although on a different couch.

I pick it up and I strum the strings. The sound is.. well... bassy and to my annoyance I can't really play any grooves on it. Normally in my dreams I can play some funky grooves, but the lucidity is probably blocking it by giving me access to my waking technical knowledge of the instrument (have had it for 2 months and never touched an instrument before). I do briefly strum the different strings and try the fretboard, but I quickly abandon using the fretboard.

The sound of the bass is somehow skewed, it is deeper and more encompassing than normal, but at the same time there is a higher pitched ending tone regardless of the strings I play. The sound does reverberate a bit in my dream body, but not the full on flowing through me I had hoped for when thinking about the scenario awake.

I decide to go and kill some minions. I jump though the window, foot first, bass in hand ready to go murder mobs, bard style! I run across the lawn and I can see a man with red skin on the road outside it. I shout out “Hey! Devil boy!” and start running towards him. I don't actually know if this is the boss I am after, but I believe so at the start. However as he briefly walks towards me and I start strumming the bass he sort off gets knocked out and decide to make a run for it. Now more red skinned humanoids are starting to pursue me, and although I don't kill them with the sound of my bass they do get knocked back. As they come closer from every direction I decide to hit them with the base of my bass (hehe) while strumming a node. This seems to work on some of them, but not all of them (My confidence in the instrument or the lack of it, seems to have carried over in to dreaming state).

After a while they realise that it is stupid pursuing me and I get time enough to run around the corner to find original devil boy (this is however when I notice there are lots of red skinned people and devil boy might not actually be their leader). The dream is a lot brighter now and they are all standing at a bus stop.

On my way around the corner I notice my fingers are starting to hurt and my D string is broken. In fact the strings all look like a mess and I get a brief doubt if my waking bass is all-right. Your fingers in waking life to respond to the movements of your dream fingers (not sharp enough here to realise there is no way I could have gotten up and actually picked up the bass).

I wake up.