The Fourth Factor

This was a dream from early in the night, which may explain some of the peculiarities. I—and I may or may not have been me—mention some ongoing problem to my mother—who definitely wasn’t my actual mother. Neither of us actually seem to be represented visually in the dream: I perceive her as a powerful and protective energy, and I am observing somewhere from outside of the “I” character—I guess whom I also recognize by ‘feel’. The only clear imagery from this part I can recall is the setting—the basement of my old house in M---.

I guess I was just complaining about it, but she takes it as a call to action and immediately sets to work. She first does something to me to keep me from interfering in any way—like an abstract version of shutting me up in a room. It had been a problem that I considered tough and protracted—I can’t remember any more about it than that—but she takes care of it with astonishing ease. And then she lets me go.

But I manage to get into some kind of trouble again not long after that—in a forest, almost falling into a freezing-cold river I don’t see because of the snow covering it. Fortunately, she comes along and is able to get me somewhere safer, but I can’t convince her I’m not getting into dangerous situations in purpose, and so she does the shutting-in-room thing again.

9.6.18

I find myself walking down the staircase to the basement of my M--- house. It occurs to me that this is a place I only visit in dreams—and so I must be dreaming right now.

The room is dark, so I try to brighten it up a little bit by clapping as if the lighting there was the kind that responded to that. But that doesn’t seem to help, and the visuals, though still vivid, have an indefinite quality to them that tells me the dream isn’t very stable. I decide I’ll cut the visuals off altogether to stabilize it through other senses, but wake up first—right around the time I ordinarily wake up, which explains the instability. I seem to have completely lost the ability to sleep in nowadays.

10.4.18

Last night, I once again found myself lucid, once again without being entirely sure how it happened. It felt like the dream was close to an hour long, although it was technically two dreams since there was a brief awakening and reentry in the middle. Because it was so long and I spent the whole thing just exploring the house I found myself in and messing around, it wouldn’t make for very interesting reading, and so I’ll just include a few highlights of it.

-Finding a series of books entitled “More Than 21 Cats” on a bookshelf.

-Devoting more attention than usual to maintaining awareness and focus. My lucid dreams almost always end with no warning whatsoever, and while I used to consider this something I couldn’t do much about, I’ve been wondering lately whether preventative stabilization might help. This intention seems to have carried over, and as the dream was longer than any I’ve had for a while, I’d call it a success.

-Receiving a few gifts for no apparent reason from people who were around. I spent a good chunk of the dream opening them, resisting the urge to go off and do other things since it seemed like that would have been ungrateful, even if it was a dream.

-Moving a wardrobe with my mind. I extended my hand, interfacing with it on a mental level—if that makes sense—and then pulled. And then I pushed it back.

-Having the dream briefly interrupted by a message displayed over the scene as if it were a screen. It was a rather ominous message, but it seemed to have no immediate effect other than turning everything in the house green and shifting some of the furniture into new styles and/or positions. This may have been a direct result of moving the wardrobe as it happened shortly afterwards, and the last time I tried to control things in a lucid dream was also closely followed by something weird and threatening happening.

-Two more visits to my M--- basement, the first before the green shift, the second afterwards to see if anything had changed. It had: the second version had a closed door where the tunnel often is in dream versions of it, as well a sort of workshop behind the same wall, visible through a couple small windows.

-Lots of cats around, but probably less than 21.

I seem to have got lucid early in the night somehow and have decided to experiment with something I’ve been meaning to try out: intentionally connecting with my dream environments on the more intimate level that I sometimes experience in my non-lucid dreams. That was the general plan, but now that I’m here, I know how I’ll carry it out: doing without my vision. It’s something I’ve done out of necessity before in dreams, but never on purpose.

I’m in the basement of my old house in M---, or the basement plus, I might call it, since it’s the expanded version of itself it usually takes in dreams. This iteration of it is completely empty and has the usual weird tunnel leading off who-knows-where. But for the time being, I’ll be staying in this room. The place is a bit creepy, but just right for what I have in mind.

I turn off my vision and feel for the influx of knowledge that I’m confident is there, latent in the dream - and find it. It’s difficult to describe - I'm not up for trying right now, but I think anyone who plays around with dreams much will have some experience to extrapolate from. I walk around for a while like that—I really don’t seem to have any trouble navigating this way. I turn my vision back on to confirm that it’s the same bare room. It is.

But there’s something else I want to try, so I turn my vision off again. I want to see if I can actually navigate a dream using sound, which I’ve never done before. I walk around some more, this time paying close attention to the echoes of my footsteps, trying to model the shape of the room with them. The sound seems to take on a living quality somehow, as if using it in this way has really turned it into an extension of my consciousness. And I’m actually getting an impression of a room, though a very rough one, and it’s hard to be sure when I already know it pretty well by now.

Vision back on. And with that done, I go off and have some non-lucid dreams until about 3:30 am, when I wake up and record the experience.

20.3.18