The Fourth Factor

As usual, I seem to have become aware that I’m dreaming without being able to remember how it happened. I’m in a house along with two other people. I believe that they’re other dreamers—not sure now on what basis.

In one part early on, I’m looking at a still scene in front of me, like a picture. It takes me a couple minutes to puzzle out what’s happening in it. A young man is shown looking into a body of water like a lake. The sky is colorful and full of varied light, with a couple odd-shaped clouds in the foreground. I figure out that the cloud that looks like a unicorn’s head is going towards the cloud shaped like a dragon’s, which represents an attack on the sun by the moon, and the man is watching it through the reflections in the water.

When I’ve realized this, the scene comes to life in front of me. The clouds converge, and the sky darkens, with the moon appearing. It behaves strangely at first before taking up a normal course in the sky. The man gets up and heads in the direction it has gone. He’s going to try to fix the situation.

A lot of the dream faded from memory when I woke up, but in the subsequent parts, I was with the two dreamers. I only remember one person well, a guy. He is apparently already familiar with this legend—I get the impression he knows a lot of them.

At some point quite a bit later on, the others are somewhere else, fighting a monster of some kind. I guess some people don’t feel like they’ve really accomplished something unless there’s an epic boss battle at the end—but I just don’t find those things very interesting. While that’s going on, I’m standing near a grove of palm trees, above which the moon is floating in the form of a little, glowing crescent shape. Once we get ahold of that, we’ve won. According to the man, however, there’s something odd about the palm leaves, and a person will die if they touch them. But they just look like normal palm leaves to me, and so I figure I’ll take my chances with them. Anyway, I can fly in from above and avoid the leaves that way.

First step: make wings. I’ve been using shortcuts so much lately I figure that this time, I’ll do the full procedure like I used to. I stand facing my shadow on the ground, and will it to grow wings. Immediately, I see them unfolding, and unfolding further, out to their usual considerable span.

But this time—perhaps in response to my wanting to get a better view of what happens when I do this—there are also reflective surfaces nearby, although I can’t say now just what they were. I can see the wings themselves reflected in them—and since I’ve never set an intention for anything beyond generic wings, it’s a bit of a surprise to see how they’re turning out—red-gold in color, and faintly glowing. I climb up onto a nearby object—again, I can’t remember specifically what it was—and from there, hover over to the trees and grab the crescent moon.

In the process, though, I brush the tips of a couple palm leaves. And, perhaps because of that— or perhaps not— I soon find the dream fading around me until I’m in complete darkness. I’m still lucid, though. It feels as if I’m moving forward, but with nothing visible except for occasional faint shapes in the darkness, it’s impossible to tell—or, for that matter, tell how much time is passing. But after a while, I feel like it’s a good time to go back. I open my eyes, intending to be in the previous setting.

And I’m there, as before, and so are the two people. I can remember even less of this later part than I can the previous one—although I can recall the second person definitely being female in this one, whereas I can remember nothing at all about them from the first. There’s a series of events involving a deep pit filled with boiling water that opened up in the house. At some later part, the others seem to have lost lucidity. They're acting somewhat zombie-like, and are unresponsive to my efforts to get their attention. Not long after that, I wake up.

8.12.18

There is a woman—some dark entity had reached out for her, badly frightening her. She has shut herself away somewhere to get away from it, but it can still reach her. I can hear her screaming there—but I’m on my way to help her.

The first thing I have to do is get out of a sort of wooden elevator running down the center of the building. I seem to have entered this way, going down, but none of the doors are opening. Somehow, I can see perfectly fine into the space beyond the shaft, but the walls are definitely there, and the doors are not only solid but quite heavy. I’m alone here in the elevator, but in communication with someone else—someone I know to be my mother, although she isn’t my actual, waking life mother. She seems to be playing some kind of guiding or teaching role.

Above my head, everything just fades into darkness, like the heights of a cavern. Apparently, it doesn’t occur to most people who come here to look up for a while, and so this comes as a bit of a shock to them, but I can remember having been through this series of events before, and so this place holds no surprises for me. Besides that, I have access to a deeper understanding of the space I’m in: it’s defined by solfege, as if the intervals and their syllables are acting as some kind of abstract structural parameters, and they are also structuring what I am able to do in it and do to it.

Once I finally manage to get out, I find myself in what seems to be an iteration of my old house in M---. This version looks twisted, hollowed out, dark—actually, there doesn’t seem to be a source of light anywhere, which would explain why, even though I feel vividly present here, it has an odd visual quality to it, and the only non-black color I can see here is blue. I’m using night vision. The blue is brightest in the fog hovering throughout the house, moving as though stirred by currents of air. When this fog is concentrated, it indicates the presence of a ghost—or perhaps it simply is the ghost.

This whole place gives off a decidedly creepy vibe—a palpable sense of decay and malevolence. But the fact that I already know where all the dangers are takes the edge off the creepiness, as does the fact that this seems to be a case where there is no outcome but success. I already know things are going to turn out fine, and so I don’t let the place bother me too much.

Now the person who is my mother is physically here with me, a couple rooms away—although, either because the walls are in ruins or because I can see through these ones too, she’s still visible from where I’m looking around the living room. Nothing much seems to be happening at the moment. I’m just keeping an eye on the blue fog. There are some mirrors there in the room: I use them to check my form as I practice jumping from side to side, moving between stances I might need to use later.

(7.9.18)