The Fourth Factor

As usual, I find myself lucid in a dream without being able to remember how it happened. I am on a stage, a raised platform at one end of a tall, rectangular room with no windows and a door at the far end—picture a racquetball court and you’ll have a pretty good idea of the layout and size. The area where I am is lit while the area where the audience is sitting is darker, with some light shining in from the doorway.

I’m singing up here and simultaneously trying my hardest to get my bouzouki to show up so I can accompany myself on it. I look around the stage area periodically, whenever I get the chance, but it just doesn’t seem to be turning up. I notice a couple guys in the audience heading for the door. Annoyed, I will them back to their seats, but they seem to sense what I’m doing and bolt. Oh, well.

In the meantime, though, my efforts to materialize myself some accompaniment seem to have paid off. There is now an array of stringed and fretted instruments in the center of the stage, a dozen or so, leaning against stands or lying on chairs. Many of them are exotic instruments I don’t recognize, and unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a bouzouki among them. I settle for the closest match— some kind of lute, judging by the angled neck and larger body. Maybe I can intend it to have a string configuration I can work with. I pick it up and sit down in the chair it was on to play. I was singing “Greensleeves” before, and so I start again from the beginning, this time accompanying myself.

Alas, my love, you do me wrong
To cast me off discourteously…

This is more like it. It seems to work best if I don’t focus too much on what I’m doing with my hands and let it take care of itself, like a spot of localized non-lucidity.

Partway through the song, though, I find myself in another room—there seems to be a small memory gap, but I’m guessing this was a false awakening I managed to identify as another dream straightaway. This room is very similar to the one I was just in—it could be the same one if not for the lack of a raised stage area and the fact that there is now a door where the opening was. It’s a metal door painted bright green.

The room is empty apart from a mat on the floor which is furnished like a bed. Looking at it stirs faint memories of sleepovers with friends—nice memories, ones I haven’t thought about in a long time. Much of the wooden floor is covered by a rug patterned with dragons—the Asian sort—in red, blue and green. As I look at it, they move and shift in mesmerizing ways, and the perspective flattens a little as the rug occupies my field of vision. I think to myself: I’m dreaming, I’m dreaming. I don’t want to get so absorbed in it that I lose awareness.

I look away to consider the door and what might be beyond it. Thoughts come to me—memories, almost, if I took them more seriously—of rooms and people beyond. But that’s a rather serious-looking door.

I wake up.

(11.7.18)