The Fourth Factor

I am traveling in a foreign country, driving a car down a dirt road—although there’s a bit of a traffic jam at the moment, and nobody is actually moving except the pedestrians, who walk between the cars and on the side of the road. Two women wearing some kind of sari-like traditional dress walk past. I think about giving them a lift—something I wouldn’t ordinarily consider doing, but they seem particularly trustworthy somehow.

At some point, I suddenly find that the car is full of people, and I’m in the backseat. The two people in the front seats are wearing police uniforms, and two or three other people are standing between the rows of seats. I ask a man in a white business-type shirt standing to my left if this is a police chase, and he confirms that it is. I have heard about this—of officers requisitioning vehicles so they can go after somebody who would otherwise escape them. I suppose that’s OK—not that I get any choice in the matter.

The next thing I remember is walking through a public building, talking with the same man. He’s asking me questions. One is, essentially, whether I can take any time off work. I reply that I can’t. I’m working remotely even now, on this trip. He is concerned that I’m not recovering from something, which he seems to feel is my fault, and wants me to undergo a scan of some kind—he’s holding the equipment now, beside a machine there. This is a little exasperating, as I’m already pretty sure this has to do with some kind of control issue, which isn't exactly news. But what’s more troubling is the fact that he’s mentioning things that happened since the car chase, and I don’t remember anything between now and then. I try to determine how big of a memory gap I’m dealing with. Very shortly afterwards, I conclude that this is not something it’s possible to do without knowing what happened during that time. And at that point, I wake up.

It’s an hour or so after that—after recording the dream and after listening to people being typically noisy atypically early downstairs—that my cell phone rings. Or vibrates, rather, since that’s the setting I keep it on. I’m annoyed since I was almost asleep, and this is such a good opportunity for having a lucid dream. If I ignore it and don’t move, it’ll stop soon enough. But it doesn’t stop after the normal number of rings, and so I finally give up on the dream and get up to shut it off. And that’s when I realize—this is a dream.

This is the part where I figure out what to do, now that I have this opportunity. And right now, what I want to do is go back to the setting of the last dream and figure out what was going on there. I head over to the window and step onto the windowsill, disregarding the glass pane, which obligingly acts as though it didn’t exist.

It is dark out, but the setting I see before me has nothing else in common with what I’d ordinarily see out my window. For one thing, it’s a long way down—the ledge where I’m perched isn’t as high as an airplane would fly, perhaps, but it can’t be that much closer to the earth. The landscape spread out before me is also unfamiliar, and remarkably strange. The ground is uniformly flat, with nothing but houses and trees as far as the eye can see. But every so often, there are tall, thin spires, each set of them closely grouped, apparently made of rock— like giant needles stuck into the earth. Their tips are about level with where I am—in other words, incredibly high—and they’re so disproportionate to the rest of the landscape that they look unnatural.

Looks like I’ll be flying, then. But first—I will it to become daytime and wait for a little while. Nothing happens. Well, that was probably a little unrealistic, but it was worth a try. Anyway, I can see just fine, even with no discernible source of light: everything below me and in the distance is clear and crisply outlined. But seen with night-vision, it’s all dark blue, which will make it less interesting to fly over. (Later on, after waking up, I’ll recall that I intentionally enabled myself to see in the dark in a lucid dream a couple months ago—could it be that it was a lasting modification? That would be interesting.)

I ready myself and launch outwards, extending a set of muscles I only have in dreams, when I choose to: wings. It’s a smooth glide for the most part. There isn’t much in the way of wind up here—as empty and still and silent as it is on the ground far below. Trees, houses, more trees, more houses, and the nearest set of spires, coming ever closer. It’s an odd feeling, being up here in this lonely place, poised and sharply aware and secure somehow.

The next part is difficult to remember—I’m not exactly sure how I managed to find my way back to the building from the first dream, but it seemed to involve flying in a pattern around the spires—a little like dialing the combination of a lock, a little like grabbing the fabric of dream-space and twisting it in exactly the right way. But one way or another, I'm there. The building was full of people before, but now it is dark and empty. And a woman with brown skin and dark hair is standing beside me there—she will take me to the man I want to speak to.

And that’s the point where it would be best to end this account, I think….

(29.1.18)