Bubble

I split this into a separate entry because it is long.

I woke up last night at ~10:30 pm. I had gone to bed at ~9pm. Fell asleep again at ~11:00pm.

Woke up again around 1:30-2:00am. I did not recall any dreams, except for dim impressions. Attempted WILD but was too tired.

I set my intentions to wake up at some point in the early daylight hours before work. At this point, I'd had the dreams about snowy car crashes, unicorns, etc. Woke up again at approximately 5:00am. Felt grumpy about lying in a supine position. It feels like it's going to take forever, too. I maintain the supine position until it's incredibly uncomfortable, then sloooowly roll over onto my side while trying to maintain as much of my trance as I can. Because I have work, I'm not going to fight falling into "regular" sleep too hard but I keep a halfhearted watch for any dreamlets I might be able to latch onto.

Eventually, a "proto-dreamlet" pops up. I'm not asleep enough for it to actually really be a dreamlet... it's still a visualization, just not one of my choosing. Even though it sounds like one, I really want to drive home that it's not an actual fully formed dream... it's like the difference between watching a movie and being the movie. It's an intense visualization - one I don't even fully control - but it is not a dream.

My attention wanes. My mind wanders, eventually producing a ghost of a memory. I am in a convenience store. It's the beginnings of a dream, but too "thin", like a flat image. It is an incredibly detailed visualization, but I'm not "there" yet. Again - tough to explain.

I am in a convenience store. It's old and run down. The walls are yellowing, even though they were once white. I recognize this faint memory - I am in Nebraska. I know that some of the cans and boxes on the shelves expired long ago. I move through the store. I look down... I am wearing sneakers. The floor is beige speckled linoleum, and it's dirty.

I go through a door, into a laundromat. It's full of ancient, coin-operated washers and dryers. They're dented and noisy. There's an old fat man, who looks like Archie Bunker. He's wearing a dingy wife-beater and sitting on a plastic chair. I recognize the laundromat as another dim memory.

The visualization gains vividness as I move through the exit. I am on the outside, on the second floor, on a fire escape. I go down rusty steps. My sneakers make metallic thumping sounds. I am on the ground now. I look around. The ground is flat, flat, flat, covered in brown and yellowing grass, and it is mid-afternoon. I feel very, very close... I move forward, trying to break the "surface tension" of the visualization and turn it into a true dream. It's right there...

But I am in Nebraska, and the landscape is SO BORING. I think that I don't want to have a lucid dream where I'm stuck in Nebraska, since scene changes can be a pain for me, so I try to shift it to the dreamscape from a prior dream. Kind of like a "bait and switch", to see if I can trick my brain into putting me somewhere I want to go.

It's a mistake. The vividness fades to a ghost of what it was. I cannot conjure up the evergreens that I wanted. I try hard to push more detail into the visualization, to no avail. I cannot become lucid in this state - the trance is too light, and the visualization is too dim. I don't give up, though.

I stick with trying to visualize the snowy forest, the towering evergreens... I imagine my "house" is there (my dream cottage). I approach it... shift... I am now in it. I am holding a baby, although I'm not sure why. I set the baby aside, and it disappears. I am sitting on a couch. The cottage only has one large room. I am looking out a large window at the ocean, which I can see through the snowy evergreen branches. There are hazy mountains in the distance.

The DC I have been looking for walks through the door. The visualization is still not a dream - his features are foggy. I decide to explore the cottage, but the visualization is disjointed. I discover that my bed is on a loft under the eaves. The eaves are made of natural, untreated wood. There is another window that lets me look out over the forest. The bed is soft, and covered in quilts. One quilt is a red and white patchwork quilt that I recognize from a memory.

The DC climbs up into the loft and stretches out on the bed. We watch the snow fall. The visualization is slowly regaining intensity and clarity, although nowhere near a full blown dream. My alarm goes off.