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    Carabas

    Eggs Benedict, bland 90s music, and narrative versus command

    by , 02-13-2015 at 10:35 PM (738 Views)
    Circumstances have caused a woman to temporarily move in with me; we're not romantically entangled in any way. At the moment I'm cooking breakfast and she's sitting at the table - she's asked for eggs benedict. I'm mentioning some gadget that was around in the 50s for cooking breakfast that I'd liked, I don't know why they don't make that one anymore.

    As we're talking, at some point I make a reference to something else that had happened in the 50s, and she gets the reference and responds as if she was also there. The character side of me doesn't take notice of this, but the dreamer side of me finds it odd that she got that reference - I take this as an indication that she's also, if not immortal, at least significantly older than her appearance. It's also clear that she knows I'm not human, though the character side of me doesn't know she knows.

    When I bring the food to the table, I say something to her and she responds with yes, father, and then immediately looks embarrassed. The character side of me takes it as a joke in response to what I'd just said to her - but the dreamer side of me is thinking, that explains it.

    I'm dancing with a different woman in my apartment. She's got short black hair in this 20s finger wave look, deliberately trying to recreate that look from the past, but this is the 1990s, and she's mortal. The dreamer side of me thinks of the song we're listening to as 'bland, inoffensive 90s romance music.' She's describing some kind of dull pain that lasts for weeks on end, and asks if I can imagine living like that, expecting the answer to be no. I have, actually. I try to describe the actual sensation without being specific about the setting, but she figures it out immediately and gets excited: "The Inquisition? You were there?" She always gets excited about these big name historical events she's read about, and they're never the parts worth remembering.

    (Woke up. Back to sleep.)

    Someone of no immediately identifiable gender, who has been on the road for a very long time, parks their truck outside my IRL home and starts to eat lunch, clearly believing that no one is around here during the daytime. When they see me watching them from the window they start to leave, but I stop them, telling them I don't mind them stopping here.

    Unfortunately, the dream apparently took that as an open invitation. While I'm outside talking to them, a great deal of people walk into the house - a married couple under the misimpression that it's theirs now and all their relatives. When I confront them they quickly accept that an error has been made, but they still keep standing around in the house. Telling them to get out does nothing.

    So I rephrase, framing it as a narrative instead of a command. "And the people walked out of the house."

    And giving no indication that they've heard me, as if it's their own idea, they all turn and start making their way out of the house.
    I'm pleased by how easy and effective that was compared to trying to control through commands - admittedly I hadn't put any mental force behind the command here, but there wasn't any mental effort involved in the narrative approach either. They're moving more slowly than I'd like, so I continue narrating. "It's a beautiful day, so they all decided to go outside." I'm curious whether the weather will respond to that - it doesn't seem to, but then it was decent weather to begin with. They're all outside now, but they're milling around outside the door. "They all decided to go to the park to catch up with their relatives." They start moving toward the road, and the women closest to me have started discussing some cousin they haven't seen in a while. This is really wonderfully effective, I'll have to remember that in the future.
    Verre and darknightedlady like this.

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    Comments

    1. Verre's Avatar
      This "narrative versus command" approach sounds really promising, I'll have to give it a try!

      Is your dream character a vampire too? Mine came about sort of accidentally.
    2. Carabas's Avatar
      Accidentally a vampire?

      Yeah, I kind of default to vampire, I blame my terrible taste in television - but I actually wasn't one in these scenes, just an unspecified looks-human-but-isn't immortal thing.
      Verre likes this.
    3. Verre's Avatar
      "Accidentally" as in, I never made a deliberate plan that my dream persona would be a vampire, but I was thinking about some characters and plots along those lines when I first started LDing in earnest, it's been a recurring theme ever since. As an RPer I'm really interested in the possibilities of playing another character in a dream while lucid -- I often dream non-lucidly that I'm another person entirely, but my LD persona is still mostly modeled on my waking self. Something to work on!
      Carabas likes this.
    4. Carabas's Avatar
      That's interesting! How are you working on that? The person I am when lucid is sort of its own beast, not exactly my IRL self but not something I deliberately created either - like you said, switching non-lucid personas is easy, but I'm not sure how I'd go about altering a lucid persona deliberately.
      Verre likes this.
    5. Verre's Avatar
      I admit I haven't gotten very far with it yet... the first step is remembering to do the experiment. Somehow there are tasks that I can easily remember in my LDs, and others that I almost never think to do. My initial ideas were to take a character that I've already RPed extensively in waking life and see what happens when I try to do so in the dream. The hard part is that the surroundings might not be conducive to getting in character--I've not yet mastered the art of altering my whole environment, and for some reason I'm terrible at summoning specific DCs. But maybe your "narrative" technique could even be useful here... such as narrating things about the character I'm trying to transform into.
      Carabas likes this.
    6. Carabas's Avatar
      Then I'm looking forward to seeing how narrating works out for you.