side notes

(Though not lucid, this first one was about dream control.)

I've finally figured out how to work with this house. I've begun simply telling it, out loud, what I need from it - not exerting any effort or willpower, just a statement. "House, we need x thing," and the house takes care of it itself, without any effort on my part - simply informing the house what's needed instead of trying to control it. Amazing what a difference clear communication can make.

I'm talking to a servant girl in a room about the size of a closet where she both works and, I'm surprised to learn, sleeps. I ask if she'd like her own room, which of course she does. "House, we need a spare room." I walk out the door and find a new room's appeared, though it's dark and half-finished and covered in dust. "A nicer spare room." Now it's something suitable for living in - and I don't think I looked away, and there didn't seem to be any transition. One moment it had the first appearance, the next moment it was completely different. The girl explores the new room, exclaiming over it. There's a little bundle of fake white roses in a bowl of sugar.

There's what I think of as a wildfire at the edge of the house, just small patches of burning grass but I know it'll grow if I'm not careful. I have the impression this is the result of carelessly reshaping things, creating vulnerabilities around the edges. I have the house stop the fire, and though the fire's stubborn, it goes out as I walk towards it.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

A servant girl came running into a room at the back of the household after hearing one of the other servant girls shouting, but I grab her at the door and stop her. I can hear voices outside, and I recognize the voices of some soldiers who were causing problems with that second girl earlier, somewhere more public. They were reprimanded. Clearly they resented it and want payback. Realizing this, I admire the girl who came running to help; she's small and only armed with a kitchen knife and completely outnumbered, but she doesn't hesitate. Very noble.

Unfortunately for both of them, I'm in a hurry, so I'm not going to let her go help her friend. I'm just here to track down an object that belongs to me and which was stolen long ago, and which she stole from its most recent owner - a leather journal with a star on the center of the cover.

She showed me her room where it was hidden and ran off as soon as I released her, and I start looking through the journal, full of brief observations and sketches I'd drawn. I stop at the sketch on the last page, Jules sitting in a chair with his head tilted back. I feel like there's something foreshadowing about this. And while I'm looking at it, I hear an old man's voice as if he's looking over my shoulder. He makes a comment that makes it clear he recognizes Jules, and then asks me, "Did you follow me?"

I started questioning the dream in a fairly dull IRL-based scene, and then questioned why I was questioning it - but I did eventually become lucid. Once becoming lucid, however, I as Jaime immediately started looking for Cersei.

(Side note: this was an interesting level of lucidity. Fully lucid in most respects - lucid about the fact that I was dreaming, lucid about my ability to control the dream, no desire to stick to the previous dream storyline - but I wasn't lucid about my own identity. On top of that, I only started playing Jaime's role when I became lucid - up until that point I'd been my IRL self. It's standard for me to play the role of other people when I'm non-lucid, but I'd thought that conflicted with lucidity - apparently not.)

I was still in a room that was meant to represent my IRL home, but it had no doors, which I understood signified a resistance against me taking control and changing the scene. I had the feeling I had to get out in a hurry if I wanted to maintain lucidity. So I turned around in a full circle in order to create a door that would be there when I turned around again. It was a wooden door, rounded at the top, and when I opened it I saw a scene that was meant to represent my IRL neighborhood.

I closed the door, called out to Cersei, and opened it again, understanding that this will have changed the location it links to. Now on the other side of the door there's a dark stone enclosed walkway with large windows overlooking a castle courtyard. Better, but this isn't the place I was looking for. I have a mental image of a glittering gold-and-white castle that I want to get to, where I expect Cersei to be. I try again - I close the door, call to Cersei, and open it again. The scene on the other side of the door hasn't changed this time - it's still the dark stone walkway. I decide that this means Cersei must be in this scene somewhere, so I walk through the door.

Recall gets increasingly shaky after this. After walking through the castle a bit I found Cersei in the courtyard, and after a short conversation she took me to a rowboat that we'd both have to row - she gave me some explanation involving the word 'knowledge,' and I made an (apparently less than successful) effort to remember her phrasing so I'd recall it after I woke up, it seemed symbolically important. The boat carried us briefly along a waterway running through the castle, and I think I began losing lucidity at this point. There's a memory gap, and very little recall after that - before I woke up I'd wound up back in an IRL-based scene, and I'm unsure how much lucidity I had by then.

(Side note: It occurred to me yesterday, lucidity works best for me when I'm focused on a specific task, as with defusing nightmares, and that's probably something I could put to work for me more. So before going to bed today, I tried typing out one of my dream goals with the heading Task of the Day.)

I was flipping through the just-released final book in a series, the Wheel of Time, when it occurred to me that this series already ended. I get online to explain the discrepancy, and there's some explanation that this new book is an optional epilogue with bonus materials and illustrations and so on. I realize this is a dream. My first instinct is to just continue with what I was doing anyway, but right afterward I think, no, what I was doing was boring. There is no way I am going to waste a dream sitting around my IRL home on the computer. (Although come to think of it, a dream computer could probably do some interesting things too.) That decided, I immediately set out to perform the task I set for myself. (Successfully remembered!) The first step is finding a doorway or other way of changing scenes, so I head for the door.

Before I get there, however, I get distracted: I realize I'm holding the t-shirt I'd taken off earlier in the non-lucid part of the dream. But although I hadn't put on another shirt afterward, I'm fully clothed now, which I think of as a convenient bit of dream logic. I remember a previous lucid dream where I'd tried to transform a shirt into something else, not very successfully, so the presence of a spare now makes me want to try again. I decide to just transform it into a robe, that should be easy, I'll just lengthen it and create an opening in the front. I see there's an opening at the front of the collar now, so I take hold of either side and pull as if tearing it, extending that opening to the bottom, seeing that it's grown longer as I go. I hold it up to look at it - it's got the shape I pictured, but it looks like a poorly-sewn costume, like something a child would make. It's got a piece of plastic sticking out of it, as if a price tag's been torn off, and there's a tangle of loose threads and frayed edges across the opening in the front. I tear that tangle off, then realize I'm waking up. (It occurred to me afterward that both shirts had been specific shirts I actually own IRL. Makes me wonder if I'd have an easier time if, rather than just the general idea of a robe, I'd aimed for something more specific. Still, though: a more successful transformation of an object than the last attempt.)

Extremely long and detailed recall for the most mundane pair of dreams imaginable: cooling my heels in a lobby while waiting to speak to someone currently in a meeting (getting a drink of water, idly eavesdropping on the couple who came in towards the end, considering getting out my phone just to have something to look at, looking at the clocks - which displayed two different times, that's something at least), and then one about a drive with IRL family & friends (looking for a place to park so we could switch drivers, fetching tissues out of the luggage for L.S. who had a cold, shuffling our belongings so that one bag could be used for trash) ...just overwhelmingly mundane and in long and excruciating detail.

Normally I don't bother to digitally record dreams that bore me, but these were so boring as to be remarkable for it. I'd prefer nightmares.

The lights in my IRL home won't turn on. None of them will, and I think of the darkness as a danger, which makes me wonder if this is a nightmare. I start to head down the stairs, by floating, head first. Yes, this is definitely a dream. I start to do my light-of-Apollo anti-nightmare trick, which after 2 uses appears to be my go-to way of avoiding nightmares now, but then it occurs to me that while I'm here, I could enjoy some lucid dreaming instead. I decide that there is no ceiling, so that when I look up, I'll see the night sky and be able to float up into it - and then I turn over and am pleased to see that this is so. After I've floated up into the stars, I look down to the house again to put the roof back on, and then, as if it was just a task I'd briefly delayed and had to get to now, I start up the anti-nightmare trick, and wake myself up in the process.

(5:08 am, just half an hour after bed. As I was trying to get back to sleep, it occurred to me - this has happened a few times now, nightmares with this timing and on the theme of darkness - I'm starting to suspect this is the result of trying to sleep before dawn. Possibly on some level I'm aware that it's much darker than when I usually sleep, and my dream interprets that as something wrong. Reliable way of getting lucid, though, so that's not really a problem. Back to sleep.)

Fragment: "Ancient papers, and an age a fraction of that."

I'm discussing an upcoming ball with a young woman I'm acquainted with, leaning against her desk while she goes over the invitation, pointing out the bit where they encourage everyone to dress colorfully, and she, thinking herself quite clever and looking for me to praise her, tells me about the black outfit she's planning, so that she'll stand out in a sea of bright colors, and she asks what I think. I tell her I expect that's exactly what the people throwing the ball are planning themselves, so perhaps take that into account. She reconsiders, and asks what I'll be going with, as she can't picture me in anything but black. I say not at all, my basilisk coat is blue, isn't it? - it's entirely black except for the basilisk design but that's enough, and I think about the feel of that dark blue color, the warmth of that creature's image on my back. As I think about that coat I either am or am referencing The Etched City's Gwynn.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

OUAT's Belle is binding Rumpelstiltskin in a contract without realizing it. She was speaking in metaphors and he's got to abide by them literally. While the two of them were attempting to patch things up between them after a fight, she asked him to pretend she's the mistress and he the servant in their deal. He, sitting on the side of her bed, is thinking that they've done this before, thinking of a particular scene in which Julia was a princess and I was her servant, and how utterly beyond my reach she'd been then. (A scene from a dream I had years ago, accurately remembered as far as it goes, though he left out the unflattering parts.) He's been silent too long, and when Belle says something, he jumps up and makes a game out of it, addressing her as milady, going to her window and throwing the curtains open, asking what she'd like for her meal. And although she didn't at all mean that he should literally treat her as his mistress, only that she wanted him to think about things from her perspective for a moment, she's not surprised by the game and she takes it as a sign that all's well between them again, so she gets up to make breakfast herself.

As she leaves the room, she finds a strange object in a corner of the hall - a statue of a unicorn that she hadn't noticed before, with what looks like a real horn. She knows Rumpelstiltskin's been after such horns, so she's wondering why he leaves one just lying around here - unless this is what he makes out of them. She thinks it's odd, and goes on about her chores, when she finds another one, smaller, in a window sill. She knows that wasn't there before, and she calls to Rumpelstiltskin, and turns to see that he's already found the first one, and is looking at it with obvious displeasure. This is something that shouldn't be in the castle.

(Woke up. That last one was almost certainly influenced by watching Legend the other day.)

(After valerian root was mentioned in a previous dream, I looked it up and found it was used for insomnia, and gave it a shot in an effort to get my sleep schedule back in order - I've been going to sleep around 6-7 am, a good 2-3 hours later than I prefer. Marvelously effective tea, managed to get to sleep before dawn. Predictably, dream recall was terrible - but since I'm only using the tea to help me get back to my usual sleep schedule and don't intend to use it long-term, that's acceptable.)

Just the one fragment: an image of an absurdly beautiful man representing either St. Michael or Apollo, with a comparison between the blue of his eyes, the blue-within-blue eyes of Dune, and the blue lotus.