The Fourth Factor

I’m on a trip with my parents and an unfamiliar young man. We were all supposed to go to a casino—and they did actually go. But I didn’t care much for that plan, and so I’ve been off doing something else and only arrived back at the hotel room in time for their last trip there, late on the final evening.

I have the impression that this is a place they’re familiar with, but this will be my first time there. I’ve been told not to bring my purse with me for whatever reason, but I don’t like going around without writing materials on hand, and so I say that I’ll just take my wallet out before I go. But it seems my parents are so eager to get back that, rather than waiting the couple of minutes this will take, they go on without me, leaving the young man to drive us there.

Outside, it’s raining hard, and has been for a while, judging by all the standing water in the streets. As we go on, it only gets deeper, until the car, which is a fairly low one, starts having trouble moving forward. Some light on the dashboard has come on. He curses at the car—and quite probably my parents, who would have had no trouble handling this in theirs. I suggest that we just pull off the road onto higher ground, as some other cars seem to be doing, and walk the rest of the way there. It isn’t very far. He agrees to it.

The next part I remember clearly is being inside the casino, in a large room with a grand staircase, crowded with fancily dressed people. On the upper floor, near a restaurant area, I meet up with my parents again. It’s sort of like a buffet, with tables in a horseshoe shape, each one with an attendant behind them, offering samples of various kinds of foods to the guests. Mother is going to get a chocolate milkshake—apparently, a favorite of hers there—but my father isn’t interested. The idea doesn’t appeal much to me either, and anyways, this is all new to me: I want to try things out before I order anything.

He heads off somewhere else. I get some kind of a soup, and then head over to where they’re serving white wine. I try the sample they have there, which is pretty good—but they have all kinds of interesting drinks here, and this would be a good chance to try things I wouldn’t necessarily want a full glass of. And my mother is trying to get my attention from across the room, so I leave the table without ordering anything and head over in her direction.

Then, suddenly, I feel a spray of cold water—and the people around me do as well, judging by how they’re crying out. It seems someone is spraying people with a hose. I move out of the way, wondering what that was about. Maybe the casino staff themselves are responsible. The whole reason this place exists is to take money from people, after all—I think it’s best not to lose sight of that—and it wouldn’t surprise me at all for one to start charging people to keep things going nicely, once they’ve got them used to it.

Once out of range, I pause and kneel down to make sure the cat is still with me. He is indeed still there and comes to get pet. He’s an orange cat, an adult, though on the small side, and has been here with me this whole time. So far, nobody has noticed him—or else they just don’t care. But it’s still a little dangerous for him to be here with me, and so I’ve been making sure he stays close, waiting until I feel him against the back of my ankles before moving on.

11.5.19

As usual, I seem to have become aware that I’m dreaming without being able to remember how it happened. I’m in a house along with two other people. I believe that they’re other dreamers—not sure now on what basis.

In one part early on, I’m looking at a still scene in front of me, like a picture. It takes me a couple minutes to puzzle out what’s happening in it. A young man is shown looking into a body of water like a lake. The sky is colorful and full of varied light, with a couple odd-shaped clouds in the foreground. I figure out that the cloud that looks like a unicorn’s head is going towards the cloud shaped like a dragon’s, which represents an attack on the sun by the moon, and the man is watching it through the reflections in the water.

When I’ve realized this, the scene comes to life in front of me. The clouds converge, and the sky darkens, with the moon appearing. It behaves strangely at first before taking up a normal course in the sky. The man gets up and heads in the direction it has gone. He’s going to try to fix the situation.

A lot of the dream faded from memory when I woke up, but in the subsequent parts, I was with the two dreamers. I only remember one person well, a guy. He is apparently already familiar with this legend—I get the impression he knows a lot of them.

At some point quite a bit later on, the others are somewhere else, fighting a monster of some kind. I guess some people don’t feel like they’ve really accomplished something unless there’s an epic boss battle at the end—but I just don’t find those things very interesting. While that’s going on, I’m standing near a grove of palm trees, above which the moon is floating in the form of a little, glowing crescent shape. Once we get ahold of that, we’ve won. According to the man, however, there’s something odd about the palm leaves, and a person will die if they touch them. But they just look like normal palm leaves to me, and so I figure I’ll take my chances with them. Anyway, I can fly in from above and avoid the leaves that way.

First step: make wings. I’ve been using shortcuts so much lately I figure that this time, I’ll do the full procedure like I used to. I stand facing my shadow on the ground, and will it to grow wings. Immediately, I see them unfolding, and unfolding further, out to their usual considerable span.

But this time—perhaps in response to my wanting to get a better view of what happens when I do this—there are also reflective surfaces nearby, although I can’t say now just what they were. I can see the wings themselves reflected in them—and since I’ve never set an intention for anything beyond generic wings, it’s a bit of a surprise to see how they’re turning out—red-gold in color, and faintly glowing. I climb up onto a nearby object—again, I can’t remember specifically what it was—and from there, hover over to the trees and grab the crescent moon.

In the process, though, I brush the tips of a couple palm leaves. And, perhaps because of that— or perhaps not— I soon find the dream fading around me until I’m in complete darkness. I’m still lucid, though. It feels as if I’m moving forward, but with nothing visible except for occasional faint shapes in the darkness, it’s impossible to tell—or, for that matter, tell how much time is passing. But after a while, I feel like it’s a good time to go back. I open my eyes, intending to be in the previous setting.

And I’m there, as before, and so are the two people. I can remember even less of this later part than I can the previous one—although I can recall the second person definitely being female in this one, whereas I can remember nothing at all about them from the first. There’s a series of events involving a deep pit filled with boiling water that opened up in the house. At some later part, the others seem to have lost lucidity. They're acting somewhat zombie-like, and are unresponsive to my efforts to get their attention. Not long after that, I wake up.

8.12.18

It’s sometimes disappointing to wake up with only fragmented memories of dreams—but sometimes, trying to image what the context might have been is almost worth it.

In the beginning of the dream, I’m walking into a building. Many people are already there—it seems like some event is taking place, possibly multiple events. A couple men are entering at the same time as I am. One of them seems to be able to see me—although he doesn’t say anything to me—and the other doesn’t. I’m keeping track of the people who are able to see me since I’m really not supposed to be here, and I’m trying to keep a low profile.

The space I’m entering is basically a circular building with a separate central area, although the specifics kept changing throughout the dream. The first area I walk through, going clockwise, seems to be a restaurant. I pass people sitting at tables, including one that’s occupied by dreadlocked guys dressed in Jamaican colors who seem to be having a lot of fun.

[Note: today, the day after the dream, I was given a story to work on about reggae becoming a UNESCO intangible cultural heritage—so maybe that’s what they were so happy about.]

There was a lot that happened after that, most of which I can’t remember very clearly. But, towards the end, the space was like an auditorium, with a lecture area in the center and areas for students to sit all around it and higher up. I had put the table I had surreptitiously borrowed from Nancy Pelosi among the tables in the student area while I went and did some other stuff, but in the meantime, students had come in, including my friend Dirk. And somebody, noticing that the table is more wheelchair-friendly than the standard tables there, which have metal bars crisscrossed underneath them, has set him up with it.

Now, I had totally been intending to give Nancy Pelosi her table back. It’s what I came back here to do. But Dirk is clearly getting some good out of it. Also, Nancy Pelosi was more of a jerk than I had expected. I figure she can just buy a new table or something.

1.12.18

I’m in what seems to be a bathhouse—a basic, no-frills rectangular room with a concrete floor, on the large side, with a number of small pools and folding screens that can be moved around. Although the setting also seemed shifty and indefinite in a more basic way—a “I had this dream early in the night” kind of way.

Weird things are constantly happening there, strange figures materializing and disappearing again in a sort of timeless convergence - it almost seems like there's nothing outside of this place, even though in one sense I arrived here at a definite point of time - but nobody else seems aware of it. But this is normal: I hadn’t been able to see them once, but I had been through a long process—all of it, every stage. I go over it in memory: some parts of it had been unpleasant or even frightening, but there’s nothing frightening about it now that I can see the whole of it instead of just pieces. It’s familiar—it even feels like home somehow.

I seem to have come here with two young women, and at some point—it’s very difficult to say what order things happened in in this dream—I say to one that this is a special place, that you can feel it in the atmosphere. I’m curious if she can feel it too, on some level. At some other point, perhaps earlier or perhaps later, one asks me if there’s anyone here I’m interested in romantically. I say that there is one person, but I’ve only spoken to him a couple times. And he hasn’t shown up here for a couple hundred years now—but I feel it’s best not to mention that.

Also, at one point, one of them is arranging stuff around a pool we're going to use. There isn't enough space for two people to do it without getting in each other's way, but I don't want to just sit there, so I clean up some of the central area at the same time.

Later on, towards morning, I have another dream. I’m now in a large house with my bouzouki instructor for a lesson. I have the impression that it’s not his house or mine—that he’s an employee here. There are interruptions to our lesson—we have to temporarily leave the house at one point and go somewhere else in a car.

But we do make it back inside eventually, and he tells me to go get something. He gives me directions to the room and tells me to get #5, indicating approximately where in the room I’ll be able to find it.

It’s only a few rooms away, and I make it there without difficulty. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to call this house a mansion, but the room I now find myself in wouldn’t be out of place in a palace. It’s richly decorated, 18th-century style, in blue and silver. There’s another doorway on the other end, and one of the longer walls, to my left, is covered with shelves, all of which are lined with ornate silver music boxes. They’re all individually numbered, and #5 is one of the farthest to the left, about mid-way up.

It occurs to me that people who decorate rooms like this usually don’t like other people coming in and messing with them. But, at the same time, this place has the look of an archive. It will probably be OK, then. I take the music box off the shelf. It has its number and what seems to be some notes about it carved onto the top in a rather messy handwriting.

I open it there—but unfortunately, I can’t really remember what happened then, although the dream kept going. Before carrying it back, I notice what looks like a bone flute lying on the floor, the only thing out of place here. Perhaps a child was playing with it and left it there, I think.

(8.11.18)

I’m at the counter of a coffee shop that looks like one in a town not far from where I work. They seem to be selling small squares of chocolate cake, and I decide I’ll get one with my espresso. I’m hoping that it will be less expensive than their big slices of cake. But the total comes out to a little more than $10—meaning it was actually quite a bit more expensive. The woman behind the counter tells me that, if the total comes up to just a little more, which it would if I ordered a different kind of coffee—but actually, I can’t seem to get her to explain what’s supposed to happen and why it would be a good thing.

After a couple attempts, though, it occurs to me that I’m probably dreaming—possibly just because it was one of those rare scenarios - rare for me, anyway - that’s enough like waking life to where the differences are obvious. I look around the room. I have just enough time to observe that this is actually quite a good rendition of the waking life location before my vision starts fading.

I head for the door, and stepping outside seems to fix the problem. I can see just fine here. I’m now on a street that’s a little reminiscent of the waking life one that I’d expect to be here, but more vibrant and interesting. But I don’t stick around: I start running down the street, then flapping the wings I know will be there when I want them to be, then flying.

I rise higher, above the treetops, then make a strange kind of turn—I ought to be flying straight up, but somehow I’m parallel to the ground in a different location. I seem to be above a forest now, and above me is the evening sky. There’s sort of a natural path here, a groove where the foliage is lower, and I fly along it. I pass a lamppost on my right. It’s an interesting thing, very modern-looking—just a smooth, cylindrical pole with a vertical slit near the top that has purple light shining through it. I note that it would be completely useless from the ground—almost as if this is a real trail I’m flying along, and it's lighting it.

Was there anything I was planning to do next time I had a lucid dream? The only thing I can think of is actually looking at my wings. I never seem to think of it until—like now—I’m already in the air. Oh, well.

In the sky, above and ahead of me, I can see a red light—really, more like a small circle of lights. I figure I’ll go see what it is. That might be interesting.

I fly towards it. Pretty soon, there’s nothing in my field of vision but sky and the red light. It will be harder to maintain lucidity with nothing more solid to focus on, I know, and so I increase my concentration.

Once I’m closer to it, I can see what it is: a meteor, headed down towards the earth. I wonder if I should try to keep it from hitting. I aim myself towards it, but miss and end up behind it. I fly back down towards it, manage to catch up, but miss it that time, too. But, as I happen to glance at the fields below, I spot chunks of broken-up rocks in a few places. They look like the same type of rock the meteor is made of. And it isn’t a very big one—only about half my height. Maybe this isn’t something to worry about, then—this is something that happens all the time here.

I watch as it hits and breaks apart and then land to get a closer look. Among the fragments is a pile of colorful rocks. Some look like red and white crystals, some like turquoises, others like amethyst geodes. I gather them up.

I notice that someone’s nearby—an Asian man, maybe in his 20s. It occurs to me that he might want some of the rocks—and really, I don’t have any claim to them. I was just the first person to get here. I offer him some. He says he’s only interested in the turquoises right now and picks one out—a particularly smooth one—and sets it among a large number of others he has in a bag. I insist that he take another one, too, but then wake up soon after that.

(8.10.18)

The dream starts out with a scenario very much like the waking one I must have just left: having trouble getting to sleep. I’m initially on a thin mat on the floor of a room in a house, in a sleeping bag, but I give up and move the sleeping bag to the couch, where I do finally manage to fall asleep.

The dream I subsequently find myself in is a lucid one. It went on for long enough to where entire segments of it have faded from memory, and I’m no longer entirely sure whether I have the order of the things right. But here goes.

The earliest parts, probably, were of flying over a city at night. I’m just looking around, observing my surroundings. I spot a brightly lit area—tennis courts—and fly down. But as I’m getting close, the lights suddenly turn off, leaving me in the dark. I imagine my wings—which I’ve been doing without until now—and use them to propel myself up from just above the ground. But not long after that, I figure that it might be better to walk—there are people I’m looking for here, and it might be easier to find them down there. So I land and continue going that way.

This city seems to be a modern one, and the area I'm in is well lit. To my right, I spot a large building that looks like a hotel, and further on is another one. No people around, though. I pause to examine some graffiti carved into the gray paint of a metal pillar, possibly supporting an overpass. Most of it is illegible scribbles, but I distinctly read the name “Joseph”.

Nobody else seems to be walking around. I do eventually spot some people (specifically, four guys and a ferret) through the glass-walled corner of a building and have a brief conversation with them, but it seems to cut off partway through, and I find myself as a disembodied point of view, looking at a bunch of grapes. They’re hanging on a vine that’s grown around a tree in a forest. I remember reading something on Dreamviews about being able to play with the perspective of visual imagery—and there’s no way in hell I’m going to be able to visualize that well while awake, so I figure I’ll try it now. I find I can change the angle just by intending to, can zoom in and have a closer look. Even close, it looks incredibly realistic.

But before I can get even closer, there’s another transition, and I find myself in a house. I’m near a large window—I can’t see anything outside since it’s light inside and dark outside, and it just looks black, but I figure I’ll jump through it and see what happens.

I jump straight through the glass as if it wasn’t there and find that what I saw before was actually accurate—there really is nothing here but featureless darkness. I don’t even seem to have a body anymore. I consider the situation. I’m not worried about waking up: I recall that I spent quite a while lying awake before this—having correctly remembered my waking life circumstances rather than mistaking the dream I fell asleep in for real, which isn't always what happens in these situations—and so I’ll still be catching up on sleep.

The idea occurs to me to sing a song, one I remember singing in choir when I was a kid. I then think that it’s kind of a silly song—why would I want to do that? But no, it’s better to go with my first thought. It’s probably the right one—it’s better not to second-guess this kind of thing. And so I sing it there.

Long ago, in a far off land,
Lived a child who loved to sing.
She opens up her fragile heart,
And the song, it takes wing…

Although it’s not exactly like I’m singing it, since I still seem to be somewhat disembodied. I’m surprised by how good my voice sounds here, though. It resonates in a way I wasn’t expecting in a space that appears to be a complete void.

At some point after that, after some unknown transition, I seem to be in the same house as before, just looking around. It has multiple floors, and above one staircase, I find what appears to be a clock playing a waltz-like melody. It sounds a bit like a calliope.

As I listen, it occurs to me to try another experiment. I clear my mind, getting everything else out of the way, then wordlessly sing, improvising a melody that might come after what I've already heard. And I find that what I'm singing exactly matches the tune the calliope clock is playing. It's as if, one way or another, we’re drawing from the same source, which is fascinating. So it is just me after all.

There’s quite a bit that happened after that, most of it involving the man who lived in the house—but, unfortunately, I can only remember the very end, as he was walking out. Shortly after that, I wake up.

(3.10.18)

There is a woman—some dark entity had reached out for her, badly frightening her. She has shut herself away somewhere to get away from it, but it can still reach her. I can hear her screaming there—but I’m on my way to help her.

The first thing I have to do is get out of a sort of wooden elevator running down the center of the building. I seem to have entered this way, going down, but none of the doors are opening. Somehow, I can see perfectly fine into the space beyond the shaft, but the walls are definitely there, and the doors are not only solid but quite heavy. I’m alone here in the elevator, but in communication with someone else—someone I know to be my mother, although she isn’t my actual, waking life mother. She seems to be playing some kind of guiding or teaching role.

Above my head, everything just fades into darkness, like the heights of a cavern. Apparently, it doesn’t occur to most people who come here to look up for a while, and so this comes as a bit of a shock to them, but I can remember having been through this series of events before, and so this place holds no surprises for me. Besides that, I have access to a deeper understanding of the space I’m in: it’s defined by solfege, as if the intervals and their syllables are acting as some kind of abstract structural parameters, and they are also structuring what I am able to do in it and do to it.

Once I finally manage to get out, I find myself in what seems to be an iteration of my old house in M---. This version looks twisted, hollowed out, dark—actually, there doesn’t seem to be a source of light anywhere, which would explain why, even though I feel vividly present here, it has an odd visual quality to it, and the only non-black color I can see here is blue. I’m using night vision. The blue is brightest in the fog hovering throughout the house, moving as though stirred by currents of air. When this fog is concentrated, it indicates the presence of a ghost—or perhaps it simply is the ghost.

This whole place gives off a decidedly creepy vibe—a palpable sense of decay and malevolence. But the fact that I already know where all the dangers are takes the edge off the creepiness, as does the fact that this seems to be a case where there is no outcome but success. I already know things are going to turn out fine, and so I don’t let the place bother me too much.

Now the person who is my mother is physically here with me, a couple rooms away—although, either because the walls are in ruins or because I can see through these ones too, she’s still visible from where I’m looking around the living room. Nothing much seems to be happening at the moment. I’m just keeping an eye on the blue fog. There are some mirrors there in the room: I use them to check my form as I practice jumping from side to side, moving between stances I might need to use later.

(7.9.18)

In this dream, I seem to have been selected to contribute to some collaborative project that has to do with “Game of Thrones” and a couple of prominent political figures, including Trump. I think there are 25 of us in all, but I don’t actually meet with the others—I just have an interview with someone, and that’s it. It’s in a large, modern building, and I recall being in an elevator at some point, deciding that I’ll go to join the others and see the complete work. It seems a little strange to me that I should be playing a part in this—I haven’t watched or read “Game of Thrones,” and I don’t seem to be personally involved in these matters the way everybody else is. But I’m curious enough to go anyway.

I join the others in a room with a large screen on one wall. It’s divided up into smaller rectangles of various sizes and proportions on which video loops are being played. I can see my own contribution among them, in the upper central area, showing the collapse of a temple-like building with hundreds of statues in front of it, among other images.

Then it starts playing, and my part comes first. In the narration, I recognize what I had said in the interview, now in a more polished form. It’s now clear that what I provided was the prologue, tracing out the historical background of the story told in all the subsequent parts, setting the stage for it. That makes a lot of sense, actually—now I can see how it’s relevant, even though it doesn’t directly concern the characters that the story is focused on.

(30.8.18)

In the earliest part of the dream I can remember, I'm reading a news article online. It’s about an odd discovery that was recently made—what seemed to be a fossilized person on a bicycle.

I pull up a map website so that I can have a better idea of where the places I’m reading about are. It starts off as a map of Europe—more or less. The only major difference I can remember was seeing a series of small countries along the (more or less) Baltic Coast.

The place I’m interested in is further west of that, around Luxembourg, I'd say. I zoom in until it’s more like looking at a satellite map, and I can see the spot the story is talking about: a place in the woods where the grass gives way to gray rock, and in the rock, the figure of the cyclist can be clearly seen in profile, looking rather cartoonish.

I look up and find I’m not looking at a screen on a computer anymore: I’m actually there in the forest. And there’s only one way that’s possible: I’m dreaming.

The gray rock isn’t there anymore. There’s just forest in every direction—deciduous forest, with foliage that isn’t so thick it blocks out the sunlight. I pick a direction and start walking, not having any particular goal in mind.

The forest is quiet and still: there don’t seem to be any animals around. The only notable feature of this place is the mushrooms I see growing in small groups among the undergrowth every few meters. They’re red with white spots—obviously fly-agaric. I recall a recent discussion on DreamViews about hallucinogens in lucid dreams: what would happen if I ate one? I’ve never been curious enough to try it before—I wasn’t even curious enough to read the thread, for that matter—but here they are, and here I am. Guess I’m going to find out.

I get down close to a group of them, pull a piece off a small one and put it in my mouth. But then I see that the mushrooms aren’t mushrooms anymore: they’re red flowers now, poppies by the looks of it. Still in an experimental frame of mind, I pull off some petals and chew on them. They’re completely flavorless and slightly cool. It is an extraordinarily realistic experience of eating flower petals.

Shortly afterwards, I wake up.

(7.8.18)

I start out in an apartment that seems to be mine, but doesn’t resemble anywhere I’ve ever lived. Hearing a commotion outside, I go out to investigate. I walk across a grassy lawn to where it overhangs a sidewalk. It seems coming from the direction of the train station, which is just down the street. I recall that today is the day the king is supposed to return from a trip abroad: there are probably many people there to greet him.

Sure enough, I soon see him walking by, just like any other person might, alone except for three dogs. One of the dogs, a large and muscular one, is headed directly my way. I’m not threatened by it, though: I don't read any aggression in its behavior, only curiosity.

It’s sniffing me over as he approaches to get it back under control. We exchange a few words. He knows who I am—I get the impression this country is on the small side, and he probably knows everyone here—and he says that he’s honored that I’m residing in his country (I am a foreigner here and not a citizen). He tells me he's happy to be the host of someone favored by the cat god. This is a chaotic, cat-like being that comes around—like any other cat—when it feels like it and not before. It appears to have taken a liking to me, and there’s now some kind of deeper bond between us. It also seems to be associated with the key of B major, whatever that means.

The king is about to leave, but the dog breaks away again to continue to inspect me. He once again gets it under control and asks in a casual way what a sky bicycle actually looks like. This odd form of transportation has to do with the cat somehow—the thing apparently has a whole mythology of its own. I reply that I don’t know, as sky bicycles only take a definite form when several people are looking at one at the same time.

(31.7.18)

I manage to maintain awareness while falling asleep quite early in the night and find myself in a house. As with most lucid dreams that are on the long side and include a lot of conversation, I can only remember some parts of it clearly, and without clear context.

The house is not a familiar one, although its layout seems slightly reminiscent of Katya’s house. I’m in what would be the front room with two other people—one man and one woman—and three dogs. I can feel a connection with one of the dogs—a medium-sized one, possibly a Border Collie—and I sense that he’s somehow mediating between me and the rest of the dream. I think it’s likely that the other dogs were doing the same for the other people and somehow making it possible for us to be together here.

One of the dogs is briefing us all about something. He’s a very large dog with short hair, probably a Great Dane. He communicates with us for a while—I don’t think he actually spoke, but my memory is fuzzy on how it happened. At one point, he mentions something about a llama farm, then cuts himself off and lays down. I realized this was something he didn’t want me and the other woman to know about, but he had let it slip, and now he’s sad about it. He refuses to say anything else, so I go into an adjoining room so he can talk to the man in private. In the meantime, I strike up a conversation with a bird on the windowsill.

It’s a small bird, a bit like a titmouse but pure white. It seems friendly, and has an odd habit of repeating each phrase after it says it. After a bit, it flies off: it’s decided it wants to catch me some kind of small marine crustacean that it eats—as a kind of gift, I suppose. Aww.

(26.7.18)

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)

The dream seemed to begin like some sort of flight simulator game, but—after a series of events I can no longer remember—I realize I’m dreaming.

I’m in an unfamiliar city. It’s a place with a charming atmosphere—lots of greenery and a small harbor that almost divides it in two, with the main part of the city built on a hill with a steep incline. I fly—without my customary wings, since I was already flying to begin with—enjoying my surroundings. Every corner I turn results in a new, interesting view as I circle around, gradually moving up the hill.

At one point, I notice a series of staircases to my right leading directly to the hilltop. It reminds me a little of the Bergpark—and that gives me an idea. I could find the Herkules statue and have a conversation with him. That would be an interesting thing to do in a dream.

I fly up the staircases and find myself in a small park where a number of people are walking around. There is no Herkules Statue, but I do see a statue slightly off to the left—although monument might be the better word since it’s basically just a bronze head on a pedestal, a man wearing what looks like a conquistador helmet.

I walk over to it, look at the head and ask: “So, is there anything you want to say to me?”

The head comes to life. It says: “What the f*** are you doing here?” in what is quite possibly a Cockney accent. I’m a bit taken aback but still proceed to have a conversation with him—as best I can. I’m finding the accent difficult, and the background noise from the other people here isn’t helping.

After a bit, three young women come up and join in the conversation. I recognize them the way one normally recognizes people in non-lucid dreams, although none of them seem to be people familiar to me in waking life. The only one whose appearance I can remember was a middle-eastern looking woman with thick, dark hair going down a little past her shoulders. Unfortunately, pretty much everything we said there faded from memory by the time I woke up.

As the conversation ends, the bronze head offers to kiss a coin for each of us—this seems to be a good luck ritual of the sort that often develops around statues. The others produce coins, and I figure I’ll go along with it, too. Without looking, I stick my hand into a pocket which I expect I have—even though I don’t ordinarily wear clothing with pockets where this would be possible, it’s a pretty reliable method of materializing objects that might conceivably be in one. I feel around the various objects there for a coin. As I do, I recall the Soviet Kopeck that mysteriously turned up in my last batch of laundry—my aunt had been washing some really old stuff, I guess—and, unsurprisingly, that’s what the coin I eventually find turns out to be.

Once that’s over, I’m once again faced with the decision of what to do. As I fly back down the hillside, it occurs to me that this might be a good opportunity to find some people I'd like to speak to. I fly all the way down to the harbor and, since the ground is flat here, I land and walk. I call out their names and try to find them among the crowd, or among the people on the boats. But I don’t see them there, and before long, I wake up.

(3.7.18)

I’m in a study, sitting at a desk facing a wall. A man is sitting to my left. This seems to be some kind of music lesson: we have sheets of manuscript paper in front of us, and I’m doing some sort of exercise where I fill in bits of the melodies that aren’t written. I’m having trouble figuring out how to notate the rhythm I have in mind, but after moving to something else for a little while, I come back and manage it easily. I write the notes in with a red pen, very neatly.

The lesson’s almost over when a young girl, 7 or 8, runs into the room and lies down on the desk in front of us—the man’s daughter. She seems to be in a silly mood. She speaks to him in German - we've been speaking English until now - and he answers. She moves across the room, and they have an exchange in which he asks her questions, but she just gives nonsense answers and giggles (and totally ignores me). I just watch and pet the cat, a gray tabby that’s also entered the room, not at all put out by the interruption. Before long, a woman who seems to be a nanny comes in, presumably for the girl.

I wake up.

In the next dream, I’m staying in a large hotel with my parents. As I walk through the lobby, towards the staircase, I see a number of men dressed in suits of armor decorated with intricate patterns and women in white ballerina’s outfits with similar patterns in silver. Some sort of wedding party, I figure.

After a quick trip to the room, which is at the end of a hallway, my mother and I seem to be walking out, away from the city center and towards the outskirts. This is Wilhelmshöhe, apparently—although it would be hard to find a place that looks less like the actual place of that name. There’s less and less to see as we walk along. Less traffic, too. A man drives a horse-drawn carriage past and gives us a peculiar look. Somehow, I have the feeling that we’re expected here, and he’s a part of it.

And, an unknown period of time after that, I’ve been transported to a different place, a large building full of people getting ready to something to begin. I’m a part of it, too, now. A man is explaining to me what’s going on in a mixture of French and German. That seems to be the norm here, and I slip into it too as I speak with him.

I comment at one point that something he just said sounded more like how people talk in movies than in real life—or dreams, I add. Because I do know it’s a dream by now, although I’m not sure just when the realization hit me. But I’m going along with it because it looks like some interesting and possibly important things are going on here.

Unusually for a lucid dream, it was difficult to remember much of what happened—some details stood out, but a lot of it just blurred together. The man I’ve been talking to seems to be in charge and has us carry out different tasks, and give answers to questions. I seem to be apart from the others somehow, involved, but playing a different role.

(17.6.18)

In this dream, I ampart of a group, possibly of students, although we seem to be doing whatever it is we’re doing out in the streets of a city rather than in a classroom. At some point, I go into a shop with a few others. It’s selling clothing—skirts mostly, long, summer-y ones that look handmade, in a variety of colors and patterns, but some belts and scarves and things as well.

The things in the shop don’t seem to be in any particular order: in one part of the room is a big pile of loosely-folded skirts. I think one skirt looks interesting and pull it out to get a closer look, but it now seems to be a sheepskin vest with pictures and words on it, not really like anything else in the shop. I put it back.

I then look at a display of jewelry on one wall. It all appears to be carved out of some kind of iridescent mineral of many colors—definitely something natural, judging by the variations. Next to the jewelry are some plectra made from the same material. A young woman from the class tells me that there are more in another part of the room, so I go to look at those as well.

I find one plectrum there that’s blue, in a kind of boomerang shape. It looks interesting, but I’m concerned that it’s too blunt. Another is a brilliant red with little flecks of black and white on the edges and basically triangular, but with slightly concave edges going up to the point. I’ll buy that one, I decide.

12.6.18