The Fourth Factor

Last night, I once again found myself lucid, once again without being entirely sure how it happened. It felt like the dream was close to an hour long, although it was technically two dreams since there was a brief awakening and reentry in the middle. Because it was so long and I spent the whole thing just exploring the house I found myself in and messing around, it wouldn’t make for very interesting reading, and so I’ll just include a few highlights of it.

-Finding a series of books entitled “More Than 21 Cats” on a bookshelf.

-Devoting more attention than usual to maintaining awareness and focus. My lucid dreams almost always end with no warning whatsoever, and while I used to consider this something I couldn’t do much about, I’ve been wondering lately whether preventative stabilization might help. This intention seems to have carried over, and as the dream was longer than any I’ve had for a while, I’d call it a success.

-Receiving a few gifts for no apparent reason from people who were around. I spent a good chunk of the dream opening them, resisting the urge to go off and do other things since it seemed like that would have been ungrateful, even if it was a dream.

-Moving a wardrobe with my mind. I extended my hand, interfacing with it on a mental level—if that makes sense—and then pulled. And then I pushed it back.

-Having the dream briefly interrupted by a message displayed over the scene as if it were a screen. It was a rather ominous message, but it seemed to have no immediate effect other than turning everything in the house green and shifting some of the furniture into new styles and/or positions. This may have been a direct result of moving the wardrobe as it happened shortly afterwards, and the last time I tried to control things in a lucid dream was also closely followed by something weird and threatening happening.

-Two more visits to my M--- basement, the first before the green shift, the second afterwards to see if anything had changed. It had: the second version had a closed door where the tunnel often is in dream versions of it, as well a sort of workshop behind the same wall, visible through a couple small windows.

-Lots of cats around, but probably less than 21.

I seem to have got lucid early in the night somehow and have decided to experiment with something I’ve been meaning to try out: intentionally connecting with my dream environments on the more intimate level that I sometimes experience in my non-lucid dreams. That was the general plan, but now that I’m here, I know how I’ll carry it out: doing without my vision. It’s something I’ve done out of necessity before in dreams, but never on purpose.

I’m in the basement of my old house in M---, or the basement plus, I might call it, since it’s the expanded version of itself it usually takes in dreams. This iteration of it is completely empty and has the usual weird tunnel leading off who-knows-where. But for the time being, I’ll be staying in this room. The place is a bit creepy, but just right for what I have in mind.

I turn off my vision and feel for the influx of knowledge that I’m confident is there, latent in the dream - and find it. It’s difficult to describe - I'm not up for trying right now, but I think anyone who plays around with dreams much will have some experience to extrapolate from. I walk around for a while like that—I really don’t seem to have any trouble navigating this way. I turn my vision back on to confirm that it’s the same bare room. It is.

But there’s something else I want to try, so I turn my vision off again. I want to see if I can actually navigate a dream using sound, which I’ve never done before. I walk around some more, this time paying close attention to the echoes of my footsteps, trying to model the shape of the room with them. The sound seems to take on a living quality somehow, as if using it in this way has really turned it into an extension of my consciousness. And I’m actually getting an impression of a room, though a very rough one, and it’s hard to be sure when I already know it pretty well by now.

Vision back on. And with that done, I go off and have some non-lucid dreams until about 3:30 am, when I wake up and record the experience.

20.3.18

I seem to be back in my old house in M---, in the dining room/weight room area (an odd combination that is actually true to life rather than your standard oneiric mash-up). I'm reading a poem that is supposedly by Heine. It’s a sort of varied, complex, allusive thing that somehow manages to be beautiful while also having real matter to it. But as incredible as it is, there’s also a real sense it which it doesn’t speak to modern people anymore. That means there’s an opportunity for a modern take—which is an intimidating prospect since whatever I’d write would inevitably be held up next to this one.

While pursuing this line of thought, I’ve gotten up and started walking towards the front door. The part about the different Chinese dynasties—well, no question what that would have to be now. In the original, it was totally an indirect criticism of his government—you had to be indirect about it in those days.

I now seem to be packing for a trip I’m going to take with some friends. The next part I remember clearly is being in a train station rather like the one in Kassel, waiting for my train. But I notice I haven’t brought my heavy coat with me, and since we’ll be camping, I could really be missing it if the weather turns cold. I also have some plastic boxes, one of which is filled with cheese? Why is this even here?

Looking at an analog clock, I see I still have 20 minutes left before my train arrives, and that’s enough time to pack more sensibly since I only have to go down a hallway to get to my house. I picture the hallway: it’s reminiscent of the one between Penn Station and Madison Square Gardens in NYC.

There seems to be another shift here: I’m now watching a video— like animated drawings, black and white. It’s about three girls, one of whom I know is me, although they are all represented identically. There is also music in the background: a bouzouki playing a cheerful melody.

According to the narration, the three girls created a world together. But this doesn’t seem quite right to me. The images are definitely showing them doing it one at a time, but the narration seems to be referring to it as a single event. Perhaps the video is just showing it that way in order to make the levels of ontological priority clear? No, the video clarifies, it really did happen three separate times. The one who is me did it the first time, and then, a while later, each of the others—but it was somehow harder for them because each time, it had grown colder there.

And now I actually seem to be there, walking through the scenery as it’s snow falls. There are graves there, marked by headstones—the graves of the two other girls, I realize. This does not compute—especially the incongruity with the background music, which has failed to reflect the dark turn this scene has taken and is continuing on as cheerfully as before—and I wake up.

But the last phrase of the music was still clear enough in my memory to where I was able to record it:



As of waking up, it was on its second repetition. My guess is that this isn’t an original creation. It just seems so familiar—but then, so many things in dreams do.

18.3.18

I'm lying in the middle of a dark room, trying to sleep. But it’s not very comfortable there since I don’t have a pillow or blankets or anything else except the (possibly carpeted) floor. As I lie there, a piece of music comes into my mind—“Night on Bald Mountain.” It’s not as if I’m thinking of it: rather it’s as if it’s pushing all the other thoughts out of my head until it’s the only thing there, even though it's clearly in my head and not actually playing.

It plays for a few bars, and then, just as the horn blasts the first note of the melody, I hear a loud crash from outside. A jolt of alarm—but it lasts only for a moment. The noise I heard sounds just like the falling branch did a couple weeks ago, when the winds came through, and it seems likely to me that that’s what happened now. But I reflect that that was odd, about it matching the melody—almost as if, on some level, I knew the crash was going to happen in advance.

I’m not sure what series of events came in between this and the next dream I can remember clearly, but my memory picks up shortly after attaining lucidity somehow. I step through a door out into a hallway—tile floors, completely bare, and several wooden doors, including one with a window in it at the end of the hall. Through the window, I can see some sort of colorful projection on the wall, like a screen. I head towards it and open the door.

The room turns out to be a mid-sized lecture hall, with the seats and desks in a semicircular amphitheater arrangement. A few students are scattered throughout, and although there doesn’t seem to be a teacher here, a PowerPoint presentation is going. It seems to be a presentation on poetry.

An idea occurs to me: I’ll write down what I see and then try to record as much of it as I can in my dream journal once I’m awake. Granted, most of it looks like the sort of word salad you might except the subconscious mind on autopilot to kick out, but it could still be interesting. I forage around for something to write on but turn up with nothing but a pencil and some kind of treated animal skin, which is pretty far from ideal, but I figure I can try writing on the leathery side. I slip into a seat in the back row and start taking notes.

I have a good half “page” or so written by the time I wake up—with no warning, as usual. But I find I can’t remember any of it—not even the one line that actually seemed striking to me as I was recording it. The only thing I can remember from the whole presentation was the centipug (to give an appropriate name to it)—the clipart-ish picture of a pug with many sets of legs that was at the bottom of one of the slides. Funny how that works.

13.3.18

I’m driving in an unfamiliar town, where I’m going to attend an event of some kind. I have the impression it has something to do with Kyabje Düd’jom Rinpoche? At first, I’m trying to find a parking spot near a junction, but all the spots there seem to belong to the nearby buildings, so I turn the car around and head towards the waterfront, closer to where the event will actually be held. It’s a long, straight street with small, gray paving stones and narrow, wooden houses painted light colors on either side. At one end of it, I can see boats, their masts blocking the view further out—to the harbor itself, presumably.

I look around for house no. 11, which is where the event will take place, so I can park nearby. The address plates are large and clearly display the numbers, rather like the Prague address plates do. The plates seem to be in the right general order, and so I don’t have trouble finding it—but there do seem to be both odd and even numbers on a single side. I’m not sure whether it was this that clued me into the fact that I was dreaming, but it definitely happened right around then.

This is a dream: what will I do? Checking out no. 11 still seems like a pretty good idea, but first, I decide to take a look around the area. I walk along the street, towards the harbor—but as I walk, it seems to change from a street to an underground tunnel, and when I reach the end, I’m not by the open sea, but looking into a square room full of water. It seems completely closed off and is made of some yellow-red stone, mossy where it's close to the waterline. The water is packed with boats—not big ones like I saw before, but little ones, more on the order of rowboats.

There’s something a little ominous about this place; it’s impossible to imagine what purpose it could possibly be serving. If this were a Zelda game, I’d fully expect the door to slam behind me and some giant monster to rise up out of the water and attack. I wait. The water seems to be rippling in a rather odd way. After a little while, a couple of larger waves swell up, rolling beneath the layer of boats. But they just die down again, and the water becomes perfectly still. I watch for a little while longer, but it looks as if that’s all that’s going to happen, and so I head back towards the house—now, an entrance partway along the tunnel. I open the door and step in.

An Asian woman greets me: it seems I’ve been expected, although there doesn’t seem to be any kind of a gathering here as I thought. The woman also seems to be expecting me to have a female friend along. I consider telling her that I’m here alone, but actually, there’s no reason I can’t invite someone else. I tell the woman I’ll send them a text message and they should be here shortly.

I pull my iPhone out of my pocket. But somehow, all the people I can think to invite are male. An idea occurs to me: I start spelling out A-N-I-M-A using the numbers which correspond to those letters. The phone is a bit shifty, as such devices often are in dreams, but not enough to impede me. But partway through, I remember that I’m not supposed to have an anima, being female and all. So I make it end U-S instead and send the ‘coded’ message off. Well, I guess I’ll see what happens. I put the phone back in my pocket and we sit down at the table in the next room to eat.

The table is a large one, but there are only three places set—hers, mine and the empty one. We have some kind of fish dish, which tastes good. Not much in the way of conversation is happening, and so I’m mostly focusing on remaining aware, making sure I don’t forget this is a dream. It’s an interesting feeling, being here in this place, which feels so real and yet so unreal. I could get up and do something else, but I want to see where this is going.

But at some point, I wake up—due to some environmental noise, possibly. But it’s only a short time before I fall asleep again, and find myself back in the house, in an upstairs bedroom this time.

Through a window, I see branch falls onto the roof of a neighboring building—a large, blocky structure. The roof looks like it’s in bad shape, with large chunks of tile missing—this place must have got hit by the storm too, I figure.

I’m eating a cup of yogurt there. It’s chalky and bland. Probably low-fat. Why am I eating this awful stuff? This is a dream, I don’t have to eat it. I place the cup on a dresser or some similar piece of furniture. Downstairs, I hear the door of the house opening, voices in conversation—somebody has arrived. Maybe it’s the person I invited in the earlier part of the dream. I’ll go down and check. But right now I’m wearing a nightgown, so I ought to put something else on first.

I step over to the full-length mirror, which is standing near the door, and look at my reflection. I’m wearing a plain nightgown, like a short dress with spaghetti straps. Oddly, I don’t seem to look quite like myself—my face is different, though not completely different, and my eyes seem to be the usual color. I step back. It’s been a while since I’ve done this—and actually, I’ve never done exactly what I’m about to try, but it doesn’t seem like it should be too hard. I’ll create myself something more appropriate to wear. I extend my hands, palms upward, feeling energy gathering.

But it doesn’t feel right—there’s some kind of a resistance there. As I notice that, I also see something standing behind me in the mirror—a furious-looking panda bear approaching me. I turn around, looking into the room—but it's empty. There's nothing there. I look back at the mirror: furious panda. Well, this is a little creepy. But because it’s a panda, being furious just makes it look ridiculous rather than menacing. I step backwards into the room with one hand behind me, feeling for the spot where the panda ought to be based on its reflection—but I wake up before I can get to it.

6.3.18

Once again, my memory only picks up partway through what seems to be a large, complex plot mostly full of unfamiliar people and settings. This setting, from what I recall, visually resembled an exaggerated version of the American Southwest—think mesas and sunsets, but more so— although the action and characters didn’t seem to match up with it in any discernible way.

My friend Ona and I are swimming in an indoor pool when two men we’re acquainted with who are cousins arrive and say that they’ve reserved it for a period of time, starting now. I can see from a chart with colored boxes on a grid that they have, so Ona and I get out and sit at a table in a sort of an adjoining area overlooking the pool. There’s a hint of past antagonism or rivalry with these men, one of them in particular, having to do with things from the earlier part of the dream I forgot.

After a little while, the other man comes over to the table. He has something for us: some ara and a loaf of fresh bread, which we accept. He doesn’t say it, but this seems to be a sort of apology for us having to leave the pool.

Somewhere along the course of us sitting there, the area transforms into an ornate theater, where people are starting to come in. As before, we’re in a sort of raised area, this time above where the stage and the lower seats are, but there are other seating areas wrapping around it in a semicircle. Many of the people seem to disapprove of us drinking alcohol, which doesn’t really bother us, and, in any case, has happened plenty of times before. But we aren’t bothering anybody, and if they don't like it, that’s their problem. But still—even though I want to like the guy who gave us this and believe that it was a sincerely meant gift, there's also the possibility that his beastly cousin put him up to it because he knew we’d get flak for it. I examine the glass: it’s quite pretty, with some transparent colored parts in an art nouveau-like abstract pattern—and above that, a silhouette of the Prague skyline. The golden city and one of its golden ages. I briefly wonder if he has a whole stockpile of these just for giving away to people.

The next part of the dream involves the production itself, which doesn’t seem to be taking place on a stage, but rather along a street—a straight, flat dirt road with low buildings on either side, again, with a Southwestern vibe. The audience and actors alike are here—or some of the actors, anyway. The protagonist, a woman in a green dress, will be passing along here and looking into some of the shops, having some improvised dialogue with the shopkeepers, but she isn’t here yet.

I know this actress personally and find her unpleasant—this also seems to go back to the earlier, forgotten parts of the dream—so I’m going to mess with her a little bit. I go to one of the shops, which is selling art, and rearrange it so that a collection of pictures titled “Halloween Bestiary” is on display on a small stand outside the door. I then flip the latch on the shop door, which is hanging open, so that the it will lock automatically the next time someone closes it. I then make sure I’m out of the way by the time the actress playing the shopkeeper arrives.

The woman soon notices the door and is alarmed. If she can’t take the woman in the green dress inside to look at things and is stuck with the Halloween Bestiary pieces outside, the script would require her to pretend to like them, which would irritate her to no end. She is relieved that it’s still open—but just then, my aunt steps out of the shop and closes the door behind her, oblivious to the trouble she’s just set in motion.

3.3.18