• Lucid Dreaming - Dream Views




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    The Fourth Factor

    What can I say? Some dreams just call out to be shared. I've always found it interesting to read about other people's dream lives, and now I'm giving them the same chance.

    1. Insistent Melody; The Centipug

      by , 03-13-2018 at 10:19 PM (The Fourth Factor)
      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