Summerlander

Date: 25/03/2022
Bedtime: 4am
Awakening: 7am
Return to bed: 7.30am
Method of entry: dream consciousness
Attempt: successful
Awakening: 12pm
Phase experience: The Full Stomach Experiment

DREAM STATE

Taking Daisy (my former neighbour's daughter) to school. We are both on bicycles but suddenly I am on a skateboard without wheels and struggle to keep up with her in a playground full of grassy knolls, sand dunes and rough terrain in general. I pick up the skateboard and run after the girl, fearing I might lose her as she goes into a train station and down a flight of stairs leading to a platform on foot (her bicycle disappears). A tanned commuter is coming down the steps right behind me and speaks to me but I can't remember what was said. Daisy finally halts and speaks to the stranger briefly as though he's familiar.

Me, my wife, our kids and my mother get inside a black vintage Citroen and ride to the city for sightseeing and perhaps do some shopping. My mum is driving (she doesn't own this type of car in real life) and turns on the radio, causing Limp Bizkit's song 'Rollin' (Air Raid Vehicle)' to blast from the speakers. We all start singing along to the chorus and swaying to the rap-rock beat, but I soon find myself unable to sing properly as my voice becomes muffled.

Me and my wife take turns in playing a virtual reality game where we have to control a space probe and make it crash on a particular planet of our choice. I'm trying to avoid the red planet Mars and then aim for Jupiter in a bid to make the spacecraft enter its Great Red Spot. I enter the Jovian atmosphere by heading for the stormy bullseye which grows in size to become a gigantic, warm-coloured cyclone. The centre of the storm is like a peaceful vortex and soon it is just me descending into the cloudy funnel like a solitary astronaut. The deeper I go, the less realistic the atmospheric surroundings become and the more I feel like I'm traveling through a simulated tunnel, the end of which is dark and the swirling patterns leading to it increasingly display white tendrils and blue wisps among the dominant fiery colours. Soon, my hands touch the whirling clouds, leading to my death in the game and suddenly I'm no longer a participant as I find myself looking at a screaming avatar on a screen, perishing in Jupiter's storm with a red caption that reads 'Game Over' and I laugh it off with my wife.

WAKING STATE

I wake up to the sound of my alarm and make sure the kids get up for school. I feel quite tired after experiencing a bout of insomnia and return to bed having used the loo with no intention to enter the phase state. I fall asleep almost immediately.

DREAM STATE

Me and my family decorate and change the layout of the living room, which looks different. There is a lot going on: walls being painted, furniture being moved and oddly, cement being applied to the floor. My wife, my mother and my oldest sister (estranged in waking life) block me into a corner of the room with a sofa and decide to go shopping. I can't move but I am busy doing something where I am. My youngest son Alfie is about to enter the room and I tell him to stop as it is a hazardous environment. He reaches for the light switch and I start panicking, thinking he might get an electric shock. Then, I notice the switch has been cemented over but don't find it odd—instead I tell my son, 'Alfie, you can't turn the light on because mum's gone over the switch with cement!' He teases me about threatening to touch it with his finger and I get slightly annoyed.

Scene shift: Me, my wife, my mum, my sister and someone else are walking together outdoors on a pavement when I notice a social contradiction—me and my estranged sister haven't spoken in years and yet she is walking next to me! Am I dreaming? I check my right arm tattoo to find the simplistic picture of a woman resembling the Virgin Mary instead of a dagger going through a skull with a ribbon displaying my wife and kids' names spiralling around them as is the case in real life. I rub the erroneous tattoo with one finger to see if I can smudge it and find that it looks surprisingly permanent, but at this point I already have enough evidence to convince me that the world around me is an illusion. 'I'm definitely dreaming!'

PHASE STATE

I look at my oneiric, make-believe family members and none of them look right. Their faces are strange and somewhat vacant. The fourth person is a complete stranger and all of them stand before me like slightly animated mannequins. I laugh and tell them they look fake. To the one resembling my sister I say: 'What the hell are you doing here?' and to the strange bald and chubby Latino man, 'And who the hell are you?' I deliberately pick a fight with the random with the intent to practise martial arts. We fight over and around stationary vehicles and he's giving me the right resistance: good at sparring and blocking! Feeling satisfied with the training, I fly away and pass through the wall of a house nearby to encounter an interior similar to my living room in the real world. As I explore the environment, it takes me a few seconds to recall my plan of action, and I remember the experiment of 'eating to feel full' as I go through the ceiling, which feels treacly around my torso. Half way up the loft, I think of ceiling as edible and find that the wooden floor near my mouth tastes like crispy, condensed candyfloss. I continue to pull myself upwards as I chew part of the floor above the ceiling.

I find a metal tube akin to an elongated thermos flask on the floor of the loft and start pulling proper pink candyfloss out of it, immediately stuffing my face with the woolly edible. I spot a bed in the middle of the loft and sit on it, continuing to eat lots of candyfloss from the long, metallic flask—amounts that I would not be able to cope with in waking life. At this point, I treat the source of the fluffy, sugary substance as capable of providing limitlessly—a magical bottomless pit! I jump to the middle of the bed to crouch as I swallow as much candyfloss as I can in fast succession. My knees come to rest on the mattress as I gobble up what's on my left hand whist pulling more candyfloss out of the flask with my right hand. As I stuff my face, I notice two freestanding, full-length mirrors—one in front of me about three feet away from the bed, and the other to my left; but none of them display my reflection initially, they only appear to convincingly reflect the loft environment without my presence.

I wish to see myself eating, so I look at the flask for a moment then back at mirrors—according to the frontal and profile reflections, I am a huge, bald, chubby and cute baby greedily eating a lot of candyfloss. My reflections' movements match my own, giving me the impression that I have really turned into an oversized baby. The profile reflection begins to reveal blonde tufts of hair on an enlarged head. I gaze at the frontal reflection as I continue to munch and, as I savour the fluffy sugar, I tell the baby I see: 'You look ridiculous!' I start wondering what the reflection would look like if it got mad at me. The baby inside the mirror continues to mimic my movements but morphs into a frowning Gollum-like creature, gradually becoming slender and his tufts of hair grow longer and darker. I've been chomping on limitless candyfloss since I arrived in this loft and I still don't feel full. I would be feeling sick by now if I had consumed this much candyfloss in the real world! Try as I might, I cannot reach that feeling of being stuffed. It's not normal.

WAKING STATE

I wake up on an empty stomach and don't feel full in the real world either. I feel no different. I jot down my sleep experiences and go about my day.