Recent DJ Posts

I am at work. Nicola is here and showing me how to do something. First, we have to take a picture of ourself, looking up through some contraption that looks like a toilet. The camera we use is like the kind my family had when I was a kid. I play around with it and reminisce, since it’s been a while since I’ve seen one of these. She goes first, arranging her skirt? so as not to reveal herself, even though I somewhat pointedly look away. I go next, sitting on the seat, extending my arm down to hold the camera facing up at the bottom of the tube, and snap the picture. Looking at it on the screen, it’s very unflattering. The background is dim and grainy, yet my face is bright and making an uncomfortable looking expression.

I think I am at work. Zoe is also here, and I think we are in a large Sani Hut. I think I entered it and then it somehow grew in size to more like that of a large room. It may or may not retain some characteristics of the Sani Hut. It also seems tall, possibly with a mezzanine-esque secondary level. I notice a computer monitor playing security footage. The footage is of me, somewhat zoomed in and following me, in real time. Zoe is currently controlling it. I don’t know if she’s aware that I can see it or cares if she does know. I think I have done something wrong?

last night I slept 8+ hrs and got 3 cool dreams. In the last one I felt getting some awareness and would have gotten lucid if they didn't call me from work.

DREAM 1

I'm visiting someone who lives on 1660 penn avenue. It's on a hill, in wooded area. I decide to go up the hill to look at the white house at 1600 penn. It's hidden by thick bushes and trees. I don't want to get much closer as not to become suspicious of doing something bad. So I decide to take a picture from where I'm standing towards the house I'm visiting and the near highway instead. To show how close they live.

As I'm looking at the screen of my iPhone, I feel a loud sharp noise. I look and there is a tiny hole right by the power button, and about 5 secret service agents are fast walking towards me. I tell them I'm sorry, didn't mean to cause any harm, as I know they disabled my iPhone with a precision shot. They ask to look at the pictures on my phone to see if I took anything secret, but I didn't. I'm a bit scared.

A bit later, this feels like a second DREAM 2. But the setting is the same. Except now I can see beautiful green mountains with peaks covered in snow. I know I'm in Colorado. I wish I took pictures of that. As I look closer, a smallish airplane is flying above the tops. It grows bigger and is now doing acrobatic loops around the mountain top. I go uuuuh and aaaah and I'm just delighted. Love airplanes and watching anything flying in my dreams.

DREAM 3

I'm walking towards the city square in my hometown. I decide to hang left, not wanting to go towards church. I'm suddenly in different city. I start to look for a place that's close to the street but kinda hidden from eyes of people walking by. Something discreet to have some hanky-panky. I find some structure of walls and I walk to the sidewalk to see if they would see us from there.

Now I'm starting to become aware. I keep looking. There is a very old wall with steps leading up to it in few different places. Normally I avoid old places because they scare me. But not this time. I'm more curious and I realize it. Makes me happy that i'm not scared.

There is a rope or something like that hanging from the wall and I grab it. That swings me out while I'm still standing on the wall. On my right, I can see a mesh roof broken on few places, over some large round room. Like a rotunda in a castle. I really don't want to fall in there, but I look inside with interest.

I changed my alarm back this morning from 5:15 to 5:05. I also put the 11pm a bit quieter. I got off computer at 10:30 as normal and meditated for a half hour. Turned off alarm and put on sleep mask and went to sleep. Woke up to 5am alarm. I sat up and said I would be going back to sleep very soon. I set a few intentions and tried to recall any dreams to no success. I laid still for what only felt like a few minutes. I felt some vibrations, and then I felt some more running across my body. I tried super hard to form a dream and then I remembered that was my mistake the other day. I relaxed and let it come to me naturally. I tried to tell the dream to put me at my old house.

I saw the dream in front of me, but it was like looking at a small low res screen surrounded by darkness. I knew I was in the dream already because of how colorful it was, but I wondered how I'd pull myself into the full dream. I imagined I was viewing the dream through some sort of camera. (I was wearing my sleep mask which is likely the cause of all this) I took a deep breath and put down the camera on a table in front of me and my FOV expanded completely. I was now in the dream. It was extremely vivid. I could see everything clear as day. I was at a strange house that was kind of a mix between my old one and this one. There was a barbecue or something going on because my whole family was there, including cousins. I rubbed by hands together and knelt to the ground. I felt the concrete texture and then I punched it a few times to test its solidity. The dream was so real and stable. I then remembered something about keeping lucidity by playing music in the background so I tried that to no success. I didn't think to try other methods of summoning music aside from pure will. I gave up on that and went back to the house. I said to myself the house would transform as I entered the door. It would change to the house I wanted it to be. I opened the door and found it was still the weird mix of homes instead of the one I wanted. At one point I entered the void. I do not recall if I fully recovered from it or not, but I do recall taking off my sleep mask and still seeing the void. I realized I was still dreaming and tried to bring back a dream but as I said, I think I failed.

Gah...Accomplished a lucid via WILD, but it was shortlived and I succeeded in none of my goals. Oh well, just another step towards my goals!

I also remembered another dream throughout the night. I was doing yoga with a room full of people. There was no set routine, but a few of us noticed that the majority of the people were doing a routine in sync. They were all mirroring the exact same movements at the same time, looking stone faced in a single direction. There were murmurs throughout the people that something weird was going on. I admitted I couldn't do yoga and talked to my dream crush. I can't say I fully recognize her irl. She reminded me of a mix between a previous acquaintance and an previous coworker. Both of course I had found attractive. We struck up a conversation about the yoga people and then I asked her to dance. I said I didn't know how and she got all happy. She said she'd like to teach me and she was glad I asked. She offered me her hand and I put my hand in hers, and then I put my other hand on her hip and she started telling me what to do from there. I was in bliss while the dream faded away.

Dang. I sure am lonely, but that dream was real nice. No, I do not do yoga. I am neither in the shape or is it something I am interested in. But I should probably go dancing.

We just got out of our hotel in Saudi Arabia. I pull out my camera but something is spilled on it and I'm not sure I can clean it up.

Going to a restaurant I saw in a tour guide, but the lines are huge. A person is with us. I have a feeling she is rich, not saudi, but lives there for a while. We ask her to recommend a place.

Then something if I got all my scans done since I was in the Royal hospital. It was suppose to be top of the line and free, or maybe she paid for it.

I'm sitting in my parents living room, in my usual spot. It's late afternoon and sun outside is getting softer. It's making for some beautiful scenery as mature, big trees and their leaves are of with all colors plus golden from the sun. I pull out my iphone and start taking pictures.

Now I'm in the kitchen, and similar, beautiful trees in late afternoon sun. I grab my iphone and my regular camera, wanting to take pictures with both and compare. See if iphone makes any good pictures compared to the other one. So I walk out to the balcony to have a clear shot without window glass. My dad is there saying he was about to have a smoke, if I don't mind doing it later. I leave without a word, knowing that later will not work, because sun is going down.


I'm outside, the apocalypse is happening. The ground is shaking, buckling, ripping, lava coming out. Cool : D

Morning of June 11, 2017. Sunday.



My wife Zsuzsanna and our children as we are now are at a carnival, though curiously, a group of people are in our house at one point (mostly in our lounge room) who are apparently waiting to enter another area. I do not see them as imposers and even consider how there are not that many people around. There is the typical ambiguity of the setting being an unlikely essence of indoors and outdoors at the same time, a common factor of my dreams since early childhood.

A photographer is present in a few different scenes. He reminds me of Al, the Italian manager of a pawn shop in La Crosse, who I have not seen in nearly twenty-five years.

Although some of the photographs he takes seem okay, many are very poorly done, often cutting off the person’s face below the nose. I have the strong impression that the photographs he takes that turn out well are the result of random coincidence.

Zsuzsanna and I sit to the right of an unknown family. I sit to Zsuzsanna’s right. I assume the photographer is going to take a few good photographs of the scene. However, when I look at them later, I see that my face is only visible above the mouth and in one photograph, the one I look at the longest, both my eyes are closed. I show Zsuzsanna and relate my opinion of this photographer as not being very good. I notice in the last photograph, my right eye is closed and my left eye is open.

---

The photographer is of course this dream’s personified preconscious. He is not really confrontational here as in many other dreams. The purpose of the personified preconscious is to initiate the waking transition and in some cases, as here, to give evidence that the dreamer is dreaming. The subliminal anticipation of the hypnopompic jerk is only one of several factors in this waking symbolism. The preconscious is more of a biological necessity, though not always personified (for example, is sometimes an animal, sometimes an event or feature of a setting, but always fairly obvious if one understands dreams). The nature of how the preconscious waking factor is rendered, and what character plays the role in a particular dream, sometimes seems completely random. However, looking more deeply, there is usually more than one layer.

In this case, the photographer is played by a man who worked at a checkout. A checkout is a form of liminal space waking symbolism. (The analogy is that a person is done shopping and ready to return home as akin to leaving the dream state, or “checking out of the dream state”.) This type of hybrid characterization, though always unique, has occurred in thousands of my dreams, with the same waking symbolism and implications.

It is not that common for me as my personified subconscious (temporary fictional dream self) to be The Sleeper. This element is typically projected as something else, even faulty technology. In the last photograph, one of my eyes is open, which is an emergent consciousness factor. (My mouth is not visible in the photographs as I cannot speak coherently while sleeping.) Zsuzsanna and I are oriented in my dream as we are in bed in reality (that is, she is to my left). There seem to be a few types of instinctual dreaming (non-lucid dream control). In addition to the state where the dreamer knows he is making the dream (and yet does not even remember or know what a dream is), there is the state as here, where the dreamer is more passive to events, yet where there is the subliminal knowledge of being asleep but not direct or creating viable lucidity. There is also a sort of halfway point when I am next to Zsuzsanna, my dream attaining real environmental orientation while still within the dream state (more common and sustained in my childhood dreams).

Of course, a carnival symbolizes the dream state itself (that is, a place not relevant to the usual day-to-day reality, though my family had been to one recently).

---

Date of Dream: FRI 19 MAY - 2017



Dream No. 115 - Separated Sections

Dream 115 A - The Celebration
My mum and I were driving when I saw a really bright rainbow in the sky. When I told her to look at it, these really dark clouds started to cover it up but then a second rainbow had appeared. As we drove closer to our local area, more and more rainbows started to appear until there were heaps of them. The sky also started to have other signs of strange, colourful light in it as well.

When we were within our streets, I noticed that a lot of houses had their Christmas lights on although it wasn't Christmas season. My dad suggested that it was this annual celebration that was taking place. We went up one backstreet and got out of the car. My parents had presented someone with this massive bag of Easter eggs. That's all I can remember for this dream.

Dream 115 B - Choir Competition
I was in an unknown building that looked like the reception area of somewhere like a clinic or a hospital. Just outside the doors, there were all these primary school students lined up wearing blue and yellow uniform. Apparently they were one of the schools involved in a choir competition. When they came back in, they sat on the chairs close by with their teacher sitting right next to me. I kept trying to get the teacher's attention to say congratulations but everyone kept ignoring me.

The next school to go outside for singing was Killester College. The dream must have skipped their repetoire as straight after, the choir was leaving the place. As they were all walking along with Mr. H, WB saw me and we frantically waved at each other. She had then pulled out some sort of polaroid camera and was trying to take a picture of me. I thought didn't know what she wanted and so I tried to avoid being snapped. She desperately tried to get my attention and said she just wanted to say bye to me, so I then deliberately smiled for the camera.

Dream 115 C - I Got A Reply
There were two instances in this dream where I got a reply. The first one was fan mail that I had sent to SML in waking life but in the dream, I actually saw that there was a reply! (no reply in waking life). My dream mind had pieced that Logan had composed the reply and there was this gibberish in which the only part that made sense was something about my music.

The dream then moved to me messaging TH on Facebook (I have not done this in waking life). Shortly after, I get a message from someone else, I have forgotten the name of this account. I eventually suss out that this is Taylor's aunty and that's all I remember about this dream.

I am at a train-station.
There is snow so appears to be like wintertime, but in a weird way I know I am in a warm country where winter with snow never happen. It is a dry and warm country in reality, the winter is meaningful in some way. There is someone with me, constantly behind my back and following. Its a friend.
The country is a foreign place for me, a country far away, and we are both taking pictures with our cameras.
I have noticed that mine has a very long lens on it, and I can zoom in very far. Its an interesting function, it takes some time for me to adjust and focus the camera. But at some point I succeed.
I walk around in the train station and take photo after photo. Some are meaningless and not beautiful or interesting in any way. But every now and then I am surprised by how well a photo has turned out.
I walk to another platform, where a train has arrived. People walk out of the train and there is a lot of hustling and bustling, people everywhere. Again I take a lot of photo's.
The now empty train is soon going to a new place, so new people are going towards it to step inside and make their journey.
People come form all corners and they even walk on the train track. It appears to be a country where a lot of people with dark hair live. I am not sure which country.
I take a picture of how they walk towards and enter the train.
When I look at the screen of the camera, I am utterly amazed by the beauty of the picture. Some people, people that are on the move, appear like a blur. Others are clear and colorful. I cannot explain what it looked like, it seemed a very balanced out picture.
A flow of beautiful people leaving, on a journey. For some reason it has a significance that I do not fully grasp.

Last night bed 9pm - 3:30am

DR at 2am, just before I switched from bed to sofa

I'm waling with someone up the hill, out in the mountains. I point to the far away hill with a ski slope and tell them I just came down from there with some other people. Right now the slope is half melted, but when we were going down on it, it still had enough snow. We were not skiing, we were just returning from somewhere higher up and took the ski slope down.

There is another hill next to this one with some rocky formations and I poit them out to this other person because they are beautifully colored pink by the sun. Here I remember I saw on a recent show why is it so.

I point my iphone camera at it and I'm delighted that a snowy hill with some daisies starting to grow make a beautiful foreground for this pink mointain in the back.

We get to the top and walk by a building. We reached the destination. We were looking for some dormitory/housing for somebody I am not sure who, but space fighter pilots like in star wars cross my mind.

We are looking for a specific name of the complex so we look around when we get in the middle of it. It has massive rectangular buildings with lots of windows, all standing around a main plaza. This plaza has a huge opening in the middle through which we can see tops of the mountains below. I look for some net that would keep people from falling down, but there is non and I know it's because it would obscure the view.

I see inside a building. People in it are all dressed in some kind of black uniforms. At first I think they all have their own tiny bed sized room, but now I see cots in a huge dormitory style room. There is a guys in the middle of it peeing, so bathrooms are public.

In the middle of the building there is empty space and that's where they practice their flying. They fly without any apparatus, just like we do in lucids.

Last night bed 9pm - 3:30am

DR ar 1 am

Me or someone has a private 747 jet. We are thinking where to take it. Aspen, Cannes. I tell them those places have remodeled their airports so now even big planes can land there. I'm walking around aspen airport outside, on a hill.

DR2 at 1 am

We are going to walk somewhere with another person, maybe my mom. She wants to go certain way. We go there and I show her lots of deep snow and I tell her we would be sinking in it. It's so deep, at some places small caves have formed. I look at one of those caves and there is a baby in clothes laying on the ground, moving his arms and legs. I yell at someone to call the cops, there is a baby in a cave. Because of the commotion, a man who was laying behing the baby sits up and is all confused. I tell them to call the cops off, baby was not abandoned.

Then I'm in some apartment hallway. I witness a conversation between "mom" and another woman, probable a reporter. She is telling "mom", that tha'ts the way to go if she wan't to get custody of kids and make "dad" look bad for leaving baby alone. I realize it's a scheme and I start recording it on my phone.

DR ar 3:30
I'm in an apartment in a tall building. Suddenly there is fire and some guys starts running around, trying to get away, without telling us. I look for it and I see smoke. We start gathering our pets. After a while it looks like the smoke is in some distance outside.

Last night bed around 8:30pm - 3:20am

DR 1:19am

Long at detailed dream of me hanging around the China - US border. Mountainous region with high mountains, steep with lots of greenery. Kinda like the Asian "dragon teeth" mountains. I'm wallking around the town, lots of people. I look up at the chinese and american flags on top of the mountain, side by side, just feet from each other. I think "so that's already China there". I take some pictures.

Afternoon nap today.

I'm at work (ugh). Walking fast, with purpose, as I normally do. There are boxes and carts and I'm organizing others how to put them.

I'm outside of a bus full of people. I hear that someone is being a bully in the back of the bus. I get on in the front and tell the driver that I will get on in the back door, to wait for me. I get on, grab the bully by his shirt collar and drag him off the bus. People are happy.

I was floating in an ocean in mostly darkness, although I could see below the surface of the water. I could see my legs moving to keep me afloat, and a long rope attached to me, via my waist I believe. On the other end was a camera. I was part of some experiment for me or an unknown identity to explore depths of this water.

Later:
I reunited with an ex from my distant past. I'll call him Jake. My first memory of the dream is Jake and I laying in bed in the morning, sitting up with our backs propped on pillows against the wall. We were talking, and Jake said, 'Don't go falling in love right away.' I was not in fact feeling happy I was there, and felt like perhaps I had made a mistake. I said, 'I'm not, don't worry.' Jake looked hurt, and I realized he had actually seemed very happy we had re-connected, and maybe I had hurt his feelings. We were on some kind of trip, and we were leaving this day. I packed up, and Jake didn't talk to me much. Randomly my mom was there, as well as my step-dad, accompanying us on our journey home. Next we were in a car with a young version of my bio-dad driving. I was in the back, Jake in the front. He said, "We need to talk later, and I hope you remember what you promised me back [at the bleachers? football field? I have a vague image in my mind of what he meant, but I don't remember what he said]. I also didn't remember what I had promised him and I felt a little nervous, and a little like a jackass and I thought I was probably ending things once again with Jake and he would hate me.

Next Jake and I (and maybe my family?) are in a grocery. I have an old, ragged roller suitcase. I stand next to a store employee and notice a crow at his feet. The crow is eating tiny crumbs of debris from the floor. I laugh to the store employee and we both agree the crow is a great little helper (keeping the floors clean). The crow begins to peck and tug at my suitcase, but I don't care because it's old. Then without my direct recognition of this in the dream, the crow is a dog, like an Australian Shepherd, and we are playing tug of war with my suitcase.

We stopped at a small Bed and Breakfast, my mom and her husband resurfaced. They showed us the rooms we would be staying in. The entire Bed and Breakfast shared one kitchen. I didn't like this idea but I wasn't too bothered because I knew we were only staying one night. It was a cozy place, like a grandmother's home. Jake, an older man [replacement for my Dad and Stepdad?] and I sat around the kitchen table. Jake was talking about how many horrible people there are in the world. I said, 'But there are lots of great people too,' I start to mention how I also think about how everyone was once an innocent child, but Jake seems not to care what I have to say. A baby crawls into the room and spills a small amount of soda on the rug. I laugh and the baby giggles, and I teach it how to clean up the spill. The baby, clad in a diaper, seems to only be around 8 months - 1 year old. I ask Jake and the man if they have seen that funny new Hitler movie. 'You know, the German one, where Hitler time travels to present day after he thought he killed himself? It's really pretty funny in some spots."


Thoughts:
The ocean beginning seems very obviously symbolic of me looking deep into my emotional past or sub-conscious. I can also see how it is a well-executed prelude to the following dream. As far as the 2nd dream, I have been dreaming rather frequently about various exes, and finding myself stuck in relationships with them again. I'm afraid this says something about my latent insecurities about my marriage; aspects of it that remind me of things in past relationships I didn't like, or things about myself that I don't like. In waking life I am very happily married, and although my husband and I are working to better ourselves, I suppose I am looking forward to a time in the future where these things have changed.

I had a dream about monkeys and polar bears. For some reason our family/friends decided it was a good idea to let a polar bear wander around our house and yard/park area. I didn't like it. I felt it was a disaster waiting to happen. I learned real quick that if you laid down on the ground the polar bear would come sit on you. I was sure that if someone hadn't pushed it off it would have then decided to eat me. (Why was this a good idea to have a polar bear?)

At some point in the dream I was carrying around monkeys. I also remember losing my camera and trying to find it around this dirt pits.

Later we were building an enclosure for the polar bear (my idea, I'm sure). We were trying to get the last of the tall metal fencing up, but he bear kept trying to get out.

This was a somewhat stressful dream.

I also remember a dream fragment of a tall man sillouetted on a road. I knew he was important.

Ritual: I've had a bit of a dry spell lately, and even worse than the lack of lucid dreams has been the sensation of diminished overall awareness: my sleep lately has been distressingly ordinary. I'm still waking up frequently during the night, but now I can't even tell what time it is—usually I can guess accurately within ten minutes or so. When sleeping properly I always wake up a few minutes before my alarm, no matter what time I set it for, but lately the alarm has been waking me. I've been having an ordinary number of dreams, but they too are lacking even in rudimentary awareness. In the past, stressful periods at work have boosted my LDing, but I feel like maybe I'm getting a bit burnt out, so I've started using sleep as a form of escapism, instead of an opportunity for more interesting kinds of work. I've become a lazy sleeper!

Probably because of this lack of awareness, this time even when I started wondering if I was really dreaming, I continued to find the environment and events extremely persuasive and followed the plotline to its end. Only then did I take the time to deliberately RC. The only aspect of this that isn't disappointing is the fact that, once having noted I might be dreaming, I did manage to hold that thought and then come back to it, instead of just forgetting. I also felt as though my rational mind was functioning well in the way it recognized the dream sign, something that hasn't always been reliable.

The dream plot was based on waking life residue. Last night (in WL) around 1:30am we heard the sound of someone going through our trash bins outside the house, even though the bins are through a gate which, although it has no lock, clearly demonstrates a property boundary. Unfortunately there is no window through which to observe that area, and by the time I went out with a flashlight the person was gone.

The same thing happened in the dream, except that the person had left behind bags of newspapers, and I was worried they might contain criminal evidence. I wasn't sure if I should call the police, as I had already moved some of the bags, so my prints were now on them too. There were many more minor details and events that would only be tedious to record here, so I'll skip them.

Later the garbage-pickers come back, and I realize I can see them if I get the right angle through a window (not true in RL). I want to take pictures for evidence, but I have trouble pulling up the camera on my phone, normally a very simple operation. Even when I do get the camera working, it is too zoomed in and I can't frame the shot properly. I recognize these technical difficulties as dream signs, but at the moment I'm too caught up in events to RC.

The garbage-pickers leave before I can get a good shot, so I go around the front of the house for another try. The camera is still giving me trouble, and once again I notice how much it resembles a dream sign, even though this doesn't feel like a dream. After a few more minor incidents that plotline wraps up, and I now realize that I can give my full attention to checking whether or not I am dreaming. Everything has felt very real and convincing, but I know well how little that sensation can be trusted.

I jump... inconclusive. I came down quickly enough, but the jumping itself felt easier than I think it should, as though I am not lifting my full body weight. I jump a couple more times, trying to draw out the moment at the apex. It might actually be lengthening as I focus on it. My suspicion grows, I jump a bit more, and then sure enough, I find that I can pause at the top, hovering in the air. That clinches it. It was a dream all along.

What now? It's been so long since I've been lucid that I just want to explore and enjoy the environment. I look out the glass wall of the living room and see an expanse of snowy fields and pine forest stretching to a distant low mountain, utterly unlike the RL scenery. I feel satisfied with this prospect, so I fly through the glass without hesitation and start soaring over the landscape, looking down and enjoying the clarity of visual detail. I'm reminded of a recent conversation with a WL friend who also turned out to be an LDer, who mentioned that he prefers not to do tasks but would rather just fly around and enjoy the environment. Today that feels just fine.

I fly to the top of the mountain and land, hoping to explore on foot. There is a problem with scale, however: I am huge in relation to the mountain. My feet cover its entire upper surface. I take off into the air again, hoping I didn't crush too many trees and little creatures. The distorted scale now makes everything feel artificial, and the dream destabilizes. I exert will to remain in the dream state as it deconstructs, and for a moment I find myself flying through a black boundless space marked with thin white lines running horizontally and vertically in three dimensions. It strongly resembles the conception of virtual space in the movie Tron. I recognize that this is unconstructed dream space, and try not to let it disconcert me that the dream has faded, and I feel very close to being awake... I remind myself that if I should be able to enter a new scene if I can just be patient and maybe suggest something.

I'm trying to stay relaxed, so I imagine lying in a bath of warm water. This makes me realize that my flying feels like swimming so I use the idea. I am swimming underwater in a pool of water that is no different from my body temperature—that's why I don't feel it. And of course I can breathe underwater, because why not? These thoughts in mind, I now think I can see the glimmering underside of the water's surface just above my head, so I fly up and break it, preparing to find myself in a new scene. I notice how seamlessly my breathing remains the same as I transition from breathing water to air, and again this feels too artificial for my liking, but I try not to let it disrupt the dream.

I am in an empty tiled space containing a pool. The lining of the pool is made of identical square beige tiles as the walkway around it and the low walls bounding the space. It appears to be outdoor because the walls don't go up all the way, but there is no impression of any surrounding environment, much less sky or weather. It is still very vague and plain and artificial; perhaps it could be described as "semi-constructed dream space." I look around for something notable, perhaps a DC, and I begin to hear music. It is a simple melody on a plucked string instrument, like a medieval lute. I don't see anyone else, but vision isn't perfect now, so I keep listening and looking. The song ends, and a woman's voice says, "Thanks, I really enjoyed this one song." There is a kind of parenthetical remark appended to the sentence in the same voice that I perceive simultaneously, though I don't seem to "hear" it as literally as the words just spoken. The parenthetical remark is: "...after a moment's reflection." In ordinary text one could write it as:

"Thanks, I really enjoyed this one song (after a moment's reflection)."

But that wouldn't quite convey the effect that the parenthetical part was not spoken aloud, and that it had a kind of simultaneity with the statement itself.

Feeling confident that I will momentary see the singer, I keep looking around... and feel paws on my face, my real face. The cat has chosen just this moment to come back to bed, waking me. Damn!