Recent DJ Posts

Went to bed at 2:45am, cat woke me for his breakfast at 6:30am, then I went back to bed. I had a few more minor wakings, but wasn't doing any particular dream practices as I needed to get up by 9:30 and wanted to maximize my sleep. However, at one point when I woke up—around 8:30am as it turned out—somehow things felt different.

I woke up, or thought I did, and there wasn't anything to distinguish it from all the other wakings over the course of the morning, except that for some reason the thought occurred to me that I might be able to DEILD. I didn't even have any particular impressions of having woken up from a dream, but somehow I felt instinctively that it would work. So experimentally I tried to move one of my hands, very small movements at first until I was confident that I was moving my dream hand and not my real one, then I reached up to touch my face. The sensations were lifelike but somehow I was certain the DEILD had worked. "Why don't I do this all the time?" I thought. "This is the easiest thing in the world!" That's how it seemed then, at least, as I got up out of bed to explore the dream.

I walked down the hallway and passed the cat. In my dream logic I assumed that this encounter was really happening, that I was walking past my real cat even though I was dreaming, and I was curious how he would react to seeing me in my dream state. How would I appear to him? Ethereal? Responding to my expectations, the dream cat reacted with an air of uncertainty to my presence. As I continued into the kitchen, I felt like dancing so I did a few random steps, pleased with how well-intregrated I felt in my dream body and in the environment.

As I approached the sliding door that leads out to the back patio, I thought I heard the neighing of horses from somewhere outside. "Could that be real?" I wondered. "Where could it be coming from?" I had to remind myself that not everything I hear in a dream is bleedthrough, and that a real horse in the vicinity of my house would be highly improbable. Looking outside, I saw a dinosaur skeleton that resembled a triceratops go ambling by. I didn't think much of it, though it was a pleasant reminder that I was definitely dreaming. Eagerly I went outside. It looked nothing like waking life: instead of my fenced-in back patio, I was in a wide grassy space bounded in the distance by trees and low hills. It resembled a bright and sunny day, but still felt dreamlike in that the bright sunlight did not aggravate my eyes the way it does when I'm awake. I looked around and felt pleased to note that my visual perceptions were crystal clear, since during my long dryspell even my NLDs had become murky and vague, at least in recollection. What was the source of this marvelous clarity? "This really is a third state, neither dreaming nor waking," I thought to myself.

I had not expected to get lucid so I had no real goals or tasks in mind; I was just thrilled to be lucid again. I walked forward through the landscape, wishing a DC would come and greet me after my long absence, but I couldn't see anyone else. As I walked I found myself spontaneously singing a little snatch of song. The pitch I was singing was too high for my voice, even in dream, and I could hear it cracking on the high notes. I hadn't put any thought into the words, but I noticed that I was just singing, "I love you... I love you." There was no one on my mind; if I was directing those words to any particular object it must have been dream itself. The melody was simple and I was sure it was music I had heard before in waking life, as I could anticipate how it should continue, and even recall some words ("...any night, any day...") but I couldn't remember what the song was. After I woke up I thought about it for a while and then realized that the melody I was using closely resembled the opening bars of the song "Bali Hai," from the musical South Pacific. The only reason I'm familiar with the song is because I was involved in a school production of the musical many years ago, when I was in seventh grade. I ambled on through the environment a bit further, still with no real purpose and nothing much happening, just delighting in the dream.